Optimize Cellular Nutrition for Vitality and Longevity with Wade Lightheart

In this Episode

• [02:00]Wade shares the backstory to the life-changing event that happened to him in 2003. When he was 15, he explains, three very distinct things occurred in his life.
• [04:10]Wade moves on to talking about the 2003 incident itself. In the 11 weeks after a bodybuilding contest, he gained 42 pounds of fat and water. His doctor explained to him that he had been building his body from the outside in, not the inside out.
• [07:33]Stephan steps in to clarify what Wade means about being healthy from the outside in. Wade then points out that it’s not just about what you eat, but also what you digest.
• [10:13]Wade talks about two challenges that people are facing in today’s world in terms of diet and nutrition.
• [11:45]What would be the first step in making sure that your digestive process is working properly? As he answers, Wade walks listeners through how the digestive system works.
• [19:52]Would the process for correcting what you’re doing wrong involve testing your microbiome to see how off it is, and then testing it periodically?
• [21:26]Wade has never met anyone who is experiencing truly tremendous, vital health who isn’t taking probiotics.
• [22:38]We hear more about how to select a good probiotic among the wide variety now available on the market. Wade talks about the two basic styles of probiotics and explains their differences.
• [27:41]Wade returns to the topic of how to find a good probiotic, revealing that he isn’t a fan of refrigerated probiotics.
• [28:48]If you’re taking a probiotic on a regular basis, should you also eat fermented foods?
• [31:08]Wade talks about which kind of kombucha is his favorite out of the many varieties that he’s tried.
• [32:58]Does Wade recommend getting regular colonics? He shares the story of a woman he heard of who had a Barbie slipper sitting in her intestines for over 40 years.
• [36:14]Wade usually does a long water fast twice a year, and a one-day water fast once or so a week. He then offers some advice to people who may be interested in beginning to try fasting.
• [40:24]Stephan mentions the film Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, which involved a 30-day green juice fast. Wade shares his experience with trying a similar fast.
• [42:10]Where does Wade stand on colonoscopies?
• [44:39]For listeners who may not be familiar with them, Wade explains the differences between alkaline and acidic diets.
• [47:06]Besides what we’ve been talking about, what goes into Wade’s regimen for awesome health? He explains that AWESOME is an acronym for Air, Water, Exercise, Sunlight, Optimizers, Mental beliefs and attitudes, and Education, testing, and coaching.
• [51:56]Wade talks about the importance of coaching and offers a free program to Get Yourself Optimized listeners.
• [53:31]Stephan asks Wade for a lesser-known example within the Optimizers category, and lists a couple of his own. Wade then mentions several recommendations.
• [55:59]What kind of magnesium would Wade recommend?
• [57:30]Wade offers information on how interested listeners can reach out to him directly.

Jump to Links and Resources

You probably knew that heart disease and cancer were the two biggest killers, but did you know that the fifth biggest killer was digestive-related illness? Yup. You’re about to hopefully nip that in the bug with this episode number 123. Our guest today is Wade Lightheart. Wade is a three-time National Bodybuilding Champion, advisor to the American Anti-Cancer Institute, and Director of Education at BiOptimizers. He’s also the author of the bestselling book Staying Alive in a Toxic World. His latest book is The Wealthy Backpacker. Wade runs three online companies, he’s been a vegetarian for 15 years, and a meditator for 17 years. Wade, it’s great to have you on the show. Wade, it’s great to have you on the show!

‏‏I am delighted to be here. Wow! To be here on Get Yourself Optimized, I feel validated. I made it to Get Yourself Optimized show. Being a geek myself, it’s great.

‏‏Alright. I’m flattered. Actually, I’m honored that you are on the show. You’re inspirational and you’ve done some amazing things with your life and your business. I’d love to have you share your wisdom and your journey with our listeners. Maybe if we start by sharing what happened in 2003, you were in the Mr. Universe contest, there’s a problem that occurred for you, do you want to share that story?

‏‏I will. Before I hit that, I’m going to give the backstory to that because I think it’s relevant. I think in today’s world, a lot of people are interested in being healthier, in fitness, looking your best and all that sort of stuff or what I call the cosmetic side of fitness and health. I was into that. Literally, I got started at 15 years old. I had always been a kid that exercises and do fitness but when I was 15, what happened were three very distinct issues, things came up for me. Number one, my parents moved to an extremely rural place. It was five miles to my nearest neighbor. I was literally up on a mountain, on a dirt road where the telephone lies into my house. I had a lot of time to think and reflect. Number two, my sister was diagnosed with cancer at that time and I literally watched her go through four years of chemotherapy, radiation, bone marrow transplants, all the whole nine yards before she died at the tender age of 22. She was my older sister. That had a really strong impact for me, understanding that you know what, health is not a guarantee. She was a fit person, she was an athletic person, very active. You know what, it just didn’t come out right in the genes for her. But it made a big impression for me. The third thing was she’d given me a bodybuilding magazine.

I still remember the cover to this day. It had Troy Zuccolotto who had Mr. California. He had these two beautiful girls in the cover and he had all these muscles. Being a young boy, impression of a young boy at 15 driven mad by testosterone. “Oh wow, I need these muscles if I want to get these girls.” I built a gym literally in my barn because there were no gyms around. It was kind of a rocky thing with dumbbells and sawhorses, and a pulley system that I had made, tractor tires, you name it, the whole nine yards. I did that and I started my journey. That journey took me on a great adventure and I ended up going to study exercise physiology at the University of New Brunswick. I moved into a career in nutrition and health, worked in stores, owned my own store, became a personal trainer, hired one of the best coaches in the world. I was fortunate enough. After 16 years of efforts—I realized, it took me 10 years to win my first contest. I didn’t have great genetics and it took me 16 years to win my first national championship in 2003. I reached my dream. I’m competing and representing my country for the Mr. Universe contest. I read all the books of Arnold, I had seen the video Pumping Iron a million times, and I remember being backstage and being so excited because it was the same guy reading out what country you are from and announcing it. It was just like the movie. I had visualized this like a million times. I went on stage. I didn’t win the contest.

However, it was a dream come true. I thought I was doing everything right. That’s where the wheels fell off. In the next 11 weeks, I gained 42 pounds of fat and water. I literally went from Mr. Universe to Mr. Marshmallow in that time. It was devastating. I was just like I don’t understand. I’ve got the best coach in the world, I’ve been training for 16 years and these last 11 months preparing for the contest, four hours a day, I’m eating a perfect diet. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. You’re representing the cosmetic idea. Now, I’m just a wreck. Fortunately, I met a medical doctor who was famous for recovering from untreatable colon cancer and untreatable cirrhosis of the liver through some pretty advanced protocols that he had developed on his own. He had become famous from healing all these different people from all these conditions and I had the good fortune of meeting him. He said to me, I met him myself, “Doctor, what happened? What did I do wrong?” He says, “Wade, you’ve learned to build the body from the outside in. What you haven’t learned is how to build the body from the inside out.” It was like a light bulb went off. He became my next mentor.

Over the next six months, I was able to rebuild my health. What a lot of people don’t realize is when I was preparing for that contest, you see all these pictures and you see the magazine, and you see the videos online and stuff, you have this look of people in these what I call cosmetic ideas, they look fantastic. What they don’t know is for the six months leading up to that contest, I felt terrible, I was deenergized, I had brain fog, my joints hurt. I had all these things and this was just acceptable in that industry. Even though the world perceives maybe athletics and that sort of stuff or cosmetic ideas as something they want to achieve, they don’t understand the story behind it. There’s a lot of people who experience the similar thing in the industry and when I learned these principles, I started to apply them and I fixed my digestion, that was one of the big areas, and understand cellular nutrition and then started using ways to optimize my health and my performance. It took me about four years to truly master it. I ended up going back to the world championships again in 2007. In my first time, I placed 13th.

On my second time, I placed 5th. That’s about as good as I can get with my genetics. There’s another class above me I would say. It doesn’t matter, I’ll never beat some of those guys. It was an amazing experience and from that time, I’ve been teaching the principles of not just how to be strong or look good or have athletic performance, but actually to be healthy from the inside out. I do believe that that’s where the future is because at the end of the day, we all want to be healthy. We all want to have the energy to do the things that we want to do. We want to do this for a long time. We want to be feeling great and looking great but being healthy while we’re doing it as we go into our 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and beyond.

‏‏When you say being healthy from the inside out instead of the outside in, you’re talking about cellular nutrition, making sure that what you are intaking makes it into the cells and gets absorbed, and gets utilized in the most appropriate way because you could be, on the outside, eating exactly the right things at the right times but because of the way that your body is absorbing it or not absorbing it, you’re not getting the nutrients that you need so then your body is holding onto bad fats and all sorts of stuff. Is that right?

‏‏You nailed it, exactly. There’s an old saying, of course, we’ve all heard it. You are what you eat. But the reality is you are what you digest, absorb, and utilize. If your digestive process is offline, and most people’s are, just to give you some statistics, 85% of the population suffers from unreported digestive issues at some point in their life, and 25% of the population is on some form of prescription medications for digestion, that’s not counting over-the-counters, the pink stuff and the capsules and all that sort of stuff. On top of that, this is a shocking fact, the fifth leading cause of death is digestive-related illnesses. We don’t think about it but the real reason why things like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes can actually be traced back to how we consume our food, what we consume, how we utilize that food, and also a part of the elimination, are we eliminating what we’re not using properly. For a lot of people, they suffer in silence. They don’t know what the options are or they get on prescription medications which are primarily designed to be used on a short-term basis to alleviate symptoms. I’m not here to discredit the medical industry but if you look at someone who’s taking proton pumps for acid reflux, those are designed to be on for 4-6 weeks. I’ve met literally thousands of people who have been on them for years and years. The side effects of those are significant and unavoidable.

You are what you digest, absorb, and utilize.

‏‏Something like maybe the slow food movement might be a sort of thing that would help with digestive-related illnesses because we’re just eating so fast, just on the go, run, run, run, maybe not eating at the right times as well if we are perhaps wanting to lose weight instead of doing the intermittent fasting thing or snacking throughout the day and never giving our body a break so that it can rest from the constant digestion that it’s having to do. Correct me if I’m wrong in any of this, of course. Is this on the right track of some of the things you might recommend?

‏‏Yeah, it is. I think what’s really important is there are two challenges that people are facing in today’s world and that is there’s so much information out there that we can get information from a variety of sources. What happens is in information paradox, we’ll see someone who’s following say Intermittent Fasting protocol versus someone who’s following Ketogenic, versus someone who’s following maybe a traditional, athletic diet which is more carbohydrates to high-protein, low-protein, vegetarian, raw food. There are all these different diet parameters or ideologies. All of them can work depending on your genetics, depending on your lifestyle and all of them have advantages, pros and cons, depending on who you are and your individuality. But all of them, still, are built on the premise that your digestive system is working properly. Oftentimes, people will follow a diet, it’ll work for a period of time and then all of a sudden, they run into these complications and they don’t know why. Then they switch to another diet and that works for them while they run into some complications. But what’s happening is they’re failing to understand how the digestive system works, and then how to optimize that so no matter what dietary program that you are on or you’re following or lifestyle that you’re going to maximize its effects, because you’re not assuming that your digestive system is working properly.

‏‏What would be the first step in making sure that your digestive system is working?

‏‏Super great question. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to just explain the process of digesting briefly in layman’s term and I can identify where the potential challenges can come up.

‏‏Perfect.

‏‏Okay, great. First and foremost, we have to understand that it’s a single canal from your mouth to your anus. What that means is the food enters into your digestive system but it’s not necessarily into the cells where we need the energy, where you need the building materials, where you turn on your DNA and you give yourself, your mitochondria, all these sorts of things that give you energy. Right there is the first step. It’s to understand that, “Okay, number one, when I start digesting, I chew my food.” Chewing your food properly breaks it down a certain amount and also, your body will release a certain amount of digestive enzymes particularly, [00:12:12] that will break down carbohydrates. The food will go down your esophagus and enter into what’s called the upper cardiac portion of the stomach which is a fancy name for the top part of the stomach. At this stage, it’s going to stay there for approximately 30-60 minutes depending on the food, how well it’s chewed up, and all that sort of stuff. During this time, this is where the enzymes, present in the food, break down the food.

All living organisms have enzymes. Enzymes are responsible for over 25,000 functions in the human body.

The first challenge that comes up for people is that we don’t eat enzyme-rich food anymore. If you are a tiger and you eat zebras—all living things have enzymes—you eat the zebra and you get the enzymes in the zebra. Of course, if you look at animals that prey, they always eat the entrails first or the enzymes and probiotics are first and then they eat the rest of the meat because that helps them to actually break down and digest the food. If I’m a horse or a cow, I’ll eat grass or hay, and I get the living enzymes. The enzymes are what separates the living from the dead. A rock doesn’t have enzymes but a piece of grass or a tree does. A fruit has enzymes. All living organisms have enzymes. Enzymes are responsible for over 25,000 functions in the human body. Literally everything from thinking to blinking requires an enzymatic process and that speeds up processes and any chemical reaction. If you’re eating cooked food, which most humans are, then our body has to manufacture its own enzymes. That comes at a huge metabolic or energetic cost that’s why sometimes you’ll eat a meal and you’ll feel tired. Often times, it’s because your body is unable to produce enough enzymes to digest that meal.

After that 30-60 minutes happened, the food goes into the lower part of the stomach. This is where hydrochloric acid starts to come in. Some people think that we’ve got this big bowl of hydrochloric acid sitting in our stomach and everything gets digested. That’s not true. Your body will start to produce hydrochloric acid once it knows that food has entered the stomach. Here’s the interesting thing, a lot of people suffer from acid reflux, heartburn, and these types of things. They take anti-acids for it. What really is the issue is they’re not producing enough hydrochloric acid because there’s a little flap on top of the intestinal tract that closes when your body hits a certain level of HCL in the stomach. If you don’t produce enough, the flap stays open and some of the acid will splash up and burn the esophagus and create that heartburn and acid reflux. Actually, the reason why people don’t produce enough hydrochloric acid is because they’re either improperly hydrated or they’re getting to an age where their body has difficulty producing hydrochloric acid. We’ll get to the third stage of digestion.

‏‏Hold on one second. What is that flap called?

‏‏It’s called the upper esophageal sphincter.

‏‏Got it. Proceed.

‏‏Then what happens is the food that’s been mixing around and [00:15:21] all the contractions going, and all that stuff, it has to leave the intestinal tract. And here is where your body will create what’s called Bicarbonate Buffers, it’s a fancy name for alkaline minerals, that will return the pH, that highly acidic pH, back to neutral. You see, the reason your body has that high pH or low pH, or highly acidic environment, is that it number one helps break down proteins and number two, it helps disinfect from parasites, bugs, bacteria, viruses, all that stuff that may be present on the food. As it transits out, you’ve got to rebuffer that or this is where people get intestinal ulcers and things like that because they have acid spilling over into the intestinal tract because they don’t have enough minerals to buff it. Highly acidic diets tend to cause that. Then, as we go into the final stage of digestion, we enter into the intestines. In there, we have a whole host of bacteria strains. There are about 500 different strains of bacteria in any given person. I always classify them like this, there’s 10% good, 10% bad, and 80% opportunists. You kind of hear of bacteria as something that’s bad but we have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria. Some of these are essential for our digestion and absorption and utilization of food. Without them, we would literally be dead.

There are more bacteria in the body than there are cells in the body.

In fact, there are more bacteria in the body than there are cells in the body. What’s happened is in the modern era, we’ve prescribed antibiotics for everything. Antibiotics mean anti-life and probiotics mean pro-life. What happens when we get sick or we get a cold or we get an infection, we’re getting antibiotics and these antibiotics act kind of like a strip bomb or whatever. They kill the good, the bad, the opportunists, they kill everything and this alters what’s called our flora or something that’s scientific name is the microbiome. When that becomes altered, we can have problems with digestion, we can have problems with bloating, we can have problems with constipation, we may get abnormal food cravings, we can get nightmares, we can get insomnia because these bacteria actually work and connect into our nervous system and will make us crave food. For example, we’ve all had that experience, [11:00] at night, you have no reason why, you decide that you just have to have a liter of Haagen Dazs ice cream. You eat and after you’re like, “Why did I do that?” It’s because what’s happened is the bacteria have activated your nervous system and told your body that it needs to feed. This can proliferate into all sorts of viral conditions, skin conditions, depression. It’s often related to a bad microbiome because what happens is these organisms start eating up the essential proteins and you can’t make the polypeptide chains that make your brain feel good and the hormones for that.

All sorts of things. We’re just really starting to learn about this. It’s huge. It starts off as bloating or gas, or indigestion, and these types of moderate symptoms. But over time, 10, 20, 30, or 40 years, they lead into all sorts of conditions, and then finally, when your body’s bacteria broken down the food the way that you want, then your body has peristaltic contractions and the waste exits the body. Of course a lot of people, a good indication if they’re suffering from constipation is because they don’t have the right flora inside the body and they’re getting a buildup of bad bacteria which are eating undigested food and creating all sorts of toxins inside the body that lead to a lot of the illnesses and suffering that people have. Including justs bad mood or inability to control their diet or their palette, insomnia, all types of things. When we look at people who want to have optimal health or not losing weight the way they want, or they’re feeling bloated and gassy, or they’re going through these various acid reflux or heartburn, oftentimes it’s just simply one of these areas that you can address and correct the problem and then maximize your results from any program that you’re doing.

‏‏Wow. Wouldn’t the process for correcting what you’re doing wrong include, for example, testing your microbiome to see how off it is and then doing periodic tests of the microbiome after you’ve made some diet changes and maybe some fitness changes as well and see what you can do to correct things as optimally as possible?

‏‏This is an area that’s kind of a growing and expanding field right now. Let’s find out what bacteria is inside the body and how do we optimize that. I really don’t think that we’re at the level that we’ll be in 10 years because for example, your microbiome, or anyone’s, is a very dynamic environment. It’s literally changing meal per meal. For example, if I go out in the street and almost get run over by a car, I’m going to get a major shot of adrenaline and I might wipe out a big portion of the good flora that I have in my body. If I go off on a vacation for two weeks to a wonderful resort, I might find out that, guess what, I’ve contracted a bunch of different bacteria I’ve never experienced or I went on a hiking trip on the Himalayas and eat some food I’m not used to, all of these things can change your microbiome. Generally, as a rule, you would want to do your testing and then do it over a significant enough time that you have enough results or enough time to kind of alter that environment on a significant nature, whether that’s taking your probiotic, whether that’s using fermented foods, whether it’s altering your diet or changing your exercise program, and really starting to track and create a history over time so that you can optimize your particular gut flora.

‏‏Would you recommend probiotics for every person or do you think it depends on their environment, their biology, or various other influences?

Choosing an incorrect probiotic can accelerate the problem as opposed to optimize your health.

‏‏You know, it’s another great question. Here’s what I will say to that. I have never met anyone who’s experiencing awesome health, what I call truly tremendous like, “Wow. That person’s vital and energized, and feeling great.” I’ve never met one of them who’s not taking probiotics. That’s not to say that you can’t achieve a high level of health without them. I just think it’s the simplest, fastest, and easiest way to kind of transform your health without aversely altering your life or altering your diet. The big challenge is, for most people, choosing the right probiotic for them because if you make an incorrect choice, it can actually accelerate the problem as opposed to optimize your health.

‏‏There are so many probiotics out there. You go to Whole Foods or your local health foods store and you’d find all these different mixes, different brands, formulations that are specifically for men, specifically for women. How do I know how many probiotics I need to take? What strength and what mix of strains and all that, it seems very complicated.

‏‏It is. This is the part that we spend so much time educating people on how to find out about how do you select a probiotic, what constitutes a good probiotic versus a not so good probiotic. Because you just said it, you walk into the store now, into Whole Foods, you look down in the digestive rack and there’s like 20 bottles of enzymes, 50 bottles of probiotics, single strains, there’s multistrains, there’s like 24 strains. Oftentimes, people will assume more is better, particularly in United States. It’s about targeting and people don’t know the difference between transient strains and non-transient strains or should they have one that’s been on a cooler or should they have one that’s been freeze-dry. All these types of questions come up and so one of the things that we aim to do is to help people make better suggestions for when they’re selecting probiotics and also to track the results. That’s a big factor. The right probiotic for you might not be the right probiotic for me.

‏‏Walk us through this. How do we know which probiotic we should be taking? I didn’t even know that there’s a thing called transient and non-transient probiotics.

‏‏You know what? 99% of the population doesn’t know this. Going back to 2003, I didn’t know this either and it cost me a considerate amount of time and frustration. Let me explain the two basic styles of probiotics that you could find in a store. There’s going to be what’s called implant strains or colonizers. That is probiotics that will actually grow, develop inside your microbiome and stay there and start to colonize if it is high quality probiotic. We’ll get to that in a second. The other type is what’s called a transient strain. A transient strain doesn’t necessarily stay and grow inside the intestinal tract, it’ll go through the entire body. In other words, it will serve as I always call it a black ops. It’ll go in and clean up undigested food in your blood that’ll go in your brain, go in your skin, it can go into all different kinds of places. For me, when we are looking at the types of probiotics that are going to produce a result without compromising people’s health—I’m a big fan of using single strain transients because number one, they’re going to wipe out the bad guys, number two, you’re not going to get an overgrowth control of your microbiome and cause more problems, and number three, they can solve challenges that colonizing strains don’t. If you’re going to use a colonizing strain in which most probiotics that are being sold today are colonizers, you really should do so under the guidance of a Naturopathic physician that can really do a good profile on your body, what you need and look at your diet and what kind of probiotics are going to be right for your dieting and your lifestyle. I’ll give an example.

We developed a probiotic that is a transient strain – it’s antiviral, it’s antiretroviral, it’s protolithic.

My business partner, he’s a carnivorous Ketogenic guy. I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years. We both use the same probiotics. However, we use a transient strain, a very aggressive transient strain that we developed in conjunction with the medical doctor that helped me out so many years ago. I’m really delighted about that because we’re entering into a new age of probiotics. To qualify that, I’ll just say this, we’ve all heard of the bad bacteria or the untreatable antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains that are present in hospitals now. Hospitals are one of the most dangerous places in the world. In fact, a friend of mine, he’s a medical doctor, Dr. Horst Filtzer that put the first dent in the body and he has a wound healing clinic, he said, “Yeah, half the people who die from surgery don’t die from the surgery, they die from infection from the surgery because we have these incredible antibiotic resistance strains of bacteria.” Any time that you try to kill a bacteria, there’s a certain amount that’s going to survive, if you’re doing it with drugs or that sort of stuff which is the common thing. We have these super strains. We thought, well, if we have super bad strains, maybe you can develop a super good strain. Going through a patented process, what you can do is you can alter the effects of what a probiotic can do. That’s what we did. We developed a probiotic that is a transient strain, it’s antiviral, it’s antiretroviral, it’s protolithic which means it digests proteins, it serves as a screen agent for pharmaceutical so people that have reactions to pharmaceutical drugs and stuff is often because of how the proteins deliver and things like that. It’s truly a remarkable product, it has anti-tumoral capabilities. I’m not saying this is actually proven on the patent.

From that, if you take enough of these guys, you can make radical transformations in your health and allow your bodies natural microbiome just start to cultivate and grow in a way that it was designed based on your dietary and lifestyle habits. We use that as our primary source to aggressively go after pathogens that might be in the body because your probiotics are your first defense in the immune system. We’ve had a lot of success with it. To follow up, I know I’m kind of rambling here but I touched on one thing, how do you find a good probiotic? Number one, I’m not a big supporter of the probiotics that you have in the fridge. The reason is just if you understand manufacturing, transit times, how long it’s going to be in the bottle, the chances of you getting this amount of strains that are listed on the bottle, very low if you get any. The other thing is I would avoid strains that use things like magnesium stearate or other chemical agents, silicon dioxide, things like that, as a binder, it’s usually because they’re using a filler, it’s usually a cheap thing. I always choose vegetarian capsules over gelatin capsules, that way, it can be used by anybody. I like a freeze-dried formula that can sit in room temperature and of course with heat and temperature, it goes inside your body to activate. You just tend to do better. If you develop your own, you can grow your own cultures and control the temperature environment and things like that, then it makes sense to use some of these other strains that you can control.

‏‏Wow. This is a pretty complicated process but great information. What about fermented food now? You’re taking probiotic on a regular basis, do you also want to supplement that with some fermented foods?                                                                                 

‏‏Absolutely. I think if you look at some of the longest living, healthiest cultures in the world, they’ve all cultivated various fermented foods like in Asia, things like Miso and Kimchi. If you look into Eastern Europe where they did the first studies on elbow karagis and found out these wonderful benefits of probiotics, they were creating their own kind of kiefers. I think cultivating these or getting a high quality source in one of those areas is fantastic. Particularly relate it to your diet. I was in Okinawa not that long ago. They had some fermented foods there. When I ate that fermented food, I could literally feel my body went, “Wow! This is something that I need.” Of course, Okinawa is known as the longest living population on the world as general. If you look at their diet, rich in vegetables, rich in minerals, a lot of raw foods and a lot of fermented foods that they cultivate and ferment right there. Also, a lot of people that use soy products don’t realize that the history of soy is mostly in Asia. Almost all the soy that you buy there in its natural environment has been fermented to break down the enzyme inhibitors that are present. What we get in America is often genetically modified foods that haven’t been fermented and so our body has a very difficult time digesting soy and this becomes an agent to create complications in our life later on.

If you look at some of the longest living, healthiest cultures in the world, they’ve all cultivated various fermented foods like in Asia, things like Miso and Kimchi. Click To Tweet

‏‏Right. What are some of your favorite fermented foods and how often do you eat them?

‏‏I eat some fermented foods pretty much everyday. I’ve always liked various forms. Pickles, I love Kimchi, Kombucha. I’m a bit of a connoisseur, I don’t drink but I do love Kombucha. I probably had 300 different kinds of Kombucha and one of the things I love to do is travel. For me, Kombucha works for me. It doesn’t work for everybody. I also love sauerkraut. I think that is phenomenal. I make a probiotic yogurt out of coconut meat actually. I mix up coconut meat and I mix up coconut water and I blend them altogether and I put the probiotic strain inside of that and I ferment it myself and then I eat that at night before I go to bed so it goes in my whole body and cleans up any waste products. Those are the fermented foods that I use quite a bit.

‏‏Out of all those different Kombuchas that you’ve tried, what are your favorites?

‏‏I’ve got to say, I’ve got these wonderful set of friends who live on top of a mountain in Los Angeles. They’re like the Miyogis for 30 years. He was a brewer before he got into Kombucha. He brews Kombucha, it’s a ginger concoction and he ferments it just right. He adds a little bit of carbonation into it and it comes out, it literally feels and tastes almost like champagne. It’s the best one. It’s not made on mass. I apologize to the population. But oftentimes, when I have a friend that’s having a party or wedding or something like that, I’ll get a case from him and have it shipped in and people literally have their minds blown. In stores, general stores, there are so many good brands. For people starting out, Synergy is a great one to start because it’s very fruity and it’s a little bit sweeter. Then generally, just like you get into wines, or you get into cigars or get into chocolate, your palette starts to change as you go over time. Some people will like the Townshend blend is a really nice one. Often times, there’s a lot of local environments. You go to a local raw food place or you go to local juice bars and they’ll have their own localize concoction. I love going for those and testing them out. It’s really expanded. What’s happening in 10 years is unbelievable. Everybody’s got Kombucha at the store now.

What’s happening in 10 years is unbelievable.

‏‏I really enjoy it too. Synergy, I’m familiar with it and I enjoy that but I’m always looking for something that’s a little better. I don’t know, I get kind of bored with the jiffy brand. It’s the same like five or six different flavors I always get all the time. I want to mix it up with something different. That’s fermented foods. What about other things that are supposedly best practices for health and digestion and all that like Colonics? Do you recommend getting regular Colonics? Do you do it yourself?

‏‏Yeah. Actually, I’ve gone through the whole process. For those who don’t know what a Colonic is, it’s basically you have a colon therapist that uses one of several different devices, the different types of colonic therapies. What they do is they put a hose up your butt basically and they use pressurized water and sometimes other things like coffee or various clean concoctions to kind of alkalize the body or they’ll do all three at once. What they’ll do is they increase the pressure inside your intestinal tract and what that does is it activates your peristaltic contractions so that you can retone your intestinal tract because a lot of people lose this particularly because we sit a lot. A lot of people, as they get older, and they sit at a desk, they don’t have their bowel movements because they don’t have that muscular contraction inside their intestinal tract. You can overdo it, you definitely want a great professional and get a reference from that but that was one of the things that I did early on when I went to that Mr. Marshmallow stage. I realized that I had this build-up of undigested protein inside my intestinal tract and I needed to get rid of it. Colonics is something that really, really helped me and started to turn me on to the idea of, “Wow! There’s a world here that I wasn’t aware of.” It sounds weird for people but I think once you go there—I know Tony Robbins is a big advocate of it. Then at home, you can also do enymas which have been used literally for centuries that people have been doing to clean up their gutter as they say.

‏‏You’re going to actually have some stuff that’s been sitting in your colon for years. It gets cleaned up from the Colonic.

‏‏I’ll tell you a funny story. My colon therapist in Vancouver, Canada, he had a client. What happens is he actually sees the stuff that goes out the tubes. He had a client in there, she was in her mid-40s and all of a sudden, out of the tube, he saw a little plastic Barbie slipper. Can you imagine that? He goes, “I’ve never seen that.” She goes, “Why?” He goes, “I see a little plastic Barbie slipper.” She goes, “Oh my god! I ate that when I was four.”

‏‏Wow!

‏‏That slipper had been sitting in her intestines for over 40 years and it hadn’t broken down. As people go through this, it’s shocking. Also, you’ll find oftentimes an emotional release. You can often experience intense heat during the process because what happens is we build up these layers of what’s called mucoid plaque. If you’ve ever driven down the highway and you see the transport trucks that rip off the black tires, they blow a tire and you see it kind of sitting on the side of the road. It looks a lot like that. I can remember doing a 10-day fast on water, nothing else. I was taking my enzymes and my probiotics. I went through this colon therapy and literally, on the 10th day, we’re still getting all these debris, if you will, out of my system. I hadn’t eaten in 10 days and this stuff just kept coming out and coming out. I was absolutely flabbergasted. Wow, I’m supposed to be healthy and I got all this goup in me? Thank God I did it.

‏‏How often do you do these water fasts?

‏‏I do a water fast usually, a long one, twice a year. Usually, I’ll do one day week where I’ll just do either a partial or a full day on just water. Then maybe two or three days on a monthly basis. Then once or twice a year, I’ll do anywhere from 5-10 days.

‏‏Wow. Is that pretty standard? I don’t really know the difference between these different kinds of fasts. When I went to Tony Robbins’ Life Mastery, Date with Destiny’s great but this was at Life Mastery in Fiji. We were on not a water fast, it was a juice fast I guess, where we were getting a little bit of, I forget which juices we were getting but occasionally, we’ll get a tiny piece of pineapple too to help us through. That was really, really hard. I did feel better afterwards and then we got the Colonics there which I’ve never had before. I’m like, “This is pretty out there for me,” at that time at least. I guess there are a lot of different protocols for fasting, for an extended period of time like 5 days, 10 days or whatever just on water, just taking let’s say Udo’s oil and juice whatever else. What do you think are the best kind of protocols and why?

It’s not a good idea for people to start off on a water fast right away.

‏‏Dr. Udo is a good friend of mine and he’s a wonderful man. He’s also a big proponent of fasting. One of the things that I think is a great way to start for people is they can do just simply something like a–Flora makes a product that’s called the Sambu Cleanse, it’s really great. You can do a three-day cleanse that have a juice and herbal pills and that sort of stuff and you can start off with that. There are also other cleansing programs that are out there that is simply easy to use, that gives you exactly what to do and you can go through that process. What typically happens, whether it’s a juice fast, maybe it’s only vegetable you’re eating or fruits, or whatever happens to be, typically, what happens is once you get into this and start seeing results, like anything else, you start to evolve and move into other things. What I would say is it’s probably not a good idea for people to start off on a water fast right away. I think a juice fast is a great way to go. Maybe take some herbal laxatives to go along with it and lots of deep breathing. When you start off, oftentimes if you are particularly not very healthy, you’re going to experience more side effects than someone who’s done it a few times.

Do a one-day cleanse and build it up to maybe a two-day and then a three-day. If you’re doing one day of fasting a week, I think it’s a good start. I started off, I just started doing a juice fast and I worked my way up and did a three-day Sambu cleanse, then I did a 10-day. This was the procedure over a year. I did one day for a few months, then I did two days for a few months and I did a three-day for a few months, and then I went off into it and did a 10-day. Then I went from there to developing water fast, adding extra herbs, and adding extra enzymes, and doing probiotic, and all sorts of different things. I think you need to follow the one that fits your dieting lifestyle. I do recommend that you do have the guidance of a professional that has done that before to alleviate the problem and also to manage what can be called healing crisis because sometimes, when you go through this, you give so much energetic releases to your body. The whole benefit of fasting is that you release so much energy. Your body can start healing organs and tissues that may have been damaged for years and years and years because you’re not spending all your enzymatic potential to digest your food, you now can go in and heal the organs. When that happens, oftentimes, people can get breakouts, bad breath, dizziness, headaches, things like that can come out the first few times that you do that and people think, “Oh my goodness. I’m sick. This isn’t working. This is terrible. I feel lightheaded.” But what’s really happening is you’re actually on a very aggressive detox and as you go through these periodically, it’ll get easier and easier until you can go through a 10-day fast literally without eating for 10 days. Once you’ve done that, it just changes your relationship with food.

‏‏I bet. I saw the movie Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, in that movie which was great by the way, I love that movie, they did 30 days of green juice. Have you ever done a 30-day fast with just juices?

‏‏Yeah. I have, actually. It’s absolutely phenomenal. The one caveat I would say is I’ve had more success doing that in a warm climate than I have in a cold climate. I found that fasting on juice on a cold climate has been difficult for me and my particular metabolic type or whatever, might be okay for other people. But I can do it easily in a warm climate.

‏‏Okay. You mentioned Udo. He was actually on this show. There’s a great episode with Udo Erasmus. What was the name of that? It was some sort of cleanse or detox, what was that one that you recommend?‏‏

Flora does what’s called a Sambu kit.

‏‏Sambu kit, okay.

‏‏It’s a wonderful introductory starter kit that you can do fasting protocol. I think it’s a great start. I think there’s also the Wild Rose cleanse. A lot of people like to do that one. It’s another company. I wouldn’t say these are the ultimate cleanses but they are great starting point for people.

‏‏Okay, great. We talked about Colonics, we talked about Enemas and there’s also Coffee Enemas and things like that and Coffee Colonics, what about Colonoscopies because people are getting colon cancer a lot from our typical western diet, those standard American diet, SAD? Where do you stand on that?

‏‏It’s interesting because I’ve studied that extensively. In fact, one of my mentors was a fellow by the name of Dr. Hiromi Shinya and he was considered the world’s leading gastroenterologist. He worked between Tokyo, Japan, and New York City, treated all the world’s top people and he developed the Shinya technique for removing polyps from the colon. He’s the guy that literally developed that technique. He was an ambidextrous, Kung Fu doctor from Japan. I think he treated almost 400,000 patients in his career. Can you imagine?

‏‏Wow.

‏‏What was interesting is he wrote a book called The Enzyme Factor. He also wrote a book called The Microbe Factor. I studied his work a lot because I thought if there’s anybody that understands this, it’s got to be this guy. I mean 400,000 colons? I mean, holy, you’ve really done your homework.

‏‏You’ve done the deep dive.

‏‏You’ve done the deep dive, as deep as you can go. What was interesting about his book is he allocated a few things that he would recommend to his clients. In fact, if they didn’t do this, he wouldn’t treat them and his success rate was almost 100% on everybody that he was able to treat. What he had them do, and he outlines it in the book, he says, “Listen, you need to have primarily alkaline diet. If you’re going to eat meats and things like that, just fresh seafood and things like that.” He kind of outlines his diet, what he does, and what his day was, a lot of breath and using alkaline ionized water, he was a big proponent of that. He said that if you do those two things, then he would treat his clients. His recurrence rate of problems that came up for people was truly phenomenal because at the end of the day, it’s all about lifestyle change. You can get the treatment or you get the cancer. Ideally, you want to avoid it but once you had it, you have to recognize, “Well, this is the result of the lifestyle that I’ve been living in my individual genetics combined. If I continue to go back and do what I did before, I’m going to get a recurrence of the condition or something even worse.” Once you’ve come out of that situation, you really have to pay attention. Ideally, you would pay attention before that. Preventive medicine is always better than afterwards.

‏‏Alkaline diet, alkaline water. Why is that so important for our listeners who don’t understand alkaline diets versus acidic diets?‏‏

We look back at what’s happened over the last 100 years or so. We’ve had an advent of processed foods. If we look at our diets in the natural state, if we ate fruits and vegetables and we ate what was kind of grown on the land, we would have about 80% alkaline diet and about 20% acidic. With modern chemistry and development and processing, it’s about reverse. We’re eating about 20% alkaline diet and 80% acidic. What happens is it alters the microbiome, the environment that we live in, it also puts an added strain on our digestion, it also depletes our minerals inside the body because we have to buffer the acids from our food to maintain pH and that affects everything from our oxygen-carrying capacity to our brains to how thick our blood is, to how our heart has to work. Also, it affects how we are able to remove waste of the product, peristaltic contractions, which probiotics will grow in our system, good ones or bad ones. What they found is that humans tend to work better for really good alkaline diet and that’s why we avoid those acidic things. You can have a much easier lifestyle. The problem is people will say, “What’s the difference between acid and alkaline?” Well, all the acid stuff tastes good. It’s the sugars, it’s the caffeines, it’s the process foods, it’s the breads, it’s all those things that we love and get addicted to that really creates the process. That’s why I have found that adjusting, getting good enzymes into your diet, and getting probiotics in your diet makes the transition much easier because you don’t have these bad guys creating the cravings for these acidic foods that have a deterious effect on your health.

‏‏That’s another really important point for our listeners. It’s that the food that you eat feeds the bad bacteria, and yeast, and all sorts of nasty stuff that then develop the cravings within you to eat more of that garbage. Those non-you cells are actually what’s craving all the junk and it’s kind of hijacking your brain.

‏‏Absolutely. You nailed it exactly.

‏‏I know you have a whole regimen of things. This is just a taste for our listeners of what you offer. There’s this whole AWESOME Health course, a whole regimen. What sort of stuff goes into besides what we’ve been talking about in terms of digestion and alkaline foods, and water, and probiotics, and all that?

‏‏Thanks for asking. First and foremost, I would like to share to everybody that having an outstanding or awesome health as I like to call it, it’s not a stag thing, it’s a process, it’s a set of incorporation of daily activities into your life. I’ve been studying fitness and vitality, and health my entire life ever since I was 15 years old and now in my mid-40s, over 30 years. Unlike what a lot of people look at, they look for what’s conflicting between different philosophies. What I did is I look at what were all the similarities between the philosophies and I mentored under people who are producing outstanding results and I would extract that and I created what I call the AWESOME Health Course. An AWESOME Health Course constitutes seven distinct pillars that were universal from virtually every super healthy person that I was able to work with. AWESOME is an acronym. It turned into an acronym. Air is the first part or in other words, more than food, more than water, you need air. It’s the first thing we do when get on the planet, we take a breath, and it’s the last thing we do before we leave. Air is of primary importance. In fact, you need about 80 pounds of air in a day compared to a few pounds of food and maybe 10 pounds of water if you’re really full hydrated on drinking a lot of water. Most people don’t even get close to that. Second part is called Water and we look at what are the ways that you can optimize hydration and avoid dehydration because this is probably affecting people, this is what creates hunger pains, this is what creates an acidic environment, it’s what causes low energy, the inability to remove wastes from the body it’s all related to hydration.

Exercise is just the way to stimulate stress in a positive way that allows our body to experience health.

The next part is Exercise. If you took cells in an environment, if you took someone and put them in a hospital and don’t move them, what happens? The deterious effect that happens on your body wastes away very, very quickly because what’s interesting about the cells which we’re made up of cells, all of us are all made up of a bunch of cells, is if it’s not under any stress, it will die. It actually requires stress in order to live. How do you manage stress? Exercise is just the way to stimulate stress in a positive way that allows our body to experience health. I call Air, Water and Exercise, these are what I call the non-negotiables. No matter how you look at it, you need to breathe, you need to hydrate, and you need some form of movement. People want to know what kind of exercise is the best. I personally believe the one that you like. I found that a mini trampoline is probably the simplest, fastest, and easiest way for people to optimize. I know Tony’s a big advocate of it. I love David Hall’s work on the Cellerciser, it’s fantastic. Those are the first three. Then what comes is what I call Sunlight, it’s the S part of it. I look at food, I look at energy production, I look at how we produce energy. We produce energy in what’s called the mitochondria. It’s like a little furnace inside our cells and that’s where all the energy comes from. Whether you’re eating proteins, carbohydrates, fats, or ketones, you’re converting that into electrons, into a process called electro-covalent transfer, that’s how we get energy. The cleaner that energy is, the less bad waste products, like having clean gas in your car versus dirty gases, how much smoke you’ll produce. I look at diet, I look at energy, I look at how we are as various condensed forms of life. That’s what physics teaches us. All the colors of the spectrum, the energy that we feel in the body, the shock resenders, all those things are related to various aspects of vibratory energies or frequencies of light. We break down food, diet, health, vitality and consciousness all to that level.

Then we go to the O which is what I call Optimizers. I look at what are the things that actually optimize cellular function? There’s a lot of products that people can take, there’s a lot of things but most people have limited resources and limited time. What are the things that are definitely going to enhance cellular function in the body? Those are seven specific things, enzymes, probiotics, minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, and herbs. Herbs are a whole class themselves. Finally, for the last two things, we have M which is Mental Beliefs and Attitudes. You could put that first because you can’t out-supplement or out-diet your way out of a bad attitude. If you’ve got a great attitude, you can achieve almost anything. Mental Beliefs and Attitude is one of the programs. I know you do a lot of work on that and Tony Robbins is a big advocate of it, understanding your mindset in the right state.

In order to learn from within, you test yourself.

Finally, Education, Testing, and Coaching. If you look at the root word of education, it’s to reduce, which means to learn from within. In order to learn from within, you test yourself. A test could be a microbiome test, it could be a blood test. I could walk one mile before and I started my exercise program and now it’s three months later, and I can walk five miles without being out of breath. A test can be simple, it can be the most complicated genetic testing, whatever you want but regular testing, to demonstrate that you are producing the result from the lifestyle choices that you’re making and finally coaching. The simplest, fastest, and easiest way to get to any objective is to have someone who has been there, done that, and can guide you specifically through the process. That’s the entire AWESOME formula and I put it together in a simple, easy, and usable format. We created 5-15 minute videos, virtually every person in every process that I learned to produce awesome health. We’ve tested this with over 15,000 people worldwide, every different body type, age, and genetics you can imagine.

If you apply even 1/10 of these principles, you’re going to improve and experience an awesome health and I’ve created a special link for your listeners. It’s called theawesomehealthcourse/getyourselfoptimized. Basically, you can have this course for free. It’s $6,000 worth of video and education and you’re going to get the entire thing for free. Go in there because I’m on a mission to help people optimize their health so that they can live their creative genius, because nothing happens in our lives if we don’t have great health. We can’t contribute to the world or it becomes very difficult, we can’t contribute to our families, and we can’t contribute to our own well-being. Health is number one and why not give it away and let people experience it because I’ve been so blessed in my own life and I know you have been too. I think it’ll be just great for your listeners to have it.

‏‏That’s so incredibly generous. Thank you so much, Wade. Listeners, I can’t encourage you enough to go take advantage of this. Follow that link. Go through this course and apply it in your life. Let’s give our listeners just a quick example of something inside of let’s say that O for Optimizers, you mentioned, generally speaking, herbs and enzymes, and probiotics and so forth, what would be a lesser-known optimizer? I’ll give you a quick example from my side first and then you go. I take Deer Antler Velvet on daily basis. Another thing I take is testosterone boosting, herbal supplements from Axis Labs, they’re call Hypertext and Myodex. That’s like a secret weapon. It’s just been so incredibly life-changing and powerful for me to incorporate into my daily regimen, these optimizers. What will be a few specific examples of optimizers for our listeners?

‏‏Great question. I think high dosages of magnesium. I think most people are deficient in magnesium. Taking a high dosage up to 2000 mg a day, you have to build up to that. You’ll get the runs. There’s the old thing that was called Ortho-Molecular Nutrition which was developed by Abram Hoffer and Linus Pauling. They would take dosages until they get the run. That’s breaking the [inaudible [00:54:44]. Then they would cut back from that. But you want to build up to about 2000 mg a day and Epsom salt dust is a really strong combination to do. Another thing for people who are looking to lose fat in a record amount of time is taking fish oil. You look at how many pounds of fat you want to lose. Let’s say you have 20 pounds of fat to lose. You would take one gram of fish oil or a good EFA blend like Udo’s oil and then you would combine it with one gram of carnitine for every 3 grams of fat. You take that and it has incredible metabolic boosting, most people have to take more fat and it works better, it really kickstarts the hormone function and really kicks that up. I learned that little secret from Charles Poliquin. They call him strength sensei. You can read all about his stuff. He coached 20, get this, gold medallists in 27 different olympic sports.

‏‏This all sounds super ninja. I’m really excited that you’re sharing this stuff. I’m curious with the magnesium. There are different kinds of magnesium that you could take. What’s the one that you would recommend the most? Or maybe the one that you would recommend the least?

‏‏It’s going to vary from person to person but glycinates probably, [01:01:03], those types. I’ll give you the brand that I use. It actually contains four different types of magnesium. That’s the easiest way to do it so you don’t have to remember all the names.

‏‏Okay, perfect. 

‏‏You can check out Charles Poliquin. I think he’s one of the best experts on magnesium. He goes into what each of the magnesiums do and what its functions are. He actually alters the magnesium dosage on a person to person basis based on their neurochemistry. You can find out neurochemistry test, here’s another one for you, Braverman. Take a Braverman Test and you can find that neurochemistry, what your dominant neurotransmitters are and you can select a specific nutritional supplements based on your individual neurochemistry. That was another breakthrough by Poliquin. I think that’s really fantastic.

‏‏Yeah. I’ve heard about the Braverman test. Jaiya is big into that. She was actually my first guest ever on this show, episode number one. We went really deep into sex in that episode, kind of the best practices and really mind-blowing stuff about sex. She mentioned the Braverman test. Very cool. Alright, we’re out of time here. That’s a really great, wonderful resource that you’ve offered our listeners here. What if somebody wanted to work with you, get coaching from you or anything like that, is there a way to work with you and if so how would they reach out?

‏‏They can reach out to me at bioptimizers.com. We have a staff that handles all my stuff. They’ll see how to access me through the AWESOME health course as well. Awesomehealthcourse.com and bioptimizers.com is the company that I represent. We basically fix digestion and that’s how I help people in the world.

‏‏Alright, amazing. Thank you so much, Wade. Thank you, listeners. Now, it’s time to take action. Start making a difference in your life and the lives of the people that you love and change what you eat, change your habits so that you can be here for a lot longer time with your loved ones. We’ll catch you on the next episode of Get Yourself Optimized, this is your host Stephan Spencer signing off.

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About Wade Lightheart

Wade is a 3-time All Natural National Bodybuilding Champion Advisor to the American Anti-Cancer Institute Director of Education at BiOptimizers Nutrition Founder of the Prosperity & Health Alliance
Enagic Master Trainer.

He is also the author of several books including the best-selling books “Staying Alive in a Toxic World “The Wealthy Backpacker”.

Wade Travels The World To Spread His Life Mission Helping Other’s Achieve A Richer Experience of Life Through Daily Practice of Rituals That Lead You To True Health, Real Wealth and Peace of Mind.

Disclaimer: The medical, fitness, psychological, mindset, lifestyle, and nutritional information provided on this website and through any materials, downloads, videos, webinars, podcasts, or emails is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/fitness/nutritional advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Always seek the help of your physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, certified trainer, or dietitian with any questions regarding starting any new programs or treatments, or stopping any current programs or treatments. This website is for information purposes only, and the creators and editors, including Stephan Spencer, accept no liability for any injury or illness arising out of the use of the material contained herein, and make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the contents of this website and affiliated materials.