Episode 102

Dr. Michael Breus

Many of us are walking around in a tired and dazed state, resting poorly at night, and living in a low-energy loop.

Exhaustion is often the result of living out of sync with your circadian rhythms, which is the inner clock that dictates the ebb and flow of hormones, body temperature, and blood pressure. 

The guest of today’s NEW PODCAST, Dr. Michael Breus explains, “If you live against your natural rhythms… let’s say you want to  go to sleep at 9:00 p.m., but you force yourself to stay up later night after night, you’re at high risk for sleep deprivation, chronic stress, mood disorders, lowered immunity, and compromised overall health.”

When you mess with your circadian cycle, not only does the master clock in your brain get messed up, but did you know that there are dozens of mini-clocks that control every organ and system in the body, and they start to have issues? That impacts your energy!

When you live in sync with your circadian clocks, you get more benefit from movement, improve the quality of your sleep, and sufficiently recharge and power up for maximum energy.

Dr. Michael Breus is a sleep specialist and clinical psychologist, and right now he’s Mr. Popular! You can’t turn on the TV without seeing him on some talkshow, including his recent appearances on The Today Show, and Live with Kelly and Ryan. 

Today, you’ll discover… 

• The 4 chronotypes (lion, wolf, dolphin, and bear) and what time is best for each to move, eat, work, and nap 
• Best tuck-in and wake-up schedule for optimal sleep 
• The 5×5 movement protocol (5 exercises that last for 5 minutes).
• Specific energy drains and energy gains 
• How your chronotype shifts with age and hormones 

FOLLOW ALONG WITH THE TRANSCRIPT 

Kathy Smith: I just want to welcome Dr. Breus to the show. Hi, Michael.

Dr. Michael Breus: Hi, Kathy. Thank you so much for having me back. It’s such an honor to be able to come back onto your show and have so much fun and be able to educate your audience about the new book, Energize. I just wanted to thank you again. Also, I just wanted to let everybody know, I didn’t do it all by myself; I did have a co-author, her name is Stacey Griffith.

Kathy: Oh, wait, before you go, I’m getting to her right now, thank you. Thank you, I was going to endorse Stacey, because that was part- but I just didn’t want to make the intro too long. But, yeah, let me jump in here because, yes, you teamed up with Stacey Griffith, who is an author and a SoulCycle founding instructor, and I wanted to wait until here to say, because I took classes from Stacey years ago. I was a SoulCycle junkie, so I love the fact that you took this two expertise’s, you took arcadian timing and movement and you brought them together to create this whole new concept of how people can improve their health and have more energy.

The book is brilliant, but I really think, and if you don’t mind telling the story, your story and maybe throwing Stacey’s in there also, of why you two teamed up, and it’s pretty interesting; you being a sleep Doctor, you had this event that happened in your life, or a couple of events, and do you mind sharing it with the audience?

Michael: I don’t mind sharing it at all. So, Stacey and I have been friends for eons, and she had come to me about her sleep. The way we describe it is, we both came to each other, and it ended up having to do with broken hearts. Stacey was in a relationship with somebody who was on a completely opposite schedule than she was, and so, one person wanted to stay up late, one person wanted to go to bed early, that kind of stuff. It really affected their relationship in a very unique way, and it was very, very difficult. I was able to come in and educate and start to do some interesting things. 

Meanwhile, Stacey was helping me get in better shape and train. Now, I’m going to be honest with you, I’m one of those guys who if one is good, twelve is better. When you’re on the road a lot, as I have been touring with the book and doing all these wonderful lectures and things like that, my way to reduce my stress is running. And so, I would be on the treadmill at 11:00 at night, doing three or four miles just to kind of decompress and get myself to start to relax. Now, gotta be honest with you; I can’t run that long. So, I decided to just run harder and faster. Well, over the course of time when you’re 54-years-old, you really don’t need to be running 7-minute miles on the treadmill at 11:00 at night. I ended up actually having a cardiac event. And so, I was out with my wife, fortunately we were at dinner with two Physician friends, but yeah, I ended up on the floor in the ambulance and in the hospital because I really wasn’t paying attention to my movement and my exercise and how to balance that with my stress, with my sleep. It was kind of one of those, “Doctor, heal thyself,” moments from the hospital room, and it’s been very interesting ever since.

Kathy: And then, Stacey, I mean, from what you wrote about in the book, she was gone gung-ho at SoulCycle, and I relate to Stacey, because I remember when I was heavy-duty teaching, you teach these classes, not only are you exercising for an hour, but you’re projecting, you’ve got the music and you’re going, going, going. And you would get down with these classes —

Michael: Exhausting.

Kathy: — and if you teach a couple of classes, and then you get on a schedule where you get popular, and then you’re on the schedule for twenty classes a week, so what happened with Stacey?

Michael: So, she ended up going a little bit too much as well, and her and her partner ended up separating in terms of their timing and what they each wanted to do, and so the good news is that she’s now with a lovely new partner who has the same schedule, who is not as interested in having her go and do all of those other things, but more spending time together. So, it really was kind of like an about-face for both of us, I would say. 

Kathy: Okay, well then, this leads us into Stacey and her ex-partner, and this idea of chronotypes. I was just talking to somebody about this today, because you’re going to find this interesting, but I happened to date somebody who is a different chronotype. I have a lot of questions about this. But I think for the audience, we discussed chronotypes in the last show, but I’d like to go over it again from the standpoint of, we discussed mainly from going to bed and waking up. I want to jump into what is fascinating about the chronotypes, and every other aspect of your body. So, I know that I am a lion, and for the people out there, lions like to get up early. I’m ready to get up, get into my workout. The minute my feet hit the ground I’m pretty happy, and I’m ready to workout. And when dinnertime comes, after dinner, 9:00, get out my little snuggly Ugg slippers, my PJ’s and crawl into bed, so I’m a lion. So, why don’t you explain about chronotypes and what that means.

Michael: Yeah, so for folks out there who might not have heard the term, “Chronotype,” you’ve actually heard of the concept if you’ve ever been called an “Early bird,” or a “Night Owl.” What my contribution was, we always knew that there were early birds, there were night owls and there were kind of people in the middle. My contribution and my third book, “The Power of When,” was I actually discovered a fourth chronotype, an insomnia chronotype. Now, everything was named after birds, and to be honest with you, I’m not a bird; I’m a mammal. I wanted to change it, so I decided to choose an animal, and I had to choose animals that people would find inspirational and that actually had the same circadian rhythmicity that we were talking about. 

So, what Kathy is describing is, she is an early bird, and we call early birds now, “Lions.” Let’s be fair; who wouldn’t want to be the queen of the jungle, right? Lions are my folks who get up really early in the morning, sometimes 5:30, 6:00 or earlier, and then they also have the tendency to go to bed a lot earlier. But that’s not the only chronotype. There are night owls, we call them wolves. That’s me; I’m actually a night owl. 

Kathy: Okay, so you are frozen now. I’m not frozen, you are frozen, so let’s see when you unfreeze. Do we have to start it over again? I mean, the recording over again. Doctor, you are frozen, can you hear me? I can’t hear you. Okay…let me just see here. Oh, are you back? Are you back…direct message? Okay, admit, you’re ready to join, joining, joining, joining, you’re back. You’re back. 

[00:28:39]

Michael: Can you hear me?

Kathy: I can hear you now. You froze up, you froze on me.

Michael: So, what happened for me was, everything dropped, and I dropped out of Zoom. Did you guys touch anything? Because I’m hard-wired into the Internet. 

Kathy: I didn’t touch anything. You were still- I was still here, and well, you were just frozen in space.

Michael: Okay, well we can pick it back up where we were talking-

Kathy: It’s no biggie, this is the beauty of editing. 

Michael: I know, right? 

Kathy: You were just saying about you being, kind of starting out, “When it comes to me, I’m a wolf.”

[00:29:16]

Michael: So, the nice part about me being a wolf is that my wife is also a wolf, so when we would start dating, we would go out at the same times, end up late at night together and it would never affect us, and we never really thought about it. But you mentioned that you and your partner may have different chrono typical schedules. And so, the question becomes, when do you get to do all the things that you might want to do as a couple? Now, we’re not just talking about intimacy here, we’re also talking about having important conversations, maybe you want to work out together, dinners or meals, when you want to have meals? Those types of things. And of course, bedtime. There’s a lot of variation based on these four different chronotypes. 

Now, the good news is, I wrote it all out for you in the book so you can actually follow a schedule and be able to kind of figure out what works best for you. But here’s where the magic happens, and this is one of the things that a lot of people don’t know about, so I want to reveal, is if you follow a chrono typical schedule, it turns out you need less sleep. So, here’s what’s fascinating is, your sleep actually consolidates, and you actually need- like, as an example, since I’ve been sleeping based on my chronotype, my body doesn’t let me sleep longer than about six hours and fifteen minutes- and I’m the sleep Doctor, right? But if I’m outside of that chrono typical schedule, I’m a mess and it can take seven and a half to eight hours for me to get the six that I’m kind of looking for.

The key here is, number one, figure out what your chronotype is. I can show you how to do that if you go to Chronoquiz.com, we can put that in the show notes for people if they want. You can go and take the quiz, but once you get there and you figure out your bedtime and your wake-up time, everything gets much simpler after that.

Kathy: Bedtime and wake-up time, but let’s talk about if you go against your chrono typical daytime, like, and maybe we can tie it into intermittent fasting, I don’t know if you want to?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely.

Kathy: I wasn’t going to go there, but I will tell you, personally, this intermittent fasting which is something that I have been into and do occasionally, I found though, that when I wasn’t eating breakfast and I was waiting until about noon to eat, after a while, there was a period in the very beginning for a few weeks that I kind of felt good, but after a while, it was impacting my daily cycle. I wasn’t, I didn’t have as much energy. 

Michael: Right.

Kathy: It was impacting my sleep.

Michael: Absolutely it does. And so, one of the things I tell people a lot, you in particular, it wouldn’t work well on because you’re a lion. In the book, “Energize,” we actually break this down into intermittent fasting, sleep, and movement. And when we look on the intermittent fasting side, what we discovered was, if you intermittent fast based on your chronotype schedule, it works a lot better for you, right? And so, since you’re a lion, I wouldn’t have you waiting until noon to eat; you might be eating by 10:00 in the morning because you would have stopped eating so much earlier in the evening the night before. So, we can shift people on a schedule for intermittent fasting based on their chronotype, and what we’ve discovered- and I don’t have hard published data on this, but I can tell you from the people that have done the program, people lose weight faster and people say they have more energy. 

When you couple that with the movement schedule that Stacey created, which is really kind of fun, like five different times a day you just kind of get up and move around, and they’re not random, they’re very specific, what we end up with is consistent energy across the day without caffeine use, which is kind of the goal. 

Kathy: Okay so, two things then, backing up because I want to make sure I don’t miss. A couple of things I wanted to comment on. So, first of all, you can go with six and a half hours sleep. I like my eight hours, and I get a good eight hours, and that’s like a 10-6, so there’s nothing wrong with saying that if you-

Michael: Oh, no.

Kathy: So, less isn’t better. Because you sort of suggested a little bit that you could go, you need less sleep. 

Michael: Fair point. Let’s break that down for just a second; eight hours is a myth, because everybody has an individual sleep need. I want to be clear about something; when I sleep within my chrono typical schedule, my body actually will not allow me to sleep longer, it’s not like I’m waking up and saying, “Hey, I’m out of here,” it’s that my body is done sleeping. That amount of time is going to vary based on gender, based on age, based on activity level, based on stress level, based on whether or not you had COVID, so there’s a whole host of things out there. I want to be clear, and thank you, Kathy, for bringing this up because I didn’t mean to intimate for even a second that people shouldn’t get the amount of sleep that they’re used to getting or want to get, but what I am telling you is, if you feel like, “Wow, I don’t have time for eight or nine hours of sleep,” and interesting hack, if you will, is if you sleep within this kind of chrono typical swim lane, your body actually doesn’t need that much. 

Kathy: Okay, then let’s- and before I jump into the movement, one of the things about chronotypes, because I’ve gotten a lot of questions about it, two different questions that people wanted me to ask you when interviewing you, can you change your chronotype? So, if you are a- what are the ones that can’t sleep at all?

Michael: The dolphin.

Kathy: So, if you’re a dolphin who is basically an insomniac, or let’s make it more a wolf, a person that likes to go to bed late, can you change a wolf into- or, would you want to, into a morning person. Now, I’m going to have a couple of levels of this question, you can answer them all, but then, what about the people that have work situations that don’t allow them to be in sync, Doctors or whatever with their chronotype, and can you, could you save marriages across the country and stuff, can you get people to sync up their chronotype? Or is that not possible?

Michael: Perfect. Question number one; can you change your chronotype? No. It’s genetic. So, this is what’s interesting, is if you go into the human genome and you look in the PER-3 section, you’ll see something called the single nucleotide polymorphism, or a SNP [ph. Snip], which means that the building blocks got switched in one direction by mistake, and that made you an early bird. They got switched in another direction by mistake, and that made you a night owl. But here’s the funny thing; everybody goes through all of the chronotypes across their lifetime. 

Let me explain that to everyone: we call this idea, “Chrono longevity,” and here’s what we mean by it, when you’re an infant, you’re a lion, right? You go to bed really early, you wake up really early, you get a certain amount of sleep. When you’re a toddler and into middle school, you’re a bear, which is kind of an in-between the early bird and the night owl. When you hit high school, guess what? You’re a wolf or a night owl, I mean, remember back in those days? When all you wanted to do was stay up until two and sleep until twelve? Then, right around age 20 to 22, your chronotype seems to set for about 30-40 years. Then, guess what? When you hit my age, I’m 54, 55, what you’ll start to see is melatonin production begins to come earlier and earlier in the circadian cycle and that moves people backwards. So, you could actually go from being a night owl to being an early bird when you hit your mid-50’s to 60’s from a biological transformation that is supposed to occur. So, while you can’t necessarily force yourself into another chronotype, and we’re going to talk about that next, you do actually experience all of them. 

Your second question, which is equally as important is, “What if your work schedule doesn’t line up with your chronotype?” You’re a shift worker. Let’s say you’re a nurse, I mean, I’ve dealt with this in the hospital all the time. We have night nurses who are there starting at 7 p.m., working until 7 a.m., how do they manage that kind of a schedule? The truth of the matter is, it’s not particularly easy. But number one, if you’re a night owl, then you’re going to have a much easier time doing the night shift. If you’re a lion or an early bird, you’re going to have a much easier time doing the earlier shift. The very first thing I always tell people is, “Make sure that your chronotype is kind of aligned with at least some part of your work schedule.” Now, to be fair, there are a lot of people that just have to do shift work because number one, it pays better, or number two, they’re a rookie, new to the job, and that’s where the rookie starts is on the night shift, and then eventually they can kind of make it to the day shift.

Then, what do you do if you’re an early bird, but you’re having to run a night owl schedule? Well, it’s kind of like jet lag, if you believe it or not, if you think about it. What we can do is, we can use melatonin to help move your sleep schedule to where it’s being forced to be. So, you can take a melatonin somewhere between a half, one and a half milligrams, about 90 minutes before the bedtime of when you want to go to sleep. It might not be your chronotype bedtime, but the time that you have, and that will help ease you back into that.

Your third question was, “How do I save marriages?” There are a couple of ways-

Kathy: Or relationships.

Michael: Or relationships, yes. So, as a sleep specialist, I actually have two or three different ways to help couples. The normal way, the way I thought you were going to ask me about, is how do you tackle snoring? Because oftentimes that is the big battle between a couple, is one person snores and the other person doesn’t, and it keeps them awake. What you’re asking is a different aspect, which is scheduling. The very first thing I try to explain to people is, you do not have to go to bed at the same time to have a healthy, good relationship, okay? A lot of people are like, “Oh my gosh, if my partner is out watching T.V. and comes in later, what does that mean? When are we going to be intimate? When are we going to be able to have other times to discuss things, talk, blah, blah, blah? Have our relationship?” So, number one, there is no rule that says everybody needs to sleep, even in the same bedroom. One thing, I had a couple, I had an early bird and a late night owl, and I said, “Look, here’s what I want you guys to do since you’re on literally opposite ends of the spectrum, four days a week, so Monday through Thursday you sleep in separate rooms, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you stay together, that way you have your time to be intimate, you have your time together, but then you don’t mess up each other’s sleep during the week.” I’ve saved more marriages doing that than almost anything else out there.

There’s a lot of creativity that we can have play around in here, and I’ve mentioned intimacy a few times, and so, I can always double-tap a little on that. A lot of people say to me, “Michael, if I’m an early bird and my partner is a night owl, when are we going to be intimate?” Number one, I actually created a matrix in the book.

Kathy: I saw that.

Michael: You can look across the top and put in your chronotype and then put in your partners’ chronotype, and it gives you two separate times. An early evening time, and an early morning time for intimacy. So, you might be wondering, okay, wait a second, why early morning and early evening? The data that we collected would show that you need five hormones to successfully be intimate; you need testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, adrenaline and cortisol all need to be raised, and you need melatonin, the sleep hormone, to be loved. Kathy, I’ll give you one guess what your hormone profile looks like at 11:00 at night. The opposite.

Kathy: It’s tanked, it’s tanked. 

Michael: Exactly! Your melatonin is super high, and all those other things are super low. That’s hint number one as to when would be some of the best times. The other thing is, if you have a male partner, what do most men wake up with in the morning? An erection. So, if that’s not mother nature telling you when to use that thing, I don’t know what is! When you start to think through this as an idea, and you start to think, “When are my hormones going to be ready for whatever the activity is that I want to do?” That starts to make sense, and that’s where the magic from the book comes from.

One last little caveat about intimacy, in the book where we created the matrix, we also created a matrix for lesbian and gay couples, because the hormone profiles are different.

Kathy: Really good job. I love it. I love that.

Michael: Thanks.

Kathy: This book, which we’re going to get in the close and I’ll tell everybody more about it, but it is packed with information. Going to the next section where it’s packed with, and this has more to do with the Stacey side of the equation, but timing+movement=energy was the equation of the book. 

Michael: Yeah!

Kathy: Explain the five by five, and why that is the magic formula for energy, and how would people, like myself and a lot of the listeners here, who do a lot of 20-30 minute workout in the morning, strength training, like to get out hiking, all these other things, how do we pack this five by five, and let’s start with- is it easier to start with maybe sedentary people, or can you just address the whole issue?

Michael: I think we can address all of them, because the nice part is, you don’t have to have a workout schedule to do the five by five, but if you do, it’s something easy to incorporate in. Let me just kind of break down what is the five by five? What it is, is we have five different periods of time during the day where we want you to set an alarm on your telephone, or your watch or whatever, that says, “We need you to take five minutes out, a break for five minutes.” Here’s the problem; sitting is the new smoking, right? We’ve got to keep people moving, and that really does help with energy. That sedentary, sit at a desk all day, watch T.V. all day kind of thing, it’s really not good for your body in a whole host of ways. What we do is, we created five different times to do five different types of exercise. And I want to be clear; these aren’t really exercises, these are movements. You’re not supposed to break a sweat, it’s not like your workout like you were talking about, your 30-40 or 45-minute doing cardio, or I’m doing weights, this is literally for five minutes. 

We have five different categories, I’m trying to remember them in the order that they were in in the book, I may have to go grab my book in a second, but it was stretch, and it was bounce, then it was-I’m going to have to get the book, hold on.

Kathy: You don’t have to, I remember it was, one was shake.

Michael: Shake. But they were in order, hold on, let me get the book. I’ve got it right here.

Kathy: As he’s getting the book, really one of the big takeaways that I had from the book is that you have things that, energy gains, I love it, and energy drains. 

Michael: Aren’t those cool?

Kathy: Yeah, I love this. You start to keep maybe a little diary, or keep some notes about what is building your energy, what is draining your energy? Part of it is a mindfulness practice so you start to understand. Okay, we’ve got shake, we’ve got bounce…

Michael: We start with stretch, okay? Because let’s be honest, you’ve been lying there for hopefully six, seven, eight hours, so you’ve got to stretch around, get everything kind of moving again. The second thing that we do is the shake, now the shake is actually kind of fun, because you just kind of do one of these, you just shake your arms, you shake your legs, you kind of do the hokey pokey, exactly, you know what I’m talking about. 

Kathy: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: But you can really tell the difference. The one that actually got me the most, which is the next one, is called, “Bounce.” It’s literally like- you’re not doing a full jumping jack, but you’re just kind of hopping a little bit, like all of the sudden you’re like, “Holy cow, I’m starting to feel more awake.” And the shake one works really well too. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, do you have dogs at your house, Kathy?

Kathy: Yeah.

Michael: Do you ever notice when they get up, what’s the first thing that they do? [shakes a like a dog], they do this crazy shake, and that’s what kind of wakes them up. So, again, this is again another way to get that energy going. The final two are a build and a balance. Build is where we actually use large muscle groups, so you might do some push-ups. Again, not to the point of sweating, or some crunches. Again, not to the point of sweating. And the final one is balance, and that’s where we have people, usually before bed, doing some sort of a yoga pose, or a stretching or something along those lines, just kind of have some runway for the plane to land, if you will. By finding the five different times that work for you, setting them on your alarm here, it literally only takes five minutes, but before you know it, you’re on your third or fourth movement and it’s 4:00 in the afternoon, and you haven’t had to have three cups of coffee, and that’s kind of the goal. 

Kathy: Okay, so these movement patterns you’re talking about, you’ll time them, you’ll set your clock, you’ll time them, but it’s going to be different depending on your chronotype.

Michael: Exactly!

Kathy: Not all of us do it at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. or whatever, it’s stretched out throughout the day, depending on your chronotype, which helps minimize caffeine. I have to tell you, I love matcha. 

Michael: I’m a huge matcha fan. And here’s what I like about matcha, is because matcha doesn’t have as much caffeine as coffee or tea does, so matcha is a great way that I get people from being crazy caffeine people to being matcha people is I can transition them to that. And I actually think that matcha is something that you can have. If you keep it into the early morning and early afternoon, it’s not going to have nearly as big of an effect on your sleep.

Kathy: Right, I still get my nine hours. No, eight.

Michael: Awesome.

Kathy: You know what? I am so- I don’t know if you talk about this in the book, I went through most of the book, I skimmed through, but I am so light sensitive, meaning- and that’s why I think the lion is the type where when the sun goes down, I get sleepy. That’s why I have to have- it’s not blackout curtains, but I have to really darken my room because in the morning, as soon as- I can sense when the light is, when the sun is coming up. I can sense that, and it feels good, and my body starts to like, “Ahh.”

Michael: That is a 100% lion characteristic. So, as a wolf, I can’t even- the darker the better for me, I don’t like the light, all of that stuff. You get energy from the light. You are drawn to the light. Me, I’m more drawn to the dark and try to stay away from the light, and those again are characteristics that we see, personality characteristics that we see in these different profiles. 

Kathy: Okay, well I need to let you go, because you’ve been so sweet to give this much time. I guess just in closing, part of it is…we can talk about sex, we can talk about energy, but in general, the bigger picture, am I right and was I correct in saying this in the lead-in; this impacts your health. And obviously being sedentary and getting up and not sitting throughout the day is a huge one, but in general, eating, sleeping, it’s just epidemic. I can’t tell you, every day, yesterday somebody came up to me in the gym- people are jealous! They’re not jealous of the way that I look, they’re jealous because I can sleep. It’s become a new status symbol or whatever.

Michael: I swear, sleep is the new little black dress, I promise you, it’ s unbelievable.

Kathy: And it is. A woman came up to me and she goes, “And you don’t take-“and then it starts and I go, “Well, do you sleep?” And she goes, “Well yeah, but then I take melatonin, then once a week I have to take-“what is that cough syrup that’s got whatever in it?

Michael: Oh, right, Nyquil?

Kathy: “Then I also sometimes in the middle of the night wake up and have, once every month or so an anxiety attack, I have to take an anti-anxiety.” That’s just a- that’s not abnormal. By the way-

Michael: That’s not normal.

Kathy: I did find out, this is completely off subject, but New York Times today said FDA announced that they’re out of Adderall right now, that they’re running out of Adderall. I’m thinking, running out of Adderall is a little bit of a testament to-

Michael: What’s going on in the world.

Kathy: Yeah. 

Michael: Yeah, absolutely.

Kathy: So, I want to know, how is this impacting our health?

Michael: At the end of the day, here’s what I would tell you is; there are certain things that I call, “Dominos of wellness.” Meaning, when you knock that one over, and you get it right, it affects so many other areas of your life. Sleep is without question one of those. When you sleep better, you can manage your pain better. When you sleep better, you can manage your weight better. When you sleep better, you can manage your moods better. Literally everything you do, you do better with a good night’s sleep. We wanted to expand that into the categories of intermittent fasting, which is arguably one of the healthier ways to be able to manage your food. I also want to be clear for folks out there who might be listening; intermittent fasting is not appropriate for anyone with an eating disorder. For folks out there who have struggled or suffered with eating disorders in the past, please talk with your doctor before you consider any type of intermittent fasting schedule, because that’s an important aspect for you to understand. 

But the big one was having Stacey on board for the movement stuff, right? I mean, who better than a person who’s been moving literally all of her life and teaching people how to move? Her contribution turned out to be so important, and what I learned from her was what I needed to learn, which kind of brings us full circle back to the beginning of our conversation, which was, how to reduce my stress in an appropriate way, and not end up in an ambulance.

Kathy: So, very, very last question” Michael, how is your heart?

Michael: My heart is great. I appreciate you asking. I’ve actually had full checkups and I’ve made an entirely full recovery. We thought I was going to have to have a pacemaker, and it turns out, no, I just needed to slow down my pace. And that worked out just fine.

Kathy: That’s good, that’s so good.

Michael: Yeah, so I’m very fortunate, and I really appreciate you asking. It’s an important aspect of my life now to really understand as much as I can, not only about helping other people’s health, but Doctor Heal Thyself sometimes has to come into play as well.

[00:52:01]