Today we are joined by Daniel Thomas Hind. He is a transformational coach and the founder of Evolution Eat. Daniel is a nutrition coach specializing in helping individuals create breakthroughs in their lives around their relationships with food.

I discovered a lot of really really interesting things about Daniel throughout this episode, and we completely hit it off. We talked about food and nutrition. We talked about psychology. We talked about habits and we talked about how to game all of it to win your way day by day to better health. From there, we talked about all kinds of hacks and different ways that Daniel etches out the best performance in himself and in his business.

I think you guys are really going to enjoy this episode. I sure did!

This episode is brought to you by my premium online training – The Become a SuperLearner Master Class. To learn more or check out a FREE trial with no credit card required, simply click the banner above!

This episode is brought to you by Organifi. Save 20% on their highly-recommended green juice products with coupon code “superhuman.”

In this episode, we discuss:

• Who's Daniel Thomas Hind, what does he do, and how did he get there?
• The surprising story of how Daniel Thomas Hind turned his health around
• A discussion of childhoods, and only childhood
• How did Daniel do it? How did he lose the weight and fix his health?
• What does it mean to have a “relationship” with food? What is the psychology behind Daniel's work?
• What about portion control? Is that a real thing?
• What is metabolic flexibility? 
• Is a “one size fits all” approach applicable? Why or why not?
• How can you determine if you have an unhealthy relationship with food? 
• How valid are the excuses that people give themselves, and how can you avoid them?
• How can you increase your willpower? Is willpower even a factor here?
• What are “lead measures” and “lag measures,” and how do you focus on the right one?
• A trick to eliminate risk factors for eating unhealthy foods
• Why modern foods are so damn irresistible to us
• What about “cheat” days or meals? Should you do them or not?
• What's a step you can take RIGHT NOW, and some homework for this week?
• What other hacks and lifestyle habits does Daniel Thomas Hind use to improve performance?
• What is Daniel's extremely unusual morning routine? How did he get into it? Why does he do it?
• What is Daniel Thomas Hind's bedtime routine?
• How can you learn more about Daniel and get in touch with him?
• What is next for Daniel Thomas Hind? What's he releasing soon that is very exciting?
• What's the #1 takeaway from this episode?

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• EvolutionEat, Daniel's Company
• The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf
• Wired To Eat by Robb Wolf
• Our first episode with Robb Wolf
• Our second episode by Robb Wolf

Favorite Quotes from Daniel Thomas Hind:

Transcript:

Introduction: Welcome to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast, where we interview extraordinary people to bring you the skills and strategies to overcome the impossible. And now here's your host, Jonathan Levi.

Jonathan Levi: This episode is brought to you by Organifi. You guys, one of the only things that every nutritional expert that we've had on the show seems to actually agree on is that we all need to eat more vegetables, eat more greens, eat organic, cut out all the processed junk. Well, who has the time, right? Who has the time to go out, do the shopping, make the salads, make the juices, make the smoothies?

And that's what I love so much about Organifi their product is an all-organic green juice. It has all of the nutrients that you need, it tastes absolutely amazing and it's made by wonderful people who I consider to be personal friends. And as listeners of this show, you guys can actually save 20% on your first order. And all you have to do is go to Organifi.com. That's ORGANIFI.com and use the coupon code superhuman at checkout.

This episode is brought to you by Become a Superlearner, The Masterclass. You guys, if you have ever wanted to learn things faster, to read faster and waste, less time reading, boring textbooks, if you've ever wanted to have near-perfect memory for names, numbers, anything you want to learn and expand your mind and retain information in a way that you never thought possible? Well, then the Become a SuperLearner Masterclass is exactly what you've been looking for. It's a 10-week program developed by myself and my mentors alongside some of the world's best memory experts and world-record-holding memory champions.

It'll take you from zero to super learning hero in just a matter of 10 weeks in about 30 minutes a day or less. Now you can go ahead and sign up for a free trial with no credit card required. All you have to do is go to JLE.vi/learn. And if you choose to pick up the full course, you will also get an incredible discount for listeners of this podcast only. So please make sure to check it out and support the show and on to today's episode.

Greeting, SuperFriends, and welcome to this week's episode, which is lovingly provided to you. Thanks to a review from NB Nutrition of the United States of America who says knowledgeable 5 Stars. I love listening to Jonathan and his insight on such interesting topics. There are always great takeaways from each episode.

Thank you so, so very much NB Nutrition. I really, really appreciate that. And today's episode is dedicated to you and your amazing review. So let's get right to it. Today, we are joined by Daniel Thomas Hind. He is a transformational coach and the founder of Evolution Eat.

He's a nutrition coach specializing in helping individuals create breakthroughs in their lives, around their relationships with food. You know, I discovered a lot of really, really interesting things about Daniel throughout this episode. And we completely hit it off.

We talked about food and nutrition. We talked about psychology. We talked about habits and we talked about how to game all of it to win your way, day by day to better health. From there, we talked about all kinds of hacks and different ways that Daniel etches out the best performance in himself and in his business. So I think you guys are really going to enjoy this episode.

I have to say I'm doing it at eight o'clock on the equivalent of a Friday night here. And I'm still saying I had so much fun. I really, really enjoyed this episode. And I think you guys will too. So without any further ado, my new super friend, Mr. Daniel Thomas Hind.

Mr. Daniel Thomas Hind, how are you? My friend. I hope you are pantless. Great start to the interview.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Drops the mic interview over.

Jonathan Levi:  Interview over.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Jonathan it's a pleasure to be here with you digitally. I have pants on only because I'm imagining that somebody is going to be coming to the door after our interview.

And I would like to have pants on for that, but for context, for anybody who's listening, Jonathan and I were talking before the interview about, you know, living the entrepreneurial lifestyle and how we get to work from home, preferably without pants. And I had asked if we were doing a video interview and he said, no, it was just going to be audio.

So, uh.

Jonathan Levi:  Yes, I have based my life off the idea that I shouldn't have to wear pants for anything that I do.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Just getting back in touch with our origins, man. I support that.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. So Daniel, for folks who haven't heard of you before, who are you? What do you do? How did you get to where you are?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Good question.

Who am I? We could go many ways with that question, but I'll give you the succinct version. I'm a transformational coach and I'm the founder of evolution eats, which is a nutrition coaching company. That's dedicated to helping individuals create breakthroughs in their lives, around their relationships with food.

Jonathan Levi: Um, so I got to say, I'm looking at your photo right now that we're going to put in the blog post and it doesn't look like you've had a problem with food, but I bet you, there's a surprising story as to how you got into this. Tell me a little bit about that.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Yeah, there definitely. So I grew up overweight, let's say. I had an, an abundance of relationship with food, had a great childhood loving parents, upper middle class in New York. So I had no hardships from a conventional point of view. I was an only child and both my parents worked and being Italian, my mother, she saturated me with love, and food was part of that equation and so.

Jonathan Levi: She loved you with the spatula.

Daniel Thomas Hind: She loved me with a spatula. I loved food as a result, and a few things happen in my early development. One, I started to associate rewards like Daniel does a good job. Good job at school, you know, do chores around the house reward with getting food and two, being an only child, both my parents working, I had to entertain myself a lot.

So food became part of that equation as well. So it's like reward, structure, entertain oneself, and very quickly that grew out of hand. And I grew quite large. And so I grew up with this, just this love for food and an insatiable appetite. So even later on in my life, when I cleaned up my diet and we can talk about that a little bit.

When I cleaned up my diet and lost a bunch of weight, the same issues from childhood kept showing up, like thinking intensely about food throughout the day, using it as a way to cope, to displace loneliness or boredom, to reward myself in lavish ways. Not necessarily like self-loving ways. Basically just became my coping mechanism, my strategy to make myself feel good.

And to also not to stay in kind of isolate, which is the only child loaner in me. So even despite cleaning up my diet and becoming successful from the outside, losing weight, looking good, all that good stuff, it was still living with me. That's what I work with my clients around. It's not just about. Cleaning up your diet, but it's actually getting to the core of your relationship with food because you can lose a bunch of weight and go on a diet and be successful.

But what does it mean to live from that place? And what do we need to clear up in order to live from that place forever so that you always have control and that your diet and things that you do in life are expressions of yourself?

Jonathan Levi: I really liked that. I, I identified a lot with the only child loner, you know, because I shamed myself for it when I also was an only child.

And I grew to really love, loneliness really. And I think, you know, we all come, I have this quote that I love to tell people, which is, you know, every parent, no matter how good they are, they screw you up. Even if their only fault was that they couldn't have another kid, that screws you up, you know? And so they loved you too much because you were the only child.

And I think that's really, really interesting. So tell me about this journey, right? So you decide, I mean, I have to say first off, I've seen you, you're a super fit guy, so kudos, you know, on losing the weight, but more importantly, getting healthy and getting to a psychologically healthy place with food.

That's a really, really hard thing for a lot of people. So I want to ask you how you did it.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Yeah, thanks, so, I appreciate that. So I would say two steps, one, the first step was cleaning up my diet throughout college, I became very physically active and I was working out at the gym a ton, and to make a long story short of work that I was putting in it simply didn't make sense that I look the way I did.

I looked good, but you know, I want it to be a GQ model on the cover, kind of looking good and the amount of effort that I was putting in would indicate that that should be the case, but it wasn't. So there was that I suffered from just terrible gut syndrome, my entire life, uh, irritable bowel syndrome. And through synchronicity or just the beauty of the rabbit hole of the internet when it comes across that way, I found a book on living a paleo lifestyle and I, for whatever reason, it just clicked. I read it and I started to implement that as a practice and, um, I lost a bunch of weight and not only did I lose a bunch of weight, but all that inflammation that I had lived with growing up all the digestion issues that went away within months. And it was really that, that sense of wow. What I put into my body has a dramatic effect on the way that I feel, not just mentally, not just physically, but like, like energetically.

That was a huge shift for me. I had never had that before and I grew up. You know, depression runs in my family, anxiety runs in my family. So it was often the case that my mood felt variable. Like I didn't have choice over the way that I felt entering into the day. And so cleaning up my diet was the first time in my life when I was about 22 years old, that I felt like I had choice over the way that I felt my mood and that was empowering. That was super empowering. So that was like level one. And level two was studying my tendencies and my coping mechanisms, my relationship around food that I talked about a few minutes ago that even despite cleaning up, the diet and cutting sugar and not feeling kind of like possessed by sugar as most of the country does, or my country America.

I know that you're, you're not, yeah. Your former country right? Exactly. Even despite that those old, old, old, deeply ingrained mechanisms would pop up. Patterns would pop up. And so I started to study that kind of just looking at myself without judgment and studying that. And then simultaneously people were asking me to coach them, which started at the base level of like helped me lose weight, which I was like, okay, fine.

But then because of the study that I was doing on myself, My work became far deeper and far more below the hood than just losing weight. And so my coaching clients, my working on myself and it just became my own approach to living this way.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. I have a lot of questions there first. I mean, that's such a great story for a couple of different reasons. One of them, which was the paleo book, just out of curiosity,

Daniel Thomas Hind: It was Robb Wolf.

Jonathan Levi: I was hoping you would say that.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Yeah.

Jonathan Levi: That's my buddy, man. That's one of my favorite books as well. Just phenomenal. And Robb‘s been on the show a few times.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Oh, cool. Yeah, he's fantastic. And that book changed my life. So I could, I could give him a hug and say, thank you for changing the course of my life and my business. I mean, I didn't wouldn't have ever had this business if not for that book to be quite honest.

Jonathan Levi: Amazing. And the second question I wanted to ask. I think it's really important that you left out. So I'm going to paint this picture. This might be a super-leading question. So tell me if I'm painting it in a way that it isn't, but you know, you talk about by quantity and having this relationship to food where you just eat whenever you want.

And then the fix was like, Hey, I needed to clean up my diet and clean up what I ate. And I have to admit the mic cut out for me for a second. The audio cut out. I hope it didn't cut out for the audience, but my headphones cut out. But in all that I didn't notice any discussion of portion control or anything like that.

And so I interpreted that to mean, you know, when I started eating the right foods, I didn't crave to overeat. I didn't, uh, have this desire or this ability to just cram calories in. Did I misinterpret that or is that pretty much what you found as well?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Oh, yeah, you did not misinterpret that at all. You know, losing excess body weight is not simply about balancing calories, consumed with calories burned or having to micromanage how much you're having.

I like to call this whole process metabolic efficiency or metabolic flexibility, um, which is just fancy ways of saying that. You can reprogram your genes to burn fat and ketones instead of sugar as your primary fuel source. And by doing that, you basically optimize your appetite and satiety hormones so that you aren't craving food all the time or in craving sugar, right?

You're just tapping into your fat stores for energy, which allows you to intuitively determine, Oh, I'm hungry time to eat or I'm not hungry. I don't need to eat quite yet. And so that's the sort of work that I do with my clients, which is training what living intuitively means, and the first level of this, of course, is getting in touch with your body's needs by optimizing your diet. And starting from that point, there are layers beyond that as well, but it starts that's the baseline.

Jonathan Levi: That's awesome. I think you and I are going to be super good buddies because I also have taken this template and it's really incredible for me and, you know, people around me have started coming to me for this kind of advice.

And inevitably it's always like, well, you know, there's your problem. It's the croissant that you eat for breakfast every morning. That's why your stomach hurts, you know?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Yeah.

Jonathan Levi: Tell me a little bit about some of the people that you've worked with and the journey, because I know, you know, Robb has taken this stance more recently that it's like paleo is the starting point, but as he got out and did the kind of work that you're doing now, he's kind of discovered that, Hey, a one size fits all is not it. So tell me what you've found in working with clients. And I know, I think it's interesting to discuss with you, in addition, to discuss with Robb, because you're dealing with the emotional aspect of it that Robb kind of barely touches on. So like what kind of stuff is coming up for people and you know, how does it need to be adapted?

How is it that paleo is? There is not a one-size-fits-all for people.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Yeah, it's a great question. So most people know what's healthy for them and you don't really need another diet guy on the internet to tell you what to eat. So whether you have, or having gone paleo or cleaned up your diet or whatever that means to you, like, I don't believe in a one size fits all approach.

I believe that I believe in helping people create a relationship with food that's meaningful to them. So for somebody, they might have very real reasons for why being a vegan or vegetarian is important to them. And I can support them in that so long as they're purposeful. And they're intentional with that.

I don't personally believe in that and I would have research to back that up, but that's totally okay. So coming from a place of, you generally have a sense of what's healthy and what's not what keeps happening is that all these other problems regarding diet and full adoption keep showing up. So when it comes to emotional eating, stress, eating, and all kinds of habitual overeating or under eating, you can't just give somebody a diet and say here, good luck.

Right? Know, there's a lot more going on under the hood that influences our decision-making. And there's a key distinction between somebody trying a new diet for a few months and then fully adopting. That lifestyle as a way of being. So that's where I nerd out on. That's what I'm here to uncover, and that's what I teach.

And I call it a counter-intuitive approach to weight loss and lifestyle design because I focus mostly on mindset and habits and my, the central tenant of everything that I teach and coach and write about is that eating healthily, living healthily is a skill that you develop, not a goal that you accomplish.

And this is where typical weight loss and dieting schemes get it all wrong. And what, you know, the paleo culture doesn't typically talk about on the surface. It's a skill that you develop over time. It's not a goal that you accomplish, meaning it's not like a goal implies that you get to a point and then there's,

Jonathan Levi: Yeah.

Daniel Thomas Hind: There's a finish line. Right? But living from this place is living from this place, which implies forever. Right? So it's a way of being versus a goal that you. Just kind of like finishing and then, you know, go on to the rest of your life. No, this is the rest of your life. So what does that mean? Well, it has to be if that's the truth and it's a skill that you're developing over time, just like if somebody were to learn how to play the piano, for example, right?

You keep practicing and the people who get really good who make piano their life's pursuits and are performing in front of audiences, are the people who fall in love with the practice, right? The key distinction between somebody becoming a grandmaster and somebody not is that they actually fall in love with the practice and they show up every day in support of that practice, which with eating well, living well means showing up for yourself.

Jonathan Levi: I really love that distinction. Daniel, I want to ask you this. I think there's a likelihood that a lot of people are sitting at home and going well, that sucks for them or, you know, well, I feel so sorry for those people. Not realizing, you know, if they look down, they probably have an unhealthy relationship with food.

And so I want to ask this question, which is, you know if someone is underweight or overweight, do they necessarily have an unhealthy relationship to food or is it, you know, how much can people blame genetics or lifestyle and how much of this is actual emotional, psychological stuff that people need to do the work with?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Great question. So if you're over or underweight, it doesn't imply that you have an unhealthy relationship with food. It's how it shows up in your life. So for example, the fact that the dieting and weight loss industry is a multi-billion many multi-billion dollar industry, and that most people are always talking about diet or focusing on weight, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, would imply that there is a fascination and a preoccupation with all this, right. So if you're living from the place of, you're thinking about other, how you using these words should, right? Like I should lose way. I should be healthier. I should think about like cleaning up my diet. I should be exercising more. I should be doing this, I should be doing that.

And or if you feel compelled by food throughout the day where you're either like upset, testing about it or looking at the clock so that you can eat more or using it as a way to distract yourself like you're at the office and there's a, you know, a candy jar or by the coffee machine. There's like, like little snacks and you're repeatedly going over there just to distract yourself. And you're using food as a mechanism to satisfy that. Well, then I would say that there's some sort of dysfunctional relationship there that you might want to look into, right? And then, especially if that's paired with this sense of, oh, I should lose weight or I should be healthier, or I need to invest more into that or whatever the conversation is that you are having with yourself.

So that's part one. What was the second part of your question?

Jonathan Levi: Well, just understanding, you know, I think there is an element and I think that definitely, researchers are discovering like really unfortunate stuff about the microbiome. And you know, it always is, it's a reflexive relationship because your biome doesn't get messed up by, you know, eating healthfully.

It gets messed up by eating Cheetos and, you know, and then you get to a point where literally all your body craves is crap. Right. And your body doesn't have the bacteria and your genes are not expressing in the right way, but at the same time, you know, just like you got into the mess and messed up your microbiota, you can fix it.

So I guess because you are the guy around a relationship with food and where that meets psychology. Yeah. I'd love to hear it. You know what you would say to people who say, well, you know, it's just genetics and it's just my age. You know, my metabolism slowed down. This is my father's favorite excuse. Well, at my age, you know, you'll be overweight too, but it's not that, you know, that's a cop-out.

So I'd love to hear your approach to it.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Great.

Okay, cool. Cool. Yeah, no, there's no timeline to this. You can start working on this immediately. You can start working on this today. Genetics. That's such a trap because it's like, there's no conversation to be had if you're using that. It's like, Oh, it's genetics. I can't do anything about it. And it's like, okay. You know, then where are we going to go with that? So I don't accept that. Might you have genetic predispositions that make things challenging or whatever? Sure. But that's not the conversation for the general person, you can start working on this immediately and it starts with.

As you said, the cleaning up your diet and giving your body the fuel sources that it needs. And also so that your genes are expressing as most efficiently as possible. And that process alone might take a long time. Some people have, you know, a lot of issues that they need to clean up. And there's a lot of health issues that stem from almost all health issues, stem from inflammation.

And so just think about how many years you've been living a certain way, eating a certain way. People want the fix and like the 30 days, right? And then there's all this marketing around the 30 day clean up and then this, and then that, and that's great as a, just a start is to prove to yourself that you can do it, but that's not to suggest that after 30 days you're a hundred percent healthy and everything is fixed, right?

No, that's just a starting point. And from there. We have to look deeper and deeper and deeper. What are your habits? What are your coping mechanisms? What are your rituals around food? What are your long-term goals? Like are you preparing for yourself? Like just time management? I talk with my clients about time management and showing up for themselves, making sure that they're thinking strategically about food throughout the day versus just passively showing up and then eating whatever, right? So it's, there's so much more that needs to happen. After we look at the food itself, the diet itself, that's mostly what I talk about.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, I actually just came up with a question for you because I live in a country where the carbohydrates are particularly delicious, right?

Like today people come into the office and they've got like fresh homos and PETA and all this amazing stuff. And at this point, I've gotten to the point where my stomach will just hurt if I eat that stuff. But for a very long time, I suffered from, I know better syndrome, which is I know better than to eat that I know what it's going to do to my body. And I know that you know, I have the beginnings of insulin resistance and so on and so forth, but willpower, right? So I want to ask you, I almost, as a coach, I want to ask you, like, what do people do for that willpower? I mean, if they aren't in the position as so many people, hopefully, aren't, they aren't in the position where they're going to have a diabetic attack if they eat it.

And maybe they're not, you know, Celiac's on the other side of the spectrum where they're going to get physically sick, but they know better. So where does the willpower element come in when the kind of repercussions are not immediately clear, you're talking gears down the line.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Well, so I talk a lot about habit formation, and yeah.

Habits are really the heart and soul of my work and being successful at just about anything that you do. So rather than relying on willpower that has little to do with dieting and nothing to do with success. I used to focus on identifying a compilation of simple behaviors that support you, would I call daily anchors and then training them over and over, and over again, which eliminates decision-making fatigue and establishes a daily rhythm of healthy actions.

Is that no matter how you're feeling or what you might want to do in the moment itself, self-support you over time and necessarily change you. And so let me make that real, uh, focusing on lead measures versus lag measures. So willpower, most people would say, God, I just need to like, uh, I just like need to eat better and, um, you know, will my self through tonight somehow.

And, uh, you know, like, it sounds like it's, everything's up to chance, right? Like I just have five and then they focus on how intensely uncomfortable that is versus the behaviors, the actions, the things that they can do that influence that. So rather than focusing on. How many calories you're having, for example, instead have people focus on how many healthy meals have you prepared for yourself today.

Whether that means ordering from a restaurant if you're going to a work event, whether that means ordering delivery if you're at an office and you just hate preparing your own food. If that means bringing your food to work with you. And if you can answer, I've prepared three out of three meals, and I have a snack on hand just in case we'll guess what you have just circumvented willpower because you've already shown up powerfully for yourself and doing that every day, so instead of focusing on like the context that you've been operating in, which is I'm hungry, I'm not hungry, I'm hungry, I'm not hungry. You know, sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes willpower will get me through and sometimes it won't. What if we just changed the context altogether and gave you everything you needed to enter into each and every day and you only focused on those lead measures, which are having healthy meals prepared, like very, very simple. But super effective. And so for all my clients who enter into the day, either having with them, their meals, that they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, and having a snack and, or knowing exactly where like, where they're going for lunch, or if they were to go to lunch for a work meeting, what they're going to order like very deliberately planning that stuff out, which might seem like a lot of work on the front end and is because it takes effort, but it over-training that over time it becomes your way of being. It doesn't become this thing that you have to think about. It just becomes your natural habit.

And that's a key distinction between somebody who's adopted this for real and somebody who's just like testing it, trying it relying on willpower. Does that make sense?

Jonathan Levi: It makes total sense. And as you're going, I'm like, man, this guy knows his shit because my whole secret to success for years is I just started with the assumption before I even read Wired to Eat, which kind of like reinforced, but I started with the assumption which I now know is kind of wrong. I'll explain. But, you know, my assumption was I'm weak. I have really, really shitty willpower. So just don't get into those situations. Like just don't have the ice cream in the freezer. And then, you know, when I crave something sweet, it just won't be there and it isn't.

So I don't put myself in those kinds of situations. I don't, you know, friends tell me what restaurant I want to go to. I intentionally pick somewhere where I'm going to have an amazing steak option. So I don't feel tempted to go for the pasta. You know, the other day I was craving just dying for something sweet, and the sweetest thing we had in the house was 85% dark chocolate, or a peanut butter with a little bit of honey in it.

I was like, God, it's a little bit sad, but at the same time, like, it was amazing. Cause I wasn't going to go downstairs and go to the store. And I later learned that you know, it's, it's not so much my fault because we are not wired to be able to deal with the temptation of the hyper-palatable foods that are around us.

But it's exactly like you said. Exactly like you said, just don't leave it up to willpower.

Daniel Thomas Hind:  Yeah. I love what you just said there, which is like, you looked in the cupboards, you were craving something which is allowed by the way, like I'm not judging anybody forever. Like we're humans and we're dealing with so many distractions and stimulations and endless bombardment of distractions and stuff coming at us, which is hyper, hyper, hyper stressful.

No, none of our ancestors ever lived in anything close to these sort of conditions. We are constantly stressing ourselves out, whether we mean for it or not. And so it's natural that you're going to have like cravings for things because your body is, it's not just about how much have I exercised today.

There's all this stress that you're dealing with and managing on a daily basis. So it's cool that you have cravings. Great. Now it gets dangerous when you also have a cupboard full of like cookies and whatever, right? Because if it's there, it's likely that you're going to then eat it. I would, you know like I've been living this way for nearly 10 years now.

I would eat it too. And there's no judgment in that, which is why I never come from a place of judging anybody for the work that we're doing for being vulnerable, and admitting that this is something that's important to you is like, the most crucial step in the way that I talk, the way that I work with my clients is by making myself well, there's a number of ways that work with my clients, but with my one-on-one private clients, I make myself super present in their lives by us being in communication on a daily basis.

They're sending me photos of what they're eating, not so that I can judge them and tell them, Oh, that's good. That's bad. It's not about that. It's about being vulnerable and saying, this is what's real, this is what's happening. This is me being honest with myself and then sharing that with another human being, which makes it far less intensive, a personal experience, and more, just something that we can talk about now.

And when it comes to food and having, you know, whether it's a dysfunctional relationship with it, or if it's just a moment of stressful eating like you were just describing, you know, you're craving something and you want something sweet during those moments, doesn't it feel so like, intensely intimate and personal. Like for me, I'll speak from my own. Say when those moments take over, it's like this primal overdrive where the world on the outside disappears and all I can focus on is satisfying that craving. And that is where, when you repeat that and train that over and over, over again, day after day, years after years after years, that's the sort of work that I'm here to help you rewire.

And so during those moments, it's intensely personal. And I, in my, with the way that I work, all I ask is that you make yourself vulnerable in those moments. And you rather than give in to the intensity of it, to the intimacy of it, you share it with me, you share with somebody else, which gets you outside of that, that sort of that sense of overwhelm. Like, Oh my God, I don't have a choice over this. And actually, you do have a choice. And when you share it with somebody, it makes it an experience that we can now like address and talk about. And then I help people energetically, just go somewhere else with it, like channel that energy elsewhere.

It doesn't need to be the satisfaction. The craving doesn't have to be exercised through food. It can be exercised through something as simple as literally walking outside of your home and walking around the block for two minutes. Well, I can't tell you how many times that little redirect has changed the course of somebody's night and therefore their week, because so often people who are struggling with this, they'll let one night like a binge night, for example, just get the best of them.

And then the next day that will set off a series of cascade events where it's like the next day, there are other try to make up for it. And then they'll starve themselves for half of the day. And then by night time, it's the same thing. They're going to have these hugely intense cravings. They might end up bingeing. They might end up starving themselves. They might be successful with starving themselves, which is not being successful at all. And then the whole week becomes this sort of management of this thing that happened. And that's such an uncomfortable place to live from. Do you know what I mean? It's such an uncomfortable place to live from.

And so going outside and going for a two-minute walk around your block, that alone has saved. So much time and energy and has given people so much opportunity to just like love themselves and accept that cravings are totally cool. It's how we manage them, how we deal with them. And that we're, we have choice over is really what the work is.

Jonathan Levi: This is awesome. I can feel the amount of healing that people in the audience are going to experience when they're like, dude, this is I'm okay. Like, I'm not this pathetic loser because I.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Uh, no, not at all. And as you said, Jonathan, you know, think about all the foods that we crave and that are pushed out of us culturally, and that are marketed to us.

They're super, super packed with fat and sugar and nowhere. And like, we are just, we are hardwired to crave that stuff. Nowhere in nature can you find any edible substance that is both fat, dense and sugar dense combined in one, the closest approximate is an avocado. That's closest approximate, but that's not, I mean, you want to go, you know, good luck eating like 20 avocados and going nuts on that. I think that probably it's unlikely that that would be the case.

Jonathan Levi: Sure.

Daniel Thomas Hind: So evolutionarily we're ingrained to crave energy. And so sugar gives us the short term, in fact, as, as the long term and when you pair those two things together, it's like boom.

Jonathan Levi: Right. And what isn't covered by that is, is covered by teams, teams of chemists on the latest, greatest flavor, which is going to be so freaking addictive. And let me tell you, these people are top of their class. You know, they are phenomenal chemists and they're phenomenal at what they do. And their work is exceptional. It's masterpieces in forming addictive flavors.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Yeah. I mean, just think about that. How much money, intelligence time is invested into you losing that game, which is why willpower? You know, good luck. One night you might be successful in one night not so I don't talk about willpower. And instead, I think of this whole pursuit as, like I said before, a skill that you develop, I use the mastery model as a way of thinking of this as a process, as a way of life as a life's work, that takes time, it takes effort, it takes focus, but it also takes enthusiasm and like falling in love with that process and what that means for you.

And it's different for everybody, but that's what I'm really interested in covering.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely Daniel. I don't want to try and get you to give away everything because I know you do coaching and you do online courses. I do want to ask you one question that I've flipped flopped on for years, and I'm currently in the no side, but for many years I was in the yes side.

Tim Ferriss has advocated and a lot of people have advocated, a cheat meal or a cheat day to like get rid of, of that need for the craving. And what's your take on it? I mean, because. I don't think it's healthy from an emotional perspective, but I'm interested to hear what your take is on it.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Okay. First of all, I'm happy to share everything. There's no like great secret to all of this. It's simply just showing up for yourself and doing it, which is the hard work. So I'm happy to share all of my secrets, all of my tactics, all of my, all the work that I do because that's just the first level. Yes. It's important that you adopt that. and you understand it, but then we have to actually show up for ourselves and do it so happy to talk about all the ways in which I work in my method and so forth.

And I'm going to give you a non-specific answer because it's truly dependent on what shows up for you with that idea. For some people I've worked with, allocating a night per week to just enjoy yourself and not be hyper-focused on this whole idea of being healthy, eating healthy, super healthy, which at the beginning can become overwhelming.

Right? So it depends on where you are along the process. For some people, when they're starting out, it can be a lot. And because it's so new and all these things are coming up, these stressors are coming up. People have been very successful saying I'm going to have a night per week where I just get to not being focused on this right now. And I come back tomorrow and I feel great about the fact that I've kind of allocated all those cravings throughout the week and to that one night. Whereas other people that one night can then set them up for all these weird mind games that playout for the next few days afterward.

So it's like they have the sugar again or whatever, and then they feel, they feel compelled by it because I mean, it's addicting, it's a drug. So it really depends on, on your way, why it's important to you. If you're trying to overcome sugar addiction and, or like a sugar dependency, sugar fixation, then I would say this idea of a cheat meal is a farce because all you're doing is giving in to your addiction and that's like a scary word, but when it comes to sugar, it's real, we just, we don't talk about it that way. So I'll, we'll use the word dependency instead, you know, it's the same, same idea. So like, if that's true for you, it might not be the best course of action, but for somebody else, it might be really healthy so that they can manage all this and feel a sense of, of celebration because here's also the thing.

Food is awesome. And it's great to celebrate. Like I love celebrating with food. And if we look back throughout the history of mankind and cultural society, we do it quite a lot. So there's something there that's like really important about celebrating. And it's the way that you show up to that. So if you're like with a family and you're having this great big meal and it's something over which she relates and you commune then great. That's fine. It's way different between that and creating that sort of night for yourself and staying home by yourself. Ordering Uber eats until two in the morning, like McDonald's taco bell, all this crap, right? So there's a big difference between what that means for you. The cheat meal, the word cheats.

All right. I'm warming up into this answer. So now I've got to put the word cheat implies that you're cheating yourself. It's a horrible word, but we haven't cultured. You know, I need to come up with a new word for that because we haven't culturally adopted something that expresses what the point of it is.

The point of it is to, is to really acknowledge yourself, to celebrate yourself, not to cheat anything you're celebrating yourself. So having a meal that you're celebrating your relationships and the food is a part of that. And you don't necessarily want to micromanage what your are having at that meal. Great. Go for it because the food is amazing. And I really love, I really love tasty food sometimes it's, you know, I don't want to live from a place where I'm judging myself if I have, you know, a bowl of ice cream on a random night or not an on a night where I'm at a party, for example, like I don't want to live from that place where I'm judging myself, but I also don't want to live from the place where I allow for having a bowl of ice cream every night, cause that's just not important to me. That's not the way that I want to show up for myself. So it's the way that you relate to it and how that fits into your sense of like, is this an expression of myself, or is it not an expression of myself? If it is, and the way that I love myself, great habit go for it.

And if it's not, and it's really just a way to cope for all the other stuff that you're working on, or you don't want to show up, then that's something to look at.

Jonathan Levi: Wow, I think that's a really, really healthy to approach and it does show how individualized it is and how the same food can be different actually in a different context.

Daniel, I just realized we're running out of time, but I'm realizing we're probably going to talk many, many more times as the years go on. So I want to transition us into some semi rapid-fire questions. The first one being what's a step that people can take right now, homework for this week if you will.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Great. So the first step is to allow yourself to be imperfect. You're not going to be perfect with your diet and that's fine. Good. So what does that mean? Well, if you're starting at ground zero, you're ready to, show up into life with creating a new and healthy diet for yourself. Start one meal at a time. Optimize one meal and then go from there rather than trying to get everything done all at once. It's really overwhelming. And it's not how you develop any skill. If you look at any other area of life, uh, any other skill that you develop, it's an iterative process. One step after the next, after the next. And when it comes to food and all this, it's hard to think of it as one step, because it's a way of being it's all around us, right? But if we just think about like the moments that you're eating, let's optimize one meal at a time, get breakfast, right. Make that a part of your daily living, where you know exactly what you're going to have every day, where you have the items prepared, whatever that means for you.

You make it happen consistently for a week. Two weeks. Great. Then move on. Now you have that. Great. Now move on to lunch. And if you do that over the course of two months, all of a sudden you've radically changed what your diet looks like, and yeah, you might not have lost, like 20 pounds within those two months, but let's again, remember what your goal is, is your goal to change your relationship with food and build healthy eating habits, or is your goal to lose 20 pounds as quickly as possible?

If it's the latter, then you're just going on that seesaw again. So one meal at a time.

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. I think that's a really, really good one. I also want to ask you, what are some other hacks lifestyle adaptations, or kind of habits that help you perform at a higher level beyond just diet?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Cool. I'll answer that in two parts, one with food and this is really important for that helps me in all areas of life. After every meal, I go for a five or 10-minute walk. And the reason for that and what I train most of my clients to do is because especially at night when we when you have any sort of dysfunctional relationship with food when you eat, what you want to do is keep eating.

So after the meal is over, when you remove yourself from the environment in which you're eating, whether it's the kitchen or wherever you go for a quick walk, you just remove yourself from it and you move your body around and it activates digested a little bit more quickly. You get outside of that experience and you remind yourself that you always have a choice and that, wow. I can actually make the empowered choice and well, I'm actually the sort of person who's doing this for myself. You feel amazing. And it also to just that sense of amazing then translates into whatever work that you're doing so that you can come back to work, not thinking about food, not preoccupied with this other thing, and actually just being in the zone.

So that's one. Two, having a morning routine. Do I have a moment to talk about my morning routine?

Jonathan Levi: Yeah please, I love routines.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Oh my God. Okay. So I'll describe my morning routine and let me just say right now for anybody who's listening, it doesn't have to be as elaborate as mine, but this has changed my life. And it's why I focus on these sort of habits around food, more than I ever talk about the food itself when I'm working with my clients and the way in which I teach.

So I live in Santa Monica, California, and I have the privilege of living two blocks from the beach. And, uh, every morning I wake up at 4:45 which was a real challenge at first I'm a night owl by nature, and I actually hired a coach to help me train into being coming into a morning person. I wake up at 4:45, I run down to the beach. I meditate under the stars under the moon. It's still dark. And then I jump in the water and in the summer it's light. But right now at this time of the year, It is dark, man. It is dark. And so I face that fear, like, Oh my God, what's going to be in there and it's cold and there's nobody around.

And I face that every single morning and I overcome that challenge every single morning and the second that I dive in, it's like, this is just fantastic release for all the shit, all the stress that I was taking into it even after meditating, it's early, I'm tired. There's all that stuff that the wake up within the day that you marinate in your brain, you have conversations with yourself. All of that goes away. It disappears as I jump in the water and I play around like a little kid for 5-10 minutes, I don't swim. I just like, it's so cold. Sometimes that my body just makes these weird just stipulations. The noises that come out of my mouth are ridiculous.

It's just like this primal release. Uh, I'm sure. I looked like an utter maniac from the outside and it's dark and it's just, it's an extraordinary experience. And I start every day like that. And then I run home and I give myself two hours of time from 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM to then work undistracted on what's important to me, whether that's my business or the project that I'm working on.

So the point of that morning routine is to actually set me up for the work that two-hour sprint of time undistracted, where it's just me there and I haven't allowed any of the outside world in.

And so what this demonstrates is one me showing up for myself and actually following through with the sort of person who I know myself to be. And then like doing that every single day, trains me into whether I believe that or not at the beginning, it's trained me to believe that.

Jonathan Levi: Wow.

Daniel Thomas Hind: And it's like the lead measure and the lag measure, the lag measure is I want to wake up, so this is me talking before I adopted this practice. I want to wake up and have two hours of time to write in the morning, every day, undistracted, where I can work on my business, work on this book, then I'm running, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And it's really easy to fall into the trap of just obsessing about that part and then saying, yeah, but how do I do that? Or I can't do that or I'll wake up, but I feel distracted or I wake up and I'm tired and it's not working.

So instead of focusing on the lag measure, I focus on what choices can I take that get me there? And what I work together with my coach was developing this amazing routine that activates me that puts me in the empowered position to enter into that 7:00 AM, two-hour zone, fully, fully, fully turned on, ready to work, right? So it's like, what sets me up for that? And oftentimes we focus on the lag instead of focusing on what choices we can make that get us there

Jonathan Levi: That is mind-blowing. I can't imagine getting up at 4:45, even for an international flight. I don't think I could manage it, but you've inspired me. I think tomorrow I'll start edging it back.

I've been wanting to get up a little bit earlier recently, cause it is winter and. It's totally impressive. You know, I realized somewhere along the way, I was like, I asked the wrong person about willpower because that's incredible.

Daniel Thomas Hind: But here's the thing. I am not special at all. There's nothing special about this, but what did I do is I made a few wise decisions. I, and investments, not just decisions, investments. I literally hired a coach. I pay somebody over a thousand dollars a month to help me wake up early. That's it day after day after day. So I'm giving money, we're talking about it. We're making choices in my life that support my waking up early, which really means going to bed earlier, which just takes time, it's uncomfortable.

And then we did it in an iterative process where it was like it started at 6:00 and then 5:45 and then 5:30 and then eventually down to 4:45, which is on that edge of like doable and it's still uncomfortable, but that, you know, that keeps the challenge up.

Jonathan Levi: Amazing.

Daniel Thomas Hind: I'm not going to go down to 4:30.

Jonathan Levi: I have a lot of questions. First off. What time are you in bed?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Yeah. Well, the ideal is that I'm in bed by 9:30, which implies that work is done and everything is done at 9:00. That doesn't always happen. It's rare is it though that I get in bed after 10:30. It's somewhere between 9:30 and 10:30. And what I do is when I get in bed, I read fiction for depending on what time it is, either 20 minutes or two seconds based on how exhausted.

Jonathan Levi: The second question is there a romantic partner who's suffering silently through this.

Daniel Thomas Hind: So no, you're talking to a single bachelor who lives obviously by himself so.

Jonathan Levi: Right. Because last night at my suggestion was babe, let's wake up at 7:00 instead of 7:30. And the look that I got, I was like, all right 8:00.

Daniel Thomas Hind: That's amazing. That's amazing. That takes attention, but it's not, it's certainly not impossible. It's just, how do you guys spend time together? Right? It would change the way in which you spend time together at night. You can speak, wake up on an alarm and just hurry up.

Jonathan Levi: And I'm totally throwing her under the bus because I could put my alarm on vibrate and I could get up by myself, you know?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Sure. There's another variable that you need to consider and that's fine.

Jonathan Levi: Amazing. So, Daniel, I want to give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit about your programs. You mentioned you have a book coming. You've also mentioned coaching Evolution Eat, I know you do a whole bunch of other stuff. So how do people get ahold of you to get in touch learn more?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Cool. Yes. So there are a few ways of working with me or just getting in touch with my stuff at the baseline, sign up for my email list. I sent a bunch of emails per week that talk about all this stuff that I'm talking about right now. Like I said, I love to, this is my life. I don't even know how it became my life, but this is my life's work. This is what I'm working on. This is what I'm thinking about every single day. And I like to write about it. I love to talk about it. I'm happy to share all of my insider secrets if you will because there really are no secrets. So that's one, uh, sign up for the email list and check out the blog.

So I also offer a course, a digital course that dives deep into my philosophy and really sets you up for the mindset and the habits, just how important setting up these habits for yourself are and how it goes so far beyond the food itself, the diet, but like how you're showing up for yourself and how to create new habits in your life and this sort of mindset that you need to get there.

So that's the online course, which you can find on my website, I work intimately one-on-one with a number of clients, but not too many because the work is deep and it's intensive. I mean, if you're interested in that you can email me at DanielEvolutionary.com and within the next month, I'm really excited about this.

I am releasing this, I really, this has been what my life's work is, is about this six-month transformational program that is going to be coaching educational community-based and focused on iterative habit adoption. So if the goal is to live this way too, reform your relationship with food to build a healthy relationship with food, to build healthy eating habits, and also lose weight and feel amazing, and eat clean for the rest of your life.

This is the program and it focuses on one habit at a time diet and lifestyle. So we're going to go from thinking of this from the diet perspective and lifestyle choices that you make for yourself. And we train one habit at a time while I also teach you all about my method and my approach and we deal with way with challenges that come up along the way you love opportunity to work with me through that program coaching.

And I'm just, I'm so excited about that. That we'll be, we'll be releasing that within the next month. And you can only hear about that. If you join my community through the email list. So, um, those are ways to work with me or to get in touch with my stuff. I really invite everybody to reach out or you can email me like I said at DanielEvolutionary.com. I love talking about this. It's what I do pretty much every waking minute of my life. And, uh, I encourage you to do that. If you have any questions or curiosities.

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. So Daniel, I really want to thank you for your time and for your attention and for your sharing, all your secrets, as you said, I'm sure we're going to talk again, but I want to ask you for the audience's sake if there's one big message that you hope they take away and carry with them for the rest of their lives, what would you hope for that to be?

Daniel Thomas Hind: Slow down, to speed up.

Jonathan Levi: Hmm. It's a good one. It's a really good one. And a good note to end on.

Daniel, let's make sure to keep in touch again. I want to thank you for your time and, uh, well, I guess we can wrap offline.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Sounds great. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for having me on the show. I love your work. I love the show. I've been a listener for a while now.

Jonathan Levi: Oh, awesome.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Some of my clients have also pointed you out and I just, yeah, you're doing great work in the world and we really appreciate you. And it's an honor to be on today.

Jonathan Levi: Thank you, sir. The pleasure was all mine.

Daniel Thomas Hind: Thanks, everybody.

Jonathan Levi: All right, SuperFriends. That is all we have for you today, but I hope you guys really enjoyed the show and I hope you learned a ton of actionable information tips, advice that will help you go out there and overcome the impossible. If you've enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, or drop us a quick little note on the Twitter machine @gosuperhuman.

Also, if you have any ideas for anyone out there who you would love to see on the show, we always love to hear your recommendations, you can submit on our website, or you can just drop us an email and let us know. That's all for today, guys, thanks for tuning in.

Closing: Thanks for tuning in to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast for more great skills and strategies, or for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.becomingasuperhuman.com/podcast.

We'll see you next time.