Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with self is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
Outworker
#075 - Jeff Krasno - Reclaim Your Health By Living The Way You Were Designed
Jeff Krasno shares how a diabetes diagnosis became the catalyst for transforming his health, mindset, and entire way of living. We explore his philosophy—the Tao of Health—built on impermanence, interdependence, agency, and balance. From dismantling the “wealth and hellness” trap to embracing fasting, cold exposure, and evolutionary movement, Jeff shows how good stress can heal both body and mind. This is a journey into reclaiming health by realigning with how we were designed to live.
Timestamps:
00:00 Living In 'Wealth & Hellness'
06:06 Seeing Healing As Miraculous
08:28 Healing The Whole Person
12:52 Allan Watts' Impact On Jeff's Journey
17:13 Balancing Storytelling & Knowledge
21:39 This Conversation 10 Years Ago
24:57 The Tao Of Health
31:00 Chronic Disease, Chronic Ease, & Good Stress
40:36 Jeff's Wellness Routine
48:25 Having An Incremental Mindset
53:42 Fasting As A Spiritual Practice
59:38 Does Podcasting Make You Healthier?
1:04:49 Connect With Jeff Krasno
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Youtube: Outworker
What’s up outworkers. Jeff Krasno shares how a diabetes diagnosis became the catalyst for transforming his health, mindset, and entire way of living. We explore his philosophy—the Tao of Health—built on impermanence, interdependence, agency, and balance. From dismantling the “wealth and hellness” trap to embracing fasting, cold exposure, and evolutionary movement, Jeff shows how good stress can heal both body and mind. This is a journey into reclaiming health by realigning with how we were designed to live.
Tim Doyle (00:05.58)
What did a typical wealth and hellness day look like for you?
Jeff (00:10.894)
Oh God. yeah, of course this is a little play on words, right? Because I've been in the health and wellness space for a long time, but, I found myself in the depths of wealth and Hellness a few years ago, um, when I was sick and eventually diagnosed with diabetes. But, you know, I was running this company called Wanderlust, which is like a big festival company devoted to health and wellness.
But I was on the business side of that equation. So I found myself really ensnared in all of the insidious behaviors of kind of like modern life. I was getting up very insomniac. So I was getting up probably three or four in the morning. I'd start that caffeine drip pretty early in order just to clear the brain fog and to shirk off the chronic fatigue.
You know, I would engage in some early morning carbicide. you know, the, you know, the typical American breakfasts of, you know, cereal or refined grains like bagels, muffins, et cetera. Um, and then, you know, I'm more or less like sit at a desk or in an airplane, um, all day long. So, you know, that sedentary behavior or just, was not moving my body. And then by, you know,
early evening, I'd be like totally wiped out. And the only way that I could sustain myself at that juncture was grabbing a glass of Cabernet. So it was really like that coffee to wine o'clock trap that you can exist that way on this hedonic treadmill for a while. But as I found out, it eventually catches up to you.
Tim Doyle (02:04.75)
So when did that wealth and hellness lifestyle turn into a breaking point where there needed to be a change?
Jeff (02:12.524)
Yeah, well, this is the crazy thing, Tim, is that you can limp through life for a very, very long time with just kind these prosaic, like anodyne symptoms. It's like, yeah, I've got a little dad bod. And yeah, like I got a little man boobs, but whatever, I can like cover it up. Yeah, I feel a little tired today. I'm a little brain foggy, but I'll do better tomorrow. I just got a bad night's sleep.
Once you actually start to learn about those, those presentations, those are just upstream from chronic disease, like just upstream from pre-diabetes and diabetes. So I was experiencing those presentations for five years, maybe a decade even. And then I put this little disc on my, on my triceps called a continuous glucose monitor. My friend was involved in, in starting one of the, one of the apps.
Um, and for your listeners that aren't familiar with it, it's just a little disc that you insert kind of into the, into your triceps. And there's a little needle that, that, uh, measures the interstitial fluid and then bounces that data to an app where you can essentially look at your blood glucose levels moment to moment. And I stared into that app and I was running fasting blood glucose levels of 125 milligrams per deciliter.
which might be Greek for a lot of people, and it was for me at that point, but that is basically the very, very top end of the pre-diabetic spectrum, bottom end of the diabetic spectrum. And I was having these postprandial spikes, so after meal spikes of blood glucose up to 250, 300 all the time and then crashes out. So I would have these very extreme readings on my app that kind of look like the Swiss Alps, right? This is not what you want, you want.
You want the rolling hills of Austin, Texas or Georgia. so that was really a wake up call where I was like, cause you know what, you know what you could actually measure, you can improve, which is the good thing, but you can measure actually, you know, can unveil something, you know, something real. And, so at that point I finally went to my primary care physician and I'll just say men have a tendency to cancel that.
Jeff (04:39.01)
that annual appointment, right? Cause always something comes up, but you go and you generally like, get a blood panel and if you don't hear anything, you assume that you're fine. So I went in to my PCP. was like, no, I need a hemoglobin A1c test. I need a full blood panel, know, CRP, all the different other markers that might indicate diabetes. And then lo and behold, I came back, you know, with a, with a diabetes diagnosis. Now,
Tim Doyle (04:40.738)
Yeah.
Jeff (05:05.634)
Diabetes, and this just to be clear, type two adult onset diabetes, so that's very different than type one. And to be clear, this exists, diabetes is disease that exists on a spectrum. So you can be way far down that spectrum and it would be very, very difficult in some ways to reverse that with lifestyle protocols. For me, fortunately, I caught it at a place where I could treat it
Primarily with just lifestyle interventions. And that's when I got serious about a whole variety of different protocols that I started to adopt in my life.
Tim Doyle (05:47.746)
Why do you think we see healing as being this miraculous undertaking and this miraculous process that has to happen rather than something that can just naturally unfold?
Jeff (06:00.332)
Yeah, yeah, it's funny. You know, I don't know. think that humans tend to be crisis driven. And, you know, we see this in forms of addiction and recovery all the time. Like we have to hit rock bottom in order to have this wake up call to then start to kind of swim with our body's current, you know, and heal.
And that was certainly the case for me. I suppose there were, you know, there were depths that still awaited me, but I had a moment where it's like I had to actually take sort of intervention and a very like muscular intervention in order to allow my body to essentially activate its healing mechanisms. And so,
You know, and I think sometimes, you know, that's what it takes. I I sometimes I think of it as kind of with like a river metaphor. It's like a river, a polluted river can clean itself to a certain point. But once it kind of turns that point where it's like no longer able to heal itself, then, you know, really, really
invasive intervention has to take place. And that's generally how we've operated here with our modern medical paradigm. It's like no one's, you know, no doctor is prescribing you a continuous glucose monitor as a prophylactic against diabetes, right? Or even pre-diabetes. They wait and wait and wait and wait and wait until then there's a disease that you can be labeled with. And then here's a cocktail.
of pharmaceuticals generally to address the symptoms of those diseases instead of A, preventing them or trying to get to the root cause of them. So, you know, this is a modern conundrum.
Tim Doyle (08:11.574)
I like how if we're going to put a positive spin on this, feel like the demise of your physical health, but also the introduction to this healing process for you wasn't just a physiological process, but it was also a psychological and sociological process of healing as well. And you reflecting back, early on, earlier on in your life, especially very early on in your childhood.
So I mean, how do you see this entire process of your physical health being compromised, also being the launching pad for you to heal not just your physical body, but just your whole being in general.
Jeff (08:57.208)
Yeah, I think for so many of us, we become the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. And I had a story about myself, which was like, I was always the fat kid that would do anything to be liked and to fit in. And that story had its origin in me being a very, very chubby kid.
getting moved around the world by my parents into new schools, into new languages, into new social situations all the time. And I was always ready to compromise any aspect of my authentic self in order to fit in and feel a sense of belonging. And that really then informed a lifelong of people pleasing and essentially fawning.
as a means to achieve that connection. And so that was my story. My story was like, I'm just this fat kid who'll never really be liked and my fate is written in the stars of my genetics. I'll never change. And for so many people who are experiencing a feeling of spiritual or psychological deficiency or physical deficiency, change seems impossible.
You know, but I, you know, started to get super into Buddhism, for example. And, you know, one of the tenants of Buddhism is that we are impermanent, right? That we are just changing moment to moment in relationship to our environment. And when you, that's a sort of a metaphysical concept, but when you start to actually study the human body physiologically, you see that spiritual concept mapped everywhere in your human body, right? It's like you, have,
39 trillion microbes in our colon and increasingly found in every organ of our body that's turning over every four minutes to 24 hours. There is nothing permanent about Tim or about Jeff, right? We're metabolizing food into ATP. That ATP is getting burned off. It becomes ADP. We have waste products. We have carbon dioxide. We have water. We're constantly burning.
Jeff (11:20.27)
You know, enzymes are changing, hormones are changing. And, you know, when you really confront that reality, what you realize is that you are nothing but change. You know, you are seven octillion atoms experiencing 37 billion, billion chemical reactions per second, right? Change is all that's on offer for you.
And so that is a physical concept, but it's mirrored kind of by a metaphysical idea. And discovering that was key for me because if I realized and could grok that all I am is change, then I have some degree of agency to adopt particular kinds of behaviors and alter my environment so that I'm changing adaptively, that I'm moving towards wholeness.
That's the process of healing and away from disconnection and disease, that's the process of ailing. And that healing, ailing exists along this dynamic spectrum and I have a lot more control than I ever thought about my trajectory on that.
Tim Doyle (12:39.288)
How did Alan Watts also facilitate that change for you?
Jeff (12:41.198)
Yeah, lot of this is based in Alan Watts's ramblings on Eastern religions. mean, certainly he talked a lot about those concepts of Buddhism, of interdependence, of the middle way, of certainly impermanence. For example, the middle way became a very, very potent concept into
how I started to think about health in my own body, but also more globally. You know, the middle way or Madhyamaka is a central philosophy of Buddhism. And it really is a way to go through life that avoids extremes. Originally, it was kind of a way between hedonism and asceticism, but it became kind of more broadly applied in one's human life as a means to find equanimity,
can find non-attachment, et cetera. But when I started to actually apply that concept to my own human body, I found that there was a middle way to Jeff, right? And that had to do with blood sugar management. My liver is always trying to find a middle way. It's always trying to find that perfect little balance that's gonna titrate just the right amount of glucose at the right time. My body is...
is fostering like a pH balance that is just, it's tenuous, but it's almost perfect. Like it's very, very hard to change your pH balance. You can eat an alkaline diet. You can hold your breath for a little while. That'll make it a little alkaline, but pretty much you're still always going to find that little warm porridge of 7.35. Same with, you know, body temperature regulation.
You know, we exist like right in that little Goldilocks zone of 98.6 Fahrenheit. Yes, we can do things to lower our core body temperature or to raise our core body temperature, but immediately we'll either start to sweat or we'll start to shiver in order to find and foster that middle way. And we call that middle way in the body, we call it homeostasis. And for me, homeostasis became the signature for health.
Jeff (15:01.214)
and everything that I could do to foster the capacity to, or to enhance the capacity to foster homeostasis, that was what I was interested in. And, know, just like Tim more broadly, and we don't even have to go there, but like balance or the middle way or fostering this equilibrium seems to be emblematic of health in every system that we look at, whether that's ecology.
with the right mix and balance of different species, known as biodiversity, or whether that's economics, like the best economic system tends to foster like a strong burgeoning middle class, right? It kind of looks like a bell curve where the distribution of wealth sits in the middle, or even a healthy political system, which seems to be totally anathema to the times, but.
you know, generally fosters a strong middle where we can actually find common ground and compromise. So I think the middle way is a very, very helpful lens through which to see the health of all systems, but particularly the human system.
Tim Doyle (16:11.662)
Speaking of that balance and of that middle way when it comes to the way that I feel like you speak, write and create in general, it seems like you have this great balance between personal storytelling and knowledge when it comes to your work. I mean, how do you see your work, not just as a way to try to highlight all this important information, but also maybe even try to combat the
dryness or the fakeness I think you can commonly see within the health and wellness space.
Jeff (16:46.318)
Yeah, that's an interesting question. Yeah, you know, I'm not a doctor. I'm not an expert really in anything. had someone.
Tim Doyle (16:56.088)
That's the other thing. I feel like you're a really astute generalist, which is really awesome to see as well.
Jeff (17:02.926)
Yeah, it's funny. I was bemoaning the fact that I hadn't gone to medical school and, you know, become a doctor or an expert in something. I was sitting at dinner with a friend and she said, well, that's what makes you a thought leader. I was like, I'll take it. I'll take it. But yeah, I'm just a curious human being and I do spend a lot of time alone, you know, reading. And I got super into human physiology.
Tim Doyle (17:17.943)
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff (17:31.448)
both out of curiosity, but obviously like by necessity. And I started to learn so much about how the human body functions. And I was really diving deep into medical literature, primary source data, clinical research, et cetera. And at first, I literally did not understand 90 % of the words I was reading. And there's a confusion and discomfort which comes with that.
But I kept leaning in and then it was like 70 % of the words and then 50 % of the words. And I just read this long study that was just released about aluminum and vaccines. And you know, it's like, okay, now I still don't understand every concept or every word, but I can really grok most of it. And so there was a while when I was learning a lot about human physiology that I kind of wanted to flex around it.
And I was doing podcasts and interviews and I'd be like, well, look how much I know I'm gonna break down the 10 stages of glycolysis for you right here. And I quickly realized that no one really gives a shit about that. It's like, yeah, it's cool to know about the basic mechanisms of cellular respiration, but unless you're gonna be a gastroenterologist or something, it doesn't mean anything to anyone.
But I'll tell you what does mean something is story. It's personal, emotionally salient story. And you know, if I can talk about glycolysis within the context of story, it's so much more powerful for people. And that's really what I'm into right now. I'm really into story. And of course, you you look back,
historically at what has most influenced humankind and its story. And I think right now where we seem to be so divided, so polarized in this kind of endlessly Manichaean debate around every issue basically, I think story can provide a bridge. It can really help us
Jeff (19:53.298)
see and identify more common humanity. And so yeah, so I'm into trying to tackle what might otherwise be very technical topics inside of story.
Tim Doyle (20:11.362)
I love that and that resonates on such a deep level. And I'd even say that a lot of my most recent guests, people like Dr. Anna Lemke and Dr. Lisa Miller, experts within their space, within their work, was surprised to see the amount of storytelling within their writing, especially within their own lives, and couldn't agree with you more that that's what people resonate with the most and that's what they remember.
Jeff (20:22.03)
Mmm.
Tim Doyle (20:38.892)
And I'm curious to know. I mean, you have this physical awakening, I guess you could say, if we had this conversation, you know, 10 years ago, what would the flow of that conversation look like when it came to health and wellness? Like what were your main talking points, I guess?
Jeff (20:58.006)
Yeah, I think it was health and wellness outside of my own experience 10 years ago. You know, I was in the industry of health and wellness. certainly intellectually knew, you know, about the attributes of yoga and I could extol the virtues of meditation, but not by dint of my own experience. I wasn't actually doing these things. Yeah.
Tim Doyle (21:26.231)
Interesting.
Jeff (21:27.796)
And now, you know, I'm like a million miles away from my best self, right? But I am, you know, I am walking the walk. You know, this has become my life. You know, I do embody the things that I talk about and I practice them. And so I think I have just more insight about what it means to actually do something and not just talk about it.
And, you know, I think that, you know, that also speaks to the Eastern traditions. Like a lot of the Eastern traditions are really, they're not about acquiring knowledge per se, but they're about experience. In fact, you know, mysticism itself, you know, we have a lot of words to describe the experience, but they always fall short, you know, because it's a feeling, it's a sensation.
of actually the transformation of feeling like a separate self to the sensation of actually feeling completely interwoven and integrated into the universe. And I can try to find symbols and words to explain that. And a lot of people try to do that. mean, the poets get a little glimpse of it from time to time, but it's like anyone who's had a psychedelic trip.
right? And all of a sudden, you know, they enter this state of integrated consciousness, you know, to then come out of that and actually try to explain it to people, it always falls short, you know? And so I think this is kind of part of my journey is trying to move from the, the empirical and cognitive into the felt and experienced. and it's tricky because I love
accumulating knowledge and I love having conversations like this. It's kind of my happy place. But that sometimes anchors me in a heavily cognitive space and to really free yourself through experience is something that you have to commit to.
Tim Doyle (23:45.42)
back to that balance, though, I feel like you have been able to do both you have brought words and knowledge to your experience and your story and getting deeper into that. When you created your own philosophy, the Tao of health, one of those pillars you've already talked about impermanence, the others are interdependence, agency and balance. How long did it take to solidify that whole philosophy? And why were those the four things that you focused on?
Jeff (24:15.566)
Yeah, it's interesting. I was really influenced by the Tao of physics. It's, excuse me, it's a book by Fritz Hof Capra who was a physicist and what he was doing was kind of superimposing some of the discoveries of early 20th century physics on top of Eastern philosophies, particularly
Buddhism and Daoism. what he was saying around physics, we, essentially when Einstein upended Newtonian physics and upended this kind of mechanical understanding of the universe and with the theory of relativity, found that time and space were conjoined and also relative to the participant and that you couldn't actually break down.
matter into its component building blocks to really understand how the world actually functions or the universe functions is that it's, and matter was fungible with energy. All these concepts that were central to kind of early 20th century physics really mirrored a lot of the revelations that Eastern philosophers had intuitively. And
And I started to think about 21st century physiology or medical science. And I started to see a lot of parallels there. know, like the last half of the 20th century was very mired in genetic determinism. So once we discovered that DNA or the structure of DNA in the early 1950s to Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin,
We basically became obsessed with this idea that you could break down the human experience into its component building blocks and that our essentially our destinies were fixed through our DNA. And by mapping our genome, we could basically uncover the source of every disease, the ideology of behavior and morphology and all these things. And then we discovered very late in the 20th century through the human genome project that we had a mere
Jeff (26:37.249)
23,200 genes, basically less than a grape plant, the same as a tadpole basically. So it opened up like a whole new set of questions of like, well, wait a minute, maybe it's not just the genetics, maybe it's actually how the genetics turn on and off. And this of course gave rise to this whole field of epigenetics, how our genes express themselves in relationship to our environment.
And so we weren't just these DNA packages wrapped up in a bag of skin. We were actually this DNA that was constantly interfacing with every single aspect of our environment or what's known as our exposome. And according to that relationship with our environment, our DNA would express itself in different ways. And so we were not fixed. We were impermanent.
constantly changing in relationship to our environment and that is a absolutely 100 % Buddhist concept. And then of course we discovered these other fields of neuroplasticity. So you're much younger than me, but like I grew up with like this idea that at 25, it's all cognitive decline. It's like we don't make any more neurons. You're just barely holding on to your memory at that juncture. And then of course now we've discovered, no, no, that's not true at all. We're actually
Tim Doyle (27:53.197)
You
Jeff (28:03.15)
You know, there's some parts of the brain that slow down, but we're actually making new neurons and new synaptic connections, you know, all the way through life. And we're always, again, changing in relationship to our environment. Then we study, we uncover this whole world of the microbiome, like we kind of talked about briefly earlier, that we're changing in relation to these 39 trillion prokaryotes, these little bugs that exist in us and on us all of the time.
We're completely interdependent with them. In fact, we've outsourced a lot of our function to them in this incredibly symbiotic way. So it's really, we're living within this holobion. And these concepts of 21st century medical science really mapped on to kind of what Fritz Hofkapler was talking in the Tao of physics as he was really addressing more physics as it relates to Eastern philosophy. I was like, my God.
We've entered this, this Dow of health where, you know, the human body, what we're discovering, it's not fixed at all. It's completely impermanent. It's completely independent, changing in relationship to its environment moment to moment. And we have a lot of agency over that, not complete agency. We can't control necessarily what toxins are in the air all the time, but we have more agency than we've ever.
been led to believe over adopting certain kind of behaviors that activate certain kind of resilience and longevity pathways, et cetera. We can shape our environment in certain ways that enhance health. And then what are we pushing for? We're pushing for that homeostasis, that middle way concept. And so I started to like amass all of those concepts into a singular philosophy called the Dow of Health. yeah, you know, it.
It's a fun way to think about it for me because I am so interested both in human physiology and also in Eastern studies.
Tim Doyle (30:06.57)
Yes, you create this ecosystem and I feel like it's the foundation for you to then be able to further decipher this understanding of chronic disease with chronic ease and needing good stress within our lives. And obviously, while chronic diseases are certainly a major problem, you experienced it for yourself.
What I like about your work is that it shows that it's really just the facade for the root cause, is chronic ease. How much of that relationship between chronic disease and chronic ease do you see as just being synonymous with symptoms versus root causes?
Jeff (30:56.044)
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. mean, as I started to try to examine why I was so sick and then by extension, why the world seems to be sick, you know, often plagued by these, you know, modern chronic diseases. You know, I started to examine what is the true source of this disease. And, you know, this is like sort of a playful turn.
a phrase, but my theory was that chronic disease is really the result of chronic ease. And it's really the result of a lot of evolutionary mismatches that, you know, we, that we've self-imposed since the industrial revolution, but very much an accelerated way in the last 50 to 70 years. Like, you know, we evolved in relationship.
to our environment for hundreds of thousands of years as homo sapiens and millions of years before that as hominids. And that environment included, for example, some calorie paucity from time to time, right? It included exposure to massive fluctuations of temperature. It included exposure to nature.
You know, with very little shoes, with very little clothes, certainly not with water resistant, stain resistant fabrics. You know, it included living cooperatively in communally in tribes of 80 to a hundred people. So this was the way that we lived and built ourselves and designed and engineered ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years.
And then in a very, very short period of time from an evolutionary standpoint, we totally switched up the way that we live our culture. know, we introduced ultra processed, always available calories. So, I mean, we never evolved with that, right? But so, you know, there's no real head scratcher of why like we're suffering from 45 %
Jeff (33:16.352)
obesity levels in the United States are up to like 80%, know, overweight percentages in the United States is that our culture has hijacked our biology and is literally using it against us, you know? And of course, sometimes this is done in the name of profit. You know, there's engineers sitting in a room, you know, basically bioengineering food to hit, you know, this, this
ancient bliss point, know, this soup, this perfect little combination of sweet and salt and fat to trigger, you know, endless kind of dopamine spritz. So of course we become addicted to these foods that are really, really maladaptive and are, you know, I would say probably the number one cause of a lot of these chronic diseases. And then you combine this always availability of
cheap processed calories with a feeling of kind of spiritual and psychological deficiency. And you really get a toxic combination because like, know, so many of us, because we're just glued to this phone all the time and the phone and all of the attention economy that is bottled in that.
Tim Doyle (34:24.526)
Mm.
Jeff (34:44.622)
bone is designed to trigger us. It's designed to trigger outrage and fear to tickle essentially human negativity bias to make us feel not enough. mean, social media is essentially designed for comparison. So we're always in a state of some form of amygdala hijack or sympathetic nervous system overload. And we're always, we're always
mad or scared or feeling deficient. And in order to address those feelings, we see the cupboard over there, you know, right? And that larder is stocked with foods that are engineered to make you feel better for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. And that combination is, man, it is just so toxic.
Tim Doyle (35:25.283)
Yeah.
Jeff (35:44.066)
Because if I can get that dopamine spritz with a bag of Doritos or a bag of cookies, man, I'm gonna go for that. Because it's gonna assuage these feelings of discontent and deficiency. And this is why, mean, man, we really need to now self-impose the Paleolithic conditions in which we evolved in order to realign ourselves with our biology.
Tim Doyle (36:15.992)
That last line that you said there is what I loved most about your book, Good Stress, because there's a lot to unpack there with what you just said. But I think that last line sums it up where it's, we need to purposefully do what was just a natural process of living for eternity, basically.
Jeff (36:25.262)
Yeah.
Jeff (36:37.762)
That's it. mean, there's so much information about how to be healthy online and it can feel overwhelming. So I generally try to give people this simple lens, which is just ask yourself, how did I evolve? That's going to provide you with so many answers. apply that, for example, to movement or exercise.
Like there's so much information. It's all zone five and hit. No, it's all zone two because you're going to be fat burning more in zone two. No, it's all about, you know, resistance training. You got to be in the gym, you know, you're doing resistance training, all muscle groups, know, whatever. We're just getting piled with information. But if you just ask yourself more simply, how did I evolve? Well, I walked a lot, right? Like seven to 10 miles a day.
Tim Doyle (37:13.603)
Yeah.
Jeff (37:29.848)
That's 14,000 to 20,000 steps if you're counting on a device, right? So I walked endlessly. That's zone two, sure. Okay, now we call it zone two. Every once in a while against my will, I broke out into a full sprint because I was getting chased by an ungulate, okay? So on the Savannah. We call that now zone five, right? That's like high intensity. So a few times a week, zone five, go get chased by an ungulate, right?
And then what else did I do? I lifted heavy things. I chopped wood. I built structures. That's now we call that resistance training. Okay. So that mix of things right there is your answer. This is how we were engineered as human beings engaging in these activities. That should be your answer. But even more than anything, think about movement as just a natural and integrated organic part of your life.
It's not something that you should be doing from 5.30 to 6.15 that sits in like a fluorescent blob in your Google calendar. That's not gonna work. Sitting in a chair all day to then go do some chronic cardio for 45 minutes at night, that is not a recipe for success. You know, we've built, god, now I forget the number. It's some 45,000 gyms, I think it is, since the 1970s. How's that worked out? Not great.
We've basically tripled, doubled to tripled our rates of obesity in that same time period. So we really just need to think about moving all the time throughout the day. And there's little hacks to be able to do that. We call that now NEET. We actually have to have an acronym for it, which I think is non-exercise activity thermogenesis. You don't have to think of it that way. You can just think of it of like every hour, take a five to 10 minute walk.
or do 20 pushups or do 10 pullups. Essentially just integrate movement and exercise, body weight exercises throughout the course of your day because that is how we evolved. We didn't evolve with an Equinox membership.
Tim Doyle (39:41.539)
Yeah. So what did your personal routine look like, especially in that first stage of being diagnosed with diabetes and getting out of that?
Jeff (39:53.238)
Yeah, well, the first stage was more fundamentalist than my life is now. And I needed that because I was in a relatively acute situation. Now, like I'm not nearly as neurotic about my program because I've set a baseline, like a solid metabolic baseline, and I've built up just non-negotiable habits. But in those early days, you know, when I was starting to experiment and I
I really think of my protocols as being half a distillation of interviewing brilliant people and half a lot of me search, just out of one experimentation. So I started to experiment with different fasting protocols. So certainly a basic intermittent 16-8 fasting protocol became pretty central to what I was doing. I changed the nature of my diet itself.
from a carb heavy diet to more of a keto oriented diet. So a combination of good amount of plant consumption for fiber, but then a really much more protein and low glycemic index. So that was kind of how I started to think about food. And then one of the keys was adopting a cold water therapy protocol. So I got very into
some of the Wim Hof stuff and then tried to modify that. And I have a very particular viewpoint on that, which maybe I'll get to. And then the last bit was really doing more resistance training. I was never that gym rat guy, sort of a closeted gym rat now. And because muscle is, well, it's beneficial for so many things, but it is incredibly beneficial for
Tim Doyle (41:39.48)
You
Jeff (41:49.048)
blood glucose management because it is essentially just a glucose vacuum. And you don't even really need insulin to uptake glucose with a contraction of muscle. So you're giving your pancreas a break there too. So it was really the stacking of an intermittent fasting protocol, a cold water therapy protocol, and then the right combination of
kind of zone two and resistance training that really started to make the difference.
Tim Doyle (42:27.884)
And did you have anyone in your corner helping you out or is this kind of just you on your own doing that me search like you said and building this out yourself?
Jeff (42:37.688)
Well, fortunately, like I host a podcast where all I do are all I did really for five years was interview doctors and they'd all come and stay at my house more or less. We have a retreat center in Topanga where I was doing most of these and with, you know, a cold plunge and a sauna and a yoga studio and hiking trails and all this stuff and a chef and all this stuff that we run as part of our retreat center. so was pretty lucky to be able to sit there with Mark Hyman and Sarah Gottfried and Casey Means.
A lot of folks that were very, very generous with, with their knowledge and their, their different, viewpoints and diagnoses of where I was. And then it just became applying that to my own bio individual self and finding the right recipes, you know, for me, essentially. but you know, where, where I, where I saw, really just an accelerated, impact.
was the stacking of those first couple protocols that I talked about. So, and because most of my issues were metabolic related to blood sugar management, know, the intermittent fasting protocol that's gonna give my pancreas a much needed break from producing insulin, then because of that, my cells would become more insulin sensitive because they wouldn't be resistant to the product.
You know, we know, we kind of know that through, you know, drinking too much beer in high school or college, right? We become basically resistant to the product. You know, we develop a high threshold. The same thing is actually fairly true for any molecule in the body, but it's true for insulin. The more, when we're hyper, when we have hyper insulinemia, like a lot of circulating insulin, we become essentially resistant to it. And so by giving my pancreas a break and lowering insulin levels through, through fasting,
I became more insulin sensitive. And then obviously through the adoption of a keto diet where my macronutrient proportions were much more around protein and fat and much less about carbohydrates, I was also lowering blood glucose. So that was helpful. And then I started to cold plunge in a very, very particular way. So prior to breaking fast,
Jeff (45:02.358)
I would get in the cold plunge, so maybe like 10 o'clock in the morning. And at that point, I would have very low blood glucose levels because I would be in a fasted state. I had adopted this keto-focused diet. And then I would get into the cold plunge. My core body temperature would plummet, right? And then my body would seek out that middle way. It would engage in some thermogenesis. And my mitochondria and my cells would look around
Tim Doyle (45:26.743)
interesting.
Jeff (45:31.928)
because they needed an energy substrate to make heat to get myself back up into that Goldilocks zone. And they'd be looking and they couldn't find a lot of glucose. So what else do they have at their disposal? The other substrate for energy, fat. And so they would go into my fat cells and essentially convert triglycerides to free fatty acids and ketones in order to warm myself back up.
And that little cadence for me of intermittent fasting and keto diet and code therapy in that little Tetris, I just saw unbelievable results in a very short period of time. Four or five months I lost 60 pounds and really started to, my blood sugar level started to really level out. So it was pretty amazing for me.
Tim Doyle (46:26.456)
Wow.
Jeff (46:29.208)
You know, I also want to say that this is what worked for me and I can understand the mechanisms behind it and every and the mechanisms I can explain them and they make sense. But everybody is also a little bit different and particularly women are different in terms of their reaction to fasting and cold. And there's a lot of amazing smart women that are talking about like how to fast intelligently and how to, particularly, you know, for women who are in their cycle or past their cycle or,
or women's relationship with coal does seem seemingly a little different than men's. So, I want us to say that this was my personal experience. I think that there are some aspects of human physiology that apply to everyone given that we all share 99.1 % of our DNA and I apologize for that. But, you know, but.
There's obviously bio-individuality, so everyone needs to figure out their own little mix.
Tim Doyle (47:34.006)
You stress having an incremental mindset when it comes to implementing things. Do you feel like you always had an appreciation for that? Or is there anything that you felt like throughout your journey, you took on and it was like, I just took on too much too fast.
Jeff (47:50.924)
Yeah, I think there were times, I and I think it's actually informed how I've started to think about good stress now, which is I would never recommend anyone start their cold water therapy protocol in a 34 degree ice bath, you know, just like I'd never encourage a runner.
or someone who wanted to start running, to start with a marathon. I'd never encourage anyone who's interested in breath work to do hyperventilation work, kind of a la Wim Hof, right out of the gates. I think what you wanna do with good stress is just push the edges of your discomfort. And you have to keep finding where that edge is.
And the good thing is that you can titrate, can decrease temperature of the water, you can increase duration, et cetera, just in the exact same way of lifting a weight. Like just take a dumbbell, you're progressively overloading a muscle, but you don't wanna overly stress that muscle because you're gonna get injured. You wanna just find the edge of that discomfort.
with a muscle, you're like literally, you you're tearing the, you're ripping the little microfibers, but just in the right proportion such that then when you give that muscle rest, your body's going to activate these, these, you know, you know, protein synthesis molecules, et cetera. You basically have an immune response and that immune response ends up being adaptive. And this is, I think, you know, goes to this idea of like the dose makes the poison, right? So.
And I find this is true just in all parts of confronting stress in your life. If you have a particular fear, for example, I wouldn't go head first into that fear. I'd go to the edge of it and then pendulate in and out of it. It's a kind of exposure therapy on some level. But it's like you look at athletes that train at high altitudes. That's a form of good stress.
Jeff (50:14.19)
Right, because like the air is less dense, there's a lower partial pressure of oxygen there, so you're getting a mild hypoxia. You don't get a total hypoxia, total hypoxia, the podcast is over, right? Right? You know, but you get that mild hypoxia. It's quite amazing though that in response to that mild hypoxia, to that little bit of good stress, what does your body do?
Tim Doyle (50:28.728)
Hahaha.
Jeff (50:42.336)
I mean, you have these chemoreceptors that are near your carotid arteries here that sense that mild hypoxia, that little hypercapnia, that buildup of carbon dioxide. And in response to that stressor, your body makes EPO, which basically produces more red blood cells. The hemoglobin in the red blood cells are obviously the couriers for oxygen to your cells for the production of energy at the mitochondrial level.
You're basically upgrading your ability to make energy by stressing yourself with the right level of hypoxia. This is exactly why Olympic athletes train at high altitudes. Or you can actually do it. You don't need a high altitude. You can actually hold your breath and essentially create what your body sees at the same conditions as like a buildup of carbon dioxide.
some mild hypoxia. So I think this is lesson is like find the edge of your discomfort and you'll generally find that your body both physiologically and psychologically will meet that challenge.
Tim Doyle (51:50.358)
It's that balancing act. And I actually came up with a couple of terms when I was reading your book and thinking about this whole idea. And I see it as stressful versus stress filled. And what I mean by that is because I feel like we get into this mindset that if it's not breaking me down, if it's not just like truly physically demanding, then there's no benefit to it. And yes, like when it comes to hypertrophy training,
Yes, what you're doing is you're breaking down muscles and then it'll grow back stronger. But I think, I mean, I've definitely suffered from this in the past and have made mistakes where I feel like if I am not fully on the edge, then I'm not doing what I need to be doing. But it's more so of like you're saying, let me create that good stress. and I'll still be able to get that benefit from it rather than needing to go all the way to the edge.
And, I want to talk about your relationship with fasting, a little bit more actually, because you've spoken about how that wasn't just for the physical or the physiological, but that was more of a spiritual relationship that you had with fasting and how you made the conscious, you made the unconscious conscious. And I feel like we've.
spoken about it a little earlier as well, how we've been talking about, know, people have that maybe that spiritual or psychological gap within their life and these physical things can help create the space for those spiritual and psychological benefits to come into their life as well. So can you talk about that entire experience and relationship there?
Jeff (53:44.524)
Yeah, I'd be happy to and I'm glad you landed on that. Yeah, I found it really interesting that a lot of these physiological stressors actually had very, very potent psychological and spiritual impacts. And it's not something that I honestly expected. I mean, when I adopted a fasting protocol, I was doing it primarily for physiological reasons. And then I became sort of a disciple to that practice. But just because
You know, my fasting or my eating window was, you know, between 10 and six, let's say, didn't mean that I didn't get hungry at 9 PM, right? I still had these pangs of hunger, but because I became a disciple to that practice, instead of just mindlessly wandering to the fridge, you know, to grab, you know, whatever was available, I actually had to stop and witness.
the nature of the hunger itself and ask myself this question, is this hunger that I'm feeling right now a biological need or a psychological desire?
And 99.9999 % of the time, it was a psychological desire. mean, I'm relatively slim, but there's enough stored warehouse energy in the form of fat on this body to last a good month or so. You know, it's not a biological need, right? This was a psychological desire for food because why? I don't know. I was bored.
Someone insulted me on Instagram. I felt less than. I wasn't hitting my goals. I was frustrated in some reason. I was politically triggered. Whatever the question or the source, the ideology of it was, I was looking for a short term fix, a dopamine spritz to get me through some sort of feeling of discontent.
Jeff (55:52.65)
And this fasting protocol helped me find that space between the stimulus, the hunger in this case, and the response, either the mindless wandering to the fridge or a more appropriate response, which is like, actually I'm fine. This hunger is just because I'm bored and let me just take a step back.
and read or drink some water or take a walk, just have a more appropriate response. And there's a famous quote that's often attributed to Viktor Frankl is between stimulus and response. There is a space in that space. There's a choice and in that choice lies our freedom and liberation. And I really think that that is true with fasting. It provides us with that space. And if you can, know, eschew that mindless eating,
Can you not also issue the mindless checking of Instagram or that extra glass of wine or that retail therapy that you're going to do on Amazon because you're feeling a sense of discontent or that extra piece of chocolate cake or just fill in the blank any maladaptive addictive behavior that you're doing unconsciously. And so this is why I believe that that fasting is really a spiritual practice that has a lot of cycle.
Tim Doyle (57:23.84)
I love that. Yeah, we are always looking for something and fasting allows us to, okay, let me sit with that nothing instead.
Jeff (57:34.732)
Yeah, well put. Well put. Yeah, I mean.
who are always focused on externalities as somehow providing the happiness that we're looking for. That there always seems to be something out there on the horizon. And we say, if only and only if I can get that thing, well, then I'll be happy, right?
But we know that the second that we cut the ribbon off that box, there's another glittering externality that appears on the horizon. And then we're back on the hedonic treadmill, you know, chasing away. Of course, this is also another Buddhist concept. It's like this concept of always craving of always clinging is the source of a lot of suffering. And you're absolutely right. If we can, for a moment to say, the thing that is
that I'm looking for is not actually out there, but it's actually in here. But I need this space in order to refocus the spotlight of my attention to in here. And I think a lot of these physiological practices help us with that. I think fasting does, and I think the cold does as well.
Tim Doyle (58:58.552)
Something that you mentioned earlier was with your podcast, you basically had a panel of doctors that you were able to learn from and that really facilitated your journey with implementing all your different tactics. I'm really interested about that podcasting experience and podcasting in general on your wellbeing, but also on your health. And you say my mind and body,
And dare I say spirit became a laboratory for both the conventional and esoteric protocols of my interviewees. I obviously don't have any data or evidence or numbers to back this up, but I honestly think that podcasting has had a huge benefit on my. I guess you could say well-being use that word, but I feel it like on a physiological level as well. Like when I get into these conversations and.
I had my first in-person interview about a month ago. Like I can just feel my nervous system just totally relaxed and just go into a meditative and flow state. So I'm just curious to know from your perspective, within your own experiences of podcasting, but I guess just podcasting as a whole, the effects that you think that has on wellbeing and health.
Jeff (01:00:24.364)
Yeah, I think that there's obviously the information itself that you're going to extract from someone who is an expert. So that almost goes without saying, but I think it's the practice itself of podcasting. think it is really unique because podcasting, when you're in a conversation like this one, you are all here.
Right? There's no distraction. And, you know, we are living in this moment where, you know, our span of attention is like, you know, a cricket. It's like five seconds long. So rarely do we get this opportunity to be in a kind of coherent long wave connected space where we're just free of every
So like I wouldn't say that podcasting replaces a meditation practice, but I think that there are aspects of it that are similar because it brings you completely into the present moment. And it does something also separate. I mean, I think you can actually, even though a lot of meditation practices happen in solitude,
I think they actually ironically lead to feelings of connection. But when you're in a podcast conversation, you are having a direct connection with another human being, you know, in a really truly deep and meaningful way. And we need that, you know, like we are wired for that experience. I remember sitting with Gabor Mate and
He was talking about how humans evolved. And he said, if you could map the entirety of human history onto the course of a day, we lived communally for 23 hours and 54 minutes of it. We are literally engineered for these kinds of connection. And in the absence of it, we feel incredible loneliness.
Jeff (01:02:47.336)
And loneliness is right there connected to addiction and depression and all sorts of other mental and physiological diseases. In fact, there's like that report that many people have studied now that came out of BYU that equates loneliness with smoking 15 cigarettes per day, right? So not everybody
wants to be a podcaster or should, although it seems like everybody almost is a podcaster at this juncture. And everyone is also a facilitator of psilocybin. That's the other thing that I found. I was like, there's no one left to take the psilocybin because everyone's a facilitator. But that's my little echo chamber anyways. But even if you're not a podcaster and you're just listening to this, have your own private
Tim Doyle (01:03:16.59)
Yeah.
Jeff (01:03:44.878)
podcast if you will, make that time to have those deep connective experiences because like you say, it's just a sublime and wonderful feeling and you really learn and you grow and I think you enhance your capacity to be able to connect with more and more people the more and more you do it.
Tim Doyle (01:04:10.413)
Jeff, I mean, that's a beautiful spot to leave things off. Thoroughly enjoyed talking with you today. Where can people go to learn more about you, all the work that you do, your book as well, if they want to connect with you?
Jeff (01:04:25.632)
Yeah. So I scooped up goodstress.com. So people are interested in, in purchasing a dusty old scroll or, or getting it on Audible. They can do it through goodstress.com. And I can also throw in a bunch of awesome goodies with a lot of my, my influences there. so that's a good place. You know, I'm waxing on Instagram and Tik TOK at Jeff Krasno. And like I was telling you before I'm embarking.
Tim Doyle (01:04:29.653)
Wow.
Jeff (01:04:53.986)
on another good stress project, which is a one man comedy show, sort of leaning into the discomfort of a little bit of stage fright. so I'm just developing that show and I'll be workshopping it around and eventually writing a book on, what it's like to be a dad of three girls.
Tim Doyle (01:05:16.972)
Netflix specials the next thing on the list there for that too.
Jeff (01:05:20.286)
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, I'll hold that out as a goal.
Tim Doyle (01:05:25.496)
Jeff, great talking with you today.
Jeff (01:05:27.212)
Yeah, loved it, man. Thanks.
