Episode 562: Shawn Stevenson: Why Your Relationships Shape Your Health More Than Any Wellness Trend

myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthy

“yourself. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. Today we have Sean Stevenson”

you guys. He is probably an OGR and OG in podcasting. He has one at the top health podcast probably in the US or in the world at this point. You know it's like the billboard charts. We've been number one in the United States like you know many, many weeks. Forever, like a long time. It's also could be because of your voice. He does have a really nice sounding voice which kind of helps kind of not to mention the science background, but

the combination and you always give such great information. So the whole thing, it's really

nice to finally have you. I can't believe how long I, I'm shocked it's taken six years to have you sit here because I feel like we shouldn't met before. I want you to tell me the top three biggest myths in wellness right now. Okay. Top three biggest myths in wellness right now. Well you want to get controversial. Oh my gosh. I've been waiting. Okay. I mean the hot thing on people's tongues right now, which they might be injecting their tongues is the

peptides. Yeah. You know it's super pop and right now and for good reason there's some interesting science around this. And I'm saying this from the perspective of somebody who was unintentionally kind of saw this coming. When I was working on my book, "Eat Smarter" and this was like

2018, 2019 when I first started to put the book together. I was pointing out you know some

of the most significant what again we relate to peptides like you know insulin, GLP1s. Like these are literally written in my book. It came out around you know the end of 2020. But I was talking about GLP1 but I was talking about the pathways to get these things activated in your system. And I also considered like what if we can just take these things to help like just like taking insulin right. And but I kind of just like left that tab open and literally that

I know within the next couple of years what's happened with GLP1 for example, which is life transforming for many people but also abused as well as most things are in this kind of pharmaceutical mindset. Are you on a GLP1? No, no, I haven't. Because every time like every single person sitting here who are thin, not thin, bulky, not whatever. Everyone's either micro-dosing it or taking it and they all just like talk like you know kind of like just

speak it away like, "Oh yeah, we have to take, I'm just taking the micro-dose, it tries up a tie." Or I'm just taking the micro-dose of this. I've watched all the specials with my hero screwing up Mark McGlier. Holds a can say go. You know, I didn't remember each each yes. Hawke Hogan, I just watched the Hawke Hogan that I did know by the way.

“Fire. I mean, I was I was, maybe that's what got me emotional.”

No, I love Hawke Hogan. I'm very close with his agent and that whole thing. I met him. I love him. He was great. It was I mean such a big part of my childhood. Oh, it was my childhood. Yeah. I bought the end and just how everything unfolded on me. I was just like choked on him. He don't even tell me because I haven't watched it. Yeah, I'm going to watch it. Yeah, don't tell him. But just again, he was right there. Oh, I didn't take anything brother.

He tried to answer your prayers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have not injected a damn thing like nothing. Nothing. Yeah. So, you know, keeping that in context, but it's not that I'm against it. I'm much more on the side of like, let's stack conditions in our favor and do the things

that our genes expect first. If you're not doing those things, stop trying to take a

particular, which again, I want to say this with compassion, a shortcut in order to get a certain response. If you're sleeping for three hours, and then looking towards like, let me take this peptide in order to lose weight or in order to help to try to increase the length of my telomeres or whatever, you're burning your telomeres away by staying up and being on your phone. Like, let's address the behavior and also we can have these other newly-invented products

to support us when appropriate. And so, this is another conversation about accessibility. We have access to some things that can really help to change the expression of our bodies because if we're

“really looking at this in a more kind of holistic way and what are we actually talking about here?”

Even when we're talking about, you know, our biological clocks, let's start their circadian medicine is going to be growing rapidly as well, circadian medicine, circadian nutrition,

all of our other genes and proteins, right? And so, just by changing the timing of what we're doing something can dramatically change the expression of thousands of our genes, all right? And so, these particular proteins influence behavior. They influence the behavior of what our cells are doing. All right, there are so many ways to go about doing that. And these might be

some very powerful, you know, one trick pony, like, but very effective ways of going about these things,

but, again, I would much rather see people stack in conditions doing what they can do with their body and their lifestyle first before looking towards or they're not getting addicted and creating a panissy out of it because that's really what I'm saying is such a huge possibility of addiction. And this is what we're seeing with the GOP ones. It's very difficult. And I have a particular colleague

“that's coming to mind. She's really working to kind of buck the system and the idea that you have to”

be on it. You know, of course she went to the micro-dosing. She started off with the kind of standard and micro-dosing and she's attempted to get off of it. We'll see if it's successful. And she can't. She hasn't been able to do this far. She got off of it and she got back on it.

But, not to say that it's not possible. I want you to, I want you to do real talk here,

because I've had a lot of people, like I just, I've talked to a lot of people about this. What it's scary to me is number one. It also decreases. It's not only just your lean muscle mass that you are decreasing. It's also your bones. Like your bone density is getting compromised. So, as you age, there's this whole like chitchat about, oh, you know, it's great for your inflammation, it's great for your cognitive brain fog. But no one's talking about the other things that

could actually be really detrimental as you age. Like bone densities are really important, you know?

“So, it's lean muscle mass, really important. And I think, I think to your point with your colleague”

is what I've seen, people who get off of them, they're gaining all their way back. And they're gaining it back fast, not just like in, you know, six months, like in a month. Yeah, that's easy. We actually have, we actually have published peer-reviewed studies on this now, some prestigious medical journals about the weight regain. But again, there are treatments for the weight regain, there's also treatments for the loss of muscle and bone. You have to strength training.

Strength training. But again, this is the thing. You should be doing that in your way. Well, that's the thing. That's, that's, that's my whole point. So, what if you're doing both, does it counterbalance each other? It, it can definitely help to retain your lean mass and your, and your bone density. If you're strength training in conjunction with the GOP one, I think that, in fact, it should be mandatory if you get onto a GOP one with the aspiration of weight loss,

you're also prescribed, we lift it. What about this whole, uh, I'm sure you've heard this, or maybe you haven't, it's not the GOP ones are not just suppressing your appetite, but it's suppressing everything else. Like everything else that is, I guess, good in life, right? Like your your ability to have one, relationships, love, not just food, but like sex, love, everything, your, you're suppressing every human, not a motion, but human, but do call it just desire for

a film, it just basically, basically, numbs every dictionary. It can make food less desirable,

of course, but makes everything else less desirable. And that is speaking to myth number two, which is, there is no one size fits all. All right. Some people can be wildly successful, utilizing, uh, you know, peptides, including GOP one, but it's situationally dependent, you know, they might not lose that zest for life, and they might think that that's just totally ridiculous. It's like, I love everything, you know, it's just, this just helped me lose weight. And so it's

situationally, situationally dependent, but also what tends to happen is we blanket everything. Like if somebody finds success on it, they think it's good for everybody else, and they'll find the same. When somebody, again, this is taking back, well, actually, I'm going to throw in number three, I'll package it all together, myth number three, one of the greatest mistakes that we're making right now, and I help to usher this in. Like we've gotten to this point and haven't even

really talked about this. And I'm grateful because I needed this conversation, obviously, and I'm so thankful for, you know, the questions that you asked. But there's a way that I went about things in the very beginning of my career. I've been working in health and fitness for 24 years, 24 years, starting off working at my university gym all the way to, you know, everything today.

“But I remember the first and my wife actually pulled it up because she was trying to, like,”

looking for like a trademark, copy, copy, copy, copy, or anything for us. And she found an email for this university lecture that I was doing for this biology department. And I remember, like, do I need the tie and the thing and all the, you know, like being this

for a little bit, and I'm just like, this does feel right to me. Like, I don't have to wear a lab

“coat in order for me to communicate science. As a matter of fact, I think that just based on what”

I've done so far, my greatest gift is to be myself and really connect with people, make people feel like, oh, I actually understand this stuff. I understand what the mitochondria is and I understand that actually my nutrition, my meals are making my mitochondria. Like, my cells aren't just manifesting out of nowhere. Like, this is built on the nutrients that I'm eating. Like, creating more connective tissue, making it fun, seeing people just have these aha moments of like, oh, like,

I actually can influence what my blood sugar is doing, which is counter to what it was decades ago. Literally, you're a victim. Like, you have insulin resistance. It just happened. Right. And so I'm saying all that to say that my inroads was, and this is being used outside of medicine. Now, I was being used at personal development. It's being used at, you know, real estate

“by in a home, but people are using peer reviewed evidence in order to illustrate a point.”

I've been doing this for almost 20 years. You've fallen in that temperament that that template because I needed something to affirm that I know what I'm talking about, right? As a research scientist, like, here's this piece of data, and then in order to communicate a message. Over time, I realized that their is data to affirm the exact opposite of what I'm saying. This was years back, years ago. And so I, but already this had taken off and, you know, a lot of my colleagues, especially in a social

media is following that template of, here's this study. Let's talk about it. Oh, there's this other person saying this thing. Where's the study? Show me the study. Right. Right. Right. Right. So we've gone to this other extreme to where if it doesn't have a randomized double-blind placebo controlled trial or, you know, some kind of, you know, meta-analysis or whatever the case might be, then it's not valid. We swung from, this is literally here, say, where a lot of the people who are

propagating, you know, these studies, they didn't know shit about this. They weren't looking at these studies a decade ago when I was and finding the, you know, the evidence that Ashugand that could be effective or whatever the case might be, right? What we need to do is to find a place of balance, which is, yes, we want high-quality studies conducted, but we do not want to negate the value of N1 because your personal experience is more instructive on what's right for you than anything else

on planet Earth, right? And so the anecdotal evidence is still evidence. And so that's really what

I want to say. The third myth is that everything that's effective needs to be validated in a high-quality

peer-reviewed study, you know, truly like, if we find out today that, you know, putting, I don't know, marine final plankton in my water, increases my one-rette max by 10%, I just experience something, and that might be true for me. It might be true for other people, but to share that and for somebody to be like, it's not valid because it doesn't have a peer-reviewed study, we're missing the point. We have to find out what works for us. Yes, it's true. So then your three top myths are the following.

The first is, well, you can say it them because I want you to say them, just so I have a, I want to have a clean piece of information here, so say what the top three are. So number one was the

“over-reliance on the trendy things, which this one, and that's what I should have said earlier,”

this one is the peptide, that's what we're hot on right now. By the whole thing, when I talk about peptides, I should tell you, GLP when I know it's a peptide, but I'm talking about the other peptides that people are like super like, my friends are all taking like stacks of like the Wolverine stack of BPC, the copper GHK for their, for their collagen and for their skin. There's also TB 500, like those are the ones that I feel like a lot of people are on. Do you find those to be

as a similar, where it's like, listen, if it's not, I think people are just overusing everything. That's my opinion, but that's why I mean, again, in of one matters, but also the, the sketchy part again is, is the sourcing and also the validation with thoroughly researched, you know, clinical trials not to negate the value that they might hold for us, but my point being is that, you know, in putting this in the category of a myth, is that like these are some kind of panacea. Yeah.

That's really the bottom line at the end of the day. For me, is we want to stack conditions

doing the things like, if you know that you're probably going to take this GLP one and lose weight, for example, and you're going to have to lift weights, lift weights anyways. I can still need that input. Let's do that and actually see what happens. Yeah. And being honest about it and not, you know, there is no thing that's just going to be this panacea. So that's myth number one.

I could you speak, you were speaking so long. I couldn't, I couldn't just give you, I couldn't just get the thing. Well, they can just rewind in, they can hear it. But how about the fact that you're not wearing a wearable for sleep? You're not wearing an aura, you're not wearing a hoop, and you were a book called sleep better. Sleep smart. Sleep smart. I sent that sleep smarter,

“but you wrote that book about two, three years ago or did it? No, ten years ago. That was ten years ago?”

It was the first part of sleep well in years ago. First sleep well in this book to become an international

best seller. Stop it. Yes. Oh my god. I thought it was like two years ago because I was like seeing all of it like in the last book. I wrote the first version of it, 12 years ago. Get out. Wow. Okay. Well, I was going to say, I, with the book, I mean, all the information is just as good as it is back then, if not better, you're not wearing a wearable. So what's your take on wearables? Do you think they're just overrated and silly? Same thing. You know, it can be a great, it can give us a benchmark

for things, but I've seen dysfunctional behavior, you know, with people like my sleep score, whatever, but you can anxious. Yeah. And so somebody could feel like they slept great and they see their sleep score and they like, fuck, like, what happened? Or the opposite, you know, like they feel like trash was like, man, like, where it's saying that I like, so it can give us a great baseline of things. And so we don't want to prescribe to get that one size fits all, but what I'm

curious about is if your sleep score is, you know, 91, 91, 91, and then suddenly it's like 27 one night. I want to know what happened then. That's really what I want to know. Where is the big changes happening? And so it can be great for giving us some baseline metrics, but we can create, and this is my wife loves them for her as a gamification. Yeah, it's okay for occasion. You know, like she can really go after that stuff. What I want to advocate for is we pay attention to ourselves and how

we actually feel, how we look, how we feel, how we perform, which is asking a lot because we're

“so distracted today. Oh, I'm not sleeping well at all. I mean, so that's why when I like when you're”

coming on, I had all these questions for sleep because I know how important it is. It's a number one thing for fat loss is sleep, right? Like you can be doing everything right. And if you're not sleeping

well, the next day, I'm eating the things that would never even think of eating, right? And like my

whole system is off. But you said something earlier about there's going to be a big uptick on circadian, something about circadian, not circadian medicine, circadian medicine. What does that mean? What is circadian medicine? So this is, you know, taking your medicine at certain times a day, for example, or treating you based on your circadian ribbons, which everybody has their own kind of unique template on when things are ideal based on what their biology is doing. So we have these internal

clocks that are determining when you're producing your big cortisol shot in the morning, when you're producing your biggest release of human growth hormone, when you are most, you know, insulin sensitive. The list goes on and on and on based on what time of day it is, right? And so the biggest influences to these circadian clocks that control thousands of our genes are light inputs

and when you eat those are the two primary controllers, but the light inputs are by far the most powerful.

Really? Like what? Tell me. So for example, innovations and clinical neuroscience found that exposure to early morning's sunlight helps to decrease cortisol in the evening because it's creating, it's helping to set this circadian rhythm, right? And so what we would see, you know, clinically, and this is like a little Q term but tired and wired, right? So we would see people who's cortisol is too low in the morning, making it difficult to get out of bed and get going, but then

they're wired in the evening, right? They're just up, like I know I need to get to sleep and I'm going to be tired in the morning like why can't I just, and so we would implement certain things that help to kind of reset the circadian rhythm. One of those things, again, clinically proven to be effective, but also try yourself, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, is getting in exercise in that first hour of the day as well because moving your body and having some kind of, you know, vigorous movement

is going to force that cortisol rhythm to, I'm the cortisol to increase and that can potentially help to set the rhythm for the day, so it goes down in the evening. So sunny sposure in the morning, some exercise and movement and maybe even a little caffeine in the morning. I mean, I, I,

“is that what you do, is that your routine for some people? Which your routine in the morning?”

My routine in the morning. I usually wake up before my alarm. I have alarm as like just in case they, but 99% of the time I wake up before the alarm, right around 5, 50, 6 o'clock. Okay, you know, and what's your routine? And then the first thing that I do that I've been doing for over two decades is I go and drink about, you know, 25 to 30 ounces of water. Usually I put

Your inner bath? Inner bath. Was it inner bath? So we take an outer bath,

“their outer shower, like I took a shower to come here, but the inside is more important, you know,”

and so it's taking that inner bath. And also the reason that I'm so grateful again, I have many

of my colleagues who've talked about this, they put this in books that I've shared with them that

“I've been doing for, you know, all this time. But the primary reason is when we were asleep,”

this is a long stand where we're going without water. Of course, we're breathing through the night, but also when you're asleep, your glimphatic system in your brain is 10 times more active,

“removing metabolic waste from your brain. All right. And the way to help to kind of flesh out these,”

this kind of internal waste management system is through water, bringing in more hydration to literally flush things out of your system. So you can pee them out, breathe them out, poop them out, all those kind of things. If you're dehydrated, it just makes it harder. All right. And also we do have this phenomenon of recirculation of things, if you're not

clear in there from your system. So getting up, take my inner bath first, and then I immediately

go and read something. So I've usually got a book or three sitting on the arm of my couch, and so I'll do some reading probably. I'm guessing probably maybe like 20 minutes in the morning. This morning, I was reading Walter Longo's book, you know, where we actually meant it. Yeah, it's hilarious. You are. Okay, it's funny. Yeah. So I was reading, reading his book this morning, and after that, I do some meditation.