Connecting Healthy Habits to All Aspects of Your Life

If the body is a temple, why do so many people mistreat it? People often overlook the importance of their health, their eating habits, and what their body needs to function at full capacity. If you want to run successful businesses, chase your ideas, and live a healthy lifestyle, you’ve got to put effort towards yourself. 

Dave Asprey, the founder and chairman of the Bulletproof 360 high-performance coffee and food company and the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, joins us on this episode of Making Bank. As a New York Times best-selling author and the host of an award-winning podcast, Dave has worked with the world’s most renowned doctors, researchers, and scientists to uncover the most innovative and effective techniques for enhancing mental and physical performance. 

One of the most profound things that Dave has discovered is intermittent fasting. The science behind fasting shows that there are profound, positive effects in an individual’s life if they do it correctly. Sharing his best tips from his most recent book, learn how fasting can help make that much of a difference in your life. 

Discovering A New Lifestyle 

Dave used to weigh 300 pounds, and he struggled greatly with losing weight. Not only was he trying to go through a weight loss journey, but nothing seemed to be working. At 16 he was getting stretch marks. No matter what he did, between dieting and trying different things, he felt like a failure.  

Dave was experiencing brain fog and realized that he wasn’t showing up to do the work he intended. He was out of energy. That’s when it hit him. He thought to himself, “If I can hack the internet, I could hack this.”  

“What would happen if I did the things that aren’t supposed to work. So I decided to go to Tibet to learn mediation from the masters. And I decided to go to Mount Kailash, which is the holiest mountain in the entire world. And there I am, at 18,000 feet of elevation…and I’m feeling crappy because there’s no oxygen. A little Tibetan woman gave me [food] and in about five minutes, I felt my brain wake up.”  

Dave had started to feel better than he had in a long time. When he got back to Silicon Valley, he wanted to try to change his diet to mimic what he had learned on his trip. He tried various butter and tea combination – which eventually ended up being the beginning of his coffee company.  

After getting out of his fog, being in a new environment, and learning new experiences that were different than what he had known before, Dave tapped into power he didn’t know he had. Humans have unlimited power inside of them that they can tap into. The problem is that people don’t know how to tap into that power.  

Dave says that power comes “from aligning things in your physical body and your emotional body, your spiritual body. So you get enough of those lined up, there are things that you can do. There are levels of power that you have. There’s energy that’s in there and has always been there.”  

Fasting for a Healthier Life 

So how does fasting play into that lifestyle of aligning different parts of your life? “The psychology of fasting is so deeply rooted inside us that most people don’t see it,” Dave says.  

When it comes to fasting, a real fast starts at 12 hours, which is simple. Eating dinner, don’t have a snack before sleeping, wake up and you’ve fasted. But it’s not always that simple – you must tune your fast as if you were tuning your exercise. There are going to be days that you’re going to feel sick, or tired, where your body might need that food.  

But there’s a balance of what you need to believe in your brain or not. When you learn how to do intermittent fasting, you don’t think about food. It’s not like diets, where you have to think about what you’re eating next, what you can’t eat, etc. Most of the time, people’s thoughts are focused on foods and their meals. When you learn how to fast, you get those thoughts back towards other energies.  

Fasting allows you to be in touch with your body in ways that you’ve never felt before. For example, fasting taught Dave the difference between craving and hunger. “Hunger is a gentle feeling…it’s not crippling. It’s not all-consuming. But most people eat things in meals that make them profoundly hungry the next morning or for the next meal.”  

Knowing what your body needs – and what it doesn’t, is a step in connecting all aspects of your life into healthier habits. Your body is the only one you have; you wouldn’t let your business self-sabotage. Fasting is a way that you can use healthy habits to control other aspects of your life.