Comfort is Destroying Your Health: Why Stress is Not the Enemy | Jeff Krasno

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 00:00

How can discomfort and stress be the key to reversing chronic disease and living a longer, healthier life? Hi, I'm Dr Gabrielle Lyon, and on today's podcast, we will be digging deep into the science of health, wellness and longevity. Today, I'm joined by Jeff Krasno, the visionary behind commune, a wellness platform and podcast that's redefining how we think about health. Jeff's personal journey of reversing, yes, you heard that diabetes losing 60 pounds and transforming his life is nothing short of inspiring. Together, we'll explore how quote, good stress like fasting and cold therapy can revolutionize your health. Why nearly all Americans face metabolic dysfunction and practical ways to escape the comfort traps that are sabotaging our well being. This is an episode you won't want to miss. I just wanted to jump on here with an exciting announcement. I am hosting the second ever forever strong Summit, April 26 27th in Houston, Texas, 2025 there's going to be two days the VIP day on April 26 you will learn from former Navy SEALs, from former secret service, from individuals that you do not want to miss myself, my inner tribe will be there to support you to learn everything from muscle health to science to nutrition. You don't have to be an expert. You don't even have to have a background. All you have to have is a will to win and stay strong. I will put a link in the show notes below. Please go to my website, Dr gabrielline.com we sold out last year, and I would hate for you to miss this opportunity. So if you're waiting for a sign, if you're thinking, you need to change something up and you need community friends, we've got you covered. Jeff Krasno, welcome to the show. Thanks

Jeff Krasno: 02:07

so much for having me. It's such a treat to be here. You built such an amazing community, and I'm just honored to to be in your presence and to be able to connect with

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 02:15

them. I have to say that you are a forever student, and you know, when I was researching you and your book, Good stress to bring you on, to really talk about this, there was a few things that struck me. Okay. Number one, you have three girls, and you've been married for quite some time. How long?

Jeff Krasno: 02:36

So I think, well, it depends, if you ask my wife or me, I've been with her for 36 years. I think she's been with me for 35 this is a subject of great debate,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 02:49

and that is amazing. A large portion of our audience is female, and you are taking care of an entire female tribe with also your information and inspiration. The other thing is that you yourself have had a health journey, and that has truly made you this student of and I'm going to read this quote, It is chronic ease breeds chronic disease. I truly just that resonated so much. Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 03:26

yeah. I mean, I hit rock bottom from a biopsychosocial perspective about five years ago, and I really had to do a very serious personal intake form, I guess you might call it in your language, but an inventory of what was going on in my life. I mean, first of all, I was a chronic insomniac. I was depressed. I had very unflattering physical

: 03:53

presentations. You said you were almost 80 pounds heavier, almost 80 pounds heavier. So I

Jeff Krasno: 03:58

was about 210 at that point. In fairness, I'm about 165 now, so I've actually put on a little bit of muscle weight thanks to you, candidly, but I was experiencing all of these symptoms of modernity, and they're so anodyne on some level, just like chronic fatigue, brain fog, a little adiposity around the middle, inability to concentrate, can't read a book, need to check my phone all the time. Just perpetual agitation. These conditions and presentations are so normalized in our society, but they're completely abnormal, and they exist just barely upstream. This is what I discovered across my journey from all of these chronic diseases, particularly for me, metabolic dysfunction and diabetes, but we've completely normalized the abnormal, and that is what I had to untangle for myself. Of, as you say, as kind of a citizen scientist. And what I ended up putting my thumb on was, yeah, this idea that chronic ease in my life was leading to chronic disease. And everywhere I looked, I saw evidence of this. And so, you know, what I began to understand is that humans, Homo sapiens, evolved over hundreds of 1000s of years, and then our hominid ancestors for millions of years before that, and we evolved in relationship to our environment and nature in its glorious brilliance, selected for the best of us over that unfathomable period of time, and so we developed adaptive mechanisms in relationship to our environment, and a lot of these adaptive mechanisms flourished in the presence of some degree of Paleolithic stress.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 05:55

And what, what kind of adaptive mechanisms? And you had mentioned upstream, what do you mean by that? Well, what

Jeff Krasno: 06:01

I felt was that these symptoms that I had were upstream from the diagnoses and the labels that we give diseases. So brain fog and chronic fatigue, really, if you unravel it, those are metabolic issues, and we don't call them anything yet. We just, and because we don't call them something, we don't treat them A and B, they're easy just to write off as like, I'm just having a bad day, you know? But you stack 20 years of bad days together, and all of a sudden you have diabetes or cardiovascular disease, et cetera. So as I began to shine a flashlight on my own life, I realized I was a victim of chronic ease. I had essentially engineered my life for convenience at every single turn I love watching Curb Your Enthusiasm till 11 o'clock at night. I get it. That's cool. I mean, whatever. We could make some exceptions around the edges. But what I was eating my eating window was probably when I was honest, 16 to 18 hours a day.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 07:16

You weren't uncomfortable most of the time, no. And

Jeff Krasno: 07:19

unfortunately, what's happening across our society is all these artifacts of modernity, at every turn where we've engineered convenience and comfort, they are rendering adaptive mechanisms maladaptive, right? So let's just like look at an example. So we largely live sedentary lifestyles in the United States and in much of the Western world, we spend 94% of our time indoors, and 80% of us have a desk job. Okay, so that's like eight to 10 hours sitting here a we weren't designed to really sit in a chair, but that's a whole other that is part of, actually, chronic ease.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 08:02

Well, in our studio, we typically do push ups right before the I'm in, push ups after multiple push up sessions during the day. So yes,

Jeff Krasno: 08:11

I'm in, I'm in, we'll do it after, for sure. And I did this morning, as you can imagine. But you know where. So let's look at like that, this idea of not moving our bodies. Did

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 08:24

you have a moment where you thought, well, if I were to take a step back, we live in a very comfortable society. And when I say comfortable, it is challenging to purposely do something that creates friction. Yes, we are designed for friction and stress, but we have one word to define stress, all these things that happen, whether it's losing a loved one, a fire, going to the DMV, hanging out with my two kids, especially at eight o'clock at night, we have one word to define multiple experiences, and we often think about stress the stress response is fight or flight, but reading your book and going through this, it's clear that there are other stress responses, like tend and befriend and the courage response, right?

Jeff Krasno: 09:23

Yeah, those are great ones. Yeah. Stress needs a new PR agent. Maybe I am he?

09:30

Wonderful, wonderful.

Jeff Krasno: 09:33

Yeah, most of the stress that we experience in modern life is chronic, right? So, and this really is maladaptive and creates imbalances in the human organism. And really every disease, the etiology of every disease, is pretty much imbalanced somewhere or another. That's totally fair to say, yes, and so you mentioned the fight or flight response.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 09:59

So and do you think that that from your student ship? Do you think that that is an interpretation mal adaptation?

Jeff Krasno: 10:10

Yeah, I think that because we live in an environment that is algorithmically preferenced to tickle our human negativity, bias, you know, 24 hour news, social media, it really the whole business model of those things revolve around making us angry and outraged and essentially putting us into fight or flight. And so what happens there? So let me just say that the fight or flight response is adaptive. It's actually quite beneficial when it serves your biological imperative. I'm a hiker. I hike the trails of the Santa Monica Mountains, God bless them right now. And every once in a while I will come across like a rattlesnake on the path, right and what happens? I have an adaptive stress response, an involuntary bottom up sympathetic response that triggers my neuro endocrine access this HPA axis. It sends a little signal down these different glands to tell my adrenals to my adrenals to produce cortisol and epinephrine, which will have certain presentations. Physiologically, my heart rate and respiratory rate will increase. My liver will secrete glucose that will go to my extremities. That's totally adaptive, right? Because I want to fight or fly. Other things happen. My pupils dilate, the aperture of my attention becomes very narrow. I distrust the world around me for very good reason. I become totally self obsessed. And then what happens? The snake slithers off the path. And what do I do? I bounce back. I bounce back to normal, to a parasympathetic state, if you will. All of those things that I just mentioned, they find homeostasis because my body is wired for homeostasis, for balance. The problem is, in modern society, the rattlesnake never leaves the path. So we are triggered all the time. So we are in this perpetual cortisol induced state that really has so many negative downstream impacts. I mean, there's many, many experts that I'm sure are on this show that can talk about chronic cortisol secretion, but it essentially is maladaptive in every way. It degrades the immune system. You produce less neutrophils and other white blood cells. It dysregulates the gut. It can cause dysbiosis and eventually intestinal permeability in excess, it causes blood sugar dysregulation, right? Because cortisol is always going to raise blood glucose levels. So over time, you're going to see all sorts of negative physiological impacts from chronic modern stress. You're also going to make bad decisions, because your blood flow goes to your hindbrain, right and not to this unbelievable Neo mammalian prefrontal cortex that allows us to be rational and sit here and have interesting conversation and do other things and problem solve, etc. So that's all the negative ramifications of chronic bad stress. But if you really look at stress at its core, it has a an adaptive, good stress component to it, and we know that. I mean, the most obvious one is like, when you stress a muscle, right? You overload a muscle, you rip them, the microfiber is in it, and what does the body do? It has this incredible adaptive response where it goes into, you know, muscle protein synthesis, and produces these little structure, structural proteins, myosin and actin, etc, that you know, use amino acids. And with enough rest, what happens? You stress it, you give a little rest, it grows. That's totally adaptive. And the body is riddled with those adaptive responses to stress.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 14:05

Is that how you thought about good stress, whether it's fasting, cold therapy, exercise, many of the protocols that you determined were going to be adaptive? Yeah, well, I

Jeff Krasno: 14:19

had to ask myself, okay, if modernity and chronic ease is causing chronic disease, did

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 14:26

you have a moment where you were like, I gotta fix this? Was this the moment that you saw that your blood sugar was out of control? I mean, there's usually a come to your senses moment that really moves the needle

Jeff Krasno: 14:43

totally. So I had all the panoply of physical presentations, eating donuts under the table, yeah, some of which were insulting my vanity to some degree, and some stuff that I learned later, like I started developing these little brown skin tags, which I will not show you. I. Um, that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 15:00

is impressive. That is, was there a genetic component to

Jeff Krasno: 15:06

No. But what I found out from this guy, Ben bickman, who you may know, is that those are presentation of diabetes or insulin resistance. Yes, so, and I don't, I didn't get them on my back of my neck. But that's oftentimes the problem. Was, when I realized a lot of this stuff, I would walk around the streets. You probably do this too, and I'm like, Damn on the back of their neck, diabetes. Oh god. Should I tell them? Should I not tell them? Anyways, so making you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 15:31

the least popular man in the room?

: 15:34

Yes, there's a gentle way to do it. Thank

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 15:37

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Jeff Krasno: 17:32

you know, I had, you know, guided comastia, which is sort of the clinical name for the the boobs of man. And my producer knows all about that, okay? And as my children reminded me, not necessarily a cups dad and so all of that stuff was happening. But like I said, all of those things are so prosaic, it's like, Oh yeah, okay, I'm just a little overweight. I'm just a little tired today. You know, all those things, you can just write them off, then I put a CGM on. So I'm pointing, for those who are just listening and not watching, to a little disc that sits on my triceps, and there's a little pin prick that goes into your interstitial

: 18:11

fluid, and no friends, doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt, although the first

Jeff Krasno: 18:15

time you put it on, when you look at it, you're like, I ain't doing this. I'm a trypnophobe. I'm afraid of needles, not anymore, but I was at that junction and but, you know, did some deep belly breathing and I snapped it in place. Doesn't hurt at all. And you know, this was a dashboard into my metabolic health, not a perfect one, which, by

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 18:35

the way, 93% of Americans, roughly, are metabolically dysfunctional. That's right, not our listeners, but right, guys, but 93% of Americans by 2050, no by 2030, 50% of Americans are going to be considered obese, not overweight in the obese category. Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 19:00

it's crazy. I mean, and that's was the wake up call, because when I looked into the app, which, you know, this device bounces your blood glucose data to an app, and you can measure your blood glucose moment to moment, really. And I was at the very, very top of the pre diabetic range, so I was running like 125 milligrams per deciliter fasting blood. What

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 19:25

were you eating? And I'd love for you to be very, very open about the kind of diet that you're eating, yeah.

Jeff Krasno: 19:34

So this was the curious thing, because I ran a yoga festival called wanderers,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 19:41

yes, which is actually where I first heard of you from our dear sister, Elena Brower. Yes.

Jeff Krasno: 19:46

She's the first person to take a chance on me at that festival in 2009 and agree to be part of the roster and help me really curate other people too. So I'm, I'm always deeply in debt to her. Yeah, but yeah, I was so I knew better. This is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 20:07

what I'm what we're eating, because I won't tell you, because when I I've been Elena's doctor for over a decade now, and when I first sat down with her, and we've had many, many meals together, it was quinoa and beans and lots of plants, and while all good for one's self, the balance was off.

Jeff Krasno: 20:31

Yeah, so I was doing a lot of things wrong. First of all, I wasn't certainly was not getting enough protein because I wasn't eating enough high quality meat, and that's okay if you are a total aficionado, yes, about what you're gonna eat if you're a vegetarian or a vegan, I'm not taking sides on that equation. No, no, you just had to be very, very on point to get enough protein if you're gonna be a vegan. Yes, so yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 21:01

and I will say, we, I think I was having a conversation with someone earlier, and there is a spiritual component to food. And I think that, for example, vegan, vegetarianism and the yoga community go hand in hand. Would you agree with that, that there seems to be a connection there? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And again, when I started working with Elena, it was more about this spiritual embrace of the food that she was eating. And so it was very challenging. And I see that a lot with many of the yogis, especially as they age, and the women, especially as they age. And I'm sure you've seen that because, again, you've been such a pillar in the community.

Jeff Krasno: 21:43

Yeah, well, one of the central tenets of yoga and Eastern religions in general is Ahimsa, so to do no harm. And so I think people make the connection between that and animal welfare, and that's a totally understandable connection for people to make, considering how we raise most of our animals in the Western world. So I understand the predisposition. I believe that there is a regenerative and humane and sustainable way to raise animals for human consumption. And generally, the question that I try to ask myself as it pertains to my health, not just physiologically, but psychologically and spiritually, is, how did I evolve? How did I evolve? Because that is what's informing my engineering. And where are you from? That's a hard question. I was a very, very peripatetic young person. So where are your genetics from? Right? So I'm kind of Ukrainian Jew on one side of the equation, and then kind of like stalwart Northern European on the other side. But of course, the the the inner, inside joke for most of my life with Skyler, particularly my, my long suffering, better three quarters, was that I essentially just had the Thrifty Gene, right? And that was a gene that was a product of, like a famine culture, which was very, very useful in a famine, but very, very un useful on Instagram or anywhere else or in the bedroom or wherever. TMI, so, you know, because I always carried extra weight my whole life, always,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 23:37

yeah, because, you know, sitting here in front of me, you look very trim and slender. I'm

Jeff Krasno: 23:42

doing I've tried to adopt a lot of protocols to get to this place, and it's, candidly, not easy. You know, I'm I slip off, and I know when I slip off. So I, you know, I'm not neurotic or fundamentalist about my approach. I was at the beginning, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 24:01

when you got your take me through, do you remember kind of what you were eating at that time? Sure, you took a look and noticed,

Jeff Krasno: 24:09

yeah, the Kooky thing was, is that I was a whole food shopper. But what was I actually eating from

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 24:16

whole I want to hear, right? I'm dying here. Yes. So

Jeff Krasno: 24:19

the the proportions of my macronutrients were first, like way, way off. So I was eating a fairly carbohydrate rich diet,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 24:29

80% 50% Yeah.

Jeff Krasno: 24:31

So a lot of things that came in boxes, but that were, you know, of course, marked organic and all natural. So you feel virtuous. But what's really under the hood there?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 24:44

What do you remember? Kind of the stuff that you

Jeff Krasno: 24:47

were eating? Sure, I mean, it was, I was starting the day, really wrong. I was starting the day with a bolus of carbohydrates. So that could have been in the form of cereals. Or bagels or muffins, no,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 25:02

really, even during the Wanderlust days. I mean, that's sure,

Jeff Krasno: 25:05

but it was like the blueberry brand muffin, or whatever it was, like the multi seed bagel with cream cheese. Got ya. Yeah, is this like I so I grew up. I didn't grow up as a hippie. My wife grew up as a hippie. She knew better all this time, you know. But of course, I didn't want to listen to her, just like my kids don't want to listen to me. So I had to learn it for myself. And I grew up with Kraft, macaroni and cheese and Tang and everything else that was wondrous that came out of a box that you could put in the microwave. And that was part of a certain culture that, you know, gave my mom the ability to work and not cook all day, you know, or whatever. There were, like, certain parts of that culture that were allowing women to get out of the kitchen. And candidly, my dad was not a good cook, so whatever, I wasn't gonna resort to him either. And so, and this was, you know, 70s and 80s. I'm 54 years old, so I was born in 1970 and like many of my contemporaries, that was just normal. You know, we were just growing up eating kind of refined foods. Fat was bad, right? So that was people still

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 26:21

think that. Now I think maybe not. Dr bikman, but there's still some confusion around, yeah, celebrated fat. Fats in general.

Jeff Krasno: 26:29

I mean, it's a, it's an ill named macronutrient, because how does that not make you fat, right? And, of course, it is highly caloric. It's calorically dense. So it's, you know, nine calories per gram, but it's like, what signals is that macaroni and nucleon giving your body? So that's a whole other

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 26:48

Okay, so you were starting with, even in the kind of yoga era, you were still starting with brown blueberry brown muffin. Yeah. And were you vegan or vegetarian at the time?

Jeff Krasno: 27:01

Very little meat consumption, yeah, and no fiber in the morning. I mean, the brand muffin might have had fiber, but, like, you know, re eating those refined grains, not a lot of fiber and so, or maybe a sweetened yogurt, you know. So that was how I was starting my day, but it was unclear where I was starting my day and where I was ending my day, because it wasn't uncharacteristic to be out late at night and maybe just like, wander into a Denny's and get a turkey club, I mean, but granted, my lifestyle, of course, I was running a yoga festival, But what was I really doing? I was on an airplane 200 days a year. Was

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 27:45

this for the festival or doing something else? I said, Yeah, we had 68

Jeff Krasno: 27:48

festivals. So in 2016 we had 68 festivals in 20 countries, and I was running low. Yeah, I couldn't even cover the amount of events that we had,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 28:00

and I think that speaks to many of the listeners, because they have quite robust lives now, sure, and one of the biggest challenges that people have is when there is no structure, then eating and training become quite haphazard, unless you are completely locked in to your standards of what you are doing 100%

Jeff Krasno: 28:23

and that's why, when I'm home and I'm in my routine, it's way easier to stay on the straight and narrow and to feel really good. But at that juncture, yeah, I was traveling 200 days a year for the festival. I mean, candidly, I was operating from coffee to wine o'clock a lot of the time.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 28:44

Coffee, I can relate, but why? Wine just tastes terrible. Sorry. Danica, yeah, that's okay.

Jeff Krasno: 28:51

What I didn't really, what I knew, per my relationship with caffeine and Merlot, is that the excess of any one molecule in the human body creates a resistance to itself, so you have to drink more and more coffee to get the same buzz, or more and more alcohol to get the same buzz. What I didn't realize is that that's also true for insulin. So the more and more insulin that you have, the more and more resistant your cells are to it. So I was stressing my pancreas all the time, and my dutiful little pancreas was producing its product. It was producing insulin, but what I was doing was essentially training my cells to be resistant to my pancreas, glorious product. When

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 29:38

did you transition that nutrition was that one of the first things that you did, I know that that's not necessarily, I think probably perhaps eating poorly creates stress, but not the conscious level stress, or even the fight or flight level stress. But was there a moment where you said, Okay, I have a continuous glucose monitor on. I am now pre diabetic. I am committing carb. Side, I have to change this up. And was there a series of explorations from a nutritional standpoint that you explored?

Jeff Krasno: 30:09

Yes. So as soon as I put on the CGM and was getting data, I finally went in to my PCP, and I didn't cancel the appointment that time. How many canceled appointments? Did you have plenty, like two or three? You know, I was an annual checkup guy. So, and you go in and you get your labs when you're in that frame of mind, and you don't, if you don't get a call, you're just assume you're good. And also,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 30:35

to be fair, you know, we won't talk too much about this, but the system is broken in terms of relationships, when you go to your provider, and we have many dear friends in common, like Mark Hyman, you know, we have a medical clinic, and it's about the relationship.

Jeff Krasno: 30:49

Yeah, I go in, I would my visits average, maybe 10 minutes, yeah, what are they going to do in 10 minutes? Not such, yeah. And this is why, as I learned about functional medicine and these initially very onerous intake forms. I'm like, Oh my God, but then what you actually, you really learn the three dimensional picture of the human being, because elevated blood glucose could have its provenance in a whole number of places, certainly in eating too much refined sugar and too many refined grains, right, and starches, but it also could have it in stress or sleeplessness. I mean, one night bad sleep is going to make you less insulin sensitive,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 31:34

yes, and I saw that all the time in residency, when I was doing the night shift, right right? And when you started evolving your diet, where did you look first? How did you begin to you know, the people on the show are so interested in nutritional protocols, nutritional standpoints, and especially as you were saying that you're eating all these Whole Foods, or from Whole Foods, and a die very high in carbohydrates. We know that there has to be a balance.

Jeff Krasno: 32:03

Yeah. So I had a multi pronged attack to my diabetes out of the gate, and at this point I did become fairly fundamentalist about it, because I had to, I had to reverse the flow of the river here. And in order to do that, sometimes you have to take some drastic measures. So my first kind of detour was with a guy named Will Cole, if you know, I do know well, and he's a, is he a chiropractor or a? I think he is, yes, and he has a kind of a telemedicine, functional medicine platform. But I read, he gave me a book called ketotarianism. Yes, I remember that book, and it was an interesting book for the moment, because, for that particular moment, because the ketogenic diet was wildly popular,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 32:55

and for those listening, it's roughly 70% fat. Is it 70 and then 10% carbohydrates, potentially, yeah, 70 to 80% fat,

Jeff Krasno: 33:06

yeah, yeah, that's like 7020, 10, I think it is. And because I wasn't quite ready to, like, dive into regenerative meat consumption, because from where I was coming, yes, just from where I was. And I think that's

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 33:23

important, because most people have that same struggle, right? I think I know for a fact our dear friend Elena did, yeah, and that is an a very wonderful way to transition from the high carbohydrate, largely vegetarian diet, which, by the way, I actually was vegan for a number of years, yeah, and then macrobiotic vegetarian, until my teeth started getting loose and my hair started falling out. So that no longer was a great strategy for me. But I think that that's very fascinating, that you know that that transition was then ketotarian towards the ketogenic diet. Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Krasno: 34:00

What clearly I needed to do was to shift the proportion of my macronutrient consumption away from carbohydrates and towards healthy fats and protein. And so my way in that door was the ketotarian diet. And for those who need a little more color, there it is a ketogenic diet, but it's largely focused on continuing to eat fat and protein, rich vegetables, but, you know, I was also eating, you know, Omega three, rich fish, etc. So that was kind of my first pivot. And I could also maintain a very low caloric diet that way as well, because I wasn't consuming an overabundance of fats. So my, you know, I was taming my caloric intake. So I would say keto, tearing

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 34:47

is very important, because people think it's whatever you can eat. Yeah, it's not.

Jeff Krasno: 34:51

I mean, calories do matter. Obviously, the calories and calories out debate we can have for some time

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 34:57

now, we're and we're in a line with it. Alignment. It matters. Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 35:02

it's like the laws of thermodynamics apply to humans. So yes, okay, so ketotarianism was my first stop there, and then combined,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 35:14

how much weight did you lose and did you see better glucose regulation, totally,

Jeff Krasno: 35:18

but only in combination with other protocols. So it was ketotarianism that's fast with a 16 eight intermittent fasting protocol. So basically, I had to flip my eating window around from 16 hours to eight hours. And obviously you can still ingest a lot of calories in eight hours. If you sit around and eat Chubby Hubby all day, you know, for eight hours, right? But generally, when you are making conscious decisions about a fasting protocol, for example, you are going to make other conscious decisions.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 35:50

So why do you think that it was do you think the ketogenic diet would have so let's say that your calories were controlled, from my reading of the literature, as long as your calories were controlled the influence of the time. And I fully agree with you, we should be eating in a restricted window. Number one, it allows for calorie control. And I think with circadian biology, we're going to see more of that, which I know that you're very interested in. Do you think that you would have also lost the weight and the glucose regulation would have been tame if you had not changed that feeding window. It's

Jeff Krasno: 36:25

interesting question, I don't know, but just by dint of my own me search and personal experience, I've

: 36:34

never heard of that. Okay, that's very sharp. Yes,

Jeff Krasno: 36:37

just my own. N of one stuff. Let's just say that those two protocols together really pay a lot of dividends, because I could calorie control in that window. And then there does seem to be some clinical research that shows that you can essentially eat the same amount of calories, but if you eat them over a bigger window, you might maintain or gain weight. But even if, but if you're eating them in a small window, you might maintain or lose weight now

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 37:04

against calories in, calories out, true, but

Jeff Krasno: 37:07

be. But I think that there is like this other dimension there, whereas if you're becoming more insulin sensitive by creating that window, then your body is more apt to use glucose for energy creation at the mitochondrial level than to store it as fat. So, I mean, I don't know if you want to go down that window, but this is, this is my, my interpretation of what was happening in my physical organism. I think there was obviously some other elements at play, where as I was kind of experimenting with different fasts, I was entering some stages of ketosis, where, essentially my body was like shifting over to, you know, using free fatty acids or ketones for energy production instead of glucose.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 38:00

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Jeff Krasno: 39:45

I think the ketogenic diet and fasting there together can contribute to achieving ketosis. How did

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 39:53

your body composition change at that? Oh, my God. I mean, it's, did you build but did you build? Mom? Not right away. That's also important, because it's very difficult to build muscle. It's unless you are starting from a place where you have a robust amount of muscle. The ketogenic diet might be muscle sparing, but it's not ideal for muscle building. No. But

Jeff Krasno: 40:15

my philosophy at this juncture was I need to get my blood glucose under control, and I need to shed a lot of weight, fair, and I need to get super lean. So I went from 210 to 142

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 40:27

and at 142 How long did that take you? Not

Jeff Krasno: 40:29

that long. Wow, six months. Seven months. Candidly, I got too skinny, because at 142 you could imagine me, I'm I'm six feet, and I felt pretty good, because I felt light, but I did not have a lot of muscle mass, so as from a pure blood glucose perspective, okay, I want to just have your listeners understand where, how, where I saw the real benefits, and where the trajectory really changed. So, yeah, obviously reducing my carbon take and adopting a ketotarian diet. Great fasting also helped cold therapy, very, very deliberate, intentionally placed and cadenced cold therapy also really helped.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 41:21

Tell me more, and did you go in and you were like, What the I'm out of here, and How cold

Jeff Krasno: 41:27

was it? Okay? Well, so Wim Hof came and stayed with me for two weeks. I hate the cold. I literally have paroxysms of anxiety looking at a cold, at a at a snow fed lake, a terrible I will cast out, yes, like, I'm never more of, like, a, you know, land loving.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 41:49

Did you grow up in California for the most part. Where did you grow up? Somewhere? I grew

Jeff Krasno: 41:53

up, yeah. I mean, my parents were bopping me around, England, Spain. I lived in Brazil for three years. Yeah, I read that, and then I came back and there was mostly in the Northeast. Was terrible. Winters, terrible. Was it New York? Eventually I went to like I was shipped off to some coat and tie chapel, going boarding that kind of kid. Yeah, against my will, let's just say kicking and screaming. Did I wear a tie and go to chapel and have school on Saturday. And then I matriculated to Columbia University in New York City, I know. And there I stayed for with a few little deviations, my wife and I moved to Paris for a year. That was beautiful. We we went back for a very extended honeymoon in Brazil. That was lovely. But largely, I was in New York for a very long time. That's freezing. New York was freezing at that juncture. It's really bad still, but so you decided

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 42:48

on cold therapy, and that actually helped you lose weight and regulate your Gold

Jeff Krasno: 42:52

Coast. So this is really, really interesting for me. Anyways, I hope people find this interesting. So let me just kind of break this down, because this is where I saw the weight almost melt off. Okay, so I would be 15 and a half hours fasted. Okay, so let's say that's 10:30am let's say my eating window was 11am to 7pm Okay, more or less so I would be 1515, and a half hours fasted at 1030 in the morning my and in combination with a ketotarian diet and the fasting, my blood glucose levels would be pretty low at that juncture, because I hadn't eaten anything for 15 and a half hours, and I wasn't eating too Many carbohydrates, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 43:41

you were needing a ton of protein, which generates gluconeogenesis, helps stabilize blood sugar. So it was probably lower than we would typically expect in a higher protein diet.

Jeff Krasno: 43:53

Yes, so at about 10:30am I would very, very reluctantly, submerge myself into an ice bath. How cold. So when I was around Wim, I had to man out

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 44:09

terrible I would now wanna be friends with that guy. Yeah, just kidding. Well, he had a, let's just say I know him and his daughter actually are coming out with a book or something of that nature. You had a commercial

Jeff Krasno: 44:19

ice delivery in the morning and a commercial wine delivery in the evening. But in the evening. But let's that's a whole other story. I'll write a different book about that. Anyways,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 44:28

55 degrees.

Jeff Krasno: 44:29

Yeah, so that was where I ended up, when I was with him, okay, when I was with him, it was like 30 it was ice on the top was like just above freezing, 34 and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 44:39

you did that? I did

Jeff Krasno: 44:41

it, but it was like, Whoa,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 44:42

did you start there? Okay, but I would

Jeff Krasno: 44:45

never recommend anyone start there, yeah, because cold is completely subjective, and I was seeing results at 5556

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 44:53

57 degrees, and the data would support that we had Suzanne soberg on, and there was a Dutch study found that. Individuals who took regular cold showers reported a 29% reduction in sick days. Seems like there's immune modulating effects. We have an increase in RMR again. The data isn't great yet overall, but there are some studies that show exposure to cold can increase calorie burn. But you reached out to. I just wanna get this story, because I'm so fascinated. You did the carbicide diet, then transitioned to the ketotarian diet. Then you moved into a time restricted feeding fasting window. And then you said, okay, because we haven't gotten to the part where you're like, Okay, I need to add in things I dislike, for cold. This is not the good stress yet.

Jeff Krasno: 45:42

Yeah, well, they were all somewhat stressful. I mean, fasting is what I would categorize as a good stress, because this was a normal

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 45:49

but you weren't thinking about it, right? It wasn't because what I took from your book that I really appreciate it is I very much believe that stress is good, and I believe that our interpretation of the world is truly what makes it that way. And you know, you're essentially saying, charge into the fire. Charge into, you know, instead of running away from the sound of gunshots, which, you know, I'm saying this proverbally, or you're married to a seal, yeah, exactly. All right, he says that we don't run because we don't train to retreat, yeah, but,

Jeff Krasno: 46:23

but, check it out. So calorie positive, or, you know, food scarcity was just a natural part of life for hundreds of 1000s of years, right? And our bodies were engineered to manage and actually flourish with that stress, so when we are in a nutrient deficient state, what happens? Well, there's some bad things that happen, but there's a lot of good things that happen. I mean, there's a lot of people talk about the activation of the AMPK path. So all of those things, we have a an adaptive response to calorie positive and that is a stress, and we've largely discarded that. What you're saying, we largely discarded that in modern culture.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 47:06

But I would see one would argue that people are always doing yo yo dieting, yeah, so I think that you're right. Most people don't do calorie restriction, but when they do, they do it and then they gain weight. Right? Enter the cold but I need to know about this cold plant, so let's

Jeff Krasno: 47:19

so So, okay, so at 1030 I would be in a fasted state, very, very low blood glucose, submerge into the ice. What you decide

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 47:26

to do that, where you're like, I just want to pick the worst possible thing I could possibly do,

Jeff Krasno: 47:31

pretty much. I mean, I was embracing this notion CD with my kids. That would be, I mean, it's like I was embracing this notion of deliberate, short term, self imposed stress. So I'd get in to the cold plunge, and what would happen? So my core body temperature, before, after, I'm off. This was after. So he he got me into the ice. But

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 47:50

was there? Why were you thinking? Is what I want to understand is, were you thinking I need to suffer a little bit. I need to pick something that is going to make me suffer? Or were you thinking, you know, I just need to fix my health?

Jeff Krasno: 48:06

Yeah, that's a good question. I was at this juncture, willing to do anything to fix my health, and what I realized is that that really needed, I really needed to embrace discomfort in order to do so, because that's unusual

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 48:25

to think that that would be the thing, right, that you it's not a normal maybe intellectually, for growth you, yeah, you have to think, because you are very well read and very well studied, And again, you're an extraordinary writer, and to get that, you probably have to struggle through thinking and

Jeff Krasno: 48:46

Okay, well, I also am the recipient of so much unbelievable wisdom from other people. I mean, part of my job is interviewing people like you and Mark and all of my contemporaries or my colleagues, I should say I have a 10 acre property up in Topanga, up in the Santa Monica Mountains, that has knock on wood, made it through these fires, and I've hosted hundreds of people up

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 49:16

there. So you were learning, even though you were overweight or struggling, I was learning,

Jeff Krasno: 49:20

I was taking all of this in, and I was starting to then actually apply it to myself. And so I'm like, Okay, I have to lean into this discomfort. And I know how anxious the cold makes me, but I'm gonna start to play with the edges of that. And as I did, I began to fiddle and experiment, and this is where I landed with the cold therapy before I put a single bite of food in my mouth. Because as my core body temperature plummeted, i. My body needed to engage in some sort of thermogenesis, because what it's evolved to have an adaptive response to stress, because I it needs to maintain this little Goldilocks zone, the warm little porridge of 98.6 degrees. So I get in the cold punch, boom. My body temperature plummets and my body does what it's supposed to do. Did you go all

50:23

the way up to your neck? Yeah, sucks. And

Jeff Krasno: 50:27

and my body does what it's supposed to do, and it warms itself up, but it's looking around and says, How do I warm myself up? I need to make heat. I need an energy substrate for heat. But at that moment, there's not a lot of glucose around. So where does it go? It goes into my fat cells, into my adipocytes, and breaks down triglycerides into free fatty acids to warm myself up, to use that fat as a substrate for thermogenesis. And I'm telling you, once I stacked those protocols, how long did that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 51:04

take? How long did it take? Not long, a couple months. And anecdotally, I do hear that from many of our patients that add in cold therapy that they seem to have. Again, this isn't well studied, but metabolic benefits, or at least anecdotally, body composition changes, many of them.

Jeff Krasno: 51:21

Well, it makes sense. I mean, if you really think about what the body

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 51:27

is doing, I don't know, and you're gonna tell you why, yeah, there's the making sense of it, and then there's what the evidence says. So when I think about a whale that is in the cold, and the whale has so much blubber, and that I think about cold water swimmers or people like that. And even when I talk to my husband, the people that did well in the cold were actually people with more body fat. And so maybe it's in combination with the cold therapy, I don't know, and the calorie restriction, it could

Jeff Krasno: 52:00

be, I mean, it also could be that if you're in a very, very low glucose state and you get very, very cold, your body has to burn something to warm itself up. And for me, that was fat so,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 52:17

and that is one of the was that the first good stressor that you added after a calorie restriction.

Jeff Krasno: 52:22

Yeah, I would say calorie restriction, or, you know, time restricted eating cold therapy. And so all along the way, my blood sugar regulation was getting better. It was going from 125 fasting to 110 to 100 to 90. But the thing that really made the difference at the end. I mean, of course you can probably guess. I can

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 52:44

guess, but I want to hear it. I want to hear what role this good stress plays in improving health and reversing chronic disease. Tell me. So, of

Jeff Krasno: 52:51

course, it was hypertrophy, right? And this is the most obvious form of good stress. How did

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 52:57

you come to that? Again, you came from a yoga community, and when I think about some of our mutual friends, even mark, I've been telling mark to lift weights for going on 15 years now. Finally, I

: 53:09

think he's taking your advice. Finally, he looks he looks good, yeah, after, after, finally,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 53:13

five years ago, right? So, but you had to have had a moment where you like, okay, the Pilates in the yoga is wonderful, but if I want to change my body composition,

Jeff Krasno: 53:27

change my body composition. And for me, candidly, was blood sugar regulation. So I started listening to you and to some other metabolic health experts and doctors, and I was like, Okay, maybe this is the final stage of my blood glucose regulation and my reversal of diabetes. So, so I started doing body weight exercises because that was the easiest for me to do anywhere. And so do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 53:56

you have any resistance to the idea of no pun intended resistance training? Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 54:00

I was never anything that I did, I mean, and I was always an active person. I was a competitive tennis player, but I was what, what you call like chronic cardio and a What did that look like? So chronic cardio was sort of compartmentalizing exercise as this 45 minute to hour long penance that you do at the end of your day to expiate yourself from your sins. You know

: 54:27

it was like so many big words in that sentence. Yeah, it was like, I'm

Jeff Krasno: 54:31

gonna be a modern day sloth and send emails all day long. But that's justified, because I'm gonna cubby hole this little exercise routine at the end of the day, and you know what that's gonna look like? That's gonna look like me for 45 minutes on the elliptical or on the treadmill. And you know where that kept me on the treadmill, on the treadmill, that's right. And so my body conversation didn't change

: 54:58

at all. And how long had you been doing? Yeah, I mean, the first kind of all my life,

Jeff Krasno: 55:01

you know, because I knew I'm not dumb, like, I know being like, living an active lifestyle is good, and so, you know, I really thought that, you know, I could essentially justify all of my vices with the

: 55:20

virtue of chronic cardio. And your vibe was, you say you liked wine,

Jeff Krasno: 55:24

yeah. I mean, like wine, like the jerky club, like whatever, you know, I was just, you know, I thought I could just kind of get away with a lot of things. But, you know, of course, the cold water on my head was my blood glucose levels. And, I mean, the cold water at that point was not protocol. It was just like a wake up call. So,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 55:45

and how long ago was this, when you started that this was all this four or five years ago, okay, you started on this journey four or five years ago. And how did it kind of culminate to this idea of the book, The Good stress? And, yeah, well,

Jeff Krasno: 56:01

you know, after doing 600 episodes on my podcast, that's it, 600 literally, yeah, and you know, I'm also a fairly rigorous host, if only out of vanity. What does that mean? Well, I do a lot of research. I read everyone's books. You know, I was reading, and I don't have any training four or five until four or five years ago. I mean, I started reading PubMed every night. My wife was like, What the hell are you doing? Come to sleep. I was like, No, I need some more blue light from PubMed. And you know, when I started, I understood 10% of the words. You know, I started reading primary source data and clinical research, but, you know,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 56:46

just study at Columbia because it's very challenging. Oh, it's, did you stop? Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 56:51

no, no, I was American history slash Bong smoker. I mean, not in that order.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 56:57

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Jeff Krasno: 58:58

I mean, I had some. I acquitted myself very well at Columbia in many ways, but I was a musician, and I was in it for a lot of the cultural elements of going to college, but, and I did fine, but I was not by I was not studying science, any of the field sciences, or biology or chemistry or anything like that. So this was just a crash course in auto didactic learning, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 59:23

that by you created your commune. The all the courses that you do is it just this person, but, yeah, just curious, never ending self

Jeff Krasno: 59:35

digit. I mean, partially Sure. I mean, obviously I have a propensity for creating community and trying to help people through community and through education. And so both my parents are teachers, and I want to hold their legacy in some way and make the world a better place by being able to amplify knowledge that I think. And can really bend the arc of people's lives. And so that is the inspiration. But the fact is, along the way, I used a lot of that information on myself and so, and the deeper and deeper I got into that me search, the more excited I got about having you on the show and having Casey on the show and Sarah on the show, and candidly, a lot of female doctors, that was sort of where my sweets about

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:00:24

women who both of those women I love, yes and

Jeff Krasno: 1:00:26

Mindy and I all these people that have been so incredibly generous. I mean, I with Sarah and Casey, they would come and stay at my house, and I would ask them questions. I mean, I would literally sit there and just pummel them with questions, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:00:41

the resistance training, the muscle piece, it hasn't been in the conversation, no forever. I have been pushing it from a female lens landscape for decades, and now it is catching up. And it's amazing. You feel that that is kind of the component that really changed things for you.

Jeff Krasno: 1:01:01

So that was the final step for me, for metabolic health. And I started with body weight, started with body weight exercises. So how many days a week I was doing them every day? And that's probably not advised, but I just got addicted. You're all in type of guy, what? What what did that look like? Was it? It was 100 push ups, 100 pull ups, 100 sit ups,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:01:24

100 squats. And when you started, how many of those could you do? One,

Jeff Krasno: 1:01:27

I don't know, pull up other things I could do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:01:30

a little bit, get some. Jeff, come on. Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 1:01:33

but pull ups were kind of the thing for me, because I had some mental, psychological scarring about pull ups. I don't you're I'm older than you, but you might have experienced the Presidential Fitness Test when you were a student. So this was, I would say, the date that I most abhorred in the entire calendar growing up as a HIV kid, was the Presidential Fitness Test, because, of course, you were under kind of the scrutiny of your gym teacher. I had this incredibly mean female gym teacher. In retrospect, I actually have respect for her, because she was probably like an early day feminist, but she wore like slacks, like black slacks and a referee shirt. And she loved her already. Yeah, she had very built, and she never hesitated to use her whistle and like every moment. And I was just like this kind of chubby, awkward, ham fisted kid, and so she would just call me out all the time. So you couldn't do so I could shop so, so part of the Presidential Fitness Test, there was a number of different criteria that you had to do, one of which was a pull up. And if you could do five or 10, you would get, you know, some great you would be honored at the school auditor in the school auditorium, or something like that. I was just trying to do one, because if you were one, you would fulfill the requirement of standard. And all I wanted to be in my life at that juncture was just standard, like, get me to one so, so I would always mark one on my little scorecard, but she knew that I couldn't do one.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:03:16

And so when you started your Were you nervous to start your physical fitness journey,

Jeff Krasno: 1:03:21

yeah, yeah, because you know you don't want, yeah, you don't want to fail yourself.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:03:29

No, but that's the only way fail is failing is the fuel for that's your best teacher. 100%

Jeff Krasno: 1:03:36

it's actually how you learn. Yes. I mean both Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:03:41

always, yes, it is failure. Is the best? Is it the teacher or the tutor? I'm not sure, but it's, it's,

Jeff Krasno: 1:03:52

it's both. And so, yeah, I started, you know, with, with pull ups, and then

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:03:58

how did you do it? Was it modified? Were you because the listener is thinking, okay, yeah, I'm really into I'm exactly where Jeff is. I am focusing on losing weight. I can embrace this idea of good distress. I mean, I did write the book forever strong, not marginally weak, forever or forever weak, right? Maybe that's my second book. But when you decided you came from a yoga background, and we're doing a lot of cardio recognized. And by the way, yoga is a lot of body strength. It

Jeff Krasno: 1:04:28

is in a bunch of different ways, but it doesn't have a pull function. Thank

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:04:32

you. Absolutely true. Yeah. And you just randomly picked those, or you felt that they were useful, or you were revisiting the past. They

Jeff Krasno: 1:04:42

were useful because I could do them anywhere, pretty much. And I put these very unsightly pull up bars in my in my doors, everywhere around the house. Yeah, I'm looking at your door now, which is a very lovely one. I'm not sure you want to put a pull up bar. There, but I put, we have

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:05:00

many, okay, in fact, that was one of my first dates with my husband. Was pull ups that is hot,

Jeff Krasno: 1:05:08

so I had to put two up and and then I could do them postprandially. That was key for which

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:05:14

is what he's saying, yes, is after eating. Yeah. So

Jeff Krasno: 1:05:19

that was a big way to regulate blood sugar spikes, because you're gonna have a natural glucose spike after you eat, and that's totally natural, yes, yeah, but one way to essentially vacuum up that glucose is to engage in some sort of physical activity, maybe 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes after you eat. And so we would start eating a little bit earlier in the evenings for our dinners, and then always going on walks. But then I would always do some pops, and because they were so easy to well, they weren't physically easy to do, but they were so convenient to do. Of course, I'm not saying that you should be

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:05:57

hitting a pull up bar. We're gonna test you on that, okay,

Jeff Krasno: 1:06:04

but, but these, but there was also something psychological to being to being able to lift my own weight. You know, there was something bigger than just actually physically doing it. It was like I can pull my own weight with some little Yes, psychological thing for me there. And so I started doing those. And it took a while. And then at its peak, I was doing about 100 a day. So 10 sets of 10, it would be like 2018, 1614, 1210,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:06:35

dead, hang, bull

Jeff Krasno: 1:06:35

ups, yeah. I mean a little bit of cheating around the edges, towards the end. But you know,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:06:40

and when did you start lifting weights? Or did you,

Jeff Krasno: 1:06:45

yeah, I mean, more recently, you know? I mean, I'm certainly not. You're not going to find me on the cover of Men's Health like, anytime soon. You might, but maybe give it a year, but, but, yeah, that's probably been in the last like six to nine months. And yeah, I'm discovering. I'm coming out of the closet as sort of a gym rat.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:07:09

Will we need you to because when someone like you who does that, then it makes it normal for everybody else. So we need you to do that? Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 1:07:21

I mean, this is not going to be my job. I'm not going to, per se. I mean, although I am writing books about it, so on some kind of tangential level, I suppose it is part of my job. But, yeah, it's, it's cool. I feel like I've already been able to influence people within my environment to start to take up more adaptive habits and behaviors and for

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:07:47

the good stress protocol. Do you have a recommendation for people in terms of exercise?

Jeff Krasno: 1:07:56

Yes, although the my book doesn't really focus specifically on that. But I would say that sometimes I call it my Jesus protocol.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:08:06

Tell me,

Jeff Krasno: 1:08:10

well, the joke is Jehovah's fitness.

: 1:08:13

Have you heard about it? No, but, but that's pretty funny. Yeah, it's walking

Jeff Krasno: 1:08:17

and fasting for 40 days. You know, in the desert, if you want, you come back on a Friday, eat a bunch of fish. We do some CrossFit. The joke gets worse. Okay, by Saturday, you're totally dead. Sunday, we come back to life. Jehovah's fitness jokes, enough of dad jokes. No, I, but I am kind of serious. Is that you go back and you look into how Jesus was depicted on on the cross, whether or not that's apocryphal or not, or really, you go back to your hunter gatherers, and you say, like, how did they evolve? You know, they're there. They probably had really sinewy, healthy, good body, like, muscle mass, you know. So they were walking like crazy, right? So walking, on average, a hunter gatherer would walk probably seven to 10 miles per day. So that's 14,000 to 20,000 steps, or something, for people that are counting on their I watch or something. Every once in a while, they would be forced into a full sprint, generally against their will, right? So be chased by some

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:09:22

so I love that you're saying this because we do have to work really hard at least once a week where you are breathing heavy, pushing yourself faster and harder than you would like to

Jeff Krasno: 1:09:32

totally and you don't have to be chased by an odd Toad ungulate or a saber tooth tiger in order to do that. But although it could be fun, it could be fun. So that informs a lot, right there. So if you're going to do five or six aerobic workouts per week, maybe do 75% of them as zone two and 25% as zone four or five. So that's a good way just to think about it, through the lens of your own evolution. And then, of course, we're. What else did our hunter gatherer ancestors do? They've lifted heavy things all the time. They chopped their own wood. They carried water, etc. And so how many sessions per week? I probably would say three to four. But I mean, you're the expert there. So and you know, you have to find all major muscle groups, but this is kind of, again, like a general framework, but most important for me, outside of, like, Okay, you do this many sets of deadlifts or whatever, is really changing the way that you think about moving your body and not compartmentalizing it to this one little thing that you do per day, but organically integrate movement into your life, because that is really how we evolved. We were walking and moving all the time. So you know, after lunch, get up and take a walk, move, drop, and do 20 push ups in the middle of the day, go outside, you know, whatever. It's crazy in bodies. So, I mean, we have a fancy rubric for this now. I think it's called neat, right, which is like a non exercise activity, thermogenesis strategy like that. And it's cool that we have to, like, label it great, but I think it's really just changing your relationship with movement. I mean, we have 45,000 gyms in the United States. I did not know that, 45,000 places to sweat and grunt. Yet we are getting more and more obese, like you said, 50% by 2030 so something's not working there. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:11:45

it's fascinating. And I have a statistic here. It says 16 the average American spends the last 16 years of life managing chronic illness, yeah, and experiencing significant physical decline, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Krasno: 1:12:01

I call this the reverse alchemy, because we're these years between 60 and 80. These are supposed to be like our golden years, right? But we have reduced our golden years to the base metals of bed pans and wheelchairs. Would

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:12:19

you say that if you were to think about the one thing, and there obviously is not one thing, but in your book, you really talk about how we are in this comfort trap. And do you believe that there is one common obstacle that humans are facing, and I recognize that that is, a loaded question, but you say you call it the Mac, the Big Mac, modern, American conveniences. Do you think there's one? I think there's one, but I want to hear what you have

Jeff Krasno: 1:12:56

to say. I'm curious to where yours is. I I think that we've fooled ourselves about what a life of ease really means on some level, even though, from time to time, it's fun to luxuriate in the 72 degrees, snuggled on your couch watching Netflix, eating a pint of Chubby Hubby. That life of ease is not what we really, really want in the end, and we know this when we taste it. You know, we don't really want that ethylene gassed tomato that we buy at the grocery store. What we really, really want is that sweet, fake and bursting tomato that we grew ourselves, and that we had to toil to grow it. We had to plant the seed. We had to make the garden bed. We had to make the soil rich. We had to go in there and prune the plant. But the result of that, that inconvenience, that hard work, is the real ease, and I think that's what we're actually looking for in life. But we fooled ourselves, and we know it when we engage in something really creative, or we're immersed in collective enterprise around something that we really care about with other people, this feeling that linear time starts to dissipate and we have total awareness of our body and space and time sometimes, like when we're playing sports, sometimes we call this flow state, right? It's like when we absolutely yoke intention and action and we're all. All there. We're completely present with each other, and we feel that sense of real ease, but that comes with a degree of inconvenience. That's how I'm thinking about it. That's

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:15:13

beautifully said. And I would say that the biggest Mac that modern American convenience that is really challenging us. My answer to that would be distraction.

Jeff Krasno: 1:15:28

Yeah, I'm so glad you said

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:15:30

that, and I think it piggybacks off of what you're saying, distraction from doing the things that matter most. Distraction. Convenience is distraction. We are wired for challenging things, and it has to be remembered, and we have to push for that.

Jeff Krasno: 1:15:51

It's so interesting that you put your thumb on that there's a really interesting article. I first discovered it, I think through an Andrew Huberman episode, but, um, it was written by Matthew Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert of Harvard study, and actually has a very sort of unscientific name for a science paper. It's called a wandering mind. Is an unhappy mind, and it basically studied exactly what you just said distraction is that the happiest and healthiest people in the world are people that are actually thinking about the thing that they're doing. So if you think about how much time we spend in our lives actually thinking about something else than we're doing. We're wandering over here. Oftentimes, we're ruminating over something that happened in the past and then projecting it into the future, and we're creating negative, anticipated memories. Hasn't even happened yet, but we're already projecting something negative out there. We're just never where we are. And I do think you're absolutely right that this is a construction of modernity, because at every second and every moment someone is trying to compete for life's most precious commodity, your attention.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:17:29

And it probably wasn't like that. No before,

Jeff Krasno: 1:17:31

no way, no way. Because, yeah, you know, how did my hunter gatherer ancestors get their weather forecast. So I have this mythical hunter gatherer ancestor named fed John Sark, which is my name to spell backwards. Sometimes I try to really sit in his sagebrush sandals. And the way he got his weather forecast was by climbing to the highest peak and sitting there and seeing some guinea fowl fly by, you know, or just watching the fluctuations of nature or clouds, and then coming back to his tribe and say, Oh, I think there's a storm coming In three days. You know, this is the way information used to be disseminated and and inferred. And of course, now, literally, our time and focus and attention has become a commodity that is bought and sold, and most of the time we're not even aware of it. Yeah, and so we have to be so conscious and so aware to take back our concentration spans and our conscious attention. And sometimes, you know, like meditation can be a very, very how

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:19:00

do we how does one do that in this extremely fast paced society, and one that doesn't like to settle, the mind doesn't like to settle. And yeah, how do we do that? Yeah. And if we say meditation, what does that have to be? Does it have to be 20 minutes, twice a day. How can we do that?

Jeff Krasno: 1:19:26

Well, you have to burn incense and you have to sit in a field of tall grasses. No,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:19:33

sign me up, yeah, but I will say I was recently in Austin, and they were doing a meditation, and I brought my two children, because I bring down my travel with them. Oh, man, I was, I was a little embarrassed. They ran to the meditation within. They were all sitting on the grass. They ran into the meditation ceremony. They started being on the chimes. Oh, man, yeah. I mean,

Jeff Krasno: 1:19:59

so. We suffer from what is often called monkey mind, right? So

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:20:04

did you explore that when you were writing this good stress? I mean, this was

Jeff Krasno: 1:20:09

huge, because every perception we have of the world in the universe is experienced through the prism of our own mind.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:20:19

I first found mud water through a friend of mine, former Navy SEAL, Mark Devine. He was on a cutting out coffee kick, and he had mud water at his old SEAL Fit Training Center. And frankly, I loved it. I go through periods of time where I try to lessen or change up my caffeine source, as well as using coffee midday, and that's where I love mud water. It has functional mushrooms in it, and I've really been trying to increase my overall stamina and energy, and I found that these mushrooms have done that. And also, if you're a matcha lover, their matcha starter kit is an absolute must try. It's a perfect way to get clean energy, stay calm, feel focused. And besides, it's March time to change things up. Mud, water, has cacao, Chai, turmeric and those adaptogenic mushrooms to help you feel focused and balanced, not wired. It's smooth, it's steady, it tastes amazing. It's also ridiculously easy to make. Even for me, in just two minutes, hot water or milk you're ready to tackle the day. It's 100% USDA, certified organic, non GMO, gluten free, vegan, kosher, take your pick. There's also zero sugar and no sweeteners added. Ready to make the Clean Energy Switch. I know that I am and have head to mud water. That's M, u, d, w, T, r.com, get your starter kit and listeners. You get up to 43% off your entire order by using the code Dr lion, you'll get a rechargeable frother. Yes, we all need them. 43% off go to mud water.com/dr lion. They will ask you how you found it? Let them know that you found it on our show. Let's keep strong. Stay strong and get going

Jeff Krasno: 1:22:08

period. So, so getting to know your mind. You know, we go to the physical gym to work our biceps and other major Marshall groups. We don't often go to the mental gym. But of course, the mental gym is as important, if not more important, than the physical gym. And one of the ways to train your mind, or at least to get to know it better, is through meditation. I often call it the tuning fork for the truth, the turn the tuning fork for

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:22:43

reality. Do you think that there is a dichotomy between the two? For example, many deep meditators seem to be very focused on their mind and allow their body to go, yeah. And the same is true for many very physically focused individuals, they focus so much on the external that they allow their internal mind to go wherever it wants. So it's it's almost as if there's two major dichotomies. Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 1:23:16

it's interesting. I was watching Novak Djokovic play this morning,

:: 23:22

I was watching Teletubbies, but sure. Okay, sure.

Jeff Krasno: 1:23:26

And he, I just bring him up because he's an example of someone that has merged the training of the mind with the training of the body. And you're right, it's it is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:23:35

rare. Have you noticed that, though, within your own Yes, I've,

Jeff Krasno: 1:23:40

what I've seen is a really interesting bi directionality. Okay, so let me start with how the physiological can actually bleed or spill into the psychological. So I'm a avid competitive tennis player, and I'm actually playing competitively still, and I I started doing squats maybe about a year ago with

:: 24:06

weight. Started

Jeff Krasno: 1:24:08

just with air squats and then with weight. But I'm not, but I don't want to pretend at risk of, you know, my daughter's like, rolling their eyes too much that I'm like, you know, squatting some outrageous weight, 500 pounds, yeah, something. But my the shape and strength of my quadriceps just totally changed. You know, I kind of had these fleshy legs for a long time in my life.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:24:40

I don't know what that means. What does that mean? They

Jeff Krasno: 1:24:42

were sort of like my wife said, You look more like a woman than a man. Oh, ouch. Okay, and not you, you know, like can So, but you know, since I said kind of started with my squat routine, my legs just totally changed. And. My solidity and my core on the tennis court just went to the entire next level. And what was interesting about it was so I'm a good player, and I'm playing in leagues with like x div one guys who are 20 years younger than me, often, 1520, years younger specimens beasts, you know. And I'm holding my own, you know. And what flipped for me was I knew that in two hours, I'm still gonna be here on this court. I'm going to be just as strong as I am now. Where will you be? Will you be there with me in two hours? You're pretty hot stuff right now, you know. But will you be there with me in two hours? And so that physical strength started to bleed over into this psychological confidence that I started to have because I knew I would be there in two hours, and then that allowed me to play more free, to take a few more risks, calculated risks. And I wouldn't always win. I lose plenty of time. But the physiological spilled into the psychological and the very opposite is true as well, is that when you put yourself under psychological stress, you build that resilience in order to do hard, physical things. And candidly, we talked about cold therapy for metabolic health, there's all sorts of other attributes that seem to be involved with with cold therapy, certainly mood regulation and dopamine production, secretion, etc. I really look at cold therapy as a mental resilience exercise. So again, you get into that cold plunge. What happens? Gasp, epinephrine coursing through your veins. It's coming up. I always feel it in my neck. I'm about to have a panic attack. This is awful. Get me out of here. Get me out of here right now. And then there's a brief moment where I can apply top down conscious pressure on top of involuntary bottom up response. Sometimes that's with the breath, ah, can I bring myself back to parasympathetic Can I do that? Can I utilize my Neo mammalian brain to put my rational side of my prefrontal cortex? Can I put that top down conscious pressure on top of involuntary response, and that training punctuates other elements of your life. Have you found that to be so I mean, I double down on my cold therapy when I'm going to the dentist, for example. You might think, what does that have to do with anything? But when I'm having a lot of dental work done right now. So when Dr Nicky, God bless her, wonderful dentist, is sitting there with a 12 inch syringe about to go into the most sensitive place of my body, and I can't get up and do anything, that sensation is very, very similar to when I immerse in 40 degree water, what's happening? I'm going into this fight or flight thing. The epinephrine is flowing. But what can I do at that moment? I can borrow the tool and the capacity for emotional regulation that I've trained myself in the cold plunge. I can transplant that on top of the dentist or or traffic, or when my kids are crazy, has

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:28:48

this I was going to ask you, has this helped you become a better father and husband?

Jeff Krasno: 1:28:52

I mean, without a doubt, I felt that fasting, strangely helped me become a better parent. It's because it's not that I didn't get hungry outside my eating window. Of course I did. It was nine o'clock at 9pm outside my window, and I was like little pang of hunger. But instead of mindlessly walking to the pantry, I actually had to sit there and witness the nature of the hunger and really untangle is the provenance of this hunger a biological need, like, do I need to eat to survive right now, or is this a psychological desire? I had to split those two in half, needs and desires, and almost every time it was a desire, I was eating my feelings. I was bored. Someone insulted me on Instagram, I don't know. And so I was using the over availability, the surfeit of shelf stable, calories. That we have now I was my psychology can use that to assuage its feelings of discontentment, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:30:08

then that can become the focus. Yeah. So

Jeff Krasno: 1:30:11

what I then learned was that space, which is like the Viktor Frankl thing, that space between stimulus and response in that space is a choice, and in that choice is our liberation and our freedom. So I was able to slowly cultivate that space between the stimulus, in this case, the hunger and the response, the eating or non eating, and then I could use that in other areas of my life. So when my kids were being annoying and aggravating, as they inevitably will do all that time ever, never happens. Instead of two movies, yeah, instead of just having a knee jerk response, I would sit there and say, No, wait a minute, hold on. What's the ideology of their behavior? Right? You

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:30:57

had to train that right. That takes time and effort. And one of the things I think that you have done very beautifully is there is a blending of evidence based practices with a level of spirituality. Do you think that that is a way to create a sustainable approach? Is that the only way, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 1:31:20

it's certainly not the only way for me, I had these two parallel inquests of spirituality and my own physiological journey going on at the same time. So I was learning all this stuff about Eastern religions, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, and studying that, and then at the same time looking into my human physiology and studying that. And day after day, I saw the metaphysical tenets of Eastern philosophies mapped in my physical body all the time. I was like, oh, yeah, you know the Buddhist philosophy is in the middle way Madhyamaka in Sanskrit, okay? And that is essentially the avoidance of extremes. Initially was the is sort of a middle path between asceticism and hedonism, but it became more associated with bringing things towards the middle, towards the center, finding balance or in the body. That's homeostasis, the avoidance of extremes, and I started studying which is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:32:23

totally the opposite of what you're doing, because cold will be considered extreme.

Jeff Krasno: 1:32:27

So this is the very interesting and ironic thing. So the body is wired for homeostasis. It's in so many different ways, thermoregulation, pH balance, neurotransmitter balance, between inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters, hormone balance like glucagon and insulin, estrogen and testosterone, you know, cortisol and melatonin, whatever. So many times there are these counterposing molecules and pathways in the body, AMPK and mTOR, etc, and the body is engineered to find this like little tenuous homeostasis between those two things. I mean, it's very, very hard to disrupt your pH balance. For example, your body is so good at managing that that level around 7.35 or so. So what I found was that that, that that ability to return to the middle, to bounce back, is actually enhanced by pushing the edges. Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:33:31

it is investing in in functional capacity and resilience.

Jeff Krasno: 1:33:37

So if you're just thermo neutral all the time. And you know, you sit back with your smart thermostat that gets to know you and say, Oh, I think you're 72 you're a 72 girl or whatever, and you never push hypothermia or hyperthermia. Now, of course, the dose makes a poison, right? Hypothermia can be

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:33:59

designated, yeah, but we love cold and heat exposure, yeah. So

Jeff Krasno: 1:34:03

you want to just push the edges, and the more you push the edges, the better your body gets at moving back to the middle. And that's true in with so many of these different protocols.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:34:15

I think what I think that's, again, very well said. What are your favorite protocols? If you were to pick your top three favorite protocols that you've put in the book, Good stress, what are they? Yeah,

Jeff Krasno: 1:34:27

so I would say the some of the ones that we already talked about, which are like the fasting and cold, like contrast bathing. So heat, cold, heat cold with a fasting protocol. I love that for my physio, my physiology, I started, actually, to become more interested in some of the psychological stressors, candidly. Oh,

:: 34:49

tell me so.

Jeff Krasno: 1:34:54

So I was always a people pleaser growing up, and part of it was the. Due to the fact that I was overweight and clumsy and always wanting to fit in. You know? In fact, I was went to see Brene Brown speak this morning, and she has this incredible delineation between fitting in and belonging, right? So fitting in is essentially changing who you are in order to be part of a group, belonging is never compromising your authentic self to be part of a group. But when I was five or six or seven, I didn't have the faculty to delineate between those things. I would do anything to be liked, and really, that became the thread of my life. And so right when we anchored into port lockdown of COVID, March 2020, I started to write a newsletter for commune, and we had this. It's a big distribution on that list. It's probably 1.21 point 3, million people. And I was writing 2000 words every Sunday, and I agreed, sort of naively, to do this at the beginning of COVID, because I thought this would be a service to the community, because there was so much fear around COVID At that juncture and so much uncertainty. And so if I could dispatch these little buoys of hope, you know, maybe people could feel less alone and feel more connected. So I said, okay, sure, I'll do it. And then, like, four or five weeks in, I was like, this is a lot of work, yeah. But then 2020, offered plenty of fodder to write about. You know, there was obviously the reckoning for social justice in the wake of George Floyd. There was an election that year. There was a rise of Q and A obviously COVID, development of the vaccine, all these very kind of hot button, incendiary issues. And I was really trying to write sort of a middle way, very rigorously researched essay newsletter. And I would connect my personal email to every single one of them, and then they would go out every Sunday, and then Monday morning, I would get a deluge of incoming opprobrium from people essentially mad about something that I said or something that I wrote, and, you know, lots of expletives in there. And as a people pleaser at the beginning, I was like, so defensive, yeah, and really hurt, and I would stay up all night, like brooding over responses and holding that little ember of resentment waiting for the right time to throw it. Of course, I was the one getting burned

:: 37:32

so and they weren't even

Jeff Krasno: 1:37:33

thinking about it. No, that's right. But then I kind of had this moment of Satori, where I was like, this is an opportunity. I was studying kind of the immune system and microbiology at that point. And I was like, Oh, I pretty much understand how people build their physiological immune system. You know, you have this incredible immune, floating brain, you know, it is on the lookout. It has its radar out for pathogens, for viruses and bacteria, and some low grade exposure to those viruses, bacteria stimulates this process by which your adaptive immune system makes these proteins and spins them up until it finds the right antibody recipe, and then you're essentially immune to that pathogenic insult. Well, I was like, I think there's a metaphor here with my psychology, is that this exposure to some of this insult, I can build my psychological immune Absolutely. And I started really looking forward to being insulted. Fortunately, there was a lot of people ready to insult me take it away. So every Monday, I was like, and I in, you know, to be fair, most of the response I got was very encouraging and very positive, but I would kind of skip over those and find the ones where there was some degree of recrimination. And I was like, I and I was really would emotionally regulate myself, I would do a little bit of breath work, and then I'd be like, okay, like, why does this person, what is the motivation here behind what they're writing. Why do they dislike me so much, or dislike something that I've said so much? And the more thoughtful detractors, I would send them an email back, and then eventually I would ask them if they want to get on a zoom call. Oh my gosh. And this is what I call my Gary David Copperfield routine,

: 1:39:43

because this is how you make people disappear. Oh my gosh, in

Jeff Krasno: 1:39:48

August and September 2020, I put aside Monday afternoons and Tuesday afternoons to have hour long zoom calls with people that. Didn't like me.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:40:02

Wow, and it was That's amazing.

Jeff Krasno: 1:40:05

And it turned out to be in a good stress, because I had to create safe space for people. And it was so interesting. What happened. So I wrote this one particular article about the virus, and there was data fairly early on that seemed to point to the idea that the people that were contracting the virus most severely had multiple comorbidities, had metabolic dysfunction, were often obese and often had diabetes. And so I was mining that data, and I was trying to write a thoughtful essay. Of course, this was also overlapping with the body positivity movement at that juncture. So you can imagine how much flak I took at that moment. So this is just to give you an example of the kind of conversations I was having. And my audience is almost is predominantly female as well. And so, you know, I would get on these zoom calls with women, primarily, I think, exclusively around this issue, who had felt very shamed by me. Of course, that was not the intention at all. And being someone that had struggled with weight my entire life, and being very open about that, I thought I had addressed that. I was addressing the health dimensions as it pertained to this virus. But still, you know, people are going to interpret things however they're going to want to interpret it. And at that moment in our cultural history, people were so triggerable for very legitimate and justifiable reasons. And I think now too, and now too. So I would get on these zoom calls, and I would mostly honestly just listen and create space for people to be seen and heard. And I developed a whole protocol around that, which is a whole thing, but I basically, over time, built this like Rolodex of frenemies, because at the end of these hour long zooms, there would be this level of connection. And I, you know, as I listened, I would really notate these areas of convergence in my life and and, you know, the person with whom I was on the Zoom and by the, you know, mostly, they would just talk for 45 minutes and exhaust themselves. And then I would be like, oh, you know, I was born in Chicago, too, and I'm part of the girls club. I got all daughters, whatever I find these areas of connection, and most of the time, we never even got around to the issue that had put us at loggerheads in the first place. But it was a really interesting test in building my, my social regimen, my my social fitness and and it was initially very, very stressful, but I started to think about all the conversations that we have, or I should say that we don't have because they seem stressful, and we tend to avoid them, particularly with the people that we're most close to. And I started to think about the possibility of what's on the other side of those stressful conversations. And my dad's 8182 my mom's 81 what are those conversations that I want to have with them before I can't have them anymore? What are the conversations that I want to have with my children or my best friends that I might be avoiding because they seem stressful. So this was sort of my good stress protocol as applied to social fitness and and it's really become a really huge part of my life.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:44:21

I am speechless. Doesn't happen often. That's incredible. That's incredible, deeply thoughtful and deeply useful for everybody listening.

Jeff Krasno: 1:44:39

Thank you for saying that, yeah, I'll just add one last thing to it, is that I hadn't had no training in nonviolent communication prior to this. Subsequently, I did get trained in it, and as a product of that. This past August, I hosted at my communi Topanga retreat, eight Palestinians and eight Israelis, and I held space in that case as a moderator between stressful, difficult conversations. And we all lived up there for a week, for five days, in sort of deep connection. And these, many of these kids, they were all students, and many of them were Palestinians that grew up in refugee camps in the West Bank, and there were Israeli Jews that grew up in the settlements also the West Bank, but in very different circumstances. Both groups very anchored in their own political identities, but often, but obviously, they had come to this retreat with an open mind, and it was the most cathartic experience of my life. What happened over those five days? So there's so many benefits in doing hard things.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:46:06

Jeff Krasno, thank you so much for your work and your forever studentship and stewardship for health and wellness, and I think your overall fellow human.

Jeff Krasno: 1:46:18

Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I don't take it lightly, so I appreciate your generosity in having me it was an

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:46:27

absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

:: 46:30

You.