Food As Chemistry With Belldon Colme

On Sept 17th 2024 I talk with Belldon Colme, a scientist who transitioned from a career in home building to studying the relationship between food and the body. Belldon shares his personal journey of overcoming heart disease, diabetes, and obesity by understanding how food interacts with the body's chemistry. He offers insights into how specific food choices can heal the body and maintain long-term health.
We get into the power of food; the four key food groups; emotional eating, its triggers, and practical steps for breaking emotional eating; plus plenty more

Transcript

Holness,

Welcome.

This is Josh Dippold,

And today I've got Belden Kholm with me.

Belden,

How goes it?

Oh,

Fantastic day in the USA.

Well,

Right on.

So,

The standard format is,

Who is Belden Kholm,

And what kind of work does he do?

Cool.

So,

I'm a scientist.

That was my second stage of life career.

I was a home builder for 25 years,

But personal experiences in my own life led me to make a shift and become a scientist specializing in how food interacts with the body,

Very,

Very specifically.

Not what's in food,

Not what's in the body,

But how do the two work together?

And I got on that line,

Literally,

To save my life,

But it was such a beautiful exploration and such a series of miraculous things I've been learning that it's been consuming my life for the last 22 years.

Well,

Let's jump right in here.

What did you learn?

You could tell a little bit about your story,

Though,

Because obviously this is a podcast and people connect with stories a lot.

So,

What happened?

And then,

What did you start doing?

And then we'll get into what you learned.

Yeah.

Yeah,

Definitely.

2004,

I was 39 years old and had my first heart attack,

And that was a wake-up call.

I didn't see it coming.

I didn't expect it.

I got a clean bill of health two weeks before that,

Which is interesting because I was 105 pounds overweight.

I did have type 2 diabetes.

I did have high blood pressure and cholesterol.

And with all of that,

My doctor said,

Keep doing what you're doing.

You're doing okay.

And we tend to believe that when our doctors tell us that.

So,

I wasn't worried.

Two weeks later,

I was in the ER.

I had woken up on the floor of my kitchen,

Staring at the underside of my counters,

Wondering where I was,

What was going on,

Completely disoriented.

And that was my first of three.

I had three heart attacks between 39 and 40.

And after the first one,

I diligently did everything I was told to do.

I mean,

I was 39 years old.

I had two kids.

I had a beautiful young wife.

I was not ready to go,

Right?

And you hear this idea of,

Were you committed?

I was committed.

I promise you,

I was committed.

And I did everything I was told to do.

And my doctor gave me the medications.

He gave me an exercise routine.

He gave me a basic food plan and assigned me to a nutritionist to take the food a little bit farther.

And I did all of that stuff and had my second heart attack.

And when I had my second heart attack,

They downgraded my prospects for the future.

And they started to suggest that I had a shelf life and that just wasn't okay.

And it was a wake-up call that what I was doing wasn't going to get me better.

So I started thinking of what else I could do,

Where else I could go,

What other drug,

What other hospital,

What other doctor,

What other path is there?

And the truth is there wasn't one.

Really,

The only thing I could think of to do was to look internally and try and discover how the body works.

Because as an engineer,

Prior to that,

I felt if I could know how the body worked,

Maybe,

Just maybe there was a way that I could work with it.

So I started diving down every avenue that I had to learn cellular biology and biochemistry.

And what I began learning right away is that what doctors are teaching and what doctors are doing are trying to force the body to do a thing,

But they're not working in harmony with how the body naturally works.

So I began learning how food interacted with the cells of the body.

I'd always heard that food was healing.

I believed the food was healing,

And I believed that I had the power in my body to heal.

So I started jumping down,

Learning,

Doing.

The easiest way to say it is learning what I had to learn to do what I had to do to get better.

And I had a third heart attack during this process before I really started to put it together.

But after that third heart attack,

I started putting food together in a way that gave the body all of the building blocks that it needs to work,

To work properly.

I changed my vocabulary.

I stopped talking about food as fuel,

And I started talking about food as building blocks,

Because that's what it's doing,

Is becoming the cells of the body.

And from that,

I put together an easy way for me to be able to eat and get everything that I needed.

And when I did that,

My type 2 diabetes was reversed in three and a half months.

I've never seen it again.

I lost 105 pounds in five and a half months.

I reversed heart disease in just almost exactly two years.

And that was 18 years ago.

I've been disease and med free for the last 18 years,

But not just disease and med free.

I've got energy to do things at 60.

I couldn't dream of doing at 39.

I just,

I love the life that you can live when you put the body where it needs to be and give it what it needs.

Well,

Beautiful.

And congratulations for that.

I mean,

Talk about a motivator,

Right?

And kind of spiritual parlance.

And there's,

It's called Sam Vega,

This spiritual urgency,

You know,

And in a way it was,

I mean,

It's your life.

I don't know how much more spiritual it gets than life and death,

Right?

So,

And you have family.

So like your hair,

If you had any hair,

Right,

That would be on fire to tackle this problem.

And that's,

And this is what happened.

So,

Yeah,

You,

You nipped it in the bud.

So I guess what,

What I'm wondering here now is like,

What are some of the top misconceptions and the most important things?

And it can come probably from your own experience too,

But maybe it applies to everybody or maybe not.

You know,

I hear these things like,

And I don't know much about this field,

Or this eat right for your type where blood type makes a difference on,

On health and diet and certain things like this.

But yeah,

Just,

Just start with maybe common misconceptions,

What people are missing,

And then what's the most important going here personally and generally.

Yeah.

I'm,

I'm sure as you know,

There's a world full of misconceptions out there.

I like to call them myth conceptions and,

And they're not accidental.

They're intentional.

Before I say that though,

I just want to,

I wish I had my picture album here.

I actually have a picture that I took at a fire handling class,

Me and another guy that was there,

Both our heads are just in flames and we're holding fire in our hands.

It was the coolest day ever.

So you weren't kidding there.

Oh,

I'm not kidding.

Right after I walked on fire,

Um,

One of the biggest myth conceptions and you hinted at it here and I want to kind of illustrate it before I say it because when I just throw it out there,

People are like,

Yeah,

Right.

We can look at any animal on the planet.

It doesn't matter what it is.

And we know what it eats.

There's a diet for elephants.

They all eat the same.

It doesn't matter if they live in Africa or Asia,

They all eat the same.

In fact,

In the early 1900s,

We put elephants in zoos and instead of living the 50 years they're supposed to live or the 75 years they're supposed to live,

They were living five.

Once we started realizing what elephants are supposed to eat and feeding them properly in the zoo,

Their lifespan went up to about 40 years.

That's the power of knowing what a thing eats.

So we've learned what tigers eat no matter where in the world they live.

The animal might be different,

But a tiger is a carnivore and they eat the same general nutrient grouping regardless of where they live.

And we can point at every animal in the world and we know that's true for that animal.

We look at people and we say,

Oh,

We're all different.

And that is the biggest misconception running right now because we're not.

We're an animal.

And like every other animal on the planet,

There is a diet that's right for people.

Now,

The way to spot the misconception is when you see somebody touting something new,

The blood type diet,

The DNA type diet,

This diet,

That diet,

The other diet,

What's at the end of their presentation?

Are they going to tell you what to eat?

Or are they going to try and sell you a supplement?

Because creating artificial methodologies is the fastest,

Best,

Most profitable way to sell a supplement that's not going to do a damn thing for you.

And that's the biggest misconception running right now.

We have to understand there is a diet that's right for people.

And the closer we adhere to that,

The healthier that we're going to become,

The more energetic we're going to become,

The more vibrant we're going to become,

The more we're going to get in contact with our mind and spirit and start creating harmony with ourselves.

But the more we deviate from that,

And this is just basic chemistry,

We are chemistry.

And I'm sure if I said,

You know,

Hey,

Josh,

Everything happening in here is a series of chemical reactions and responses.

Do you say that's true?

Well,

I think we're more than that.

But yeah,

On a physical level,

That's what happens.

Now,

What causes that?

We know a little bit about,

I feel,

You know,

We've got the nutriments,

You know,

Then the physical ones is what we can talk about,

Because that's what science can measure,

Can see and study,

Right?

And to some degree,

We've got the next one,

Emotional.

Yeah.

So emotions are a nutriment.

And then we've got thoughts.

Thoughts are a nutriment and consciousness.

And,

You know,

We can only measure those a little bit compared to food,

Because science has all kinds of instruments and studies and things for food.

So that's mostly what we're going to talk about today,

I'd imagine.

And so,

Yeah,

I'm curious here now,

You know,

You can finish your line of reasoning there.

But of course,

I'm sure everybody's fascinated now.

Well,

What should I be eating?

You know,

Is it going to be a dog food mixture that I can't deviate the rest of my life and I just have to eat like a dog?

You know,

Just one thing,

That's it.

No,

And this is this is the funny thing.

Elephants are perfectly happy eating what elephants eat.

Tigers are perfectly happy.

We're perfectly happy when we're eating what we're supposed to be eating,

Too.

You said something important,

And I hope we can come back to this.

And that is you have to have the harmony between the body,

Mind and spirit.

You have to.

But that's not outside of the realm of understanding either.

We know what to do in those areas.

And if we look at the interplay between body,

Mind and spirit,

Take just one that everybody knows about stress.

We feel the emotion of stress that changes our body chemistry mass.

It puts us in a constant state of of of high cortisol and that changes our body chemistry that changes the health of our body.

All of our emotions change our body chemistry.

Our thoughts change our body chemistry.

So at the end of the day,

The part that the vessel plays this,

The part that this plays is we get the chemistry right and it strengthens everything else.

It starts making us less stress.

It starts making us clearer in thought.

It starts bringing harmony.

And of course,

We have to pay attention to the other areas as well.

But this is the one that gets neglected while everybody's working on on thoughts and controlling your thoughts and what to do with your emotions.

They're getting sicker and sicker and sicker in the body because they're not paying attention to it.

So if we do think of ourselves as chemistry,

And we are physically,

If we do think of ourselves that way,

Chemistry is easy.

To get what we want out of a chemistry equation,

We put the right things into the beaker to get the response that we want.

That's kind of a no-brainer,

Right?

We keep the wrong things out of the beaker because they pollute the reaction and it's not going to happen.

This is where we fail every freaking day.

And we have to get the right balance of things because the recipe matters in chemistry.

If you get things out of balance,

Your equation lacks strength and it doesn't complete itself.

So the right things in,

Wrong things out,

Right balance.

And the right things in,

I think most people try to do.

Certainly not everybody.

There are people that would rather die than give up cheeseburgers and beer,

But most people are trying to get the right things in.

But if you don't mind,

I'd like to give a quick analogy for why it's so important to keep the wrong things out.

Sure,

Please.

And the other thing that's coming to mind is,

You know,

There's electrochemical processes,

Right?

And there's magnetic,

I'm sure,

Electromagnetism potentially,

But that's maybe down the line.

But yeah,

Please go to the main part.

Probably.

I think the important point is giving people a place where they can start.

Yes.

Because when you start on the path,

Going the right direction,

All of those other things have a tendency to work themselves out as the energy of your body picks up,

Right?

And energy in your body,

As I mentioned earlier,

It doesn't come from food.

It comes from ATP.

It lives in your cells.

We just have to make it work,

Right?

But I like to use the analogy of the Grand Canyon.

And if you're familiar with it,

It's funny you mentioned that.

Fiance and I just visited for the first time,

You know,

Months ago.

You walk up to that spot on the South Rim and it's one mile straight down.

Now,

If you step off of the lip of that canyon,

What's going to happen?

I don't even want to think about it.

You're going to fall and you're going to die.

We'll leave the graphic stuff apart.

You're going to fall and you're going to die.

Now,

What would happen if you obeyed the laws of gravity from Sunday through Friday,

But Saturday was your cheat day.

So you went and stepped off the edge of the Grand Canyon on your cheat day.

What would happen then?

Well,

If I could defy the laws of gravity,

Well then,

I mean,

Something else is possible than normally what would happen.

But in all the time people have been at the lip of the Grand Canyon,

Not a single person has been able to float.

Not that I'm aware of.

But the thing is,

When it comes to the physical law of gravity,

We don't think in terms of cheat days.

We don't think in terms of everything's okay in moderation.

We don't step off a little bit,

Right?

Oh,

I stepped off a little bit and only once in a while.

No,

We respect that physical law so much that we give ourselves distance from the edge,

Unless we have,

You know,

A screw or two loose.

We give ourselves- Evil can evil maybe,

But yeah.

Yeah,

Exactly.

But we give ourselves that distance,

Josh,

Because we respect that law and we give it a little extra just to make sure that we don't screw it up.

When it comes to our bodies and our food,

What do we do?

Because the laws of chemistry will kill us more slowly,

But they're every bit as much a physical law as the law of gravity.

And if we live by those laws of chemistry,

Amazing things happen in the body.

Turning around heart disease and diabetes and losing 105 pounds and getting my energy back.

All of those things happen by recognizing that we're chemistry,

But we disobey the laws of gravity with these crazy reasonings that we have.

We disobey the laws of chemistry.

We begin to create chaos in the body and the body begins to break down and begins to not be able to heal itself and not be able to do what it does best.

So the first thing we have to do,

We have to do,

We have to do,

We have to do,

Is recognizing that we're chemistry and there is a diet that's right for human beings.

Well,

It's a really good point real quick.

I just say Big Pharma,

They recognize this,

Right?

They're pumping people full of chemicals and these chemicals address our chemical system.

So right there,

Just think of the billions and trillions involved already in that.

So that's a lot of money.

So yeah,

They recognize that.

So why don't we,

You know?

Yeah.

And they recognize that and they use it to their advantage.

Yeah.

Use it to their advantage.

So the chemistry that they give us does the opposite of mind,

Body,

Spirit,

Harmony.

The chemistry they give us turns off our pain receptors,

Right?

Turns off our emotional self.

Oh,

You're depressed?

Don't worry about it.

We got a pill for that.

We can just turn it off.

So instead of creating harmony,

They're further disrupting the process.

Yeah.

And any adverse effects?

Well,

There's another one for that too.

So funny how that works.

I was on 21 pills for my heart disease.

21 pills and only three of them were from my heart disease.

The other 18 were to counter the effects of the three.

And they are effects.

They're not side effects.

They're effects.

They are effects.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A hundred percent.

All right.

So now that we've established that,

You know,

We are these chemical beings are,

You know,

Even if we don't want to frame,

You know,

Existence like that or whatever this life is,

We recognize that,

Yes,

Chemistry does play a huge role when we look at the things we put into our body,

Things that are coming out,

They can be analyzed in chemical ways.

So that's pretty undeniable.

So what do we do about it?

I still am trying to get to the,

What is the human diet here?

You know?

Sure.

And by the way,

What I'm sharing here is nothing new.

This isn't something I came up with.

This is what has been the human diet since the beginning of time.

And what I'm going to share about the interplay of what's going on with body,

Mind,

And spirit is nothing new either.

Jesus said that the body is the temple.

Take care of it.

Muhammad spoke of the importance of taking care of the vessel.

Every philosopher,

Every religion,

Every culture throughout all of history has stressed the importance of the vessel or else everything else begins to break down.

Right?

So when it comes to the chemistry of the body,

Write things in.

Write things in is easy.

Today,

I call this the four jars.

Back in the day,

It was a bunch of food that I knew I had to eat and putting it together.

But in the last 18 years,

We've put this together in simple four groupings so that if people eat from each of these groups,

Which are easy to visualize as jars,

If people eat from each of these jars every day,

They're going to be moving in the right direction every day.

First jar is the one that when I was a kid,

Every mom on the planet would not let you leave the table until you ate this.

And today almost no one puts leafy greens on their table.

But leafy greens have 85% of the building blocks,

The nutrient building blocks that your body uses to create a strong and vibrant and immune you.

So we have to get those every day and we have to get those in enough quantity every day.

And before people freak out,

There are easy ways to make these things that are good.

Right?

You don't have to make them like mom did and just boil them to death.

So there's ways to do that.

The second jar and leafy greens are self-evident.

If it's green and it's a leaf and it's edible,

It goes in that jar.

Right?

Fibrous vegetables.

These are the things,

And don't fool yourself into thinking you can get your fiber from a pill.

Okay?

Fibrous vegetables are the ones that when you chew them up,

They leave strings in your mouth.

Those strings are the fiber your body needs because they act as your body's rotarooter.

They keep you clean.

And these we've learned,

Especially in the last 10 years,

Are the most important element to gut health.

And we've been learning how intrinsic gut health is to everything else in your body,

Mind,

Spirit connection.

And we've got to have these going right.

So we need to be eating from that jar every day.

If you're chewing it up and it doesn't leave strings in your mouth,

It is not the fiber you need.

Okay?

And that's the second jar.

The third jar is high quality,

Unprocessed carbohydrates.

Now we keep hearing simple and complex carbohydrates.

I can show you the film from the day in Congress when a group of politicians started calling things simple and complex.

These words don't even belong in the vocabulary of nutrition.

Processed and unprocessed do because an unprocessed carbohydrate is packed with the phytonutrients your body needs.

Now,

This has been the last five to eight years.

We've really started to realize the tens of thousands of phytonutrients that are at work in your body every single day.

And these come from our carbohydrates.

Carbohydrates are your fruits,

Your nuts,

Your tubers,

Your basically any plant that's not in one of the first two jars.

Every plant is a carbohydrate.

So if it isn't already in its own jar,

It goes into this jar.

Processed carbohydrates are those things that cannot exist without a factory.

So I know people like to say,

Oh,

Processed,

If you cook it,

It's processed.

Well,

Let's just put all the BS aside.

Okay?

If it cannot exist without a factory,

It probably doesn't belong in your body,

Right?

Well,

It's better if it's not.

Yeah.

So we want unprocessed carbohydrates to give the body what it needs.

And then the fourth jar is your unprocessed proteins.

Now,

When they tell you all these adverse effects of red meat have on your heart,

They're looking at sausage and pepperoni and processed meats.

Unprocessed meats do not have that effect on your body.

In fact,

There are nutrients in unprocessed meats that we can't find anywhere else.

But it also doesn't mean you have to be a meat eater.

There are a handful,

There's not a lot,

But there are a handful of what we call perfect proteins in the plant world.

A perfect protein is a protein that contains all the amino acids that make up a human protein.

Quinoa,

Right?

It might be one of them.

Okay.

Quinoa is one.

There's actually several grains,

Quinoa,

Buckwheat,

Spelt,

All fall into that category.

Fermented foods,

For example,

Tofu.

Fermented foods bring in a bit of the animal element because the bugs,

If you will,

The yeasts are eating the food and leaving behind a high-protein thing.

And there's one in the leafy greens that surprises people.

It's a plant called purslane.

Yes.

My dad picks this as a weed from his garden,

And I go and when I visit,

I take it because,

Yeah,

They sell it pretty expensive at the farmer's market.

I love it.

He doesn't.

Nearly everybody has purslane growing within 50 feet of their front door.

It grows out of the cracks of the sidewalk.

I mean,

It's easy to grow almost worldwide.

And it also is a perfect protein.

So even the leafy green is a perfect protein.

So they do exist.

It's easier to find them in meats because every meat is a perfect protein,

Whereas only a few plants are.

So that's the fourth jar is getting those proteins.

So your dark leafy greens,

Jar one,

Jar two,

Fibrous vegetables,

Chew them up,

They leave strings in your mouth,

Jar three,

Unprocessed carbohydrates,

Jar number four,

Unprocessed proteins.

You eat from those jars every day,

You're moving in the right direction.

This is how we get the right things in,

The chemical part of the equation,

The chemical equation,

Right?

Rule one,

Write things in,

This is how we do it.

Rule number two,

The easiest thing to put in your head,

And this will weed out 98% of all things that don't belong in your body.

If it can't exist without a factory,

Don't eat it.

And you'll eliminate 98% of the things that you need to keep out.

It's the easiest rule of thumb to keep things out.

Look at the ingredients,

If it has ingredients that aren't food.

I also love the people that say,

Oh,

H2O is a chemical.

Well,

Sure,

But nobody calls it H2O on a label,

Do they?

They call it water.

So on a food label,

Food will be called by its food name.

If they're using a chemical name,

It's not the thing that you need to be putting in your body.

So easy way to keep the wrong things out,

And then getting the right balance is just understanding how much to eat from each jar every day.

That part is going to shift a little bit based upon how active you are,

How much damage.

A couple of examples.

If you are an absolute gym rat,

And your goal is to look like Lou Ferrigno or Arnold Schwarzenegger,

If this is your goal,

You're doing a lot of muscle damage,

And it requires a different balance of foods to repair that damage.

If on the other hand,

You're a desk jockey,

Then you're not using nutrients the same way,

And your balance shifts.

So it's not that the foods shift,

The foods stay the same,

But the balance of those foods is going to shift based upon the lifestyle that you live.

And when you get the right balance for the lifestyle that you're living,

Magic happens.

Very good.

That's a really good,

Important distinction because while,

Yeah,

It seems fairly universally applicable that not everybody is kind of built the same or does the same thing.

So that makes sense that finding that balance would be great.

Now,

Two things that came up.

I wonder if you have anything to add,

Not to bad mouth doctors and whatever,

But I hear that they're not really taught nutrition in medical school,

Or it's very little compared to all the other things they do.

I wonder if you had any other light to shed on this other than the standard.

.

.

Oh,

I don't know.

I won't name names here,

But there's some reasons I've heard for that.

I wonder if there's anything else I'm missing.

And then I really feel that emotional eating is a huge thing.

I see this in other people.

I've just kind of been very fortunate and blessed to at least have decent physical health.

I mean,

Little things here and there,

Perhaps,

But I do see this as people eating emotionally.

And why don't you tell people what that actually means to,

I think coming a definition from you might actually be more of an authority here.

Yeah,

Definitely.

And I want to take what you said and break it up into two,

And I'll answer the first one first,

Doctors,

Because it's the fastest.

Doctors kept me alive long enough to learn how my body works and to be able to allow my body to heal.

Doctors did that.

I will never batten out the doctor in my life that kept me alive long enough to learn this,

But we need to understand what a doctor is for.

It's our responsibility to eat right.

If you refuse to do that,

You go to a doctor,

There's only so much they can do.

And even the doctors that know nutrition complain constantly because people don't want to hear it.

And so I go there,

But we need to understand that's our responsibility for the food that we choose to put in our body.

Totally.

We need to,

You don't need to be a biochemist or a cellular biologist,

But you need to understand the basics and put the right stuff because doctors cannot heal your body.

And I want to emphasize this.

Doctors cannot heal your body.

Your body heals itself.

All a doctor can do is support the process.

Your arm breaks,

A doctor sets it,

Puts it in a cast,

What heals it?

Your body heals it.

Now,

How well your body can heal is 100% dependent upon how close you're adhering to the human diet or how far you've strayed from it.

And that's on us.

So I think it's absolutely wrong for us to sit around and say things,

And I know you didn't,

I'm not saying you did,

But it's wrong for people to sit around and badmouth doctors,

Expecting them to do something that they just can't do.

And it's even for a certain generation who's kind of been programmed to every little thing that goes wrong,

You go to a doctor.

At the end of the day,

When they're not at the doctors,

They're still going to have to do things on their own and take responsibility for their health regimen or whatever's going on too,

Right?

And even the doctor is responsible for that.

How many doctors do you see these days that are obese,

That have heart disease,

That have body parts missing like their gallbladder because they're not taking care of the nutrition part of the equation?

But that's on us,

And we need to take that responsibility.

I tell people all the time,

It's not your fault you got this way.

You got this way because we've been misled.

But now that you're here,

It is your responsibility to get out of it.

Nobody else is going to do that for you.

We have to do that.

When it comes to emotional eating,

This is part of what we were talking about at the very beginning,

The mind-body-spirit connection,

Right?

When we,

Let me digress just a little bit because emotional eating isn't accidental.

Emotional eating is something that's been put upon us,

And it's because of the work of a guy named Ivan Pavlov and his dogs.

Ivan Pavlov learned how,

And it was an accident by the way,

He wasn't looking for this.

He just had his dogs wired up a certain way,

Noticed something and chased it down.

But he realized that you can make a dog hungry,

Like ravenously hungry,

Like aggressively hungry by ringing a bell.

Even when they're not biologically hungry,

You could take that trigger and program it to a response.

In this case,

A hunger response.

And it wasn't just the bell.

He did it with whistles.

He even found out that the sounds of the shoes of the person that brought the food would cause this reaction in his dogs.

And he learned that you could effectively create this connection in one week of consistent behavior.

Ring the bell,

Eat,

Ring the bell,

Eat,

Ring the bell,

Eat.

After one week of that,

Ring the bell,

Your dog is going to become aggressively hungry.

Now,

Can you imagine if a report like that landed on the desk of a big food executive?

And he's like,

Huh,

Does that work on people?

Hell,

I'll ring bells all day if I can get people to go buy more food,

Right?

Not just food either.

Yes.

Yeah.

But the thing is,

It does work on people.

But the thing that works best isn't bells and whistles.

The things that works best are negative emotions.

You have a negative emotion.

If we can take that negative emotion and connect it to a hunger response,

And that's exactly what emotional eating is,

Is a negative emotion hits and it's connected to a hunger response.

Now,

We give into that hunger response,

It's negative for our body.

Our body drops,

Our health drops.

When our health drops,

That sends a signal to your conscience,

And it makes you feel shame and guilt.

That shame and guilt makes you want comfort,

And you only know one place to get it.

So you get back in the cycle until you get to the bottom.

And I know how people say this.

I don't want to say it on a family program,

But you basically say F it,

And you just stop,

You give up.

Now,

The way to break that is to first know what it is.

This is a programmed response that you can find in every book you read.

When you read a book,

Nancy gets depressed.

What does she do?

She goes to the fridge and she gets a half gallon of ice cream and a shovel and goes and sits on the couch and doesn't take a bite.

She eats the whole damn thing.

And when her friend comes in and sees her in a bad state,

She's going to go get another one and come over and commiserate with her own tub of ice cream.

They're not even going to share it.

You'll see it on billboards.

You'll see it on movies.

You'll see it everywhere.

When you start seeing it,

It has less power over you.

And once you understand what it is,

Then you know where to break the cycle.

You break the cycle in what you choose to do when you have the negative emotion.

And the thing is Pavlov trained his dogs in a week.

If you know where,

When,

And how to break this cycle,

You can reprogram yourself in about a week.

To crave things that serve your body.

When you have negative emotions,

Now you have a negative motion,

Emotion,

And you want to go out and jump on your skateboard and ride around the block.

And yes,

I'm 60 and I still write my skateboard around the block,

But you start to have that craving for something that serves your body.

Now,

The thing that you do serves your body at a higher level that sends a message to your conscience.

That's very,

Very positive.

And the negative emotion starts to go away.

You see how the body and the spirit are interconnected and how taking care of the body is one of the easiest ways to begin to affect the spirit or the mind.

And we start getting a clearer mind and we start getting a more positive emotional self.

We begin to get harmony in the body,

Mind,

And the spirit.

And we begin to function at a higher level as a human being.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

I mean,

We are under so many programs and this is a really kind of fundamental one.

Pavlovian responses,

How much of our economy for so long,

Even still today,

Functions on this Pavlovian conditioning.

It's pretty wild,

Not just substances either,

I would think.

And it's been refined and sophisticated,

I think.

But the thing you mentioned is very helpful.

And yes,

Replacing it with healthy habits,

Healthy responses,

It's totally doable.

And the first step is awareness.

If you're not even aware of it or see how it works or know that it's happening,

You really don't have any chance to make a change or make any other choice.

Yeah.

And most of us never have.

I will say something fun though.

Yeah.

The very first time that the word comfort food or the phrase comfort food was used,

Very first time ever,

It didn't used to be a thing.

Comfort eating wasn't a thing.

The very first time the phrase was used was in 1973 in Town and Country magazine in a food advertisement.

1973,

Coincidentally,

Was enough time after Pavlov to have figured out how it works and to start the process.

And from 1973 forward,

We're being conditioned every single day.

It's pretty wild.

Now,

I think maybe the other important thing here is I would say a lot of people do actually know what's going on.

They know what's bad for them.

They know what's good for them.

But there there's a but,

Right?

There's the if and buts.

I had a counselor at one time told me if ifs and buts were candy and nuts,

We'd all have a happy Halloween,

Right?

So people know what they need to do.

How can they get it done?

How can they do it?

So do you have any advice for folks before we start to wrap up on that front?

Because I think that's huge for some people.

The trick here is to know where to break the cycle,

Where you need to have the pattern interrupt.

Most people say,

I'm gaining weight.

Let me go to the gym and work out harder.

Well,

The reason you're failing your diets is emotional eating.

It's not lack of exercise.

So if we're trying to break the pattern by going to the gym,

We're not going to reach the problem.

We have to reach the problem where the problem exists.

The problem is,

What do you do when you have the negative emotion?

What's the next step that you take?

And if that next step involves food,

It's going to lead you astray,

Even if it involves healthy food.

Because what are you going to do the first time that healthy food isn't available?

You're going to go right back to the garbage that hurts your body again.

So you need to break the pattern,

Not with another diet,

Not with another workout program.

You need to break the pattern by connecting that negative emotion with a response that serves you at a higher level.

And that's where people struggle,

Literally for a lifetime.

People die never solving this problem.

And that's why our obesity rate keeps rising and our heart disease and diabetes rates keep rising.

People die never having solved this.

The only way to solve it is to break the pattern in the right place.

That is,

What's the connection?

What are you connecting to?

And if you break that pattern in the right place,

You solve the problem in a very short period of time.

Beautiful.

And so what are some of the more common ways to do that?

What reconnection or diverting connection do you find?

Is there anything that's more easy for people to do?

Anything that's more beneficial?

Any kind of tips and tricks on that,

I guess?

I recommend two things.

One is a three-minute meditation that I do with my clients.

And this isn't a meditation like sitting down and clearing your mind or something like that.

That's damn near impossible for anybody with ADHD like me.

But I do a three-minute meditation just to get people in the present.

And you do that by one at a time,

Focusing on your senses.

And what are you sensing right now?

And as you do that,

You immediately forget the stress and the depression.

It's gone.

Because stress lives in the future.

Depression lives in the past.

So if you get to the present,

All of that dissipates.

Then when you're in the present,

You have a clear enough mind to make a decision.

What do I want to do right now?

Now what people need to do here is when you make that decision,

How am I going to make this connection?

Pick something that you can do consistently.

The same thing every time you have the negative emotion.

This means you can't say,

Oh,

I'm going to go read a book.

Because if you have the negative emotion at work,

You don't get to do that.

Right?

So we need something that's simple,

That can go with us,

That we can do consistently.

And then we need to promise ourselves,

I can do anything I want to do for one week.

So for one week,

Every time I feel this emotion,

I'm going to number one,

Center myself,

Get back to the present.

And number two,

I'm going to choose to do this thing.

So I have clients,

I have one client that has made some amazing things.

He makes sculptures out of paperclips.

And he carries in his hip pocket all the time,

A little tiny pair of needle nose pliers.

And this is his connection.

I'm having this negative emotion,

He starts creating.

Anytime you can create,

That's one of the most powerful ways to refocus that there is.

I have another client that carries around a small pack of origami papers,

Makes these amazing origami things.

For me,

It was photography.

I carried my camera and I have award winning pictures.

Didn't start out award winning,

But I got so good at it through this process that I have award winning pictures of stuff on my desk.

Because I just got really,

Really good at doing this thing that I really loved,

Which is the third thing.

And that's,

You have to pick something that you enjoy.

Too many people say,

Well,

I'm going to connect this to exercise because that's good for me.

Great.

Do you enjoy exercise?

No,

I bloody hate it.

Well,

Then don't connect to that because you're not going to do it,

Right?

Connect to something that you want to learn,

Want to do.

But you do that.

Number one,

Get present.

Number two,

Make a conscious decision to consistently do one thing that serves you.

If it can be creative,

Even better.

And you break this process in a week.

Very cool,

Belden.

Thanks so much for coming on today and sharing your story and what you've learned and your wisdom and your knowledge and a big help for people.

It sounds like it's a,

I learned a bunch and very well spoken too.

So take out the audience on a message you'd like to leave today.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Well,

Don't believe the myth.

I mean,

One of the,

I'll leave you with two things.

One,

Getting the wrong stuff out is the most important thing people can do.

Because if you get the wrong stuff out,

All you have left to eat is the right stuff.

So if you just practice,

Don't eat things that cannot exist without a factory,

Don't eat them,

Cook at home.

Let's get back in touch with that.

But if you keep the wrong stuff out,

You're 90% of the way there already.

And number two is attack the problem,

The real problem.

Assess what's holding you back.

What is your stumbling block and address it?

Because if your stumbling block is emotional eating and overwhelming,

You're not going to get anywhere with the gym and another diet.

So address what is blocking you.

Those are the two things I think that will jettison people forward.

Very cool.

Thanks again for joining and may all beings everywhere come to know and master optimal health and nutrition.