Greetings, SuperFriends!

Today, we’re joined by Christopher Kelly, software engineer and pro cross country mountain biker by day, and host of the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast, certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner, health coach, and all around fitness buff by night.

Recently, I had the opportunity to appear on Chris’ show, and I so enjoyed chatting with him that we agreed to do a follow up conversation here on our show. I wanted to learn how Chris became so interested in nutrition, what he learned through his certification, and hear some of the best stuff he’s learned by doing over 150 episodes.

In this episode, we talk about a LOT of different things, from autoimmune isolation diets, to health optimization, to immunity, to accelerated learning, blood glucose, diabetes, cold exposure, and a heck of a lot more. Christopher has so much knowledge to share that I couldn’t help but jump around and cover a lot of ground – so I do apologize if it feels a bit like I’m all over the place. All in all, It’s a phenomenally interesting and engaging episode with lots of exciting information, and I think you’re really going to enjoy it!

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

This episode is also 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!

In this episode, we discuss:

• Who is Christopher Kelly, what does he do, and how'd he get into it?
• A discussion of Chris' former health issues, and what caused them?
• How did an elimination diet change Christopher Kelly's life? How is it done?
• What is Christopher doing with his clients, and how is it different from other approaches?
• What are some of the more surprising or unusual things that Christopher has learned in his career?
• How much more complicated is it than simply “No sugar, no grains?”
• A fascinating discussion of “social isolation” and how it influences our immune systems
• How does Christopher Kelly learn so much so quickly?
• How can you “hack” your focus to pay attention to even boring materials?
• What other performance improvements does Christopher Kelly use?
• What is the “photo period,” and how can you use it to enhance performance?
• What's the big deal with blood glucose, and why is it gaining so much attention?
• What's the ideal blood glucose number?
• Christopher corrects a big misunderstanding that I and many others have had about body fat
• Does eating fat make you fat? (The answer is more complicated than you think)
• What are the “just tell me what to do” guidelines for improved health?
• Are there any other products or services that Christopher Kelly recommends for health optimization?
• How do you know if Nourish Balance Thrive is a good fit for you?
• A discussion of mindfulness and a homework assignment
• What made my interview with Chris so good? 😉
• What is the #1 takeaway Christopher Kelly would like you to remember?
• An interesting story about Angry Birds, and life experience vs. analysis

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Nourish Balance Thrive, Chris' podcast & clinic
• My interview on Christopher's Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast (if it's out)
• The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf
• Our previous episode with Robb Wolf
• The Kalish Institute
• Our Become a SuperLearner MasterClass
• The Precision Xtra Blood Glucose Monitor
• Counter Clockwise by Ellen Langer
• Shhh! Sound Health in 8 Steps (TED Talk)

Favorite Quotes from Christopher Kelly:

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 know, the one thing that literally every. Single diet and nutrition expert that we've had on the show seems to agree on is that we need to eat more veg and get our greens and consume all-natural products. But let's be honest. How many of us actually have the time?

Well, recently I had the opportunity to meet some of the folks over at Organifi and I've been absolutely blown away by them and their product. We see Organifi is an organic superfood green juice powder. That literally covers all your nutritional basis without having to eat five bowls of kale. It saves you loads of time, loads of money, and a lot of chewing.

And really all you have to do is add water and drink it. So to check it out and save an incredible 20% off your first order, visit Organafi.Com. That's ORGANIFI.com and use 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.

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It'll take you from zero to SuperLearning 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 JLEvi/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 today's show. You guys, today we are joined by Christopher Kelly. He's a software engineer and pro-cross-country mountain biker turned host of the nourish balance thrive podcast, certified functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, health coach, and all-around fitness and health expert.

Pretty interesting career shift. We do talk about that recently, guys, I did have the opportunity to appear on Chris's podcast and I really, really enjoyed chatting with him. We had such a great intellectual connection that we agreed that he absolutely had to come on to our show and do a follow-up conversation.

I really wanted to learn how Chris became so interested in nutrition, wanted to explore all the knowledge that he has to share over three years of accumulating knowledge through his podcast. But honestly, I was pretty vastly under prepared. I had no idea just how much knowledge he had to share on so many different topics.

So throughout the episode, we talk about a lot of different things that came up that I had no idea we were going to talk about from auto-immune isolation, diets, health optimization, immunity, accelerated learning, blood glucose, diabetes, cold exposure. We really covered a lot of ground. As you can hear, Chris had so much knowledge to share.

I could not help, but just jump around and go for every shiny object that he threw my way. So if it feels like I'm all over the place, it's because I am, and I apologize for that, but all in all, I think it is a phenomenally interesting and engaging episode with a lot of exciting information. And for that reason, I'm very excited to present it to you guys.

So without any further ado, let me present to you guys, my new SuperFriend, Mr. Christopher Kelly.

Mr. Christopher Kelly. So good to talk to you again, my friend, how are you doing?

Christopher Kelly: I'm great. I'm delighted to be here. It's an honor. Thank you so much.

Jonathan Levi: Thank you. I have to say that I walked away from our interview together and I honestly think it was one of the better interviews that I've given. You're a phenomenal interviewer.

So I really hope to return the pleasure. I really enjoyed our talk last time.

Christopher Kelly: Well, likewise, that was definitely, you know, I've recorded a lot of interviews now. I've been doing it for three years and so there's good ones and there's great ones. There's never any bad ones. And that was definitely one of the great ones and yeah, it was a high fives with myself.

Cause there's not really anyone else that heard it at the time too. Yeah. I think that came out really, really well. I'm really looking forward to putting that out.

Jonathan Levi: Awesome. Yeah, me too. So Christopher, for the audience who hasn't had a chance to chat with you for an hour, tell us a little bit about yourself.

I mean, I didn't realize when you interviewed me that you are a software engineer by day and that you're also a pro certified biker. I knew you had this deep interest in nutrition and had a career around that. But tell me a little bit, it's sorted out for me. Like, you know, what parts Superman, what part Clark Kent kind of situation?

Christopher Kelly: I still identify as a computer programmer, but I quit my job. My last programming job at hedge funds just over three years ago.

Jonathan Levi: Ah, congrats.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. So I'd be running an online clinic with two medical doctors. I employ two nurses. My wife is a food scientist. I work very closely with her.

We've just taken on another researcher. There's somebody else that just listens to podcasts for me all day long and tells me the low down on podcasts that I can't get around to, which is really fun. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of is working on this online clinic now, but I still identify as a computer programmer and I still do a lot of computer programming.

Although all of my income comes from doing health coaching with clients.

Jonathan Levi: Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. That makes sense. So walk me through a little bit of this trajectory, because I'm already understanding that the bio that I looked at was vastly outdated at least three years. I'm sorry. No, that's fine. Walk me through a little bit of your journey.

I mean, how did you go from being a software developer at a hedge fund manager to then having this huge passion for biking. Becoming pro certified there, and then obviously, somewhere along the way a wrench got thrown in the process because I've read a little bit about your health struggle and stuff like that. So talk to me about that.

Christopher Kelly: Sure. Not a hedge fund manager. I see correct you there.

Jonathan Levi:  Right? Hedge funds, software engineer. Sorry about that.

Christopher Kelly: Okay. So this is an interesting part of the story that I used to be a very introverted programmer that lived in the back office of some hedge funds somewhere.

Occasionally fixing problems definitely considered myself to be an introvert. No, the fewer people I could make eye contact with during the day, the better, as far as I was concerned. And now I'm doing these podcasts interviews, not just, you know, other people's podcasts, but also my own. And it's a huge transformation in my personality.

And I'm sure that's a lot to do with changes that I've made to my diet and lifestyle. So yeah, that Nourish Balance Thrive is the name of my business. And it's my business that I wanted for myself. You know, where it was the, it was the thing that when I couldn't find it. That I created it. So just to go back a few years, you can tell by my accent, I'm British, I'll be living in the US for about 15 years.

And I was brought over by Yahoo and I had a really good time working for them. And I also worked for amazon.com and some other hedge funds. And I found that I had lots of free time on my hands, which is really nice, you know, a single guy living in the Bay area. Got really into cycling. All of the people that I met were all big road biking people, and then also mountain bikers too.

And so I got really into my psych and got very competitive with it. Started doing some races, realized that I had some talent, started working with a coach, did more hours. I training harder, starts eating, eating more of the food that was probably causing me a problem in the first place. And my goal was to get the UCI pro license, which I did, but not without a terrible cost. Right?

So, you know, I had the most dreadful fatigue, really tired during the day, wired at night, a lot of gas, a lot of bloating, a lot of diarrhea, erectile dysfunction. Can I say that on your podcast? You can say whatever you like. That was actually the main driver. Actually. It was the first time I went to a primary care doctor.

It was just after I'd been kicked off some girl's doorstep. And I said to the doctor, you know, something's not right. And his answer was Viagra, which does work to be fair. It does work. It's like putting a bandaid on the problem, right? As an engineer, as a problem solver, I've got the impression this guy was faking it and he wasn't doing a proper investigation.

And he acknowledged that I had some GI symptoms and he sent me to a gastroenterologist and the gastroenterologist was actually worse than useless. They said it was nothing to do with what I was eating, that they had some steroid anti-inflammatory drugs. That would help with my symptoms in the short term and when they stopped working, they had surgery.

And that sounded pretty awful to me. And I was really lucky because I just met the woman actually that came later on, I should say later on I met a woman who's now my wife who suggested an elimination diet and the reason she suggested that was because she spent a lot of time in the lab. At university studying dairy allergies.

And she said, Oh, well, you really must try eliminating some of these foods before you take some of these more drastic measures. And she was bloody right. And it all worked out.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. Okay. So talk to me about the elimination diet and specifically, I mean, we kind of brushed over. A little bit of the, I mean, it's so you had GI tract issues.

I understand, again, from reading kind of your bio, you had some pretty high fasting blood glucose. Walk me through what the elimination diet did and how it works for those who aren't familiar. I know you and I are both huge fans of Rob Wolf, but for those who aren't, I mean, how did that work and what did you start to experience, and what was the first thing to change? So on and so forth.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah, this is just another testimonial because I know that everyone listening to this podcast has already figured out that you're a paleo, no grains type of guy. So that's exactly why I was, I was fielding all of my insurance activity with pastor and cereal and bread and tons and tons of refined carbohydrates.

And so the paleo diet was helpful as describes in rebels. Both of his books actually. But the thing that really did it for me was this autoimmune paleo protocol, which is, uh, it's a subset of the paleo diet. So you're also eliminating eggs and nuts and nightshades and seeds. And you do that for a period.

For me, it was about 60 days. And then I started experimenting with reintroductions. And one of the main ways that I knew that this diet was working for me was I measured, uh, blood tests called high sensitivity C-reactive protein. And when I first started doing the diet, mine was hovering around between five and seven, which is very high.

And then it came back down into standards, a normal reference range, perhaps not quite optimal, but it was around 9.5. So a huge improvement in my systemic inflammation. And that was very much coinciding with the way that I felt, which was much better.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. Incredible. And were you able to go back on the eggs and some of the, I mean, what were you able to add back in.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah, that's really the purpose of the diet. And this is true in other interventions you see as well. So it's, it's really, the purpose of fasting is the refeed, right? That's why you're doing it. And it's the same with AIP. The reason you're eliminating these foods is so that later on you can reintroduce them.

And so I think it's a mistake that I see all the time is people go on to these elimination diets. Without really understanding why they're working and then they never reintroduced any of the foods. And usually what happens to these people is that they eliminate more and more things. And then by the time we get to speak to them, they may be only eating like five or six foods, which is a terrible, terrible mistake.

So the reintroductions went really, really well. And you do them one at a time. So. This I have to say is unlike the engineering approach. So the engineers listening to this will be wanting to change one thing at a time. So they know which was the thing that was causing the problem. Right. That seems like common sense to me, but when you're dealing with something as serious as your health and you're not feeling good, I think it's much better to do all of the things that could possibly work.

And then once you're feeling good, you then do the re-introductions one at a time, very carefully. And so then the signal to noise ratio perhaps is a good term here is good enough to where you can feel, which is the thing that you re-introduced, that's doing the harm. And so, yeah, I have no problems with nuts or eggs or nightshades or any of those things now, but I think the, the elimination diet was really important to allow a period of healing.

Jonathan Levi: I really liked that. I, you know, I was just complaining to a family member that I've been so tired lately and it's kind of, it's not clear cut. It's probably as an iron. It probably isn't anything like that, but it could be some kind of irritant. And so I'm really starting to think about this, uh, auto-immune protocol and really looking into it and seeing like, okay, It may just be that nightshades make me exhausted.

And you know, here in the Middle East, we live off eggplants and tomatoes and all these nightshades and bell peppers that, you know, that's something that I eat almost every meal of every day. Okay. Interesting to know those things do change over time with the microbiota. So it may be the case that it wasn't a problem food for me. And now is.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah, that is the bugger about health and fitness is the thing that's working for you today is I think unlikely to be the thing that works for you next year or the year after, or in 10 years time. So you have to be continuously mindful about what's working and what you might need to do next.

Jonathan Levi: Right. So tell me now, on that note, a little bit about the private clinic, about what you guys are doing. We talked a little bit about this before the show started and how you were certified through the Kalish Institute, you're a certified FDN practitioner, and yet what you do. Is a little bit of a different approach.

Walk me through your typical interaction with a client who comes to you with health issues, similar to the ones that you have.

Christopher Kelly: Oh, sure. I have to explain a little bit of that before I get into the, to answer your question directly. So I know once I've been through this process, I was so wild by it. I thought I've really got to know how this works and parts of it that I didn't mention earlier was that I met a chiropractor by the name of Dan Kalish who runs some tests that I'd never seen before on me. And, you know, I did a lot of testing up until that point, but I'd never seen the tests that he did. And in particular, there was one urine test called the organic acids test and the result comes back and it has all these weird names in the left-hand column, which to me look like variable names in a computer program. And then there was a result, you know like there was divided into Quintiles and it told you whereabouts you lay amongst a healthy cohort of individuals. And then, so then I've got this really strange keyword like is one example of these keywords or variable names.

I'm like, what the heck is a rapper knows in the first place. And so, you know, you can type that into Google and many of the names on the organic acids test, they don't really appear anywhere apart from in the medical literature, which I didn't know it at the time, but that's likely to direct you more towards really good quality content.

That's going to explain exactly what's going on. And so that was really what sparked my interest. Was this working systematically through these results or what the heck do these things even mean in the first book? I really want to know, like, I can't just let this slide. And one of the other things that Dan found, he did some stool testing on me and he found a protozoan parasite.

And then also a pinworm infection and, and those things were really, really easy to treat with Herb's and I felt much, much better, again, probably about as much better as I did with the elimination diet. So I was totally wild by all this. And I'm like, Oh, what kind of magic is this guy selling here? So I had to do this training course and my wife did his training course.

And then also my mother-in-law did his training course cause we were also blown away by this guy. And Dan is amazing. I love his training course, but I didn't really stop there. I went on and I did functional diagnostic nutrition, which was also very interesting. I took away some nice things from that training course, but then a medical doctor who'd been listening to my podcast.

He's also a research scientist. His name is Tommy woods. And Tommy is not like any other doctor I've ever met. He's incredible. Not only does he have the classic education, he has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry is nutrition, a new medical doctor. He's now a research scientist, but he also has a voracious appetite for continuing to read the research.

And then also blogs and podcasts. You name it, he's listening to it. And so he was able to come along and said, Oh, well, have you looked at this and this and this and this and this. And I was, my head was spinning on it. No, I haven't looked at any of those things. And so now what we do in our clinic today is vastly different from what any of these training programs are.

And to answer your question. The people that come to us, usually they're the sorts of people that have already tried a lot of things and they've had some good results. So for example, the autoimmune paleo diet would be one example. Maybe you're already doing that and you had some good results there, but you feel like something's still missing, maybe not sleeping very well still, or maybe you're still tired during the day, or maybe you're not happy with your exercise performance.

That's one of the main things that we care about in our clinic. We work almost exclusively with athletes. So we pick up where you have left off, right? So you've already done the base work, and then we do a proper investigation. We do blood work, we do the urinary organic acids. As I mentioned earlier, we do stool testing.

We look at urinary hormones and then I behave just like an engineer, right? I do an engineering approach, a problem-solving upload. So I'm looking for root causes of the person's fatigue or insomnia or erectile dysfunction or whatever it is. And we do that using these tests. And then the solutions are most powerful.

Interventions are certainly diet and lifestyle, but we also use nutritional supplements that we found to be very helpful for correcting some of the problems we find on the test results.

Jonathan Levi: Phenomenal. So I'm going to ask you a hard question because I know so much of the strength in what you're doing is the individualization and the digging deep to an individual's specific needs, but both through your work in the clinic and also through the podcast, what are some of the more surprising unusual, interesting things that you've learned just about health, that hopefully, we could apply to many listeners in the audience. You know, the one size fits all audience or a one size fits all advice that you have found that isn't the standard. No grains, no sugar.

Christopher Kelly: Oh, well, so there's so much more to it.

So that's what I thought in the beginning. I was like, all people need to do is eat this paleo diet and they're going to be fine. And it's surprising how far you can get with that approach. Like you could launch a business where all you did was take people off the street from the local strip mall, put them on a paleo diet and they will get fantastic results.

And then refer like five of their friends. Like that would be a great business model, right? In my experience, working with a thousand athletes over the last three years, there's so much more to it than that. And so some of the more surprising things I found out about through my podcast, there's a naturopathic doctor who is also a biochemist and a wonderful, critical thinker.

His name is Brian Walsh, and he's been on my podcast a couple of times, but one of the most inspiring episodes he recorded with me was about a phenomenon called social isolation. Does that mean anything to you?

Jonathan Levi: A little bit, I heard about it during my undergraduate degree, but carry on.

Christopher Kelly:  Really? So yeah, this is really interesting.

So the idea is the basic premise is that humans are very social creatures and our immune systems have evolved to cope with communicable diseases. Right? So if you're living in a tribe, then you may get some virus that your neighbor has and you should be able to cope with that. But let's say, for example, Another tribe invaded your tribe and you will try with scattered off into the woods.

Well, now you don't need protection from communicable diseases. You need innate immunity, right? You may be, you're going to be hit with a bow and arrow, or you're going to fall over and cut your leg open or something like that. So you need a different sort of immunity. And so what Brian introduced to my podcast.

Was that there are decades of research where scientists have been looking at what effects it has on our immune system and other parts of our health and wellbeing. When you take a human that's designed, I say, designed in commerce they're inverted commas and put them in an isolated position. So. Yeah. As soon as I say that people are probably thinking about old people at an old people's home or something like that.

Right. But that's not true. You can have somebody who is surrounded by people. Maybe you are a busy office worker working in London. You can still feel lonely. You know, we ask that people that question, you know, I feel lonely and whether or not you're surrounded by people is really nothing to do with the answer.

So this, I think was absolutely mind-blowing to me the idea that we should be talking to people about whether or not they feel lonely, know-how can you problem-solve that? Like how can you become part of a community? And then Brian talks about some other concepts like eudaimonia. So this is the idea. So you're probably familiar with the term hedonism, which is, you know, the pursuit of pleasure.

Jonathan Levi:  Jeremy Bentham.

Christopher Kelly: Ah, okay. Oh, that's the name of not host. Okay. So that's one for me to look up and then eudaimonia. And so Brian talked about the idea of gaining pleasure through helping others. And so this may be as simple as volunteering at your local community farm or something like that. So that's what we do with our clients now is we actually problem-solve with social isolation, which is something I'd never, it's certainly not in the collegiate method training, cause it's certainly not in FDA.

And you know, this is one of the many things that we've added onto our program. So yeah, that's very cool.

Jonathan Levi: Very cool. I like it. I'm just kind of taken aback by how holistic the approach is. And I think it's, it's just a testament to like how much you've been able to learn. As you said about three short years.

Tell me a little bit about your learning process. I mean, obviously as a software developer, you're someone who has to learn quite rapidly or in arguably the fastest growing fastest changing industry, but then you've now taken on a second and third career as an athlete. And so walk me through that I mean, do you think that you approach learning in a different or unique way that has allowed you to succeed in such diverse fields?

Christopher Kelly: No, I've just signed up. We talked about this on my podcast and I have now signed up for your SuperLearner course.

Jonathan Levi: Awesome.

Christopher Kelly: And I feel like I'm a, I'm really not a talented learner at all. I'm just the kind of person that's so enthralled by what I'm doing. You know, now I've really found my passion with this new line of work that I can just keep going at it for hours and hours and hours and hours.

And, you know, we have a Slack channel going with a couple of doctors and researchers and there's studies being posted all the time. And I mean, I'm not sure I would advise anyone to do this, but literally from the moment I get up until the moment I go to bed, that I'm reading stuff. And so for me, it's just about putting in the hours and the reason I'm so interested in your SuperLearner cause is can I reduce the amount of time that I spend learning all this stuff and can I improve my retention?

So, you know, one of the problems I find is that sometimes I'll get to the end of a paper. And I think chefs I've read this before and I didn't even retain any of it because I've just read it again and not realize until the end.

The only thing I can tell you about this paper is that I've read it before. And I think that's a real problem. So I don't think I have any super powers when it comes to learning. It's just being highly motivated and then putting in the hours.

Jonathan Levi:  I love that. And I think that's one of the things that I'm most proud of in our courses. We teach people how to prepare themselves to learn in a way, because ultimately you're going to have to learn things that you don't want to have to know how to do. And so how do you kind of hack that? And we have created kind of this prereading SQ3R methodology where you can kind of go through.

And even if it's something you're really not enthused about reading. You can pick at it in a way that kind of in even a spiteful way, motivates you to read it and pay extra special attention. And I mean, as someone who's suffered with ADD, that's been one of the most interesting effects for me is I can motivate myself to read just about anything.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, maybe this is my superpower is that I found my passion, you know, and I, for all that, for many, many years, I did work where I didn't really care about. So I'll give you an example. When I worked for Yahoo, I used to work in the registration and login department. And so I'd be working on that page that nobody cared about until it stopped working.

Right. That was the only reason you heard from anyone was because they couldn't log in to their Yahoo account. And I know that's not much fun, right? Nobody's going to get terribly passionate about that. So maybe what I needed to do was find my passion.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. I mean, I've certainly had that experience as well.

And I think that's like, that's the ultimate productivity and motivation hack is stop working on things that you don't enjoy. So Christopher, I want to ask you, are there any other kinds of skills, habits, or routines that you've sussed out over the years of podcasting working with clients that are maybe not diet and nutrition that allow you to perform at a higher level.

And also on that note, you're still. A competitive athlete or you've kind of pulled back from that over the years?

Christopher Kelly: I have increasing cognitive dissonance over my endurance activity. So I still love to bounce bike. I live in the woods in Santa Cruz here, and we have the most phenomenal trails and I love to ride my mountain bike.

I'm doing a bike race next weekend and the weekend after that. But increasingly I interview experts that tell me that you can have too much of any good thing, which makes complete sense. Right. And that's definitely true of endurance exercise. And that may be a, you know, a kind of a U-shaped curve, you know, where being sedentary is a bad thing.

And then you reach this sweet spot where you've got just the right amount of exercise. And then if you overdo it, you start to see some of the same problems. That are associated with being sedentary. So I've just interviewed a cardio, electrophysiologist and researcher that talks about arrhythmias and endurance athletes.

And these are really common and it would seem like too much to endurance exercise is actually driving that arrhythmia pathology. So yeah, I have this kind of increasing disconnect between more. Yeah, I'm doing an unwind. I hear about on the podcast, but yeah, I still, I'm still very competitive on the mountain bike and I, I still really enjoyed that.

Um, to answer your question more directly. One of the things I think is most important, both for me and for the clients that we work with is this idea that I first heard Rob Wolf talk about, although I've interviewed many other experts that have talked about it since, and that's the idea of photo periods.

And so if you mentioned that term before on the podcast?

Jonathan Levi: No, that's actually new to me.

Christopher Kelly: Really, I was definitely rubbed off that I first had used that word photo period. So it's just the idea that everything that you do during the day happens during the day, right. Rather than at night. So you think there's lots of things that in train your circadian rhythm, it's not just light and dark.

It's also eating, it's socializing. It's exercising. It's maybe the temperature, right? So if you live in, uh, an air conditioned and heated home where the temperature never varies, that could be a problem. And so that I think is one of the most overlooked things is a lot of people know about applications like F.Lux and Night Shift on Apple devices, where you can change the color temperature of your screen and cut out the blue light.

And I've, I've seen that to be really helpful in clients. But nobody's doing the opposite end of the spectrum, right? So as soon as you get up in the morning, you go outside, you expose your eyes to the light, even if it's not sunny out, because that's one of the things that change your circadian rhythm, and the same is true of eating.

And that seems like become really trendy to do intermittent fasting and skip breakfast, but actually. Eating breakfast is one of the things that can change your circadian rhythm. So I think it's a much better idea to eat within 30 minutes of getting up. And then if you're going to skip a meal, skip dinner.

And so it goes on in obviously with socializing and exercising, everything else. You want to do those activities during the day and then reserve the nighttime for sleeping?

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, that's always been my experience and I always try, I love the 30 minutes, 30 grams of protein that Tim Ferris advocates.

Christopher Kelly: Oh yeah, that's fine.

Jonathan Levi:  I do find it's a lot easier to skip that last meal and extend the fast, much longer. I do feel like it'd be a little bit remiss because you sent me over some phenomenal slides on the glucose podcast that you want to talk about. So I feel like I would be remiss if we didn't go a little bit into blood glucose and just what you've discovered about that.

I guess first we should kind of give people the heads up on like, what's the big deal with blood glucose.

Christopher Kelly: Ah, yeah. So this was one of my main complaints that I didn't mention earlier was that I checked my fasting blood glucose, and I honestly can't remember what prompted me to do this. I just went on to amazon.com where you can go to a local drug store and pick up one of these handheld meters.

Yeah. And then you pick your, you just did it. Okay. Oh, well, okay. Yeah. So you prick your finger with a little finger stick and it doesn't hurt. It's just like a little teeny tiny needle. And so that creates a drop of blood on the skin. And then you put that drop of blood onto a strip that you insert into this digital meter.

And it comes back with a number and there's some really interesting research that shows that I think you want that number between 83 and 88 milligrams per deciliter. And I would have to do a Google search to convert that into millimole. If you're in Israel, you might be using international units. So I apologize for that, but 83 to 88 milligrams per deciliter.

But what I saw when I first check. It was consistently 120 milligrams per deciliter, and most doctors would agree. That's diabetes, that's type 2 diabetes in a, in a guy of my age. And so, um, that's a pretty serious problem. In fact, it's, uh, one of the most serious problems in Western civilizations. Now it's estimated that half of the American population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic right.

Even though they've not been diagnosed. So this is a really, really common problem. And then diabetes is the major underlying predictor of cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer in the US. So, you know, there's some evidence to suggest that cardiovascular disease, if you're not already being diagnosed as diabetic than you're just an undiagnosed diabetic.

And so, wow. I really, really important problem, I think, and that, that people can get on top of this just by doing a simple finger stick test at home, and then perhaps adjusting their carbohydrate intake and thinking about some of the other things we've been talking about in order to bring that fasting glucose back down into the normal reference range.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. And I also want to add, I mean, on top of it, it takes high blood glucose for the body to start storing body fat. I mean, uh, as I understand it, and this is probably an oversimplification, but the body only starts storing body fat when there's such an excess of blood glucose that it stored as much glycogen as it can in the liver and the muscles everywhere else.

And it's like, you know, what do I do with all this glucose? That's just pouring into the body. So it really is blood glucose. One of the big indicators of all of these different health issues from diabetes to heart disease, to obesity, so on and so forth.

Christopher Kelly: Right? Yeah, actually, you know, so I can't say that I'm going to be sounding like I'm trying to be clever right now, but I really only figured this out myself, about six months or 12 years ago, 12 months ago. Sorry. And that is the, you know what you said? I don't think it's true. So the most of the fat on your body, it came from the fact that you ate. And de Novo lipogenesis through glucose is actually not a major pathway in humans. So it is technically possible to make fat out of carbohydrates that you eat, but it doesn't really happen in humans.

And so there's some really good studies that show overfeeding by thousands of calories of carbohydrates. And it doesn't really make a significant contribution to interesting. Yeah. So what's going on there is that. So most of the fat in your body comes from the fact that you ate and then the glucose raises insulin and it facilitates the storage of that fat, right?

So insulin, you eat carbs, you raise insulin and that's generally antibiotics. So inhibits like policies, which is the breakdown of fat and promotes the storage. So you're basically storing the carbohydrates, allowing you to store the fact that you just ate. So nobody's eating, you know, pure white sugar, or just a bowl of white rice, right.

That comes with some fat too, which may be in the meat, or it may be an avocado. It may be olive oil. It may be coconut oil. It could be anything, right. But what I'm saying is people don't eat just purely one macronutrient. They're always eating a mixed diet to some degree.

Jonathan Levi: Right. Okay. So that's really interesting because you know, we've spent so much time trying to reeducate people.

We being kind of like the media people who are advocating paleo, stuff like that. Fat doesn't make you fat. When in fact it is fat in the access route with the big asterisk of fat in the presence of excess carbohydrate actually does.

Christopher Kelly:  It's really it's. So it's such a nuanced thing, isn't it? It's true that eating fat doesn't make you fat necessarily make you fat, but that is where the fat on your body came from.

Jonathan Levi: That's so interesting. Okay, cool. So then back to the kind of skills, habits, routines that you feel make you perform at a higher level, is there any other kind of, I mean, the blood testing one is a really good one. I've recently started doing that. Any other kind of performance tricks that you want to share with us?

Christopher Kelly: Just trying to think of some things that nobody really talks about. And definitely, the photoperiod is one, but so sauna is another one of my favorite things that I think is underutilized. Yeah. So I had a sauna this morning. It's one of my favorite things. And there's some really good studies that show reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease, which is what we were concerned about in the first place with the blood glucose spike.

Right. And then the same is true of cold thermogenesis, which is just a fancy way of saying, getting cold. Right. And so my favorite way to do that is I've got a wine bar or from the local winery. And I just fill it full of water, which comes from our well it's freezing cold and so maybe 15 degrees seats.

It's not freezing cold, but it's pretty cold when you get in there on a, you know unless it's a really, really hot day. And what that does is it promotes the conversion to nerve. Why adipose? So your brown adipose and brown adipose is a special source of fat whose primary purpose is to create heat. So it's just uncoupling.

So it's taking the food that you eat, and then it just turns it into heat, which is basically wasted. And so that's a way for you to increase your metabolic rate. Just through changes in your lifestyle that I think is a, is a really cool hack. And there's actually some really interesting studies that have come out recently.

We still want to knock in our Slack last week that showed that that type 2 diabetes is actually connected to the ambient temperature. So the warmer, the climate that you live in, the more likely you are to develop type 2 diabetes. And the hypothesis is that that's the reason is there's less Brown adipose.

And so there's less uncoupling, less wasting of energy. And so you're more likely to develop type 2 diabetes for that reason.

Jonathan Levi: That's very interesting. I didn't realize.

Christopher Kelly:  I get cold. Yeah. It's probably hard to get cold in Tel Aviv, isn't it?

Jonathan Levi: It's pretty tricky. Unless I go and buy ice, it's actually pretty tricky to do like a cold shower is not super easy to come by at all.

Okay. Okay. So we've got a lot of good stuff here. We touched a little bit on kind of keeping blood glucose low. We talked about cold exposure. We talked about auto-immune protocols. Anything else you wanted to touch on on the whole glucose thing? Cause I feel like I might've rushed you there a little bit.

What's kind of the, one of the things I really loved on your slides was like, just tell me what to do. Right? Like actually give you an opportunity to just tell me what to do or just tell the audience what to do. Like what's kind of the prescription there. Because as you said, it's not so simple, it's not so cut and dry as just don't eat carbs.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah, of course, of course, but that is the first thing you should do, right? So let's say you stick your finger and the number comes back and it's like mine, it's 120. Well, the first thing you need to do is stop it in carbs, right? That's one of the main places where the glucose is coming from. And so I find this to be very analogous, to dealing with a sunburn.

Right. You go out onto the beach and you get sunburned, and I'm not saying you should do that. In fact, you should actively try and avoid that obviously, but let's say for some reason you do get sunburned. Well, the next thing you do is you stay out of the sun, right? Well, the same should be true with the problem with fasting blood glucose.

The first thing you should do is avoid carbohydrates until you get to the bottom of the problem. But I do think there are some general recommendations for health and, and perhaps these won't be new to people and that's to avoid the highly refined carbohydrates. So it's starting to look like there's something special about the highly refined carbohydrates.

So that's the difference between a potato and say, mashed potatoes is you've processed it, right? These starch granules. Well in a nicely defined cell that was maybe surrounded by some fiber and some water. And then you take that and you smash that all up and you turn it into one homogenous mess. And when you look at the, some of the studies that shows that the digestion of those refined carbohydrates are different from when you eat just a whole potato.

And so there's many examples of these refined carbohydrates bread is obviously an obvious one. Pasta would be another. For me as an endurance athlete, one of the most important things was removing maltodextrin from my diet. So maltodextrin is a type of sugar that appears in sports supplements. So it's in the drinks, it's in the jails and I was eating buckets of this stuff, right.

Literally I couldn't go for more than 40 minutes without pounding down another gel. And that was. A really slippery slope. I don't know how I got into it. I just succumb to some of the, the marketing that's done to athletes. Oh, you need sugar in order to do what you do. And, and it's a slippery slope because you get hooked on it.

Jonathan Levi: Right. It's super addictive.

Christopher Kelly:  Yeah, exactly. A little bit of caffeine, some sugar, very addictive.

Jonathan Levi: So it hits the opioid receptors. Like just this, you know, the same way that an opiate would.

Christopher Kelly: Right, right. Yeah. So I think removing those things from your diet, we should be, you know, one of the first things that you should try.

Jonathan Levi: Very good stuff. I was actually going to ask you to complete the sentence, which is most people would be much better off if they just dot, dot, dot.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. I remove refined carbohydrates from their diet, like the number of people that I see on the street these days. And you see that insulin resistant pattern of ectopic fat.

You know, where you get a Geyser, especially as susceptible to this. I think where the whole body looks normal, like normal. They don't look fat at all, but then they've got this huge, like rock hard belly that is the classic ectopic fat insulin resistance. You are diabetic. You're going to have a heart attack unless you address the situation soon.

Jonathan Levi: Right. Yeah. And I've seen that and that's like the warning sign. Hey, when they look like they're about to burst.

Christopher Kelly: Right, right, right. So this comes back into, you know, what we were talking about earlier about do carbohydrates make you fat and what's really going on here is that the person is becoming diabetic because they can no longer get any fatter.

Right. So, the fat cells, they are insulin resistance. They don't want any more fat. They're already full. They say no more. I don't want any more energy. And so the reason there's so much glucose in your blood is because it can't get into any of the cells because they don't want it. It's just excess.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. You know, it's probably about a Southeast, it's still like, they're just full to the brim.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Levi: Awesome. Well, Christopher, I want to be respectful of your time. So I'll start to kind of wrap us up here. I do want to ask, are there any products or resources that, I mean, you mentioned the glucose monitor, I guess we should say, are you using the Precision Xtra?

Christopher Kelly: Yeah, I have used the Precision Xtra meter for ketones. I think you can get cheaper meters that only measure glucose and the test strips will be cheaper. So have a poke around on Amazon and you'll probably find the cheaper meter. If you want to measure ketones too, then the Precision Xtra meter is probably the still the one to have, but the test strips are more expensive.

Jonathan Levi: Definitely, they're very pricey. Are there any other kinds of products or resources that you find to be exceptionally useful? Both working with yourself and working with clients?

Christopher Kelly: Well, my own stuff, right. I mean, I continue to use my eyes.

Jonathan Levi: Tell us about that.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. And so, you know, if you're interested in our program, you can come to the front page of my website, it's NourishBalanceThrive.com and you can book a free starter session to talk to either my wife or one of the registered nurses that I employ about our program.

And uh, what we do is we investigate root causes using these biomedical tests. And so I continue to do that all the time. You know, I can't continue to do stool tests and I find problems. And then when I find a problem, I fix it, you know, even before maybe I'm having symptoms. And then I continue to do blood chemistry and just continue to, so, you know, as an athlete, you just have to continually monitor the machine and monitoring the machine means doing these biomedical tests. And, you know, people who do engage in motor sport are very familiar with this. You can't just take your car to the track every week without doing any maintenance on it.

And without doing any testing on it, to make sure that it's still running correctly. You know, at some point you have to throw it up onto the rolling road and maybe measure what the output of the engineers, and then maybe do some debugging, lift the hood. And so, you know, that's what we do for athletes today.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. That's actually a, another question is what kind of people should reach out to you? I mean, it sounds like you work a lot with athletes, but your average Joe, who's just not feeling at the top of his game. Is that someone who would be a good candidate to chat with you and your wife?

Christopher Kelly: Sure. So, we work with anyone who is motivated and has a goal.

So we don't have entry requirements. Oh, you're not a good enough athlete. Therefore, you can't work with us. You know, we'll work with anyone that has a goal. So that goal, it may be a brain function. It may be you want to get an erection. It may be, you wanna qualify for Boston. It may be, you want to be a better mountain biker.

We don't really care. As long as you're motivated. I have to say that not everyone is motivated in the early days of our business. I went and did some presentations at our local police station. And I don't think those guys were motivated. They didn't really care. You know, they were, they were taking a bunch of medications.

They didn't know what they were, and they didn't really care about what they were either. You know, it was so those are different sorts of people is, and that's why we love the athletes is because the highly motivated. And then when you give them a plan that will resolve the issues that we found on the test, they just execute it.

Right, there's never any compliance issues. They just get it done. Always, which is, I mean, completely wonderful for everyone concerned.

Jonathan Levi: Right.  And I'm looking on the site, it seems like you guys have really reasonable rates for coaching testing, all kinds of really interesting services. Some of which, honestly, I don't know what they do. Like a dried urine test. That's a new one.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So we, we look at hormones in, in urine now, which is, um, it's really cool. So, um, cortisol is this really important hormone and it varies according to the time of day, it follows a circadian rhythm. Like we were talking about earlier. You know, if you go to the lab and get blood tested, you could look at cortisol, but it depends on what time of day you took it as to what the result will be.

So it's very hard to judge whether your cortisol is high or low from a blood test. Whereas the dried urine test, it allows us not only to measure your circadian rhythm, but then also look at the metabolites of cortisol. And that allows us to distinguish between how much cortisol you're making and how much you're clearing it's is super cool.

Like it's just like being an engineer, like trying to figure out what's going on inside of a person.

Jonathan Levi: Very interesting. And I can definitely see that background in your approach, and I can even see it on the website. You have like all these different stages and phases that people go through, like stage one, stage two, which is very much kind of this protocol.

I think you and I share that mentality, although I'm not classically trained as an engineer of going through protocols in problem-solving and in elimination of kind of issue.

Christopher Kelly: Mm, it was some of the best people I've met have not being classically trained as engineers. You know, some of the, some of the best programmers I've met were actually mathematicians.

So at this point, I don't know what background, what education makes for the best problem-solver the best, anything.

Jonathan Levi: Right. Right. I think we've all become by necessity, such polymaths that you do find that cross-disciplinary behavior to be a necessity. So Chris wrapping up here, I want to give the audience some homework because there's so much that we covered and we definitely on this interview went wide.

I think on a future interview we could go far and kind of deep on it. What kind of homework would you, you like to assign people? I mean, is it as simple as go prick your finger or where can people start approaching their health in the same way that you have that's yielded such incredible results for you?

Christopher Kelly: Mm. Okay. All right. Well, so we already talked about blood glucose. I won't say that again. How about mindfulness? So this has been another thing on my podcast that just totally blew me away. And if people want a book that they can learn about this stuff quickly, I'd recommend Counter Clockwise by Ellen Langer.

But I interviewed Ellen on my podcast. And when I read that book, I realized that she was talking about something that my wife had taught me to do quite early on when we met. And that is to notice the small differences. And it really is that simple. It sounds so ridiculously simple that it's not even worth talking about, but it's actually harder than you think.

It's easy to say, but hard to do notice the small differences. So for me at that time, It was noticing the way that the foods that I was eating were making me feel. So I think many people walking around today, they're doing things like going for lunch at work, they're eating something. That's affecting them in a negative way.

And then something bad is happening to them in the following hours. Like the falling asleep at their desk, or they're not feeling motivated in a meeting that comes later on in the day and then not making that connection between. What they ate for lunch and the way that they feel later on. So they're acting mindlessly.

And so the goal is to be mindful all the time. And the way that you become mindful is to notice small differences. And this could be as simple as when you go for a walk. You just look around you and try and notice something that you've never noticed before. Maybe it's some Moss on a tree that you've never seen before.

Maybe it's the call of a bird that you've never heard before. Maybe, you know, we have lots of Jays around where we live and the Jays are able to mimic the cause of other birds. And so you've got to be like, really have your wits about you to understand what it is that you're listening to. And it sounds trivial, but the simple act of noticing is good for your health.

And so I think it should be encouraged.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. Absolutely. It reminds me of a Ted talk where the speaker tried to encourage people to try and differentiate all the different sounds and split them into tracks. And just by doing that, not only is it an exercise in mindfulness, but it can actually cure a lot of the hearing issues that we all have, where we're not able to hear as well as we used to.

Christopher Kelly: Oh, that's really interesting. I have to check that one out. I have terrible trouble with that. You know, when there's a lot of background noise, I can't pick a person's voice out of a noise very well at all. I'm useless in bars.

Jonathan Levi: I have the same issue and apparently there's a way, right?

Christopher Kelly: Oh, that's really good information for me. Thank you.

Jonathan Levi: I'll put it in the show notes. Chris, I want to ask you where can people learn more and get in touch with you? Where should we send them?

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. NourishBalanceThrive.com. And so from the front page there, you'll see that my podcast is also linked from there. And I generally talk about issues related to health and fitness, but I can only chose this name where anything goes.

So right now you may hear something about machine learning. You may hear something about mindfulness. You may hear something about arrhythmias in endurance athletes, or it might be something completely different. So I'm quite enjoying that.

Jonathan Levi: Love it. Love it. And I can attest to the fact that it's really a phenomenal show. I mean, like I said, I think you got the best interview out of me. Out of everyone who's interviewed me. So.

Christopher Kelly: Oh, why do you say that? That's a really interesting thing for you to say.

Jonathan Levi:  You know, I don't know. I just can't, I'm away from it feeling like you gave me the opportunity to stretch my legs and really like you asked the right questions at the right time and kind of let me expand as much as I wanted to.

And part of it is also, you know, I've given interviews on the topic now quite a few times, so I have samples ready to go and metaphors ready to go, but I just felt like. Really you gave me the opportunity to stretch and kind of fill the air in a hopefully entertaining way.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah, no, absolutely. I feel like maybe part of the art is building up like a spring and then jumping out of the way and letting the person talk.

You know, if you can over wine the spring, if you keep talking, then you lose that pivotal moment where the person is ready to spring off and go. And it's an art trying to find that exact point.

Jonathan Levi: Precisely. Precisely. So definitely would recommend people check out Nourish Balance Thrive, and yeah, I do hope we give in touch.

I do want to ask you our closing question though, before we get to thank you, which is, if people really are only able to remember one thing that we talked about today, or they take away one message and they carry it with them for the rest of their lives, what would you hope for that to be?

Christopher Kelly: I think it would be. And this is a lesson that I learned recently from a neurologist who is leaving his practice to do diet and lifestyle medicine, because literally zero progress has been made in urology over the last 20 years. And I may antagonize some people by saying that, but I think it's really true. And so Josh Turnkey has this really really interesting story about the computer game, angry birds.

 Ever played angry birds?

Jonathan Levi: Few times. Yeah.

Christopher Kelly: Yeah. To any computer games. So the idea is, imagine two groups of space aliens came to the planet and they both had this goal without learning how to play angry birds and one group of aliens. They set about the task by examining the source code for the game. So they go through it line by line, by line, by line, by line, trying to understand what each line of the source go does for the game angry birds. And the other group of aliens, they just play angry birds and then six months pass. And who do you think is going to be better at playing angry birds?

It's obvious, right? It's the, the aliens, this display the game, right? So the point is the same thing is happening with medicine at the moment, like scientists are going through the human machine, trying to understand it line by line, by line, by line, in the source code. And I think they have made some amazing progress, but still at the end of the day, if you want to be optimal, if you want to be healthy and fit, then you should just play the game and playing the game means adhering to ancestral health principles.

It means eating food that was for humans. It means getting appropriate sleep. It means appropriately managing stress. It means being part of a tribe. It means finding your passion. It's all of the things that Rob has talks about in his book.

She just needs to play the game. And, you know, we don't know all of the details yet. And at some point in the future, we'll know a lot more than we do now. I'm sure. But you can't wait for that time. So my advice is just to play the game.

Jonathan Levi: I love it. That's brilliant advice. And some of the most unique closing comments, I think I've heard in 120 some odd episodes.

So, Chris, thank you. I really want to thank you. It's again, been such a pleasure chatting with you and I do hope we keep in touch next time we can maybe go into specific topics and a little bit more depth.

Christopher Kelly: Sounds good. Thank you.

Jonathan Levi: All right, my friend, you take care.

Christopher Kelly:  Cheers.

Jonathan Levi: All right, SuperFriends. That's it for this week's episode. We hope you really, really enjoyed it and learn a ton of applicable stuff that can help you go out there and overcome the impossible. If so, please do us a favor and leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. Or however you found this podcast. In addition to that, we are always looking for great guests posts on the blog or awesome guests right here on the podcast.

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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.

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