The SIMPLE Path to Healing and Wellness

– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 133 with Graham Tuttle

Graham Tuttle, known as the Barefoot Sprinter, is a strength and conditioning coach who is passionate about fitness, movement, and nutrition. He focuses on training athletes to stay out of pain, be stronger, and stay active with the sport they love longer.

Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Graham Tuttle about the simple path to healing and wellness.

Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:

– How health and functionality should be so simple people can’t disagree with it.

– How many wellness companies use fear-mongering as a marketing strategy and why that’s counterproductive.

– Why the fake food that wasn’t around 200 years ago is the real problem.

– How there are six fundamental levers to being healthy and what they are.

– Why some people can’t simply “listen to their body” when it comes to health.

Connect with Graham:

Guest Contact Info

Links Mentioned:
grahamtuttle.com

Connect with Steven:

Website

Xeroshoes.com

Twitter
@XeroShoes

Instagram
@xeroshoes

Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes

Episode Transcript

Steven Sashen:

Getting in healthy… Getting in… let’s try that again. Getting healthy these days, there’s a lot you need to do. You need to work out, you need to find the right diet, you need to find the right supplements, you need to get the right amount of sleep, you need to get the right amount of light or darkness or get rid of the blue. I mean, there’s just so much to do. I don’t know. We’re going to find out.

On today’s episode of THE MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting feet first, because that’s your foundation, although today we’re going to get into the rest of you too. Here’s where we break down the propaganda, the mythology, and often the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or play or to yoga or CrossFit, whatever you like to do, and do it enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Did I say enjoyably? I know I did. It’s a trick question because look, if you’re not having fun, do something different until you are, because you’re not going to keep it up if you’re not enjoying it. So just call it what it is.

By the way, we call this THE MOVEMENT Movement, because we are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s supposed to do, naturally without getting in the way. The movement part about which involves you, is really simple. You can go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join. There’s no membership, there’s no secret handshake. It just means that you can find our previous episodes that you can like and share and leave reviews. Give us the thumbs up where you can do that. You can hit the bell icon on YouTube, et cetera, et cetera.

You know what to do. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let’s jump in. Graham. Why don’t you do me a favor? Tell human beings who you are and what the hell you’re doing here.

Graham Tuttle:

I mean, I got to say though, if you were talking about W2s and how you’ve very rarely had any, if you ever need a W2 job being a radio host, phenomenal, I mean that was just smooth.

Steven Sashen:

Oh, well thank you. I mean, I don’t know. Well look, anything where I have to be there every day for a fixed amount of time, doing a specific thing is not going to work in my brain, but I did make a lot of money doing voiceover work for radio and TV. In fact, I’m going to tell you right now, I’ll show you right now, how I made $15,000 one year. This is 30 years ago. Ready? Here we go. I did the following.

This is literally the entire length of the recording session that I did. Fire! That was it. It was a commercial. The army did something really interesting. They’d hire actors to do radio commercials, and if the commercials worked well, they would then bring in actual people from the army to do the TV version of that commercial. So you heard me yelling, fire all around the country for about a year. That was a blast.

Graham Tuttle:

That’s amazing. And if you think about $15,000 back in those days is like $3 million now.

Steven Sashen:

No, I don’t know what it was. Suffice it to say, it paid the rent for a year.

Graham Tuttle:

That’s amazing. So my name is Graham Tuttle. I’m the, I guess more colloquially known as The Barefoot Sprinter on social media these days, which has just become an interesting little tidbit about me. But basically I’m a strength, performance, health, fitness coach. Just a failed personal trainer, decided to move more into creating content and educating people more broadly.

I was talking about this with one of my friends yesterday. I was like, “I’m a really bad personal trainer. They sit there, they count to 10. They really care. And I’m like, “I want to find a solution and get past it.” So I’m just unorthodox. I have an unorthodox level of curiosity about life, and I just tend to question everything.

That paired with this, there’s this great Alex… is a guy I look up to, and he put up this post about the three things that very successful people have in common’s like one, they think they’re superior. They’re better than other people, and not like worth more, but they have more capacity to handle and do things and develop a skillset. Two, they never think they’re good enough, and three to have incredible impulse control, so something along the lines.

Steven Sashen:

That’s interesting. Do you know the impulse control study they do with kids and how it’s correlated to success later?

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah, where they put a marshmallow or something down and they say the ones that will not do it, they come back and they get two, the ones that can pass that…

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. It’s like, “Don’t touch the marshmallow. We’ll be back in a little bit. If you don’t touch it, we’ll give you another one.” If people haven’t watched these videos, you can find them. It’s hysterical watching kids lose their minds, trying to not eat a marshmallow. And then some of them just crack. I mean, it’s really sad, but it’s pretty funny. It is interesting that the ones who have better impulse control tend to at least perform better on statistical tests, like the SAT, they get better grades, they get in better colleges. I don’t know about the success thing, because that’s just a word I have no concept for.

I think I have friends who have made huge amounts of money and they’ve all said the same thing, which is, “After I made all this money, people thought I’m way smarter than I am.” There is that phenomenon.

Graham Tuttle:

That’s an amazing thing. After you get any level of notoriety, people look at you differently, and I’m like, “I was the same thing six months ago, but no one noticed.”

Steven Sashen:

It’s really disturbing. I used to live in Boulder, Colorado, and now I live slightly out of Boulder, and there’s a group that I refer to as Boulder’s Rich and Guilty. So there’s a lot of people with a bunch of money and they clearly seem to feel guilty about it because of the way they spend it and what they support. But I’ve been going to par… Boulder’s a small town. I go to parties and I see these people and they’ve never given me the time of day; They know who I am, never spoken to me.

Someday, we may be in a situation financially, where we show up at that party and they come up and say, “Hi.” I have responses planned. It’ll be interesting to see if I say them and make it So they definitely never talk to me ever again, because-

Graham Tuttle:

Amazing.

Steven Sashen:

I mean, I get it. Some of these people are in social and financial situations where people are awkward around them or people are asking for things from them. They want to use them. They don’t get to know them. They have all these ideas. I get that you don’t want to do that, and I get that they don’t know that I’m not someone who gives a crap about any of that. But nonetheless, it’s one of those things. I want to back up to your failed personal trainer. Was it because you had a hard time counting to 10?

Graham Tuttle:

Well, so this is one of the things, I went to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, that’s where I got my exercise science degree.

Steven Sashen:

I’m sorry. We’re going to have to cut this short. I totally either forgot or didn’t know that, since I went to Duke and we’re not legally allowed to have this conversation.

Graham Tuttle:

Well, it’s okay. You’ll forgive me and maybe you make an extension this once, but I graduated early, so I didn’t even do the… there’s the general track, then there’s like the fitness professional, the athletic training. So the actual advanced tracks, I did the bare minimum, and so I got there and one of the classes I always joke is, they teach you how to count to 10. So I didn’t do very well in that one. I only got to eight, but-

Steven Sashen:

But there’s some workouts where you only need to get eight, so you could have had a successful career. You didn’t ask enough questions to yourself the way you said before. Like, “Do I need to count to 10 or is eight good enough?”

Graham Tuttle:

Well, so there is a certain part, I think when it comes to personal training, that you have to kind of go along with the… you’re going to show up, I’m going to be here to babysit you. I’m going to motivate you and you’re going to go to this, and I count to 10. It’s like once you kind of see through it all doesn’t matter because it’s like, “What is it? A six, an eight? Is it 10?” I don’t know, the rep made it up. It’s like I pick a few exercises and make up some for a few. And it’s like, people don’t really like that kind of free moving creative inspiration. They want you to tell them what to do.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. It’s like, “Here’s a plan that will get them to the place that they think will then make them happy.” Yeah, that sentence is fraught with peril.

Graham Tuttle:

Then they come in the first day and I end up talking about like their feelings and their thoughts and what’s going on in their life and their sunlight and why they’re working a job they’re miserable. One of the guys he’s been a really good friend and he’s helped me establish… the landlord. He’s a client, a landlord, just to kind of helped me establish a few different things, so he is played different roles in my life, but the man owns dozens of businesses. He is a very successful entrepreneur, dozens of individual locations in his business. He’s very successful, and yet he works in an office in the middle of a warehouse with no window.

Like he goes into a warehouse and sits in the middle with no… and I’m like, “You’re one of the most successful people I know, and yet you sit in a place for 60 hours a week with behind 15 screens,” and I’m like, “Gosh.”

Steven Sashen:

Yeah, look to each his own. I can’t think really well unless I have a high ceiling and or space that I can see. There’s a weird… I remember being at a meeting with a bunch of friends in a restaurant and we were sitting at a corner table, and the ceiling in the corner table was low, and we were doing some creative something. And I said, “Wait, hold on. I got to think, figure this out,” and I had to back up until I was at a point where the ceiling above me was like 15 feet instead of 8 feet, because I couldn’t think.

This sounds weird. I couldn’t think with the ceiling that low above my head. I mean, because I couldn’t place all the ideas in this imaginary space, and rearrange them in a way that was going to get me where I wanted. That was the first time I really thought about how my space interacts with my thinking.

Graham Tuttle:

I just Googled it to make sure I’m on the same page. It’s called the Cathedral Effect. It’s basically, low ceilings tend to bring on feelings of confinement while high ceilings inspire a feeling of freedom. So there’s something to do I think with your brain’s capacity, but it is a fascinating thing too, so you’re not alone in this.

Steven Sashen:

I’m sure it’s not the same for everybody because I mean, I do know many people who just spend their whole time in a tiny room behind a bunch of screens right up against their face, and they do just fine. It’s just the way my brain works for whatever reason.

Graham Tuttle:

You could probably make the distinction between like a left and the right brain like, or-

Steven Sashen:

No, I’ll tell you why. The guy who came up with… so I was a cognitive psych guy when I was at Duke. This is… when did I graduate, ’83 and a half, ’84. The guy who came up with that idea of left brain right brain, has on numerous occasions, said it was the biggest mistake he ever made in his life. Because it’s not the way it works. I mean, there are some localized functions undeniably, but with the idea that right brain is all about creativity ,and that if you’re creative, you’re in your right brain versus if you’re linear, left brain, is completely not true.

Your whole brain is doing all of those things, but it’s become like a thing now. It’s a badge of honor. I mean, especially among… I’ll say this with a bit of disdain, not disdain, a bit of something. I’m poking fun at people that I’m about to talk about.

There are creative people who take pride in going, “Well, I’m just really right brained. I don’t do that.” You never hear people doing the other, “Well, I’m really left brained.” They never are proud about that. You can be proud about being right-brained but not the other way. Now, my favorite thing about that is when people would… So way back when I started a software company product for writers, and I would have writers say to me, call me for tech support, complaining about something they had a hard time with, on their computer, and they’d say, “Well, I’m a writer, I’m not a computer programmer.”

And I would say, “Okay, do you know the following three writers?” And these are people who are massively successful as writers. Ignore how much money they may or may not have made. And they would, “Oh yeah.” I go, “Yeah. In their spare time, they all write computer code.” So it’s just not what people think; anyway, blah, blah, blah.

Graham Tuttle:

Point being is that it wasn’t at this functionality across, like, let’s just say you’re oriented towards more of a creative open and versus a contracted dilated perspective. I think that there might be-

Steven Sashen:

I’m going to stop you there too, just for the hell of it. Because this idea that one is open and the other is somehow contained, I would argue that’s completely not true. You talk to any good, really, really logical linear scientist, and they will be talking to you about how creative they are, and what they’re doing, and it’s about opening new spaces. I remember the physicist, Richard Feynman, somebody said to him that they would hate to be him because he sees everything as just parts and pieces, and it’s linear and they’re really creative.

And he’s like, “Oh no, no. I don’t think you understand. When I look at a…” I’m going to paraphrase him dramatically, “When I look at a glass of water, it’s all I can do not to be overwhelmed by awe because it’s incredible that I’m seeing through a solid, and I understand how the molecules and atoms play together, and how this is actually a microcosm of the universe itself. And even that it’s contained in a glass is miraculous,” and he just goes on and on about the incredible artistic-ness of physics, and it just stopped the person cold.

Now Feynman, also just to prove a point, became a really amazing bongo drummer, did crazy things, learned how to paint portraits and do still lives. What’s the word when you’re painting a human being who’s sitting in front of you?

Graham Tuttle:

Oh yeah.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah, whatever that is. He did that in part to, frankly, he admitted to see women in small amount of clothing, to paint them and draw them. But regardless, he started doing artistic things because he found it interesting and also to prove a point. But anyway, so yes, there are some things that are the end result looks linear to people who don’t know any better, and there are some things that look open and creative to people who don’t know any better.

Graham Tuttle:

I’ll refine my language once further to say that the fractals of contracted and dilated thought processes allow you to think in different modes that allow you to be focused on something versus to think more broadly. I think it’s an eye dilation versus a constriction. I’m not saying that the same person can do that. I would just say that there might be times where you feel stronger or you’re making the decision that-

Steven Sashen:

No, I’m going to go there, and there’s definitely, there’s that thing of focusing that sort of opens up the doorway where suddenly something just pops in, because you’ve become so focused that your brain almost is looking for an escape and finds some wacky new idea.

Graham Tuttle:

This is fun. Normally, no one else will refine the semantics and then go to the next piece, and like, “All right, let’s go there.” This is like a chess match. This is a verbal chess match. I love it. That’s what like of all my people that go to the gym that unfortunately still think I’m a personal trainer, they show up and I’m like, “We’re going to have an argument about something. I don’t know what it is.” Like someone will just literally anything in the news, anything in like political theory or just like, it doesn’t even matter. I just like pick aside, let’s argue. And then I’m like, “What about blah?” Just back and forth. But no one gets to argue. This is fun. I like this.

Steven Sashen:

There’s a Charlie Chaplain movie. I almost said an old Charlie Chaplain movie, which was a funny phrase. It popped into my head because he hasn’t made any ones lately. So I don’t know what’s going on with the guy, but there’s a scene, if I’m remembering correctly, there’s a dad, big guy and his two younger kids who are like 20, and they’re on a boat if I’m remembering correctly, and they’re having dinner sitting at the table.

Dad’s at the head of the table, the two brothers are sitting on opposites facing each other, and they finish dinner, and they push back from the table, and they look at each other and say, “Okay, let’s fight,” and then they just break into a fight.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. But it is like a verbal jujitsu, verbal chess. It’s like being able to think about, it’s like, “Okay, where are you going?” And then it’s like, you catch it. It’s a lot of fun because if you can start to… I mean, at some point you get to like… if you maintain the idea that, “I’m never wrong, it’s just, you don’t understand me,” I think that always is a fun place to go in.

Steven Sashen:

Well, you started by talking about asking questions and I was going to accuse you of being Socratic. And I recently was asked if I could go back in time to meet anybody, who would it be? And I said, Socrates, because I love this idea of just continually investigating until you find something where you just can’t get underneath it, where that’s as true as it’s going to get as far as you can tell. And then I like to see if I can get underneath that too.

So that’s how I got here, was just all the things about running and movement. It’s like, “Are these things that people are saying, is that true? It just sounds like mythology.” I’ve developed a good radar for urban mythology. I can kind of hear something where it just sounds like it’s just been passed down without anyone ever investigating it.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. Which is amazing to me to think about, just even the concept that most people don’t… you’ll hear something and the way they say it, whether it’s a lack of conviction or they kind of like say, and there’s some like, “Oh,” well, when they do that, like they back away from it, as they’re like leaning into it, in a sense where it’s very interesting.

Steven Sashen:

Oh no, sometimes they’re 100% convicted. I mean, they are completely convinced that this thing is true, and it takes just a tiny bit of probing to reveal that that’s not the case. And then of course they start acting like you’re trying to kill their children, because we seem to hold our beliefs in a similar way that we hold our very sense of self. You question someone’s belief and you feel like they’re being attacked or they feel like they’re being attacked.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. People confuse the statement of truth with the statement of belief and they walk around thinking their statement of belief or statement of truth, and so then like you’re tearing apart their framework of their reality by just questioning certain things. You’re like, “Well, it’s not that big of a deal.”

Steven Sashen:

For some reason though, it feels like a big deal, and I literally do think it’s a neurological thing. I literally think that we hold certain beliefs, especially ones that are not attached to physical reality; something you can see, feel, touch. We hold those in a way that I literally do think is partly what makes up our sense of self. And so you pull the rug out from underneath that, and for some people that’s very disturbing.

Some people find that fun and interesting. Yeah. That’s a whole subset of human beings. But anyway, this was a very entertaining tangent, but I want to go back to what we opened with, because this was a conversation you and I started with that maybe people give a shit about. Look, and this relates to your failed personal training biz, there are so many things.

If I just go through my inbox or even more, my spam box, I can’t even tell you how many emails I am getting on a daily basis, about something that I need to do to be healthy. Some new thing that has just been discovered or only they, the secret they, know about. It can be really, really overwhelming. I brought that up because of something you said in our little chat before this started, you may have a different opinion about that or a different take on that, it seems. Am I incorrect?

Graham Tuttle:

No, and I think it’s ironic because there’s a certain level of our conversation on Socrates or Socrates, however you pronounce it.

Steven Sashen:

It’s Socrates.

Graham Tuttle:

Socrates okay, there you go, even the third option, but the idea of getting under the… continuing to ask the next question and getting under the next level, in a certain sense. My entire framework in terms of how I want to present a model of health and functionality for people, is to make it so basic and simple that they don’t want to disagree with it, in a sense like your feet shouldn’t be in pain, your feet shouldn’t hurt.

That is a simple argument’s like, okay, what’s the counteractive? “Well, no, my feet should hurt.” It’s like, “Well, do you like the way that sounded?” And so you’re starting to the basic simple framework of going, okay, fundamentally, it’s like we have these bodies, these carbon-based meat suits that have evolved over millions of years, and a lot of death, a lot of things have happened to allow us to get to where we are now.

And so, in some sense it’s like everything we’re here is built with a lot of trial and error in some capacity. So the idea of a, “Well, it just doesn’t work. You got bad genetics. You’re not going to be okay. The shoulders are an unstable joint. The feet can’t run. The feet need to be in shoes. They need to be protected, need support.” And so a lot of these urban myths is urban, I guess, legends as you call them, which I think is the perfect thing. It’s like anything that has to be substantiated by some level of like, “Well, this happens because of that,” as opposed to an evident thing that you could walk and see, proven by basic… like the inexistence of our human ability in some senses, is like it doesn’t stand the truth test to me.

So, I look and say, “Okay, our bodies are strong and capable, and what would we have done for a dietary support? What would we have done for our health, light? What would our life have looked like a 100, 200,000 years ago? And then how much of that could we have possibly lost in the intermediate generations versus how much of that has just gotten rusty?” And so I kind of take that to say, fundamentally, our body shouldn’t be in pain. Being healthy should be simple, and it’s accessible to everybody.

In those three little capacities, like that forms the world, do I look at it, and then say, “Okay.” Well now, in the cases that these aren’t exhibited to be true, meaning you’re in pain, you’re confused about your body and you don’t feel like you have access to the skills you need; what’s gone wrong there?

And a lot of people, they get confused by marketing. They’ve been shoved into an environment that no longer fits their actual physical operation system. Or they’ve been told that, the gatekeepers of knowledge that make everything challenging and they put a patent on something, and they tell you, “Well, you can’t do it unless you have our special thing.” It’s like, those are the things that it’s like, “Okay, what are the pre suppositions that these people are trying to create?” So I think you sort of see this bifurcated in a sense, where there’s either your body is strong, healthy, capable, resilient, you get the right things to kind of get the rust off and get it moving. You get the right support and the right stimuli for the tissues and joints itself, it will take care of itself.

Or the body is ultimately fragile. It’s not healthy. It’s not capable of surviving on its own, and you need this supplement, this pill, this thing to be able to function. And so that’s where you see one of the other things, and you see our medical community either goes to like a triage and like a, we got to get everything still so that we can hold onto things and not let anything happen; provide support and passive control to keep the body bound up, or there’s things that are restoration and getting things moving in the right direction.

So, there’s movement or stillness, and stillness is always death. So that’s the underlying foundation to look at. And then you look and say… I’ll let you have any reflections or thoughts on that?

Steven Sashen:

Well, the only one, I mean, there’s a bunch of little things, but the only one that I’m most intrigued by is when you present this idea to someone, how often do you find that they try to make a claim of being a special little snowflake to whom what you just said, doesn’t apply.

Graham Tuttle:

This is the pet theory I have in some sense, I think there’s, and this is obviously a reductionist perspective, but there’s like two sides of types of people; there’s the generalist, and there’s the specialist, the snowflake, meaning, I tend to be like, “Well, if it happens to me, it happens to everybody.” There’s a certain level of like, “I’m not special, I’m just a human, these things could happen to anybody,” or there’s people, “I can’t believe this happened to me. Everything is bad. Everything’s always in my life.”

And maybe there’s phases of life people go through, but I think you see the certain level of a like… and maybe this is an extrovert versus introvert thing. An introvert’s like, “It only happens to me. I’m alone, no one could understand me,” versus an extrovert that’s very probably like, “Oh yeah, you just like me. So I’m going to talk to you.”

Steven Sashen:

I’m going to, I’m going to dive into this a little more, because I think human beings, we do tend to extrapolate and think that whatever we are experiencing is what other people are or should be experiencing as well, which is often massively misguided. It’s why we don’t understand people from other cultures very well, because we think that they’re just confused versions of us. I’ll use a as an example, just China, and I’ll use the intellectual property argument that’s going on with China.

It’s like, “They’re stealing our intellectual property.” Well, in China, if someone develops something valuable, their worldview is it should be copied and shared with as many people as possible, so they can enjoy the benefits of it. Not that one person should make a whole lot of money from it. That the value of the community is important.

And this is a completely logical worldview, completely conflicts with the one that we have here, which is, you need to protect that so that a select number of people can make money and then lord it over you. Americans just literally can’t wrap their brain around the idea that this communal version, I don’t want to say communist, because that’s a whole other thing, but this communal version of intellectual property, is a completely valid way of seeing the world, but we don’t get it because we think that other people should think the way we do.

We’re not exposed to a myriad other ways of seeing the world. So there’s that part. And that creates problems. Because, I’ll say it from the zero issues perspective. When someone has… look, manufacturing is never perfect. We have a very low problem rate with our products.

But if somebody has a problem with one of our products they’ll write or often, they will write or contact us, assuming that it’s happening to everybody, they’re extrapolating from there. “This thing that happened to me, clearly everyone’s having the same experience I am.” It’s sometimes very difficult to present information to them to demonstrate that no, this is a weird thing, or they go, “Well I got one pair of shoes and then I got it replaced. I have the same problem.” I went, “Yeah. It’s not because we have this with everybody. It’s because the guy who was making that shoe, made the one right after it too. And so he just screwed it up a couple times in a row, and we’ll see what we can do about that.” So we’ve always got a solution, but anyway, so that’s the first part.

But the other snowflake-y part is that even if you found a million people who were exactly like you, who thought just like you, but there was one thing that all million of those people thought that was different than you, you’d go, “Yeah, but see, I’m actually not like them.” If 99.9% of what they’re doing is exactly like you, that 0.1%, you’re going to, “See I’m special.” If you hear that everyone who’s ever won the lottery is no happier than they were before they won the lottery some a year later, you’d still think, “Yeah. But if I won the lottery.”

Graham Tuttle:

I want to learn that lesson the hard way.

Steven Sashen:

Well, but again, that’s an interesting point. It’s like people say that same thing. It’s like, “Let me see. Let’s prove it.” No one will believe that if they found a million people who got the thing that they thought they needed to be happy, and found out those million people were no happier than they were before getting it, or no happier than the person investigating, they’d still go, “Yeah, but if I got it,” and that’s the flip side.

On the one hand we extrapolate and assume everyone’s like us, on the other hand, around certain things, we think that we are special little snowflakes, which is again, you’re presenting a, we’re all fundamentally the same in that these bodies are really simple really. Because there was a time where we didn’t have all these accoutrements and all these accessories and all these supplements and all these tools and techniques and gyms and workout styles and blah, blah, blah. And people were doing just fine.

But you say that to someone these days, again, I’m just wondering how many times someone goes. “Yeah, that’s fine for all of them, but me…”

Graham Tuttle:

Which is interesting because what people… so I rarely go in with the broad picture. I always go specifics, like, “How does your body feel?” And there’s always some type of pain or something like that. But what’s interesting about that argument is that like, who’s selling them that? Like, “Well you’re not like anybody else.” It’s interesting that once people start to see that of like-

Steven Sashen:

Well wait, I’m going to interrupt. I think it’s a natural human thing that has been exploited.

Graham Tuttle:

Yes. That’s what I was getting at. So like you look at the marketing where there’s a certain level of like, “Well, that works for some people, but you probably have a specific microbiome, a specific dietary thing, a specific shoe, and a specific thing,” and it’s like, “Okay, that’s convenient for you to sell me a specific product that I have to continue to do.” No better is this argument exemplified than when you look at weight loss for an animal. If you have a dog and you say, “Okay, your dog’s overweight.” How do you get the dog to lose weight? I know you know this too.

Steven Sashen:

Well first you have to find CrossFit for dogs, and then you need a minimum three-month membership. That’s all I know. Is there some other option?

Graham Tuttle:

You need the right supplements. You have to make sure you get a nutritionist. You get a personal trainer that you work with around the CrossFit. You have to have the right pair of workout clothes, right leash, right collar.

Everyone knows the answer, which is, you feed the dog less, and you take it for a walk, and there is no question about that. And yet when it comes… like I was watching this thing. I watch lectures and stuff at night when I’m eating dinner by myself. I watched a lot of the commercials just to see the marketing angle. But you’ll see these arguments going, where there’s now it’s the current, you got toxic poop floating around your entire body.

And it’s the fear mongering. Before it was, “You’re eating too many carbs. You eating too much fat. You have toxic poop and now you need to cleanse yourself. Wait, now you’re cleansing yourself too much. Now you need to fast.” There’s always some reason. It’s like, take your dog for a walk and feed it less. It’s pretty simple.

Steven Sashen:

Now look, I mean, granted, there are sometimes where there are yes peculiarities, and there are genetic differences, it’s still fundamentally similar. I’ve been accused often as a sprinter, I’ve been accused often of eating too many carbs. And I say, I’ve never met a sprinter or other power athlete who doesn’t eat a lot of carbs. That’s the way we’re wired.

Graham Tuttle:

Well, and you think of even the language, “Too many carbs.” I think about this, so you hear this thing where like, and I’ve been guilty as well, but almost like, think of like, what’s the underlying assumption that someone is making, when they’re making their argument and why do they need that to be true, to support their worldview, where people would say, and again, I am attentional to my carbs, like I eat rice and fruit and you know, squash, carrots, whatever.

My thing is like, it’s the fake food that wasn’t here 200 years ago, that’s the real problem. But more specifically you hear people say, “Well, carbs and fat never existed in the same food as in the wild.” You hear that.

But guess what happens, humans are really funny and they’re really weird and would go around and say, “Oh, that would look good with that.” I think about this all the time. I mean, this is just a thought, but you know the idea of like, ‘Well, humans aren’t meant to have tattoos or piercings.” You name one indigenous tribe that doesn’t have all kinds of body modifications. We’re just weird people.

Even just think about the fact of the food thing. You have celebrations, “We’re going to go and we’re going to hunt. We’re going to get some of this and put it with some of that.” And it’s like, we come from a long, rich history of people who kept fiddling with the world around us. Our bodies are very well adapted to do this stuff just because that’s… we’re like the most multi-tool like… we’re the multi tool of the animal kingdom in a sense. It’s like, do a lot of stuff.

Steven Sashen:

I like the idea that we are walking Leatherman.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah, it is, but you think about that idea from like, “Okay, well you should never eat carbs,” like, “Well, I’m pretty sure we would’ve eaten…” again, you make the argument where you would have access to it. And like that’s all there. But I’m just saying like, anytime there’s a reductionist about the human body can’t do this, I’m like, “Well, are you sure? I think we’re pretty much… if we’re healthy and happy, we should be able to kind of survive.”

Steven Sashen:

I’m going to have a plug for someone who’s not on this call. Have you heard of Denise Minger?

Graham Tuttle:

I have not, but I would love to be told more.

Steven Sashen:

Wrote a book called Death by Food Pyramid.

Graham Tuttle:

Okay.

Steven Sashen:

So, Denise was, as a teenager, a raw food vegan, and then started having serious health problems, and started investigating this, and then went the exact other way, and just started eating practically nothing but meat. And so the paleo community loved her, but she decided to investigate what they were saying too. And why they were saying carbs and sugar, and especially refined sugar, is the devil incarnate.

She found a couple things, a number of indigenous tribes, whose diet is like 80%+ carbs. Some of them refined carbs, like they refined their sugar, and they eat the sugar. There was a diet actually done at Duke called the Rice Diet, where you could eat… This is for massively morbidly obese people. You could eat as much as you want of only the following things, fruit juice, white sugar, and I’m forgetting one other thing. It’s mostly like fruit juice and white sugar. I know I’m forgetting one other thing.

Now, the diet is no longer being practiced because it’s so hard to stay on. The guy who did it, who was this crazy German guy, who was literally whipping people to make them stick on the diet. I also know Domino’s guys who made a $1,000 by delivering pizzas to these people, without anyone knowing. But the interesting point about both the people on the rice diet, who lost their weight, got down to a normal weight, reversed, completely cured themselves of diabetes, and the people who are these indigenous tribes, who we eat a ton of carbs, totally healthy, totally fine.

Denise, I think her blog is something like, Raw Food SOS, don’t hold me to it, but look her up. Denise Minger. She has said recently that she doesn’t plan to be writing about diet and health any longer. And given her way of investigating things, my suspicion is that it’s because she, in her research, determined there’s no real correlation between what you eat and how long you live.

Graham Tuttle:

This is an interesting thing. I kind of started to pay attention to what people we’re doing, what they weren’t doing. I think there’s six fundamental levers of health we could pull on. I think movement is just one of them. Food is the second, but there’s water, light, breathing and sleep. So you look at those like… So if I’m talking to someone, all people want to focus, and interesting because we have an obsession over food.

You look at TikToks and people will just sit there and watch food and food and food and food and food. Think about the idea of how many restaurants there are there for food. It’s just, they’re everywhere. People want to go eat and want to eat again. We’re just eating people. We just sit down and… I remember was with one of my clients, like, “Y’all north Carolinas are just a bunch of eating people. You just eat and eat.”

I’m like, “Yeah, people wake up, like, “What should we eat?” and then they sit around for three hours, “What should we eat?” And that’s just one level.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s one,” but if your sleep is horrible, if you’re not breathing, if you mouth breath or you have no capacity to understand, I think sleep is how we control our energy, food is how we control our nutrients, our breath is how we control our psychological state, our movement is how we control the hormone. Obviously there’s a lot of things in movement.

I think movement is how we think as well. You can make the argument that movement came before… I think it’s actually not argument, movement came before speech in a sense. We movement because we speak in a sense. We speak because we move. I should say backwards. And then, obviously there’s the emotional, your connection in the tribe and the community, and no one ever talks about that.

You look at the blue zones and all these different things like, “Yeah, but they had a purpose. They had to thing to get up and do.” But there’s so much money to be made in telling people they have the wrong thing. And the water too is another piece too. You know, getting enough hydration.

Steven Sashen:

I’m old enough to remember before the word hydrate was a thing. I mean, it’s like, we used to just drink water when we were thirsty. Now you’ve got to be properly hydrated and you need magic hydration, whatever stuff to be properly hydrated.

Graham Tuttle:

Well, to me it’s funny because I remember being told, I didn’t think this has actually gone about it, the homeostatic cues or tells your body would give you when you’re thirsty, you can’t trust those. You got to drink before you’re thirsty and you got to drink after you’re thirsty and you got to keep drinking. I remember when I was in exercise sports science, talking about hydration.

It’s like, “Well, your body doesn’t know you’re thirsty until 15 minutes later.” You’re telling me that the thing you just told me, if I lose 1% of my body weight, I’m at risk for death and stroke and all this stuff yet, my body has a delayed cue. Especially in an environment where it’s like, we pass out, “I don’t need water. I’m not thirsty. My body would tell me.” And it’s like, “Wait, I should have had like…” It’s so silly.

It’s so silly that our body is like, “We can’t listen to our body.” And again, there are a lot of people who are very out of tune with their body and some of them can’t feel the ground and feel their environment, but I think the path back towards understanding ourselves starts with the fundamental idea that maybe there is some wisdom that’s stored in my intuitive, knowing that I might not have the words or science hasn’t proven the exact studies or I don’t have the exact supplement to do that.

There’s something in my body isn’t just a dumb meat suit. There’s a lot of knowledge stored in this thing that like… Because I think that’s the beginning of curiosity. And then once you can start to open up and see like, “Huh, it’s interesting,” you start to trust yourself more and I think fundamentally that’s what gives us the ability to move forward in life, is to trust in ourselves.

Steven Sashen:

It’s anti-capitalist in that if you were good at paying attention to yourself and your own experience and analyzing that correctly, you become much less susceptible to marketing.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah, absolutely.

Steven Sashen:

I’ve often said this. I say, “More people need to know about physics because then you won’t be susceptible to certain kinds of marketing, in the running shoe world in particular, where they misuse physics on a daily basis to convince you of things that aren’t true.”

Graham Tuttle:

It’s crazy stuff.

Steven Sashen:

You started a segue that I want to follow, which is really, let’s talk about this practically. When people are introduced to this idea of paying attention to these six things that you mentioned paying attention to, then what can some people who are listening to this, watching this, or somehow getting it through psychic vibes or smoke signals, what’s the next step? What can people start to do to start experiencing what you’re talking about? To start discovering this for themselves and expand on that.

Graham Tuttle:

One of the things I always think is valuable to point out first is that these are ubiquitously available. It’s the most handicap accessible thing in a certain sense. We all have the capacity to move. I was doing some research about the spinal engine theory, where you start looking at people that had no legs and no arms. Their spine can still move. All movement comes from the spine. So we all have the capacity to move, to use our body, our eyes or face or ears to engage with the world. So movement is free, right?

Whether or not you have to do it at the gym that’s whether or not you want to believe someone else’s story, but movement is ubiquitously free. Then sunlight. The sun still shining even on a cloudy day. The sun still comes out everywhere in the world, except for 30 days of night Antarctica, but…

Then water. What’s interesting is you look at things like air, the water and the food. There’s the sleep, there’s movement and there’s the breath. So sleep, movement and you have to go and add water. So sleep movement, air, so breathing-

Steven Sashen:

You can do it. I believe in you.

Graham Tuttle:

I know sleep, movement, water, food, air… There’s another one but you think about the ones that like are problem, so communal. The ones that matter right now like the water, the food and the air, right? Those are things that we would’ve depended exogenously. We can breathe, we can move, we can sleep. We can do that wherever we are, our bodies need to have that, but we have to depend on a community to take care of the water, to care of the food, take care of the oxygen around us.

That’s where it gets really tough and I think when you look at things, people that get marginalized in some sense. It’s like they don’t understand. They’ve been told that it’s not that important whether or not you drink out of a plastic water bottle. They’re told that it’s not that important if you have clean air around you or what you’re wearing on your face, any number of things.

Those are the things that really frustrate me because it’s like the things that are fundamental to our human bodies, access to health is being polluted by a communal community that, not only is not going to pay the actuality for it but is also gas lighting them along the way of like, “Oh yeah, your water is dirty, but that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter that much.” “Oh wait, we got fluoride in it. That doesn’t matter that much.”

Then you get it on the health professional, where they do studies and stuff like that or in like 1950s, when they paid the sugar industry, paid the researchers at Harvard, I think to point that it was fat and cholesterol that was causing problems as opposed to the sugar and the soda. Something along those lines. But you see this where now it’s a difficult thing because people don’t know what to believe and that’s where you see a fundamental misalignment of values in some capacity. It’s like, these things that should be ubiquitously available for people, it’s like, they can control some of them, but other things it’s like, we don’t have the intuitive sense to go out and get the well water and test that it’s clean, so we are going to have to trust that our community’s not pouring pollutants in the water.

Steven Sashen:

I like the delineation between the things that are intrinsic versus extrinsic. The extrinsic things are the… I mean, they can all be problematic, but once we have this delineation, again, we can get hyper focused on the water, the food, the air to the point of wanting to shoot ourself frankly. And the intrinsic stuff, the breathing, the sleeping, the moving, that we have more immediate control of, but we’re still susceptible to the same kind of sales pitches, the same kind of whatever.

Some people are going to argue that that’s what I do. That’s what we do. It’s like, we’re selling this idea of, “Grab these shoes,” but of course the joke is, I just say, “We’re just getting out of the way as much as possible.” Shoes, since the beginning of human history is something to protect your foot, something to hold that on your foot, some insulation, if you need it. If you need any of that at all, it’s really pretty straightforward.

Graham Tuttle:

But I think you look at the underlying ethos of what you’re doing as a company, as an individual like, “I’m taking you from this step.” You can look into the argument and say, “Okay, what direction am I moving people in?” I may be using the tool and the language… If you speak Spanish and I don’t speak in Spanish, then I can’t communicate with you. But if I can learn to speak some Spanish, even if it’s a broke Spanglish, and I can walk with you in that direction of like, you could say, “Why are you trying to change everything?” It’s like, “No, I’m trying to get on a kind of communal level of understanding.”

The shoes you sell are getting people in a direction of, “I’m getting more stimulus to your body. I’m getting you in this direction of trusting yourself,” and I think that’s the thing, is it doesn’t have to be like, “Oh, you’re still on this side of the spectrum, which is selling your product, but it’s like that product’s moving you away and there’s a whole ethos around how you orient the business, which is huge

Steven Sashen:

Obviously, we’re part of that equation, but backing up to you, it’s all about you. Not really. It’s conversation, but it is all about you. What else do you want to give people as giving them an invitation to start exploring this simpler version of approaching their health, their body, their relationship to everything else. We want to give people some things they can experience rather than just go, “Oh, that makes sense,” and not have anywhere to go with it.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. There’s a few things. One, sleep, breath, light, movement, food, water. I don’t know which one I was forgetting, but that’s the simple idea, but the exogenous ones are the-

Steven Sashen:

Light. You forgot light.

Graham Tuttle:

Light. That’s it. Yeah. Light’s always available, movement’s always available, sleep is always available. Those things we can easily control. Breath is kind of the next thing, in some sense, unless you’re in a polluted environment, but then there’s the food and water. Those are things that can get messy quick because we don’t have ability to control that. That being said, I’ve been dating this girl that I’m quite crazy about, but there’s one of the things I’ve spent time with her realizing she’s very good at feeling in a sense, and so there’s an intuitive sense.

So, what I would invite people to start to do is to pay attention to things in a sense that we get ingrained in our life like a… If you think about the analogy of a ski slope, where people go down the exact rivets and they get rode in these ruts and they go through this life and they don’t really think about things.

They’re always reacting. They’re never responding. They’re never really thinking or feeling or paying attention to things. Some of those pieces are involved in slowing down and just attending to the things in your body. This is the idea of, “Okay, because it’s nice to talk about these things on a theoretical level, but it’s like, where does it come in with a tangible. What do I do next?”

That’s where I look at this idea of feedback. Your body is always giving you feedback, and in many cases, it’s the next most obvious answer. Not the one that like, “Oh, I would love to watch TV,” but it’s like, if you think of one layer underneath, what is it that you want? I’m craving this specific food. It’s like, “ Well, what is it that I really want? Do I just want the sugar or am I stressed and the cortisol will be mitigated by the insulin rush?”

“Do I want to watch TV or am I just overwhelmed; I need to turn my brain off? We’ve learned quick responses to deal with these specific feedback impulses we have and so, “Okay. Well what’s the thing I’m feeling?” and sure, I might want to go shoot heroin up, but really what I’m feeling is overwhelmed and stressed and so I just need to talk to someone, have a good conversation, get outside, take a nap, whatever these things are.

And so, the point is to attune to the feedback your body gives you. It is a very obvious thing and so most people, they talk about, you get involved like the entrepreneurial circle, people talk about like, “What’s the dream in your life? What’s the passion? What are you going to build? What are you going to do?”

Your body can’t even comprehend that until it has the basic necessities taken care of. So it’s screaming at you saying, “My knees hurt,” and so I look at like, “What does joint pain feel like? Okay, well I’m not getting enough stimulus like let’s say hyaluronic acid and hydrations of the tissues and the connective tissue around it. Maybe there’s something missing into my nutrition, maybe I’m doing too much of the same thing, maybe I’m too sedentary.” Your body knows this stuff.

Steven Sashen:

Well, I want to interrupt because the way we kind of dove into this, but as we dove into it, it suddenly started getting super complicated, like the whole hyaluronic acid. I mean, that’s like suddenly we’re talking fucking supplements. I want to back up to the first part you said, before we try to figure more crap out, was this, again, it’s kind of this Socratic approach to our body of paying attention to things that we either want or want to get rid of, and pardon me, I’m trying to paraphrase and asking some questions. I mean, paying attention and then asking questions. The biggest one is simply why? So like you said, the one that I love is, “I want to watch TV.” “Why?”

Because for Lena and me, at the end of a long day, I come home, I make dinner, we watch TV, dog on the couch and it’s because we’re tired. On the one hand, we could go take a nap, but we also like being together, being with the dog, having some entertainment, which is a shared experience. So the why for watching TV is definitely… It’s a really interesting question. But if I went underneath, in fact the why is, “Shut my brain off,” but I already just did it.

The secondary, why or underneath that is, “Oh yeah. There’s this time together.” All those whys can be really interesting, because my favorite example you gave is, “I’m going to go shoot heroin or drink,” or whatever it is that we use to not feel something or not think something. That’s an interesting one. “I want to go get drunk,” or, “I want to go get high.” Why? “Well, I can’t handle,” fill in the blank.

And if we ask why we might find ourselves saying, “Well, that’s interesting because actually I can handle it. I just don’t like it. I’m just trying to avoid this thing,” and maybe that’ll change the relationship you have when you reach for that bottle, that syringe, that pill, that whatever.

Again, I’m paraphrasing, but it sounds like if we had to put someone on the path, we’d invite them to, and please correct me when I’m finished ranting about this, we’d invite them to pay attention to the things that they want to have different or that are causing problems or they’re moving towards whether it has to do with food or… Pick one. I’d pick one, is what I would do. Pick one and pay attention to what thoughts you have, what feelings you have around that thing and ask that question of, “Why?” or, “What’s next?” or, “What does that mean?” That’s the way I approach investigating.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. No, I love what you said. I think there’s a bidirectional component to that, which is okay, you pay attention to, “What is the thing I’m moving towards?” and then you ask why. And it’s almost always, “I’m either moving towards it because of something I’m…” There’s like a co factor in a sense, like, “I’m moving towards watching TV on the couch because it also represents this thing,” there’s a carry on with it, or I’m moving away from something else meaning there’s a problem.

So, the question is, “Whatever this thing I’m attending to that I think is important that I want to do that I’m motivated to do, why is that? Is it because of something… What’s the real thing that I’m going with it or what’s the thing I’m running away from?” In many cases, there’s, there’s two opportunities there.

If you pay attention to things that’s going with it, you can actually then say, “Well, I do love watching TV and that stuff, but what I really want is the connective time with my wife, so I might play a board game or something like that.” I could maximize the thing I actually want by doing this thing. Or I can turn and have more feedback. It didn’t even have to tackle today, but it’s like, “I’m doing that because we don’t really want to have a conversation. This is our quality time, but we don’t want to have conversations about some difficult fight we had the other day or I’m running away from the stress of things I have to do.”

And it’s like, “Well, I need to turn and face that,” because… There’s this great quote I read today, which is, “If you imagine the problems you have in your life right now, but put yourself 3, 4, 5 years in the future and those problems have only gotten worse to the point you have to deal with them, it’s like, it makes it much…

We don’t attend to the problems in our life because we think they’ll just go away. But if we were to sit there as a thought experience and say, not only is this not going to go away, it’s going to get five to 10, 15 times worse. It’s kind of like the parking ticket. It’s 20 bucks. I don’t want to deal with it, but if I said, “Okay, in two years this will be $2,000, $200,000 or I can’t get a license,” that makes that $20 seem very easy.

I think some of those things that like changing perspective, but it only happens when we start to attend and actually notice what’s going on and then say, “Okay,” but you have to have an honest account. We have to see things clearly.

Steven Sashen:

So then let’s apply this to our six different things as simply as we can to sort of investigative informative, moving towards or moving away thing. I’ll let you do them in whatever order you like since I can’t remember the order.

Graham Tuttle:

I would look and say, “What’s the simple… What’s the function of this thing?” So you look at sleep is the ability… I think if you look at enthusiasm, excitement, joy, like gratitude, that primarily has to do with sleep. These are broad categorizations because they do overlap, but you look at like, “What do you feel when you feel you’re tired, you’re grumpy, you’re hungry, you’re all these things.” It’s like, “Okay. If you’re feeling low energy, you’re unenthused about life, then you probably need more sleep. If you’re feeling low, energetic, meaning you don’t have the… Your brain isn’t functioning well, you don’t have the energy to focus, you don’t have the… It’s a little bit different-

Steven Sashen:

I’m going to pause right there. Let’s say we have that. We realize, “Okay, my sleep is not contributing to my happiness and all those other factors.” How does someone then not go down the rabbit hole we described of trying to figure out every supplement you need, the perfect mattress, the perfect pillow, the perfect this.

If you remember from the movie Being There, when Chauncey, the gardener says, his bed is in the middle of the room facing some weird way, and someone says, “Why is your bed like this?” He goes, “I can only sleep with my head pointing North.” And as they start to leave the room, the guy goes, “Wait, that’s West,” and Chance goes, “Huh?”

Graham Tuttle:

I would look and say, go to the fundamental underlying basics of like, “What’s the simplest thing? Have you given yourself eight hours to be in the bed?” Period. Have you done that? And then you can look at some of the basic things like, “Okay, which makes more sense? Do you sleep when there’s light outside or when it’s dark outside?” “Oh, okay. I sleep when the sun goes down.” So your room dark?

“All right. Do you sleep better when it’s really hot or when it’s really cold?” or like, “Okay, are you comfortable?” Some of the basic things, before you look at anything exogenous, just look at what’s the basic framework within which I would’ve slept 300 years ago?”

Steven Sashen:

Awesome.

Graham Tuttle:

Simple.

Steven Sashen:

Okay. Now, from there, let’s move on to something past sleep.

Graham Tuttle:

That will go light. So light would be your exposure, because there’s a few things. There’s sunlight, which is like your… Do you have tan lines? Do you burn when you go out in the sun and do you get enough sun exposure or light exposure in the morning? There’s a certain level of like, “That sets your energetic rhythm.” You don’t have to know a bunch of this stuff, but otherwise it’s like, generally you would wake up when the sun comes up and you go to bed when it goes down, roughly speaking.

And you don’t have to do that, but you would otherwise know that before we had abundant access to fake light, that would’ve been the circle. The whole point is I’m not expecting people to go live this perfect ancestral lifestyle because I don’t even think… I think there’s a fetishizing about that we don’t even know. We can’t prove it to be for sure at all. But I think you can take these allegorical examples of like, “Theoretically, this is how it would work,” so our first principle’s perspective and say, “Yeah, okay. I can imagine that most people without fire and a lot of fire or a light bulb, would’ve said, “It’s getting dark outside. I’m going to go to bed,” and, “It’s getting bright outside. I’m going to wake up.”

Okay. Good. So we can take cues that like, “I generally would’ve been awake at these times and so I can say my brain would’ve associated the cues with that.” Then in the middle of the day, it’s like being… I think this idea just astounds me. The idea of being inside. Think about that. We’re both inside. That concept would not have existed up until, I don’t know, a few hundred years ago, maybe a few thousand, like 1,000, 2,000, 3000 years ago.

Inside, as in a separate side isn’t to cut away but inside, outside, it so blows my mind that like people would not, “Yeah. Do you want to come inside of my house?” It’s like, “What do you mean inside? What?” They couldn’t understand it. So the idea though is we would’ve been inside and we have exposure and so that sets our brain’s ability to get light to… There’s so many different levels without getting too nerdy about it. The basic idea is like, if you’re low on energy, like getting the sunlight sets your energetic circadian rhythm, and that also functions with your sleep. So that’s why they overflow.

But you can say first principles, “What am I missing?” If I’m low energy, it’s like, Well, have you been inside all day?” Okay. So maybe it’s time to go outside and then start your day, finish your day and then spend some time in the middle of the day being outside and that’s going to help your energy go up.

Then you look at food. I look at food, you think, “Okay, well this basic thing that people would’ve had.” How would you know that it’s a problem and say, “Okay, you either overweight, meaning you have too much fat, or you are nutrient deficient.” So in a sense food would function as a way to store calories for the future, so store energetic capacity for the future, by getting nutrients.

So that’s where you look at deficiencies in your skin, your hair, your nails, basically your body ability to recovery, your hormone production, stuff like that. But basically it’s like, “Do you feel good? Do you look good?” And that’s where you look at the cues of, “Is your skin supple? Do you get flush? Is your circulation good? Are your nails healthy? Is your hair healthy? Do your teeth, are they formed well? Is your jaw formed well?”

So, you can look at… How attractive someone is really a good measure of how well they have access to food in some sense. So you can look at someone that’s, and this is broadly speaking because obviously it’s not the same for everyone.

Steven Sashen:

Yes. We’re not going to talk about anorexic models. There’s different levels of attractiveness in that frame, but suffice to say… Anyway, onto our first principles or simple thing of approaching food, and FYI, I do… Back to something else you said, I do think that we over focus on food, thinking it has more magical powers than it does, but be that as it may. So if someone starts to investigate the food aspect, then what’s our simplest way of doing that, of inviting that questioning mentality?

Graham Tuttle:

Did what you eat exist 200 years ago? I just think that is the simplest thing. And honestly, for most of the vegan vegetarians, it can be totally fine, it can work for you, but it’s like, “This is a modern-day luxury based off refrigeration and the ability to have this access to farming.” And I’m not saying that we couldn’t do it.

Steven Sashen:

You know, in 150 years, definitely, you can’t ask that question because then not only would you be able to say, “Well, 200 years ago we Twinkies, but you’d still be able to have one that was still fresh that was made 200 years ago.”

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. Well, that’s assuming the people, I think at that point, if we have not managed to have an understanding about nutrition that serves us well, we would’ve bankrupted every capacity of a free society because of healthcare. We’re already on that path but…

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly a good start. “Was this something my grandparents could have made or gotten access?” I mean, not even access to because we do get access to things that they couldn’t get. I mean, getting grapes in the winter, I mean, that’s not going to happen in the Northern hemisphere, but the fact that you can get them, 200 years ago was reason to find them.

Graham Tuttle:

Somewhere in the world. Yeah. That’s why I think you can look and you don’t have to be overly reductionist about like, “Well, at this latitude, we wouldn’t have this at this season.” Yeah, but you know we also have iPhones and I’m happy about that too. So you look and say like, “Broadly speaking, I don’t need to be overly dogmatic about this because there’s a lot of things like, flushing toilets that are great about technology. So I don’t have to be overly dogmatic about it but I think the fundamental thing of saying, “Was there some place that this thing existed in the form I can eat right now at any point in the world at any point?”

And if that’s a no at ever… And you can make the argument things that like the more ubiquitously available, they would’ve been like fish and meat and some types of fruit, like, “Okay, then probably would eat those more frequently and then things that like, maybe not as always there, like you can say a proportion of that.”

Steven Sashen:

I want to highlight something you just said, which is, don’t get too panties in a wad about it because the bananas we have now are not the same bananas they had 200 years ago. Whole different game. Apples, same thing. In fact, some we lost, some we gained, but suffice it to say, don’t get too uptight about it. All right, we’ve done sleep. We’ve done food. We’ve done-

Graham Tuttle:

Light.

Steven Sashen:

We’ve done light. All right. We got a couple minutes. Let’s do the other three.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. So water, for example. Water, I think goes into your ability. There’s a lot of things to go with water, but basically, I think that’s your focus in the sense. Your joint, your hydration, your skin, it’s like a dehydration, like a dryness. If you feel dry, you feel parched, like your body isn’t elastic, your skin doesn’t pop back, there’s certain things you can feel. That’s a more of intuitive thing, but you will feel dry and that’s a cue for a lot of people.

It’s like, “Okay, have you drank any water?” or, “When’s the last time you drank something that wasn’t flavored?” And not to say that’s a problem, but it’s like, “Okay, some level, it’s okay to have that.” That’s a little bit broader because I think that there is some of this stuff… It is important, but, “Do you drink when you’re thirsty?” There’s basic, like an ounce per two pounds body weight or an ounce per kilo. Roughly speaking, that’s going to be fine, but like…

Actually, I’m sorry. I lied about all that. Is your urine dark purple? Is a dark brown, dark yellow? What does your pee look like? If your pee is really yellow, you need to drink more water. If it’s really clear, probably drink less water.

Steven Sashen:

And if your pee is dark purple, you are on shrooms, dude.

Graham Tuttle:

Yeah. Sorry about purple. That’s what I meant. The first principles of like, “Yeah, look at your body,” and it’s like, “Okay. One of those is that you’re drinking too much, one, you’re drinking too little. It’ll tell you. You use the color.

Then the next one you get movement in a sense. I think movement is basically a level of pain and it’s like your joints in a sense. Do your joints feel good? Do you feel stiff? Do you feel tight? There is something like, “Do you have pain in your body?” That pain could be a finger, it could be joints, it could be anything going on, your muscles feel stiff. You’ll know. When you get up, it’s like, “What hurts?” And if you don’t hurt, that’s good. It’s okay. It’s okay to not hurt. I think there’s a level of people who want things to be different. They want running.

People get really known and talk about running because they think it’s like, “Well, it’s supposed to be hard,” and I’m like, “No, it’s not. It is a fundamental we can run and it shouldn’t take that much energy. You want it to be hard so you burn the calories and that stuff,” but that’s broadly speaking. But if your body hurts, yeah. And so then you say, “Okay, have I moved everything? Have I gotten out of my chair? Have I sat for more than 30 minutes in one spot?”

And then the last one, breathing. I think breathing is where you look at the inner psychological state basically. Are you stressed? Are you overwhelmed? Are you anxious. Are you tense? Are you grinding your teeth? Then in which case, most of the time, you’re mouth breathing in sympathetic state of like, “Okay, I’m hyped up.” Breathing is how we access that parasympathetic, which is a calm, rest, digest phase. Meditation is mindfulness, just calming and taking a second.

So, it’s one of those like, “How do you feel? Do you feel good? Are you anxious? Are you depressed? Are you overwhelmed?” “Yeah.” “How’s your breathing?” And it’s like, “Okay, well just take a second and catch a breath.” There’s a reason for some of these statements.

Steven Sashen:

One of the things that I find interesting is the challenge to some of this for some people is that one of the other functions that our brain does for us is habituating. And so we’ll have a certain kind of pain, a certain kind of tension, for example and for a while the brain just goes, “I got to stop paying attention to that because it’s too distracting,” so we just don’t notice and it takes someone to point it out, which typically we don’t respond well to.

So, someone says, “Dude, you’re a little tight.” “I’m not tight.” “Oh real relax.” “I’m relaxed.” “Oh geez, take a breath.” “I’m breathing.” “Holy crap, man.” Things like that. That’s actually another interesting thing that I’m just playing with in my brain right now is like, “What can I…” I don’t even know how to ask the question because how do you become aware of something-

Graham Tuttle:

The snow globe?

Steven Sashen:

Say it again?

Graham Tuttle:

How do you shake up the snow globe when you’re so used to doing something that you’re not even pay attention? How do you shake-

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. How do you shake up the snow globe? How do you bring your awareness to something that your awareness has shut you off from, is an interesting question. I don’t have an answer for it, but that’s a fun one.

Graham Tuttle:

Well, so I would look and say, I think there’s the school of, not the Epicureans… There’s like the ancient, the Greeks that were very cha… They were specific about what they there’s… Jamie Wheal’s written some stuff about it. It’s not stoic, but there’s basically people that were like very reserved, very specific, did this, but every now and then they would just light things up. So that’s where certain things like, scheduling in things…

Basically, I would love… First, I would be like, things like psychedelics and hard workouts and challenging things, but that’s where there’s a whole level of scheduling in routine things. So it could be a vacation… You don’t know you’re stressed at work till you’re go on vacation. You have to create, whatever the opposite is of your normal thing, you have to get out of that thing.

You don’t know what hunger is till you stop eating in a sense, or you don’t know your full. The opposite of that. So if you don’t know… Schedule in the thing. Have I gone to vacation? Have I had a mental break? Have I had a movement? Try doing those things and movement session. So I think that’s… I could think of a more formulated way of saying it, but it’s-

Steven Sashen:

I have a real simple version of that I notice that I do is I pay attention to habitual movements. Like I noticed that I was putting my pants on left leg first, so I spent the last three months trying to stop myself and always doing right leg first, until about two weeks ago, I realized that I’m now ambidextrous or whatever that would be, and without thinking, I just switch back and forth from one to the other in a way that I wasn’t doing before.

So, I always look for, “What’s that thing that I do?” I always sit on my left butt cheek when I’m in the car. What am I doing that for? So, now I’m focusing on my right butt cheek. I don’t know why until I find going back and forth is sort of effortless. Maybe that’s one way in, is-

Graham Tuttle:

Well, I think the underlying… I agree. I do the same thing, but I think the underlying question is how do you get someone to bring awareness to the fact that they have habitual patterns? That’s a little harder.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. It is. I mean, luckily for things like how you brush your teeth, how you put on your pants, how you put on a shirt, there’s some things that we do encounter so frequently that I’m hoping that my mentioning one of those might make people go, “Oh.” Here’s a funny one related to my business. I never knew there were so many ways to tie your shoes until I started going to trade shows and watching people put on a pair of shoes and seeing how they tied their shoes.

I’d see 100 different ways of tying your shoes. Find a new one. Just look for these things that we do on a daily basis and see if there’s a there, there for trying a different one. The shoes is hysterical or find the way that you do long division. Get online, find another way to do it. I have a certain fondness for those, so I like your idea of basically do the opposite, but you have to figure out what the first thing is before you can find its opposite and give it a whirl.

Graham Tuttle:

Well, I think that’s why movement is so valuable because movement is how we form trust with our bodies and it’s the ubiquitous thing that’s available to us. So starting your curious adventure, think of gymnastics as like Nu… I think it stands for a Naked Movement or something like that. Literally it’s just like kids, would’ve gone to school. It was like, you just go to school and you move and you learn how to be curious about things as evidenced by your body and then from there you can start to ask bigger questions about purpose and meaning. So that’s more important is, you can’t fundamentally think bigger until you’ve taken care of the basic feedback your body’s given you.

Steven Sashen:

I see that. I hate to do this because we could do this all day and go in many different directions, but I got a pee. Actually-

Graham Tuttle:

What color is it going to be? Purple?

Steven Sashen:

Actually, I got a meeting in two minutes, but it was fun to say I got to pee, which I do, but you know, I’ll wait. To wrap things up, if people want to find out more about this, to dive into this with you a bit more and experience what it could be like to not have to go down this path of always looking outside for some magic solution for our special little snowflake self, but make this whole health and wellness thing simpler and more enjoyable, how can they find you?

Graham Tuttle:

Social media is going to be the best. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, it’s The Barefoot Sprinter, but basically, I’ve got three, one-month long courses that teach people about their body and help them get inspired to move again, to solve pain points in their entire system and they like themselves again, like really be awed by the beauty that is your body.

Steven Sashen:

That sounds delightful. Well, Graham, this has been again a total pleasure every time we chat. Go check out what he’s up to. Let us know what you experience when you do and then just a plug for us, once again, a reminder go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, all the places you can find, the podcast ways you can interact with us on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and et cetera, and share it, spread the word.

That’s the movement. The first movement of the Movement movement. If you have any questions or recommendations, people that you want to be on the show, people you don’t want on the show, I don’t know, whatever you can think of, drop me an email [email protected]. But most importantly until the next time or whatever that happens to be go out, have fun and live life feet first.

 

 

 

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