ep. 17 - Carly Pollack: Clinical Nutritionist and Spiritual Advisor
Bio
Carly Pollack is the founder of Nutritional Wisdom, a thriving private practice based in Austin, Texas. She is a certified Clinical Nutritionist specializing in holistic nutrition and wellness. Carly has been awarded Best Nutritionist in Austin three years running and has helped over 10,000 people achieve their health and happiness goals.
Carly has lectured all over the country for incredible companies such as Facebook, Whole Foods Market, Livestrong Foundation, lulu lemon, Atlassian, Facebook, lulu lemon, WeWork, Tech Stars, Flatwater Foundation, the Texas Medical Association, and many more.
Growing up, Carly struggled with anxiety, autoimmune issues and an ongoing battle with her weight. Through trial and error (mostly error), Carly was able to figure out why so many of us fail to achieve the health we so badly desire. Through years of study and self-healing, she found the key to creating permanent change. Carly beautifully marries the science of the body to the wisdom of our intuition.
Raised as a quick-witted New Yorker, she was raised without the ability to sugarcoat the truth. You won’t find any nonsense here--just clear and honest information—and some tough love if you need it. Her teachings empower you to shift your thought patterning, change your physical body, eliminate stress and live your best life.
Transcript
Gail Davis: Carly Pollack is not your typical nutritionist. With a Master's degree in holistic nutrition and certified as a clinical nutritionist and spiritual advisor. She beautifully [00:01:30] marries the science of the body to the wisdom of our intuition. Carly has been consulting and speaking for over 10 years. As the founder of Nutritional Wisdom, she is best known for helping thousands of people heal their bodies, eliminate stress and find that ever elusive balance that we call optimum health and happiness. Carly, where have you been all my life? Welcome to the podcast.
Carly Pollack: [00:02:00] I'm here now. Thank you. Thank you.
Kyle Davis: Yes. Welcome, welcome, welcome. By the way, you called me out beautifully for drinking a soft drink for a photo that I sent you a minute ago.
Carly Pollack: I could not. I mean, and then you made some really ridiculous excuse about how you don't drink unpurified water but we'll let that one ago.
Kyle Davis: It's true.
Gail Davis: Carly, talk to us. What's your story? How did you get into this? Tell us all about Carly.
Carly Pollack: [00:02:30] I really believe that we teach what we most need to learn and you'll find that some of the greatest teachers have a history where they've had to go through this process and heal themselves from the very thing that they teach people to heal. My story is no different than most of those people where I grew up, I was a super anxious kid, very stressed out. I was your typical type A perfectionist to go, go, go. I found ways to comfort [00:03:00] myself and my constant anxiety and discomfort with food and honestly, as I gotten to teenage years, with food and drugs.
For a while, it worked because the food help me feel comfortable and drugs help me not feel the anxiety and help me release. As I became an adult and body image became an issue and I didn't like the way I looked. I said, "Okay. I have to do something about this." That really started the path of figuring [00:03:30] out how could I not only lose weight but how could I manage my emotions to a point where I can lose weight and be in this body that was fantastic but that I could also have happiness at the same time.
Kyle Davis: That's awesome. When you're going through that Puritan time, I know you said it's about, it was body image and been trying to manage your emotions. Was there like a moment that it just clicked or was this [00:04:00] a culmination of things?
Carly Pollack: I wish I could say that tell this amazing story about how one day I had this quantum shift. Because you know, those stories are much cooler. The reality is, is that over time, I made a bunch of small shifts and I made a ton of mistakes. Honestly, I am the most unusual success story because I feel like I've done every single thing wrong 30 times. I gained and lost over 200 [00:04:30] pounds if you count that I gain and lost the same 20 pounds to over 10 times. The same five pounds up and down. I was like from Monday through Friday, I would put myself in food prison. I would count my almonds. I would drink my unsweetened nut milks and I would start to see the scale go down a little bit a couple pounds. Friday was always my skinniest day. It was like, "Oh, okay. I'm getting somewhere." Then the weekend, [00:05:00] when you put yourself in food prison, you have to escape with reckless abandon. The weekend became this pendulum swing of binging and being super reckless.
Then every Monday, you're the exact same weight that you were the Monday before. Overtime, you start putting on weight every month to where you feel like most the time you're in food prison. Something is obviously not working. There are probably were moments, I write about this [00:05:30] in my book where there was a moment in which I was sitting with my brother and he thought I had something on my pants. He was like, "What is that?" He tried to scratch something off my pants. I was in Lululemon's at the time and it was my cellulite sticking out of my pants. I said, "No. You A-hole. That's my cellulite." It was just such a mortifying moment for me. There [00:06:00] were a string of those moments and that's what I said, "Okay. I can't live like this anymore."
Gail Davis: Were you cereal dieter? I mean, did you try all the diets that we all know and love?
Carly Pollack: Every single one. Borrowing the grapefruit diet because I hate grapefruit.
Gail Davis: Okay.
Carly Pollack: Also, I never had anorexic or bulimic tendencies because I'm a foodie and I just love food too much. I was never able to restrict heavily my calories [00:06:30] but I could restrict the types of food I was eating and I was always an over exerciser. I could always burn the calories off.
Gail Davis: Usually when people find peace of food, it isn't one of the mainstream diets that we've all tried. Do you have an approach or is it different for everyone? How did you finally find peace with food?
Carly Pollack: I want to say that finding peace with [00:07:00] food is never really this endpoint that you arrive at. I've made it the spiritual practice. It means that I still am in the healing process. I don't know if I'll ever be able to check it off the list and say, "Oh, great. I've healed my relationship with food." Even the other weekend, I had friends in town and there were so many social triggers and after they left, I said, "Okay. I took some inventory." I said, "Okay. What was that?" This weekend felt a little bit like old behaviors. [00:07:30] I think that it's really important to show the vulnerability of the fact that I'm still along the healing path and it helps me connect with the people that are learning for me and healing themselves. Yes, I'm still healing with food and to answer the first part of your question, I found a particular way of eating that works for me but you hit the nail in the head that there is a what we called biochemical [00:08:00] individuality.
Which is really just a fancy term for saying that different diets work for different people. Do I think that everybody needs to be on a diet? Yes. One, because that war doesn't trigger me anymore. Listen, you could be on a healthy diet or you could have a shitty diet but everybody is on a diet. For me, instead of calling them rules, I call them loving boundaries and these are boundaries ... Yeah, you know. Rules create scarcity and we could talk for hours [00:08:30] on scarcity and when we create scarcity with food, how it makes us do crazy things. For me, instead of rules, I've created these boundaries based on a communication from my body to myself that when I've tried to eliminate or eat certain foods in the practice of conscious eating for me which is really bringing so much awareness to what my body's feedback is. I'm actually creating these rules for my body's communication, not from my mind, if that makes sense.
Gail Davis: That makes total sense.
Kyle Davis: [00:09:00] Would you ... Okay. I'll go.
Gail Davis: We have a lot ... We're both interested in this.
Carly Pollack: Well you know, I'll tell you this story because I talk a lot about transcending diet dogma. What I mean by that is that there's so much dogma out there. What's trending right now is Paleo and Ketogenic diets and there's absolutely nothing wrong with them. In fact, at the core of those diets, there's a lot of sanity there. Then you also have the vegan diet and the low-fat diet [00:09:30] and you have a lot of different diets. Now, I'll tell you this story. A few years ago, I had a woman walked into the practice, she sat down in front of me for her first consult. She looked a hot steaming pile of mess. I mean, her hair was thinning. I could tell that it had been falling out. Her skin looked horrible. She had bags under eyes, her skin was pale, her lips were cracking. Then out of the corner of my eye, she's wearing a t-shirt. At the corner [00:10:00] of my eye, I see something on her arm and she's all tatted up. She's tattooed head to toe because it's Austin of course.
I see at the corner of my eye on her arm, it says, "Vegan." She has a tattoo that says vegan. Immediately I know, okay. I need to change this woman's diet. That this is obviously not working for her and she's giving me this whole rundown and I can't even pay attention to her because I'm thinking in my mind. How on earth am I going to get a woman who actually has tattooed the word vegan on her arm [00:10:30] to eat meat? Over a period of time, it was start with bone broth. The truth is, is that, we all have a pain threshold and the pain threshold is a point at which the pain in our life hits a level to which we say, "Can't do it. No more. This was a should. Now it's a must."
All of these things that have been negotiable are now nonnegotiable and we're willing to do whatever it takes to not be at that pain threshold. I really [00:11:00] just need to find this woman's pain threshold and then help her move through it. Long story short, we start with bone broth, we start with collagen, we get her to eat meat. We actually get her to be on a Paleo diet. Within a few months, her hair grows back, she start losing weight. She feels great and it's funny because I saw her the other day and it's been years and she joked with ... She still looked amazing. She joked with me that I should pay for her tattoo removal.
Gail Davis: I love that.
Carly Pollack: I said that's ... You know it's [00:11:30] cheaper is we're just going to add ish. Vegan-ish.
Kyle Davis: Vegan-ish.
Carly Pollack: We know in the same vein, I had someone come in pretty recently. He was an Indian guy of Indian ancestry and he was super into the crossfit world. He was doing Paleo and he felt horrible. He was not losing weight and I said, you know I asked him. Do you come from a family vegetarians? He winds up telling me the story about how he's eight generation. [00:12:00] He is the first of his lineage to eat meat but he moved here and want to follow what's going on. Anyway, I put him on the vegetarian diet. I take him off meat. I actually put him on a vegan diet because I'm not a huge fan of dairy. The guy loses weight and feels amazing. It's not that Paleo works for everybody or vegan works for everybody. It's really about finding your unique medicine which you can only do if you learn how to listen to your body and put down the diet books and [00:12:30] the magazines and all the crap. That basically people are writing going, "This worked for me. So, I assume it's going to work for everybody."
Kyle Davis: I'm only following this one because we had a brief discussion of this before we went to record. As some people might know, I just got a dog. The reason why I'm only bringing this up is because each breed is very different and the breed that I have has very specific gastrointestinal needs. It can't eat the same diet that a little what a [00:13:00] yap ankle biter dog can. It has to eat a very specific, very bland diet, so that it can have full functionality and a quality of life that it deserves. To that point, somebody who like you said has this whole background of only eating vegan. Not vegan, a vegetarian and then you start to introduce meat and dairy. You're throwing off a way that your body that you're currently inhabiting has developed into over a generation. There's [00:13:30] something to that.
Carly Pollack: Before we started recording, Kyle and I did a lot of deep work on conscious eating and his body told him that he needs Dr. Pepper. He just following his intuitive eating guide.
Kyle Davis: Yes, yes. Dr. Pepper and I'm also a huge fan of the ketogenic diet. That's ...
Gail Davis: Make sense out of that.
Carly Pollack: Dr. Pepper is definitely on a keto.
Kyle Davis: Yeah. I'm in hardcore ketosis right now.
Carly Pollack: You take one sip and you push yourself out of ketosis.
Kyle Davis: I [00:14:00] am so out of ketosis right now. There goes all my Kerrygold butter that I had this morning.
Gail Davis: Carly, I know earlier you mentioned that when you were younger, you used drugs. Before we started recording, you mentioned that you've been sober for a long period of time. One thing I always think about with food and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Obviously, if you'd make a conscious decision to be sober, you can go to support groups and alcohol is off-limits. You substitute alcohol with club soda [00:14:30] or Topo Chico. If you decide not to use drugs, you say, "No to drugs," but food. I mean, you have to have food to live and it's so hard for people who have had challenges with food to reconcile that you can't just say, "I'm not going to eat anymore." What are your thoughts on that?
Carly Pollack: I completely agree. I never mean to mitigate anybody's path of getting sober on drugs and perhaps I'm a little bit biased. I think healing your relationship [00:15:00] with food and going from being addicted to food to not ... You can go from being a alcoholic you said and then just not drinking and that abstinence is really the only route. With food, it's like you to show up to your drug three to five times a day depending on your metabolism and blood sugar and say, "Okay. I'm going to use you in a healthy way," and it's really, really difficult. There's only two reasons why we [00:15:30] eat. We eat for physical hunger. We need that nourishment and then every other reason, we eat to shift emotion I say is the second reason. We have over 400 different emotions.
Gail Davis: That's a lot of eating.
Carly Pollack: It's so much of what I teach is ... I do entire lectures simply on conscious eating. We're not talking about what's healthy and what's unhealthy. We're talking about how do you bring [00:16:00] enough awareness and clarity to your meal, so that you can eat in a way that nourishes you but also allows you to realize your goal and your outcome for your life. It sounds so cheesy coming from me because I'm a nutritionist. It's like saying, "You are what you eat." The truth is, if you don't have your health, you don't have the quality of anything. You could have money, you can have love, you can have all this stuff. [00:16:30] How many of us have been on an adventure where you're on vacation and you have the money to spend on this vacation and you're not having as much fun. Because you feel totally insecure about your body in a bathing suit or you don't have the energy to go out and do all the things that your family wants to do. As cheesy as it is, it's true if you don't have your health every aspect of your life the quality of that lowers.
Gail Davis: Another thing I'm curious about again comparing drug addiction, [00:17:00] alcohol abuse and food issues. It's very typical for a family together around an addict or someone who's an alcoholic and have an intervention and say, "Look. This is what we're seeing in your life. We want to offer our support. We want to help you." Sometimes, that's roll in the dice. It works and sometimes, it's just horrible. Gosh, it's a touchy subject to do an intervention with someone that has a food issue. [00:17:30] To your point about health, I know often times, people have loved ones that maybe they're really worried about their long-term ramifications of caring extra weight. Do you ever ... Have you ever heard of someone actually doing an intervention on food or is that just a no-no in our society?
Carly Pollack: Yeah. I have a client this morning that we were talking about this and how his family pulled him together during the holidays and said, "You know, we're worried about you that you're [00:18:00] not going to be around for your kids' graduation if you keep doing this. We love you and we want to help you and what can we do?" That though is out of the norm. You can tell in our society, it's perfectly okay at this point to heckle a smoker and to alienate them. You can't smoke here, you can't ... We have to smoke in this little square outside with all the other smokers. You lowly purse, we don't want to be around you. It's interesting. I went to visit ... Actually, my best friend [00:18:30] who's a smoker had an impromptu get-together at her house and I walked in and she was outside smoking and I hugged her in front of everybody. I said, "Put that down. Why do you want to kill yourself?"
Because that's totally ... She just gave me a hug and said, "I know." I said, "I love you. I don't want you to die early from lung cancer and have a hole in your throat. Please quit." Everybody laughed about it and it was totally okay. Can you imagine if I came to see my best friend in front of all of her friends and she was shoving something with sugar. Then I said, "Oh, my God. Those sugar-free, [00:19:00] it's cancer and it's going to kill you. Put it down." Everybody will be mortified. It will be so inappropriate. I'm not saying that we should heckle in any way. People who are overweight, it just is a really weird ... It's a really weird dichotic subject.
Gail Davis: Are you watching the new show? This Is Us by any chance?
Carly Pollack: Of course, I am.
Gail Davis: I'm wondering if that's going to open the conversation. I love the character Kate that is just openly talking about food issues. I [00:19:30] think it could be a positive thing.
Carly Pollack: I love that storyline and she was recently interviewed in a magazine saying that she is going to get ... I don't know. She since changed her story but she had said originally that she was going to get gastric bypass and that she ... People said, "Oh, it's the show forcing you." She said, "Honestly, I don't know if I would do it myself. It's nice to have the pressure of the show." The fact that we're not talking about it and that it is essential to the subject, [00:20:00] are we doing our loved ones a disservice because the accountability and the positive loving pressure to say, "Hey, this is selfish. We love you. We want you around. We want you to be in your best self." Perhaps we're not serving them in the way that we could.
Kyle Davis: I think it's also difficult when you're talking if we're just they see having one of those tough conversations on weight. Whether the person is overweight or underweight. At what point is it okay to [00:20:30] even have that conversation. Is it 30 pounds overweight or is it 40 or 50 ... Who am I as a nonprofessional to say to somebody, "Hey, you've got to lose weight." I'm saying this is a guy who at one point in time weighed 320 pounds and I played college football and weighed another 320 pounds what? Eight, nine months ago. It was a rather disgusting 320 versus college football 320. I have lost 75 pounds since then doing mostly keto running and some variation of crossfit. [00:21:00] At what point do you have that conversation with somebody? Because when I watched the show like my 600-lb life, it's okay, you're going to die.
Gail Davis: Yeah.
Carly Pollack: Right.
Gail Davis: That's obvious.
Kyle Davis: That's obvious. You know who the enabler is. It's the person buying them ranch dressing and cheese to put over their fancy iceberg lettuce salad. That sounds like the meanest thing ever but that's what it is.
Carly Pollack: No. It's so funny you're talking about this. Because that is literally my favorite show. I always just watching it right before [inaudible 00:21:26].
Kyle Davis: I binge-watch it with my girlfriend and they all eat the same [00:21:30] thing.
Carly Pollack: The most disgusting thing is sometimes, I will eat while I'm watching it. It just feels really wrong.
Kyle Davis: I always eat when I'm watching it, too. I would say I'm careful what I eat though.
Carly Pollack: I'm eating broccoli. I will say honestly about the conversation. The most appropriate thing to do is open up a conversation that's not really about, "Hey, you need to lose weight," but, "Hey, how are you feeling?" We don't really even talk about emotions because we're all ... We have our head in our own. We're [00:22:00] all so obsessed with our own lives. How about just checking in with the person? "Hey, how are you doing?" What's going on in your life lately?" I honestly feel that vulnerability is the easiest way to connect with people. You say, "Hey, I've really been struggling with this." Perhaps and you say, "What are you struggling with right now in your life?"
Really, if the person is really closed off and you don't feel like you're going to get anywhere with that, you just come from such a place of love. "Hey, I noticed this thing," and you just put it out there. With communication, [00:22:30] for me, I always want to put out there what I think people ... especially when I lecture. I want to put out there when I think people are thinking, so that they don't have to put it out there. I might say to that person, "Hey, I want to talk to about this but I feel so nervous because I'm petrified that you will think that this is a judgment. Or that you won't see how much that this is coming from love." When you put it out at there like that ...
Gail Davis: That's awesome.
Carly Pollack: You have no choice but to go, "Okay, well, let me listen to [00:23:00] this." You can say, "I'm really struggling but I love you so much and I honestly don't know how else to explain this." You see, just be vulnerable. I think it opens up a really raw, honest conversation.
Gail Davis: Carly, I know you have lots of clients that you help. Which do you find more challenging? The person who has gained and lost the same 20 to 30 pounds over and over and over and is so perpetually yo-yo dieter. Or the person who has just really gotten in a [00:23:30] bad spot and has this insurmountable amount of weight to lose and they just ... I mean, I know I can lose 20 pounds if I put my mind to it. I'll probably get that going. What if I had to lose over 100 pounds? How do you even start that?
Kyle Davis: Let me add a third character type.
Gail Davis: Okay.
Kyle Davis: Which is the person who knows what to do or they think they know but they never like ... You know what I mean? They never fall through on it. Like, I know what to do but I just ... [00:24:00] Okay.
Gail Davis: Okay.
Carly Pollack: It's probably the third. What I was going to say is that before Kyle introduce that third type.
Kyle Davis: Variable, yeah.
Carly Pollack: It's a great question to ask but it's really neither. I've worked with people who the yo-yo. When someone is ready, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I have worked with someone who was yo-yoed for years and years and years. When they're ready to do the work and they're willing to look at it differently. [00:24:30] A mantra I use all the time. "Am I willing to see this differently?" Versus I've had someone who's, I had that same person who I was telling you. The family did an intervention. He has a lot of weight to lose. Probably around 100 pounds and he's just been kicking butt ever since he came in. The hardest client to work with is a client who is unwilling to look at weight loss as a spiritual path to learn something deeper about themselves and about their purpose in this life and what [00:25:00] their dharma is or what they're here to give. If I have someone who is unwilling to look at the fact that the weight loss is not about the food, then I'm not the right person to work with them.
Kyle Davis: What I've noticed and I've tried several different diets just because I played sports and was an athlete. I've done super high protein diets. I've done high protein, high carb. I've done, you name it. Only recently have I gotten into this keto thing. The ketogenic [00:25:30] diet. I've noticed for me at least and I think this is a better diet for me compare in other ones that I've have. Is that, it makes me feel better and I know I haven't been on it for three weeks. I'm a little tired, little sluggish. Not getting the best sleep but I do. I am planning to actually jump ...
Carly Pollack: You know, that Dr. Pepper is not pecking you right up?
Kyle Davis: No, no, no. It's horrible. I can give you ...
Carly Pollack: This is all Gail's fault, by the way.
Kyle Davis: Yeah. All Gail's fault.
Gail Davis: I know. We have to tell out listeners. [00:26:00] She's like, "I'm going to wear my Lulu." I said, "I'll take a picture and send it to Carly."
Kyle Davis: Carly requested the photo because we're submitting with each other.
Gail Davis: Yeah. She's like, "Oh, my gosh. Call your mom. Did you ... What's a Dr. Pepper in your hand?"
Kyle Davis: I think the word was nark.
Gail Davis: A nark. Okay, well, sorry.
Carly Pollack: From a drug addict, I have to say nark.
Kyle Davis: Yeah, nark. I know. I'm planning on jumping back into ... I really do have a plan to jump back onto it on Monday and this is [00:26:30] legit plan. I don't want to ... Stop piling up on me. What I've noticed is, is that, when I do find something that's working for me just from a diet standpoint. Not even exercise. I'm not exercising as much. I'm just walking, walk my dog, doing things like that, kind of live a normal life. Just the eating aspect of it, it takes two or three days, maybe five days for it to kick in. Once I'm there, the fog that was in my head has lifted. The sleep is better, my energy is instant. I just [00:27:00] feel more alive. I'm sharper, I'm quicker. I think once people find whatever that diet is, when you tease it out of them, that works. They can have that experience, too. It is like a spiritual experience.
Carly Pollack: It is and it does happen rather quickly. The issue for most people is not that diets don't work. The issue is that diets are simply behavior modification. So much of us, so many of us are emotional eaters. [00:27:30] We eat for other ... When I have someone who's super logical and I hate to stereotype. That men are less emotional. We could talk, we could theorize that they don't allow themselves to be more in touch with the feminine side. More often, they are like, "Tell me what to do and I will do it." Ketogenic diet is a completely fine diet. It's just that, it requires a lot of discipline and it requires a very logical mind. Honestly, if I just play devil's advocate, I might [00:28:00] have someone lose more weight long-term on a diet that has more carbohydrates than the keto diet. At the outcome, they'd be more successful not on the keto, even if scientifically speaking, keto would be a healthier diet for them because it allows them to make permanent change through less scarcity.
When we're talking about diet, I really am thinking in two categories. The diet which is what you should eat and then there's this whole other piece of it [00:28:30] which is, why we do what we do. Diet says, "Do this. Don't do that." There's this formula I use with all of my clients that thoughts drive emotions or thoughts drive how we feel and how we feel then drives how we act, it then drives behavior. Diet, the reason why they don't work for a lot of people is not because the diet itself is the grapefruit diet or so. As we were joking like all of these crazy diets, whether you're a vegan [00:29:00] or Paleo, which are two completely ends of the spectrum diet. They actually have a lot in common. Any diet that says, "Don't eat processed crap. Eat foods out of the box. Eat foods that rot and spoil. Eat less. Drink a lot of water. Eat lots of plants."
They're both saying that even though you look at the macronutrient ratio and you say, "Wow. This is a wildly different diet." It's really not. You have that piece of it and then you have the thoughts [00:29:30] that are driving it. The diet says, "Eat this, don't eat that." What about our core beliefs about what we're capable of. Or let's say someone has a thought, "I've eaten so well and I've lost 10 pounds. Now, I can reward myself." Well, that thought is going to drive an emotion that will be desire for a word. Then, a behavior will be if they eat sugar let's say. The consequence that behavior is that they then gain weight. Then, it changes the, "Now, I'm overweight. [00:30:00] I need to restrict." Which drives a different behavior. You start to see this really vicious cycle of this weekday, weekend binge as I mentioned or this on-off diet. Because what we're really not looking at are the thoughts that are driving why we do what we do. Does that make sense?
Kyle Davis: Totally. It totally does. Because what I was going to ... What you mentioned down earlier, especially when it comes to carbs for instance on the keto diet. Most people are like, anti-carbs. I'm like very pro-carb on the keto diet but to an extent. [00:30:30] For me and my output and the amount of energy that I put into certain workouts. If I don't want to have that like a ... I don't want to get too much in the keto but if I don't want to have the keto flu hangover, like woozy headache and all that other fun stuff that happens when you're trying to get into the ketosis. I have to add carbs and I can't just do the 25 grams that everybody else can do in a day. I have to get up to like 75 and that's like a whole sweet potato or half of sweet potato. You have to modify it to make it work but once you figure [00:31:00] it out and it works for you within the balance of what's I guess acceptable. You can make it your own.
Carly Pollack: It really just depends on what someone is trying to do. If you're trying to manipulate your body for athletic performance or you're trying to manipulate your body purely for the physiology change versus make permanent change, fuel your relationship with food. Then, the guideline for that is going to be so different. Just because we know better does not mean we do better. There is this huge gap between [00:31:30] knowing what we need to do and then actually creating an authentic desire to wake up day after day after day and do it with the consistency that creates permanent change.
Kyle Davis: You're telling me, eating bananas and drinking distilled water won't give me that permanent shredded body? That's by the way a bad idea for anybody.
Carly Pollack: No. It absolutely will. You should continue to do that.
Kyle Davis: All my friends are the "fitness models of the bodybuilders" that's like their meals are three days out. It's [00:32:00] so disgusting.
Carly Pollack: Yeah. Right at the very end, bodybuilders but right at the very end, they're out there most week and unhealthy. Then right before they go on ...
Kyle Davis: Sugar.
Carly Pollack: They eat a bunch of sugar because that makes their veins pop.
Kyle Davis: Sugar and I saw one do sugar with vodka. Because a vodka is also a vasodilator, so then he get all the veins and stuff.
Gail Davis: My goodness. [inaudible 00:32:19].
Kyle Davis: We can talk about this. We'll get some pretty routine and we get some pretty routine and we'll get some nitric oxide and we'll be ready to go.
Carly Pollack: Oh, my goodness.
Gail Davis: Everybody [00:32:30] is always looking for the answer and people love take away actionable items. I know you did individual work with people but can you give us two or three just practical things that people could implement if they're really trying to move towards a healthier relationship with food?
Carly Pollack: Sure. If I were to think about just two or three things, I would say [00:33:00] the first thing is to do something everyday for your liver. Because your liver is the detox organ of your body. It's what helps you burn fat, it's going to be responsible largely for your long-term health and vitality. The easiest thing to do is to wake up in the morning on an empty stomach. Pour some warm or room temperature water, squeeze a half of organic lemon into it and drink it. Be nice to your liver on a day-to-day basis. The second thing [00:33:30] I would say is about portion size which is a little bit cliché. For the foodies listening and for the my inner fat kid inside.
It's like, I don't ever want to get rid of some of my favorite foods again. There's so much we could get into with scarcity and food. The second we make something scarce, we want it so much more. The best example of this would be the holidays. Like look at Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a time where we make some of our favorite foods. I [00:34:00] love stuffing. Who doesn't love stuffing? Yet, for some odd reason, we all follow this cultural story like, "Nope. We only make it once a year. Nope." We can't make it in March. That would be totally inappropriate.
Kyle Davis: Or pumpkin pie.
Carly Pollack: Or pumpkin pie. What I do is, before the holidays for about a month, I work a Thanksgiving light meal into my weekly cook rotation. I put turkey in crock pot. [00:34:30] I'll make roasted brussel sprouts. I'll make some gluten-free stuffing and a little bit of ... I'll put cranberries over spinach. That might be one week. The next week, I'll do something else. I'll make a cranberry's bacon salad. Something like that. By the time Thanksgiving comes, I don't need to binge on these things. By not making food scarce, you don't give it that power where it starts to grow a pair of lips and lip brownies are actually talking to you and saying, "You have to eat me. Or else, I'm going to go [00:35:00] extinct." The portion control for me is we are only supposed to eat what we can carry in our two hands. If you put your two hands together and you spread your fingers out, you're going to see four women who are about 5'4" in height. They are going to look ... Their hands are going to look like an appetizer plate.
For a taller people that are hands are bigger, they can eat more. When you eat less, you can eat more food, more variety of food that may not [00:35:30] be the healthiest food for you but you're not going to put on weight. I'm about to say something very outlandish for a nutritionist and I'm going to say that it's not the type of food that makes us gain weight. That the type of food makes us feel well or sick. It is how much food we eat. That is the largest contributor to weight gain or weight loss. This is my second recommendation would be to start eating your meals in a cereal bowl. [00:36:00] Slow down. Use chopsticks. I used chopsticks. I used to be such a hurry eater. I use chopsticks for a lot of my meals and I still to this day eat most of my meals in a cereal bowl.
Kyle Davis: Well, that's good.
Gail Davis: Wow. Yeah, that's good.
Kyle Davis: I saw a video today actually on, I think it was on Facebook or should this bodybuilder who was ... He eats just like what would be considered the most unhealthy. Nothing but like 20 pancakes covered in maple syrup [00:36:30] with a bunch of powdered sugar. It's like the biggest junk food and he does it at 2:00 in the morning and this is the only thing that he eats. He has a 4,000 calorie meal at 2:00 in the morning.
Carly Pollack: Eww.
Kyle Davis: It takes him about two hours to eat the whole thing because you're giving yourself a food baby. Then he goes and works out. He goes to work out at 4:30. He's in the gym by five. Then, that's it. Is that crazy? He is like shredded.
Carly Pollack: That's an anomaly. Then of course, you know, that [00:37:00] does not sound like an extraordinary life.
Kyle Davis: No, it's [inaudible 00:37:03]. I do ...
Carly Pollack: It's funny you say that because that really if I had to come up with the third thing. It would be doing exactly the opposite of what he did. I practice something called Circadian Rhythm Fasting. What this is, is life forms on our planet have evolved under strong influence of a light and dark cycles. Each of us has this internal clock called the Circadian Rhythm and it controls our hormones like our cortisol and our testosterone. [00:37:30] It controls our metabolism which is our response to food and how we burn it and some other cell activity. If you think about it, in primordial times, during the day, we would pillage, we would hunt and eat. Then when the night would come, we would go to bed because we couldn't see anything because we didn't have electricity. Our Circadian Rhythm, we are really makes it that we're least able to metabolize the food we eat once the sun goes down.
[00:38:00] Yet, that's when the majority of us eat most of our calories. Because we wake up and we're trying to be good and we go, "Oh, today is the day. I'm going to get my butt on track." We eat so little during the day and then at night, all of the stress of the day hits us and we wind up eating the majority of our calories when our body is least able to break it down. Circadian Rhythm Fasting is to restrict your eating to a window of about 11 [00:38:30] hours during the light. Then, having a 13-hour fast every night. 13 and 11 equals 24 hours. I know that a lot of people may have heard of intermittent fasting which is big right now. There's an aspect of Circadian Rhythm Fasting but I never liked intermittent fasting completely because all intermittent fast ... I mean, there's many ways but the most popular way of intermittent fasting is just restrict your window of eating to about eight hours. I would hear [00:39:00] people go, "Oh, perfect. I don't get up 'til 11 anyway, so I'll just eat from two to 10 and I'll be good to go."
I always feel like there was something wrong with that because it went against our natural rhythm. I would say to people, "Really, I know it's harder in the winter because the sun goes down but I use this app called Zero." It's a free app and it's super simple. I press a button when I stop eating for the night and I press the button when I start eating in the morning [00:39:30] and it helps me track. Because you can't manage what you don't measure. There's this measuring tool that I use and it completely obliterates nighttime eating for me. Because I'm so OCD. I press that button, I brush, I floss. Even if later I want to go into the kitchen and have something. There's more of a barrier because now, I'm attaching pain to having to go and eat and reset the app. That's what we want to do. We want to attach [00:40:00] more pain to the things we're doing that are not allowing us to live our best life. We want to attach more pleasure to the things that we need to do to get us there.
Kyle Davis: I wanted to just talk on one last thing with the next couple of minutes and then we can wrap up. That is, you've been brought out to speak for a number of different companies over the last 10 or so years. You've spoken with Facebook, Whole Foods, I think the Livestrong Foundation, Lululemon which is the joke about Lulu that we're talking about earlier.
Carly Pollack: [00:40:30] That's how you got into trouble.
Kyle Davis: Yeah. That's how I got in trouble [inaudible 00:40:33]. Frog Design, I think Rogue, the weightlifting stuff.
Carly Pollack: Yeah. The Rogue.
Kyle Davis: What are they having you come and speak about?
Carly Pollack: Most of them are having me speak about overall wellness, how to make steps towards ultimate vitality, things like work life balance, stress management. Or I like to call it stress elimination [00:41:00] in the workplace. Everything under the veil of wellness, it's been nice. They really let me come and I think because they ... Because of my reputation and because of they see the website, they say, "You know what? You know what you're doing." You're going to come and talk to us about wellness." Help us bridge the gap. That's what I'm thinking about when I speak and who's my target audience. I think, okay, where's the gap for them? Where are they now? Where do they want to be? Whatever I'm going to come and deliver is going to help them get there.
Kyle Davis: Yeah. Because [00:41:30] we've unequivocally spoken nothing really more than just food but there's so much more to what you do talk about. We spend a lot of this time talking about food but having that work life balance and some other aspects that really lead to a healthier, happier life. An overall better wellness is really what you speak to.
Carly Pollack: It's funny that we did one with speaking about food but I will say, most of what I do is not speaking about [00:42:00] food. Most of what I do is speaking about everything else and then using food behaviors as a conduit to show the deeper path here. Your plate is just a reflection of your interstate. If we want to fix our plates, we can't just shift what we're putting on them. We really have to look within and manage our emotions, manage our core beliefs, change the way we view stress. Since stress is what's driving us to sabotage and have all [00:42:30] of these unhealthy behaviors. I will do complete lectures where I don't talk about food at all. I'm just talking about stress, meditation, spirituality, what does it mean to be spiritual? Because a lot of people have a different definition and that's what's really fun for me as I get to switch it up.
Kyle Davis: I think what's really interesting about that is you get to talk about all these other things but because they have such a big impact [00:43:00] on your life. I got where you're hitting out when you said spirituality and people have different aspects because they can confuse it with religion.
Carly Pollack: Correct.
Kyle Davis: There's this inner way of thinking and the way of flowing through life and being much happier. Some people call it, flow state. Other people call it this. Other people call it that. I love the key nugget takeaways but just in brief and everybody else then can just call GDA and we can book you out to go and have them speak [00:43:30] to you, have you speak to them. In short, what can you say are the couple of key takeaways that are really important to just living a happier, better life?
Carly Pollack: The key takeaways are really to have an honest look at the fear in your life and to learn how to train the mind. If you're not on a self-development path, if you're not on a spiritual path, you have what I call an untrained mind. The [00:44:00] mind and I'm not talking about the brain. The brain we see when we do an autopsy. The mind is that voice in the head that no one can locate. That voice in our head has evolved as a way to keep us alive, keep us surviving. When we were almost reptilian, it was this idea of don't touch the fire and run from the bear. This mind of ours is this is two million old machine, it's completely outdated. Remember, it's supposed to protect [00:44:30] you by showing you what's wrong.
As we've evolved, it has not. Now, we have this voice in our head that's always trying to look for what's wrong. It's always going to bring up fear, it's going to dress for her strategy. Who gets on a plane and says, "Oh, I can't wait to land safely and I'm going to have such a smooth flight. Maybe we'll even land early." No one does that. What we focus on we experience even if it's not real. [00:45:00] The number one key to answer your question about how we live a happy life is you learn to train the voice in your head to think best case scenario, to make things less important than they are and to focus on what we can control and change the meaning to the things that we can't control.
Kyle Davis: I actually had a conversation not too long ago with an adventurer and his whole thing was, you got to scare yourself once a month. If [00:45:30] you do that, you'll have a better grasp of your fear. Now, I'm not saying you to jump out of a plane like this guy does every so often. What it does tell you and in line with thinking for the best case scenario. Is you're not getting into this circular style of thinking where you're constantly thinking about what's going wrong. Because what's wrong, you've already done. You've ran across the street when you were a kid. You didn't get hit by a car because maybe you're fast [inaudible 00:45:59]. Who [00:46:00] knows? It's starting to think about like you said, the best case scenario. I want to ...
Carly Pollack: What he was saying. He wasn't saying scare yourself once a month sitting at your desk, worrying about whether your life is going to fall into shambles.
Kyle Davis: No.
Carly Pollack: He was basically saying in summation the most powerful statement which is the quality of your life is directly related to the amount of uncertainty that you can comfortably live with.
Kyle Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's good.
Carly Pollack: If you saying scare [00:46:30] yourself and put yourself in uncertainty and in the unknown, so you can get used to it. Because when you can get used to the reality which is we are so much of our life is out of our control and you can live with that uncertainty of when will this money come in? Will it always be here? Will I always be in health? How long will my partner live? How long will I live? All these things we don't have control over. When you release them and you can get comfortable with them, then you start to really live.
Kyle Davis: Yeah. That is the truth.
Gail Davis: I love it. I have [00:47:00] downloaded Zero. I can't wait.
Carly Pollack: Yes.
Gail Davis: I'm going to start doing that. I love it. Love it, love it.
Kyle Davis: I'm going to keep wearing my Lulu.
Carly Pollack: You rock that Lulu. This is the ...
Kyle Davis: Hey, Lulu. You can send me some free clothes. I'll take it.
Gail Davis: This has been so much fun. I think we have to have you on again. I know you're working on a book and when we get closer to that, we'll have you back, so you can talk about that.
Carly Pollack: I would love to.
Gail Davis: Listeners can keep up to you.
Kyle Davis: We'll have to hang out when we're in Austin, too.
Carly Pollack: Yes. Let me know. I'll come meet you where [00:47:30] you are.
Kyle Davis: Sounds good. Hey, if you guys want to read today's transcript, you can go to gdapodcast.com where you can find it, download it, do all bunch of fun stuff with it. If you would like to book Carly for one of your events, you can do so by contacting GDA Speakers at 214-420-1999. Or you can go to gdaspeakers.com as I inhale a dog hair. Hey, Carly ...
Carly Pollack: How fitting.
Kyle Davis: Yeah, how fitting. Hey, Carly. It was a real pleasure having you [00:48:00] on and yeah, thank you.
Carly Pollack: Thank you.
Gail Davis: Here's to being healthy and happy.
Kyle Davis: Healthy, wealthy and whatnot.
Carly Pollack: Yes, I appreciate you guys.
Kyle Davis: Thanks.
Gail Davis: Thank you.
ep. 17 - Carly Pollack: Clinical Nutritionist and Spiritual Advisor by GDA Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.