SHAWN STEVENSON: Today you're going to discover how your brain and your gut are controlling what calories actually do in your body. Contrary to popular belief, we do not absorb all the calories we consume. The human body is not a glorified calculator. It is more like a very dynamic chemistry lab with all kinds of moving parts and calories. And there are powerful epi caloric controllers that are determining what our bodies do with the calories we consume. So we're going to be covering this and much more. And this is from an incredible moment for me. This is from me being interviewed by one of my greatest mentors. This was actually his very first show, the launching of his new show that is now one of the top shows in the country. But I was invited on as the very first guest. And as a matter of fact, we actually had a hand in the launching of the show.

My amazing wife, and helped Michael Beckwith and his team to launch their podcast in a big way. And she's really a big mastermind behind the model health show and in all of our impact. And I'm so grateful. We recently crossed 100 million listener downloads, which is crazy pants, crazy! And i'm so grateful for that But you know being able to help one of my mentors to start his amazing show and he's actually been doing this long before me. He was interviewing experts and doing shows. Before I even had a show, I was dialing in.

There was like a hotline. This is back in the day when you call in and join a live broadcast. And I would listen to Michael Beck with teach and interview people. Again, this had to be like 15 years ago and now he's a really good friend. And these are just those really special moments that remind me of how powerful we are to affect change in our lives and how what we focus on tends to show up in our lives and it's not just the focus though. It's the dedication. It's the work ethic. It's the service. It's the love that goes into it that can really create something special. So I think that you're really going to enjoy this conversation. And before we get to this interview, as mental health challenges have skyrocketed in recent decades.

Without addressing the root causes shown in mountains of studies. including social isolation, sleep abnormalities, nutrient deficiencies, sedentary behavior, and many other factors. We'll continue to see rates rise and our communities struggling for solutions. It's so important for people to understand that no two cases of depression are alike. There are unique lifestyle and mental health work that each of us need in different situations. And right now in the United States, depression is the leading cause of disability. It's the number one reason for people missing work and school, and so we've gotta do something about this. Of course, medications can be helpful in some contexts. But most people are not educated about the science backed natural supplement that's shown to be just as effective as many medications.

An analysis published in the Journal of Effective Disorders found that the renowned spice saffron was just as effective as conventional antidepressant drugs like Prozac, Tofranil, and Celexa. Additionally, the researchers noted that fewer people experienced side effects from saffron than from those other treatments. This should go without saying people should know about this, something that's been utilized for centuries, far safer, and just as effective as conventional antidepressant drugs. Now, are we talking about curing this condition? Absolutely not. We're talking about having another option to turn to.

Something that can be supportive in an overall plan to support our mental health. There is no supplement. There is no drug that's going to fix everything. But again, people need to know about this. And there are great companies that are providing easy to use saffron supplements, like the happy drops from Organifi. This includes a therapeutic amount of saffron, got you, cola, Passion flower and ginger. They are amazing. You really do notice a difference and I highly encourage you to look at the reviews for this product. I'm just going to share a couple with you because they really do stand out. Nicholas said, Happily surprised. He said, I was extremely skeptical of this product despite all the good reviews.

However, after using it daily for the past two weeks, I can definitely say, They work. I definitely have an easier time staying positive and rolling with the punches of daily life with the help of happy drops. Hillary said happy drops will make you happy. You ordered. I found out about these little drops of bliss on Instagram. I was skeptical as every product makes claims that aren't always backed upon trying these happy drops. I've noticed a mood improvement energy that lasts throughout the day. And improved sleep at night. I'm thrilled. Definitely check out Organifi's science backed gummies. Again, they're called happy drops.

Head over to Organifi.com/model and you're going to get hooked up with 20 percent off. Go to O R G A N I F I.com/Model again, you're going to get 20 percent off store wide. And now let's get to the Apple podcast review of the week.

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five star review titled "learn something new each episode" by D cello. I've been listening for well over a decade. The information Shawn gives his listeners is so valuable to help each of us to become the best and most healthy person we can be. Knowledge is power. And Shawn is a wonderful communicator of the knowledge he has amassed. Thank you. You are a rock star.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for sharing your voice over on Apple Podcasts. Over 10 years, we are family. I appreciate you so very much. And yes, we've got so much more in store. So I appreciate you so much for sharing your voice. And without further ado, let's get into this very, very special segment. I was interviewed on my mentor and friend, Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith's show, Take Back Your Mind.

And he is, of course, a bestselling author and he's the founder of the Agape Spiritual Center here in Los Angeles. And he's just been somebody I've learned from afar when I was living in Ferguson, Missouri. And Just a series of events landing me face to face with him in Portugal of all places is where we officially met and it's just like It's so crazy you know the power of intention and also the power of service and we really just united on that. And As mentioned in this interview, we're gonna be covering how our brain and our gut impact what calories do in our bodies and so much more. Let's dive into this special segment where I was interviewed on Take back your mind.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: One of the things you talk about, people have a misconstrued idea of calories. In terms of calories and obesity, but you break it down differently. How do you teach that?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Because I think we should always question things, and another thing, the reason that I love and appreciate you so much is directing people to that. And in that university class, in that nutritional science class that I paid good money for, right? It was expensive private university. I was taught the first day that if you can control calories, then you can control your health.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: You can control calories. You can control your weight. It's a very simple Paradigm of calories in calories out if you want to lose weight you expend more caloric energy than you take in.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: That's right. It sounds logical.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Sounds very logical. But here's the thing. The human body is not a calculator. It's more like a very complex chemistry set or chemistry lab. There's so much going on, and not even to bring in the mind into the equation, which we'll talk about later. Our metabolism, the human metabolism, is unique to each and every person. You have a unique metabolic fingerprint that's not like anyone else on the planet or who's ever existed before us. We have these simplifications that we love. And so in studying calories and looking into where did this Dogma come from because tens of millions of people right now in the United States alone are on calorie restricted diets. Probably way more than that that are eventually going to fail right and a dogmatic trainer, like I used to be, strength and conditioning coach, nutritionist is going to be like, you're just not doing it right.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: You're taking in too many calories or something to that effect.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so we got to find that sweet spot for you with calorie restriction, right? People post, even to this day. Somebody's posting, they're struggling, they've tried so much. They've, they're, they've cutting their calories now. This is a grown woman. We'll just say she's 5'8" and she's 190 pounds and she's, It's consuming 900 calories a day at this point and the weight is just not budging. And sure enough, some expert, some nutrition expert is going to say, have you tried calorie restriction? Like they're just going to throw that out there and not understanding that there are epi caloric controllers, right? So epi meaning above.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Caloric control that controls what calories do in your body, just to give you an example. And this ties in together what. What I was eating processed foods, heavily ultra processed foods, by the way, right now, the United States here in the United States, 60 percent of the average American's diet is made of ultra processed foods. So turning back to those lucky charms.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: It's not even real food.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Not real food.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: The body doesn't even recognize it as food.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So what happens? When you do that calorie restriction with those kind of foods because it's on your point system, right? And so this study is published in the journal food and nutrition research. They want to find out what would happen with caloric expenditure When someone eats a meal of processed foods versus a meal of whole foods. All right. So this is that the saying that people have now not all calories are created equal.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Now we have the science on this. So the whole food sandwich was You It's multi grain bread, whole grain bread, and cheddar cheese. All right? It's debatable how good it is, but we're not getting into that. But this was, the ingredients for that cheddar cheese is like four things. Okay? 

The whole grain bread, a couple of ingredients. You could still tell that it came from some grains versus a meal of a Processed food sandwich, which was white bread and cheese product. And if you're wondering what cheese product is, that's Kraft singles. They can't legally call it Kraft cheese, right?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: They have to call it Kraft cheese product.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, it needs to be 51 or more cheese in the cheese, but they don't have enough cheese in the cheese, right?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So they have enough cheese in the cheese.

SHAWN STEVENSON: They have the test subjects to consume these different sandwiches. Now, here's the most important part. The sandwiches are the same amount of calories, the same amount of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. On paper, it should have the same impact on the body. But when the test subjects consumed the processed food sandwich, they had a 50 percent reduction in calorie burn after eating that sandwich versus the real food sandwich. Their bodies, their metabolism, their metabolic rate slowed down and created this hormonal clog to where their system was not processing and expending this energy.

It made their cells stingy and hanging on to that processed garbage. All right. This is not accounted for when we have this calories in, calories out paradigm. And in Eat Smarter, I actually went back to the root of calories. Like, where did this concept come from that's dominated our culture that hasn't worked? Not to say that it hasn't worked for some people, but calories have their place. But it's not the king. It's not the monarch. It's not the emperor of nutrition. As we are inundated, I was indoctrinated through my expensive education to tell people. If you control these calories, you can control your health.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: You can lose weight.

SHAWN STEVENSON: All right? And it actually, the origin of it dates back to the 1800s and in the realm of physics. This had nothing to do with nutrition. That was brought in a little bit later. We can look at people like Atwater. We can look at Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, who really popularized the concept of the calorie as far as nutrition is concerned. She had a nutritional bestseller in the earlier part of the 1900s and She sold like two million copies, which is basically she was like Drake, right?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Yeah, you don't I mean back in the day two million. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous now. What are you talking about at the turn of the century? That's..

SHAWN STEVENSON: So everybody and in that book she shifted the mental perception of food from being this incredible, highly complex substance. Which even if you take, for example, an avocado, when you eat that avocado, you're not just eating the avocado, you're eating that avocados microbiome. So that's just one layer of complexity that people don't think about. So taking it from being food to being calories, she said, you will no longer eat a slice of bread. You'll eat 100 calories of bread. You'll no longer eat a slice of pie. You'll eat 350 calories of pie. It's turning food into numbers instead of this substance that literally makes up who we are.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So that dominated the culture and the perception.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's when it all happened.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And also in that book, this is when we began to popularize the idea of tying food to morality. So your food choices determine who you are. what kind of character you have, right? If you're a bad person, you eat bad food, right? If you eat something, you cheat on your meal, you have your cheat meal, right? What does that say about your character? You're a cheater, right? So it starts tying these things. And also this was time at wartime. Food rationing was going on. And so she was imploring people to strive for hunger.

If you diet and you feel hungry, that's when you know it's working. So another popularized idea that has no weight in science. So you should look for the suffering in order to get where you want to go. Wow. And these are the ideas that get pushed into culture. And the last thing I'm going to share with this with the calories. So there are many epicholoric controllers, and this can even segue into understanding the brain. Yeah. Your brain is the governor really in determining whether or not, or how much, right. Calories you are assimilating from the diet from the food that you just ate.

Okay, so I'll give you an example of researchers at Yale University. They found that the vagus nerve, you know, connecting the brain and gut that this kind of superhighway of information is constantly feeding back and forth data. And your brain based on its assessment and the data that's coming from via the vagus nerve. Your brain can tell your gut to decrease or increase the assimilation of calories from that meal you're eating, and decrease or increase the assimilation of key nutrients based on your brain's perception of what you have stored.

So if somebody's in a state of obesity, why on earth would their brain still be telling their gut to assimilate a great deal of those calories instead of ratcheting it down? And this ties into work and this was coming from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. And they found that the biggest, well, from the scientist's perspective epidemic, hidden epidemic happening right now is something called neuroinflammation. Inflammation in the brain.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And they said that neuroinflammation is really a double-edged sword for nutritional diseases. They found that inflammation happening in the brain is creating more visceral fat, more obesity and insulin resistance. Because of inflammation in the brain and insulin resistance and obesity is creating inflammation in the brain. So it's a vicious circle. So one is creating, the other is creating the other.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So the brain is not operating properly.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Exactly.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So it's not sending the right information for the body to do the proper thing.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Exactly.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So I want you to talk about two other things then. One, The gut and the bacteria of the gut creating that healthy, my own nature, you know that's An epidemic as well. Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, so..

MICHAEL BECKWITH: And then the psychology also of the brain, you know what kind of nutrition should we be taking to make sure that inflammation goes down? Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, so it's not just our brain It's the brain of our microbes, right? So the estimate that we have right now, we have four to 10 times more bacteria cells in and on our bodies. We're teeming with bacteria. If we go gene for gene, 99 plus percent of the genes that we carry are not human. They are bacteria genes. And so they also, again, they have their own goals, their own ambitions, their own fears and things like that. Now, of course, I'm personifying the bacteria. But all of this is supposed to work together in synergy, right? For the greater good of the entity. But when things get out of balance, negative things can happen. 

And being from St. Louis, some researchers there. Wash U is doing great work as well as St. Louis, St. Louis University. But the greatest database of twins studies, identical twins, Beared out something really interesting when it comes to our microbes and our body fat. And they found that identical twins in the same household, eating the same diet, and same practices. If one twin has a microbiome that is distorted, so the definition is dysbiosis. Where they have more microbes that are associated with obesity and insulin resistance. So this category of Firmicutes, for example, we have Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. These are very broad definitions or categories of microbes. But if one twin has more Firmicutes, they tended to, even though they're eating the same food, have higher rates of insulin resistance and higher rates of obesity. Even though they're identical because they have different microbes, alright?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: They're eating the same food and they're in the same environment.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: But they're different.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes, this goes into those conversations things that we ignore in our culture where we have friends who can eat. They could eat the same diet as your friend, right? And one of you gets thicker while the other one stays relatively slim Even the same diet, right? We see this all the time. You could see a Skinny friend who's eating this way and drinking whatever. They don't seem to really gain weight, right? Each person has a unique metabolic fingerprint that includes that unique microbial fingerprint.

So your microbes have a huge influence on your assimilation and processing of the nutrients you're taking and the calories you're taking in. So our microbiome is another epicaloric controller that I damn sure was not taught about in my university class. Again, it was very superficial. And so we need to eliminate the dogma. Eliminate the victim blaming when it comes to weight loss. I've worked in this field for 20 years. Next month is my 20th anniversary in this field.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Wow.

SHAWN STEVENSON: All right. You're gonna hit me with the wow like it's a long time ref.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Well, it is a long time based on everything you've come from.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: And where you are today.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So 20 years. That means you've done more research and more investigation and using yourself as a research project yourself. You have more than 20 years of information and knowledge because you've actually practiced what you've learned.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes. Yeah. Ferociously. Yeah. And the biggest gift again is being able to package this up in a way that makes sense for people. Because, we tend, we have this tendency in our culture to, again, victim blame and to put into this psychological pocket that our university education is the end all, be all. And oftentimes we don't really realize, even my nutrition program at the university, It's getting funded from General Mills, right? You know what I mean? So it's just like what else are they gonna tell you to eat right in their products? How on earth could their products be unhelpful, right?

And then again even to this day you go and look at some of the marketing on some of these cereal boxes, and it's heart healthy you know made with healthy whole grains and all these things .And it's just, it has a whole lot of sugar in it. Yeah. It's insane. It's not even real food. Not to say that you can't have your bowl of cereal, but just realize what it is. And make that the minority of your diet, the exception, not the rule. For many people today, including myself, it was the rule back in the day.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Now talk to us about the psychology of, how someone looks at their food and what, how it's presented to them. You have a whole teaching around that, that I think was very important.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. So our food choices, because this again we get into this place where we're treating symptoms instead of the root cause, right? So we tell people what to do. You do this, eat that, right? Eat that, not this, right? Instead of getting to the heart of why do we make the choices that we make? Every choice that we make is based on our perception of who we are, right? The, really the biggest driving force of the human psyche is to stay congruent with the ideas that we carry about ourselves and the world around us.

We do things because that's what we do when we do stuff that isn't connected to who we see ourselves to be. It's very uncomfortable. And we tend to withdraw from those things, right? And this is why habit change can be so difficult. And so it's looking at what is the psychology behind our food choices. And so these things really go hand in hand. Because our food choices deeply affect our psychology as well, right? And you know this, it's much easier to make a healthful decision when we feel good.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Yeah, of course. I'd say across the board anything in life.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, absolutely. It's not to say that we can't make a healthy decision or a powerful decision when we're not feeling well. It's just harder. And it's just illogical. And also what are we making the brain itself out of? What are we making our nervous system out of? What are we making our hormones out of? Because of our hormones, people hear these terms. These are essentially chemical messengers that they're like little metabolic emails or DMs that are sending messages between each cell, trying to get everybody on the same page.

It's like a group text. But if the group text is like, it's coming in too hot, there's too much and it's going to get spammed. It's going to, it's going to get flagged. And now you're going to have resistance to that particular hormonal message, like insulin resistance, right? The system is being bombarded with this metabolic email, and it's too much. The system has had enough, it's going to the spam folder, right? And even with hormones, what are they made of? Our hormones are built from proteins, from amino acids.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So if you're not getting in these key elements to make these things, your body simply can't make the magic happen. And this is the thing too.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: It doesn't have the foundational pieces.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. This is the thing I'm marveling about more and more in this stage of my career, is how resilient the human body is. Because even without those things, it finds a way, right? It might not be efficient. It might not be that effective, but it keeps you ticking. And you could see it in our society. If you look around just how resilient our bodies are under these conditions, right? Because even insulin resistance, what that is diabetes, this condition that's, we've got right now here in the United States, about 130 million American citizens have diabetes or prediabetes right now.

That's damn near half of our population. All right. And so what that is when our body is creating the conditions of insulin resistance, which is just one symptom, but then you get classified, right? You get the symptom, you're classified, you're the same type 2 diabetic as everybody else. But what that is the body making an adjustment to operate differently under unideal circumstances.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: It's adapting to keep you alive. It's like arthritis. Yeah, adapting to some kind of stimulation in there that creates a covering of whatever the negative issue is. Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Because what's being talked about more and more now. And again I'm so grateful for this because I, again, I have you in my life, the best of the best. And the same thing holds true when I'm talking about neuroscience, when I'm talking about cardiovascular surgeons, right? The best of the best are my friends, my colleagues, right? And Knowing this and looking at, ok. When it comes to the human brain, for example being able to actually look at the brain versus like you guessing. So because we even our whole field of psychology today is really based on conversation. And maybe the expression of behavior. And then it's dubbed you have a chemical imbalance. Have you checked their chemicals? What chemicals are you looking at? Because it's these..

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Have you taken their blood? Have you actually looked at a screenshot of the brain? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's what you're saying.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so one of my really good friends and he wrote the cover quote for the Smarter, Dr. Daniel Amen. He has the largest database of SPECT imaging. Yeah, so hundreds of thousands of imaging of the brain for activity, circulation, all those things, actually see, versus Guessing. Yes. Because as he shared with me, in the field of psychology, in the field of psychiatry, as wonderful as it can be, oftentimes it's throwing medication tipped darts at the brain in the dark. Trying to see what sticks, what works, what hits the target versus let's look at the brain and actually see. What's going on with your, with the actual structure of the brain itself. Is there some damage being done? And having clinically proven ways to help to heal the brain, right?

And so just to circle this all back, we're talking about this psychology when the brain itself is suffering, it's injured, it makes it harder to make the decisions that we want to make. Now, so that's one part of it, right? And on the other side, this is where it really gets cool. And as I was driving over here, I thought about this. I didn't really get it when Joe Dispenza said, you are the placebo. But this study that I'm going to share really nah, I get it. I get it. And this was done by researchers at Stanford University. Lead researcher was Dr. Elia Crum. And this was, this is called the milkshake study. All right. As Rev. A milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. It does what?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Milkshake does what?

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's from Khalees. It's a Khalees song.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Oh yeah, I got it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's a Khalees song, ref. Alright. So Khalees is doing some really cool stuff too. I don't know if you've seen it recently. But she's like gardening, she's on the vibe. Yeah. But anyway, so it's called the milkshake study. And what they did was the researchers blended up a big batch of milkshakes. And They decided to put labels on the milkshakes to see how the perception of what you're drinking affects what happens biochemically to your hormones based on your perception of what you're drinking.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Absolutely.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So they had some of the milkshakes. They put a label on it that said 140 calorie sensible shake. It's a sense of shake. So this is like it's not a big deal. It's sensible low calorie 140 calorie sense of shake. Other milkshakes, they slapped a label on it 620 calorie indulgent milkshakes. Now here's the truth. All of the milkshakes were 380 calories. All right. They're all the same. Equally measured the whole thing. Here's what happened, the participants who consumed the indulgent milkshakes, their ghrelin levels, which is associated, ghrelin is really this glorified hunger hormone, right?

So it's driving us to seek food, it's driving us to seek nutrition to bring in certain nutrients, but it also has a role in fat metabolism. People who consumed the, what they believe to be the indulgent milkshake, their ghrelin levels. Plummeted, it dropped three times lower than what they believed based on that particular amount of calories that they consumed. Their ghrelin levels dropped three times lower than what should have happened had they consumed the actual amount of calories that was in the shake, right? So that means their satiety levels were much higher.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Based on perception.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Based on their perception, right? So again, ghrelin levels dropped three times lower. Then they should have, right? So that's, again, it's, that's their hunger hormone driving them to eat something. So they felt deeply satisfied versus the people who had the sense of shake, their ghrelin levels barely moved at all. It's negligible. All right. So what's going to happen? They have this same amount of calories, but they're going to be hungry sooner. Because they're not satisfied because they believe this is a low calorie sensible milkshake. Their beliefs. Changed their biology. Their beliefs changed their hormones. Instantaneously.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: This is all of Bruce Lipton's work as well. The biology of belief. I can remember a similar experiment with water. People went into this restaurant and they had all these different kinds of water like these Really expensive bottles of water that were so pristine and then they have these cheap bottles of water that were just okay all the way to tap water and people were drinking it and they had to check how the water tasted. And of course the ones that were thinking they were drinking this really expensive water were like, oh my god This water is so good.

It just makes my mouth salivate. It was all the same water. But they were all having these different experiences based on perception. So it's not just the food you're eating but it's your belief about the food that you're eating. And of course, you know my whole teaching is about basically taking dominion over your attention. So that you're placing your attention at a very high level of consciousness, oneness with the presence, et cetera, et cetera, so that it alters your perception, so that it changes your whole experience. So you're actually taking responsibility for your own life, which is what you did. You took responsibility for your own life. You took it away from MD, which is a minor deity. And placed it back on yourself.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back.

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MICHAEL BECKWITH: Now tell us a little bit about neurogenesis because there used to be a belief that once you lost brain cells, it was over. You were never going to get those brain cells again. That was old science.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: What is, what do we know today?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes. We're going to talk about where neurogenesis is specifically happening. But I just want to finish off one point here because it's something you just said. I've had wonderful conversations with Bruce Lipton as well. Yeah. And he's had a big impact on my thinking. And I mentioned Joe Dispenza, you are the placebo. Because we can use this to our advantage. This psychological insight that I just shared. If you choose to believe that your food is more nourishing, right? If the food that you're consuming is you're believing that it's nutrient rich and it's health affirming, you're going to far more likely express the chemistry because every thought you think has correlating chemistry. You're going to shift your chemistry. To make it much more likely, again, this is not a perfect science.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: But you are the placebo. You can utilize your thinking. Because on the other side, if you're eating the most wonderful food, and you feel deprived, because that's what they had, that's what happened to them. They thought that their milkshake wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to bring the boys to the yard. All right? They felt that their, that milkshake, was lacking and so they didn't get that satiation right that this other group got drinking the same milkshake right because of their beliefs.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Absolutely.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right, so being able to point your attention in those moments to Trusting and appreciating the nutrition that's in your food is going to make the effects of that food so much stronger.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Which is why when individuals actually truly pray before they eat and actually affirm that this food is going to be properly assimilated and turned into bone and muscle and beauty, they actually infuse the food with that kind of dynamic. It actually works. Even if it's bad food, it's "bad food", they still will be able to get the best out of that.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Like a lot of these athletes that eat They don't mineralize their bodies and they're able to convert fast food, so often, into extraordinary Olympic feats. A lot of it is their attention and their perception. So if you combine good perception with great nutrients.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Unstoppable.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: It's unstoppable.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Absolutely. That's powerful. I love that you said that you get the best out of it. The best possible. Even if it's not the best stuff. So powerful. Now, circling back to recent discoveries with the brain. My conventional university classes, one of those tenets was, your brain cells are, and they are, they're different from the rest of the cells in your body. But even your brain cells have stem cells, right? There's the possibility of brain cells becoming different things, you know at their root, you know might become, a dendrite, Synapse, or this might be a structural Piece right might be something for a neurotransmitter, There's so many different potentials that your body can make food out of right, but here's the point.

We were taught that The brain cells that you got, once you reach a certain age, this could be between 20 and 25, we'll just say. Your brain cells, basically you stop growing new brain cells, and it's just a decline from there. Today we know that there's this phenomenon of neurogenesis: the creation of new brain cells. Predominantly, the vast majority of this is taking place at a specific place in the brain, the hippocampus. Which is also. It's more than this, but it's known to be the memory center of the brain, right? And even as I'm saying this, because of the people that I know and what I've had the opportunity to be exposed to and to learn about, Yeah.

Your brain, there isn't just one place in your brain that's the memory center. Like your brain isn't just, in your body. There's, your brain has an extension cord, essentially, like we see this, that spreads throughout every cell in your gut.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: The gut everywhere.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So even the gut, it's called the second brain. In your gut we have just about as many different types of neurotransmitters as in the brain. And so it's called the enteric nervous system. That's another name for the gut. . The enteric nervous system. And. Some scientists call it the gut brain and even your heart, right? You know about this, you know about heart math.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Absolutely.

SHAWN STEVENSON: They call it the heart brain. Go to Dr. Google, look it up. The heart brain, right? Your heart also is expressing these different neurotransmitters similar to your brain, right? So when we put things in this isolation, that's what we tend to do. We find a discovery, we isolate it, right? So even as I'm saying that, please know that it's coming with a caveat, but the hippocampus is where we've most identified to be the memory center of the brain and also where we have, can stimulate the growth of new brain cells, which is great news. What most people don't realize, it's now inching its way into the top five killers in the United States is Alzheimer's disease.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: That's right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right now it's number six.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: It's really growing.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. And people who've been exposed to this, it is a terrible disease. And the degradation is, it is just very difficult to articulate what we know today. Of course, like we, we tend to have that identification as a society, like to lose your memory, these kinds of things, but you could, of course, lose your awareness or your ability to remember how to eat or how to walk or whatever the case might be. So what's going on here? One of the And one of the terminologies used to describe Alzheimer's today by researchers is type three diabetes, right? So they're calling it type three diabetes because of the insulin resistance taking place in the brain. The human brain is, Michio Kaku calls it, and he's like modern day Einstein, the most complicated object in the known universe, right? And you have one.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: It's bigger and better than any computer.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's incredible. You have one, but that's a big responsibility, especially if you don't have an instruction manual. You're just like, well, I don't know what to do with this thing. I'll just put it on auto and ride it out. But understanding, he said this is the most complicated object in the known universe. There's so much going on with the human brain itself, but being able to properly fuel it and to create that connectivity, it's the powers in our hands, right? The most complicated object in the known universe, but knowing what it's made of. And one of the foundational tenets, even we're talking about growth of the hippocampus, what are our brain cells made of? We know that it's made from food, but also primarily water. Yes. So hydration.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: And certain fats. Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So about 80 percent of the human brain is made of water, it's upwards of 80%, which makes it the most water dominant organ in the body next to our lungs. Now, what happens when we're, this is, right now Rev, you know this, there's a huge market of nootropics. Looking for how can we optimize our brain? What can I take to get, improve my memory, focus, all these things. Water!

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: If you're deficient in the number one thing, which this particular study, so this was published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, found that just a 2 percent drop in your body's baseline hydration level can lead to impairment in tasks requiring attention, motor coordination, and executive function. This includes things like mental math, proofreading, and understanding your environment. All these things are being compromised when we're dehydrated.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Because we're 80 90 percent water and then the brain has most of the water.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So what other things should people be putting in their body temple to feed the brain? What are some of the basic things that people can begin to infuse into their temple?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Okay. Next to water. If we're talking about the dry weight of the human brain is fat as you just mentioned. Yeah. And fat is one of those words that we have an issue with semantics. Because the fat in food is not the same as fat on your body. And marketers leverage that with this low fat movement and not understanding for the vast majority of the public that we need dietary fat in order to create key tissues in our bodies, including our brain cells. And so over that process, when we hit, say 25 years old, your brain is still creating brain cells.

And also you need to protect the cells that you have. And when we're talking about the brain being made of fats, we're talking about structural fats. It's very different from storing fats right that we think about for our bodies, right? Which it's a highly evolved system right for humans to survive, right? Our fat cells are brilliant, right? They just never experienced a culture like this today, a fast food culture. Our fat cells can actually span their volume 1, 000 times their size. 1, 000 times their size. But the rub is when they are expanding and consuming and holding onto that much energy, it starts to send out this distress signal, inflammation, right?

As we were talking about earlier with neural inflammation. So it's creating inflammation in the body and a body is essentially when we talk about inflammation, it's like. Your body is trying to fix something. Inflammation is not a bad thing. Without inflammation, we wouldn't exist. It's a continuous healing process. Our bodies are, every, even being awake is catabolic. But that healing process is spurred about by inflammation. It's calling in resources, right? And so with this false distress signal going off with these fat cells, it's creating this kind of chronic state of inflammation, and it's really affecting our brains. And so to go back to what are the brain, what is the brain made of? So the structural fats, these are going to be made primarily of omega 3 fatty acids.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Okay. Omega 3 fatty acids.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's not just all fats are not just rolling up into the brain. Okay. So for years, even in that nutritional science class, saturated fat was terrible. It's the worst thing you could ever, you shouldn't even sPique it. It's dirty language in the class. But here's the crazy thing. Human breast milk is 20, 30, 40%. Saturated fat.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: From the mama.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Here's the thing, Rev.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: It's feeding the brain.

SHAWN STEVENSON: This is another place I've come to in my career. We don't know what the best human food is. Everything has been an experiment. The one thing we know for certain is human food is breast milk. That's it. Everything else has been an experiment. We've had some great experiments. We've found some things over the years. But, we're Sat, being that much saturated fat, that percentage of saturated fat, and to say that it's bad is, it is so dangerous, right? Now here's the thing, as you get older, those gates, because we have the blood brain barrier, that's allowing certain nutrients to get into the brain. The brain has two protective mechanisms, primarily security systems. It's the only organ fully encased in hard bone. So we have the cranium. It's that, because again, most complicated object in the known universe.

Our biology didn't come to the party without some protection. So we got the built in helmet, but internally we have the blunt brain barrier. It has certain toll booths, little gates that allow in very specific nutrients. The body, the rest of the body has its own diet, even certain organs, of course, we know this, but the brain has an exclusive diet. We call it neuro nutrition.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: The gates that allow in saturated fat diminish greatly as you get older. So we can't just be like, you need saturated fat for the brain. And I'm saying this, not to say that this can't be false, but I'm saying this from the perspective of science, what we have now by actually looking at the brain. The researchers who are in the lab, looking at how nutrition specifically affects the makeup of the brain. So saturated fat is just one of those things where it's not to say that it's bad right now. Okay. And the sourcing, that's the problem with saturated fat and the dogma around it. Because the saturated fat in an avocado is very different than the saturated fat, in a fried snicker. You know what I'm saying?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: I was going to ask you about that because I had a friend of mine who I was telling him to put in an avocado. And he said, no, my doctor said that it has too much fat and I shouldn't eat avocados. And I won't say his name. I was saying, doctor. No. I don't think your doctor is correct on that, man. I've been eating avocados all my life. It's a different kind of fat. Exactly what you're saying regarding the avocado. So, they're, all fats aren't equal is what you're telling us.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: And the source is important as to where they come from.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So just on that note, with avocados and the saturated fat content, which again, it can create this unnecessary fear in, here's what the peer review data shows. I'm just going to share a couple of studies with you. Number one, this was published in the journal Frontiers in Endocrinology, revealed that there's dramatic changes in blood sugar, because when we're thinking about the heart, we just tend to, we have this cognitive association with blood pressure. But it's the same blood. Blood sugar is one of the biggest determinants of whether or not you're going to have hypertension, cardiovascular disease, the whole thing. So the same, it's the same blood. They found that there's dramatic changes in blood sugar, shifting from high blood sugar spike to an impending crash, can increase anxiety and trigger hyperactivity in the emotional centers of the brain. So now we've got issues with cardiovascular, diabetes, and cognitive. And they found, and this is in the journal, Nutrients and molecular nutrition and food research found that avocados can increase insulin sensitivity and directly improve your blood sugar levels All right, .

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So that's what I was trying to tell my boy , but I didn't have all that scientific language. Yeah. But I Absolutely.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. And again, you just know this experientially.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Yeah, absolutely. And I eat an avocado every day in my smoothie.

SHAWN STEVENSON:  Yeah. I love it, it's one of my favorites.

MICHAEL BECKWITH:  It's on the cover. Look at that.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Look at that.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Oh yeah. You, oh yeah. Eat Smarter. You got an avocado with a light bulb coming out of it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: One of the studies that I shared in Eat Smarter found that the brain itself will gladly confiscate upwards of 50 percent of the glucose from any meal you consume. All right? So if you're bringing in a lot of sugar, your brain is sopping up half of it. Again, driving up those rates of insulin resistance taking place in the brain, right? Again, tying back to Alzheimer's disease.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: That's what I was going to say, yeah. Tying back to that, yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So it's because of that exposure. The brain is never, even though it does what it does, it's never been exposed to this level of sugar before. So helping to heal.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Because sugar's in everything. It's in your Lucky Charms. It's in your bread. It's in so many ingredients. And people don't even know that they're eating so much sugar. Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. It's crazy. If you think about, and the biggest culprit is liquid sugar, right?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Well, like sodas, things like that.

SHAWN STEVENSON: 20 ounce bottle of Coca Cola. You're getting 16 teaspoons of sugar. 16 teaspoons.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So any mother would not feed their kids 16 teaspoons of sugar, so giving them a Coke, that's what they're doing.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. But now here's the, I wasn't a big fan of soda growing up. I was about the juices, but not juices. We wouldn't, we didn't have the juice box, orange juice. We would have an orange drink, right? Zero percent juice, but it just has those flavors, sensations, right? But a 20 ounce glass of pasteurized orange juice, 14 teaspoons. You know again, but we think we're doing a better decision and of course not to negate that we probably got some minerals here, whatever. But if we're talking about the impact of sugar, it is incredibly abnormal right to consume that much sugar. You are definitely going to be invoking a distorted response from your hormones, from insulin, glucagon, cortisol, the list goes on and on. Thyroid hormone, all of these things are going to become dysfunctional when you bring that much amount of sugar in at one time.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Wow. As we're coming to a close here, first of all, I want people to know about Eat Smarter, Shawn Stevenson. This is a very powerful. I would say powerful, it's a national bestseller, but it's a powerful handbook, and I know you have some more books coming out, and we've covered so much material that I'm going to have you come back. Cause we didn't even, we barely scratched the surface of some of the things you wanted to talk about. But what would you want to leave the people with in terms of not only the psychology of the food, but what. What's the basic things that people should be putting in their body? I know you talked about fat for the brain. Certain things for the heart.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. We'll start with those two things. Number one, hydration. It's so simple. Yeah. But we tend to overlook it. And unfortunately, we, and we have these cookie cutter recommendations as well. There are some people on the extreme and it's just, I just had a friend of mine Brilliant guy in the fitness domain, recommended people drink a gallon of water a day. And he has his reasons behind it.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: And he can. He's depending on the size of your body.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's the thing Yeah, you can't tell a five foot person who's a hundred pounds a drink a gallon of water today. That's not gonna be ideal versus Shaquille O'Neal, right? Like we've got to pay attention to your unique needs, right? That's where the work comes right the number one signal for how much water you need to drink. It's listening to your body. . That's the best. But I know that we got a lot going on. We can be distracted. That whole thing. So what is a better recommendation? You take your body weight. , you decide, you divide that number in half. So just say you weigh 180 pounds, divide in half. That's 90 ounces. Is going to be your target.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: For the whole, for 24 hours.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Or 12 hours per day.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Now, again, it's going to be based on your lifestyle too, maybe you're training for something, maybe you're sweating more, maybe you're out in the sun, maybe you're just laying around, not doing much, but that just gives you a baseline to start. I've been talking about this for, again, almost 20 years and the practice that I have every day, I did it on this day, for 17 years. And now I saw, I'm not really on TikTok like that, but there was a challenge going around and people were sending it to me because, sometimes you can put something in the culture and it just takes on a life of its own. But I've been talking about this inner bath for, I've been doing it for 17 years. And a couple of my friends who got, big new York Times bestselling books and the whole thing, they've referenced, This idea that I share with them, but every morning, the first thing that I do, when I get up in the morning. Well, you know being under your tutelage, the first thing that I do is It's going through that process right now is I set an intention.

And I give thanks right or the opportunity to go into this day But the first thing that I do is I ask how can I serve today? Yes and so I do that then I go pee. Then I go pee, then I drink water I do my inner bath. And so this is what I'm gonna recommend people to do is Start your day with an inner bath because the day can get away from you. And what that means is number one when you wake up in the morning You Or whenever you're waking up, this is one of the states that you're the most dehydrated. Yeah, you've likely gone seven eight hours without any hydration and your body's undergone Again, trillions of processes and there's a lot of metabolic waste.

This is why urine tends to be more concentrated, of course but to help to flush out these metabolic waste products because One of the things I also talk about in the book is a reabsorption of things if they're not removed from the system same thing with whether it's hormones whether it's You know even lipolysis, the breakdown of stored fat, it can get reabsorbed. We actually need to burn the fat. Beta oxidation, cellular respiration. And one of the studies that I shared was, again, a Superior View study, published in a major journal, found that drinking 17 ounces, just within a couple of minutes, of water led to something called water induced thermogenesis, where the test subject's metabolic rate is Increased about 30%.

So there's, they're burning more calories simply by drinking a calorie free water. Wow. And that response happened, we'll say 30 to an hour later, like it has this kind of lasting effect. This doesn't mean to go guzzling, keep drinking all this water, try to lose weight because we might think, okay, well, how is that possible? Is the body is because you got to warm up the water. That's superficial. It's because the water makes everything work better. But then we don't want to get into a place of diminishing returns where we're just like haphazardly fleshing out minerals. Fleshing out your minerals and everything else, yeah. So keep this in balance, use this to your advantage.

MICHAEL BECKWITH:  That's what I do when I wake up too.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: I have a glass of water with minerals and lemon. Yes. First thing I drink.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes, same here. So what amount, I'd say Ideally. That study was 17 ounces. So 15 to 30 ounces to start the day. I'm usually right around probably 25 ounces.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: I've got to add a little bit more to mine then.

SHAWN STEVENSON: But just to get that metabolic effect and also to help the flesh the system out, the metabolic waste. And again, this isn't just some airy fairy thing. This is real. Like you literally have metabolic waste accumulated. Drinking water helps to remove that stuff. That's another thing. This is a tie back to Alzheimer's. One of the things seen is an inability of the brain, an inability of the brain to clean itself. So the glial cells, so it's the glymphatic system of the brain, it's 10 times more active when you're sleeping. It's another one of those risk factors for Alzheimer's is sleep deprivation.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: And you have that book.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Sleep Smarter.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Another bestseller.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And I didn't write these books because I. Just felt compelled to do it. I did it because I knew that this was missing from the conversation. And this is so important for people to have this information, right? In a way that makes, because sleep, here's the thing too, Rev, is not necessarily a sexy topic, food is something we, food is sexy, it's sexy, it's fun, it's complex, but sleep is just we don't even know what it is, it's so weird, it's a very weird thing, now people that love their sleep, they, it is romantic, but what I did was, I took The peer reviewed data and just brought it to life, made it fun and sexy and beautiful, applicable, easy to apply things and to get results.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Outstanding. So this has been great, man.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you. Oh, you can't let me go. I didn't even give anything for the fat. For the last thing, I'll share one more thing with everybody for the fats, for those structural fats, omega 3 fatty acids.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Omega 3, that's necessary.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Every person today, if you're going to take one action on what should I get besides. Superfood greens from Rev, right? Besides getting that is getting yourself an omega 3 supplement, right?

MICHAEL BECKWITH: And so one of the, I take that every day.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, one of the things that Was most alarming for me in doing the research for this book was coming across some data on They used fMRI. 

So they were looking at the brain and To see the test subject's intake of omega 3s and what that did with the degradation of their brains. And they found that the test subjects who had the lowest intake of omega 3s had the highest rate of brain shrinkage. Okay? And so it's 4 grams is that target baseline that you want to hit. And so omega 3s are most popular, and in these studies as well, 99 percent of the studies are done on fish oil. Now, there's a range here, because food first. All right. So in the Journal of Neurology, they found that people who ate one seafood meal per week did in fact perform better on cognitive skills tests, had the healthiest brains.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Because of the Omega 3s.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes.So the Omega 3s. So food first, seafood.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: But that salmon has to be the one, it can't be farm fed salmon.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, it has to be a wild salmon. There's levels to it.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: There's levels to it. There's levels to it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And also we, you have to include, because this is what you do as well.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: I take a vegan diet.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, so if people are doing a vegetarian protocol, vegan protocol, we're inclusive here. Yeah with the Rev. So for food, for the food, we've got, neuroscientists, Dr. Lisa Moscone shared with me again. She's a neuroscientist, but also a nutrition expert. Looking at the brain, she shared that the highest source of Food based omega 3s in nature is actually coming from fish eggs. Caviar, salmon roe, right?

It's just like, why is that so expensive? I get it. Okay, I understand. We've got that. We've got, eggs, that kind of stuff. But then, if we're doing more of a vegetarian protocol, and depending on where our beliefs lie, we might look at krill oil, which is a microscopic, my keyword, microscopic shrimp, all right?

And there's also rich in astaxanthin, you'll notice that it's red. Yeah, I have that. Which is very protective of the omega 3s. But if we're not doing that, what I was doing in my practice rev, and this is one of the biggest mistakes that I made, was I was recommending people to for the omega 3 needs, I understood how important it was, but I was telling people to get your chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, all that stuff. 

Those are wonderful in their own rights, but the omega 3s are not the same as what the brain uses. That's ALA. Those are more used for cellular processes, energy, whatever, but it's not.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Plus they can produce high level estrogen if you eat too much of those.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. It, this is the thing, it's not used for structural fats in the brain. Your brain is not using ALA to make your brain cells structure.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Let me just say this, Shawn is bringing a lot of information here, and he's giving you a lot of very detailed analysis of this. You should get his book, so that you can really get down with what he's saying.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's go. Let's go. And so just to put the period on the statement we can convert some of that plant based omega 3 into DHA and EPA, which is what we need. That those are the ones used for structure, the structural fats of the brain. We can convert some, but we can lose upwards of 90 percent of that conversion process. So he, you have to eat a lot of chia seeds to meet your needs. Yeah. So with that said, what you do is get yourself a vegan omega 3 supplement, which is going to be an algae oil, right?

That's what I take. You recommended it. Yes. That's what I take. If anything, again, today, stack conditions in your favor. You need, I'm saying to do this because it's so important for the structural integrity of your brain. If you're not getting in your DHA and EPA, you're losing brain volume and it's dangerous and you don't have to do that. Absolutely. So if you're taking on a vegan protocol, get yourself an algae oil, For other folks, food first, ideally, fish sources are great, eggs, we got the krill oil we mentioned. That's a lot for today.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: That's a lot, man. We've covered a lot, brother Shawn. Yeah. I appreciate you, man.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hey, it's my pleasure. Absolute pleasure.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: Number one model health show. Number one in the United States. I'm glad that you are my first guest.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's go. Me too. Such an honor.

MICHAEL BECKWITH: So listen, we just had a beautiful conversation with the individual that created the model health show, Shawn Stevenson. And he gave us so much rich, in depth understanding of what's necessary for the body temple to shine and to glow. Now we're talking about taking back our mind. Now, what happens is, when we're able to apply what he's saying. The Bodhi Temple becomes a fifth instrument to catch more of the cosmic energy that needs to be assimilated through the Bodhi Temple so we can do the work that we're appointed to do as we've arrived on Earth as a spiritual being, having a human incarnation.

The human incarnation. We have a body temple, we have a mental body, we have an emotional body, but if those particular bodies are not congruent with our soul, or we're not able to carry that kind of energy, we don't get to do the work that we're appointed to do. So health, as he talked about, and fitness, and vitality, and vigor, and regeneration, and neurogenesis, all of that has something to do with our intention, has something to do with what we The hydration has something to do with the real fats that we put into the body temple. All of that works together to take back our mind to do the work that we're appointed to do. We want you to be healthy. We want you to be fit because you have a right and a reason to be here on the planet this time in human history and beyond.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I highly recommend checking out, take back your mind from my friend and mentor, Dr. Michael Beckwith. And listen, if you got a lot of value out of this episode, share it out with your friends and family. You can share this on social media. Of course, take a screenshot of the episode and you can tag me. I'm @Shawnmodel. And you could tag Michael Beckwith as well and share the love and listen, we've got some epic masterclasses. We've got some amazing guests coming your way very soon. So make sure to stay tuned, take care, have an amazing day. And I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode.

And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much and take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.