Episode 39: Pilar Gerasimo on Being a Healthy Deviant: Deciding to be Healthy in an Unhealthy World
Show Summary:
We all want to be healthy… but it is a difficult feat in a society that is constantly enticing us to be unhealthy. Fast food, screens, long work hours, and lack of connection means that in order to be healthy, we actually need to take a radical step in the other direction. You might say that we need to be a healthy deviant!
Today’s guest, Pilar Gerasimo, is a founding editor of Experience Life magazine, co-host of the top rated The Living Experiment podcast, and author of The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker's Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World.
We are excited to bring you an enlightening conversation all about what it means to be a health deviant. Stay tuned to learn what steps you can take to build a life that supports your health.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
3:17 - Pilar’s story
9:29 - Why willpower fails
15:29 - Why our genetics and environment don’t match
20:25 - Multitasking doesn’t work
27:08 - What does it mean to be a healthy deviant
33:00 - How society might need to change for our health
38:11 - Ultradian rhythms
43:50 - Being a healthy deviant in the healthcare system
49:57 - What Pilar does every day to cultivate joy
51:06 - Getting in touch with Pilar
Listen to the full conversation:
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Full Episode Transcript:
SPEAKERS: Dr. Andrew Wong, Pilar Gerasimo
Pilar Gerasimo
Willpower– I think it's a simple enough notion that we prefer to imagine that if I just have enough of this willpower, I can make these healthy decisions and then my life will be okay. That's sort of the story that gets told. And in some ways, the solutions that are presented to us like diet and exercise routines are kind of perfectly set up for a try and fail experience because they're so difficult to maintain in the face of all the other challenges that we have like time poverty, like focus deficit, and multitasking and distraction, and chronic depletion, which I'm going to talk about in just a second. That every time we sort of pick up a new intervention like a diet or workout, we're coming at it from this depleted place where we really can't sustainably succeed without intervention. Or we do the thing, but it doesn't produce the results that we anticipated.
Dr. Andrew Wong
We all want to be healthy, but it is a difficult feat in a society that's constantly enticing us to be unhealthy. Fast food screens, long work hours and a lack of connection means that in order to be healthy, we actually need to take a radical step in the other direction. You might say that we need to become a healthy deviant. Today's guest, Pilar Gerasimo, is a founding editor of The Experience Life magazine, co-host of the top rated The Living Experiment podcast and author of The Healthy Deviant, ARule Breakers Guide to Being Healthy and an Unhealthy World. I am Dr. Andrew Huang, co-founder of Capital Integrative Health. This is a podcast that is dedicated to transforming the consciousness around what it means to be healthy and understanding the root causes of both disease and wellness. We are excited to bring you an enlightening conversation all about what it means to be a healthy deviant. Stay tuned to learn what steps you can take to build a life that supports your health.
Hi, Pilar! Thanks so much for coming on today. It's such an honor to have you on.
Pilar Gerasimo
Thank you so much for having me, Andrew. It's really a pleasure and an honor!
Dr. Andrew Wong
Yes. And we were talking about Wisconsin just a minute ago offline. I'm just curious how the weather is there.
Pilar Gerasimo
We're having a very delayed spring normally by this time in April. It's lots of flowers and grass and it's been cold. So it's a little icky out today. I would say it's not our usual fabulous spring. You know, Minnesota and Wisconsin, upper middle west, they generally say you really only get about four months of the year that aren't winter. And it's kind of squeezing in four months, right..
Dr. Andrew Wong
All right. Yeah, hopefully it comes soon.
So Pilar, you are a health journalist. You are founding editor of Experience Life magazine and also co-host of the top rated The Living Experiment podcast. And you're also an author of an amazing book which I want to fold up here for those who are watching on video, The Healthy Deviance. I love this book. I knew I needed to reach out to you and try to interview you when I read it. I thought it really is a game changing book for all of us both clinicians like myself, but also for the public for many reasons. But let's just talk first about kind of more about the journey that led you to what you're doing now.
Pilar Gerasimo
Yes, well, there's a personal journey and a professional journey. And I think that they kind of came together in the book and the content that I founded the book in which was part lived experience, and part research; and observation of what's going on in our culture and what happened to me my personal story is very similar to what happens I think, to most people in our culture, which is I started out as a pretty healthy happy kid, and then found my health and my happiness degrading as I tried to comply with the norms and conventions of our society and tried to fit in with my peer group. I was born in 1967. So that late 60s early 70s was really the beginning of a lot of the proliferation of processed foods and ready to eat things and you know, lots of different kinds of snack foods and microwave foods. And to me, that was desirable, that was what’s getting advertised. And even though I grew up on an organic family farm where we raised a lot of our own food and my mom cooked and we all learned how to cook, there was something so attractive about these advertised not just the food products but even then the fitness products right it was go for the burn and Jane Fonda diet and exercise and aerobics and hand weights. And it's really silly when I look back on it. Now I see how many times our culture has gone through a shift of prescription, but the basic pattern is still the same to be to be an acceptable person and to be, you know, 16 as successful or desirable. You have to go through this crazy mill of different products and solutions. And then you still aren't going to be good enough and you're gonna get down on yourself and feel badly about yourself and that's gonna make you even more desperate part of that cycle I describe in the book as the vicious cycle of the unhealthy default reality, meaning that when you go along with the defaults and automatic choices that are encouraged, you end up becoming less and less healthy and that's really what's happened to our whole society. So my personal story is that after losing my health and fitness and then trying really hard to get it back, both my physical and mental and emotional fitness, I started noticing what actually worked and what didn't. And when I realized what was working and how simple it was, and how different it was than what had been prescribed, I became passionate about sharing that information with other people. And for me, a lot of it was just getting my head straight about my own value and my autonomy and my okayness the way I am that it wasn't me that was the mess. It was me in the context of a culture that was making almost everybody that I knew sick and miserable. I described my sort of rock bottom moments in the book as being one where I was in a fit of frustration at myself. I stomped my foot so hard, I literally broke the bone in my foot, my fifth metatarsal bone. And that for me, was so symbolically important this realization that I had been breaking myself down, that I was capable of doing great violence to myself in my determination to do everything perfectly and be just right. I also realized it wasn't just me like I said, it was a lot of other people around me that have been suffering and struggling and experiencing the same mounting set of symptoms, rashes and stomach aches and headaches and misery of various kinds. So that coincided with my professional journey of being a health journalist. I'm working on a health and fitness magazine called Experience Life which I started in 2001 in partnership with Lifetime and called Lifetime Fitness. And as I became more expert as the result of my professional researching, and you know, I said passionate about sharing what really did work telling the truth about what creates health and happiness and what degrades it. I found myself effectively obsessed with this idea that most of what we're being told to do doesn't work for most people most of the time. And to get into a healthier way of life requires first, a radical shift of perspective about what the real problem is, in other words, like not you but your relationship and unhealthy culture. That's experimental at best and I would say right now a kind of failing experiment culturally and what produces good results for most people. So from there interventions are very different. The interventions that work are not just diet and exercise interventions, there are mindset and self regulation, and self compassion, amplified awareness, pre-emptive repair which we're going to talk about and continuous growth and learning are what I consider to be the most important what are called nonconformist competencies to help bust you out of the unhealthy culture. So for me, it's still a journey. Every day is an experiment. Every day is different than the last day and I make my commitment to noticing for me, what is going on in my own body mind and what my body mind is meeting now. And mostly it's not screaming out for another yoyo diet or another exhausting workout. Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Wong
So thank you, Pilar. This is very enlightening to like some light bulbs are popping in my head as you talk here. When we think about our culture, you know, in the United States or you know the Western world for sure. It certainly seems to me to be more of an individualistic culture, right? Like we talked about the importance of communities we just talked about, you know, group shared medical visits and we talked about you know, ways to you know, help improve individual health outcomes. You know, a lot of the studies are done saying oh, well if you diet together in groups or you exercise in groups, then your individual you know, willpower will be better essentially, right? So it still goes back to this idea of individual willpower, but it totally ignores which you highlight in your book, The Healthy Deviant, this idea that the culture itself, the whole idea of individual willpower being the be all and end all of, you know, individual success or failure for health outcomes. And even like, I think you alluded to the healthy outcomes of you know, a skinny waistline so we looked better at the beach or you know, something like that, or look better in a gym clothes is that really the health goals that we want. So these are some of the things that you touch on in the book. So I love to kind of hear your thoughts on how this idea of individual willpower has sort of taken over the culture and, really, I think muted this idea of the actual system itself is unhealthy, by default.
Pilar Gerasimo
Yes. It's such a setup for failure. This obsession with willpower, it is very Western, individualistic, oriented around how you know, the person can triumph in the face of challenge just by having more robust willpower. And I think it's really interesting. I have a whole chapter in the book about moving when I say it's from willpower to willingness and which is a very different mindset. I actually have an exercise I call “shifting your grip”, which is about just experimenting with how that simple shift of attitude like “I have to do it”, “I've got to do it by force” versus “I’m willing to experiment with this thing”, “I'm willing to notice and try something different”. Now historically, how we got to this place where we believe that willpower is the thing that is the biggest indicator or a predictor of success has a lot to do with how research was done psychologically and what people were interested in studying. So kind of like, you know, when they say if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you start studying willpower, and how it works in people, you start making interesting discoveries that get reported in the media and people like to talk about willpower. It's just, it's been implanted and ingrained in us for this culture from Calvinists times, self denial, you know, showing the fortitude that you have to resist temptation and self regulation, I do believe is an important factor but self regulation for me, it's not about self discipline. It's about re-regulating the dysregulated systems that we have neurologically, metabolically, digestively and microbiome level. And so functional medicine has always taken a more complete look at the human being and how they operate or don't. And the conditions that create health versus disease, but willpower. I think it's a simple enough notion that we prefer to imagine that if I just have enough of this willpower, I can make these healthy decisions and then my life will be okay. That's sort of the story that gets told. And in some ways, the solutions that are presented to us like diet and exercise routines are kind of perfectly set up for a try and fail experience because they're so difficult to maintain in the face of all the other challenges that we have like time poverty, like focus deficit, and multitasking and distraction and chronic depletion, which I'm going to talk about in just a second. That every time we sort of pick up a new intervention, like a diet or workout, we're coming at it from this depleted place where we really can't sustainably succeed with that intervention, where we do the thing but it doesn't produce the results that we anticipated. And what happens that again, psychological research has shown us, is that when we exert a lot of attention on something like a challenge, and could be a diet, it could be many of the studies that they did were about pain tolerance, like putting your hand in a bucket of ice water and seeing how long you could resist that. What they found out was that when you exert your attention and focus and determination that way, it effectively depletes your capacity in other areas. Now there is some debate about the nature of these studies. Some of the results of these studies, when tested in a computer generated environment don't work the same as these visual studies do of willpower. But there's an idea called ego depletion, which is that as we attempt to exert willpower, we begin depleting ourselves and we have less available that it's a depletable resource to apply somewhere else. And the results of that are things like when we give people a very challenging, mental math tasks like a math test, or challenge them this like cognitively it depletes their willpower in another area like then offered the choice between various foods people will choose the less healthy foods as opposed to the preferred, you know, healthy options. The same thing works the other way which is very interesting to me that if you are exerting what they call restrained eating tendencies, trying really hard to manage your eating just so, it depletes your cognitive capacity in other areas, including your ability to even discern whether the foods you're choosing are in fact healthy. Food labeling studies have shown this too that people get overwhelmed trying to figure out those nutrition panels and what all of the carbs and grams and things are and they just kind of give up and they sort of choose “Okay, it says light on the package”, I'll just go with that. Or it says cholesterol free on the package. I'll just go with that.”
Dr. Andrew Wong
Yeah, it's like the circuits are getting overloaded, right?
Pilar Gerasimo
Yes, and I think, really, quite technically, they are getting overloaded. You know, we know that our mental firing gets pretty messed up when we put too much information into the hopper at once. And I think we're living in a society where that is the default mode that we're living in. So just to get back to your original question, like how did we get here? I think part of it is historical, cultural stuff that we brought over to this society, Western culture brought along with Calvinism and a bunch of other things. Part of it is, I think, the disservice of our health and fitness media, which has benefited from advertising for lots of different products and services if we can get you to try the next thing. And the next thing and next thing, you cycle through buying these things, and if we convince you that it's just your willpower, that's the problem. It's not the failure of the product or the design of the program. You know, it's you. You're gonna then try again and again, and that's a lot of how we end up getting depleted financially, attentionally, energetically at a mood level, that then is a setup for more of that try-and-fail cycle. And I think interrupting that cycle is the truly healthy, deviant renegade thing to do.
Dr. Andrew Wong
So there's information overload, it sounds like there's depletion of willpower equals ego depletion, like you were saying, what are some of the other factors, Pilar, that you see in terms of that are pillars of or create this unhealthy people reality what what kind of are we up against so we can kind of move through this in a more enlightened way?
Pilar Gerasimo
Yeah. Well, if it's okay with you, I would love to just take a little bit of a historical look that addresses how our bodies and minds were evolved over time to succeed in certain circumstances and what we're actually living in now. The way that I do this, I kind of think of it as like a timeline from the beginning of the history of humanity, which started about 2.5 million years ago. And during the course of most of that 2.5 million years, the way that we evolved as a species was in small nomadic tribes living obviously, entirely off of what was available in our foodshed, you know, animals and plants that we could manage to access and our daily lives were determined by the patterns of the rising and setting of the sun, energetic cycles that were normal, you know, rest and recovery after exertion. And we lived in an environment where people pretty much all had the same stuff. There were not like differences in wealth, like everyone kind of had the same things and shared them so that they could succeed together in communities and if you had a problem, everyone in your tribe or community or you know, area had a problem because we all needed to be operating at pretty much top notch as much as we could to survive. So those are the conditions over which we evolved and then suddenly, about 10,000 years ago, which is like a blink of an eye relative to 2.5 million, we had the agricultural revolution, was changing everything about the way that we were living we began domesticating plants and animals, having surpluses of things moving into villages and towns and then cities and starting to see a specialization that caused us to have some people to have more and some people that have less. It also caused a lot of technological change, that rapidly led to the Industrial Revolution, which was just about 200 years ago, and then to the technological revolution of about 60 years ago, the first computers and lots of push button appliances and things. And all of these things contributed to just really rapid change in our environments, our food availability, our lifestyles, how much exercise we are getting, our sleep patterns and waking patterns. And socially, that difference in what you have versus not-have, making you successful or not successful in each other's eyes, compact competition versus collaboration and cooperation. So all of that happened. And then just 25 years ago, we had the digital revolution, where suddenly all of these devices and beeps and things and blips are in our face constantly in social media and all of that. This is an unprecedented set of circumstances that has only been in existence for about half of my 55 year old lifetime. And what that means if you really think about it, that accelerating rate of change from 10,000 years ago to 200 years ago, it's just been like a direct line straight up versus that flat line of almost no change. And what it's created is something called evolutionary mismatch, where the DNA and the tissue of our body, the design of our body, mind, the hard wiring, if you will, does not match with the circumstances we're living in. And I say, you know, we are the first generation in the history of humanity to have even attempted to live the way that we're living right now. And that disconnect that evolutionary mismatch is creating conditions of chronic stress and consistent low grade trauma. Really like what's wrong with me, what's wrong with the situation, automatic negative thinking, comparing ourselves to each other, always feeling there's something wrong that we have to willpower, our way out of, and that is a toxic experience. It's a constant source of negativity and feeling like you're failing in an environment where also it's becoming more and more difficult to get our most basic needs met just by in the course of our daily life. We have to have these specialty cures and interventions, just to function, you know, even things like CBD or supplements that, you know, whatever works works. But the truth is, we are having fidget spinners and spinning classes, and all of these things that are designed to help us rise to the challenges of being healthy, where our bodies and minds simply are not thriving in these circumstances. So that's what I see is the basic problem is that our most basic human needs are not being met during the course of what passes right now, for so called normal daily life.
Dr. Andrew Wong
Yeah, thank you! There's so much mismatch, like you said, between our genes that, you know, from million years ago and now with the technological and then the you know, digital revolutions, for sure, and even before that, like industrial agricultural, so how do we kind of marry or how do we pair this idea of from paleo, that they can be evolved with tribes and farming and you know, being on the land with all the abundance to harvesting the best of the technological and digital revolutions? How do we kind of integrate those and synergize those together?
Pilar Gerasimo
Yeah, well, part of it, I think, is experimentation and noticing what is working and not working. Like I think one thing we've learned from PET scans and great science and observational studies is that, this thing we call multitasking does not work. We are it just is not functionally ever going to work based on the way our brains are currently designed until we have neural implants or something that can hold information over one hand while we function over here. Computers do that but people don't. So I think we're observing that if we want to have successful days and nights, we need to find a way to regulate, again, not just discipline ourselves, but re-regulate our energy and attentional patterns, and put our focus on the most important things early in the day, take breaks between tasks, don't try to do things at once because what that does is slows you down, creates inflammation and frustration and sets you up for failure. That's just one thing though, right? That's just okay. Multitasking, for example, something that we're presented with is normal. That doesn't work at all, and we're having to figure that out. The question is, how do we go about noticing the real impact that this normal way of existing even though it's not functional, is the impact that it's really having on us? And that's one of the reasons I say that amplified awareness, a higher than normal level of awareness on your own experience, is the first nonconformist's competency. How do I feel when I get up and how do I feel different two and a half hours later after I've been struggling and toiling away without a break? Oh, what I noticed is I feel frazzled, distracted, brain fogged, energetically depleted, my mood is lower, and I can notice the first subtle signs of inflammation. If I have anything that's going to itch, it starts itching you know, the people around me start pulling their hair because they're, you know, that's how we relieve stress or we start fidgeting or you know, chewing on something. And you if you really pay attention with amplified awareness to what's going on in you and around you. You're like this isn't working, and then he's struggling with how I want “Oh, I actually feel like it'd be good to take a break”. Well, it turns out that our bodies and minds were designed to have these undulating energy patterns of high productivity and focus followed by recovery, but we're missing the recovery breaks that are known as ultradian rhythm breaks. It's one of the- I call them “renegade rituals” that I recommend to people to help restore them to their higher functioning level. But once you realize once you have the amplified awareness that the way you're living isn't working with you, each of us does have to do a certain amount of studying and experimenting to figure out how to return ourselves to a better functioning state. Now, most people aren't going to go out and try to re embrace the lifestyle of their ancestors, you know, cave dwelling and all of that. And there's a reason that we moved inside, you know, to be protected from nature's discomforts and dangers. Also say like, I have coyotes out here in Wisconsin. I can hear them yapping away at night. I don't really want to be out there with them sleeping under a little blanket, you know? So there's, there's reasons that we did it. But I think we have lost a lot in the process. And now the experiment is how do we keep the best of what our bodies and minds need? How do we restore those cultural norms? Acknowledging that we can't change our DNA, we can't change our hardwiring, while also embracing the best that this culture has to offer, which remember, also brought us things like beautiful music created, you know, on on extraordinary instruments, and I'm talking about, you know, from medieval music to now like it's just really cool stuff. We didn't have that before the fun of being able to watch, you know, Discovery Channel and learn how animals that are nowhere around you are living. That's the upside there's some pretty cool stuff. And then there's the fact that things like watching the news are incredibly destructive to our health and well being and there are a lot of studies to show the more nighttime sort of news you watch, the less healthy and happy you are not just take time early anytime of the day. So I think experimentation is the name of the game and then learning what I call the skills of the healthy person. Realizing that you're going to have to develop a skill set that isn't going to be taught to you by their culture, but that is available to you. And I say, Andrew, I'm sure you've seen this too, that the people if you look around at who is healthy and happy around you, despite all these challenges, some of it is obviously privilege and the fact that people who have more resources have more of an opportunity to experiment and try things out and get their needs met. But part of it is a skill set and the skills of the healthy person are exactly what we're talking about. Noticing, putting your attention on yourself, being willing to intervene earlier to do what you need to do even sacrificing what might look like success, to be able to preserve your body and mind and the sanctity of your own self. That's really what I teach. That's what the book is about. That's I know a lot of what you guys do. Capital health, other functional medicine practices really are starting to study how to create the conditions for health and happiness even in the face of the cultural norms that are tearing them apart.
Dr. Andrew Wong
Thank you, Pilar. Thank you for shouting us (CIH) out, too. You know, when you think about functional medicine, and it's very similar to what you're writing about in your book To Healthy Deviant, we think about this concept in society of normal and normal is considered you know, normal is considered very, I would say, unsaid is sort of considered an optimal condition. Like if you think about it, it goes back to our evolution or kind of way that we kind of evolved as you know, in tribes of 150 Villagers or less and so in that situation, it's life or death. You don't want to be not normal. You don't want to be outside that tribe, right? So, but now we have millions, billions of people in the world. And we're in this environment where there's an environment genetic mismatch. So there's a situation that essentially is telling us primordially, you know, internally that we got to be normal to survive in this tribe, but now the tribes like billions of people. So in a way, we have to have that, like you said, this amplified awareness that essentially, there's a mindset shift that needs to happen to say that nowadays and 2022 or beyond when you're listening to this,, normal is not optimal. The normal healthy you know, the normal default reality is actually not healthy, it's unhealthy. So, you know, that's, I think the first thing is that awareness, which then it sounds like the next thing is to build up that courage to break away and become a deviant. Right, because even that word deviant, I think I read that in your preface, you know, like what kind of book is this? You know, so, can you describe the ideal, you know, healthy patterns for you? And, you know, what does it mean to be a healthy deviant? Let's kind of zero in on that.
Pilar Gerasimo
Yeah. Yeah, let's start there. Because I think that this, the solutions that I'm proposing make a lot more sense once you understand what the concept of healthy deviance is really about. So you know that the word deviant in our culture is often the first reaction you have is like, “oh, not good, right? Bad thing. Nobody wants to be a deviant. Terrible people are deviant.” But in the context of our culture, where most people statistically speaking are not healthy and happy. And I'll share some data about that. Choosing to be a healthy person when most people are not healthy and happy is an act of social deviance. It's a deviation from the norm. Well, what is that norm? Right now? That norm is more than 50% closer to 60% of people, adult US people being diagnosed with at least one chronic illness, many people being diagnosed with many more than one because they tend to flock together type two diabetes and heart disease and you know, all of those things, cancer. So if you think about right off the start more than 50% of us are diagnosed as chronically ill 60 to 77% of us are significantly overweight or obese. 70% are DL, are taking regular prescription drugs many more than one by the time you're 65 I think it's like the average is five prescription drugs at once on a daily basis. 80% of people are not mentally or emotionally thriving, meaning that they're dealing with cognitive issues, depression, anxiety, mood problems, behavioral issues and so on. 80% Andrew, I mean, that's an enormous massive majority and not this is..
Dr. Andrew Wong
This is pre pandemic, yeah?
Pilar Gerasimo
Yes! These are pre pandemic numbers. And those numbers we know climbed, I think to 89% during the height of COVID lockdown, and we still don't really know what the aftermath is going to be. Here's the thing though, the number that blows my mind the most. And again, this research was done in about 2016. I don't know the current number because they haven't really done the study. But data that was supported, reported in the Mayo Clinic proceedings and by the Centers for Disease Control suggested that about 97.3% of US adults are not practicing even the most basic healthy behaviors or habits that they would need to practice in order to stay healthy and happy for the long haul. In other words, we're not eating healthy enough, moving enough or sleeping. I mean, they didn't actually consider sleep. They only looked at eating a reasonably healthy diet, getting a moderate amount of exercise and not smoking and maintaining a healthy body composition, which to me last time I checked isn't a behavior or a habit. It's the outcome of behaviors and habits. So they really only looked at three things. And they didn't raise a great standard for healthy eating. They use the USDA nutrition guidelines. So we think about it: 97.3% of people aren't managing to eat reasonably well, exercise enough or in healthy ways and not smoke. They didn't consider sleep. They didn't consider stress. They didn't consider social connection and still 97.3% of people were not doing all of those things. And that means that if you are, you are an absolute outlier. You represent a single digit percentage of the US adult population, and you are having to work against the norms that produced that set of results. Every single day. You're having to do a lot of things differently than most people do them and differently than we are encouraged to do them by a culture that now considers those behaviors that the antithesis of the behaviors that they studied, to be the norm and to be promoted by advertising by media setup to be easy and convenient everywhere you go. And I think that if you really take stock, is a reasonably healthy person of how much of your energy and attention go into defending yourself against the unhealthy culture and defending yourself against the unhealthy norms. You realize, it can be exhausting and difficult and depleting and we're talking about depletion. It's an effort. You don't get a lot of social support. People around you look at you weird. Things are not set up for your convenience. And all of that walking against the traffic of swimming against that tide proves to be another set of challenges that healthy people have to rise to meet, which is why I think it's very important to start addressing them more collectively and realizing we can create a healthier culture by making the demand of our circumstances in our workplaces, in our homes or schools or hospitals. We have to start changing those norms because it's not sustainable. Just to have a few people trying to like manage life when everybody else is getting sick, and really struggling to just get their most daily needs met.
Dr. Andrew Wong
Thank you, Pilar. I actually came across that 97.3% figure, even before I read your book, and then when I read it, because before I read your book, I was kind of like, “What's wrong with people? Why can't they, why can't they be their big guns that willpower, you know, put that ace up their sleeve?” I think teaching a public health class, but the point is, is that, you know, I kind of went to that unhealthy default reality mindset of, okay, you know, “97.3% of people they're just not good enough to do the lifestyle you know, something, what's wrong with them? “
Pilar Gerasimo
What's wrong?
Dr. Andrew Wong
Right. So it sounds like a big revolutionary question. You're asking your book is not what's wrong with us as a human race as a you know, collective individual willpower. It's actually what's something wrong with the system and you know, there's collective ways to change that. I think a big thing that you've mentioned before is that there are a lot of, you know, people that are able to, you know, kind of hack into this a little bit more to some degree. You know, once they get the amplified awareness with some degree of privilege, how do we get the entire population involved in healthy gay dance?
Pilar Gerasimo
Well, the final section of my book after I've talked about the concepts, how to do this, you know, the renegade rituals, the interventions I suggest after I present a program called The 14-day Healthy Deviant Adventure, where I give people an opportunity to experiment with some of these suggestions, I noticed that just the real life effect it has on them. The last part of the book is called Taking it to the Streets, and it's really about how we need to begin advocating for making healthy choices easier and by healthier choices, I don't mean lower calorie food in these soup lines. You know, I don't mean, you know, putting in a treadmill in everybody's office, that's not the goal. How can we create the norms and defaults that support health and happiness and just the expectations and the demands that we're placing on ourselves and each other, provide more what I called preemptive repair opportunities. That gives people a chance to get ahead of the damage that is being done to them, but in this context of this culture, in order to reclaim their vitality and energy and Mojo and resilience so that they can make healthier choices, we have to address the chronic depletion burnout, overwhelm, freakout, depression, anxiety stuff in a more holistic way, not treating people as individuals who have a problem, but acknowledging the culture we have is producing negative results for almost everybody. And so how this might look would be, on the one hand, and suggestions that some people like my friend, Dan Buettner, who has the Blue Zones project, observe that redesigning our communities, redesigning the flow of traffic to allow people to be able to be outside comfortably moving under their own steam more easily, as opposed to putting everybody in cars on freeways sitting or public transport that makes them sit and breathe, you know, diesel fumes for hours in both directions. And some of it is obviously about the food supply, rethinking convenience and the lowest possible cost commodity driven foods for nourishing foods that can taste wonderful and be gratifying that you can get enough of and feel satisfied with as opposed to foods that are designed to make you feel insanely hungry no matter how much of them you eat. These are going to be acts that require political well, they're going to require a real shift in our educational system to honor the value of little children knowing how their bodies operate, and respecting that infrastructure, rather than fighting it all the time. Now, at the time, I was eight years old, I was convinced I was a flawed person, that I needed to lose weight. I put myself on my diet and my first diet when I was eight years old. I believe that's a sick society. That's not a screwed up eight year old, you know? So there's just a lot of examples, but I think one thing I recommend to people is to begin advocating in small groups, in your workplace, in your school, for example. So this is important to me, and I don't think that these basic needs are being met. It might be a privilege to be able to voice that but when you voice it as something that is going to benefit the whole, I think that's a responsible thing to do. For example, when I was running Experience Life magazine, we began experimenting with flexible locations of people long before that was the norm. Come in when you want you know, here's the stuff to do you know and also like while we're together let's plan to take breaks, let's not frown on the person who is going off to take a walk on you know, at a at a break time or just sitting and meditating in a quiet room. Let him be model that as the leader and affirm people who are doing that rather than punishing them or ridiculing them. Saying thank you for taking care of that brilliant brain that I hired and that healthy body that is going to help you get through all of the challenges and then when people do have issues, addressing them with compassion, as opposed to “go fix yourself and come back when you're fixed.” I see a lot of that too. Like people getting basically nervous breakdowns and going off, you know, running away trying to do recovery and then coming back into the same burning fire that produced all of their breakdown in the first place. So I think you know, the great resignation, I often say I don't think that that's a product of COVID I don't think that that's a product of you know the last few years I think the burnout, overwhelm and exhaustion have been cresting for a long time. And the most recent sets of circumstances have just you know, in that last little needle in the haystack for a lot are less of a straw, I guess that breaks the camel's back. I'm mixing my metaphors but you know what I mean? The last thing. It was the last straw.
Dr. Andrew Wong
So your ultradian rhythm breaks, I think, he's saying the book there's some of your top recommendations for how to take breaks during the day because let's face it, we're not cars and even cars we don't run 24/7. We don't run that engine 24/7, it's gonna burn out. That's what we do to our bodies, whether it's workday or you know, at home doing some errands. We have this culture that really validates achievements and validated the doing rather than being you know, and this is something that you speak to very beautifully in your book is that there's actually a way to take a pause using the ultradian rhythm breaks and that's gonna give your system a chance to recover and be more resilient over to long term.
Pilar Gerasimo
Yeah, absolutely. We'll try the rhythm breaks. I think it's such an interesting word. You know, a lot of people have heard about circadian rhythms. But even many doctors don't realize that there is another set of rhythms that just like circadian rhythms happen on a 24 hour cycle, this ultradian rhythms Ultra meaning many throughout the day. Rhythms that happen on a smaller scale every 90 to 120 minutes. You have a peak and energy followed by a trough and energy. And what happens it's you mentioned a car, if you want to use that metaphor, it's like as the car goes down the road, burning fuel, it produces pollution that comes out the exhaust the tailpipe, right? And what happens is it says burning off his fuel, there's a bunch of leftover gunk that kind of starts you out to push it out of the system. Well, our human bodies are very similar that every 90 to 120 minutes what happens is we start building up the byproducts of focus and productivity and effort in the form of things like metabolic waste, cellular debris, imbalances in our biochemistry, we start depleting blood sugar we start increasing inflammation, our neuro synaptic circuits start getting overwhelmed, the inbox is too full. And what happens is the body produces a signal of some kind or multiple signals that suggest that it is becoming stressed, fatigued, less capable of doing what we want it to do. And what we, most of us will notice this if we pay attention, we have experienced about 10-10:30 in the morning, if we've started at 8:30 or 9, and then we start noticing it again midday. If we're lucky, we take our lunch break, but it happens again about 2:30 then 3 in the afternoon people start hitting another low and we are ignoring our body's signals in these low periods that it needs to take a break in order to process and detoxify all of that waste in order to reorganize those disorganized neural circuits in order to help rebalance blood sugar and hormones so that we're operating well again. If we're willing to take the break when we start noticing that fatigue or schedule those breaks every hour and a half to two hours. Our body profits from the break in effort in order to do all of this behind the scenes work, which is really important. Otherwise, what happens is that tailpipe in humans is basically being rerouted back into the cab of a car, and you're burning fuel and all of this pollutions building up in the cab of the car, you can't see, it's foggy, you can't really function, you're getting poisoned. And you're also trying to ignore that in the service of just keeping going. Just keep driving. Just keep driving. It gets worse and worse throughout the day. So I'll trick and rhythm breaks basically give you an opportunity to acknowledge ah, I'm seeing the signal of tired eyes, of fatigue, of brain fog, of low mood, of exhaustion of food cravings, the need to go to the bathroom, noticing that I'm itching or fidgeting or tapping my foot, that I'm frustrated with my co worker, that I can't just can't do this anymore. Taking a break. All you need to do is like shift gears to go do something else. If you want to that simpler like filling up your water bottle or emptying your trash. It can be an action like that or taking a little walk around the block but it also can be meditation or a nap. It can be deep breathing, it can be listening to something soothing. What it's not is dealing with anything that is digital or looking at any media or trying to process new information. Even things like listening to a podcast I wouldn't recommend because you're trying to empty those circuits so that they can process the stuff behind the scenes, plug in a bunch of wires that need to be connected. And then you get big oz. Then you get “Oh wow, now I know how to solve that problem” or, “Oh, I know how to relate to this person.” Suddenly you come back as a much higher capacity and higher functioning person. The military has studied ultradian rhythm breaks at quite a great level to understand what they call human performance rhythms. So for people who are wanting to be more effective and more successful, it's pretty clear that taking these breaks helped to improve both your mental function and emotional function as well as your physical capacity and they reduce inflammation at a pretty amazing rate. I've had a lot of people tell me their A1C normalizes when they start taking ultradian rhythm breaks. Their blood pressure lowers. A lot of the signals will have what I call pissed off body syndrome start to recede as the body goes “thank you for acknowledging my most basic needs”.
Dr. Andrew Wong
To stop body syndrome, we'll make sure to add that to the ICD 10 diagnostic.
Pilar Gerasimo
You really wouldn't need any other diagnostic code.
Dr. Andrew Wong
That's right there. This is so great. I think you know when you think about his trading and rhythm breaks, you know, we think about even that word break. It sounds like the body isn't doing anything, but in fact, it's metabolically and thoroughly mitochondrially regenerating. I mean, there's a lot of activity going on, like you said, clearing those waste products so that you can then focus on the next task at hand. So for all the listeners out there, if you are currently on your chain rhythm break and you are trying to take a break, but looking at your phone, I'd like you to take a five minute meditation break right now and then switch back to the podcast so you can focus on the next section even more. Lastly, on the healthy deviant side, I'd love to kind of chat with you about you know, and maybe you've been through the healthcare system yourself but areas of your journey not necessarily going to all the personal details but just like how do you as a healthy deviant move through a healthcare system that's designed to not necessarily to promote health but to treat disease and you know, how do you how do you kind of work on that?
Pilar Gerasimo
Well, it's interesting. I think one thing many people have personally experienced is that while the health care system is designed to address and you know, resolve or at least manage disease states, it also produces a lot of damage and trauma and stress on the people who are moving through it. And many people have seen that they're being treated like a collection of body parts or a collection of diagnoses. And that's what's being addressed. Not the person in the context of their life, not that life in the context of a culture. So you know, I think functional medicine, sometimes it's called Root Cause medicine and physicians who are practicing according to a functional model, try to look at what are the common what are the causes that might be producing a variety of different disease states or diagnostic, you know, codes throwing codes for you? I think maybe functional medicine could actually look a little deeper at the true root cause, thinking about what's going on in all of our lives that are producing this flood of autoimmune diseases and in digestive disorders we call functional diseases that are disorders that we don't even really know how to diagnose. So we don't know how to tell people how to get better. Typically, what we find is that it's the way we are living that is producing all of these disease states. So when we go into the conventional medical system, and someone says “your cholesterol is high, take this pill” rather than asking “why is your cholesterol high?” And now we know from science that really what drives cholesterol, inflammation in the body, and that inflammation can be produced by a crappy diet by a chronic infection, by chronic stress, lack of sleep. As an individual person, you can begin advocating for I would like to go deeper than just I have high cholesterol, here's a pill and think about why is my body producing all of this cholesterol? And if your doctor and your practitioner are not interested in that question, or don't know how to answer that question or help you investigate it, I would suggest it's probably good to aim higher and try to find another resource and sometimes that's education. My friend Tom Blue, at the Institute for Functional Medicine, talks about, you know, content is therapeutic learning, again, the skills of the healthy person learning the the knowledge base of the healthy person does sometimes unfortunately, end up falling to the individual who has to begin researching and studying. But meeting together in groups of people who are learning together can make this a much easier and more joyful experience collecting people in communities, whether that's group practices or learning circles. There's a nutritionist out here in Wisconsin who won't see individual patients until they've come to a class to learn how their digestive system works. And people's minds are blown. You know, they're like, “Oh, this is why I'm supposed to be having foods with high fiber and antioxidants in them”. Not just a whole list of more things to do, but now I know why. And I have a group I call Healthy Deviant You where it's a membership program that people who've taken my classes come into in order to be in supportive community, but to learn things together, practice together, report back. You don't have to do that in a paid program. You could do that in the context of a partnership, a family, a workplace. I'm increasingly encouraging workplaces to really recognize that businesses and the cultures of business aren't small societies in and of themselves, and we can begin shifting the norms of our daily circumstances when we advocate for that together.
It's not easy I'm not going to I'm not going to lie and say if there's a hop, skip and a jump, but I do believe initially shifting the attention away from what's wrong with me, with my diagnosis, what's my disease, to what is causing me to live in a way that is producing these outcomes, not just for me, but for everybody around me? We can't all be having a statin deficit. You know what I'm saying? Like, there was a reason that this much cholesterol, and you know, are we have runaway inflammation in our bodies. And I will say just one other thing about that, that we're living in a very difficult set of times, I think, you can figure it out level like how do you be a healthy, happy person? There's a lot of why I wrote the book, but I think it's easy for people to go on Google, and, you know, put their symptoms in and get a pile of confusing answers back that actually makes things worse. So I think it's also very important to begin with a self respecting study. Of how your body mind works and how the different parts of your body mind work together. It's a tall order. It would be better if we started in kindergarten or preschool really teaching kids this stuff, so that by the time we got to college, it wasn't like oh my gosh, I've got to take organic chemistry. But I think now is a better time because we do have some of these devices that make it easier to learn from each other, to get together and connect and compare our experiences and with compassion, recognize that if we want to be healthy and happy in the world we're living in now we all need to begin doing things differently together.
Dr. Andrew Wong
Yeah. That's so great. Thank you so much. And like you said, I think this is really focusing now on a “we need to learn or relearn depending on the situation, how to take care of ourselves and and do good community.” It sounds like people, often learn better in community, at least they don't feel isolated, they can share kind of stories about what worked, what didn't work.
Pilar, thank you so much for being on today. This is so enlightening, and I'd love to chat with you more about the Healthy Deviant life and you know, really, this is a revolution that you're starting here. Very exciting to be part of the revolution. And kind of light up the way here. We can ask you a few closing questions if you don't mind if we use the asset for all our guests' kind of questions about health. I think the one thing is what do you do everyday to cultivate joy because we know that having joy and meaning and purpose and life is a really important part of having a healthy, happy, fulfilling life. And in a way is a revolutionary act in itself to focus on joy rather than like other traditional markers of success.
Pilar Gerasimo
Yeah, absolutely. Well, one thing I do I have a morning practice I call them “morning minutes”, where I take a minimum of three minutes when I first wake up before I plug into any digital devices or any media and I simply do something that feels good to me. A lot of what I do, every morning I will light a beeswax candle to a very simple unscented beeswax candle, and I let the pleasure of that experience really sink into me. The smell, the look, the sound of it. Just focusing, letting myself be. And that practice alone ,the focus on what feels good to me today. Sometimes I'll play my guitar for three minutes. Sometimes I'll pet my dog for three minutes. Sometimes I'll walk outside and just listen to the birds and the wind. That gives me joy. That brings a sense of wonder and pleasure and awareness back of myself as an autonomous human being with choices to make, and it sets me on a path to where then I can decide like, oh, man, I can notice myself. I'm ready for a walk now. Just doing what your body wants you to do can be a source of joy and pleasure.
Dr. Andrew Wong
That’s beautiful! And just connecting that mind body and only takes three minutes, you know, that's so great! And how can the listeners learn more about you and work with you?
Pilar Gerasimo
Well, the easiest place to find the work related to this body of knowledge, my healthy deviant work, is that healthydeviant.com. I've got a lot of resources there. Free resources for learning, also classes, programs and membership things. There's a quiz that I have there too, that I really encourage people to take called Are You a Healthy Deviant quiz? It just takes like three minutes. It's maybe 20 questions, but it will give you an answer to where you fall on a healthy deviant spectrum. At the same time, it will actually kind of help inform you about what healthy deviance is and some of its different modalities and different ways you can be thinking like a healthy, deviant or behaving like a healthy deviant as well as some next steps that can help you move forward on your healthy deviant journey if you want to. So it's kind of fun to find out like “Am I a hardcore healthy genius to help a deviant in the making, or somewhere in between?”
Dr. Andrew Wong
And of course, you know, in an healthy default reality, we want to be healthy deviants. We want to be more optimally healthy. So thank you, Pilar, so much again for coming on today and for listeners out there. Check out healthydeviant.com. Pilar’s book is on Amazon and probably other sites too.
Pilar Gerasimo
Everywhere. There’s an audio book, too. It's an audible now.
Dr. Andrew Wong
It’s great to do the audio. I prefer the kind of paper but uh, but it's great just to have a book in my hand and it's kind of a source of meditation in and of itself.
Pilar Gerasimo
And it's an illustrated book. So you know, a lot of these things we've been talking about, I drew pictures and charts to explain them because I do think we all learn better that way. But the audio book comes with PDFs, too.
Dr. Andrew Wong
I love the illustrations. They're really funny. All right, well, we'll chat later and thanks so much again for being on today!
Pilar Gerasimo
Thank you again so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Dr. Andrew Wong
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