Paleo Magazine Radio Eps 115 Mastering Your Mind with Chris Kresser Hey, Paleo Na.on. I'm Tony Federico, and you're listening to Paleo Magazine Radio, the official podcast of the original paleo lifestyle publica.on. We spend a lot of.me focusing on what we eat, how we move, and how we sleep, but rarely do we discuss who is doing the ea.ng, moving, and sleeping. In other words, we talk about ac.ons, things we do, but not so much about being, who we are. Turning our ahen.on within to the complex and mysterious realm of mind, emo.on, and spirit can be challenging, but there is a reason why so many of the great thinkers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and high performers of the world make explora.on of their inner world a priority. On today's show I'm joined by Chris Kresser. Even though you probably know him best for his uber- popular website chriskresser.com, top- rated podcast Revolu.on Health Radio, and bestselling book The Paleo Cure, but what you might not know is that Chris Kresser is a long-.me prac..oner of Zen medita.on, and he's someone who understands the role that the mind can play in both health and disease. On today's show, Chris and I discuss his background in tradi.onal Chinese medicine, the nature of the placebo effect and why he thinks it should actually be called the meaning response, studies of the placebo effect's opposite, the nocebo effect, the benefits of medita.on, how to cul.vate the witness and break the cycle of reac.vity, the connec.on between mindfulness and health, and how to start your own personal medita.on prac.ce. Before we dive into my conversa.on with Chris, I want to take a moment to thank the sponsor of today's show, the Bare Bones Broth Company. Bare Bones Broth is hand- crated in small batches and made from the finest organic ingredients available. They use a gentle slow- simmered process which extracts all the rich nutrients that make Bare Bones Broth a paleo perfect essen.al. Before the company was started, Bare Bones Broth founder Ryan Harvey was working as a chef, wondering what his next step would be, that is un.l his friend Aaron told him about a new paleo meal delivery service called Pete's Paleo. Ryan: Ryan: He was telling my about this meal service and how he knew Pete, "This guy's really cool, you guys should meet. Pete brews beer." Me and my buddy Aaron were brewing beer, so it was like one of these inevitable things, like, "One of these days I'm going to meet Pete." That thought lingered in the back of Ryan's mind un.l the day he decided to leave his restaurant job. He went on to the Pete's Paleo website and used the contact form to send Pete and e- mail. I was like, "Hey, you don't know me. My buddy Aaron has been telling me about you for a while. I just wondered if... If you guys ever need any help, let me know."
Ryan: Pete wrote back to Aaron and said that they didn't have any openings at the.me, but he would keep him in mind if anything changed. As it turns out, Ryan didn't have to wait as long as he might've thought. The next week Pete called me and set up a mee.ng, and that was that. I sat down with him, told him about my life in the restaurant industry. He had a very similar story. He thought that this would be a good opportunity for me, and it was." Working with Pete Servold taught Ryan that it's possible to deliver high- quality real food na.onwide, and now, thanks in part to that experience, you can enjoy real bone broth any.me, anywhere. Bare Bones Broth has flavors like Classic Grass- Fed Beef and Pasture- Raised Chicken, as well as pre- seasoned savory sipping varie.es like Rosemary Garlic Chicken. If you haven't tried Bare Bones Broth yet, you can get $5 off your first order at barebonesbroth.com. All you have to do is enter the promo code PALEO at checkout. All right, folks, it's.me to start contempla.ng your navels. Paleo Magazine Radio starts now. Hey, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Paleo Magazine Radio. I'm here with Chris Kresser. He is really somebody who's been around the paleo movement for quite some.me. Author of The Paleo Cure, he blogs at chriskresser.com. Has a top- rated podcast as well. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tony. Pleasure to be here. Let's just go ahead and zoom back in.me. Chinese medicine was your original course of study, correct? Acupuncture? Yeah, that's right. When you're studying Chinese medicine, did you see yourself doing what you're doing today? Yes and no. In California, acupuncturists are considered to be primary care providers in the workers' comp system, and in order to do that we need to be trained to make diagnoses and so we take a lot of Western medicine coursework. It's a four- year master's program, and a good two years of that is physiology, anatomy, pathophysiology, pharmacology, internal medicine, a lot of similar courses that you would take in medical school. I was really fascinated with all of that, and research methodology was one of my favorite classes, even though most of my peers hated it. I'm going to say that you're probably not in the majority there. Yeah. That's prehy safe to say. By the reac.on to people around me when I would get excited about this topic, I can say that it's not a popular course, but that really laid the groundwork for some of my later work. I knew already at that point that just prac.cing tradi.onal Chinese medicine and acupuncture wasn't going to sa.sfy me. There was a lot about allopathic medicine and its approach that I resonated with and that I thought was worth preserving. I didn't have the a`tude that a lot of my peers had, that conven.onal medicine was worthless and we should really just only be using alterna.ves to it. I think it plays an important role in an overall approach, but it has really significant limita.ons. That's the yes part of the answer. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 2 of! 12
The no part of the answer was if you had asked me when I was a student if I would be si`ng here doing this interview with you and had wrihen a book and had a website and a blog or a podcast and all of that, I really had no idea. That evolved organically out of some research that I was doing on the rela.onship, or lack thereof, between cholesterol and heart disease. Right. I started just wri.ng down my thoughts, basically. I'm a kinesthe.c learner, so it helps me to write about what I'm learning about. I was doing that and I had just discovered blogging, and I thought, well, it's kind of like a journal almost, so that's an easy way for me to keep track of my thoughts and include links to studies and all of that. Imagine my surprise when somebody let a comment on one of my blog posts, which... "Oh, someone's reading this." Yeah. I had not told anyone about it, not even my family, so I had no idea how somebody found it. Then one thing led to another, and here I am. That's awesome, man. It wasn't like there was this strategy in place to posi.on yourself as the expert on diet and nutri.on. I wish I could claim that, but it was very accidental, and perhaps that's for the best, because I had earlier in my life plenty of grand plans and strategies that didn't work out. I do believe in this what I called organic unfolding, where if your interests and what you're passionate about and what you're good at are aligned, then generally that will turn out well. I'm curious, do you s.ll maybe even personally incorporate some of the Chinese medicine treatment methodologies, whether it's acupuncture or herbs or things like that? I definitely use herbs a lot in my prac.ce with pa.ents and in my own health and in the health care of my family. Our daughter is almost five years old, and she only went to the doctor once when she was I think six months old, just to get weighted and say hello and establish a rela.onship. "Hello, I won't be seeing you again." Yeah, exactly. I treat her with herbs, which hasn't really been necessary very oten. She actually likes acupuncture. She was prehy reluctant at first to the idea of her dad s.cking needles in her, but once she felt that it didn't really hurt and experienced the relaxa.on, the benefit of it, she actually requests it some.mes now. I do it just for myself and my family, but I don't do acupuncture with pa.ents. I s.ll believe it can be helpful, but I refer them out to people who are prac.cing more regularly. There's a community acupuncture model that's set up to offer that kind of care very affordably, which I believe in, and so I will generally refer out. One thing that I want to point is I wrote a series on my blog about acupuncture and how I believe it works. I never really bought the whole chi, energy, meridian theory. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 3 of! 12
Yeah. That's what I was going to ask you about, because I was curious about your thinking around the mechanics of acupuncture and why it might do the beneficial things that it seems to do. Yeah. I think some of the concepts that were originally used to describe how acupuncture works were maybe appropriate for the.me and place in which acupuncture was developed, which was over 2,000 years ago and in a completely different worldview and contextual understanding of how things worked. To transfer that kind of framework of understanding into our modern- day worldview and scien.fic understanding doesn't really make sense to me. I became interested in alterna.ve explana.ons for how acupuncture works that can be explained within our own current scien.fic understanding. I wrote about it extensively in that blog series, so if anyone's interested they can check it out on my blog. There's a lot of detail there. In short, I believe acupuncture works, and I think the research supports this, primarily by promo.ng blood flow. Blood carries everything that the body needs to heal: oxygen, nutrients, immune substances, et cetera. It works by s.mula.ng and regula.ng the nervous system. Now we know through the field of psychoneuroimmunology what a profound influence the nervous system has on not only the immune system but health in general. I believe it also works by inducing a parasympathe.c relaxa.on response, which again we know is crucial to health. Many of us live in an almost constant state of fight or flight reac.on, and so anything that can take us out of that chronic stress response and put us into what they call the rest and digest response, which is the opposite of fight or flight, will have a beneficial healing impact. It's funny you men.on that, because I've been ge`ng some acupuncture fairly regularly for some lower back pain and feel like it's definitely given me some relief, but I was surprised the first.me I fell asleep on the table. I thought the last thing in the world that I was going to do was fall asleep with needles in my back, and next thing I know I'm drooling on myself. It's deeply relaxing, right? It's interes.ng. It happens for animals, too, not just humans. There's a big debate about whether acupuncture is more effec.ve than placebo, and that's perhaps a whole nother conversa.on, but the interes.ng thing to point out about acupuncture is... Well, a couple things. Number one, I do it on myself, and so... Yeah, what's that like? It's great. Awesome. It induces a similar kind of response that you felt when you got the needles for your back pain and it made you feel relaxed and deeply relaxed. I think the problem with the research on acupuncture is that there's no real control. In a randomized clinical trial that's tes.ng the effects of a drug, they give a sugar pill as a placebo. No sugar needles. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 4 of! 12
No, no sugar needles. What they do is they put needles at non- acupuncture points, and they call that a placebo, but if you accept the explana.on for how acupuncture works that I just provided, it doesn't rely on points or meridians at all. In that explana.on, you could put a needle anywhere in the body and it would induce the same kind of physiological response. Right, it's s.ll going to have an effect. It's s.ll going to have an effect, and so the control is not really a control. What you oten see not surprisingly in these studies is that both groups improve significantly. There might not be a big difference between the control group and the "ac.ve treatment" group, but that's only an issue if you are relying on the tradi.onal interpreta.on of how acupuncture works. It's prehy hard to prove whether or not it works, but I guess the anecdotal evidence is there, and certainly your subjec.ve experience indicates that there's some benefit. At the end of the day, that's what mahers the most. I would go even further and say, okay, so what if acupuncture is "placebo"? What does placebo really mean? It means that an effect that's dis.nguishable by measurable parameters, not just in your mind... Sta.s.cally significant. Yeah, a significant effect that can be measured in terms of actual markers, biomarkers, inflammatory markers or endorphins produced or whatever the par.cular effect is that's being looked at. A more accurate descrip.on of placebo might be the combined effects of the interac.on with a prac..oner and/or a par.cular treatment. My argument is, let's just use your back pain as an example, if you can go get acupuncture for a few sessions and you come away from that feeling more deeply relaxed and your pain reduces considerably and you haven't had to take any NSAIDs or any kind of painkilling drugs... Exactly.... that have a lot of side- effects, who cares? If that is the ritual that creates the context for that kind of healing response and there are no side- effects and no downsides, that... I would argue anyone who can manipulate that kind of healing response without using drugs or anything that has nega.ve long- term effects, that's great. Yeah. I'm all for it. We should be shoo.ng for that. Exactly. It's a fascina.ng conversa.on and it's one that I'm... When I was studying Chinese medicine and integra.ve medicine I actually wrote a term paper on the placebo effect, which some have argued should be called the meaning response, because it's really much more about the... Placebo is kind of a derisive term. It's something that the drug companies hate because it stands in the way of approval of their drug. It's always been seen, for the last 20, 30, 40 years, as something to be eliminated rather than Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 5 of! 12
something to be researched and celebrated. That is changing now because there are a number of researchers, like Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard, who have realized that placebo effect is a powerful interven.on in its own right and that, as you just said, we should be figuring out how to harness it and how to amplify it instead of how to get rid of it. Unfortunately, that is not in the interest of drug companies, because the more powerful the placebo effect is, the less likely that their ac.ve drug treatment will be approved. To give you some kind of crazy examples of this, it's now well- established that certain painkillers or certain an.- anxiety drugs like Valium only work beher than placebo when the pa.ent knows they're taking the ac.ve drug. If they're just given Valium and they're told that it's a placebo, it won't work any beher than the actual sugar pill, but if they are given the Valium and told that it's Valium it will work beher because of the pa.ent's belief culturally that Valium is a powerful medica.on. The placebo effect is s.ll in effect. It's s.ll in effect even with an ac.ve medica.on. You can't separate the effects of a medica.on from the collec.ve effects of the interven.on surrounding that medica.on, including all of the cultural beliefs about that par.cular medica.on. Here's another interes.ng example. In Italy... It's fairly well- known, not just in Italy but elsewhere, that blue pills typically work beher for sleep, green pills work beher for anxiety, red pills I think are beher for pain. In Italy, that was not the case only for men. The blue pills worked well for sleep for women, but for men they weren't working. When they did some more inves.ga.on, they discovered that this might be because the soccer team, the na.onal soccer team in Italy, their uniforms are blue. Subconsciously, the men were seeing these pills and ge`ng riled up. It sounds ridiculous, right? that we could be influenced that profoundly by things like this, but they then switched the color of these pills and they started working as expected again. Wow. I think that really speaks to the power of belief, and then where belief originates, which is our mind. We had actually talked, I think it was maybe even a couple years ago at this point, not on this podcast but for a Paleo Magazine print interview, and I don't even think it was really included in the interview, but we got onto the subject of medita.on, of mindfulness prac.ces. Since we're now live and this is something that people are going to hear, can we maybe talk about that a lihle bit, just how you've personally u.lized medita.on and mindfulness in your life? I think it.es directly into what we were just talking about... Absolutely.... which is how powerfully healing the mind can be if it's focused in the right direc.on. Or destruc.ve... There you go.... which is the flip side of that. Right, right, right. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 6 of! 12
We didn't talk about the nocebo effect. That is just as powerful as the placebo effect. To give you an example of that, and I'll come back to your ques.on in a moment, but this is equally fascina.ng I think, which is they've done a lot of studies now where they'll separate pa.ents into two groups. There's different ways that the studies are done, but one way is that both groups receive a placebo, just an inert sugar pill. One group, they say, "Well, you know, the side effects you might experience with this include nausea, diges.ve distress, cons.pa.on," whatever, rahle off a whole list of side effects. Right. Then the other group, they don't say a word about any side effects, they just give them the pill. In the group that they advised about the side effects, you can bet that they are going to experience way higher rates of all of the side effects that were men.oned. In some cases, the difference can be drama.c. I remember one study that was done on I think it was Finasteride. I'm not remembering exactly, but one of the side effects was erec.le dysfunc.on. In the group that they didn't men.on it, it occurred something like 2% of the.me, and in the group that they men.oned it, it was 30% to 35% of the.me. Oh, wow. We're talking about massive differences. There are a lot of other examples of this. It can work in both direc.ons. I think where this really.es in is medita.on I see as the prac.ce of awareness. It enables us to observe our thoughts and our feelings and our reac.ons to the world around us in a way that creates some distance, and where we can not just simply be stuck in this constant reac.veness, where A happens, B reac.on, and that's it, there's no awareness or ability to observe what's happening and intervene and maybe take things in a different direc.on. There's no space. No space at all. We're just caught up in this constant reac.vity as we go through each day. Medita.on allows us to cul.vate the "witness" is what it's oten referred to as, which means that... Let's say somebody cuts us off in traffic. It doesn't mean we're not going to react and get angry, but it means that we're able to observe that reac.on and instead of necessarily slamming on the horn and ge`ng extremely tense and doing something that could actually put ourself in danger, we no.ce the anger, we experience the sensa.on of the anger, and then we have a choice about how we react. Who knows? Maybe the choice is s.ll to slam the horn, but at least we have a choice in that situa.on. We're not just blindly and uncontrollably reac.ng to every emo.on and thought that we have. This really seems to be one of our op.ons as humans and one of the things that... I mean, I can't speak for other animals, but we have reflexes, we have ins.ncts, we have these impulses. I certainly can admit to ge`ng cut off in traffic, and it feels like somebody is ahacking me. It feels like a fight. You get that fight or flight reflex. That's right. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 7 of! 12
It triggers some deep, primal, rooted reflex to engage in bahle, and that's certainly not a good thing to be doing going 70 miles per hour down the freeway in a two- ton metal and gasoline- powered machine. At the same.me, you have that reflex, you have that impulse, but I think a big part of big responsibility that we have as human beings, if we want to be evolved human beings, is to take a moment and observe that, like you said, cul.vate the witness and watch what's going on. I think that this is a huge and not spoken of as much as it should piece of the whole diet and lifestyle picture. Because what are we talking about with the paleo diet and what are we talking about with really all these different nutri.onal approaches but saying, "Hey, I know you want to eat a bunch of junk food, but, here, let's get that brain on board, let's get our thought process moving in a different direc.on." It's really hard to do that if you don't have some sort of mindfulness built in. Absolutely. I would argue that any meaningful and las.ng behavioral change is virtually impossible without cul.va.ng that kind of awareness, because behavioral change requires being aware of when we get stuck and when we're likely to engage in a par.cular habitual pahern. To use an example, let's say I have a tendency to overeat when I'm upset and that's interfering with my weight loss efforts, and I have the goal of losing weight. How successful do you think I'll be in my weight loss efforts if I don't find some way of raising my awareness around those.mes when I start to overeat when I'm emo.onal? It doesn't maher what I do other than that if I'm not able to bring ahen.on to that behavior, because if let's say I get home from work and I'm really stressed out and there's a bag of chips that my partner let on the counter. Before you know it, I've taken down half that bag of chips, and I'm not even really fully aware of what I'm doing. Then you go right from there into self- loathing and that whole downward spiral. Right. Then ater comes punishment, which may involve more overea.ng, depending on how it goes. I'm sure a lot of listeners can relate to this. The thing about medita.on and mindfulness prac.ce in general is it's not magic. It doesn't take away those feelings. It doesn't make us inhuman. It doesn't mean that we don't have the responses that we naturally have, but it does mean that we can create some distance between those thoughts and feelings and sensa.ons and how we respond, and it gives us a choice in that moment so that when we come home from work and we're stressed out and even when we start to reach for that bag of chips we're more likely to say, "Ah, I see what's happening here. I'm really stressed out, I'm feeling the need for some kind of comfort, and I'm reaching for this bag of chips to give that to me, but, you know what? I'm going to go take a hot bath," or, "I'm going to ask my partner to give me a neck message," or, "I'm going to go play with my kid," or, "I'm going to go outside and take a walk." Those are all choices that will serve us beher, but we have no hope of making that choice if we're not first of all aware of that kind of behavior. You started to speak to it, what I would call the fear of mindfulness and why somebody might ac.vely avoid prac.cing mindfulness. I think that there is fear there that you are maybe losing some of yourself or there's this no.on that somebody who meditates is this Zen Buddha that has a flat affect and doesn't really engage with the world, you may be going beyond a healthy level of detachment to some other plane of existence. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 8 of! 12
Right. Is that something that you've encountered personally, people that are maybe resistant to the idea of mindfulness? What are your thoughts on that? Oh, absolutely. I would say I had that misconcep.on early on in my prac.ce as well. I was fortunate enough to be exposed to medita.on at a prehy young age. My dad got me into it when I was 16. I'm 41 now, so I've been medita.ng for about 25 years. I've been through a lot over that period of.me, and my understanding of medita.on and its role has evolved a lot during that period of.me. Certainly I think it's natural for all of us, when we first get involved and we're exposed to this whole different mindset and paradigm, that we think that if we become really mindful and aware that we'll never get angry anymore, we'll never get really sad or upset, we'll just live in this constant state of equanimity and peace and happily ever af-... Oh, the horror. Right. As I've done this for longer and as I've matured and as I've been exposed to... I've had teachers, because I've done more of a formal Zen prac.ce for the last 10 or 15 years, and part of that tradi.on means you have a teacher. I've gohen a chance to spend.me with teachers in various lineages. What I've learned is that it's really not about any of what you just said of a flat affect and maintaining this constant state of equanimity. What it is is just con.nually cul.va.ng greater and greater levels of awareness of where we get stuck and how we get stuck and being able to intervene and respond in an appropriate way sooner and sooner. It doesn't mean the responses don't happen. It's doesn't even mean that we don't get caught up in those responses. Sure. It generally means that the amount of.me we spend in that kind of unconscious, checked- out space becomes shorter, and if we're prac.cing that, that's what you would expect to see over.me. You would be more and more able to cul.vate that witness perspec.ve. I think it'd be great if medita.on and mindfulness and these types of skills were taught in elementary school and it was just something that we all had as a tool in our toolbox growing up, but most of us don't. Most of us, we're lucky if we had art or PE. A lot of those are going away even. What is your intro to medita.on, or what would you recommend to somebody who just came up to you and said, "Hey, Chris, I've never meditated before. I'm interested, what should I do?" Well, I'm not par.cularly dogma.c about that. I think there are a lot of ways to the top of the mountain, so to speak. I think it really depends on people's inclina.on. For example, some people know that they do a lot beher learning something new with a par.cular structure in place, and for those people I think ge`ng a teacher or taking a class is an excellent way to get started, whereas other people tend to have more of an independent streak and might be reluctant to join a class and that might actually be an obstacle to ge`ng started. In those cases, ge`ng a book about medita.on and learning that way, or even using an app for those of us who are higher tech... Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 9 of! 12
Yeah, more of those coming out by the day.... yeah, Headspace is a popula.on one, but there are many others... is a good way. Some people will be naturally drawn more to one approach than another. For example, some people are really interested in Buddhism and the philosophical approach behind Buddhism, whereas other people are not interested in that at all. In fact, that might be a turnoff and may even conflict with their religious beliefs, and so they may just specifically want to be interested in learning the technique of medita.on without any Buddhist philosophy surrounding it. I'd say the answer to that ques.on really depends on who it is and what their par.cular situa.on is. Just like the paleo diet. You've got to customize. You got it. All right, man. Well, that was super fun. I'm glad that we got a chance to talk about some of those things, because I do feel like, within a paleo- sphere that's oten dominated by diet and nutri.on, some.mes we forget who's on the diet and who's ge`ng the nutri.on. We really can miss the witness, the being that's behind the scenes, and taking care of that part of ourselves is absolutely essen.al as well. I want to go ahead and flip things around a lihle bit, give you some.me to talk about something that you've been working on recently, a complete departure from our talk about medita.on and mindfulness. It's your physician training that you're working on and the Kresser Ins.tute that you're building for func.onal and evolu.onary medicine. Yeah. The quick story on that was I've been prac.cing this kind of medicine for a lihle over five years myself. During most of that.me my prac.ce has been closed to new pa.ents because there's just been more demand than I could handle as a single prac..oner. About a year and a half ago I hired an trained a physician, Dr. Amy NeH, and now her prac.ce is nearly full and not accep.ng new pa.ents. The wri.ng was on the wall, which is that there's way more demand for this kind of work than there is supply of prac..oners who can meet that need. It became clear to me a couple of years ago that the biggest impact that I could probably have would be to train the next genera.on of prac..oners that are interested in combining func.onal medicine and ancestral nutri.on, which I believe is the most powerful combina.on available for healing and health op.miza.on right now. I started working on this program and founded the Kresser Ins.tute. We launched the first cohort just a couple weeks ago, actually. It's called the ADAPT Framework Level One Program. We've got about 200 clinicians this first year, which is exci.ng. It's really the culmina.on of decades of work and study for me, and I'm really excited about being able to offer it and ge`ng the next group of prac..oners who can prac.ce this kind of medicine out there so that we can start helping even more people. How is this training taking place? If someone's maybe listening to this and maybe they are a physician and they're excited to begin incorpora.ng some of these principles into their prac.ce and your program sounds like something they want to learn more about, is it in- person study? Is it an online program? How is the informa.on disseminated? Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 10 of! 12
I thought a lot about that, of course, when we were developing the course. I have a website with a global following. I have physicians and other health care prac..oners from around the world that follow my work. I wanted to create a way of offering the training that could serve people not just in the Bay Area where I'm located or within travel distance from the Bay Area but around the world, so I decided to u.lize really fantas.c modern technology available to us. The curriculum is delivered via video, PDF, audio, transcripts, et cetera, so it's passively consumed. It's dripped out on a week by week basis to control the flow and facilitate a beher learning experience. Then we have live support in the form of webinars and Q&A sessions throughout the year to help answer people's ques.ons. In future trainings that are more advanced I'll probably end up doing some in- person training where we have prac.cum and do some hands- on experience, experien.al stuff with pa.ents. This is the founda.onal course, ADAPT Framework Level One, where we cover all of the things that I think people need to provide the founda.on for a successful func.onal medicine/ancestral health prac.ce, and then from there we'll go into even more advanced topics, and some of that will probably be in person. I like how, and I'm just looking across some of the curriculum, you get into some of the business side, the prac.ce management. It's not just, "Here's all this informa.on, now good luck," it's how do you actually put together an opera.on that can take clients in and service them. Obviously there's a lot of talk now about just medical records and how those are transmihed, so I'm glad you're incorpora.ng that in as well. Yeah. We're not doing so much prac.ce building, like how to build your prac.ce, but it's focusing a ton, as you can see there, on how you set up and run a successful 21st century func.onal medicine prac.ce. By that I mean no paper files, how you use an electronic health record to streamline your opera.ons, how do you set things up with a par.cular focus on func.onal medicine, because the way you set up a conven.onal medicine prac.ce is very different than how you set up a func.onal medicine prac.ce. That's something we'll be addressing as well. That's awesome, Chris. Well, thank you so much for your.me today. I know you're a busy guy. I had fun with this conversa.on and I think we touched on some pieces of the paleo puzzle that don't get a lot of air.me. Yeah, just really appreciate it. Good luck with the new physician training and with everything else that you've got going on. Thanks very much, Tony. I enjoyed that a lot, and good luck to you with your projects. That was Chris Kresser, author of The Paleo Cure and host of The Revolu.on Health Radio Podcast. You can find out more about Chris by going to his website, chriskresser.com. If you go to the show notes for this episode on paleomagonline.com/ radio you'll also see a link to the medita.on app Chris men.oned in the show, as well as his series of blog posts about tradi.onal Chinese medicine. Next week on Paleo Magazine Radio we're going to go down under to talk to Pete Evans, an Australian chef who's made it his mission to share the Paleo Way with the masses. Here's a preview. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 11 of! 12
Pete: The main comment I get from families or individuals is that "You've reignited my passion for cooking, and I'm ea.ng beher food than I ever have before and it's cos.ng me less to feed my family." They're happier. "We're reconnec.ng around the dinner table, so the family unit is ge`ng stronger again." They're just happier. When you get feedback like that, not only about delicious food, that's a wonderful compliment, but when people are saying that the family dynamic is changing because of the food that they're crea.ng for their family, that is a prehy profound thing to be partly involved with. To learn more about chef Pete Evans and his Paleo Way, you'll have to tune in to next week's show. Un.l then, you can check out our full archive of Paleo Magazine Radio episodes on paleomagonline.com. Whether you're a brand new listener or a long-.me fan, we'd love to hear from you. A great way to do this is to hop on over to itunes and leave us a review. Every.me you do this, a podcaster gets a pair of wings, so please take a minute or two to let us know how we're doing. Thanks again to today's episode's sponsor, The Bare Bones Broth Company. If you haven't already done so, be sure to check out their new cookbook, The Bare Bones Broth Cookbook. It features 125 gut- friendly recipes to heal, strengthen, and nourish the body. Paleo Magazine Radio is brought to you by the Paleo Media Group. Our show music features the song Light It Up by Morgan Heritage and Jo Mersa Marley. Paleo Magazine Radio is produced by me, and on behalf of everyone at Paleo Magazine, thank you for listening. Mastering-Your-Mind-with-Chris-Kresser_PMR-115 Page! 12 of! 12