Smoking vs Weight Loss | Salty Talk 025 | THRR

Salty Talk is a special edition of Healthy Rebellion Radio. Each week on Salty Talk Robb will do a deep dive into current health and performance news, mixed with an occasional Salty conversation with movers and shakers in the world of research, performance, health, and longevity.
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Transcript:

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Nicki: Welcome to The Healthy Rebellion Radio. This is an episode of Salty Talk, a deep dive into popular and relevant health and performance news pieces mixed with the occasional salty conversation with movers and shakers in the world of research, performance, health and longevity. Healthy Rebellion Radio Salty Talk episodes are brought to you by Drink LMNT, the only electrolyte drink mix that’s salty enough to make a difference in how you look, feel, and perform.

Nicki: We co-founded this company to fill a void in the hydration space. We needed an electrolyte drink that actually met the sodium needs of active people, low carb, keto, and carnivore adherence without any of the sugar colors and fillers found in popular commercial products. Health rebels, this is Salty Talk. And now the thing our attorney advises. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Given that this is Salty Talk, we should expect the occasional expletive.

Robb: Top of the morning, wife.

Nicki: Top of the morning.

Robb: Top of the morning to all you rebels.

Nicki: Yes.

Robb: Hope you’re all doing well.

Nicki: We’re just chuckling because Robb was commenting on my geriatric hard drive. I’m guilty. I’m one of those people that has probably 50 tabs open and lots of stuff. I have a very messy computer and it makes him crazy.

Robb: It causes me anxiety. I’m not the most clean, organized person, but Nicki could that she could be in a Pentagon sized file system.

Nicki: Oh.

Robb: And she would still stack things on whatever flat surface was there. Am I?

Nicki: No.

Robb: No?

Nicki: No. I don’t think so.

Robb: I just need to get you more file cabinets and then, yeah.

Nicki: Do you want to continue or let’s just leave it there.

Robb: No, I’m in the happy wife, happy life mood.

Nicki: Oh.

Robb: Which you’re not generally-

Nicki: I don’t know if you’re not starting the day off quite right with that one.

Robb: No. I already shit the bat on that. So anything new or exciting we need to share with folks besides the content of today’s show?

Nicki: Exciting. I don’t believe so. We’ve got a lot of fun stuff gearing up in the rebellion. We just had Jack Ruston from Ruston’s Boneyard, teach us all how to do beef tenderloin with a celeriac puree.

Robb: And it is worth showing up for that. Just for the accent. The accent alone is worth the whole price of admission.

Nicki: Yes. It was fabulous folks really enjoyed that. And we’ve got Chef Eva Bee coming on gosh, in about two weeks, to show us how to do a fabulous paleo, appetizer board. And gosh, we’ve got our holiday party coming up. We’re working on our-

Robb: Which I’m equal parts excited and horrified how that’s going to turn out. We’ll see how that goes.

Nicki: Yeah. We’ll see. We’re working on some fun stuff for that though, too. So lots of fun stuff happening inside the healthy rebellion community. Gosh, and this is the Salty Talk. How salty did you get in this one?

Robb: Not super. I’ve been trying to be more targeted in my profanity as a baseline. This one though gets out into salty territory. It’s been a long time coming. We did an update, not an update. We just posted the whole healthy rebellion, in an unhealthy world, you’re only-

Nicki: It’s the Albert Camus quote.

Robb: Yes. Which I’m butchering.

Nicki: The only way to be healthy in an unhealthy world is to become so absolutely healthy that your very existence is an active rebellion.

Robb: And so our tagline is kind of like make your health an act of rebellion, which I think is pretty good, particularly when we try to figure out anything marketing-related, it’s absolute dog shit. We’re terrible at this type of stuff. But we did, we just posted that, make your health an act of rebellion, on my Instagram feed and this person popped up in that and started really haranguing us.

Nicki: Well, we mentioned this before, this was the woman that said, “What do you mean? Why are you posting this quote? It has…”-

Robb: Ableist features to it.

Nicki: Yeah. “It feels like you’re being ableist.” And we’ve mentioned this before. So, your topic today might also fall into those-

Robb: So there was that, and then there was also, we had a person sign up in the rebellion and cheese partway through a registered dietetics track and in a class, her professors, apparently it was kind of like a group forum where a number of the professors over there and the professors were basically saying, “Yeah, we really don’t recommend that you encourage people to undergo dietary change for weight loss, because most people fail and it just makes them feel bad about themselves.” I was just absolutely horrified. And it was also kind of like, then what on earth are you doing in this registered dietetic setting? And granted there’s more to eating and health than weight loss, other than when you’re in the United States. And then that is kind of the only thing that there is, to be freaking honest about this.

Robb: I just started thinking about that and I was noodling on, well, do shy away from encouraging people to quit smoking because it doesn’t succeed very often/ I started doing some digging around and the long and short of that is that, smoking is far less successful as a cessation process than weight loss is, but yet it would seem utterly preposterous and I would say immoral to not encourage anyone who is ready for that change to undergo that change. When you look at the amount of morbidity and mortality, the loss of life, the costs, in this age of COVID, it’s kind of like the Monty Python deal, every sperm matters and it was like, “Well, every life matters.” Okay. If every life matters, then goddammit, we encourage people to halt smoking.

Robb: Again, when and where they’re ready to do it. You can’t force people into this. You can provide certain economic incentives, which can vary in their efficacy. But, it’s just ridiculous to let this woke social justicey type stuff, infiltrate the world to a degree that I’m really left wondering what can you offer as help to people? We’ve joked between each other. It’s like, “Hey, Nicki, you’re on…” Oh, no, I’m sorry. You’re not on fire, just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s like, is someone who’s burning up, literally, can I offer assistance? Or is that being ableist? If they have an infectious disease, is that being ableist?

Nicki: Well, it’s interesting, because we’ve had a few conversations with Michael and Kaylee, who run the SBG gym here and she is born and raised in Korea.

Robb: That’s are really good point.

Nicki: She’s Korean and Michael had lived there for the past gosh, eight-

Robb: 15 years.

Nicki: 15 years.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Okay. And so in Korea it is like-

Robb: She just laughed at this.

Nicki: Fat shaming is a thing. When we were sharing this, she was like, “Oh gosh, in Korea, if somebody even looks like they’ve gained two pounds, it’s just a very direct vocal.”

Robb: So imagine your family, the way that we kind of become accustomed to speaking with our family, although in this day and age, I don’t know even that still works, but the intimacy and the directness that you would expect within a family unit is all of society. Someone you don’t even necessarily know, like the person at the coffee shop, they’re like, “Hey Robb, you look like you’re getting fat. What’s up with that?” And it’s that fucking direct.

Nicki: It’s super direct and harsh. And that’s just how their culture is.

Robb: And shockingly, it does actually modify behavior to some degree. Now, I will say in both Korea and Japan, there are remarkably high rates of suicide to which this may feed into that. And this is part of the point that I made in the main talk, which is that we can approach this stuff in a way that isn’t just Savage and injurious to people.

Nicki: No. But you can be supportive and kind and give good advice and create programs that actually work.

Robb: Well, and in the main part of the talk, I made the case that, I cited a couple of different studies and they both make the case that readiness for change is critical in this story. So we shouldn’t allocate a ton of resources to people that just aren’t ready to change. Because this is God, ages ago, Denise Minger did this. It was really a pithy talk. It was live back when we did silly stuff like that. God, you could catch-

Nicki: Was it at Paleo f(x)?

Robb: Ancestral Health Symposium. I mean, you can catch disease being around people, Nicki. So I can’t even believe we did that in the past, but-

Nicki: We might not ever do it in the future.

Robb: We may never do it again in the future. But she had this… It was actually very well done, how to argue with a vegan. She had this multi-step process, very good she’s way smarter than I am. But there was one thing that was a little bit off about it. This was when I was trying to come to terms with the deluge of emails and reach out and everything. And most of them were like, “I’m dying. I need help.” And I had no idea how to help enough of these people. It was reaching that point where enough information was out in the wild that people were kind of making some progress. But this was kind of when we started looking at winding down the paleo solution seminar because out of 100 person group 20 or 30 of them would bring a binder of medical records. And it’s like, “I’m not a doctor. I can’t dig into this. I don’t have time to do it. I’m not legally…”-

Nicki: This would have been like 2010, 2011.

Robb: This was 2012, I believe when this went down. And so I just stood up and I made the point, I’m like, “This is all very good kind of practice for making a logical case for whatever.” But, I’ve got literally 40,000…” At that point, 40,000 unread emails and the bulk of the people just needed help. So instead of us really becoming whizzes at how to argue with vegans, maybe we just doubled down on helping the people that need help. I think that this is a pretty key feature to this, but in that whole process of people needing help, that I’m not an expert on the stages of changes, the contemplation and the pre-contemplation. I’m like, “How can you be pre-contemplate?” I just don’t get some of these, but these are the distinctions interviews.

Robb: But when people were talking about things, maybe they hear a story of someone who had a major health crisis and they’re the same age and the same gender and they both have kids. And the person says, “I almost died and I realized how much I was going to lose.” Then it lights a fire under the other person and be like, “Okay, I need to do something.” But if it is verboten to mention the crazy idea that optimum human health has a lot of different kind of U-shaped, with patterns to it with regards to how much vitamin D should you have, what is a healthy weight? You can’t make it the case that people can be healthy at any weight, if the planet cannot be healthy at any temperature. It’s just bullshit. It is a lie

Robb: I get on the one hand that it’s trying to protect people from big meanies, like what we experienced in grade school, where people were just jerks and well, let’s-

Nicki: Or like the Koreans.

Robb: Pertinently, like the Koreans. Apparently, literally everybody else on the planet-

Nicki: Lots of other cultures.

Robb: Outside of the US and kind of Europe to some degree, although I think Europe is probably still much more direct in that regard. There’s this… This goes to our playgrounds and everything. There’s such an attempt to round all the rough edges and everything that we’re left with just a farce of a society. So this thing, the intro may be longer than the damn talk that I gave, but-

Nicki: All right, let’s get into it.

Robb: Okay. Hey, rebels, welcome back. Glad you are here. I’m glad I’m here too, at least for a little bit longer. I think I’m glad to be here. Kind of an interesting one today. At least I thought it was interesting enough to put something together and I think it’s important at least. We had kind of a series of things happen. On Instagram we posted pretty seemingly benign thing, just a little spot about the healthy rebellion itself. We cited Albert Camus in his quote about living in an unfree world, the only way to be truly free is to make your existence and act of rebellion, I’m paraphrasing. And so we’ve kind of modified that.

Robb: Basically, our tagline is make your health an act of rebellion, which I personally find pretty empowering, pretty benign as a standalone thing, but maybe not, maybe not to everybody, clearly not everybody in current outrage culture, but we had that. Then we had a response to it, which I’ll dig into a little bit. I think I talked, Nicki and I talked about it a bit in the intro, but then we also had a new person join the rebellion. She is part way through her registered dietetics program. She posted that these students who are learning how in theory, to help people with nutrition, learning all about food and in theory, good diets and all that type of stuff were effectively counseled by their professor to not really encourage people to lose weight because nobody’s able to lose weight and it just makes people feel bad about themselves.

Robb: These two things just kind of, I don’t know if pushed me over the edge, it’s not some Michael Douglas falling down deal where I’m shooting rocket grenades and stuff like that, but it just kind of stunned me. I think it’s a good thing that I’m still stunned by some things that I’m not so calloused and so jaded that I’m like, “Yeah. Well, of course people think that.” We had some pushback from the healthy rebellion post, make your health an act of rebellion.

Robb: This person on there started kind of cross-examining us. “Well, what do you mean by this? What are you trying to get at?” It effectively made the case that we were being ableist, that we were making people feel bad for where they were in their health situation or their health journey. I don’t recall jumping on there and saying, “Hey, fatty, you’ve got problems. You should die if you don’t lose weight.” I mean, nothing like that. And again, I acknowledge, I’m trying to be as open-minded about this, as I can, folks can interpret things in different ways. People arrive at it at different places. There are topics in my life that I’m sensitive about, I just am.

Robb: I can’t think of something off the top of my head, but there’s topics that come up that I’m just sensitive about, I guess. So I acknowledge that this can be a sensitive topic, but I also think that, it is one of those things that we can be reminded that, wherever we are in our health situation and what hand we’ve been dealt, we can do something about it. This is again, one of these features of the constant or the current manifestation of kind of critical theory and these identity politics and whatnot. I think I’ve talked about elsewhere. I’m not 100% sure it’s been in here, but I think so. Stories of say, Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning and that his only way that he navigated the horrors of Auschwitz was by cultivating gratitude.

Robb: What I find in these kind of words, critical theory circles is that it’s impossible to have gratitude and kind of in two sides of this. For me as a white male, I seemingly should never have a sense of gratitude because everything’s been given to me, everything has been arrived at by theft and subterfuge and privilege. And so I have no right to feel gratitude for my existence. What I am supposed to do with my existence, I’m not entirely sure. It feels like a very zero-sum nihilistic existence that even my death would not be enough seemingly to undo all the horrors that have been done. There’ve been absolutely horrible things done in the world. I acknowledge that and I would love to work to remedy and remediate that stuff. But, bludgeoning me about just being born, I think it’s maybe a problem.

Robb: The other side of this is that people who have been dealt a difficult hand, whether it’s an outright disability or they develop an illness, or what have you. What I see pull people up from their bootstraps, like literally is an act of what seemingly appears to be magic, is cultivating a sense of gratitude. Again, I think I’ve talked about this a little bit before, but I keep kind of coming back to it because the current environment that we live in seems to have developed a rash against the concept of gratitude. I used to really dismiss this stuff is kind of a hippy notion of goofiness, but I was wrong about that. It’s actually a very… I think it can be driven off the rails and made goofy, but it’s a really powerful tool. It’s arguably one of the most powerful psychological spiritual tools that I think we have.

Robb: I think that this kind of woke-ism, critical theories, identity politics stuff, which falls into this ableist deal. It robs us of the ability to have that. I think that it then, I guess what I’m putting forward is kind of a hypothesis, that the inability to have gratitude, the inability to accept what our situation is, and by accept, I mean, acknowledge it and then do something about it. And the doing something about it may… The most important part may exist between our own ears. The physical manifestation of what happens may actually be secondary or tertiary in importance to what actually happens in our gray matter. But the meme that exist, and back when the term meme meant something other than cat photos and whatnot. What it is, is essentially a mental virus or a mental contagion, but contagion can be both good and bad in this case. But it’s something that can go on and self perpetuate within cognitive environment.

Robb: It’s kind of a life form in some ways, and the current meme that exists around all of this stuff is that we’re helpless, we should just kind of give up that it’s whatever our problem is, it’s somebody else’s fault not… And I’m not saying that it’s our fault, but there are situations where again, excuse me, we’re just dealt a shit hand and we have to figure out what we want to do about that. So this got me here thinking. This notion that weight loss or the health in general. This was a whole interesting thing. I want to back up a little bit about that.

Robb: In this Instagram piece, we just threw out health. And we didn’t say actually anything about weight loss. This person immediately started going after the weight loss topic. And I said, “Why are you going after that? We didn’t say anything about that. Maybe you need to lose weight, or maybe somebody needs to lose weight to get healthier, and maybe they don’t.” But what was implicit in this is even though this person was giving us hell about suggesting that we might want to make our health and act of rebellion, is that even she knew that there is something to health and body composition.here’s been a lot back and forth on this.

Robb: Like there was some research that suggested that folks who were overweight do not have greater health issues than folks who are, are normal weight. And then that kind of got overturned when we parsed out the data on that a bit more carefully and realized that a good number of people who are under or normal weight, excuse me, they’re underweight because they have a disease process. They’re sick. They have a wasting condition, end of life type stuff. Or just generally poor health stuff, that goes in a direction in which the person is losing weight or underweight versus kind of like the metabolically driven problems of over consumption that kind of typifies the modern environment that we live in.

Robb: So when you adjust for that, there is a problem with being overweight and there’s a U-curve attached to this. If you’re too skinny, there’s problems, sarcopenia, and a host of other problems. Anorexia, leading to death is a pretty good example of this. I’ve kind of thrown this idea out there that the idea that you can be healthy at any size is as preposterous as the planet being healthy at any temperature. There are boundaries by which we exist within biology and just dismissing this stuff because it’s uncomfortable or difficult, or because people have been assholes in the past, teasing or harming people psychologically because they have a challenge. I’m not saying that none of that matters, but that isn’t justification for just ignoring these problems. And so again, I started thinking about this stuff. There’s, again, two pieces to this, the Instagram piece kind of going after health as a concept and being ableist, although there was some weight loss stuff attached to that.

Robb: Then also the post that was put up in the rebellion in which this soon to be minted registered dietetics student is being counseled by her professors that she and the other folks in our program should not really encourage people to lose weight, started thinking about that. Again, the main reasoning behind that, which is ironic, it’s somewhat similar. Somebody has a health problem that would be amenable to say a ketogenic diet and there’s good documentation to support that neurological condition, whatever. It’s one of these things that’s really well established and we will not infrequently hear physicians say, “Well, we don’t really bother telling people to do that, because it’s just too hard and they won’t do it.” How do you know that? And how lazy is that?

Robb: Maybe the person is in fact not ready for change, or they’re not a good candidate for doing that, but what has been done to even vet that? Oftentimes virtually nothing. So again, I started thinking about this stuff and I was wondering, the title that I have for this, if you’re watching this on The Rebellion, when we post these videos, the slide is, Smoking versus Weight Loss. Why is stopping one okay and the other is ableist/verboten? Who would ever suggest that counseling people to stop smoking would be a bad idea because it, either one, it has a low effectiveness, people don’t stop smoking that often. Or two, would make people feel bad. That just seems ridiculous. And again, because somebody is a smoker, it doesn’t mean that we have the right nor should we as just decent human beings, flog, bludgeon, harass these people. Because, they’re smokers.

Robb: No, that’s not okay. Not what I’m suggesting, but at the same time, we know that there’s a massive individual and societal cost attached to this. And this is kind of ironic here, in the age of COVID where everybody or not everybody, but many people feel compelled to make all manner of recommendations of folks. That they should wear masks, that they should close their businesses. Devil may care what the impacts are on these people. So folks feel pretty empowered to make some rather robust statements in some areas. But then in these other years, it’s just off limits, which I find ridiculous and will be interesting, kind of unpacking some of this stuff with Nicki, as we go forward. But anyway, I started digging into this stuff, and this is a piece from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It’s called long-term weight loss maintenance.

Robb: It’s basically looking at how long-term weight loss progresses and looks and what the success and failure kind of boundaries look like. What they did was kind of interesting where they looked at what constitutes successful weight loss. They basically made the case for a long-term maintenance of at least a 10% loss in current body weight, which is somewhat arbitrary. I mean, some people don’t need to lose 10% of their body weight. Some people really, for health perspective should probably lose significantly more than currently 10% of their body weight, but they were just trying to put a benchmark and say, “What could we call successful long-term weight loss?” And they defined it as a 10% of current body weight loss. From the very bottom of this thing, thus, although the data are limited and the definition varied across studies, it appears that approximately 20% of overweight individuals are successful weight losers.

Robb: So they take about 10% of their weight off. They’re able to maintain it over time. And honestly, this is a bit higher than what I thought it would be. And again, you can find other articles that paint this as not quite this successful, but, there it is. And again, the boundaries are very fuzzy. It’s not a super hard scientific deal. We’re not specifically using an end point of, we get people to “a healthy body weight” which I think would also be similarly slippery to define, are you kind of a mesomorph who carries a lot of muscle and you actually work out a lot? Are you more of an endurance athlete. It’s just a bunch of different stuff in there. But anyway, let’s just for… Even if we cut this in half, it’s going to kind of make my point, okay. Now a quick word from today’s sponsor,

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Robb: So now we’ll shift over to a piece, success rates and smoking cessation, psychological preparation plays a critical role and interacts with other factors such as psychoactive substances. So what this… So again, from the introduction, smoking is a leading cause of avoidable death in the world. According to the world health organization, smoking kills 5,000,000 people every year. That is to say more than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. In France, smoking is the leading cause of premature death before age of 65, the risk of anxiety and depression is also higher among smokers. Despite these figures, smokers still find it difficult to stop smoking. 73% of smokers wished to stop. 22% try and less than five percent succeed.

Robb: Now it does appear that with highly structured interventions, that, that success rate goes up a little bit, but it’s maybe around seven percent. It barely budges. Successful smoking cessation is almost unheard of yet it would be immoral, ridiculous to not provide opportunity and a little bit of goosing and pushing to get people to change these behaviors. As it is, if you pay for insurance and it’s understood that you are a smoker, whether life insurance or health insurance, you typically paid more. I’m hard-pressed to understand why that would not be the case, because you are going to cost that system more, both on the insurance side and on the health care delivery side. 16 year old boys are exceptionally expensive to insure when they drive automobiles. And that’s because they’re idiots, they have poor judgment and self-control and they cause a lot of accidents. Although I think that young female drivers maybe even higher than males, but I’m not 100% sure on that, but the young are dangerous when behind the wheel, period. And so their insurance costs more.

Robb: A male who is unmarried costs more, and this is just all actuarial table stuff that’s been figured out when, and this is I’m getting kind of off in the weeds here, but in the military, single males oftentimes are passed over for advancements with regards to piloting because they are higher at risk taking in a way that is disadvantageous for both them in the investment that the military has made in them. So married male pilots, and I guess this would apply to female pilots too, tend to see different types of advancement because their risk profile is better. They are hard chargers, they’re willing to put their life on the line and do dangerous things, but they don’t do ridiculous and reckless things, or they are less likely to do so because in theory, they have other shit that they want to live for.

Robb: So, there’s ways that we can parse all this stuff out. My real point here is just that it is no surprise to virtually anyone that smoking is really dangerous and it’s very, very difficult to get forward progress in getting people to reduce their rate of smoking and or stop. But yet it is… We are morally obliged to do something about this. Again, it doesn’t need to be publicly shaming people, but providing support where and when it makes sense, definitely could help a lot of folks. A real commonality within both of these pieces and kind of why I chose both of these articles and I will have them in the show notes is that the psychological state of the individual is critical to success. And so a commonality between both successful weight loss and smoking cessation, a host of other factors, is just simply this concept of readiness for change. And so I have a paper here, change readiness, focusing change management where it counts.

Robb: This deals with business related issues. So this is a readiness for change analysis that is applied at a businesses level or corporation level, trying to figure out if the corporate culture is in a position to be ready to change in ways that ostensibly would be of benefit to the organization. Because, not all entities are. A lack of readiness change is the clear indication of a waste of resources if you’re really going to dump a lot of effort into this person or this entity. So a big part of this story is understanding the readiness to change and being able to focus on those who are good to go, and then really helping them in that story. This other piece focuses more on health, specifically five models to assess readiness, to change in behaviors, this from family practice news. And again, there’s just striking overlap, whether we’re talking about an individual versus again, a corporation or company or something like that.

Robb: It’s striking to me how similar this process is, whether it’s one person or 10,000 people, under the banner of a corporation and kind of the culture that exists there. So, part of my question is who is being helped by protecting their feelings? And it again, or this notion that people’s feelings are going to get hurt. The annual number of deaths attributable to obesity in the United States, this is another piece that I have here. This is from JAMA. The estimated number of annual deaths attributable to obesity in US adults is approximately 280,000 based on all subjects and this is the hazard ratio, and this is looking at everything that includes smoking and other problems and 325,000 based off of hazard ratios from only non-smokers and never smokers.

Robb: So when you factor in how powerful a non-healthy body weight is, we’re again, not remotely making light of the number of COVID deaths that we’re going to see in the United States, but we’re in the 200,000s right now. This is something that we see year in and year out every year in the United States, and really around beginning to be around the world related specifically to obesity and smoking. There’s again, not a pushback really on the smoking side, but there’s a remarkable pushback on this idea that recommending health or recommending the attainment of healthy diet and lifestyle, whatever that means for a given individual is somehow a bad idea and injurious idea that we’re going to psychologically damage people.

Robb: One, I think that people are a hell of a lot tougher than what the kind of critical theories woke crowd present. And this is really one of the main that instead of fostering a sense of resiliency and hell yeah, and can do, these folks are encouraging people to just die within their own chrysalis, that they’re in this state where there could be a metamorphosis, there could be a change that is profound and life-altering and world altering and instead of embracing that and embracing some of the suck around that, it is difficult to change. It is difficult to grow. That’s understood. But we can help people. We can help on the front of that by being good at asking these readiness for change questions, both in healthcare and a host of other venues, so that we focus resources on those folks who are ready to go, who are good to go. And then beyond that, we can sow some seeds that help people to get to that readiness for change spot.

Robb: This is all the pre-contemplation contemplation stuff. I am not an expert on it, it kind of makes my head spin, the delineations there, but you do have to get it put on your radar that there might be problems here, or you need stories like hey… We had a client when we were running the gym that had two kids, suffered a stroke, and it definitely seemed to be metabolically-driven. This person was not that old. And we had kind of a come to Jesus conversation with this person. And it’s like, “Hey, it’s not a guarantee that modifying your diet better than what you’ve done is going to get you 100% out of this, but it’s not likely to make it worse. And at a minimum you will be more effective with everything that you do, if you are at a better body weight and you’re metabolically healthier and whatnot.”

Robb: That combination of kind of a scare in this understanding of the brevity of life and the importance of being there for this individual’s family, it lit a fire that had not existed previously, but had we been so worried about offending or hurting this person’s feelings that we didn’t bother do anything. I guess you could make the case that so long as this individual was paying their monthly gym membership no, all good for us, but I actually want something a bit more than that, which is that people get success of their lives and they move things forward. Because life is short and there’s lots of unknowns. But one thing that I’m noticing is that folks who have good resilience, they have a reason for living, they have a really powerful sense of gratitude.

Robb: These are generally happy, powerful people and that happiness and power usually bubbles over into other arenas. And they do good things elsewhere. But I’ll be damned if this kind of woke, critical theories weirdness is not like a… It’s like an insecticide sprayed on hope and gratitude. It is like a poison applied to the very tools that are our only means of lifting ourselves up, out of just abject horrible situations. So I don’t know if this was particularly valuable for you all. It wasn’t specifically protein, carbs and fat. Definitely a little bit more in the, I guess, soft sciencey side of this stuff. But, readiness for change, gratitude, all these things are really important features of life.

Robb: Honestly, as I guess I motor through my career, I’m seeing more and more the importance of acknowledging this stuff and honestly, at this point, protecting it. Because if we lose the ability to talk about these things, to hold each other accountable, I want to be held accountable. I would like that to be done in a respectful, thoughtful way and the opportunity for give and take on that. But, if I’m screwing something up, I’d love for somebody to mention that to me. We can do that in a way that is loving and supportive, even if it’s a bit of tough love. So anyway, hope you guys found this valuable, take care, hope to see you in the rebellion.

Nicki: All right, hubs.

Robb: I don’t know if that was valuable though.

Nicki: Not too salty.

Robb: Not to salty. But it’s-

Nicki: But important.

Robb: It’s important and it is another one of these things that I just… If it’s career suicide to mention that it’s actually injuring people, hurting people to not just put the notion out there that we can change, that we can better our situation. Then there’s something profoundly broken with our society, if that or things like that is what gooses us out of the space then so be it. Because it’s just, I see a lot of people in this space that managed to dance around this and or actually feed into it in this kind of frenzy to… It’s almost like the little cars that putter around and they’ve got different bumper stickers all over the place and… Broadcasting to the world, all of it.

Nicki: All of their political beliefs.

Robb: All their political and whatever beliefs. And so I see folks doing that and I see it in this kind of appealing to the woke space in a way that I feel like is, they’re just trying to fly under the radar now and actually think these people fully believe it, but they’re willing to broadcast it, just so that they get left the fuck alone. I think that’s kind of cowardly. I get it on the one hand, people have businesses and there are probably things that I would like to say that I tamped down because it’s probably a bit too controversial. And so I just keep it to myself, but this is an area that there is a clear problem of people being hurt by this incapacity to just say something about, if health is not where you would like it to be, there are things that we can do.

Robb: And we have friends that have overcome remarkable hands that have been dealt to them and live really remarkable lives. And maybe this is something we’re going to dig into later. We’ve been talking just kind of about purpose and meaning and whatnot. It’s an interesting thing, particularly when you work from home and in the age of COVID and all the rest of this stuff, but, having something that you work towards and doing a good job on it. It might be the most important thing in our existence, because it provides value and focus and it’s something that we talk to our kids a lot about in this self-enrichment, self betterment, I think is just right at the center of all that.

Nicki: All right. Thanks everyone for joining us. Remember to check out our show sponsor, Ned and give their Full Spectrum Hemp Oil or their new Sleep Blend a try. Go to helloned.com/salty15 or enter code Salty15 at checkout for 15% off your first one-time order or 20% off your first subscription order, plus free shipping. That’s H-E-L-L-O N-E-D. Helloned.com/salty 15. And come on and join us over at the healthy rebellion. Go to join.thehealthy rebellion.com and join us for all of our upcoming holiday fun. Plus, our new resets kicks off mid January. So get in early and you get to partake in all of the goodies.

Robb: See you all soon. Take care.

Nicki: See you all soon. As always Salty Talk episodes are brought to you by Drink LMNT. The only electrolyte drink mix that’s salty enough to make a difference in how you look, feel, and perform. Get salty at drinklmnt.com. That’s drink L-M-N-T .com.

Robb Wolf

Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat, is a former research biochemist and one of the world’s leading experts in Paleolithic nutrition. Wolf has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of people around the world via his top ranked iTunes podcast and wildly popular seminar series.