2017 Podcasts

Transcript of Episode 153: Staying Healthy in College and Beyond

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Olivia Pompa

Meredith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 153. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line. Today we have a very special guest, his daughter, Olivia Pompa. We are so excited to have you on the show, Olivia. You've had a few appearances on Cell TV, but this is your first solo interview.

Olivia:
I'm kind of excited.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome.

Meredith:
It's all about you today.

Dr. Pompa:
She just came off the ski slopes.

Olivia:
My hair looks so bad.

Dr. Pompa:
I dragged her here to do an interview. Of course, she hates me right now, but so be it.

Olivia:
I hurt myself too. I'm icing my knee right now.

Dr. Pompa:
We literally had two feet of powder.

Olivia:
I hiked to the top, a 20-minute hike to the top and skied down. That's when I hurt myself.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me ask you a question. Meredith is going to do most of the interviewing. Did you eat food before all this hiking and all that stuff?

Olivia:
No.

Dr. Pompa:
Hasn't eaten food yet today.

Olivia:
All I've had is a cup of coffee with a little bit of cream. That's it.

Dr. Pompa:
She did all that skiing and hiking because she's a fat adapted athlete. That's cool. Anyway, Meredith, that's a little promo to the fact that my kids do what we do.

Meredith:
That is true. You guys walk the talk. I know that fat adaptation did not occur over night. I know you're behind this and I know with all of us who have transitioned over into being fat adapted, that it takes some time. There is a story behind all of this, and I know you have an amazing personal story. Let's take it way back.

I'd like for you to share a little bit about your health journey and how things started. You have a twin brother, Dylan, who has been on the show as well. You guys have a really interesting story with your health. Why don't you take it back and share when you first started to notice symptoms and how it progressed.

Olivia:
When I was little, I definitely watched Dylan experience a lot of health problems at a really young age. I didn't, and he can explain that more with testosterone. How do I explain that?

Dr. Pompa:
Dylan with each vaccine got worse. Males, their testosterone has more of an exaggerated effect on the toxins in vaccinations, especially mercury. Girls, their estrogen has a protective effect. You have one that's causing more exaggerated effects, and the other protecting. That's why, by the way, you have boys on the autism spectrum four or five to one versus girls.

Olivia:
It was kind of difficult when I was little always watching him experience these health issues. Thankfully he got his health back slowly, but surely. Then as I started to enter into puberty, I started experiencing a lot of health issues. I started becoming allergic to things I hadn't been allergic to before. I started gaining a lot of weight. My number one thing that actually really made me driven to bring my health back was my skin. I had terrible acne.

Dr. Pompa:
Typical teenager. It was the skin that did it.

Olivia:
It affected me as a person just because I was not as confident in school. One day my dad said to me you need to take grain and sugar out of your diet, so I did. It took me a minute to really adjust, seeing all my brothers always eating grain. It was kind of hard, but I've actually been grainless ever since. My skin was perfect the moment I took grain and sugar out of my diet.

Dr. Pompa:
They were raised on a certain diet. We adopted Dylan and Olivia at age seven. Their parents tragically died. They were raised on a certain diet that was a standard American diet. Then they came to us and we were so mean that we put them on the diet that they were raised on.

Olivia:
I guess that's kind of a cool thing to talk about too. When we first were taken in, we would get in trouble for chewing unhealthy gum. I would hide my candy from school. I just didn't understand. It didn't click why I couldn't eat a bag of Doritos from school.

Dr. Pompa:
Everyone else did.

Olivia:
Yeah, everyone else did. Why couldn't I do it? Obviously I'm thankful now. I understand, but going from that adjustment to all of a sudden never eating Halloween candy. That was kind of hard, especially to take grain and sugar out of my diet on top of that.

Dr. Pompa:
When they're a certain age, we control their diet in the house. Of course, they went to school and did certain things, but you guys ratted each other out. The other kids would be like Olivia had something. I saw. Pretty much they grew up from age seven on. When they were old enough, we let them make their own decisions. I have to say 100% of them started eating maybe not as bad as the standard American diet, but you definitely opened your eating up to other foods, and they all paid the price.

Olivia:
I did. I gained a lot of weight. My skin was horrible, and that's when I finally took grain and sugar out of my diet. My skin cleared up, and I finally got it. Diet is key. You have to fix your diet. I did, and I've literally been grainless ever since. I started grainless, but then I started watching them do ketosis two summers ago. I thought I'll do it. Oh, my gosh. I had the most incredible experience with ketosis. I had so much energy every day.

Dr. Pompa:
When did you start intermittent fasting?

Olivia:
Same time.

Dr. Pompa:
About two years ago.

Olivia:
It was a lot easier for me to get into ketosis with intermittent fasting. I even got my ex-boyfriend doing it. I got everyone doing it. All my friends had incredible energy and were able to work out longer. It was awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
You said something just yesterday. Intermittent fasting, there's days where you just eat one meal a day like I do. It's so easy to be in ketosis. You can eat carbs with dinner. You said you eat your squash, more healthy carbs, and it makes it that much easier. Intermittent fasting, even if you're eating just two meals a day, it makes it so easy to be in ketosis. No doubt about it.

Olivia:
Two summers ago I had done ketosis, and I did it for six months. I had incredible results. I looked incredible. I felt incredible. I was detoxing at the same time. I had more energy while I was detoxing. I went to Europe. I studied abroad for the entire year in Europe. While I was there, I couldn't do ketosis. I couldn't not eat the gelato and pizza. For a year I actually didn't do ketosis. I was eating grain all the time. Granted the grain is healthier over there, but I gained a lot of weight back.

When I got back from Europe, I got back into ketosis. I've actually lost almost all the weight that I gained. I feel great. I've been doing intermittent fasting. Two summers ago I would fast until 2:00 during the day. Now I'm fasting until 5:00 every day. My body is already well-adapted, more efficient. It's awesome. It's incredible. I have incredible energy. I'm going to the gym every day. I'm lifting way more than I was two years ago. It's really cool to see my body adapt again.

Dr. Pompa:
All my children are just living lab rats -inaudible-. We send them off to Europe and fatten them up. We bring them back home and see what happens. If I went to Europe, I'd be eating pasta myself if I went there for two months. It is better pasta. It's a remarkable difference in the pasta there and the pasta here.

Olivia:
I did notice a difference.

Dr. Pompa:
You did?

Olivia:
Oh, yeah. I remember I would go there and have a plate of pasta. After doing ketosis for so long, eating such a grainless diet, every time at home that I would eat grain once, I would get bloated and feel sick. In Europe I could eat it every day. I could eat it twice a day and be fine. Just another point of how screwed up our food is here in America. Everyone should go grainless because the food is just so unhealthy over here.

Dr. Pompa:
Sprayed with glyphosate.

Olivia:
That was something that Europe taught me too. It was definitely not great over here.

Dr. Pompa:
I know where you want to go. I'm going to let you do it. Just for fun, guess what this is? This is Ketonix Breath Meter.

Meredith:
Oh, you got one of those.

Dr. Pompa:
What you do is you go —

Meredith:
Did [Deana] bring that to you?

Dr. Pompa:
Just for 20 seconds. It'll show ketosis.

Olivia:
I'm not on ketosis right now.

Dr. Pompa:
If it thinks you are, it'll blow. Watch.

Olivia:
I'm not. I had corn yesterday.

Dr. Pompa:
It doesn't matter. She doesn't understand. Watch. No, you go like this. You put your lips on it and you blow. I'm trying to teach them how to do it. These are about $150. I'll use myself as an example. Next week I go back into ketosis. Even now that I'm not in it, I'm probably eating about 75 to 100 grams of carbs a day.

Olivia:
I had my carb day yesterday.

Dr. Pompa:
We did. I witnessed that. That is true. In the morning, it would be grain and color. Yesterday afternoon I was in the yellow phase, which means I was probably about 0.5, 0.6 in blowing ketones. Instead of doing the finger prick, you're able to use this as a gauge. It's just cheaper. I can do it all day long. I keep it here just for fun. Now that I'm going into ketosis, I've been monitoring myself out of ketosis more. I'm just going to see the differences.

She will blow ketones. Put your lips on it and exhaust your breath, maybe 20, 30 seconds of a solid breath. Take a deep breath in and then blow tightly. I don't want to do it. You have to put lips around it and blow.

Meredith:
For those of you who are just listening on iTunes, they're using a Ketonix Breath Stick to measure ketones. If you're just listening, that's what's happening right now.

Dr. Pompa:
We're measuring breath ketones as opposed to blood ketones. The blood and the breath are the most accurate ways to assess it.

Meredith:
Do you get the actual point measurement of the ketones?

Dr. Pompa:
What color is that? She's about 0.5. That's basically where I was. You're about 0.5, 0.6 ketones. You look at the colors. You don't get an exact point. You get online and it'll tell you the colors and you count the flashes. When you count the flashes, it'll give you a range of where you are. You just kind of get used to it after awhile, then you can start to read where the ketones are.

Olivia:
I need one of these.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it's really cool. You can do it multiple times. I'm paying $2 to $4 per strip. It's just a way to do it. It's accurate. It's not point on. You don't get oh, I'm 0.7. You get a range, knowing that you're in or you're out. Just wanted to show that for teaching's sake. You had a great thing. How does someone do this in college?

Meredith:
I'd like to take it back even further because you guys had a lot of information that just happened. I'm sure our viewers are thinking what was the time span that all of this happened. It seemed like a flash for you, Olivia, but just to take people back to when you first started on this journey. Then you went off of it. I'd like to know the timeframe of it all so people can kind of gauge and have some realistic expectations, especially some teenagers or parents of teenagers who are watching too to see the timeframe of how it all worked for you and how you transitioned into where you are today.

Olivia:
As I said before, the first time I did ketosis, which was about two summers ago, I got myself into ketosis —

Meredith:
How old are you now?

Olivia:
Sorry?

Meredith:
How old are you now?

Olivia:
How old am I? Twenty.

Meredith:
Twenty now, okay. You started when you were 18.

Olivia:
When I was about 18, almost 19. It took me probably a month to really stretch no carbs, under 50 grams, to get myself into ketosis. Really becoming fat adapted took me five months probably.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, maybe longer.

Olivia:
Maybe even longer. That's when I went to Europe was right after that. I got out of it, and for a whole entire year I was not in ketosis. I didn't do ketosis at all. When I came back from Europe, that took me even longer the second time.

Dr. Pompa:
Like many people, it took longer to become efficient. Now she can go to 5 o'clock intermittent fast without eating, ski all day, have energy, and not even get hungry. Whereas before, even when she took grains out of her diet, she was eating five, six times a day, just like most people. She would get so cranky when she didn't eat. Why? Her blood sugar would drop. She needed to eat. She was a sugar burner. Just like most teenagers, they screw their mitochondria up. She needed to eat all the time. Look out if she didn't eat because she's going to rip heads. Now she's controlled.

Olivia:
My first couple months really trying to get myself into intermittent fasting, I was miserable. It was not fun. Not eating until 2:30, I did not enjoy that whatsoever. Once I got myself there, I loved it. Perfect time to work out in the morning. I love it so much. The journey's hard for sure.

Meredith:
Being on the other side is really amazing. You went off to Europe and you were in Spain and had this amazing adventure and had all this wonderful food that you enjoyed. What's it like now being back in college, and how do you maintain your health when there's all these temptations around? I think back to college, just lots of cheap beer and bad pizza, lots of junk.

Olivia:
I wish I had my friends here to vouch for me. I don't eat like that, and I never will. That's why I always have to have a kitchen. I cook every meal. I don't eat out. I go to school at Florida State in Tallahassee, and they don't have any healthy restaurants. I don't eat out. I eat every meal at home.

For my late lunch I'll have eggs with Vegenaise, lots of good fats, and lots of butter. I eat pads of grass fed butter with my eggs. For dinner I always cook. My brother is actually right down the road from me, so I cook for him too, which is really nice.

My friends always say to me you cook all the time. How do you do that? You've got to do it when you're trying to eat organic. I definitely put that as my number one priority, so I spend a lot more time cooking and driving to Whole Foods. Regular college kids won't do that. My advice is for them do it.

Dr. Pompa:
Get off your lazy -inaudible-.

Olivia:
It becomes a real habit, coming home and setting time. Here's the another thing. I'll buy a whole pack of organic chicken. I'll make six chicken breasts, and that's my whole week of food. They'll make an excuse, I don't have time to cook. I don't want to. There's ways to do it where you can prepare — what is that? Meal preparation or something? What's that word? I don't know. There's ways to do it. Then they also say it's too expensive. There's also ways to shop.

Dr. Pompa:
When I was in chiropractic school, you know those rice cookers? It was a steamer. I would put my chicken and vegetables in there. It would be done. I would come home and have my meal. I was going to school and working, and I still managed to eat well. Like her, all the guys I worked with started seeing the difference. They made fun of me at first. Then by the end, they called it the Pompa program. They all jumped in on it. They shredded all this weight. Their health went through the roof. Many of them are still eating that way today.

Olivia:
I have a funny story, actually. I just joined a sorority. When you first join a sorority, you don't know all these girls. You're slowly getting to know them. I went to Disney World one morning and didn't know the girls I was with very well. Obviously they don't understand how I eat and how I do my life. I had just gotten back from Europe, so I was miserable adjusting, getting myself fat adapted. I would be waiting to eat until 3 o'clock during the day, but we were at Disney World early.

I was so hungry, but I knew I couldn't eat. I had to push through it. I said I just need coffee because coffee really helps curb your appetite in the morning. It's the number one thing that really helped me get into intermittent fasting really well.

We get there to Disney World, and I'm just hunting for a Starbucks. I need to get some coffee. All my friends are like why isn't she eating? She's anorexic. Of course, you get anorexic thrown around all the time, which it's not anorexia. It's intermittent fasting. I tried to explain it, and they don't get it. I just need some coffee. The other thing was that I had brought three hard boiled eggs in my pocket.

Dr. Pompa:
I saw you do that.

Meredith:
Everybody does that.

Olivia:
We were there until 6 or 7 o'clock at night. I knew I had to bring food, and I'm not going to eat a hamburger there or French fries. I bring my pocketful of hardboiled eggs. They're my best friends to this day, but they remind me of it all the time. They're like you were the girl that brought hardboiled eggs, and all you wanted was a Starbucks coffee. We thought you were anorexic. I literally had hardboiled eggs sticking out of my pocket. That's how desperate I was, how valuable food is.

Dr. Pompa:
That shows dedication, right? Who goes to Disney World — I would. I would do that.

Olivia:
People say you're in college. It's too hard to eat healthy. No, hardboiled eggs fit in your pocket. I promise.

Meredith:
If you're looking for an excuse, you always find one. That is very inspirational, and I love that dedication. When you mentioned you have had a lot of influence on your friends as well, can you share there as to how your lifestyle and some of the things you've been sharing with them have had an impact on some people that you know and care about?

Olivia:
Lots of my friends, actually. Here's another story. One of my friends I've mentioned before in one of our shows, Evan, I told him one day you can't burn your butter or else it becomes a bad fat. Now that's the joke. Every time I see him he goes, “Liv, this morning I burnt my butter.” It's cool that all my friends know now.

Dr. Pompa:
She polices them. You're going to make your oil go bad.

Olivia:
All my friends are eating ranch dressing. No, that has canola oil in it. Come on. Now my friends don't eat that anymore. It's kind of cool to see that happening. I just had a bunch of friends come visit us in Park City, and a couple days ago my friend Holly called me on FaceTime. She was like, “Liv, guess what? I'm drinking coffee right now with butter. I'm intermittent fasting until 2 o'clock every day.”

She watched my family do it every day. She watched them get up at 7:00 in the morning. She would watch my dad sit here and work all day and not touch food until 5 o'clock, and he looks great for his age. It's like that's your dad? He looks incredible. How are they doing it? My brother looks great. It's kind of cool to see my friends valuing that too, listening to me.

Dr. Pompa:
She's a teacher in -inaudible-, and she's actually going to school right now. She's going to go to chiropractic school.

Olivia:
I'm a bionutrition major at Florida State, and I think I'm going to graduate a year early and go to -inaudible- University.

Dr. Pompa:
The sooner, the better. That's what's her calling. You can tell it's her calling. How do you know something is your calling? When you start realizing all these lives around that you influence in this way. No doubt, that's her calling. Detox is another big thing. I said that when she became older, she started getting some of the effects, some sensory integration. She gets some pain sensitivities, smell, even taste sensitivity.

Olivia:
My roommate told me this story one day that when she was little she had a really bad mold problem in her house. I live with her, so she tells me all of her health problems about how she can't wake up in the morning, how she's so groggy, and she's fatigued. I mean bad fatigue. She can't even go to the gym she's so tired.

She's like I don't know why I feel sick all the time. I'm like didn't you just tell me yesterday that you lived in a mold trap for a year when you were a kid? That's why. You have to be detoxing. I'm actually having her order DMSA. We're going to start detoxing her. It's kind of cool that she's in college, I'm in college. Everyone needs to start getting their health back.

Dr. Pompa:
That's awesome. She started detoxing later. Dylan went through stuff earlier, and then put it aside. She had these symptoms crop up. Now she detoxes all the time. She knows how to use cellular detox. Believe me.

Olivia:
I had a lot of my symptoms come out after I had gotten a concussion. I got a really bad concussion. I don't know what it was yet. I'm going to figure it out one day. It triggered it. I started experiencing horrible fatigue, fogginess in my head where I couldn't focus in school. It was really bad. That was when I finally was like I have to detox. I've been detoxing ever since. All the time.

Meredith:
You notice a big difference after your concussion since implementing the detox?

Olivia:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
I'll say something about the concussion. When I do a history with someone, I look for traumas; physical, chemical, or emotional. Physical trauma, especially to the head, can open up the blood brain barrier. When you get a concussion, you're actually allowing more toxins to cross into the brain. We knew that they were in her body. We knew she needed to do more detox. That was it. When those symptoms started, she did it.

Olivia:
It was like the skin thing. I needed something to push me.

Dr. Pompa:
Most people do.

Olivia:
The fogginess in my head, I'm not kidding you, I could not think. I couldn't get up in the morning. I could barely work out. It really pushed me. Once I'm into it, every time I detox, I feel it in my head. I need to detox. Once I start it again, I feel great. I've got to push myself to do it, even though it really isn't fun sometimes.

Meredith:
That's part of it. I think so many people who maybe have had head trauma, traumatic brain injuries, concussions, different issues wouldn't connect detoxing as a healthy support to the healing of a brain trauma. I think that's really important.

Olivia:
Just another point, great story. I had gotten a second concussion in Spain. I fell and hit my head on the floor in Spain. It was horrible. I had to go to the Emergency Room. It was worse than the first one. The first one was a car accident. The second one I knew it was coming. I knew the feeling in my head. I had that concussion again.

It was this fogginess in my head. I literally felt drunk. It was this unexplainable feeling. I called my dad. I was freaking out. I had just gotten back to Spain, and I couldn't even travel it was so bad. I could barely walk. He called and said to fast. I water fasted for five days. It was the most remarkable thing ever. I woke up on the fifth day, walked downstairs, ate. I felt 100%. It was like my concussion just went away. It was a miracle. The fasting literally healed my brain.

Dr. Pompa:
I had sent her a paper that was written on research on fasting and healing concussions. The results were dramatic in the study. A study is one thing, but a second concussion takes four times longer to heal. This was her second concussion. We had gone to college and put her in this gyroscope.

Olivia:
I had treatment and everything. I went all the way to Atlanta. The first time I had treatment, it really didn't work that well for me. I don't know why. Maybe it just wasn't right. I think most of the symptoms was also my toxicity too. The second time he was like Liv, you have to pinpoint that inflammation by fasting. You need to fast. I thought he was crazy. I was like I'm not going to not eat for five days. I had done the fast before, and I hated it. I was like never again. It was miserable.

Dr. Pompa:
With every fast people get better. I think that was your second long fast.

Olivia:
The second time I did it, I did it over the summer too. It was easier.

Dr. Pompa:
Day two though, I got the call. I'm miserable. Stick it out. She did. She's disciplined.

Olivia:
I was like I can't do it, but I did it. I woke up on the fifth day, and I could walk. I was fine. I traveled that next weekend. It was amazing. That's my fasting story.

Dr. Pompa:
Fasting heals the brain. It heals the brain regardless. You have something traumatic like a concussion prove positive of what fasting can do. It's the combination of super high ketones during fasting. The reduction of the inflammation happens during the fast can heal the brain just like that. She's already experienced so many things. She's called to it because she's going to remember those experiences.

Olivia:
Just like him. He's got his stories, I've got mine.

Dr. Pompa:
From pain to purpose. I always share that picture back there. Oh, my gosh. Let's just embarrass her a little bit.

Olivia:
I used to have really bad glasses.

Dr. Pompa:
There she is, and there's Dylan. I'll talk to you. He just wasn't right then. Poor Dylan. That's when we had just gotten him at age seven. If you met him today, you'd be like really? You were on the autism spectrum? He's completely different than that, obviously. Daniel, who we've interviewed here.

Meredith:
That's the Pompa squad.

Dr. Pompa:
That's Izik, high lead. That's Simon. Oh man, just wait until I bring that kid on the show one day. Of course, that's Merily. I don't know who that guy is. That's Olivia. That's from pain to purpose. That's the same picture, isn't it? It's another version of the same picture. I thought that was later on. I have a new one coming. Enough of that.

Olivia:
Meredith, what else do you want to know?

Meredith:
We've covered a lot. I just want to recognize you for the inspiration that you are at your age. I wish when I had been 20 years old that I had the knowledge that you have and the impact that you're having on so many people. I think it's fantastic. The strength that you have to be in a college environment where you're cooking all of your meals, and you're staying so strong. I just want to applaud you for that first of all because I think that that is not an easy thing to do. Over time it can seem easy. You should be so proud of her, Dr. Pompa.

Olivia:
I would not be here without him. I wouldn't know anything. I'm so blessed.

Dr. Pompa:
I'm blessed to have a daughter like her, that's for sure. She's called to this. Right now out of all my children, she's the only one that I know is going to take this message on. The other ones are up in the air. Who knows? She is no doubt called to it. She's a world changer. Her story, if you only knew the details. From pain to purpose. I showed that picture because all of us really have an amazing story.

Olivia:
It's all a journey, that's for sure. I'm still getting my health back. I just took a urine toxic metal test, and I just saw the metals in my body. I'm not as healthy as you would think I am.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what my message is to her now, Meredith? Everyone on this show watching knows this; physical, emotional, and chemical trauma. My -inaudible- was a trauma that caused things. My sickness was a trauma. Going through everything with all the legal stuff and adopting the kids was a trauma. Imagine losing at seven years old your mother and father. Understanding how all that went down, how traumatic that was. Her next step in healing is the emotional stuff.

Olivia:
We all have to do it.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. EMDR therapy, I'm telling her she needs that stuff. I hope everyone listening, it's physical, chemical, and emotional. We all have traumas. When you remove those emotional traumas, that reduces cellular inflammation just like removing chemical traumas. That's the next journey for her, getting through those emotional traumas.

They went through counseling when they were younger, and the counselor back then said they're as far and as good as they're going to get now. When they become teenagers and early 20s, they're going to need more counseling. Sure enough, I think a lot of it now, she's ready for that next stage of detox. True cellular detox is emotional detox as well.

Olivia:
My goal before I have kids is to have my health great. I want to be the healthiest mom out there.

Dr. Pompa:
Aww, that's sweet. She will be, trust me.

Olivia:
I want to teach my kids healthy.

Dr. Pompa:
Meredith, she reminds me of you. She creates recipes. She's on it just like you. She's very creative with the food. I wish we had more time. She could tell you some of the things that she puts together.

Olivia:
Is there anything else, Meredith, that you want to ask me?

Meredith:
What's a fun new recipe you've been working on? Give us a little something fun.

Olivia:
After coming home from Italy, one of my favorite things to do, and my friends love it too, is I literally just do chicken breasts with Vodka sauce and cheese. I don't know why. That's my favorite meal right now. I put pesto on it. I just studied abroad in Italy, so I have this pesto mindset right now. I eat it all the time. That's a fun idea. You just throw it in the oven, and it's easy. It's so easy. It's so good.

Dr. Pompa:
What would be your first meal in the afternoon? Let's say you eat at 3 o'clock. What would be a first meal?

Olivia:
I love eggs. Not everyone loves eggs, but I love eggs. I eat eggs on these fiber crackers. They're just fiber literally. I put tons of butter on it. I eat it with eggs and Vegenaise too. It's good fats. That's definitely something I would eat. I love turkey breast with Vegenaise or cheese. Just high fat and a little bit of protein.

Meredith:
I think the simpler, the better too. Many people tend to think the ketogenic diet or cellular healing diet, it's so complicated. How do I change all these things? It's so simple. It's good fats. It's clean proteins. It's lots of non-starchy veggies. It's real food. It's so simple.

Olivia:
It's really hard for people, especially college kids, that want to do everything that the book says. They think high fat diet, there's no way that can be healthy. You tell them why. You say the fat you're eating today isn't healthy. It's genetically modified. There's hormones in it. It's not the way God intended it to be. It's not how it was originally supposed to be. That's what you have to teach them. Fat today isn't healthy in America. It's not.

Dr. Pompa:
It's education.

Olivia:
You have to eat the right kinds of fat. That's hard for people to understand. They don't understand what grass fed meat is. That's what I want people to understand. College kids need to understand that.

Meredith:
I think like you just said too, it is education. That's what people are lacking. That's why we need truth seekers and people like you, Olivia, who are going to go out and spread the truth and share information with people so that they can make informed decisions about how to live their lives and how to be healthier.

Dr. Pompa:
When I went to college, I didn't know anyone taking medications. How many —

Olivia:
Everyone. Oh, my goodness. I've never been on an antibiotic once. I had strep and pink eye a week before coming home. All my friends were like Liv, get medicine. I'm not going to do that. We use antibiotics too much. All my friends are on Z-Pak all the time. They're getting sicker. They're getting sick all the time. Your immune system isn't building itself.

Dr. Pompa:
You have friends that are on anti-depressants. How many college kids are taking anti-depressants, from Adderall to who knows what else?

Olivia:
People are abusing drugs today. It's really sad, and it's going to catch up to us. It's destroying our bodies.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what makes me most proud of my children? Olivia's in college. It's the hardest place to be. You're surrounded by people who are doing things a certain way that's acceptable to them; taking medications, stimulants, surviving. Wait until they hit their 30s. Meredith, autoimmune, imagine the diseases that are coming. They're leaders. Just not taking the drugs makes their brain work better, let alone the food. It's just unbelievable.

Olivia:
When my friends were here, they commented I don't get vaccines except the required ones. I was like no.

Dr. Pompa:
How many are taking flu shot after flu shot?

Olivia:
Lots of them. You don't get vaccines, but you take the required ones?

Dr. Pompa:
Here's what people have to understand. Before age seven, when we went to visit them, they seemed like they were always on antibiotics. As a matter of fact, there were antibiotics in the medicine cabinets. This is the point. After age seven, she hasn't been on an antibiotic one time ever. My biological children have never been on an antibiotic in their life.

Olivia:
I'm jealous. I wish I wasn't vaccinated. That would be awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
Bottom line is are we just really lucky or do we have a different philosophy? It's a different philosophy that everybody can adopt.

Olivia:
Here's another story. I was in Jamaica on a mission trip, and I stepped on a rusty nail. They all said you need to go to the hospital and get a tetanus shot. He was on the phone and said, “Heck, no. You don't need a tetanus shot. You're fine.”

Dr. Pompa:
It's anaerobic bacteria. That's what tetanus is. The nail is exposed in sunlight. It was impossible to have tetanus because it wasn't under water. Heck with that, right? Bottom line, she was fine.

Olivia:
People are just so quick to throw drugs in their bodies. That's the problem today. We're abusing drugs. There is a time and a place for them. If we were to get super hurt or super sick, of course.

Dr. Pompa:
A time and a place, absolutely. Olivia represents a generation that is the sickest generation that's ever walked the earth. This generation is doomed. Probably even worse is the generation under her. That's probably the really sick generation. Her generation is much sicker than my generation, no doubt. It keeps getting worse.

The leadership of kids like her that are being raised with a different philosophy that health comes from within, remove the interference, the body can heal. That's the way we live our life. It's as simple as that. Because of that, the outcome is different. I believe leaders need that mindset today. That's it, Meredith. There's just another picture of what God's doing in our life.

Meredith:
I think it's amazing, and I think your story is amazing, Olivia. Thank you for sharing. I just want to know if you have any parting advice for kids your age who are watching the show or adults of teenagers. What would you say to them to encourage them to stay on the path or to jump on the path?

Olivia:
I don't know.

Dr. Pompa:
I'll start, and she can finish. Here's the thing. I don't know who we were interviewing last time, but people today are sick and they don't even know it. I know who it was. My son Daniel's girlfriend was here from Florida visiting. This is another great story. When she first came here, I said, “She is sick.” Daniel said, “I know she is.”

She would literally have to sleep several times through the day just to get through the day, this young girl. He started influencing her, and she fasted. Now I think she's fasted three or four times. The last fast I said to her, “[Chrissy], your health is so different now.” She's like, “Oh, my gosh. I didn't know how sick I was.” That's where that came from. I didn't know how sick I was. She says, “I just thought it was normal.” Most of her friends were like that.

When she got up, two hours later she had to sleep again. She had no energy. She was wiped out doing what Americans do. This generation is doomed. If you understand that that's not normal, there's a starting place. Don't wait. If you're on medications, there's something wrong that you can do something about. That's my advice.

Olivia:
My advice is you need to do your research. People need to educate themselves. I know that's hard because they think that everything in the books is right, but it's wrong. Everything is not right. My other advice is stopping eating McDonalds first.

Dr. Pompa:
Get rid of the processed fast food.

Olivia:
Another piece of advice is I'm tired of my friends coming to me and saying am I gaining weight? I tell them every day what do you mean are you gaining weight? You're not eating well. You're sick. I give you advice, and you don't do anything with it. My advice is to do something with the knowledge that we're telling you and that you're learning. You're learning it, you're just not doing it.

Dr. Pompa:
Good advice.

Olivia:
My advice is just do it.

Meredith:
Just do it. I love that.

Olivia:
It gets easier. It really does get easier.

Meredith:
It does over time. At first it seems like a mountain, but once you're on the other side, it's a whole different journey. It's amazing. The influence that you guys are having is awesome. Thank you so much, Olivia, for sharing so much today, your wisdom. I'm so excited to see what God has ahead for you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, Meredith.

Meredith:
Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Thanks, everybody, for watching. Have a great weekend, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Olivia:
Bye.

Transcript of Episode 152: Never Binge Again

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Glenn Livingston

Meredith:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 152. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course. Today we welcome special guest Dr. Glenn Livingston.

We’ve a really fun topic for you guys today. We’re recording now during the holiday season. You probably aren’t listening to this show—you’ll probably listen to this show a few weeks after the holidays. Dr. Glenn is an expert on over eating, binge eating, and all kinds of food issues that a lot of us struggle with, so this is going to be a really important topic today we’re going to discuss. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Glenn.

Glenn Livingston, Ph.D. is a veteran psychologist and was the longtime CEO of a multimillion dollar consulting firm which has serviced several Fortune 500 clients in the food industry. You may have seen him or his company’s previous work, theories, and research in major periodicals like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun Times, The Indiana Star Ledger, The New York Daily News, American Demographics, and other major media outlets. You may also have heard him on ABC, WGN, and/or CBS radio or UPN TV.

Disillusioned by what traditional psychology had to offer overweight and/or food-obsessed individuals, Dr. Livingston spent several decades researching the nature of binging and overeating via work with his own patients and a self-funded research program with more than 40,000 participants. More important, however, was his own personal journey of obesity and food prison to a normal healthy weight and a much more light-hearted relationship with food.

Welcome, Dr. Glenn Livingston, to Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Livingston:
Thank you very much. It’s a delight to be here, and I look forward to talking to you and your listeners to learn anything that’s going to be helpful to them for the new year.

Dr. Pompa:
We thank you so much. Timing couldn’t be better this time of year. We know that so many people—this is the time of year they just pack it on, right? The older they get, the harder it becomes, supposedly, to take off. I’ve got to jump into your story because obviously that’s where your passion came from. So many people that we have on this show, it’s from pain to purpose, including myself. Tell us that. Start there.

Dr. Livingston:
Okay, well that’s the most embarrassing part, so we might as well get it over with.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s our goal here, Dr. Glenn. We just want to embarrass people.

Dr. Livingston:
There you go. I suppose when I was younger, I could have been diagnosed with what today you’d call exercise bulimia. What that means is that I eat an awful lot and I exercised it off. I didn’t like to put my finger down my throat. That was always abhorrent to me. I figured out that as a six-foot-four, fairly muscular guy, that I could eat more or less whatever I wanted to if I worked out enough.

The problem was that as I got into graduate school, and started to have patients, and when I was married, and I had responsibilities, I just couldn’t make two or three hours a day to work out all the time. I started to get heavy because I found that it wasn’t easy to adjust the food the way that I really wanted to. I was a real eater. I could eat two pizzas. I could go into a delicatessen and dislodge my jaw. I had a real thing for chocolate.

It was something to joke about at that age. Because I’m tall, I wore the weight reasonably well. It wasn’t having a lot of people telling me that I looked horrible. I did have a lot of doctors yelling at me for my triglycerides and telling me I was going to have a heart attack in my 40s or maybe sooner. I had bad blood lipids, and cholesterol, and everything like that.

More importantly, I was very obsessed with the food. I found that as I took progressively more responsibilities in my life, like I would be sitting and working with couples who were in the midst of some very serious issues, and I couldn’t be 100% present because I was thinking about when am I going to get to eat again? When can I get to the deli? When can I do X, Y, and Z? That bothered me because my dedication to being a psychologist always was first and foremost in my life. I come from a family of 17 psychotherapists and psychologists. If you say Dr. Livingston at a restaurant, we all turn around. It’s pretty funny.

Coming from that family, I went the psychological route to try to figure it out. I was very successful at my practice. I was very successful as a consultant, so I had a lot of resources. I went to some of the best psychologists and psychiatrists. I went to Overeaters Anonymous. I learned a lot about the psychology of eating, and I learned a lot about the personal choices I was making. As a matter of fact, I even developed a study. We wound up having 40,000 people go through it over the course of several years. Not quite as impressive as it sounds because it was online, but still.

We figured out that, for example, people that are really craving chocolate tend to be experiencing some sort of loneliness or broken heartedness in life. I really thought when I saw those correlations that I was on to something. I dug really deep inside my own soul to figure out well, where does that come from for me? I kind of figured out that my dad was scared about going to Vietnam, and my mother was overwhelmed that maybe he was going to go. She couldn’t quite take care of me the way that she should have when I was really little, no fault of her own. She gave me chocolate or she gave me Bosco. She used to keep a little bottle on the floor. If I was crying and I needed her and she couldn’t be there, she’d point me to the chocolate. I developed a lifelong patter of running to chocolate when I felt lonely.

That’s a very soulful and intriguing thing to understand except it didn’t cure the problem because what would happen—and this is what I found in my patients also. What would happen would be there’d be this little voice inside of me that would say you know what, Glenn? You’re right. You’re mother didn’t love you enough. Until you figure out how to fill those big holes inside of you and stop being so lonely, you’re just going to have to keep on eating that chocolate. You know what, chocolates kind of like a vegetable anyway because it grows in a cocoa bean or a cocoa bean is a plant. It would say all these crazy things to justify no matter what I did, right?

Some of the other interesting things, as long as we’re talking about that, are people who are craving salty, crunchy things tend to be stressed at work. There are a lot of correlations like that. What I would find is that there was this mediating voice. Even though you could trace food preferences, and you could find the patterns, and you could learn an awful lot about yourself—and I think that we all should be compassionate to ourselves, and those are things we should figure out, and we should learn, and figure out how to fix the loneliness and the stress in our life. It’s not really the solution in my estimation to a food problem.

The solution has to do with addressing that crazy voice inside of you. Unfortunately, it took me until I was about 40. I’m 52 now. It took me until I was about 40 to figure that out. I was about 260 pounds. I’m 200 pounds now. I ran across some alternative addiction literature. The 12 steps were fascinating, but they didn’t really work for me. I came to understand that they aren’t really scientifically backed up. As a matter of fact, the only two controlled studies seem to suggest that they’re either a parody or worse in doing nothing at all. That frightened me.

I looked very aggressively into the alternative research. I came across a book called Rational Recovery. He’s fairly protective of his books, so I don’t like to say too much about it. Suffice it to say that he was talking about this crazy voice inside of you as the really primary cause of addiction. He developed a methodology for separating from that voice.

Essentially what it says is that look, that voice is the lizard brain. That voice is our survival drive, and unfortunately our survival drive has made a mistake. It’s gotten corrupted by alcohol or drugs. He really works with the black and white addictions. Everybody else is telling you you need to love yourself well. When you have an addictive craving, everybody’s saying well, where is the loneliness? Where is the isolation? Where is the stress? How can I love that inner wounded child back to health?

He said you know, that’s really the wrong approach. It’s more like caging a rabid animal. It’s more like getting control of the lizard brain which seems to overtake us during addiction, whereas all of our goals—you can interrupt me whenever you want to. All of our goals, and aspirations, and everything that we think of as ourselves—love, and meaning, and relationship, and hugging your kids, and going to school, and losing weight—those all live in the higher brain, the mammalian brain, the neocortex.

Thankfully, if you would look at a — and you could do a much better job at this than I can because I’m bastardizing this. If you look at a map of the brain, the lizard brain is the earlier evolved part of the neuroanatomy. Where we live is later evolved and is actually superior to it and able to control it. All of these notions of powerlessness and that there’s really no defense against an addictive impulse, it’s just not true. It’s fine to have a spiritual pursuit. You should do that to fill up your life, but it has nothing to do with can you control this addiction.

I really had to study that carefully and make a lot of modifications to deal with food whereas Jack Trimpey was working with the black and white addictions where you can actually quit, food is something where you’ve got to take the lion out of the cage a couple of times a day and walk it around the block, right? I had to figure out how do you draw this really clear line. The methodology has to do with being able to hear that crazy voice which is coming from the addictive part of ourselves, from that lizard brain. In order to hear that, you have to very clearly define what’s healthy eating and what’s addictive eating.

That led me to a whole series of insights having to do with thinking differently than our culture tells us we should think. Do you want me to pause for any reason?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think pausing right there. I know myself and many of my doctors watch this program, too. We would all say we have so many of these clients and patients that are stuck right there. They know they’re doing emotional eating, addictive eating. They know that. We make decisions in that primitive brain, is what we call it. Because of that, it’s so hard to fight. Right now, you’re speaking to thousands of people that battle this right here.

Just in review, this can absolutely come from different traumas in our life. I had an episode, I had someone—it was one of my friends. My son identified this. He had this emotional thing happen in his life, this moment, and it was girl related, not the point. She made him a bunch of cookies and took the cookies over to him. My son said now wait a minute, that explains everything about him because now he was severely overweight. Meeting my son, he had lost a lot of weight. My son taught him things, but he still struggles with that emotional addictive eating. No doubt, I realized, I’m sure that happened throughout his life. Mom made cookies every time life got a little hard or whatever. Now this thing of struggling in emotional times, he reaches for the cookies because his brain says well, that worked. I feel better. He associates it with love.

That’s kind of what you’re saying. I just put a story to it. Is that true? Then we want to know the solution. What the heck’s the solution?

Dr. Livingston:
Yes, there is that etiology. There is that development of the story and the associations. However, every day we can choose to remake ourselves. The solution that I’ve found—and I’m not saying this is the only solution. The solution that I’ve found is not really to delve deeply into what was the emotional trauma and then—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you said that. That’s what interests me. Who cares? Here’s the solution.

Dr. Livingston:
The solution in your son’s friend’s case would be something like well, what would healthy behavior and cookies be? When specifically do you want to eat them? When specifically do you not want to eat them? Don’t feel any judgment from me. This is totally up to you. You can talk to your doctor. You can talk to your nutritionist. Let’s say you decide I will only ever want to eat cookies on the weekends again. You know that if you only have cookies on the weekends, it would be under control for you. For whatever reason, that’s a balance for you. Now you have a really clear line in the sand.

You’ll notice that you could even say I’ll never eat cookies during the calendar week again, during the weekday again. You’ll notice that’s a very, very strong statement. It’s almost heresy to say something like that, say I will never do this or I will never do that, because what our culture will tell you, what the addiction treatment specialists will tell you, is that well, you’re setting that person up for a binge. That perfectionism is a setup because eventually they’re going to screw up, and they’re going to binge. I think that’s a big problem.

Now, I do think that people that pursue a perfect rule when they make a mistake, they have a tendency to over castigate themselves, and get involved with the guilt. That can make a binge more likely, but if you look at the psychology of winners—let’s take an archer. An archer poises, focuses on the bull’s eye of the target, knows exactly where that bull’s eye is, takes every ounce of their being, and poises towards the bull’s eye, sees the arrow going into the target before they release it, and then they release it.

If the arrow doesn’t go into the bull’s eye, then they do the same thing—and I am so sorry about that. If the arrow doesn’t go into the bull’s eye, they do the exact same thing again, and they refocus with determination. Knowing where the bull’s eye is 100% allows them to purge all that doubt and insecurity from their mind because if there’s something that comes into your defense—well, you might not hit the bull’s eye this time. Why don’t you aim a little to the side? Aim a little to the side of the bull’s eye. That’s better because you’re never going to get to the bull’s eye. That’s not the psychology of winning. The psychology of winning is see the goal with 100% clarity. I say—

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say, that’s a great analogy because if you know anything and maybe some of our viewers and listeners don’t, but the ability to hit that target really is your certainty, your visualization, and just knowing it’s going there. It really is. Whether it’s throwing a dart or not, it is that visualization. For one second you visualize something else, it’s not going into that target.

I’m with you so far. I’m with you so far. Keep going. Keep going.

Dr. Livingston:
I think that there are two separate mindsets required: before the shot and after the shot. After the shot, it’s necessary to be reflective, analytical, and kind to yourself. You wouldn’t say I missed it. I missed the target. I’m an f-ing idiot. I’m never going to hit the target. There’s something wrong with me, and I might as well just give up and -inaudible-, right? That’s what people can do with food.

In our culture, when they say go for progress and not perfection, have guidelines and not rules, I think they’re telling you go shoot at a blurry target. I don’t think that that really works. I think if you aim at the center of the target with determination, and you simultaneously know that after the shot, if you happen to make a mistake, that you’re going to be forgiving, you’re going to figure out what you did wrong. Maybe the wind was going this way or that. You’re going to make adjustments, and you’re going to aim for it again.

I would coach your son’s friend to say okay, if you say you never want to eat cookies during the week again, then you can say you’re never going to eat cookies during the week again. That’s your bull’s eye. That’s your bull’s eye. That’s the first modification that I had to make to the way that things were done today.

Dr. Pompa:
We want to hear more ideas. Basically then, what you’re doing is you’re tapping into the conscious mind, the intellectual mind, to basically intellectualize it. You’re saying look, I know if I did this, it’s healthy. Darn it, that’s my goal, and I’m going to hit that goal. It’s simply making an intellectual decision, saying this is what I’m going to do. Am I right so far?

Dr. Livingston:
That’s a part of it. The enforcement of it is more emotional, but you do want to use your best thinking and your reason in order to determine where the bull’s eye is.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. We actually have something I call diet variation, and we talk about why purposely increasing your carbs one or two days a week can actually be a strategy that actually helps you, by the way. We’re talking about healthy carbs, usually not cookies. Point being, if you’re going to do it, you can have a very good reason why doing it on this day of the week would actually help you. Because there’s a really good scientific reason for that, that helps the process. It helps your brain be more determined to do it or succeed in doing it. Is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Livingston:
Yes. For me, it’s largely about clarity. For me it’s largely about having clarity. I think people walk around with a fuzzy goal. They don’t quite know where they’re going, and they wind up some place else, like my grandma used to say.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the key, then. I’m not going to eat cookies. Dang it, I’m just not going to eat cookies. I’m only going to eat cookies on Saturday.

Dr. Livingston:
For some people, never is easier than sometimes, but I purposely use that example—

Dr. Pompa:
My point is it could be I’m only eating cookies once a month. My point is it’s specific, whatever it is.

Dr. Livingston:
Whatever it is, it’s—yes. Because if there’s ambiguity, your lizard brain will barrel through and find the teeniest, tiniest whole in your rule. The guideline I use—I don’t know if you studied research methodology, but there’s something called an operational definition. When they’re trying to measure squishy things like love, or intimacy, or something like that, what they did is they would get ten people to rate the level of love or intimacy using this scale and they’d see to what degree they’d agree with one another. The guideline I used for this work is that if there were ten people that followed you around all month long, using your rule, would they all agree that you followed it or not.

I think if ten people followed your son’s friend around, and your son’s friend said my rule is I’m only ever going to eat cookies on the weekends again, these ten people would agree at the end of the month because it’s real easy to see did your son’s friend eat cookies on the weekend or not, right? As opposed to I’m only ever going to eat when I’m hungry and I’m always going to stop when I’m full. That’s a good guideline. That’s a good thing to do, but it’s not never binge again. It’s not this game that I’m talking about because you can’t measure it objectively from the outside. People could never agree. Make sense?

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely makes sense because they would be saying well—there’s so many rationalizations involved there that you would arguably—at the end of the day, they’d probably tell you that they always just ate until they were full, but really they didn’t. You can’t measure it. Unmeasurable. Once a week, once a month, that’s measurable. Got it.

Dr. Livingston:
Exactly. When I guide people about—let me just finish the construction of a set of rules. When I guide people about them, I tell them there are four categories of rules. There’s things you’ll never do, things you’ll always do, things you will do conditionally, the rule that we just came up with was a condition because it had -inaudible-, and things that you’re going to do in an unrestrictive way because I think that it’s good for people to know that there are some things they can do without restriction so that they don’t walk around feeling starved. That’s just a very basic template. We can talk about more. We can find some more templates to use later on if you want to.

The enforcement of this becomes kind of like a game. Remember, it’s more like capturing and caging a rabid animal. I like people to give their inner lizard brain, their destructive food self, a name. It should be a name of something that they’re going to feel a little disgusted with and superior to. You’re actually going to cultivate a sense of contempt and disgust because you’re going to need that emotion at the moment of impulse to jump back up into your right brain, okay?

I call mine my inner pig. It doesn’t sound like a very sophisticated psychologist—

Dr. Pompa:
Inner what?

Dr. Livingston:
I call it my inner pig. I call it my pig. I call the things that my pig says pig squeal, and I call the things that my pig is squealing for pig slop. I don’t eat pig slop, and I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do. I know this is not what you’re expecting from a sophisticated psychologist with my credentials.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I get why this would work. I understand how brains are predictably irrational. I get where you’re going with it. Go. I get it.

Dr. Livingston:
You get it because at that moment of impulse, you need something really primitive. What’s happening is the lizard brain really thinks on three levels when it sees something -inaudible-. The lizard brain sees a stimulus, it says do I kill it, do I meet with it, or do I eat it? That’s how the lizard brain is operating. That’s the level at which you have to react to the lizard brain to get your thinking back in place because when the lizard brain is powerfully activated, it pushes all this out of the way.

You need to be like an alpha wolf that snarls at a challenger and goes I will f-ing kill you. I don’t listen to pigs. I don’t listen to pigs and farm animals tell me what to do. I will f-ing kill you. Get back in your cage. That’s the level of emotional response that you need to get those microseconds to say wait a minute, chocolate’s not a vegetable or wait, it’s Thursday. I can’t have a cookie on Thursday. Why, because I never eat cookies during the week.

That’s why I’m 200 pounds instead of 260 pounds right now. That’s what’s worked for me. It’s worked for 100s and 100s of people. There are a number of other elements to making it work. It’s a little bit of an art. That’s what I did, and that’s what Never Binge Again is about. I call the book Never Binge Again because I think if you’re aiming squarely for that archery target, you’re going to say I’m never going to make a mistake again because admitting the possibility of a mistake is admitting that little bit of doubt into your mind. I think it’s—

Dr. Pompa:
Dangerous.

Dr. Livingston:
Yep. I define the binge as one step off of your carefully constructed food fight.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, knowing what I know about the brain, how the brain works, I can see this being an effective strategy. Obviously, you’ve proven it. Tell us a little bit about—okay, yeah great. It was 40,000 people online. What did you get from that study that you did?

Dr. Livingston:
Okay, I have not proven this scientifically. I have not had the resources and time to prove that this is scientifically what is necessary to happen. Of course, that’s in my plans as things are growing. This is now the best seller for eating disorders on Amazon, so we’re starting to get some attention. We’re going to be moving in that direction. At the time I did that 40,000-person study, I was looking at the relationship between food preferences, particularly those things people felt that they couldn’t control, and personality. I had a personality questionnaire. I had a questionnaire about the different types of addictive foods that people are having trouble with. We did a lot of factor analysis, and we came up with these core set of insights. Like I said, it was kind of in the wrong direction. It was a valid study. We had a lot of press for the study way back when. It wasn’t really answering the problem. It was just really interesting.

Dr. Pompa:
Cool. Meredith, I know you have some questions. I’m going to turn it over.

Meredith:
Alright. I know I always have lots of questions, and I love this topic, too, because it’s something I’ve definitely personally dealt with a lot in my life was overeating, emotional eating, things of that nature. We can continue that more, but I just wanted to get your opinion, too, on rigid diets and things like that. I’m guessing that you’re not a fan of strict diets and people following a specific regime but being a little bit looser about it?

Dr. Livingston:
It depends upon the person. What I am absolutely against is over restriction. I haven’t seen the scientific proof yet, but I firmly believe that there’s some evolutionary mechanism in our brains that says if you go through famine, you must go through feast when food is available. I’ve talked to so many binge eaters who’ve talked to me about their history of dieting and how thin they used to be, and I’ll tell them well, I think this is why you are having this trouble now. They’ll tell me that it’s almost like someone is putting your gun to your head and saying you have to keep eating. You have to keep eating even if you’re full. I think that that’s an element of the lizard brain that it loading up on calories and nutrition because it’s anticipating another famine. I think part of overcoming binge eating is a regularity of nutrition and calories.

The particular diet that people have used—you know, I have people who have just used behavioral rules like I will always get up from the table and walk around outside for two minutes before going back for seconds. Everything is really about stimulating mindful eating, but they draw these lines in the sand to make sure that they are mindful eating.

I have other people who’ll say I will never eat sugar, or flour, or chocolate, or candy. They have a long list of things that they just never eat. I don’t really see a problem with that unless the things that they’re never eating are really essential nutrients. Usually they’re industrial foods. In all the years that I worked for the food industry, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that there’s a lot of money putting a lot of calories in a small space, getting a really pretty package, and spending billions of dollars to advertise that it’s good for you. I think that’s how we all got messed up. There were no chocolate bars in the Savannah. There were no potato chips in the Savannah. If people want to get those out of their diet, I don’t see a reason why they can’t cut those out of their diet. If people want to enjoy them once in a while, I think that’s an artifact of society that’s not getting them into trouble then what’s the big deal?

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to say I have to admit that people that—my clients even that have had eating disorders, when they say I’m just never eating that food again, I find that they actually succeed in doing that. They literally have never eaten it again. It’s almost like the alcoholics that succeed, right? I’m just never doing it again. Then they don’t. If they did once, then they’re probably back on the wagon.

Dr. Livingston:
There’s this phenomenon where—I run into people who try 17 different ways to conditionally control something. I’m only going to have chocolate on the weekends. I’m only going to have it after a big hike. I’m only going to have it when I’m with my wife. I’m only going to have it after a meal with some type of a glycemic slowdown. For a year or two, they go through all of these different permutations, and it just keeps kicking their butt. Eventually they say you know what? It would just feel like such a relief not to have this at all, and it works so much better for them. There are a lot of people like that.

Dr. Pompa:
There are. I’m sure it’s not for everybody, but there are people like that. Go ahead, Meredith. You had something.

Meredith:
What do you think about specific diets? I’m curious about the Paleo diet or the ketogenic diet. Do you have any thoughts on that because that can really affect—when you’re eating so much good fat in your diet, it can really affect your satiety which can really decrease binges and cravings I’ve found personally. What are your thoughts there?

Dr. Livingston:
I’m weak on medical knowledge. I do read an awful lot about nutrition. I kind of know things. I have opinions about it. I’ve taken the position that I’ll help you with any diet. If it’s nutritionally complete and sound, I’ll help you with any diet. I will tell you that I tend to get two camps of people that want to work with me, or read my stuff, and hang out on my forums, and stuff.

One camp are Paleo people, and they do very well. They tend to need to be really strict, I find. I find that when the Paleo people are moving into processed sugars and grains and trying to do that conditionally, it doesn’t seem to work for them. I don’t really know why. I think maybe it triggers a carbohydrate craving that’s just too strong and they’re not going to have enough something. I don’t know.

Then I get the whole foods, plant-based people. If you read my book, it’s no secret I’m a little bit more on the whole foods, plant-based side myself. Those are the two camps that I get. I try not to judge the specific diets that people are going through because I’m not a medical doctor or nutritionist.

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t think that’s your point because in any of those groups you have someone who fails because they end up binging or does some emotional eating. You’re point is let’s stop that and then you’ll be successful at whatever diet seems to be working for you or you like for whatever reason.

Dr. Livingston:
What I do find is that whether or not you include animal foods that the emphasis on whole foods and the elimination of industrial processed foods tends to correlate with success. I don’t think we’re meant to have these hyperpalatable foods that industry has created.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. Look at what these processed foods are. There’s even chemicals in them that stimulate dopamine receptors. Come on. It’s like saying I’m going to take these drugs and not get addicted. You’re right. If you’re still eating processed food, you’re asking for trouble. It’s highly addictive. Pure sugar is highly addictive. Shifting to just wholesome food is step one.

One of the things that I talk about, Dr. Glenn, is diet variation meaning that I don’t need to make the argument that this is the perfect diet for everybody. We use and I teach how to use ketosis, how to use what I call a cellular healing diet, no grains. Different diets, moving in and out of different diets, actually creates adaptation at the cellular level that’s amazing.

I believe if you look at every ancient culture on the planet, they ate different diets at different times for multiple different reasons, for whatever reason: they ran out of certain food, seasonal changes, droughts, environmental pressures, what’ growing, what’s not. I can go through many reasons of different reasons why ancient cultures were forced into diet changes, just even getting sick of certain foods because they had to eat it in the winter and now they have different, more carbohydrate foods in the summer.

Point being is that I think getting away from this is the diet that everyone should be on isn’t the argument. I love what you’re saying because I don’t care what diet you’re on. There’s emotional reasons, primitive reasons, that we all fail. We’re all pulled into these bad foods, and you’re giving us a strategy on how to deal with it.

Dr. Livingston:
That’s very interesting what you’re saying. You advise periodic bouts of ketosis in order to trim the body fat and then varying the diet so that you’re not in long-term ketosis. Is that what you’re recommending?

Dr. Pompa:
I fell into it. I have a love for studying ancient cultures and history there. We put people into ketosis, which you’re forcing the cell to burn fat as its primary source of energy. How could someone not lose weight? Yet there will be people who go into ketosis and they don’t lose weight. As a matter of fact, worse than that, they don’t even get into ketosis, and yet they’re eating 20, 30 grams of carbohydrates a day. How is that possible? The mitochondria is that broken.

I would take them out and just say okay, let’s go back to the diet we had you on, by the way, wasn’t working for weight loss either. All of a sudden, they start losing weight. They even feel better. How’s that possible? What changed? I don’t know. Then let’s do that for three months, and then let’s go back into ketosis. Now all of a sudden we put them back in, and now all of a sudden they go into ketosis. They even lose more weight.

There is something in the diet—

Dr. Livingston:
Could you fix the mitochondria?

Dr. Pompa:
– a change that actually became the magic. Now we have a group of doctors doing this. Even this, people could be in ketosis for a long time. There insulin starts getting so low that their body takes on almost a starvation thing, and they start to gain weight or this weird, odd fat around their belly, or they stop losing weight, either one. Then we throw in these carbohydrate days, healthy carbs though, more fruit maybe, more berries, whatever it is, maybe more potatoes, sweet potatoes, root vegetables, something like that. All of a sudden, boom. They start kicking weight loss again just by randomly throwing in some days. Any type of variation creates some sort of adaptation that gets the body more efficient at the cellular level of using—

Dr. Livingston:
Makes sense. That makes sense.

Dr. Pompa:
Anyway, it’s part of a strategy that we use not just for weight loss. It’s a part of a strategy that we use for fixing the mitochondria. Even putting people in feast and famine cycles, we fast them for periods of time and then we bring them out of fast. Then again the feast cycles where we have those days where we eat more, all healthy whole foods. I agree with you. Then we have the days, even once a week, where we fast them. Feast and famine cycles is what ancient cultures did. It forces adaptation. Bad cells die. We always say bad cells don’t adapt. Good cells adapt.

We just interviewed Seyfried, Thomas Seyfried. He wrote a book called Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. They discovered with cancer same thing. It’s this forced cycling that actually works and creates bad cells not to adapt.

With what you’re saying really goes with what we’re talking about here because it doesn’t matter where you are in that process. Getting addicted and binge eating is going to ruin it.

Dr. Livingston:
Yeah, so what I’m teaching would help people to stick with the instructions that you’re giving them. I imagine when people say doc, I really believe you, and I want to follow this, but it’s just a little bit too hard to stay with, this will give people more power to do that.

Dr. Pompa:
We all deal with it. All of our doctors, we all deal with people who really have good intentions, but they fall into their wicked ways, if you will. Having a strategy for them, this show becomes really important. As a matter of fact, so important, the strategy, I want you to bring it again with a different scenario and a different direction. People need to hear things several times to get it. I know our listeners right now are going okay, I kind of get it. Bring it another way so they get it. Let’s give them another strategy or the same strategy a different way.

Dr. Livingston:
The way that people get this best is to think about their single worst food trigger or—there’s a really bad echo on my side for some reason all of a sudden.

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe turn down your volume a little bit.

Dr. Livingston:
Turn down my volume.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll turn mine down.

Dr. Livingston:
Okay. Yeah, that’s better. Am I too low?

Dr. Pompa:
No.

Dr. Livingston:
Okay, if people could think about one food or one eating behavior, for some people it’s eating in the car or eating in front of the TV—if there was one thing that they wanted to change that would make a world of difference. I know that there’s this voice inside of them that says you can’t do that. If you ignore that voice for the moment and imagine what if you got that out of your life, whatever that means to you. Maybe it’s overeating on the weekends. Maybe it’s only at social events. What if you got that out of your life entirely? Imagine what would be different in a year.

Think about how your weight might change, how your health might change, how your confidence might change. What about your thinking? Like I told you, I was much, much too obsessed with food early on. Would you be thinking less about it? Would you be more likely to be present with your spouse and your kids? Would you be more likely to take on more work projects, do more fun things outside? Really flush out the entirety of what your life would be like in a year if you could only follow this one rule.

What that does is that really anchors you more in the upper brain because what your pig is going to be telling you, or your lizard, or your troll, or your B-I-T-C-H as a lot of women like to call it—they’re going to be telling you that oh, you can’t do that. You’re going to feel too deprived. That’s awful. It doesn’t tell you that there’s two types of deprivation. The second type of deprivation is what you’re depriving yourself of by continuing to indulge. It’s that whole future that you just laid out for yourself.

That’s what I find people really get is when they think about the single worst problem they have and they allow themselves to imagine that they really could be rid of it even though there’s this voice in their head going on and on that says you can’t. Then what are you going to deprive yourself of if you don’t fix this.

Now let’s listen to that voice really carefully. What are all the different reasons that this voice says that you can’t? Let’s challenge those reasons. Let’s see what’s going to be necessary to ignore those reasons. That’s how I take people through and get them to get it on a more gut level than all the theory and intellectual stuff we talked about today.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s really like you said. It’s caging the animal. It’s really just taking control of it. When you go through that process, you’re controlling it. I think the way the human brain works, if we feel that we have control, we will be successful. If we feel that the beast has us, then we feel like we’re going to lose. You’re basically giving them reins. If you have reins, you’re going to be able to ultimately be successful.

Dr. Livingston:
The key to those reins is the language that you use. It has to do with purging all the sense of doubt and powerlessness. What I’ll typically ask people if they say well, I will never eat cookies again except for the weekends, I’ll say well, how confident are you. They’ll say well, 20%. Where’s the other 80% coming from? Then they’ve got a whole list of reasons: well, you know, Christmas is this weekend, or it’s New Year’s, and I screwed up the last few years, I’m going out with my girlfriend this week, and she makes these great cookies, and I don’t want to offend her. It’s this long, long list of reasons.

We go through those reasons, and we say well, how can you handle this situation? How can you handle that situation? How confident are you now? Then they’ll say something like you know, I’m actually about 60% confident. How come not 100%? They’ll come up with more reasons.

Eventually they get towards 80% or 85% where they can’t give me any more reasons. I explain to them that that’s because your pig is always going to be lurking in the background. You can’t cut this part of you out of the brain. It’s the part that you live on top of. There’s always going to be this sense of doubt. What you want to learn to do in this game is assign that doubt to your pig.

The way that you do that with language is you say I’m 100% confident, but my pig has other ideas. The moment that you’re willing to do that, it’s not going to feel 100% confident, but you can be. You can declare yourself 100%. The moment that you realize that and you realize that all of the doubt and insecurity is coming from your pig, you’ve inserted an algorithm into your brain that will keep pulling apart you and your pig. You’ll hear your pig better, and better, and better. I’m 100% confident that I will never binge again, but my pig has other ideas.

Dr. Pompa:
Part of that, too, is part of that even identifying when you ask them those questions. Really, they’ve already planned to fail. When I go to my girlfriend’s, they already know that that’s going to be a failure. Basically you’re targeting here’s where you just planned on failing. Until you get them to 100%, you’re almost going ahead of them and giving them victory. Where else are you going to fail? I fail here. Now you have victory. Again, you’re talking to the animal.

Dr. Livingston:
That’s exactly it. That’s exactly how you do it. You’re changing the person’s identity. When the person is willing to say I’m 100% confident, that’s who they are. Every day we decide who we’re going to be. Every day that we decide who we’re going to be and we act in concert with it, we’re a little more confident that that’s who we are. This is really a game of character. It’s a game of character building. It all starts with I’m 100% confident, but my pig has other ideas. It all starts with that separation.

Dr. Pompa:
Alright, Meredith. What was your pig? Meredith’s successful. She’s disciplined, but she wasn’t, obviously.

Meredith:
Yeah, well, oh that’s funny. Yeah, I had some other things, too. Yeah, just to share personally, too, I definitely for many years struggled with my weight, and overeating, and dieting. It’s better now, for sure, but I still don’t feel 100% fixed. It’s just been Christmas, and I definitely had some binges on cheese and chocolate in particular. It was really interesting earlier in the episode how you shared some of the specific correlations between specific foods we crave and binge on and then the emotional components to them. I think you had said that chocolate can be connected to—

Dr. Livingston:
Loneliness.

Meredith:
– need for love and loneliness. That’s really interesting. I definitely feel like I have made massive strides towards that. I don’t binge much anymore, but I’ve also created an environment where I’m set up to succeed. I don’t keep junk in my house, in my cupboards. It’s just not even there at all.

Another component that I’ve really worked on that’s really helped me is not just what I eat but how I eat it. I wanted to ask you about that, too, if you do coaching in that area. For me, I try not to be distracted when I eat: sitting down, possibly even lighting a candle, playing music, but really honoring the food, and paying attention to cues of satiety and fullness. I’m trying to not eat in the car or on the run but really focusing on food. Can you speak to how we eat and how that can impact binging, overeating, satiety, things like that?

Dr. Livingston:
All of the work in mindfulness is very accurate. If you’re not really present while you’re eating, then you’re not really going to have the experience of being nourished, and supported, and loved by the food. The more that you can create situations in your life where your food intake is in a mindful and loving environment, the less you’re going to crave more, the more you’re going to be aware of whether you’re full, whether you’ve had enough, when is enough enough.

I took an interview with the guy from Cornell. I actually interviewed him. He does all those mindful eating studies. What’s the name of his—I’m going to get that for you because I think your readers would really like it. He’s really quantified most of what you’re saying. This is perfectly complimentary with that because you can set up structures that support that. I will always breathe before beginning eating. I will never eat in front of the TV. I won’t eat in the car. You started to talk about it as you were describing what’s worked for you. It’s just stepping back and memorializing in written form what it is that you believe. How could ten people following you around all month know whether or not you were doing it or not? Everything you say, I couldn’t disagree with anything. It’s wonderful.

Meredith:
Great. I just wanted to follow up, too, with the conversation with diet variation and how that’s been so helpful for so many people, too. It’s adding in a carb day, possibly a protein-load day, having some lower carb days. It also adds in a fasting day. How do you feel about fasting, Dr. Glenn? How does that fit into the paradigm? Do you think that that can be helpful? From a health standpoint, of course, Dr. Pompa and I feel that it can be extremely beneficial. How does that work from your approach and for those who really struggle with—

Dr. Livingston:
From my personal study of nutrition, I do believe in it. I do periodically go through a day or two of fasting myself. I do believe in it. I don’t recommend it for my clients. It depends upon how serious a problem they have. If I work with people who say I eat until my gums bleed, and my entire life is sitting by the refrigerator. I can’t leave the refrigerator. I’m sitting there with a chair, and I want to kill myself. This is not someone that I’m going to encourage to have a fasting day.

Dr. Pompa:
I would agree.

Dr. Livingston:
I work with a lot of people that feel like binge eating is overtaking their whole life and so on. I’m very cautious. My general philosophy is look, let’s just not binge. Let’s get a regular intake of food going. Worry about fasting and cleansing in five years or something like that when you’ve really got this thing totally under control.

It scares me for people who really struggle with binging or anorexia to go through fasting even though I know on a nutritional basis it really gives the body a break and allows us to cleanse. It’s something that I personally do. I’m very, very careful about that with people who have trouble with that button in the brain that says dislodge your jaw and put everything into it.

Meredith:
That makes sense, just easing into it, as well. You can’t always jump in fully with everything, especially when you have such challenges. Those dealing with such extreme conditions with the over eating and the binging, definitely slow, slow and steady can win the race.

Dr. Livingston:
What would be close to a fast, though, would be a day full of berries and melons or something like that, wouldn’t it? Something that’s really quickly digested but provides some calories so that you’re not necessarily triggering the binge response? I’m asking, I’m not saying.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, a partial fast, partial fasts work well, too, honestly. I’m thinking even that could be a little—for the person who binges. Again, it’s the person in front of you, you have to know that person, right? Even then that could be a little bingy for some people. Who knows?

Dr. Livingston:
Yep.

Meredith:
Many, many different styles of fasting modification, that’s why it’s so important to work with a practitioner. If anyone’s watching, really struggling with the binging eating and the overeating. Having that trained practitioner to guide you along the way is so priceless, really important.

What I’m just wondering, anyone who’s watching who’s been struggling maybe for years or maybe a short period of time with over eating, binging—what are some key tips and techniques that they can walk away with after this show, implementing really quickly into their life to see a difference?

Dr. Livingston:
The most profound thing I could say is to really simplify the whole thing: that all you really need to do to never binge again is never binge again. It sounds crazy, but it’s all you need to do. You need to draw these lines very clearly in the sand about what that means. You need to start listening for that crazy inner voice that talks you out of your best-laid plans. You need to stop trying to love your inner wounded child and kill your inner wounded child to fix this problem. You can do all that to fix other problems. Determine that you’re disgusted, get good and disgusted, with that lizard brain part of you that keeps talking you out of your plans. That’s the most fundamental tip that I can give people is to realize it’s a lot more simple than you think it is.

Kathryn Hansen, who wrote Brain over Binge, is a good friend of mine. She puts it like this. She says you just have to think of all those urges as neurological junk. It’s a miswiring of the brain. You would know about nerve plasticity, but basically he says whatever fires, think of the wires together. If you start dismissing those urges, then those urges will weaken over time.

In plain English, we don’t really crave those things that we know we’re never going to have. If a prisoner has no hope, then the prisoner starts to calm down because there’s no sense banging your head against the wall of a cage. It’s a real simplification, a switch of paradigm from loving your inner wounded child to caging your rabid animal.

I’ve got all sorts of free resources on my site if it’s okay to say that, and you give me the word. Today we’ve talked a lot about theory. I’ve recorded a lot of full sessions so you can hear how I actually implement this with people. I’ve set up a whole bunch of food plan templates so you can get a sense of the kind of rules that work for people and the rules that don’t. It’s all free. The book is free also, by the way. You can download it on—

Dr. Pompa:
Give the resources.

Dr. Livingston:
It’s all at neverbingeagain.com. If you go to neverbingeagain.com, you hit the big red free button, and you sign up for the free reader bonus. You’ll get everything we just talked about including the link to the free book so that you can get a better sense of what we’re talking about and all that stuff. Yeah, neverbingeagain.com

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Look, I know you’re going to get a lot of people going there because so many people that watch and listen to this show to some degree, different for everybody, but to some degree struggle with this, right? It’s part of it, no doubt.

Dr. Livingston:
It’s a very empowering philosophy because it supports your independent thinking. It get’s that negative part of you out of the way that says that you can’t do this and you’re powerless. It gives you a new sense of hope that you haven’t had before. Find one rule. Find one rule. Play with one rule. See how that works. Listen to some of the sessions and see how they do it. You’re going to be very surprised as to what your brain can do that you didn’t know it could do.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Glenn, thank you. I think you’re really going to get a great response from our viewers. Thank you for coming on the show.

Dr. Livingston:
Thank you for helping me to reach more people.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Meredith:
Yes, thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thank you, Dr. Glenn. Such a message of empowerment for those of us who have struggled for so many years with these challenges, but to know that with the right tools that this doesn’t have to be a challenge that we live with forever and that we don’t have to have this food prison as you called it. I think that’s a really powerful message. There’s hope.

Dr. Livingston:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you.

Dr. Livingston:
Bye.

Meredith:
Thanks so much, Dr. Glenn. Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Thanks for watching,

Transcript of Episode 151: The Dark Side of Blue Light

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Jack Kruse

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode number 151. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course, and today we welcome special guest Dr. Jack Kruse. Have a lot of exciting stuff to talk about today. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Kruse.

Dr. Jack Kruse is a respected neurosurgeon and CEO of Optimized Life, a health and wellness company dedicated to helping patients avoid the healthcare burdens we typically encounter as we age. He is currently in private practice in the Gulf South, straight in live from Bourbon Street. Love that. As a neurosurgeon, Dr. Kruse’s research has been published in respected dental and medical journals. His popular blog, drjackkruse.com, gets over 250,000 unique worldwide visitors per month from countries like Australia, Germany, Russia, and Zambia, Africa. Welcome, Dr. Kruse, to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you on the show.

Dr. Kruse:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Jack, I love this topic, and I think a lot of our viewers and listeners really haven’t heard a lot about this topic. One of the things that struck me in one of your video interviews or maybe it was something I read, you said something that—you said as years of doing neurosurgery, you were killing people, and your goal now is to save people. I mean, I don’t know how you got into this arena of talking about the dangers of blue light or the positive effects of red light, which we’re going to discuss in this episode, so folks, hang in there. If you have unexplainable illnesses, this man could have a very, very unique reason why you’re not burning fat, why you don’t have the energy, or why you have brain fog, etc. Stay tuned, very informative show. Jack, how did you get into this? I mean, you said you were killing people and now this. Tell us your story.

Dr. Kruse:
I mean, to cut it to the chase, I’d love to tell you it was altruistic. It wasn’t. It was actually my own illness that I got and didn’t really think about it as an illness. I was giving a spine talk in Birmingham, Alabama about 12 years ago on some instruments that I had designed to do minimally invasive spine surgeon to a group of neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons who happened to do what I do. When I stood up to give the talk, I immediately felt a really bad pain in my right knee, and I actually had to have help to get to the podium to give the talk. Long story short, I found out that I had torn my knee meniscus from one of the orthopedic guys that were there that diagnosed it.

The most fortuitous part of the whole story was one of the orthopedic surgeons who was there whose wife was present. She worked for one of the big biotechnology companies in California. She said to me, she goes, “Look, my husband says you’re a pretty smart guy.” She goes, “I think I know why this happened to you, and I’d like to send you some information about this.” Of course, I looked at her like she was crazy, and I said, “Sure.” She goes, “You’ll have it probably next week.”

I got home back to Nashville. I got a FedEx package. The craziest part of the story was it was a book with paper stuffed in it, and she gave me direction. She goes, “You need to read this book, and then you need to read these six papers.” She says, “Don’t go out of alignment with this,” so I did. I started to read the book, and the book is a fable. It wasn’t a scientific book by any stretch of the imagination. A book called The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma.

That story in there was about a very famous lawyer from New York City who had a heart attack during court session. Basically, quit his job right there on the spot, sold everything in his life, and basically went to the top of the Himalayan Mountains. Came back tan, 100 pounds less. In the book, they talk about the guy being an asshole, which I think I probably could’ve been characterized pretty well 10 to 12 years ago. Everybody knew that he was a different kind of cat when he came back. I read the book, and I actually enjoyed the book, didn’t see the point of it.

Then I started on the trek of reading the papers. I got to about the third paper, and I had this weird idea in my head. I said she’s trying to tell me that what’s in the book is for real? That’s not what she was trying to tell me. She was actually trying to tell me something else that was probably a little bit more sinister. The company that she was working for had made a drug called synthetic leptin. It was basically being used for people with anorexia, obesity, and things like that, and they had a lot of success. The funny thing about it is they shelved the trial. The reason why they shelved the trial is because they realized that if people understood the fundamentals behind how leptin worked, there would be no reason for the drug.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Dr. Kruse:
The most impressive thing that Amgen did is, as soon as they shelved the trial, they went out and then patented all their medications that could work on cold receptors in the body. That’s really what she was trying to tell me, but unfortunately, I decided to jump down a far bigger rabbit hole. Once I did, it took me awhile to put this all together, but where my come-to-Jesus moment occurred was when I was in Italy at the foot of Michelangelo statute. Everybody’s looking at him from the front. Not from the back. I was standing behind him, and I was looking up at his behind. I was going what’s the difference between perfection and my fat ass?

The craziest thing happened. If you know where the statute is now situated—they put it inside after 1973 because it was getting worn, but it’s a beautiful dome place. It’s all white marble. There’s a glass dome right above him, so the light is phenomenal. I looked up, and the light was coming in. There was a bird on a ledge, like a cornice, and immediately, that was my eureka moment. I realized what the difference was is that Michelangelo lived at a—I should say Michelangelo and David lived at a time—because let’s face it. David is a picture of what life was like to Michelangelo 500 years ago.

It dawned on me right away. I said the life that they were living 500 years ago isn’t the life that we’re living now. In fact, everything about now is artificial, starting with light. Then it dawned on me further. I said wait a minute. The other big issue is that we now control the environment. They had to live by their environment like a wild animal do. That means that circadian biology is the issue.

Then the last real kick in the shorts was when I was walking out of the museum. The bird didn’t tie two and two together, but I firmly believe this to this day that, if I hadn’t read The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, I wouldn’t have made this link. Birds, from an evolutionary standpoint, come from theropod dinosaurs. Theropod dinosaurs were flying dinosaurs. What was important about them? They were the one dinosaur that made it through the last extinction event 65 million years ago. The belief is the reason why they did is because they had large mitochondrial capacity.

Then I thought about David and thought about myself. I said guess what? I come from eutherian mammals, the other animals that made it through that extinction event. The reason why we made it through is because our deep ancestors used to hibernate underneath the ground, connected to the ground, outside of the sun with no food, and they also had mitochondrial capacity. Right there, I realized the key point that I needed to study a whole bunch more was how circadian biology and mitochondria clashed, and that’s probably the genesis of Jack Kruse.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Learning then we’re under these artificial lights that produce something called blue light. We’re staring into our computers, our phones, getting this blue light. Affecting certain receptors in the eyes that I’m sure you’ll speak about. We’re not getting the outside light anymore. Matter of fact, everyone’s slathering sunscreen, covering up, and running from it because, God forbid, it can cause cancer, and now we’re realizing that we’ve actually caused disease.

Here’s a question for you, Jack. Okay. You understand the benefits of certain foods or eating certain foods. What’s more important, light or the food that we put in our body?

Dr. Kruse:
Oh, that’s pretty simple. It’s light. Anybody who says it’s food immediately announces to me that they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

Dr. Pompa:
On this show we talk a lot about the mitochondria, as far as this is really why people are getting sick. We’re looking at cancer. We just interviewed Thomas Seyfried who’s saying, hey, look, cancer has nothing to do with the DNA.

Dr. Kruse:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
We know that. Yeah, right. It’s a mitochondrial issue, right? I mean, all the way back, Warburg, turn of the century, spoke about it. How is light affecting the mitochondria; therefore, the energy that we produce; therefore, basically every cellular function? Explain to our listeners and viewers how this bad light affects it. Also, how does good light affect it? Start there.

Dr. Kruse:
You have to go way further back than asking that kind of question. I can’t assume that, (A), you know what you need to know in order to make the jumps that you need to make. I could give you the short course, but you do need a little course of evolutionary history.

Dr. Pompa:
Go for it then.

Dr. Kruse:
This history goes back 650 million years ago. On this planet at that time, there was only two kingdoms of life. One was Archaea. The other one was Bacteria. Most people are familiar with that. Eukaryotes hadn’t come on the planet. Okay?

One of the interesting things that occurred only twice in evolutionary history is that we stole the symbiont bacteria. The first kingdom that did it was plants, and they did it 650 million years ago. Why is this important? This is where all the food gurus go off the rails right away. The basis in all the food webs on this planet are tied to photosynthesis. If you don’t understand where photosynthesis came from, how it works, in my opinion, you have no idea how a mitochondria works in a eukaryote because these are the big steps that evolutionary biology took a long time ago.

It turns out that Bacteria have been collaborating and competing amongst themselves with the Archaea for about 3.8 billion years. They’ve done this through a process call lateral gene transfer. Nature only came up with the idea of eukaryotic cells once in both the Animal Kingdom and the Plant Kingdom. The interesting thing that drove it was viruses that grew in the sea under the power of sunlight. Many people don’t realize that in seawater every day, as soon as the sun hits it, you create trillions on tops of trillions of viruses at the surface floating zone, and those viruses do some pretty amazing things. They have the force—they have the ability to force bacteria to do things that the virus wants it to do based upon the environment that the virus senses.

Viruses we know today are capable of changing bacterial cells and eukaryotic cells massively. I mean, anybody who’s a clinician knows that. If somebody comes down with CMV, they can get really sick really fast, but the problem is we ignore this evolutionary trick at our peril today in terms of understanding truly how mitochondria work. What did this viral science teach me? It taught me everything I need to know about food. I found out that dead viral hosts can still make a virus that’s living, and a dead virus can also make more virus to change more hosts. It also means that viruses are extremely unique in biology because it points out why the enemy of an enemy is often our friend in biology, but we miss that all the time.

Now, I have a deep sense that this was part of the equation that formed for the mitochondrial nuclear partnership 650 million years ago that occurred in plant chloroplast because the chloroplast is actually a symbiont bacteria that a plant stole. For 50 million years in the water, the sun interacted with those bacteria and algae to eventually make something called DHA and oxygen. Remember, the exhaust of the photosynthetic pathway is oxygen and DHA. That DHA in algae is eventually what fish came to eat. Then along comes, 600 million years ago, something called the Cambrian explosion. If people don’t know what it is, they can Google it and learn about it.

Literally overnight, every single phyla—32 phyla showed up on this planet overnight at that time. This is when we began to see this amazing endosymbiotic event that we’re now a part of ourselves going forward, and it turns out that mitochondria work under a very special part of the electromagnetic spectrum from sun, which drove the changes by pushing the viral agenda. For those people who are listening to this that don’t know this and this is very important, the human genome, in fact, every genome on this planet has been found to be made up of viral parts. It’s called the HERV1 and 2 oncogenes; 97.8% of the nuclear genome is made out of these viral components. This gets buried. In fact, I don’t think I’ve talked about this on any podcasts because nobody ever wants to talk about the beginnings, but that’s where it begins.

It turns out, what happened over the last 600 million years, we had to develop a communication system that’s based on light and water to allow the nucleus, where the viral parts are, to talk to the mitochondrial DNA. How that happened? We slowly deleted many of the genes in the mitochondria to force it to do things we want to do. I told you the way we did that. The way this process occurs is by lateral gene transfer, the same thing that happens in a petri dish when an infectious disease doctor gets you to spit into a petri dish. It’s no different. The interesting thing is, the direction that we went, we deleted our mitochondrial genes down to 37. Thirteen of the 37 are critical for the respiratory proteins that we all learned about in biochemistry when we went to our educational training.

It turns out now, for the last 600 million years, we’re the last animals that have evolved through this whole pathway. We’re supposed to be the most complex, but when you understand the story, you begin to realize that two systems coexist in every cell of our body. They’re mitochondria and nuclear genomes. One is bacterial, and one is virally based. They sit in every single one of your cells, 100 trillion, with the exception of 1. Here’s where it becomes really interesting, Dan.

The one cell there’s no mitochondria is red blood cells. I tell everybody at this point when I talk to them; I want you to pull out a picture of hemoglobin and a picture of chlorophyll and look at them side by side. You know what you’re going to notice? They’re almost exactly the same. The only difference is the metal atom in the middle for chlorophyll is magnesium. The metal atom in the middle of hemoglobin is iron. The difference between those two metals are the number of electrons, and the reason why this becomes important is the number of electrons tell you how something can work with sunlight.

There’s this famous guy, you may have heard of him, named Albert Einstein. He won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for something called the photoelectric effect. The photoelectric effect is the statistical effect that tells us how sunlight interacts with electrons. People don’t realize this. Sunlight can only interact with electrons in a cell. The more electrons you have, the more probable chance you will be able to harness the energy of sunlight in order to build complexity, and it turns out we’re the most complex animals on the planet. What happens in a chloroplast actually happens in us, but there’s a little bit different pathway. In a chloroplast, for those of you who don’t know, you have the reaction center, all the photosynthetic abilities right there, and their endosymbiotic bacteria is inside that cell. In us, we collect the light via hemoglobin, and we bring it to cells where mitochondria are. What’s the conduit? The conduit is blood plasma, which is made up of 93% water, and that’s where water comes into the story.

The other interesting thing that I want your readers to know, you have to understand the differences between chloroplast and mitochondria. Here’s the main one that you need to focus in on if you’re a food guru and not a quantum biologist. When you look at the overall process of making food from light, which is photosynthesis, you basically have to take CO2 and you take oxygen. You combine them and burn them to make actually glucose. That’s the entire process that you really need to know. You don’t need to really go into all the 39 quantized steps.

Here’s the interesting thing. If you look at what a mitochondria does, mitochondria reverses that process. It releases CO2, and the release is water. The big part that most of the food gurus miss is that release of water from oxidative phosphorylation is the key. When you have poor mitochondrial function, the quantum biologist like I am wants to know what your BUN and creatinine ratio is. We want to know if you’re dehydrated or not. We want to look at all measures of the redox potential in your body because that tells us how efficient the system is in you, and it’s a little bit different from plants.

When you begin to understand how these parts are together and how they work together, you begin to see that inside of you, what a mitochondria functionally is, is 100 trillion organisms. It’s actually more than that because there’s about 3600 mitochondria in every neuron. Basically, you have a colony of bacteria that live inside of you, and that colony of bacteria has a totally independent life, independent evolutionary history, and it has its own objectives, even within your cell, and that colony has to interact with those viral genes. When this happens, you begin to say is it they or we? Is it we or I? You begin to realize that it’s really all a big elusion. All these processes result in how a cell generates energy and how we use energy. It turns out how we make and use energy comes down to light.

Getting back to your original question, you are designed to work with full-spectrum sunlight. What is full-spectrum sunlight on Earth? It goes from 260 nanometers to about 700 nanometers. That’s it. It turns out, if you look at the redox couple of cytochrome 1, which is the NAD+, NADH, the fluorescent absorption of those chemicals are 340 nanometers. That’s decidedly in the UVA range. You begin to realize that all foods, basically, are a collection. If you think about a tomato in your head right now as I talk to you, I want you to—the paleo gurus, the food guys, the ancestral guys, they look at food as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. I look at all foods as electrons and protons.

When you realize that all foods get broken down to electrons—because what’s the input to mitochondria called, electron chain transport? When those electrons come in, they are excited by sunlight via the photoelectric effect. What is the redox couples? What do those cytochromes really do? They measure. They’re the observers of the effect, and they’re measuring how much sunlight is affecting each electron, and then they order how that process goes from cytochrome 1 to cytochrome 5. Cytochrome 5 is what you probably all remember learning in biochemistry. That’s called the ATPase.

The ATPase has a spinning head. What do you know about spinning things in science? Anything that spins basically makes a magnetic field. Where is most of the magnetic pulses in the human body generated? Everybody who’s listening to this, they may think I’m talking over their head, but you guys know this stuff. It’s not uncommon. Every time the doctor puts EKG leads on you, what do we see (squiggles on there)? It tells us a little bit about electric and magnetic deflections. Okay? That’s the electric current from the mitochondria across your inner mitochondrial membrane. That’s basically what you’re measuring.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the definition. I mean, that’s really life, Jack, right? I mean, what’s moving from cytochrome 1…

Dr. Kruse:
I think I lost you. Hello?

Meredith:
All right, yeah. It looks like he’s frozen there. Oh, shoot. He had a good point he was making too. Oh, man. Okay.

Dr. Kruse:
It must be that Park City weather.

Meredith:
It is. It is, all righty, well, if you want to continue with your discourse there.

Dr. Kruse:
I could do that. What I was saying is that—and what Dan was saying. Dan was saying that’s what all life’s about. It’s true. When we interrupt electron chain transport for any reason at all, whether we do it with drugs or we do it from bad decisions we make, it slows the flow. There’s two things. When I talk about flow, we’re not talking about guys like Steven Kotler. Flow, for me, is how electrons move across the inner mitochondrial membrane. The faster they move, the faster the ATPase spins, the higher the magnetic field is, the more life you live. Not only that, that life is healthy.

When the electric current drops and the ATPase stops spinning, you get sick. What we now know from Doug Wallace’s work, who is probably the next guy up to win a Nobel Prize from all this science, is that all diseases—and I don’t want to say all. It’s a bad time to use the word all or never. About 80% of diseases linked to mitochondrial energy flux dropping. That’s the reason why obesity, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, their train stops based upon the loss of voltage and the decreased spinning. In medicine, we’ve been taught to believe that all diseases are genetically based in the nuclear genome, and that’s what causes it.

It turns out Dr. Wallace—he’s the Head of Mitochondrial Medicine for those of you who don’t know at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He’s the world expert in mitochondrial medicine. If you don’t know anything about him, I strongly recommend you read and look at his videos on YouTube. He has made the case that just about every Neolithic disease on this planet comes from a mitochondria with the exception of the 20% that are truly genetic, which are inborn aneurysm, metabolism. Things like that. Those are not the diseases that are killing most of the people globally today.

My focus has been on mitochondrial medicine since that time. The best way, I guess, I’ve been described, I think, on social media is that I’m a mitochondriac. My entire focus, the biohacks that I create, the things that I construct, the way I biohack patients by what they tell me and what they post on my form, I look at things completely through this optic that I discussed with Dan earlier about the evolutionary history of how mitochondria and chloroplast are linked together. I really want people to understand that I have respect for food gurus. When they can sit down and explain to me how an exciton is formed in a chloroplast. Then I can say this is a food guru that I’m going to listen to. I haven’t seen that yet, and I’m still waiting. I hold out hope. This is isn’t a contest for who’s right or who’s wrong. It’s really a contest for all of us to get what’s right and what’s wrong.

Fundamentally, we’re all in this for the same reason. We all want to help our patients. We all want to help people who follow us on social media get the story right. Dan asked me before he froze up; he goes, “Jack, tell me a little bit about how light affects this.” The interesting thing about the inner mitochondrial membrane is we have those cytochromes. Cytochrome 3, 4, and 5 turn out to be what we call red light chromophores. That means they work specifically with red light frequencies. That’s between about the 550 and 700 nanometer range. It turns out the one that most people are interested in now is the cytochrome c oxidase because almost all the literature, about 1.5 million articles about photobiomodulation or LLLT, that’s all red light therapy, is based on how red light photons interact with cytochrome c oxidase and nitric oxide, and things like that.

The thing that I want to bring home here so your guys understand the other part of the equation that very few people talk about but I spend a lot of time talking to my members about is cytochrome 1. Cytochrome 1 is where almost all the diseases manifest. The reason for that is—I told you before that, the electrons that come in here, they’re highly excited. That means all carbohydrate electrons enter in at cytochrome 1. Why is that? Carbohydrates only grow on this planet on long light cycles.

Now, we have screwed that prescription up. Why? Today, we just passed the winter solstice. Technically, I can buy papaya fruit from Chile in the city I’m in now. Just because I can buy it doesn’t mean I should eat it. Why? That is giving information. Meaning light information to cytochrome 1 that something is present in the environment that shouldn’t be there. That’s what we call a circadian mismatch.

When most people think about circadian mismatches, they think about the eye. I’m actually talking about the eye when I mention this about food. Why? When I go outside in the street right now, my eye is sensing the frequencies that’s present in the light. For example, since we’re using the papaya and December 23, today, many people may not know this. I’m at the 28th latitude. My eye right now is seeing 13% of the total sunlight on Bourbon Street is blue light. Okay? On June 21, it’s about 26%, so if I eat a papaya—papayas only grow when it’s that 26%. That means that cytochrome 1 is seeing a huge mismatch.

What happens when cytochrome 1 sees that mismatch? It begins to spread. It’s got a complex of proteins that make cytochrome 1. Okay? There’s about, I think, 32 subunits in cytochrome 1. When those proteins begin to spread apart, here’s where the quantum magic comes. We start to make abnormal signals, meaning free radicals, and those free radicals sit right next to the mitochondrial DNA at cytochrome 1. Those free radicals ruin the mitochondrial DNA.

Something else happens that’s very important for you to understand. Cytochrome 1 has another component that most of you know about. It’s called Coenzyme Q10 or the Q cycle. The Q cycle is extremely important. What it does, it takes electrons from cytochrome 1 and shuttles them to cytochrome 3, 4, and 5. It does this through a very elaborate quantum process. Okay?

The other thing that it does and many people don’t know this, that 340 nanometer light is purple light. I’m sure you can see this. This is a UV LED purple light. The Q cycle acts as a frequency shifter of light, and turns purple light into lower frequency light, specifically red. What does it do? It takes the sun’s light and turns the powerful short frequency light, both purple and blue, into red light for the cytochrome 3, 4, and 5 for it to do its magic. Now, cytochrome 2 is extremely important because that’s where mostly protein and fat electrons come in. That is a totally different—I should say a totally different system, and it does not use the Q cycle to do this.

The reason I bring the Q cycle point up is this is where you have to know a little bit about quantum biology, and the way electrons move on that inner mitochondrial membrane is called quantum tunneling. That is, in effect, tied back to quantum electrodynamic theory that was made famous initially be Einstein and then brought forward by people like Feynman, and Murray Gell-Mann, and all those famous physicists, but this is what you need to know. Quantum tunneling of either electrons or proteins becomes extremely efficient the closer things are together. Remember before when I told you that you—say you live in a blue light environment. Okay? You have blue light all around you. What happens is those respiratory proteins in cytochrome 1 begin to spread apart. When they spread apart, the electrons can’t get close enough together.

When they can’t get close enough together, guess what? Your Q cycle is like a deli slicer for sunlight. That means you can’t make the proper red light frequencies. What does it do? It decreases the quantum efficiency of cytochrome 3, 4, and 5. There’s something else that happens. The inner mitochondrial membrane begins to spread out. When the inner mitochondrial membrane spreads out, then you’re increasing the angstrom difference. What functionally blue light does, blue light expands the respiratory proteins to decrease electron tunneling. It makes you energy inefficient.

For those of you who think this is too much science, I’ll give you the Jack Kruse analogy. Like putting a lightbulb in the socket back here, and putting it on a dimmer switch and dimming it down. You’ll see the light goes up and down. That’s effectively what mitochondrial heteroplasmy rate is. The higher it goes up, the lower your energy is, the more diseases you get. Until you fix that problem, you’re never going to get better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, we have these receptors in our eyes to, obviously, the light. The blue light is electric smog, right? I mean, specifically for our listeners…

Dr. Kruse:
Hold on. I don’t think that’s fair. I know where you’re going, and you want to jump down that rabbit hole. Let’s be extremely accurate here.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay.

Dr. Kruse:
Blue light is extremely important from natural sunlight in order to turn on the pituitary gland every morning. What we’re talking about is manmade blue light, like the blue light behind me. I don’t want to throw either one of you guys under the bus, but I noticed, as soon as we came on—you see I have BluTech Lenses on. Both of you are talking to me over a blue light device, and neither one of you have blue light protection.

Dr. Pompa:
Put yours on, Meredith. Meredith has them. Right there in front of her.

Meredith:
Yeah. They’re in my bedroom. I tend to just use them in the evening.

Dr. Kruse:
Meredith, Meredith, let me ask you a question. How good are they if they’re in your bedroom? You need them when you’re in front of this LED screen. Why? This brings the point that Dan just asked me. Sunlight, when it rises in the morning, has a color temperature of 1800 kelvin. Do you know what that screen in front of each one of us has, between 6500 and almost 11,000 kelvin?

This gets to Dan’s point. What’s the real problem that all of us have since we now live in a wired microwave world? We’ve got huge color temperature that’s basically telling our eyeball and brain it’s always summertime. That information not only gets codified in the mitochondria of a special cell in your eye called the retinal pigment epithelium, but then it gets generalized into all different parts of the central nervous system. Here’s the crazy part. That information goes to those trillions of mitochondria all over your body. That is how we develop circadian mismatch disease. That’s how mitochondria heteroplasmy begins.

We have to major ways that we get this light frequency information to our system. That’s through our skin and through our eyes. There’s two others, both the gut and the lung system, but the one that I think most people like to focus in on—because the one in the eye is extremely complex. That receptor in our eye is called melanopsin. Melanopsin is coupled to the vitamin A cycle in your brain. If those two things aren’t yoked, you’re guaranteed to get circadian diseases. For your listeners, so they understand, the reason why astronauts and cosmonauts get sick when they go in space is because melanopsin and the vitamin A cycle decouple. That’s the reason why they get osteoporosis in a year. That’s the reason why they come back and they have degenerative disc disease. It’s the reason why Neil Armstrong came back from the moon and basically was infertile the rest of his life.

People don’t understand that the energies in space are in the cosmic level. The interesting thing for me and my members, I use those examples to explain to you how your cellphone, how the phone in front of you, or the material around Dan and the stuff around Miss Dykstra is actually affecting us. If you do this every day in your life, what are you doing? You’re actually ruining this wireless system that’s built into your cells to work with sunlight. As Dan rightly pointed out earlier, light is the key. We evolved for 4.5 billion years under sunlight. The crap behind me, we didn’t—we’re not designed to work around that light.

Can we? Yeah. You know why we get away with it, Dan? It goes back to the story that I told you in the beginning. We have huge mitochondrial capacity as humans. Guess what? If you don’t, you’ll get sicker. That’s the reason why small dogs who are your pets, if you leave them in the same environment you will, they’ll die sooner, and they’ll get sick quicker, and you’ll have higher vet bills. People don’t get it that that’s a canary in the coal mine for your own environment.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow. Listen, I mean, we—let’s talk about solutions here because you brought up the glasses. Meredith, I love yours because you can’t even tell.

Dr. Kruse:
Just so you know, these are the ones that I use when I’m talking to patients, or I’m working on our electronic medical record, or when I do podcasts. Now, I did bring these because I figured you were going to talk about it. These are the ones that I actually where at nighttime, and they go right over. These block everything between 5 and 600. Just so you know, you can buy these for 15 bucks off of Google or Amazon. The ones I use in surgery have the exact same frames as this except they have BluTech Lenses, but I also put a tint over them called the BPI tint. I use those in surgery.

For example, this morning I was in surgery. Last night I was in surgery. I protect my eyes, and I protect all my skin when I’m in surgery. I’m still getting screwed by the non-native EMF from all the materials that are around me, but do I do things to offset those risks? Yes. You need to.

The worst your environment is, the more you have to get right. The less your environment is trashed, the less you have to do. Functionally, where this comes down, it goes back to the story about why I was so bad 12 years ago. I was completely ignorant of all of this, and that’s the reason why at 40 years old I was getting way sicker than I am now at 52 years old.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. Look, let’s talk about it. Obviously, getting natural sunlight is part of the solution. Avoiding the blue light from all the false light we’re around is part of the solution. Jack, what about people that live in areas that don’t get a lot of sunlight? I mean, I know that DHA plays a big role in these receptors in the eyes. Blue light, the more blue light you’re exposed to, the more DHA you need because it depletes the blue light and affects the melatonin, etc. Answer that.

Dr. Kruse:
Okay, this one, a little history. Not too much. The retina to the leptin receptor because that’s—if any of your listeners go on my site, where I got famous on the internet was from The Leptin Rx and The Cold Thermogenesis Protocol. You need to realize that DHA, which is fish oil, is—the highest concentration in your body is in your retina and the central retinal hypothalamic track that connects to the leptin receptor in the hypothalamus. If you have too much blue light, say you’re on the computer all the time or you’re a trader in Chicago, you have a higher need for DHA because blue light destroys DHA in that track. The key thing for circadian biology—for me, I love talking about this stuff. I don’t know if a lot of other people like listening about it, but we have a really cool system that is tied to this story right here on the internet and the cellphone.

You guys know that we have Garmin devices in our phones so that if I came to Park City and Dan told me where he was, I could navigate to him, and get there no problem. What people don’t realize is we have the same system set up in every cell in our body, and it starts with our eye. The way a GPS system works is that the clock that’s up top has to run faster than all the clocks below it. Okay? In the phone, the Garmin device here, 30,000 kilometers above the surface right now there is an orbiting satellite that’s basically controlling light from the sun using an atomic clock, and it runs 38 microseconds faster than the clocks on the surface. That way, when I try to go find Dan in Park City, I don’t get lost. If it was off, I’d be off by a fact of 10 kilometers on the surface of the earth. That would not be good for Garmin, and it would not be good for me meeting Dan.

It turns out the same physical relationship—because remember, the laws of physics scale go from macro to micro. It turns out the same issue—hey, can you stop all that noise? Thanks. It’s my wife. She’s getting ready to do some stuff. You don’t really need to do this do you?

Dr. Pompa:
Bring her on. Let’s meet her.

Dr. Kruse:
The key thing in the eye is that the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which I think most people know is the main body clock for circadian biology, has to run faster than every other peripheral clock in the rest of our body. Most people don’t know this.

Dr. Pompa:
I did not know that.

Dr. Kruse:
I’ve been shocked that even some of my neurosurgeon colleagues didn’t know this. In front of every mammalian eukaryotic gene is a peripheral clock gene, and it takes its lead from this. Let me give you a for example. If you take your laptop and put the laptop on your lap, effectively, what I’ve told people, Dan, is that—if it’s a lady, it’s akin to NuvaRing. It’s actually no different. Why? How those IUDs work, they have metal in them. What they do is they spin that peripheral clock much faster than this clock here, and that’s the reason why ovulation is blocked.

When you put a laptop on your lap or a cellphone in your pocket, you’re running the clock genes in that area much faster than this one here, and that creates a mismatch. The key to DHA is you need to know that you need more of it in the eye to run this clock faster. What does DHA fundamentally do? It turns sunlight into a DC electric current. When you got blocked before, we had a long discussion about that whole electric potential that goes on in the mitochondria. That electric potential is the key to life. It’s the big time key in this system here between the retina and the leptin receptor, and that whole key is the retinal hypothalamic track.

For those listeners who want to learn more about how incredibly important it is to know about this, there is a famous guy who used to be Walt Disney’s time-lapse photographer. His name is John Ott. He’s actually down close to Joe Mercola in Sarasota when he was alive. You need to read his book called Health and Light. This guy was incredible. He wasn’t a scientist, but he was an observer. I always tell people that humans are really good to see, but they’re not good observers. This guy was unbelievable in his observations utilizing time-lapse photography. He actually postulated that the problem with most diseases came from this defect in the central retinal pathway, and he brought this information to several different doctors. Some of them listened to him, but of course, the bigwigs in ophthalmology, they thought he was completely crazy.

It turns out he’s been now vindicated. Almost every journal you pick up now about chronobiology talks about the central retinal pathway. Guess what the central retinal pathway connects to, Dan, in the retina (the melanopsin receptor, which runs 435 to 465 in the retina)? That’s strongly in the blue range. If any of your members want to really see the true devastating effect of light, I would tell you go look at my Ubiquitination 24 blog post. I put three spectra up of incandescence, that’s the bulb behind me, and fluorescents, and LEDS.

You’ll notice that fluorescents have a huge spike right at 465. You’ll also know that LEDs have a huge spike there. The key thing is they have no red. Incandescence mimic the sun the closest. Now, is it close enough to keep you extremely healthy? In my opinion, no. Did it do a way better job for the first 65 to 70 years in the 20th century? Absolutely and that’s the reason why Neolithic disease didn’t begin to explode until 1960 and 1970.

What did we do? The key thing is, when you subtract out the UV purple and the IR red, what is the bulb called? It’s called energy efficient. Why? You do. You use less electricity, and it goes to the story that you just asked me, Dan, about DHA. The key is you need the shorter frequency lights to run this clock faster, and DHA is the chemical that does it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that’s an explanation for these people that live—the Eskimos, right? I mean, they’re getting less light. However, I would argue they’re definitely getting more DHA, right?

Dr. Kruse:
No. Not only that, but guess what? There’s another fact that everybody forgets about the Eskimos prior to 1950. They all lived a connected life. What do I mean by that? Their connection was to the earth. A lot of people don’t spend a lot of time talking about grounding. When we talk about light assimilation, especially since we’re getting into this kind of deep, can you assimilate as much light?

You mentioned to me before we came on that you lived in Park City at 6500 feet. For UV light, that’s awesome, anything above 5,000 feet, but here’s the key. If you’re not connected to Earth, Dan, if you have rubber sole shoes on, that connection isn’t as great as you think it is. Guess what? The Eskimos, prior to 1950, everything that they put on their feet was made from animal skin, animal wool, all that actually transmits the magnetic flux from the magnetic dynamo. For those of your friends that don’t or the listeners who don’t know this, that process has now been described physically—in physics, it’s called the inverse Hall magnetic spin effect. What does that effect do? It takes magnetic flux from the earth’s dynamo and turns it into a DC electric current. What’s the photoelectric effect? The opposite. It turns sunlight into DC electric current.

What did Robert O. Becker teach us in the 1960s and 70s? The reason I cut my teeth on this guy, he was an orthopedic surgeon, a spine surgeon. He worked with bone. He taught tons of stuff, but this is the number one thing. The higher the DC electric current is, the more you regenerate. That’s the key. What did Becker really teach us? That redox is the most important thing in the world, and redox is a function of how well we’re able to turn the two forms of energy on this planet to a DC electric current.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s unbelievable. I mean, obviously, I would love for you to show your shoes because, again, you just gave another solution, right?

Dr. Kruse:
Here, every pair of shoes I have, animal soles. Just so you know, I don’t wear any socks. It drives my wife crazy, even when I’m in seeing my patients. The reason I don’t do it with my patients, Dan, is because it always stimulates discussion. They always want to know why I’m doing things. The longer they’re a patient of mine, the more peculiar things they see.

Sometimes I’ll even bring them into my office. When they’re pretty far down the path and they’ve really started to do really well listening to what I’m telling them to do, I go and show them the pictures on my wall. The first thing they notice, no lights are on. In fact, the lights have not been turned on in four years in my office. All the pictures up there are pictures of different things looking at light. Even some of them there say no shoes. I say just look. Do you see what the trend is? As you walk out my door, right above it is an abstract art where it looks like the sun spinning out UV and red light because that’s the key to life.

When you understand how to use purple and red light, that’s when your life changes. That’s when my life changed. The really cool thing from my perspective is when we have a—you invite me on to do a podcast like this. We jump down the rabbit hole, and we can discuss all the quantum effects and the detailed science, but here’s the best part. How hard is it for a patient? It’s not hard at all. You know why? All I do with my ladies in the South that come to me with osteoporosis, so when you’re out having your coffee in the morning, I just want you to take your shoes off. Sit on the porch, and make like the Sphinx. Look to the east, and keep all four of your extremities grounded.

They look at me like that’s it? I say yeah. If you don’t mind, when you make your coffee, make sure it’s not done with fluorinated water. Very few of them ask me why, but the ones that do, usually they’ve been a patient for a while. I tell them why. What does fluoride fundamentally do to water? It decreases the amount of DC electric current that you make from sunlight. Why? Fluoride is a dielectric blocker in water. Everything always scales to the same three things, Dan, light, water and magnetism.

That’s what a mitochondriac spends most of their time studying, and that’s part of the reason what makes me a little bit controversial. If you want to talk proteins, carbohydrates, and fats—I mean, just think about it. We’ve been talking about for close to an hour. How many times have I mentioned fat?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’ why light’s more important, right? Here’s the thing. Okay. What about wool socks? Could you wear a natural wool?

Dr. Kruse:
Yeah. Wool works and so does cotton. In fact, I tell people—I wrote a blog post called The Jet Lag Rx. You want to ground when you’re in the plane. You can do that because Boeing has to ground all the avionics, so you have these metal stanchions that sit right in front of your feet. Just take your shoes off. Put your foot right on that, and you’re technically grounding when you’re flying.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s great. That’s good to know. Leather bottom shoes, if your—hey, this is what the old Italian shoes are. The good shoes are still leather bottom shoes.

Dr. Kruse:
See, I’m lucky. Down in New Orleans, we just take them to the cobbler on Magazine Street, and they switch them all out.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it. Yeah. Get rid of the rubber, man. You might fall more. Hey, that could be a benefit too. Yeah. The glasses, we got to get into the real sun, no doubt, a lot of solutions. Okay, one last question, Meredith. Then I’m going to turn it to you.

Dr. Kruse:
This one too. Don’t forget this; good water.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt about it. No doubt. We preach it. What about if you had—what about the saunas? If you had a full-spectrum sauna from near infrared to far. Obviously, the far is going to be good for detox, but the near infrared is what you love for the mitochondria. Am I right?

Dr. Kruse:
I think infrared sauna has to be used properly. In other words, here’s where—when you become a mitochondriac, you begin to realize that everything is an N = 1 gain. Meaning, when I say that, that your respiratory protein angstrom difference tells me whether the sauna would be good for you or not. I’ll try to give you a good for example. Someone with grade 4 heart failure who has fibromyalgia, I would not put in that situation. Why? That’s a person with high heteroplasmy rates. Everything’s stretched out. Now, somebody who, say, was relatively healthy, 50 years old, on no meds, I think the sauna is a great thing to do. Their heteroplasmy rate isn’t great, and what you’re technically doing is trying to optimize mitochondrial function.

I’m a big fan of sauna. I really am a big fan. I will tell you, full-spectrum sauna, not so much a big fan of. Me and one of my good friends, who’s a former GE light executive and engineer, we worked on a project together. We really believe that you need to focus more on the far infrared and, actually, the near infrared in your sauna. If you really want to upgrade your sauna, one of the things that we recommend is to get gold foil, and put the gold foil around where you are, where the light’s shining on you. The reason for that—many people don’t know this, but infrared light, the prefect reflector is gold. Now, I don’t expect you to go out and use gold bars unless you’ve got unlimited resources, but you can get gold foil to do this. There’s a teaching here, Dan, that you may not know that’s from the ancients. You know the top of the pyramids?

Dr. Pompa:
Uh-huh.

Dr. Kruse:
The top of the pyramids were lined with gold foil. Do you know why?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Kruse:
When they looked at it, they were getting more red light, and that’s how they knew they’d regenerate. They had no idea how it worked. That’s the reason why they were all lined with gold foil. They knew that there was something healing about that red light. Here’s the interesting part that a lot of people don’t know. In sunlight, full-spectrum sunlight, 42% of sunlight that falls to the earth is infrared A, so it’s the most important part.

It turns out, when you look at the respiratory proteins as we mentioned earlier when we were doing the deeper dive in mitochondria, cytochrome 3, 4, and 5 all have red light chromophores in it. When you look at hemoglobin, hemoglobin the same way, hemoglobin’s got a huge cut off. It works all the way from the UV, but it stops at 600 nanometers. That’s firmly in the red. You have to realize that red blood cells are effectively ferry boats of UV and IR light. That’s the way I look at them.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow. All right, Meredith, I could continue to ask Jack questions. Yeah. My curiosity is just blooming right now. We’re almost at the top of the hour. Meredith?

Meredith:
Thanks, Dr. Pompa, and as is mine. Thank you, Dr. Kruse. What a wealth of knowledge and might have to have you back for a part two because I have so many questions. Something that really struck me, I thought it was so interesting when you were talking about food as information as we know. If we eat foods that aren’t naturally in our environment, that it’s a circadian mismatch. I’m thinking, okay, I’m here in Pittsburgh, and I’m…

Dr. Kruse:
Don’t eat any bananas.

Meredith:
Right. I don’t do bananas because of the sugar content typically. I’m thinking, well, I just ate…

Dr. Kruse:
That’s not the reason why. See, here’s the thing. I’m glad you brought this up. I don’t mean to interrupt you, but when you say this, I think this is going to be a huge benefit for people. I got to get you past. I now you just said you had Seyfried on. Here’s where him and I differ. Sugar’s not the problem. You know why sugar’s the problem? You’re designed to eat sugar when there’s UV light in your environment.

Guess what? If you live in an environment where there’s no UV light, then sugar is a problem. Guess what? We have a lot of data from people that live around the equator that they can eat sugar, and it doesn’t cause problems that it causes us. Guess what? Pittsburgh’s at the 42nd latitude. On December 23, my dear, you’re only going to see about 8 to 8½ hours of sunlight, and the only time you’re going to get even a wisp of UV is right around solar noon, which in your place is around 12:50 to 1 o’clock right now. Guess what? You have no business eating very much carbohydrates at this time because of your latitude.

To take this further back, I want you to think about the Inuit’s because that’s the one tribe that lives even north of you. The only carbohydrates they ate is usually when they grew locally. See, the problem is we control our environment now, and just because it is available in whole foods in Pittsburgh doesn’t mean you should eat it. Why? What’s the other part of the system? The other part of the system is that we spent a lot of time talking about was the eye, and how it’s sampling the sunlight. The gut surface also needs to be yoked to that, and it is.

See, many of these alternative practitioners talk about leaky gut. They drive me nuts because they fundamentally don’t realize that circadian mismatches are the cause of leaky gut, and it’s not by most of the stuff that they believe. When you eat a banana in Pittsburgh, you effectively cause a leaky gut because of a circadian mismatch.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, fascinating. It’s funny, Jack. I was just in Wyoming, and I was doing all of this research on the Indians that lived in Wyoming because there’s so much access to great info there. It was amazing because they talked about their diet. Of course, they were fat adapted, in ketosis in the winter. Then they talked about their summer diet, higher in berries and root vegetables, much higher in carbohydrates. I found this thing. It said that they believe, the key to the diet variation, the sunlight allowed them to be more insulin sensitive, and therefore, tolerate the higher carbohydrates. Today, the American Indians are developing massive diabetes, alcoholism, and they’re saying it’s this disrupt in the circadian rhythm and their circadian diet rhythm.

Dr. Kruse:
It’s lack of sunlight. There’s no doubt.

Dr. Pompa:
Interesting right?

Dr. Kruse:
There’s no doubt. No. There’s no doubt because people don’t—look, people aren’t up on what they’re not down with, Dan. Here’s the problem for me. I can actually sit down with somebody if they have an open mind and explain to them why the nonsense that we’re getting told by the alternative health practitioners about that sugar is bad. It’s part of the reason why I have an issue with Dr. Seyfried. I know what his message is, but here’s the problem that people really need to understand. When we talk about fat adaptation—because Dan just brought it up and it just—it fired off a neuron in my head, and I’m glad he did. Fat adaptation has nothing to do with the fuel that you put in. You know what fat adaptation has to do with?

Dr. Pompa:
Red light.

Dr. Kruse:
No. The respiratory proteins stretched out. Guess who taught us that, (Doug Wallace)? Here’s the key that we need to understand. When you get somebody—say one of my patients in the office has brain cancer. It doesn’t mean that eating sugar is what caused this problem. It means eating sugar right now for that patient is a real problem. To demonize sugar is the wrong thing.

You know what the problem is? That person has mitochondria that is senescent. Meaning they’re stretched out. Their respiratory proteins are at 60 angstroms. They’re no longer at 36. Even when you give them the proper fuels, they can’t use it, so they’re a Nissan Sentra blowing black smoke. They’re not fat adapted. What did Wallace teach us? Fat adaptation occurs when the inner mitochondrial membrane oscillates at 100 hertz. Guess what? That means that all cancers are situations where your mitochondria cannot oscillate at 100 hertz, and that’s the real problem.

The key thing is is to take those senescent mitochondria and fix them. In other words, here’s the beautiful thing. We come with change programs in our body. We need to teach people how to engage autophagy, apoptosis, mitochondrial biogenesis, or what we call mitophagy, and then we can get to the business of fixing. Where Seyfried is right is it is a mitochondrial problem. Not a nuclear problem. For that issue, I am always on his train, but when he starts down this glucose is bad thing, I’m sorry. If glucose was bad, everybody that lives on the equator should be dead, and that’s not true.

The reason it’s not true is because they have huge quantum yield from their environment. The problem is where he is at Pittsburgh, where Meredith is, those people eat bananas at the 42nd latitude, and they do get brain cancer. People who don’t think deep enough blame sugar instead of realizing there’s other things that are causing this problem. That’s how we’re going to solve the problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s interesting. Meredith, I didn’t have this conversation with you about—this is a whole other light on diet variation how in our environment, including the sunlight, really drives when to eat what and how many times. It’s so funny because I’m writing an article on that based on my interview. You wait for the thing. I did a video in front of the buffalo herd. I heard the buffalo were coming out of Yellowstone. I said let’s go find them, and then there they were. I did my video there, and I talked about this. I talked about becoming more insulin sensitive because of the sunlight, and therefore, driving diet variation, which we’re a big fan of.

Dr. Kruse:
Think about this. The reason this happens is because vitamin D, which is made from UVB sunlight. That’s the reason why. I want to bring it back further to how we started the podcast. I want you to—I want to bring you full circle. How are foods made?

Dr. Pompa:
Sun.

Dr. Kruse:
Photosynthesis.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, photosynthesis.

Dr. Kruse:
That’s the link. It goes all the way back to that. That’s the reason why, when I’m talking to you now and you’re saying this, I want you to get full circle, and say, god, now I’m starting to see how this really links. The entire system is yoked to what happens in the chloroplast. You have to realize the brother from another mother is the mitochondria in every cell. Once you begin to understand that quantum connection, dude, everything changes. I mean, you start to go, man, this really is starting to make sense, and that’s the beauty of nature. That’s the beauty in my message is that it’s really not that hard. The problem is we have this really smart thing in our head that allows us to do things that break nature’s laws. That’s the circadian mismatch, and that’s what causes the problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, great stuff, Jack. We’re going to have to have you on again. Meredith, wrap us up, man, or Jack and I, we could go all day. You’ve got your wife there. Thanks for coming on, Jack. What a wealth of knowledge. What great information. It’s funny that my brain was going down these routes, and then it’s just—here it is confirmed even hearing you today. Thank you.

Dr. Kruse:
No problem, anytime.

Meredith:
Thank you so much, Dr. Kruse. I wonder if you could just do a super quick answer because I know I’m going to get this question all the time. What do you think about vitamin D supplementation, just rapid fire, if you can have a quick answer for us who are not in sunlight this time of year?

Dr. Kruse:
I wrote a blog, Time 11. Read it.

Meredith:
All right, check out your blog, all right, everybody. Give me your website one time again. It’s jackkruse.com?

Dr. Kruse:
Jackkruse.com and if you want to know the vitamin D answer, I promise you, I take it and explode it. It’s the Time 11 blog; Can You Supplement Sunlight? You read that. Maybe the next time you have me on we’ll talk about that.

Dr. Pompa:
I would say the answer’s no.

Dr. Kruse:
No.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. The next question is can you supplement DHA? I think the answer may be no.

Dr. Kruse:
Listen. You can but you shouldn’t.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay. See, Meredith? Him and I, we’re—I get outcasted for that message right there alone. I’m not a big fan. Anyways, hey, Jack, this is great stuff, man. Thank you so much.

Dr. Kruse:
No problem.

Dr. Pompa:
I love the conversation. Yeah.

Dr. Kruse:
Take care. It was good meeting you guys.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll talk more. No doubt. Thanks, Jack.

Dr. Kruse:
All right, bye-bye.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Dr. Kruse, awesome to connect today, amazing show. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, as always. Everybody have an awesome weekend, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.

Transcript of Episode 150: Transforming Difficult Kids

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Howard Glasser

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode number 150. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Daniel Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome special guest, Dr. Howie Glasser. We’re super excited to have Dr. Glasser on the show. We have a really exciting topic today. Before we jump into the subject matter, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Howie.

Howard Glasser is the founder of The Children’s Success Foundation and creator of the Nurtured Heart Approach which has been used in hundreds of thousands of homes and classrooms around the world. He’s the author of Transforming the Difficult Child, currently the top-selling book on the topic of ADHD and otherwise challenging children; The Inner Wealth Initiative, one of the leading books on school interventions; You Are Oprah—I love that title—Igniting the Fire of Greatness, a book that outlines ways to apply the Nurtured Heart Approach to oneself; and All Children Flourishing, a book that describes the approaches use with all children, difficult or not. Four of his eight books are in the top one percent of all books on Amazon.com. Howard has been featured as a guest on CNN and as a consultant for 48 Hours. He currently teaches the Nurtured Heart Approach through live presentations worldwide. He has consulted for numerous psychiatric, judicial, and educational programs.

Although he has done extensive doctoral work in the fields of Clinical Psychology and Educational Leadership, he feels his own years as a difficult child contributed to most of his understanding of the needs of challenging children and to the success of his approach which is based on aligning the energies of relationship. Howard has been called one of the most influential living persons working to prevent children from relying on psychiatric medications. He works also to support many children in developing the inner strength to resist addictive substances. Awesome, amazing bio and welcome, Dr. Glasser, to Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Glasser:
Thank you, Meredith.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Hey, doc, listen. I have to credit my wife for you being here for today because she read an article that you had out there somewhere. She started reading it to me about ADHD children, and how they’re put on all these unnecessary medications. That’s been a heart of ours. I was a dyslexic kid who, no doubt, would’ve been medicated for some reason. Two of my children are absolutely ADD, including my wife, so you can imagine our house, as well as my son, Simon, who is ADD, dyslexic, OCD. He always jokes, and says, “Just go ahead and just give me one more label, and watch what I can do with that too.”

Dr. Glasser:
That’s when you have a fun household.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, it’s a fun household.

Dr. Glasser:
It must be [to 20].

Dr. Pompa:
I say I’m going to write the book on how to live with ADD humans. Okay? She started reading me things that you had wrote, and my heart is so on the subject of just drugging children. I always say there’s a time and a place for a medication. I don’t know the percentage, but I would say, by far, the majority of these medications that they’re drugging children with are not just unnecessary but massively dangerous. I see the effects. What I do and we do on this show day in, day out.

Matter of fact, I’ll take it even a step further. I believe that, most ADD children, it’s simply their personality. They’re brilliant. I was this child who couldn’t read until sixth grade, and I had to work my way around who I thought I was, my insecurities that developed through it. Only to realize, oh, my gosh, there’s a brain in here that not only works but has a brilliance behind it. My son, Simon, absolutely had to go through the same thing. You and I actually discussed it on the phone. You said try this next time, and I had just read the introduction to this wonderful book. Now I’ve read the whole book. After you gave me those suggestions, I read this book. My son is already a different person.

With that said, our viewers are going to say, okay, what did you do? I’m telling you it worked in the matter of a day or two. I’m not kidding. My wife saw the difference, everybody in the house. The brothers and sisters saw the difference. What does this have to do with health on cellular healing? What you talk about in this book is transferring energy from the heart of a parent to the heart of the child. That energy transfer, I can tell you that I always thought I was feeding energy in the correct place. I am a teacher. I am that person who inspires, and every time he misbehaved, I used that, doc, as my platform to lecture him.

What you taught me was I was feeding the negative fire. I was giving him hundred dollar bills to basically misbehave, if you will, or create more conflict in the house. You showed me how to switch that energy, so thank you at the top of the show. Let’s tell our viewers this is the heart of the health of our children. I’m telling you it’s perhaps one of the most important shows we did all year. I mean that. I saw what it did to my children, and I see what’s happening in schools. This is a sick generation, and emotional sickness is part of it. All right, doc, with that said, what is this energy transfer?

Dr. Glasser:
Listening to you speak it in real time with such magnitude in your voice is exciting to me. I can actually feel the connection between you and your son. Maybe the words that I wanted to say as you were saying that are in relation to your audience, in relation to your work on cellular healing, is there is a cellular magnetism that gets upside down. That inadvertently, by way of a loving parent and a child who’s desiring, deeply desiring, craving that loving connection and just merely watching us at the level—as my friend who teaches in—Anne Marie Chiasson, who teaches at Dr. Weil’s program, says that at the level of—reality at the level of energy. Kids are reading energy like Braille. When something goes awry, we say we’re busy. We are busy, but we’re never too busy for a problem.

When we show up, we’re showing up with our full throttle desire to teach a lesson, to right the ship, to help this child come to see the light. We’re merely speaking our truth to that child, and we’re giving the gift of us, the energetic, magnetic, compelling gift of us, simply at the wrong moment in time. We’re choosing to give the gift when things are going wrong as opposed to very meticulously limiting the gift when things are going wrong. Having a way out, having a way of saying, oops, broke a rule, consequence. Oops, your foot’s on the line, reset but then very meticulously choosing to give the gift of us when things are going right. It’s like save your soul for the good stuff. Save your soul is something I—a mystical statement I never really grew up with or understood, but I heard it in my—as background music in my neighborhood. We need to save our soul for the good stuff. Don’t give it away.

Dr. Pompa:   
You have turned entire schools around. The schools that are using this principal literally have credited you to completely turning the whole ship, which is -inaudible-. I watched it work within days. Matter of fact, I have to tell this one story. Listen, inadvertently you said it. I was failing. I was. I’m going to call it what it was, but I did it with all the love. I’m so good at inspiring and teaching lessons in it, but I was just doing it at the wrong time. I was doing it when the behavior was bad. According to your book, it’s like giving your child hundred dollar bills to continue that process, and that’s exactly what was happening.

The simple shift that I made was just not giving into the energy. Every time those things happen, I would give a very short thing. I would say we’re going to talk. We’ll talk more about this when you calm down, so I literally just stopped feeding that fire. Then every time I saw him do something good, I would say, “You know what, Simon? I am just astonished the successes that you’re doing here. You are making decisions every day. I’m seeing it of someone who is successful.” He just would light up, and I just kept doing that.

Then here’s an incident that you gave in your book. Some parents out there are going to say, well, wait a minute. It can’t -inaudible- what my kid’s doing and be good to praise him. That’s not true, and you point it out in your book. The ADD child, right, we tell Simon, “Simon, could you take that stuff downstairs?” “Yes. Yes. Yes.” He has all good intentions, but it doesn’t get done.

Then the second time, then the third time, now my wife and I are going, “Didn’t we tell you to get it downstairs?” It’s like, “Yeah!” Then it starts, right? It’s like, oh, my god. It drives me nuts because I am one of the people; I can remember.

Dr. Glasser:
He studied you, Dan.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, no doubt.

Dr. Glasser:
We advertise what gets our goat.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Oh, no doubt. Oh, gosh, that’s a whole other subject. I could tell you every way he knows how to turn my buttons on. Anyways, so this time Merily says—that’s my wife. She says, “Simon, take those cars downstairs.” I’m sitting there watching the scenario. This is day one of me reading this book, right? I’m sitting there going—I know he’s not going to remember, right? It’s like, “Okay. Yeah, I will.”

Simon gets up, and I know he was going to the refrigerator. I mean, I knew where he was going, and I knew he was going to forget. He gets up. I said, “Simon, that’s awesome. You listened to mom just like that. Man, that’s success.” What did he do? Of course, instead of heading to the refrigerator, he heads over and takes his cars downstairs. Boom! It was like he had no intentions of doing it, but he was like, okay, I just got praised for that, so of course, I’m going to do that. I’ve repeated that same strategy many times.

Dr. Glasser:
Dr. Pompa, it’s not just praise. What you’re doing is—because I could hear into what you’re saying is you are giving a lecture, but you’re choosing to give the lecture at a moment in time where he could hear it. What you’re tying into by being conscious of the magnetic energy you carry and the real gift you want to do is you’re lighting up his runway of seeing the beauty in him. You’re showing him who he really is. Not who he thought he was. You’re not just praising him, which is good job, or thank you, or way to go, which is empty.

It’s like eating the packaging on foods you buy. It has no nutrition to it. You’re serving up the nutrition of very carefully crafting encouragement and appreciation by saying here’s the incredible choice you just made. You could’ve gone to the refrigerator, but you rerouted to go—I saw you look like you were thinking of going to the refrigerator, but you made a choice to get done what you needed to get done. That shows me your responsibility. It shows me your thoughtfulness. It shows me how much you care about this family and how much you care about our relationship.

What you’re doing is not manipulative. It’s shining a light on the great characteristics, and I could prove this to you. Had he thumbed his nose at you and gone to the refrigerator anyway, how not great would that be? Had he been disrespectful like that, how not great would it be? It could’ve been extremely not great. It could’ve got you really over the ropes. Therefore, how great is it that he didn’t do those not great things? We need to tell our kids about their greatness. We’re so willing to tell them about their non-greatness.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Just looking for those opportunities, it’s easier than people think to give the inspirational when they do the right things.

Dr. Glasser:
It’s like fruit hanging on a tree. It’s staring us in the face. It’s always there, but we didn’t know it was there.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. He went down like—after a couple days of doing this, all of a sudden the shower before bed argument and the brushing your teeth that normally would go down, whether he forgot, whether he didn’t want to do it, it was like—so Merily said, “Did you shower?” He’s like, “I did it. I did it, mom.” “Well, did you brush your teeth?” He said, “No. I did that too.”

I said to her, I was like, “He’s a different kid.” I said, “Who is it? I mean, this kid is making successful choices day in, day out.” She’s like, “Yes,” right?” He just puffed up.

Dr. Glasser:
Dan, it’s almost as if he was always that kid dying to show his stuff. Frankly, he was getting paid more to do the opposite.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. He literally would just—the banter of when he wasn’t doing something, it got to the point where he was no doubt just feeding from it. Very typical, especially of a child like this, that they will just feed from a negative. We just keep feeding that negative, and yet, it’s such small things. In your book, you give so many ways of doing this rightly, meaning that it’s not just good job. It’s not just that shallow praise. You give example after example of how to really inspire someone. Not just good job, but even beyond that, linking it to success, linking it to achievement. Linking it to a person who’s going to change the world, make a difference. He loves that, and he was just sopping it up.

Dr. Glasser:
We love it too. Let me give you a compliment. There are people who could read my book and go, “Aah,” like it not register. What I gather from what you’re saying is you’re a very loving dad who has deeply yearned to have a positive impact on your son, and I want to appreciate—I am going to appreciate you for the kindness, the thoughtfulness, the consideration, and love you’re showing. It reveals to me how much you care and how deeply you care and how meaningful this is to you to have figured out a way to inspire your son. I’m not there where you live. I’m not in your household. It’s you who’s doing it, and it’s your wife who’s doing it. I just want to applaud you for that, and to me, that speaks of the greatness of how deeply you care and how loving you are as a dad.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you. It means a lot to me. My wife will tell you that the one area I feel like I had been failing was Simon, and it wasn’t intentional. I was just putting the energy into the wrong thing. I mean, it was just feeding a bonfire. When you say, hey, look, there is two fires. Unfortunately, I was just feeding the wrong one. Now I made the shift. I’m feeding the right one. I want you to talk to us some more.

Dr. Glasser:
The nice one is the fire that doesn’t get fed dies on its own.

Dr. Pompa:
No. No, absolutely. Yeah. His love language is affirmation. It is. Maybe that’s one of the reasons it worked so quickly. I mean, honestly, he just blossomed and still is.

Dr. Glasser:
I really get that you’re doing this in a very powerful way. I love that you picked up on the—it’s funny you picked up a book—the book that came your way somehow is a book that’s five or six years old. I happen to be—it happens to be one of the books I speak about at schools, and I really am longing for the moment where we not only have one school like Tolson that has low to no usage of kids on medication, but where there’s whole school districts, there’s whole geographic areas where it can’t be dismissed as some anomaly. I love your introduction. It shows you among many, a growing number of doctors, really know deeply with a knowledge base of how toxic these medications are to the organs of the body, and I look forward to the day when we don’t have kids on medication.

Dr. Pompa:
This is the sickest generation, I believe, in the history of man, honestly, and for multiple reasons. One of which is the over medication from antibiotic use to psychotropic drugs. If we would just be able to educate people on these two things, these two topics, we would save a generation. We really would. You have the answer, I believe, to really help even to communicate with this generation. On this show, we talk a lot about emotional traumas and how that affects the health throughout their life. The traumas that we create in our children unknowingly just by feeding this fire, I mean, honestly, it really is remarkable, which will end up manifesting in physical illness later.

When we look at these people that are very sick later, it’s physical, emotional, and chemical trauma. So many of the emotional traumas were put there by parents with—loving parents, meaning that…

Dr. Glasser:
Loving parents.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, that just simply didn’t understand this simple message. You have a story. You need to tell your story. You were Simon.

Dr. Glasser:
I was Simon, “Simon Says.”

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You were my son.

Dr. Glasser:
I actually won a “Simon Says.” I was on television once as a kid on some show that had a “Simon Says” program. I won and probably because I was so ADHD.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s funny. Tell us your story. I mean, from pain to purpose, man, that’s all…

Dr. Glasser:
My story is similar. My parents weren’t educated as you are, but they were loving parents. I’m sure they wanted me to be—to live the dream and do well. They had their first child, my brother. He’s four years older. He just thrived, was valedictorian of everything he’s ever looked at, and I wasn’t wired that way. Maybe by way of my intensity, my extra added intensity, my life force—which of course, as you know, isn’t a crime.

Dr. Pompa:
No.

Dr. Glasser:
It’s a great thing, but nobody knew how to handle me. When I pushed the limits, instead of people unplugging like you did and saying reset, essentially, to me and then turning back to me and energizing me appreciatively when things are going well, they threw themselves full barrel into haranguing me, reprimanding me. Every punishment anybody knew to mankind at that moment in time, they gave it. That’s what they thought they needed to do. They thought if they lecture me perfectly, or they harangue me, or threaten me, or if they get ever more drastic a punitive, I’ll wake up and smell the coffee.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve done that.

Dr. Glasser:
It made me a devotee of living life through negativity, and I was good at it.

Dr. Pompa:
Simon’s the best.

Dr. Glasser:
I wouldn’t give an inch. I was like Simon. I would not give an inch.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. How did you discover this, though? I mean, here you are. I mean, obviously, you didn’t discover it as a child. You discover it as an adult. Tell us that part of the story.

Dr. Glasser:
Oh, goodness. It didn’t really make sense to me. Maybe I’ll back up a little. There were a couple of moments in time where I had experiences that led up to when I came back to the field and I started working with families at the age of 40. In my 30’s, I lived in Boulder for a while, and I had a dear friend. I think we met at the gym or something like that, and we’d go play tennis.

One day he wanted me to meet his family, his 14 age sons. He told me about his—he and his wife were psychotherapists. I get to their home, and they’re talking to their kids. Not in a way I write about in my book but in a very loving way. They go out of their way to tell these kids about the good things they see in them, and it was as if my world just changed in a moment. It was the first time, believe it or not, in those 30 years that I ever saw a family talk purposefully in that manner to their children. I still had no explanation for it. All I could tell you is that I couldn’t stop the flow of tears, and I couldn’t explain why I was so moved.

Fast forward about ten years. I had studied clinical psychology. I had dropped out just before—I was working on my dissertation. I’m going to take a year off. I’m going to live my childhood dream of being a cabinetmaker. One year turned into 15 years, and when I finally came back, instead of working with outpatient schizophrenics, which I did as a young professional, I came back, and I got a job working with families.

I had studied with some incredible people. I knew all the work I needed to know, and I’d come in unknowingly with this open mind. I think the beauty of having been away from the field for 15 years was that I had the ability to tell myself the truth. I wasn’t so overwhelming loyal to method A, B, C, or D that I couldn’t question it. When I’d go in and work with a family and I’d use method A, philosophy, theory, practice A, and I saw it wasn’t working or helping these people, I simply went on to theory, practice, belief B, C, D, E, F, G. I was blowing through these approaches.

Then I’d try and get innovative. I’d try to read more. I’m going to sound like Seinfeld now. I had nothing. It was just me—eventually, it was me and the family. I don’t know if it was—I love to jokingly say this. I don’t know if it was flashbacks from Woodstock, but eventually, when I wasn’t masking everything and I was just purely being with the family, what I began to see was that—it was almost as if I could see the energy. I’d notice there were times when a family would say something to a child where the child would lean in. It was almost like, oh, something beautiful just happened here. The family doesn’t know it, and the child doesn’t know it.

Then there were times where the family would say something that sounded so good on paper. It sounded so kind and loving. All of a sudden, the child would unhinge, and take a step back. Something energetic was going on. I start watching for this, and I’d start trying to explain it. That’s where some of my analogies would come from. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d go, oh, kids are reading us this way, like the Toys “R” Us analogy or the video game analogy. I would say that as an attempt to explain to a family here’s what I’m getting at. Here’s what I’d like you to try.

I would notice in families, if I said these metaphors well enough, it’s almost like they’d sit up. They’d just go, oh, and they’d turn. They’d go, oh, my god. That makes total sense.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Let’s use that. Let’s use that video game analogy. That made sense to me as well.

Dr. Glasser:
I’d be happy to tell your listeners the analogy. I’m not a fan of video games. I mean, hopefully, someday there’ll be some excellent ones, but I’ve noticed how kids just get enraptured by these video games. They don’t play to lose, and they don’t just play. They want to go level, level, level of greatness. They want to be the best in the world. These games are compelling to them.

When I started dialing in what is it that video games, what magic, what spell does it have, I started to see that there was a—the games have a way of explaining reality that’s captivating to kids. It has incentives that are clear and predictable in a way that contrasts normal incentives. It has limits and boundaries that make sense to a child in a way that contradicts normal boundaries and limits.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. There’s a reward. There’s instant reward. There’s points. There’s energy given, and there’s instant death, which we want to talk about how that little check in time-out.

Dr. Glasser:
Yeah. I’ll get to that. I’ll be the kid for a second. Here I am playing. I think the structure of these games is compelling to kids. It makes them feel alive. It makes them go, oh, the world makes sense. I’ll be the kid. Here I am playing one of these games, and at the moment, I’m going towards the goals, getting the goals.

While I’m doing that, the game is in my face, confronting me with my success energetically, score, score, score, bells and whistles. Everything’s going great. In the next second, if I cross the line, the game doesn’t go, oh, I’ll look the other way, or oh, let me yell at him. The game just delivers a consequence. It gives me complete freedom to break the rules. We adults look at these rule violations and the consequence, and we go, oh, those are massive, destructive consequences: heads blowing up, bombs bursting, blood spurting. The truth is who’s out of the game for two seconds? The game just unplugs usage for two seconds, and for the child, it feels like an eternity.

When the child comes back in, they’re not just coming back in. They’re coming back evermore motivated to go level, level, level. I’m not going to break that rule again. They come in evermore inspired to be their best. To me, that’s very replicable. It’s transferrable.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, it brings out the second point, right? Yeah, we want to give our energy to the child who’s doing -inaudible-. We want to not feed that energy. We want to feed the energy here. That’s step one. Step two is there are rules, and that’s what the video game analogy brings up. You have rules. There’s consequences. You have a different approach there, so describe that approach a little more detailed.

Dr. Glasser:
To me, it’s really like unplugging the gift of us. To me, the reason video games work so great is because game in, game on is so powerful that game off, game out is—it doesn’t have to be drastic or punitive. It’s just merely the game. You’re paused. You’re out of the game.

If I’m interacting with a child and the child rolls their eyes, I’ll say reset. I’ll unplug me. I’m not going to lecture them. I’m not going to say anything other than reset. I’m unplugging me for a couple of seconds. I turn back. They’re not rolling their eyes now. They may be thinking about it. They may look upset at me.

I’ll come back, and I’ll say, look, I see you are still upset. That’s okay. You’re not rolling your eyes, and to me, that’s an incredible decision you’re making. It’s great control. It’s great wisdom. It’s great kindness that you are being respectful in that way. You could be rolling your eyes still, and you stopped. That’s what I care about.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Next time the eye rolling will not be there. Now, talk about time-out. You have a different approach there. Do you know what I’m saying? Sorry about that. My son’s looking for his phone, and it’s going off. I’m sorry about that. It’s sitting on my desk.

You have a different approach with the time-outs. Talk about some of the consequences. You’re talking about unplugging in that very moment. How do you also give a consequence?

Dr. Glasser:
I’d say, for the vast majority of all wrongdoings that we would typically get upset about, I really prefer the consequence of what I’m referring to as a reset. The child doesn’t have to go anywhere; stand in the corner; go to their room; think about it. There’s no explanation. I don’t have to say reset because you’re talking unkindly to your sister. I don’t have to say reset because you didn’t do what I asked you to do. I’m just going to simply minimize it, and I’m going to minimize this energy.

I’m going to minimize—I don’t want to inadvertently give energy to the problem. A kid’s tantruming, I’ll say reset. I’ll turn away. The reset is you lose me. I still love you. I’m still unconditionally loving. It’s just that I am unplugged right now.

I’ll give you a great explanation. There was a family I worked with where they had an 18-month-old. They knew my work because of their 5-year-old, but now they had an 18-month-old who had no words. All he had was a—I’d jokingly say 50 shades of whining. He was world-class whining. He had zero vocabulary. He could whine to the nth degree.

These were very loving parents, spiritually loving parents, intelligent parents. When this kid was upset, he’d go, “Waa.” They would pick him up, and they had a language of their own. They wanted it to stop, and they were asking for my help. I said when he’s not whining, make a big deal. Give him credit for the choice he’s making not to whine. You need a rule. No whining, along with whatever other rules you need.

When he whines, I want you to simply say reset. Turn away. When he’s done whining, even for a second, turn back and congratulate him for the choice he’s making. You’re giving him credit for whining. Give him credit for not whining. This was hard for them because they were so—they cared so deeply about being perceived as loving.

I was in their kitchen. They had this beautiful toaster on the counter, and I said imagine this is the best toaster ever. It intuits when you’re going to wake up. It bakes your bread. It intuits what kind of toast you want that day and how you want it buttered. It makes your coffee. It’s the best toaster ever. When it’s unplugged, it’s still the best toaster ever. It just simply doesn’t work.

You’re the toaster. You just choose to unplug you, and all of a sudden, it made sense to them. I wanted to let them know affirmingly that I know they’re loving. They’re still loving their child when they’re unplugged. They’re simply not giving the loving at that moment, and then the connection resumes. As soon as the whining stops, you plug back in, and say here is what I—just like you did with your son, Simon, and telling him here’s what I’m excited about. I need to tell you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Glasser:
To me, people shake their heads and go what do you mean? You’re not punishing him. You’re not taking things away. You’re not taking away screen time or yelling at him. Yes, I am saying that. I’m saying you could be infinitely more powerful than yelling, infinitely more powerful than scolding or lecturing by simply not saying anything at the moment of the incident, by simply saying reset. Turn away. Then turn back, and give the best lecture ever about what he’s now doing right. That’s what you wanted in the first place.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You’re lecturing on what he’s doing right. You’re not lecturing on the wrong. I hope people hear that. It’s an amazing transition of power. It really is.

Dr. Glasser:
It’s a transition of power. You’re right.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Not only does the other not work—I am a consistent person. I mean, I’ve done all the creative discipline. I’ve done all the lecture. I’ve done all the things that—I mean, a room for this one. I’ve done it all. I can tell you it not only doesn’t work, it makes it worse.

Dr. Glasser:
It makes it worse. Yeah. It’s like a drop of gas on a fire is a drop of gas on fire. Why give a drop? That’s where I’m playing hardball is I’m not going to give the gift of me to that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Stop lecturing the -inaudible-.

Dr. Glasser:
What I am going to give the gift of me to is the great fire of your greatness. That’s what I’m going to give a lot of gas to.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Transition the energy to that, the greatness, the success as opposed to the bad behavior.

Dr. Glasser:
It’s a different way of being powerful. As you were saying—I love what you just said. It’s a transition of power. It’s a very different way. We come from a heritage, from ancestry that believes power comes in a certain packaging, and I’m saying power actually really comes in a different manner. Kids don’t have their awakening by way of drastic punitive consequences. Kids awaken to who they really are as great people, and that’s what you find with Simon now. You’re awakening him to his greatness.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. It’s worked already, Howard. Thank you. Meredith, I know you have some questions that you have. Meredith doesn’t have children yet, but she sees the problem. Fire away, Meredith.

Dr. Glasser:
Hi, Meredith.

Meredith:
Hi. Hi. Hi. I have just been so enjoying the wealth of information you are, and thanks for sharing everything.

Dr. Glasser:
Thank you.

Meredith:
I’ve just been wondering too from a different perspective. I think you mentioned that a lot of these strategies are applicable to adults as well and to ourselves. How do we translate some of these strategies into our adult relationships and/or to improve our communication skills as well?

Dr. Glasser:
There’s two aspects to that, Meredith. There’s one where we’re interacting with other adults. The very same things that Dr. Pompa and I have talked about really is what I try and hold true to in my interactions with adults. We could lose sight of the fact that it’s just merely—it’s just another form of relationship. Truly, there are people who come along, and we wind up having relationship through negativity. If we want to change that, we have to be very purposeful. We can’t wait for that to happen. We have to go, no, I’m not going to give my energy to that. Here’s what I am going to give my energy to.

I’m not saying we have to necessarily say reset to that other adult, but certainly, I have at times. Saying I’m just going to reset this conversation, and then thank you. Now I want to—and I’m not waiting ten minutes. I’ll come right back, and say thank you for resetting. Here’s what I really think is going to serve us to talk about now, and I want to honor you for being willing to change gears. It’s amazing what we could accomplish by way of shining a light on somebody’s true nature and seeing through to not this surface, but beyond the surface of who they really are. Most people, in fact, probably all people have very loving hearts. They may not operate from that.

In terms of adult relationships, I’d say the greatest frontier is a relationship with ourselves. That’s the book you referred to, You Are Oprah. I’ve since written another one called Igniting Greatness. That came out two years ago. I really write in a focused way about my own journey of using this work on myself. Fifteen years ago I thought I was a very positive person. I’m teaching Nurtured Heart Approach. I am changing the lives of a lot of kids and families.

I had a personal crisis, which just shined a big light on the fact that my default setting really, when push came to shove, was still primarily negative. I could have an hour’s long conversation with myself about how a poor choice, or some fear-based thing, or some other worry, or such thing. It was so evident in that moment that I decided I’m going to change that. I don’t want that default setting. I’m going to change it to a new default setting. I decided I’m not going to give the gift of me to the negativity within me. I’m going to purposefully have those same conversations you had with Simon. Now I’m going to have that same conversation with myself over all the uplifting, and inspiring, and positive qualities I see in myself.

Through that process, ten years hence, I started using the word greatness because I want—me being that push the limits, Simon kind of kid, the Howie, difficult child, I wanted—the upside of that is I wanted to see how far I could go. I started accusing myself of various qualities of greatness. I started energizing that within myself. I started to, I believe, have a very big impact on my own psychic, psychological health and wellbeing in terms of believing in myself and maybe even changing that default setting.

Dr. Pompa:
Our thoughts become who we are. Our thoughts literally change our DNA. Epigenetically, the DNA’s produce different proteins, and after a while, the proteins are who we are -inaudible-. It’s dopamine. It’s serotonin. It’s our flesh. It’s who we become. Literally, with our thoughts, we have the ability to become a new person. By feeding us, our own self, these types of thoughts of greatness, success, you made a choice, a decision to be a different person. You just started downloading that new programming into your self-conscious.

Imagine what we’re doing to our children when we’re telling them. We give them the opportunity to think of themselves as that successful person. Change their DNA. Change their -inaudible-. You can ultimately change who they are.

Dr. Glasser:
There’s one more thing. I can’t wait to hear your medical response to this is when I see negativity coming my way, when I encamp to my own negativity, when I’m conscious enough, I go—I reset myself. When I’m really aware, I like to take the energy. I don’t want to go, oh, yuck. Worry, yuck. Get rid of it or fear or anger. What I do is I embrace it. I lovingly embrace it. I take the energy, and I use it, that very energy, to promote greatness. It feels like I’m doing some alchemy there. I don’t know what you would call it in a medical conversion, but I’m very warrior-like in how I go about this.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No. It’s transfer of energy. I mean, energy is neither created or destroyed. You’re just transferring the energy. Negative emotions have great energy. Why can’t we take that great—if energy is the key even to heal it, then why couldn’t we take something that has great energy and apply it in a positive way?

Dr. Glasser:
Yeah. Why let it run through our fingers, and throw it away, and go yuck? Why not take it and just convert it?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Convert the energy, and say wow. I’m going to utilize that great energy. You know what? It’s like what I’ve had to do with my story, Howie.

Dr. Glasser:
What’s your story?

Dr. Pompa:
I had to tell myself, look, it’s like all of this and how and who. I wouldn’t be able to be who I am if it wasn’t for all of this. That’s a transfer of energy. We can look at these things, and say woe is me, horrific, how bad it was. We were trapped in the court systems for three years, I mean, all of this stuff. Again, it’s massive negative energy that I can create to such positive.

Dr. Glasser:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
It is exactly what I needed for greatness, Howie. It is. There’s no doubt in my mind.

Dr. Glasser:
Yeah. I get that you’re leading a life of greatness. I get that you are helping so many people through the work you’re doing and through your knowledge and what you’re sharing out to your community of likeminded doctors.

Dr. Pompa:
I had a conversation with a gentleman named Gilles LaMarche today. Actually, he interviewed me. He is the Vice President of Life College, and he said something profound. He said, “With every principle is a promise,” so behind every principle, there’s a promise. He said, “Dan, you live a principled life. So did I. That’s why we hang on to every promise that goes with principle.”

You’re a three percenter. You made a choice to be different. You made a choice to not be negative. You made a choice to change the world, and make a difference in children. Now you are. I mean, it sounds trite that we can just make a simple choice, a decision, but that’s what three percenters do. I always say three percenters are the people who change the world, change lives, heal from cancer, the unexplainable. It’s a choice. Be a three percenter. Transfer that energy, man. It’s like I’m a three percenter in parenting now.

Dr. Glasser:
Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Meredith:
Awesome. I love it. In closing, since we’re at the top of the hour—amazing, that whole conversation was just awesome there too. The three percenters, love it. In closing, Dr. Glasser, if there’s some parents who are listening or watching and are just really struggling with difficult children right now, what would you say to them?

Dr. Glasser:
I would say it’s very simple. There is three stands, if you will, that I believe I’ve been talking about, but I haven’t said it this way. The first stand is I’m not going to give any of me to negativity so absolutely no. I refuse to give connection, relationship energy to negativity. The second stand is I refuse not to give myself fully, appreciatively, resolutely to the qualities I want to recognize in my child. I am going to make it my business to see through like X-ray vision into the beauty of this child, and see appreciatively the qualities that I want to grow, that I want to feed, that I want to nurture. I’m going to see respectfulness. I’m going to see responsibility. I’m going to see the thoughtfulness and consideration, collaboration my child does, and I’m going to honor them with words of appreciation.

The third stand is here is the rules, and here’s the consequences. That’s very simple. That’s what we’ve talked about is, if a line is broken a little bit, I’m not going to give any warnings. I’m not going to give any hoopla. I’m not going to give—I’m just unceremoniously going to say reset. Turn away. I’m going to be in the truth of the moment. If the truth is this child looks like he’s going to yell, and scream, and cuss but he hasn’t, I’m going say—I’m going to marvel at him for choosing not to. Even if he’s this close to doing it, the truth is he didn’t do it. If he in the next second puts his foot on the—toe on the line like in sports, I’m going to say—I’m going to blow the whistle. Say reset.

I’m going to turn me away. As soon as that’s not happening anymore, I’m going to be back in the truth of the moment, and I’m going to say beautiful. That was hard to do. I know you’re mad at me. I know you’re mad at mom. I know you didn’t get what you wanted, but look at you. You’re using your wisdom, your power, your control to make a thoughtful choice, and I appreciate that. It’s not an easy choice, but you’re doing it.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s so simple.

Dr. Glasser:
It’s simple. It’s a different kind of consequence.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I agree.

Dr. Glasser:
It’s a very honest consequence. It’s really being in the moment.

Dr. Pompa:
I hope everyone gets your books. I hope they order your books.

Dr. Glasser:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
This is part of how we’re going to change a generation.

Dr. Glasser:
All right, I’m with you. I’ll be a fellow three percenter. I’m in.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr. Glasser:
I applaud your work. I applaud what you’re doing, and thank you for having me as a guest.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you so much, Howie.

Dr. Glasser:
Say hi to Simon.

Meredith:
How can our viewers find out more about you, Dr. Howie?

Dr. Glasser:
If you go to childrenssuccessfoundation.com, you’ll see lots of stuff about my work, and resources, and a free eCourse. There’s a book store, and all the books that are relevant are there.

Meredith:
Wonderful.

Dr. Pompa:
Perfect.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thank you, Dr. Glasser, for today’s show, super inspiring.

Dr. Glasser:
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Meredith:
Thanks everyone. Have a wonderful weekend. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you next week.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. Bye-bye.