TMHS 856: Boost Fat Loss and Improve Brain Health with THESE Hydration Tips
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December 30, 2024
TLDR: In this interview on Mindvalley Podcast with Vishen Lakhiani, they discuss how water affects health, including its impact on metabolism, cognitive function, and brain shrinkage. They also share tips for optimizing hydration, such as drinking pure water and adequate amounts daily.
In this episode of The Model Health Show (TMHS 856), host Sean Stevenson dives into the transformative power of hydration and its far-reaching effects on both fat loss and brain health. With insights from his interview with Vishen Lakhiani on the Mindvalley Podcast, this discussion unveils why optimal water intake is crucial for overall well-being and how even slight deviations can impact your health.
The Impact of Hydration on Health
- Metabolism Boost: Drinking just 17 ounces of water can increase metabolism by approximately 30% for about 40 minutes. This process, termed water-induced thermogenesis, showcases how hydration directly affects metabolic rates.
- Cognitive Function: A mere 1% drop in hydration can damage cognitive performance significantly. The brain, which contains over 70% water, requires adequate hydration to function optimally. Dehydration can lead to brain shrinkage and diminish focus and clarity.
- Physical Performance: Proper hydration strengthens bodily functions, enhances energy levels, and maintains joint health by ensuring synovial fluid remains at optimal levels.
Practical Hydration Tips
To maximize the benefits of hydration, Stevenson offers several actionable strategies:
- Start Your Day with Water: Aim for an inner bath by consuming 16-32 ounces of water first thing in the morning. This sets up your metabolism and replenishes lost fluids from sleep.
- Daily Water Intake: A good guideline for monitoring water consumption is to drink half of your body weight in ounces. For example, a 150-pound individual should target around 75 ounces of water daily.
- Keep Water Accessible: Carry a reusable water bottle to encourage constant sipping throughout the day.
- Avoid Plastic Containers: Opt for glass or stainless steel bottles to prevent leaching of harmful chemicals like BPA which are present in plastic.
The Connection Between Dehydration and Mood
Stevenson emphasizes how dehydration can lead to hormonal imbalances, affecting mood regulation and cognitive processing. Proper hydration acts as a 'superhighway' for neurotransmitters, ensuring efficient communication within the body and good mental health.
Importance of Water Quality
The quality of the water consumed is equally critical. Here are key insights:
- Reverse Osmosis Benefits: Consider filtering water using a reverse osmosis system, which removes impurities, but remember to reintroduce minerals back into your water for optimal health benefits.
- Structured Water: Incorporate elements like lemon, vegetables, or minerals to enhance water structure and absorption.
What to Avoid: Sodas and Diet Drinks
Stevenson categorically advises against consuming sodas, both regular and diet. Diet sodas, often marketed as healthier alternatives, can actually contribute to weight gain and cognitive decline due to artificial sweeteners that stimulate cravings without providing nutrition.
Conclusion
Hydration is not just about drinking water; it’s a fundamental aspect of maintaining overall health. As Stevenson concludes, knowledge about hydration is only powerful when applied in daily life. Emphasizing hydration in your routine can unlock incredible potentials for better health, improved metabolism, and enhanced brain function.
Next time you reach for a drink, remember to hydrate wisely and prioritize your water intake. Cheers to better health through hydration!
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You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Sean Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com.
Welcome to the Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert, Sean Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. This year, we want to win. We want to win at our fitness. We want to win at our health. We want to win at being in the best shape of our lives. And championships are all about the fundamentals. And one of the most overlooked fundamentals that has a direct, powerful impact on your metabolism.
Your cognitive function and so much more is your body's level of hydration. On this episode, you're going to discover the remarkable ways that water can impact weight loss, the ideal water to drink, what you absolutely should not drink and so much more.
This is an interview that I did on an incredible show hosted by the founder of Mind Valley, Vishan Lakhiani. And this interview on the Mind Valley podcast was filmed after I did a powerhouse keynote at an event in Portugal.
Now, vision is incredibly insightful and ask great questions. And he has a great swag about him as well, which you'll see. And I think you're really, really going to enjoy this. Now, before we get to this special episode, if you're going to add something to your water, add something that long-lived people have been adding to their water for thousands of years.
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The researchers found that Thea Brownin can positively alter gut microbiota and directly reduce excessive liver cholesterol and reduce the body's creation of more fat, a process called lipogenesis. Another study published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry found that Puer may be able to reverse gut dysbiosis by dramatically reducing ratios of potentially harmful bacteria and increasing ratios of beneficial bacteria.
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Another five star review titled I am so addicted to this podcast by Sabine. I am considering becoming a truck driver just so I can listen all day long to these podcasts. All podcasts have so much great info. Health, brain, diet, working out, et cetera. Amazing guest come to the show. My brain is so happy and full when I listen to these. I listen to the podcast when I get ready in the morning, when I prepare dinner, lunch, breakfast, and when I drive to work.
Incredible. Thank you so much for leaving that review over on Apple Podcast. I truly do appreciate that. And without further ado, let's get to this very, very special interview that I did on the Mind Valley podcast. Again, you're about to discover the remarkable ways that water can impact weight loss, the ideal water that you should be drinking, and what you absolutely should not be drinking, and much more. Please enjoy.
With me is one of the most brilliant minds I've encountered in health. I'm a big fan of his podcast, The Model Health Show. And get this, it has been featured as the number one health podcast on iTunes. It gets millions of listener downloads each year. He's been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Men's Health Magazine,
ESPN, Fox News. He is an incredible soul. I have such incredibly beautiful conversations with him. He has such a good heart and he is brilliant in so many ways. Now his book is one of the most highlighted books I've ever read.
And I like to show this picture to Sean. These are all the highlights I made in this book. Truly one of the most highlighted books I've read because Sean has a funny way of writing that just hooks you, but then he delivers so many insights that you change your perspective on practically every aspect of your body, from how you sleep to how you drink to how you jog to how you exercise to the foods you eat.
So I love the way this man thinks, because he's able to connect so many dots and make it entertaining. If you've not listened yet to the model health show, you definitely should. So welcome to the set, Sean Stevenson. I'm so grateful to be here. That is the greatest introduction I've ever had in my life. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm happy I did you just as Sean, because I love your podcast and I love the way you introduce your guest. Yeah, thank you so much. So we're talking about water. Yeah, yes.
Such an important topic. You know, Leonardo da Vinci called water the driver of all in nature. And it's one of those substances, you know, we're so, I think we become jaded by it because we're around it so much, especially if we're in a developed place. And we really don't understand the value that it has. And so I always like to start with something that is super visceral for people. And the reality is that, you know, a lot of us are, we want to look good. You know, we want to look good, we want to feel good.
And one of the most fascinating things I came across recently was this instance, it's something called water-induced thermogenesis. All right, so when a lot of people were thinking about modulating our nutrition, we're thinking about changing things with our exercise and trying to burn fat, burn calories. But simply, according to the latest research, drinking 17 ounces of water in one go, just within a minute, can boost your metabolism upwards of about 30%. What?
17 ounces of water. So I've heard that when you are dehydrated, your metabolism goes down by about 4%. But you are seeing that there's an alternate hack. Three of these glasses, 30% boost in metabolic rate. How long does that boost last? So it's going to last upwards of about 40 minutes. So you're going to burn somewhere around 30 to 40 additional calories, just from drinking water. I see. Now, of course, we know that calories are not the whole story.
But I just want to share that to get started, to get people thinking a little bit differently about, well, because my question is always, how? How is that even possible? And so if we start to understand some of the basics of what water does in our system, water is known as a universal solvent because it is the most interactive substance that we know. The most things that are possible dissolve in water versus any other liquid.
And so understand that we're mostly water, which you mentioned at the top of the show. But what does this actually mean? Number one, our blood is about 90% water. This is how our body is transporting nutrients and oxygen throughout our system. If we're dehydrated, this is according to the US military, even 1%.
It's gonna start to damage our blood and also damage our cognitive function. Just 1% dropping our normal hydration level. So we've got our blood, we've got our synovial fluid, we've got our cerebral spinal fluid, we've got our brain obviously. Well maybe not so obvious. So let's talk about that. So the physical matter of our brain is mostly fat, protein, a little bit of carbohydrate.
but the majority of our brains is over 70% water. And so again, dropping around 1% to upwards of 5%, literally causes shrinkage to your brain. And so if we're trying to be sharp, we're trying to be focused, we're trying to be our very best cognitively, and we're simply not drinking water, we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. It's something so simple, but we overlook it. And so yesterday in my talk, I talked a little bit about my experience of having this so-called incurable spinal condition.
And I had something called degenerative disc disease. So my discs were just kind of rapidly deteriorating. So much so that they were so compressed that I had two ruptures in my lower back. And the number one thing that makes up our disc is actually water. But it's actually one of the last places that get hydration because your body really works on a hierarchy. Your brain is a top priority of getting the hydration you consume. And it's delivered to all of your cells through these little protein channels called aquaporns, which we'll get to maybe a little bit later.
And then your blood is obviously important. And your body's going to get the hydration to your disc whenever it can. And just a little fun fact, everybody gets shorter as the day goes on. And so you might start the day at five foot 10, but by the end of the day, you could be down to five foot nine, just because of gravity. Wow, half an inch. So I didn't want to say five foot nine. Five foot nine and a half three quarters. So one of that doesn't just make you increase your metabolic rate. It makes you taller.
It does. You've got to think about gravity. We just talked about John Carter the other day. And I mentioned this and you mentioned how terrible the movie was. But when you think about it, we're constantly experiencing this force of gravity. And so when he went to Mars, he was like the superhuman because he didn't have that gravitational force. And his body was able to really express itself in a different way.
And so yes, one of those things that compresses water. And so one of the number of people asked me, what did you do to reverse the condition? I'm not going to say it's the number one thing, but it's right up there was I began to do this process called getting super hydrated each day.
And I started to, you know, digging into the research. I saw that your disc or one of the last places to get hydrated is through a process called remote diffusion, which we're going to talk a little bit about diffusion in a minute. It's super important, but you have to have so much water available in your body that it will get fed to your disc. All right. So again, just a small drop in that normal hydration level can cause dehydration to your disc in your back and increase risk of energy. And so are you saying that if we super hydrate, it actually increases a height?
Potentially, you need that substance in order to hydrate your disc and really every tissue in your body. And so if you're lacking in that, you're putting yourself at a metabolic disadvantage, at a cognitive disadvantage, and also
I guess at a high disadvantage too. So what was so fascinating is I came here to Portugal and I was on the plane. And I shared this little fun fact with my wife, which she got mad at me later about. She actually yelled at me today in the room with love, with love. But I told her that, and this is, again, super fascinating stuff, but we don't think about this.
When you're on a flight, the air is, it's kind of like a processed air in a sense. And depending on the pilot, they can actually modulate this, but it's going to be some recycled air. And it's also, they're bringing in some air from the outside too. But the air is so dry, it's actually upwards of three times more dry than the Sahara Desert in an aircraft.
And we don't think about it because we're not sweating. We don't have like the sun beaming on us. But this diffusion and what diffusion basically means is that water is moving from a place of higher concentration to lesser concentration. So it's literally pulling that water out of your body. It's sort of like, did you see the movie Aquaman? Yeah. Well, there's a scene when they go to the desert and they're trying to unlock this key to find, you know, this map to find this trident and they're in the desert and this key is not working because they needed hydration. There was a time when the desert was an ocean.
And so she basically mirror, she's like a princess, underwater princess, and she pulls a little bit of water off of him and drops it on there. And that's off his sweat. That's it with telekinesis. And he was like, I could have just peed on it. But yeah, that's kind of what's happening, but we don't see it.
One of the things that we experience when we travel, especially if you're flying, is reduced reductions in your mood, your mood can go down a little bit, also your energy experiencing fatigue, some people experience more pain, headaches, things like that. Just simply getting hydrated and being more proactive about it, especially when you're flying, drink more because water is getting pulled from your body. And you're saying that actually influences our moods as well? Absolutely, absolutely. And here's why.
So we know that our mood is really influenced by what's happening with our hormones and our neurotransmitters. That's really when we're talking about feelings, these are the chemicals in our body that are sending messages throughout ourselves that are telling all of yourselves how you're feeling.
And your neurotransmitters and your hormones are moving throughout your body on a water superhighway. And so again, dehydration causes those nice four lane highways to become like one lane, Portugal back roads, right? And so, no offense, you know, it's beautiful. But just understanding that those pathways begin to get compressed and that communication starts to go down.
And that's really what it is as far as our mood. Well, one of the big aspects of that. But even building the hormones themselves, guess what they're made of, primarily water. Same thing with our mitochondria in our energy. The mitochondria themselves, which are really the energy power plants in our cells, which a lot of people have heard this statement before, but they're operating in a water medium as well. And so that dehydration is really affecting you at a cellular level, damaging your mitochondria and literally can damage your DNA.
So that's incredible. So that is so much in terms of how water influences our lives. I was not aware of a lot of these things, but let's go a little bit deeper. So you spoke about super hydration. You spoke about how drinking 17 ounces of water can increase metabolic rate for the next 40 minutes by around 30%. What is a framework that we can think about from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed in terms of how we're consuming water? Perfect.
You know, when I ask people who come into my clinic for years, you know, just basic things about drinking water. And they, nine times out of 10, they're like, I know I should be drinking more, you know. And what I did was develop this tactic. And lots of my awesome friends have employed this tactic and have even put in books like Aubrey Marcus put in his book, When the Day. And it's called Getting Super Hydrated, as I mentioned. And what I do is I take what's called an inner bath to start the day.
And so the first thing I do when I wake up, you know, I might go to the bathroom first, but then I'll have about a liter of water to start my day. And this is because... As a liter, a liter would be about, I think... Somewhere around 32 ounces, well, it depends on the day, 24 to 32 ounces. And I do this to get a jump start, because once the day starts going... So that'll be around four glasses like this.
Yeah, maybe a little bit more. Five. Yeah. Six. Yeah. Around five of those. Around five of these glasses. Okay. And I'm not saying everybody needs to do this, but it's a great opportunity, even if it's 16 ounces, to get a jump start on your hydration demands of your body, right? It just starts your day. Plus, you're going to get that boost with the water-induced thermogenesis. You're setting your metabolism on, and your giving, when you wake up in the morning, is probably the most dehydrated that you are without exercising.
because you've gone for six, seven, eight hours without drinking. And when you're sleeping, your body is going through a tremendous amount of metabolic processes. And there's a lot of metabolic wastes that are left over. And this is why your urine is usually so concentrated when you wake up in the morning. It's trying to flush that stuff out. And you need to replenish those fluids. And so, especially when you're sleeping, it's the activity of something called your glymphatic system, right? So I mentioned earlier, you have the lymphatic system, which is a water-based system. It's really your
cellular waste management system of your body, which is super important, is where a lot of your immune system is located doing its work. The glymphatic system detoxifies your brain. And there's essentially this break with the blood brain barrier. And so the lymphatic system doesn't go there. And so your brain has its own waste management system. And it's 10 times more active when you're sleeping. And so now we have data that's affirming that Alzheimer's is really related to an inability of the brain to detoxify itself.
And so if you're dehydrated, it's one of those underlying things. Are we providing the base material for your body to do its job, right? And so the glymphatic system is 10 times more active when you're sleeping and getting those waste out of your body, you need water to assist in that. And so it's just you're getting so many benefits by getting up, taking an inner bath, we take an outer bath, you know, but taking that inner bath, 16, I'll say 16 to 32 ounces, can be an absolute game changer. I'm not saying you can't have coffee.
Have some water first. Get that into the body. I'm not doing that. I realize when I wake up, I meditate, I exercise, I might make myself a smoothie, but I'm not taking water. And I now realize that that is putting me at a disadvantage. So literally, you should be taking anywhere from three to six of these classes, depending on what you're comfortable with. And I guess it depends on your body size as well. Absolutely. In the morning when you wake up,
Fantastic. And another little tip with the body size because that's important as well because there's this cookie cutter statement of you need eight eight ounce glasses of water each day. Huh? If somebody's in the NBA and they're seven feet tall and you know two hundred and eighty pounds versus you know somebody who's five foot one and a hundred pounds. And so just a general metric for people is taking your body weight which you know if you're a hundred and fifty pounds divide that number in half that'll give you seventy five.
That's the number of ounces to target. Okay, as a baseline. So 75 ounces for the morning. For the day. For the day. For the day. Okay. Yeah. And that just gives us a little bit of a barometer to use as a market for folks. Wow. So that's a brilliant strategy. So 150 pounds, you take your body weight in pounds. So let's say you weight 200 pounds. You divide that by half. That's 100 pounds. And that means 100 ounces of water. And a single glass like that is how many ounces?
So this is somewhere, the glass itself is about eight ounces. Eight ounces, okay. So you're looking at around 12 of these glasses of water a day, if you weigh 200 pounds. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Thanks, that's really cool. Okay, so we start the day with super hydration. Now as we go throughout the day, what is our relationship with water? This is another little simple tactic.
if you have
associate with me, I'm always checking, like, where's your bottle? You know, where's your water bottle? I want to see it with you. Because if it's with you, you have a greater perclivity to actually drinking it. Something super simple, but get yourself a nice bottle that becomes like your travel buddy. And, you know, even for me, I've got that bottle that was taken away from me for the filming, but I've got a bottle that I carry around with me that, you know, it just enables me that it's easy access.
Right. And so that's a simple, very simple tactic. And if you really are starting to understand how powerful water can be for so many different factors of your life, just making it a mandate that you just keep a bottle with you. And so you have easy access to keep sipping throughout the day. Right. And a really cool hack for that is to get a good designer bottle. They now sell these designer glass bottles with beautiful cork. And they look so good. And I've seen some people in my office put that on their desk.
Not only does it remind them to drink water, but it almost serves as a base. It looks so beautiful. It lightens up the desk. And so you kind of kill two birds in one stone. It beautifies your environment. And it also has water for you readily available. It beautifies you. And beautifies you. Right, I love that. And some of these bottles now also come with filters.
based on coconut fiber or charcoal, where it actually filters the water, it gives an additional layering of filtering to the water as you pour it in. And there's some incredible brands out there. What would be a recommended Google search to find such a problem? This is such a great topic, and you just mentioned bottling it in glass. And so now a lot of people are aware of this, but I always like to go a little bit deeper and drill in.
But I've not been talking about this for a decade and a half. And it's so beautiful that now people are really understanding this. But plastic has its benefits. But because water is the universal solvent, it absorbs
compounds from whatever it's exposed to. And plastic doesn't biodegrade at photogrades. And so literally light breaks plastic down. And so water being a solvent, it's absorbing those compounds from the plastic. And one of the ones that people are aware of now is BPA, Bisphenol A. And this is a known zenoestrogen. It's in these camps of these kind of external estrogens that when you consume them, they can fit into estrogen and receptor sites in your body and turn on programs related to estrogen.
And so that doesn't sound very good because it's not. And so now we're understanding that plastic might not be the best thing to keep our water stored in. Now with that said, if you're on a flight, again, don't be neurotic like I used to be because I went through phases like I literally would.
I'm not going to say I'll drink my pee first before I drink bottled water. But I would definitely postpone my drinking of water because I didn't want to drink out of plastic. Wow. It's more important to get hydrated. And your body will always choose it, preferentially, the higher quality water. Right. Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back.
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So plastic water bottle, so the water bottle that you carry with you is that plastic or is that glass? So that one's glass, and I got that from here, but I generally carry a stainless steel bottle. They're super nice and they're stainless steel is also great. And a phenomenon that's happening right now, especially in American airports, and I'm so proud of the US for adopting this, is in many American airports, they are water refill machines. So you can take your metal or your glass bottle and refill it.
So, you know, you don't have to buy plastic bottled water. Not only is the plastic bottled water not so good for you, but it poses a huge environmental risk because only 5% of plastic water bottles in the United States actually get recycled. Yeah, it's terrible. So a lot of it is ending up in landfills or worse, the ocean.
Yeah, yeah, it's a definitely big issue. And again, this just stacks conditions for us to realize how important it is and to take a little bit of a different approach. And something else I want to share with that is when we're filling up water at these different water stations, it might be spring water, it might be oftentimes it's reverse osmosis water. And this is one of the
ideal ways to treat water that is not under the best conditions. Because again, I started this by Leonardo da Vinci's quote, water is the driver of all nature. This is a smart guy. And for him to say that, so I want to dig a little bit deeper and understand water being the universal solvent.
It carries memory. Water is sort of like a liquid crystal and it's conductive as well. Pure water, H2O, is not anything you find in nature. But pure water itself is actually an insulator because it doesn't have the conductivity because of the minerals. So these ions that are in the water, you find it in nature is going to have. Then when we talk about acids and alkalines or acids and bases, it's really talking about the mineral composition.
And so it has an electric charge. This is why, you know, the scary movie like you're in the bathtub, you know, trying to exfoliate or whatever and Jason comes in and drops a, you know, a radio in the bathtub and shocks the shit out of you. You know, it's because it's conductive and you're conductive. Guess what you're made of? Water. And it's
It's water that has a lot of dissolved solids in it, right? So understanding that, and also that water has this memory, water's able to pick up a lot of the things that we're putting into the water supply. So in the U.S., there was a study that was published by the Associated Press, and this was 10 years ago, and again, I've been talking about this literally since it came out, but now more people are aware of this, they tested the water of 41 million households in the U.S., from California to New York City.
And they found trace amounts of chemotherapy medications in the water supply, antidepressants, blood pressure medications, muscle relaxants. The list goes on and on. And how is this getting in the water? There's two ways. There are water treatment facilities that are using recycled water. And they're doing a great job cleaning it.
you know, filtering out all the crap that comes in through, you know, our toilets and our sinks and things like that. I don't think a lot of people are aware of that. We just think that our water comes from somewhere. But sometimes it's actually recycled water. And so this is why they're adding. And so people who are taking these medications, the medications are passed out. They're pissing it into the water. And the water is recycling because these...
These molecules are so tiny, it's near impossible to filter. So we are creating water that's more and more highly concentrated in these medications. And the thing is, it's not super alarming because the experts would say, well, these are such small micro amounts that it doesn't matter. It kind of matters, especially when we understand that things kind of bioaccumulate in our tissues.
And so understanding that, you know, because it can be a little bit scary and a little bit gross, that the water is getting recycled. And this is not 100% of the cases, but in some cases. And so they're using very strong antibiotics, very strong chemicals to destroy every kind of pathogen that could be in the water. The main one is chlorine in the US. And this is what we use in swimming pools and things like that again.
You want that if you're having recycled water, but here's the problem. It's used to destroy bacteria pathogens, but you're mostly bacteria in your body. The research changes a little bit, but we have upwards of somewhere around 50 trillion human cells.
And you have ten times more bacteria than you have humans. Yeah, we have more bacterial cells than human cells and roughly three to four percent of your body weight is made up of bacterial cells. We live, we coexist, not just, we're not just human, we're human plus a gut bacteria and the bacteria all across our body. They actually cause us to function. Exactly, exactly. And so when we're taking, you know, a nice tall glass of chlorinated water,
you're going to be taking out some of the good guys, you know, and I've seen this just clinically, you know, gut dysbiosis. In some ways, like, well, I drink plenty of water and just drilling down and kind of doing a survey of what's happening in the life of things they're consuming. And we have a very anti-microbial, antibacterial culture now, like we're trying to destroy everything. We thought that that was the root of problems, but it's actually one of the things that supports our health is supporting the friendly flora.
because pathogenetic bacteria are very crafty at sticking around. And so I just want people to understand that. So if tap water, recycled tap water, is bad, are there any situations where we could be drinking tap water?
While you seven, absolutely. Again, if it comes down to it, I'm going to drink tap water rather than chronically dehydrate myself. Yes. But if you are aware enough to choose and to create strategy, there are better options. And for anybody who has tap water, even getting a simple filter, I recommend reverse osmosis because when I say a simple filter, that's
You can remove some things. We'll take an example of a popular one. Can I name drop here? Yes, absolutely. All right, Brita is a really popular one in the US. But if you read the package, it literally just says, removes the smell and taste of chlorine. It doesn't actually remove the chlorine.
And it's made by Clorox, who makes bleach. Right. And so that's not going to be there are going to be some impurities that get filtered out. But what we want is reverse osmosis would be a good choice. And what that does is it's pushing the water through a very, very, very tight, very small microscopic membrane and remove the chlorine can't fit through there. Nice.
And so, but the problem with it is it's creating a really a blank slate of water, H2O, which again, that doesn't exist in nature. It's more of like a supplement. And so what we want to do is bring back the conductivity, the electrical charge to the water. We can literally light a light bulb with this water having minerals in it. And so again, it's lighting you up and giving yourselves that energy. But if it's just blank H2O,
diffusion, it's going to be pulling minerals from you to try to process the water. I'm not saying it's the worst thing. I'd probably see somebody drink pure H2O, then chlorinated water. But so something simple, if you have a reverse osmosis system, is to simply add some minerals back to your water. This could be some liquid minerals. So give us a pop in how to do that. Firstly, what reverse osmosis systems do you recommend? And what mineral
They're all really comparable. I don't want to. So, no, I get that. But tell us at least a Google search we could put in to get started. Reverse osmosis filters. Would that be something we can search? How would Google best reverse osmosis system? Got it. Best reverse osmosis system. Do your homework because something might be appropriate for you that's not for somebody. I understand why. Some people get a whole house system. Some people get a little desktop.
Right. That's the most osmosis system. And then what are some of the additional supplements and nutrients we can put back in the water? Yeah. So there's liquid minerals. There are like ionic minerals that you can buy. Is that a brand that we search for? Liquid minerals? There's one is called, I believe it's trace minerals. But I get mine from a company called Activation Products. You know Ian Clark by chance? No. Okay.
So, activation products has a great liquid mineral. So, we can search for activation products, and what is that particular thing that we're looking for under activation products? Liquid minerals? Yeah, liquid minerals. Now, we put that back in the water. Yeah, just put some mineral drops in there. Or something simple as... That is a very useful tip. Now, should we ever be buying water in plastic bottles?
If you can avoid it, avoid it. If not, not just because it's bad for the environment, but because the plastic is bad for you. Yeah, you're definitely drinking plastic tea. Right. Yeah. Plastic tea, estrogen water. Now explain that for a moment. Why do you call it estrogen water? Because of the Zino estrogens from the plastics. Wow. Okay. So this actually like messes up your, your biochemistry. Yeah. Definitely. Amazing. Potentially do that. Okay. So to summarize,
tap water, in many cases, you can drink it, but over the long term, it's not the best option. Find a reverse osmosis filter, but the problem with reverse osmosis systems is that it turns water into a clean slate. We want to add back the nutrients to water. And the thing that we're going to search for is best reverse osmosis system and liquid mineral drops, activation products is my favorite. Fantastic. High quality salt. Okay.
high-quality salt. Now, there are a couple of other things that you speak about in terms of things to add to water from lemon to crystal energy to MSM to veggies to sea salt. Let's talk about that. How do we optimize our water? Sure. So, again, water being this universal solvent and being a liquid crystal, water has structure. It's like Bruce Lee, you know, and him really understanding the power of water that it's able to flow
but it's also able to have structure at the same time and the strike very hard, right? It has this really amazing quality to it. And creating structure with the water, it's not just the minerals, but providing electrons to the water as well. And that's what fruits and vegetables can do. You know, we have a natural proclivity, to add lemon and to add lime to our water.
and it makes the water more hydrating. It's so much more tasty. Yeah, exactly. I just did that last night with dinner. So simple hackers, I always keep a bowl of sliced lime in my refrigerator. So I have my water filter. As soon as I get my water, I squeeze lime into it.
And another hack, which I want to add, is a sparkling water machine. So, just like you, I know you had a soda addiction, right? Oh, yeah. So, I used to feel that I needed, well, in the early days, when I was a college kid in Michigan, right? I would watch a movie with Coke. Then as I grew older, I'm like, okay, Coke is really bad. I'm going to watch a movie with red wine.
But what happens is, as I'm watching a full two-hour movie, I'm consuming two classes of red wine. But I realized it wasn't the wine or the Coke. It was the sensation of something, you know, tasty going through my mouth. Regular water just didn't cut it, because we are so used to the taste. It's a blank taste. But what I found is that, eh, you could add lemon to the water. And it actually became a pretty good substitute for red wine. But an even better way is a sparkling water machine. I couldn't understand how Europeans were so into sparkling water. But when I started,
really enjoying sparkling water and the machines are really really really affordable. Sparkling water actually helped me cut down on my alcohol consumption by 70% because no longer did I need that red glass of wine for taste as I was watching a movie. I was drinking sparkling water with lemon. So that's just a bonus tip for those of you who might want to use water to replace some of the more unhealthy products you must be putting in your body. And by the way, Coca-Cola, absolutely not. That stuff is poison.
And it also dehydrates you. So it's literally pulling out a lot of your water to try to process. It's not about this. There's a lot of talk about acids and alkalines and eating an alkaline diet. Your body is always modulating and keeping your pH where it needs to be. And different organs require different pH's.
But it is such a strong acidic compound coming into your system. It won't make your body acidic necessarily. It will leach and pull minerals to try to process it. So alkaline minerals, like for me, I was experiencing this degenerative disc disease and degenerative bone disease.
And what was happening was my body was literally siphoning and pulling the calcium from my bones to try to aid in clotting my blood. You know, because that was my diet was very high in soda. And so here's a, so there's a famous YouTuber who recently did an experiment. He decided to take just three cans of Coke a day. That's it, three cans of Coke.
for 30 days. Now, at the end of 30 days, this is basically what happened. He said that, firstly, he put on 10 pounds. So that was kind of unattractive. But the worst part was this. He worked from home, and he started needing to take five naps a day, because his energy level plummeted. But not only did his energy level plummet, he found that his motivation to exercise disappeared. He stopped working out. And so it created this whole disruptive cycle, and that's three cans of coke,
As far as I'm concerned, and I've spoken up about this, Coca-Cola should be banned. It is a substance that should not exist on planet Earth. Now, I'm using Coke, because it's by and far the largest brand. But diet soda is horrible. And companies get this hope done it through really powerful marketing. But they say spreading positivity. No, they are spreading diabetes and other bad things. But it's brilliant how these companies Coke Pepsi associate their poison with positive emotion and get
billions of people hooked on it. One of the first things I do for people who come and join my valley, I bring in people from all across the world, 54 countries, is we get them off coke. We did not serve soda in our office at all. It's just water, sparkling water, coffee. And even by a coffee machine, we avoid putting sugar. We used to have these moaning Italian syrups. Just got rid of it.
not a single person complained. But as a result of these changes, the average person joins Mindvalley and they stop drinking Coca-Cola, they get rid of their sugar and coffee addiction. Average man now loses 10 kilograms, which is about 22 pounds in year one, upon joining us. Amazing, amazing. And the thing is, they don't go through any pain or suffering doing that. They just
Because there's no availability of these things, they just reorient. I'm sure it's inconvenient for the first few days, but then your brain gets retrained. So let's actually go into that. We spoke about what to drink. Let's talk about what not to drink. Let's talk about real quickly about soda. And I want you to also speak about diet soda because that's a big misconception. People think it's actually healthy. And let's talk about alcohol. Absolutely.
the interesting thing, and I love that you shared that experiment that he did, and it's just a real testament to how powerful liquid sugar is. Because your body is just able to absorb that and get it into your bloodstream very, very quickly. And what's happening is you're getting this associated spike in your insulin levels, which that feeling of tiredness and fatigue is really a result of what's happening with their blood sugar.
Because the blood sugar is getting this huge spike and insulin's out doing its job to get that blood sugar back down and then you go hypoglycemic like you don't just go back to baseline you go lower and Going through that process is just gonna make you feel terrible This is why people have to keep on going to the next soda to the next cup of coffee and to just just try to make it through the day or just keep passing out or napping and so
That's one of the big things with soda. And I already mentioned that it literally dehydrates you. It's the opposite of what your brain and your cells are wanting and looking for. And again, I'm, but I'm not the police with this stuff. You know, I understand there's situations and if it's a consistent part of your daily ritual that you're consuming these things, you're really, really setting yourself up for failure.
And the funny thing is, it's very easy to get off the addiction. It's really simple to get off sugar. It takes about seven days. I went through that. I couldn't drink coffee without sugar, right? So here's an experiment that happened to me. I was at AFS right here at this festival. This was 2014. And there was this guy from the military, from the South African military there. And he observed me adding sugar, a satchel of sugar to my coffee every morning, because I love starting my day with coffee, right?
And I would also add some, look, and he said, vision as a leader in personal growth. Why are you doing that? And I was offended. I'm like Anton. That was his name, Anton Koning. I'm like Anton.
I love my coffee. I'm going to get on stage. I want to make myself feel good. He goes, yes, but you're adding sugar to your coffee. You have no idea what that's going to be doing to your body. And I'm going to help you get off it. So I'm like, OK, I wanted to see what this guy could do, what magic this South African military dude could do. And he said, this isn't really simple.
Tomorrow, don't add a full satchel at half a satchel. The day after that, add a quarter satchel. The day after that, just don't add sugar. Watch what happens. So I thought, OK, I'll play along. Second day, I added half a satchel. Coffee didn't taste as good, but it was still drinkable. It wasn't a big pain at all. The day after that, I added a quarter satchel. And the day after that, I really didn't eat sugar anymore. And four days later, so it took me four days, and now it's been five years, I can't take coffee with sugar.
And that is how fast it takes to retrain your brain. Literally, if you're willing to just go through four days of slowly desensitizing yourself to sugar, you can get off it. It's that easy. But I want you to touch on one quick thing, diet cola. Is that safe? Yeah, that's one of the greatest marketing ploys of all time. This concept that even throwing the word diet in front of it.
is incredibly brilliant, but it's very evil, you know, because here's the thing. And I shared this with you, I think in a conversation we had not too long ago, that some of the latest studies are finding that, number one, consuming these artificial sweeteners are related to, you know, we already know there's data linking into cancer. It even say it on the package of some of these things, you know, it's like aspartame and things like that. But it'll say like, you know, warning, laboratory animals cause cancer, it causes cancer.
But now we're finding that it's also linked to dementia. And so looking at what's happening with our brain, we understand these artificial sweeteners are actually interacting with our brain cells. And that's really the thing to be aware of because it's kind of.
There's this category of compounds that's being referred to as these excitotoxins, and they're exciting our brain cells to the point that they can actually die. Now, that category is in and of itself. Again, a lot of this stuff is still debatable, in my opinion, but...
It's also something to be cautious of because something is going on because we now we know that drinking more diet soda is linked with dementia. We know that it's linked with diabetes as well, which is funny because you're not consuming any sugar. What's going on here and what it's doing is it's increasing your desire for more calories and more sugar because your cells are not actually getting the sugar that it thinks it's getting. There's this gustatory, there's this
interaction with your palate and your brain is thinking it's associated with this sweetness is things that is getting these calories now they're high quality sweeteners and they're in this category of like natural sweeteners that are low glycemic or non-glycemic like stevia and things like that
I'm going to go out there and say, I would even be cautious about that. We don't have the fact yet. But right now, Stevia itself, if you get the actual Stevia leaf, which I've done years and years ago, it's kind of a taste a little bit sweet, but it's a little bit medicinal flavor to it as well, if that makes sense.
but I'm a fan of like these little liquid Stevia drops and just especially if you are somebody who like I don't like water and there's a lot of people and I understand for my wife she's she doesn't like drinking water in the morning she found is if she heats the water up and drinks it with lemon she enjoys it she just did that in the room and so you can use some liquid Stevia drops especially if it's sparkling water too can make it really nice you know but
I wouldn't lean too hard on those things either. Just go bat shit crazy with dropping Stevia into your water, five dropper fools. But just having a little bit to make it attractive for you. And it's going to be safer according to the data that we have right now.
That's really, really, really cool. So diet colas, diet sodas, and absolute no. And I want to touch on one thing, right? You said about your wife not liking the taste of water. Let me just say this, you don't have to like the taste of water to drink water. You can drink water for enjoyment, but you can also drink water for fuel.
for as a health practice. I don't like shaving, but I shave anyway. And likewise, you don't have to like the taste of water. My son doesn't like porridge in the morning. But I tell him, Hayden, you're not eating this for
for entertainment. You're eating this for fuel. So eat the damn porridge, right? And he understands that. So he understands the difference between breakfast as entertainment with his dad where we are enjoying what we eat, typically like a good brunch place or breakfast as fuel when he has to do it in 15 minutes because he has to get on the school bus. So again, keep that in mind when you're consuming your water in the morning.
Any closing words? Well, first of all, I haven't heard anybody eat porridge outside of fairy tale books, personally. That's like a total US thing. I didn't even know people ate porridge. I think it happens in Europe. That's super cute, man. I think that the resounding takeaway is that this is such a simple thing that we overlook because I think we're a little bit jaded by water. We've got these beautiful swimming pools out here. We've got fountains.
We have overlooked the value of something so simple. It's literally the number one nutrient that we require is water. It's beyond the omega-3s and the biotin.
all the different, you know, vitamins and minerals that we can conceive of, enzymes, phytonutrients, water. Something so simple, get some high-quality structured water, whether it's through reverse osmosis system, whether it's through drinking, my favorite, which is spring water, which we have access here, at this event, spring water, well water, you know, well, those are coming from aquaporins. Just do the best you can, but make sure you're above all, just get yourself hydrated. Amazing. Let's give it a cheers to water. Cheers.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. As with everything, knowledge is not power. Knowledge is potential power. Knowledge applied is truly where the power is. So make sure to put this information into action for yourself. Make this a year of really mastering the fundamentals. There's fun in the name.
All right, make sure that you're getting optimally hydrated on a daily basis. We've got some epic master classes and world class guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode. And if you got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well.
And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome and I appreciate that so much. And take care, I promise to keep giving you more powerful and empowering great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.
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