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Episode Transcript
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Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to. How to live. A podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 86.
Do you ever feel staying healthy in your forties is a massive challenge. You're not alone. Today's guest, Alex Mearns knows exactly what it's like. He was a high powered CEO, burning the candles at both ends smoking, drinking zero exercise. And then the wake up call came, which changed everything.
He [00:00:30] went all in and read all he could about fitness and health, But he didn't stop there. He became his own Guinea pig testing, experimenting and figuring out what actually works for leaders, navigating health in their forties. With these learnings. He founded
The company that helps senior leaders like him transform health. He spoke at top companies like UBS and BCG.He's worked with professionals from Morgan Stanley to Goldman Sachs.
And now [00:01:00] he's here to share his game changing insights with us on the how to live podcast.
We're diving deep into the connection between mental and physical health biohacking, cholesterol Sleep stress and a lot more. Thank you very much for your support. We're in the top 3% of all podcasts and are listened to in one 40 countries.
Now let's get started. Here's Alex Mearns.
Sharad Lal: Hi, Alex. Welcome to the How to Live podcast. How are you doing
Alex Mearns: I'm doing very well. [00:01:30] Thank you.
Sharad Lal: congratulations on all the impactful work you're doing. You work with senior leaders and C suites, and help them in their physical and mental health.
What got you motivated to do this?
Alex Mearns: Basically it started, looking at my own physical and mental health, which was not in great shape at all. I was quite successful in business. I made it to be CEO before I was 30 years old.
I drank sort of 30 pints of beer
a
Sharad: of beer and
Alex Mearns: 20 cigarettes a day, didn't exercise and [00:02:00] lived off, KFC and pizza and things like that.
I think it was like in my mid thirties, every afternoon I felt really dizzy,and there was a history of diabetes in the family.
So I thought, okay, this, maybe this is a blood sugar issue. So, I went to the doctors. I did a bunch of tests, went back a week later or two for the results.
and he said, you're overweight, high BMI, high blood pressure, pre diabetic and, high
Sharad: high cholesterol.
Yeah,
Alex Mearns: Yeah, it's all that stuff. Early warning signs,
I'm 49 [00:02:30] now. So that would have been around about 35. So I was like, okay, that's kind of young to be having all these problems. And what should I do about it, doc? He's like, well, you can take these, medical drugs, statins, beta blockers and things like that.
That didn't really sit well with me at all.
I felt that I didn't want to take these drugs because I was too young and I was worried that, by taking these drugs, I'll be on them for the rest of my life.
so I was rebelling against the doctor's advice, kind of like,
I don't need your advice, So as soon as I walked out the doctor's office, I looked up,
What is cholesterol? So I looked it up on [00:03:00] Wikipedia and it said, Cholesterol is the essential building blocks of your cell membranes. And I was like, okay, how many cells do you have in the body? Oh, 10 trillion. and then how often are we destroying and replicating, rebuilding our cells?
You know, you turn over 200 million a day or something like that. So I was like, this makes no sense. Why is my cholesterol trying to kill me?
So I went onto the website and I typed in alternative ways of reading a cholesterol panel.
The article came out by Mark Sissons. and this was fascinating. And I was like, wow, this is not what they tell you. And then there was another article next to it. [00:03:30] Grains bad for you? He's talking about whole wheat flakes and Weetabix, and whole pasta and things like this is part of the food pyramid.
This is what we all should be eating. And that was it. It just opened Pandora's box and I just became an avid reader of all things around health and wellness.
I used to work for the British government. So I was in politics and I knew that certain Western politicians can't really be trusted and in my opinion, they're not, don't really tell the truth that much.
so I started researching myself. I got into the biohacking movement, the quantified self movement. I used [00:04:00] to run experiments on myself, diets, exercise, supplements. and I would order blood tests from the doctors, but I wouldn't see the doctor.
I changed my diet and saw how it changed my cholesterol levels or my liver enzymes.
I'd read scientific papers. I was reading books, listening to audio files, listening to podcasts, thought, this is fun.
and that's when I decided to launch Levitize to work with people like me. Using the tools that I'd used on myself, but not really getting the answers from [00:04:30] the existing medical community or health
Sharad: I
I love that. So it was more the patterns that you talked about. Because of the Rebellion, you went and started searching for answers on your own. Then there was Curiosity. And then you also knew the system wasn't right, because of which this is why we're not told this.
And based on what you read, based on experiments on yourself, you started learning many things. And that led to you starting Levitize. In Levitize, you said, now I'm going to focus on senior folks who are living a similar lifestyle to me, [00:05:00] and I'm going to help them figure this out for themselves, figure out holistic health for themselves.
How did that process go when you launched Levitize and you wanted to target these guys? How did you set it up and how was the process of meeting these people and discovering what their
problems
Alex Mearns: Guys? problems were space, no clients, a couple of staff, all outgoing. So rent and salaries
Sharad: like this. Only fixed costs.
Alex Mearns: first month.
Sharad: How many years back was this?
Alex Mearns: So this was seven years ago.
Sharad: So 2017.
Alex Mearns: our first clients. [00:05:30] And mostly they were people that knew me. And they wanted the same for themselves.
I basically took people on the same process that I went through. Measure them holistically. And then we prescribe solutions.
Sharad: how does this feel?
Yeah,
Alex Mearns: we worked with one person on quitting smoking, which is quite [00:06:00] interesting because it sums up our philosophy. telling this guy, Oh, you really got to quit smoking.
Stupid, lazy advice. He knows this. His doctor's told him a million times. We would never tell someone. And maybe if you can describe
Sharad:
Alex Mearns: process of working on other things
Sharad: said.
Wow. And maybe if you can describe that process of [00:06:30] working on other things for him to feel better, and then that sparks the need to quit smoking.
Alex Mearns: this example will apply to everyone, but obviously, smoking was one of his issues that there would have been several.
first we've got to measure it, assess, don't guess.
So most of our clients, when they're coming to work with us, there are issues like stress and anxiety, maybe fatigued or sleepy, out of shape physically and mentally or, maybe worried about the future, right?
they've been successful financially to a certain extent and, [00:07:00] they want to make that switch, But making that switch is tricky. Because they're so used to running their life in a certain way, adding anything new can often be very difficult.
So the first thing is we want to assess, so we want to look at people, how are your stress levels, how's your organ health, how's your digestive system health, how's your adrenal health, your thyroid health, your hormonal health, your prostate health, with women your estrogen, progesterone levels, and things like that.
So we're looking at all this.
Sharad: And these are through a series of blood tests
Alex Mearns: We mostly use symptomology based questionnaires. So this is a series of
long questionnaires, like 30 minutes [00:07:30] to fill in, but basically a lot of questions about symptoms and these symptoms associated with organ issue, so any problem with, let's say with men,
like sort of urination,
not fully emptying your bladder, any kind of pain or swelling is generally an indication of an enlarged prostate and then an indication of some male hormonal issue, pain under your right rib cage, being the liver, sensitive, looking at how often people poo, are they pooing?
we've worked with people who poo, once a week, That's really indicative of an absolutely destroyed microbiome. [00:08:00]
and then stress levels, Do you spend a lot of time worrying over finances and career and money? Are you stressed over any relationships in your
Sharad: Life sleep?
Alex Mearns: Yeah, exactly. Are you not sleeping well? anyone who has a sleep issue pretty much has a stress And the way we can prove that is to look at children. Children generally are unstressed
and sleep through the night because they've got no responsibilities,
So once we've done this analysis, this might take a couple of weeks. I can corroborate a lot of this with the doctor's blood work. So if my [00:08:30] symptomology analysis says you have a liver problem, and then I look at your doctor's blood work, and I can see high AST and high ALT scores in your liver profile, and then you tell me that you're smoking and drinking,
Sharad: But now
Alex Mearns: Then it's a question of discussing it with the client and saying, Okay. we're going to have the greatest impact in improving your physical and mental emotional health and working on this,
but that might not be where they have the capacity to start. So often you can start something simply personal because as soon as you start feeling better physically you then [00:09:00] build the capacity to take on maybe more challenging things.
Sharad: why,
Alex Mearns: Often, why people say to give up smoking, start exercising. 'cause then actually you're boosting your dopamine levels naturally so that the desire for that cigarette decreases.
And that's certainly with me. Once I started exercising, I didn't really feel as much the need to smoke, it was easier to quit.
Sharad: The first time we spoke, I loved what you said about C suite senior leaders who don't want to go into a gym and exercise. Because in the gym, you have these fit people lifting [00:09:30] weights, looking great.
So you have a gym personal training system, which is tailored to them, where they don't feel out of place, which helps them do it more often. So if you can talk a little bit about creating an environment, which makes it easy for someone to start a part of the process.
Alex Mearns: It can be a bit tricky. to, walk into the gym and get your top off and everything starts hanging out.
And that can be really difficult to deal with, particularly as guys, we're a bit more fragile, I think, in the ego So,what we do is we prescribe exercise like a doctor would,
we [00:10:00] develop these three hour movement assessments. with our clients. And they gave me that look no one's going to buy a three hour movement assessment.
we've got it down to an hour, So what we're trying to do is find out as much about you as possible in one hour.
putting it simply, we can work out what's where the weak bits are, where the tight bits are. where the imbalances are, in various aspects of the body.
We recommend you train with us twice a week for six months. Somebody might say, ah, 20 kgs. Okay, great. But first
in order to lose 20 kgs, generally you're going [00:10:30] to need to play with a diet and push a little bit hard on the exercise, And we need to build the foundations first before you can do that, because you've got weak ankles, flabby glutes, a weak core.
We can't be squatting and deadlifting going out running for miles because you're just going to get injured. And this is what happens when people get older. And often they go to the gym and they have got injured and then they like, and this is another problem with the industry, they'd say
I was working well and everything was going great. And then I did my back in. So I had to stop. And then all the weight came back or [00:11:00] something. And then they blame themselves. But was it their fault? Or were they prescribed the incorrect medicine?
Sharad: I had a similar thing as well because I started doing weights late in life And my biggest worry was that I'm going to injure myself. I went to one of the trainers, the guy would want me to measure my biceps and make me do all kinds of stuff.
And I was tight all the time. My shoulders are in pain. And then I went to another guy
He was all about posture, the right muscle moving, starting slow. And I thought that was useful because once the foundation [00:11:30] is right, then the achievement mindset can come in. Then you can want to improve and that becomes an activity system.
Alex Mearns: We're basically taking people through three stages: pain, problems, goals. If someone's in pain, the first thing is to do, what can we do? So if they're back pain, we need to get them out of pain. as quickly as possible by, say, improving the musculature around the core and the spine. If they have problems, we can fix those, and then we can move to goals. Okay, I want to play football again. I want to play more tennis. So yeah, this is
Sharad: That. And maybe related to this, when you think about fitness, there's [00:12:00] an aesthetic part to it. And there is a health part to
Alex Mearns: That's right.
Sharad: And if you can talk about the differences in the two and how that mind shift for a lot of people, as they get
Alex Mearns: The industry is totally messed up on that one. Because from both sides, when the clients want results quickly and there is a complete lack of understanding about how quickly and sustainable those results are.
And on the other side,
from the personal training side of things, they want to. say that they can deliver results very [00:12:30] quickly. And then they show these before and after pictures of people who are overweight and then totally ripped six weeks later. and they're under a lot of pressure to get your results quickly.
I studied at the Czech Institute in California under Paul Cech, who's basically the godfather of wellness and biohacking. He's an absolute genius, a little bit crazy, which is always nice.
When I studied with him, he said, look, if you want to clear out the garage and it took you 20 years to fill your garage with junk, it's going to take about 10 years to clear it out.
so if people want to [00:13:00] lose weight sustainably, you need to do it slowly over time,
Sharad: And the truth is that if you don't do it properly, you don't really lose weight. It always comes back, even if it's one year or two years later. we know it's unhealthy to be overweight, but just by focusing on the aesthetics and doing it quickly, you get a couple of Instagram shots, and then all the weight comes back, and then you feel like crap because you feel like you haven't got the willpower to sustain the diet or training regime, and it [00:13:30] makes you feel bad, so actually think these things negatively, contribute in the that makes a lot of sense. I'll just bring it back to this whole thought of upward spiral, which I found very fascinating.
You described how a person can get into it by building the foundation because of which the person feels better.
How would that upward spiral typically work?
Alex Mearns: If we take the most simple example of weight loss, people think, I'm gonna go on a hardcore keto diet starting from tomorrow. I'm also gonna cut my calories down from 2, 500 to 1, [00:14:00] 500 or something like that. And I'm gonna hit it hard in the gym three times a week.
What they're doing is they're jumping from where they are right to the top of the spiral where they want to be and missed out all the and it requires a phenomenal amount of willpower. Which is in finite supply to achieve that. So the likelihood that they'll be able to maintain that, it's very small.
Studies show only 5%. of people that go on a hardcore diet and
exercise. regime. Yeah. Actually maintain it for life and that's great. But 'cause they can maintain it for a long [00:14:30] time, but 95% of the people, they bounce back. So it's about finding the next thing on the spiral. So for some people it might be personal training, for some people it might be working with a life coach for example.
We're trying to build a lifetime relationship with our clients. So they can pop in and out at various points and think, oh let's check in with Levitas if they can help me on this one.
Sharad: I'll click into your knowledge on two things that many people at this age think about, which you mentioned. So let's talk about cholesterol. You read about cholesterol. You learned a lot about it in simplistic terms.
What really [00:15:00] is and how should people think about it?
Alex Mearns: cholesterol is the building blocks of life, there's 37. 2 trillion cells in your body and cholesterol, makes up the cell membrane. 60 percent of the dry weight of your brain is made up of saturated fat and cholesterol. the myelin sheath around your nerves, send electrical impulses all around your body, that's made up of saturated fat and cholesterol, and your sex hormones, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, the steroidal hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, it's all made up of saturated fat [00:15:30] and cholesterol.
LDL is a protein which carries the cholesterol from your liver to these sites. The HDL carries it back. Yeah, so all this stuff I was talking about is the bad cholesterol. So for a start we have been conditioned incorrectly by saying this is bad cholesterol. This is completely wrong.
The new science says that the problem is when this cholesterol builds up in the arteries. So having high cholesterol is not a big deal, but what happens if it builds up in the arteries? cholesterol is like glue, It can clog up your arteries. That's only happening [00:16:00] when it's oxidized. cholesterol oxidize? Because there's injuries. Why are there injuries? Smoking, drinking, sedentariness, ultra processed foods, not sleeping enough, This is what the problem is. And if you look at ancestral tribes that had high cholesterol, the Masai from, Tanzania
They only live off meat basically. And they drink the blood of their animals. They have high cholesterol, but they don't have heart disease or cancer and things like that.
When I look at a cholesterol [00:16:30] panel, I look at broken down LDL cholesterol, HDL and triglycerides.
And the first one I'm looking at is triglycerides. Because a lot of doctors say they want it over 150 milligrams per deciliter. I want to see it like below 100, ideally 50 to 80, because that's an indication of how much sugar
converted into fat.
Sharad: just going to put in a layman's term for people like me to understand. Cholesterol isn't the enemy, even the bad one that we call it. because it flows through the body, that's fine. [00:17:00] It can get blocked with certain things like stress, bad sleep, smoking, these kinds of things.
So if you're drinking. So the cholesterol level that you see isn't something you should be worried about. But you could look at other ways of their blockages because of certain lifestyle things, and that's when you want to tackle it.
Alex Mearns: giving someone cholesterol, lowering medication is not solving the root cause of the problem, which ties into what is holistic. Just like.
You've
got some wood, you've got more wood. That's not a problem. When you set [00:17:30] fire to it, if you've got more wood, now we have a
Sharad: a great analogy.
Let's talk about holistic health. how's, you talk about your approach as holistic health, and this is a word we've seen in many places.
What do you think about it, and how's your approach different from others that we see?
Alex Mearns: when I think of the word holistic, comes from the word whole, it's really looking at the big picture. For example, if we only did nutrition, it's very difficult to look at the big picture if someone's sitting watching Netflix at two in the morning and eating ice cream. As a [00:18:00] nutritionist, I could say, that's not very good for you.
But actually what they need is, Why is that happening? What are they stressed about? so we need to understand that the problem is not nutrition. The problem is the stress. So holistic is really examining everything. We have a process where we look at movement, nutrition, sleep, breathing, emotions, hydration, environment or environmental toxicity, social thinking, and sunlight.
So 10 elements of health, happiness. and longevity. I examine [00:18:30] all of those areas and see what's out of balance. And then present that this is where I think it could be out of balance. And this is potentially where we could start.
so that's holistic,
The second part is always making the best recommendations from a holistic perspective.
I say to people when I do a consultation, are you taking any supplements? Yeah, I'm taking vitamin B12.
vitamin D. Why are you taking those? is it helping? how about we get the B12 from red meat shellfish, oysters. Vitamin D, we can get that from the sun. The [00:19:00] vitamin C, how about we just add in more green veggies, like broccoli, which has seven times more vitamin C than blueberries, for example,And so it's oh, no, because I don't have time. too busy at work. what's the problem here, okay, is it that you don't have time or you're not prioritizing?
So that's what I mean by holistic, really drilling down into what is the root cause. And in that case, it's prioritization.
Sharad: And it's like mental related to physical related to mental related to physical, and you keep going back and forth.
Alex Mearns: so the world is full of specialists,
[00:19:30] chiropractors and osteopaths, you have the specialist personal trainer who just does iron man training and he only knows about cardiovascular and you have the doctors like the endocrinologist, the paediatrician, all these specialists.
So I specialize in being a generalist.
Sharad: You touched upon something very interesting about supplements. And I know you're not a big fan of supplements because exactly the way you described it,
I mean, there's an absorption issue as well. How do you get the things that supplements give you from food? So maybe we talk a little bit about that.
Alex Mearns: the problem is with supplements [00:20:00] is
Often we're taking them because somebody from a marketing perspective made them sound very appealing. Sometimes we're taking them as a quick fix because a diet's not good enough, it's very hard to know individually whether supplements are working or not. It's very hard for people to measure.
Actually people were taking, say, calcium, they used to give calcium to mothers, we now know that if you don't take calcium with vitamin D, it causes calcification in your arteries.
So there always seems to be new information. Some people take magnesium because they want to help them sleep, and it's [00:20:30] hard to get magnesium in the modern diet. There's 16 different types of magnesium, magnesium glycate, magnesium citrate, it's all these different ones, and how many components have we not even discovered yet,
What about polyphenols? These are all the plant compounds that are very beneficial. They're not listed as essential, but they're all helpful.
All these anti cancer polyphenols that you get in like bright purple, fruits, like sweet potatoes and things like that. Mother nature created food with synergistic components.
So if you eat the food, you are getting the calcium [00:21:00] and, maybe the B12 and a whole bunch of other things as well. And they're in synergistic form. So it's easy for your body to absorb. So believe if we eat. good quality food, we don't need the
Sharad: Let's talk about good quality food. And maybe we're in Singapore.
How do we figure out what's a good diet? How should we, how should a layman think about food?
Alex Mearns: a couple of things we do or we don't do, we focus on metabolic typing. So that's eating the right diet for [00:21:30] you. Instinctively, we should know it, but we spend so much time in our heads listening to our friends, doctors, and we've forgotten. Kids know it, as long as you don't confuse them with ice cream and stuff like that, they can do it.
I tested this on my son. But, so we look at metabolic type, what's the right diet for you?
We want to focus on good quality food, Which basically means moving away from
Sharad: food. to
Alex Mearns: unprocessed food.
we can look at that within two types of food. I could take two steaks,One [00:22:00] steak is from America, USDA. That cow will have been pumped full of growth hormones, antibiotics, vaccines, medical drugs. It'd been raised on a farm knee deep in its own bovine feces.
The water will have been shipped in. It'll be stressful. It wouldn't have had access to sunlight. This is a very poorly produced cow.
Sharad: almost processed. Wow. You could be having like a steak and it's almost processed.
Alex Mearns: Or you could get one from an organic state from Australia, where the cow's been running around on grass for [00:22:30] all its life, under the sun, drinking rainwater, not pumped full of crap, eating, it's a cow diet.
That is a good quality product, both steaks.
We focus on the quality and what we found is when people improve the quality of their diet.
health gets much better. Weight starts coming down.
Sharad: Where do you get your meat in Singapore?
Alex Mearns: I've got a cut butchery. They've got one in Bucatimba Plaza, one in Thompson, and then there's another one I think Marine Parade. There's a Kirkbrook tree, they [00:23:00] do a lot of good grass fed steaks. Ryan's Grocery is pretty good, Butcher Box I like,
A lot of people like Hoobers, basically looking for organic, hard to find in Singapore. I'm looking for fresh,
as naturally raised as possible.
Sharad: As fresh as in not frozen,
And then you don't take good meat and freeze it on your thing.
Alex Mearns: I prefer to eat fresh. I've done a lot of work on frozen food, and scientifically, I can't prove that frozen food is worse for you than fresh [00:23:30] food. But I do know that when you freeze cells, they expand, because water freezes.
And that can break the cell membrane, and a lot of the goodness can leak out. So the argument is that food that is frozen and then thawed is less bioavailable. So yes, you're consuming it. If you test it, it's got all the vitamins and minerals in it, but is it getting into your body?
I suspect not, but I can't prove
Sharad: What about vegetables? What do you think about vegetables?
Alex Mearns: I eat quite a high meat based diet, but I reckon I eat more veggies than most [00:24:00] people. Vegans and vegetarians. I eat a lot of vegetables.
Sharad: how many meals do you have?
Alex Mearns: I do three meals a day and, and I want, protein carbs and veggies with every meal.
I'll honor my cravings and I'll always eat green veggies with every meal. I particularly like cruciferous vegetables from the brassica family.
western vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, things like that. eastern vegetables like, cancon, kailan, bok choy, this kind of stuff.
I know we can talk [00:24:30] about dieting a lot, but there are other things we should touch upon. One of the things that a lot of males hitting 40s and 50s do is testosterone. How does that work? What happens?
worked with a lot of people with low testosterone levels, so boosted them holistically. But. A couple of my clients, against my recommendations, get testosterone shot in the butt. They felt
Absolutely amazing. So that's when I realized that testosterone is not just a sex hormone and a hormone for building muscles. It's actually a happy brain chemical.
I put it in the same [00:25:00] bucket as dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, and testosterone.
and it also helps with drive and determination. Men, we've got to keep it as high as possible. and it falls as we get older, which is okay because muscle mass decreases. Maybe we're not having sex as much, maybe not working with retirement, but it needs to be at the level that we need it to be at,
there's different, whether you look at imperial or metric, we're looking at 200 to 800, but some ranges are like 150 to a thousand, but it's just a crazy [00:25:30] range because we know that the lower you are, the more crappy you're going to be feeling. so we want to get it as high as possible and there's no reason at our age we shouldn't be around 600 to sort of 800.
if you're stressed, when you go to bed at night and repair, your body will repair adrenaline and cortisol first. It'll then repair insulin. So it can get energy into cells. It'll then repair your thyroid hormones,
Which runs your metabolism. At the end of the night, if there's any time left over, your body will be like, we've got a bit of cholesterol [00:26:00] left, let's make some testosterone. if we don't have the time to make it, it's okay because we don't need to make babies. Tomorrow we need to focus on the host.
When your body makes excess testosterone, it just keeps making it until you wake up. And then if it makes excess, you wake up with a boner.
so that is a good
Sharad: sign. All right. Good to
Alex Mearns: we want to be waking up
With women, obviously, it's much harder to tell what you find with women if they've been through a particularly stressful month.
At the end of the month, when they have their period, it will [00:26:30] often be a lot more problematic, maybe more bloating, heavier, last longer, maybe their mood is not so good. So they have more of a a lagging indicator where men have a more immediate one,
Sharad: You said, less stress? I guess sleep as well? Because there's more time to do the work, versus if you sleep less, then again, there's no time for converting testosterone.
Saturated
Alex Mearns: fat and cholesterol, making sure there's enough in your diet. It can be very useful doing a vegan diet for three months to clean up the body.
Sharad: But often people have been on it for a couple of years or [00:27:00] longer, they can see all these hormonal problems because not enough saturated fat in the diet, not enough cholesterol in the diet. There's not enough B12, taurine, creatine, and they need to start supplementing and you can see they get very angsty. very argumentative, becomes like a belief system. I feel this is a direct kind of, opposite correlation to the amount of testosterone levels they have, men and women. And in all the things you talked about, there's of course sleep and stress as a core component of a holistic lifestyle that you need to manage.
[00:27:30] How do you manage that?
Alex Mearns: I always try to get into bed by 10 o'clock, so I'm 10 to 6, pretty consistent.
even at the weekend, I find by forcing myself to do that, the body loves
consistency. But what's very important is that your life must feel fulfilling in the daytime. So today I feel like we're having a very productive
Sharad: I'm going to
Alex Mearns: podcast, right? So I'm going to be grateful for that, and I'm going to put that in the win box. And I feel I've done something productive rather, rather than answered a lot of emails from my boss who's on my [00:28:00] back about X, Y, and Zed about something I really don't want to do,
doing something productive for the day, even if you are in a job you don't like, doing something for yourself in the day. Exercise is a great one, even if it's just 20 minutes, five minutes of meditation, something for your mental health.
That's how I manage it.
Sharad: I think the one thing I want to touch upon deeper into is biohacking.
So there are a lot of folks who are already very strong and doing well, but they're biohacking to maybe live longer and do stuff. So if you can explain the concept of biohacking, what do we make of it, what do we know [00:28:30] is true, and how can we do that?
Alex Mearns: biohacking
is a way of hacking your health or hacking things that you do in your life in order to make it better.
And they could be holistic things, alternative things, could be modern things that haven't been proven yet, a whole bunch of things so I think wanting to be better and healthier, that's fine, I don't have a problem with doing stuff. But, if we're biohacking to cut corners, to not address the root causes of issues, that's when I have a problem.
for example, if you are supplementing, [00:29:00] because you don't have time. To eat a good diet it's kind of judgmental. But if you just want to continue eating processed foods and then you want to talk about supplements, that is where I disagree with it,
There are some things which would be considered biohacking, like full spectrum infrared saunas, those are amazing.
fantastic for detox because it penetrates like two or three inches into the skin.
It's great for reducing your cardiovascular disease risk. Anti toxins. It's great for boosting your immune system.
Even traditional saunas are great as well, then there's some from a philosophical [00:29:30] point of view,which something that I like to do, is wellness stacking,
If you're busy, how can I get the most value from my health and wellness journey with a minimum amount of time? I lie on the ground and meditate,
for 20 minutes. I'm lying flat on my back, good for my posture because my posture is not great. Second thing is I'm getting grounded,
I'm in touch with the earth. Uh, the third thing is the sun's out, I'm getting vitamin D, infrared, solar energy in my body. And the fourth thing is I'm [00:30:00] meditating. And when I meditate, I'll listen to binaural beats at the same time, which possibly would be considered biohacking, which puts your brain into a certain state, which makes it easier to meditate.
five things at once. So that's called wellness stacking.
Any other examples of wellness stacking?
Do you know what the most nutrient dense
Sharad: No, what is it?
Alex Mearns: world are? So that would be organ meats, liver is the most nutrient dense food in the world.
So from 200 grams of liver to get the equivalent amount of nutrients from spinach, you need a bin liner [00:30:30] full of it. You could also look at shellfish like oysters and things like that.
Sharad: In biohacking, one of the things people think about is life extension. I don't know if something in that movement resonates with you, and what science actually works there.
Alex Mearns: There's a chap that came here to run a biohacking summit. Brian Johnson. Yes, and apparently takes a hundred
Sharad: 130 spills every day.
Alex Mearns: let's look at the actual people that do live to 100, there's the famous ones from the blue zone. which Dan Boettner has talked about in his book, and then he did a recent Netflix
[00:31:00] documentary.
That would be like Okinawa, Sardinia, the Cretans, the Nicoyans, and the people from Loma Linda in California. There's also some that he didn't study as well, the Hunza from northern Pakistan, the Abkhazians, and a couple of other groups. And all these people live uncommonly long so I studied them in depth, and looked at what they have in common. All their diets are actually quite different,
the Huns of northern Pakistan, what are they eating in the winter when the ground is covered in snow and they're up in the [00:31:30] Himalayas?
They're either eating what comes out of the goat, which is, milk, kefir, yoghurt, or they're eating the goat.
it was the Sardinians during Lent when they weren't eating meat.
So he said it was a high vegetarian based diet, which I thought was quite manipulative.
Sharad: We can look at these, but what do they have in common? All the food was good quality, unprocessed food, whether it was a high veggie or high meat, it doesn't matter.
How does processed food affect us? Just science, if you can break it down.
Alex Mearns: packet of Skittles, which is the multicolored candy. [00:32:00] If you read the ingredients on the back, and you can't pronounce any of them, andI actually do this at one of my, corporate workshops.
I pass it round and say, who's going to volunteer? They put their hand up and say, can you just read that on the back? And people really start, it's quite, it's quite mean actually, because people really struggle and feel a bit shy, right? But it's like, do you think that's healthy?
And at the end, I put broccoli out of the bag of pasta.
Can you just read out the ingredients on that? It's broccoli.
Sharad: Broccoli!
Alex Mearns: That's called a
single ingredient diet,
The three most common ingredients which [00:32:30] are in all processed foods would be White sugar. It has many names. like glucose, sucrose, high fructose, corn syrup, beet syrup.
But basically, refined sugar, white flour. So cakes, cookies, bread, pasta. It's not the most evil, but we basically eat too much of it at the expense of good quality stuff. And vegetable seed oils, which are really becoming big now with RFK in America. He hates his staff.
I have done a recent blog where I looked at [00:33:00] ADHD, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia, and all these different diseases. And there is a high omega six to omega three ratio, high vegetable seed oil consumption element.
Actually, vegetable seed oils look more like plastic under a microscope. So what happens if we're now making our nerve endings out of plastic? And our cell membranes out of plastic? Surely that's going to have some implications. Is there enough science to support that categorically?
No. Am I going to hang around and wait until there is no, [00:33:30] I'll just do what we did for 2. 4 million years and eating real food. and then, you know, the governments and politicians and healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies, they can all argue over it. Meanwhile, I'll
Sharad: the biggest villains in processed food is if there are too many ingredients, that's one sure sign
vegetable oil.
that's clear that unless you have pure olive oil,
Alex Mearns: olive oil is basically fine.you take an olive, you squeeze it, out comes the fat. Coconut oil. Vegetable oil.
Sharad: [00:34:00] Vegetable oil is, is,
we keep coming back to diet because you have so much
Alex Mearns: flour bread.
Sharad: the white flour, the white flour bread. Bread is part of our life. and even wholemeal bread isn't. Perfectly right. So how do we think about bread? How do we get some bread into
Alex Mearns: funny. This is a great question because this actually brings us full circle. It almost feels like it was planned, which it wasn't , but remember when I told you I was feeling dizzy in the afternoon?
And when I look back, I realized what I was eating at [00:34:30] lunchtime to give me this blood sugar swing so I have something at lunchtime, high blood sugar, and then it drops and you feel dizzy. It's a classic pre-diabetes or diabetes, blood sugar rollercoaster. I was thinking of having a. Big white baguette from a sandwich shop on Robinson Road, uh, with turkey and lettuce in it.
Sharad: it.
Alex Mearns: So you would think, like, you know, that's pretty healthy, right? It's a sandwich, it's healthy. But actually, it's just that, my Achilles heel is white flour. I can't digest it properly. It raises my blood sugar, [00:35:00] and it stays there for ages.
so it's fattening for me, raising my blood glucose, causing insulin problems, all sorts of things.
Sharad: it has some gluten
Alex Mearns: Yeah, there's a lot more gluten in, um, and I also have a massive gluten intolerance as well, because I tested myself for that. So that was,
white flours tend to have a lot more gluten these days because it makes the bread more fluffy. I don't say that bread is bad.
the Swiss from the Lauchenstau Valley, lived a diet a hundred years ago on a lot of bread, but it would [00:35:30] all be made,
grinding their own wheat berries, and making it fresh, but it'd all be sourdough. Good quality, using the whole thing.
It's basically just the wheat berries ground up, water and a bit of salt. And then they make the sourdough. And then they would cover that in like cheese and just eat loads of cheese. And these guys are so tall and so handsome,
I used to think like bread was the devil's food. Until I read about these guys, I thought, okay, there is a way to do it properly.
Sharad: So it's doing it fresh. Yeah.
one last question. What is this one piece of advice that you'd like to
Alex Mearns: We talked about [00:36:00] the spiral a couple of times. What is the
next thing for you on that spiral?Do it and make it happen. Twice as easy. Let's say I'm going to go out for a 2km run. Don't go out for a 1km run. Yeah. I'm going to meditate for 10 minutes. Don't meditate for 5 minutes.
I'm going to do it every day. Do it every day. Yeah, that's it. Is this now a habit? It's good stuff.
Sharad Lal: Got so much knowledge and you make it so accessible to [00:36:30] people and you're willing to share. So thank you very much for spending time with us. Thank you, Alex, for such an informative and powerful conversation. For more on Alex, please check the show notes. What's the small step we need to take to get into that upward spiral? How can we make it easier? Is it meditating for a minute? Running one key. Or something else? All the best. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next one will [00:37:00] drop two weeks from now. Do join us for that.
Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.
Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to. How to live. A podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 86.
Do you ever feel staying healthy in your forties is a massive challenge. You're not alone. Today's guest, Alex Mearns knows exactly what it's like. He was a high powered CEO, burning the candles at both ends smoking, drinking zero exercise. And then the wake up call came, which changed everything.
He [00:00:30] went all in and read all he could about fitness and health, But he didn't stop there. He became his own Guinea pig testing, experimenting and figuring out what actually works for leaders, navigating health in their forties. With these learnings. He founded
The company that helps senior leaders like him transform health. He spoke at top companies like UBS and BCG.He's worked with professionals from Morgan Stanley to Goldman Sachs.
And now [00:01:00] he's here to share his game changing insights with us on the how to live podcast.
We're diving deep into the connection between mental and physical health biohacking, cholesterol Sleep stress and a lot more. Thank you very much for your support. We're in the top 3% of all podcasts and are listened to in one 40 countries.
Now let's get started. Here's Alex Mearns.
Sharad Lal: Hi, Alex. Welcome to the How to Live podcast. How are you doing
Alex Mearns: I'm doing very well. [00:01:30] Thank you.
Sharad Lal: congratulations on all the impactful work you're doing. You work with senior leaders and C suites, and help them in their physical and mental health.
What got you motivated to do this?
Alex Mearns: Basically it started, looking at my own physical and mental health, which was not in great shape at all. I was quite successful in business. I made it to be CEO before I was 30 years old.
I drank sort of 30 pints of beer
a
Sharad: of beer and
Alex Mearns: 20 cigarettes a day, didn't exercise and [00:02:00] lived off, KFC and pizza and things like that.
I think it was like in my mid thirties, every afternoon I felt really dizzy,and there was a history of diabetes in the family.
So I thought, okay, this, maybe this is a blood sugar issue. So, I went to the doctors. I did a bunch of tests, went back a week later or two for the results.
and he said, you're overweight, high BMI, high blood pressure, pre diabetic and, high
Sharad: high cholesterol.
Yeah,
Alex Mearns: Yeah, it's all that stuff. Early warning signs,
I'm 49 [00:02:30] now. So that would have been around about 35. So I was like, okay, that's kind of young to be having all these problems. And what should I do about it, doc? He's like, well, you can take these, medical drugs, statins, beta blockers and things like that.
That didn't really sit well with me at all.
I felt that I didn't want to take these drugs because I was too young and I was worried that, by taking these drugs, I'll be on them for the rest of my life.
so I was rebelling against the doctor's advice, kind of like,
I don't need your advice, So as soon as I walked out the doctor's office, I looked up,
What is cholesterol? So I looked it up on [00:03:00] Wikipedia and it said, Cholesterol is the essential building blocks of your cell membranes. And I was like, okay, how many cells do you have in the body? Oh, 10 trillion. and then how often are we destroying and replicating, rebuilding our cells?
You know, you turn over 200 million a day or something like that. So I was like, this makes no sense. Why is my cholesterol trying to kill me?
So I went onto the website and I typed in alternative ways of reading a cholesterol panel.
The article came out by Mark Sissons. and this was fascinating. And I was like, wow, this is not what they tell you. And then there was another article next to it. [00:03:30] Grains bad for you? He's talking about whole wheat flakes and Weetabix, and whole pasta and things like this is part of the food pyramid.
This is what we all should be eating. And that was it. It just opened Pandora's box and I just became an avid reader of all things around health and wellness.
I used to work for the British government. So I was in politics and I knew that certain Western politicians can't really be trusted and in my opinion, they're not, don't really tell the truth that much.
so I started researching myself. I got into the biohacking movement, the quantified self movement. I used [00:04:00] to run experiments on myself, diets, exercise, supplements. and I would order blood tests from the doctors, but I wouldn't see the doctor.
I changed my diet and saw how it changed my cholesterol levels or my liver enzymes.
I'd read scientific papers. I was reading books, listening to audio files, listening to podcasts, thought, this is fun.
and that's when I decided to launch Levitize to work with people like me. Using the tools that I'd used on myself, but not really getting the answers from [00:04:30] the existing medical community or health
Sharad: I
I love that. So it was more the patterns that you talked about. Because of the Rebellion, you went and started searching for answers on your own. Then there was Curiosity. And then you also knew the system wasn't right, because of which this is why we're not told this.
And based on what you read, based on experiments on yourself, you started learning many things. And that led to you starting Levitize. In Levitize, you said, now I'm going to focus on senior folks who are living a similar lifestyle to me, [00:05:00] and I'm going to help them figure this out for themselves, figure out holistic health for themselves.
How did that process go when you launched Levitize and you wanted to target these guys? How did you set it up and how was the process of meeting these people and discovering what their
problems
Alex Mearns: Guys? problems were space, no clients, a couple of staff, all outgoing. So rent and salaries
Sharad: like this. Only fixed costs.
Alex Mearns: first month.
Sharad: How many years back was this?
Alex Mearns: So this was seven years ago.
Sharad: So 2017.
Alex Mearns: our first clients. [00:05:30] And mostly they were people that knew me. And they wanted the same for themselves.
I basically took people on the same process that I went through. Measure them holistically. And then we prescribe solutions.
Sharad: how does this feel?
Yeah,
Alex Mearns: we worked with one person on quitting smoking, which is quite [00:06:00] interesting because it sums up our philosophy. telling this guy, Oh, you really got to quit smoking.
Stupid, lazy advice. He knows this. His doctor's told him a million times. We would never tell someone. And maybe if you can describe
Sharad:
Alex Mearns: process of working on other things
Sharad: said.
Wow. And maybe if you can describe that process of [00:06:30] working on other things for him to feel better, and then that sparks the need to quit smoking.
Alex Mearns: this example will apply to everyone, but obviously, smoking was one of his issues that there would have been several.
first we've got to measure it, assess, don't guess.
So most of our clients, when they're coming to work with us, there are issues like stress and anxiety, maybe fatigued or sleepy, out of shape physically and mentally or, maybe worried about the future, right?
they've been successful financially to a certain extent and, [00:07:00] they want to make that switch, But making that switch is tricky. Because they're so used to running their life in a certain way, adding anything new can often be very difficult.
So the first thing is we want to assess, so we want to look at people, how are your stress levels, how's your organ health, how's your digestive system health, how's your adrenal health, your thyroid health, your hormonal health, your prostate health, with women your estrogen, progesterone levels, and things like that.
So we're looking at all this.
Sharad: And these are through a series of blood tests
Alex Mearns: We mostly use symptomology based questionnaires. So this is a series of
long questionnaires, like 30 minutes [00:07:30] to fill in, but basically a lot of questions about symptoms and these symptoms associated with organ issue, so any problem with, let's say with men,
like sort of urination,
not fully emptying your bladder, any kind of pain or swelling is generally an indication of an enlarged prostate and then an indication of some male hormonal issue, pain under your right rib cage, being the liver, sensitive, looking at how often people poo, are they pooing?
we've worked with people who poo, once a week, That's really indicative of an absolutely destroyed microbiome. [00:08:00]
and then stress levels, Do you spend a lot of time worrying over finances and career and money? Are you stressed over any relationships in your
Sharad: Life sleep?
Alex Mearns: Yeah, exactly. Are you not sleeping well? anyone who has a sleep issue pretty much has a stress And the way we can prove that is to look at children. Children generally are unstressed
and sleep through the night because they've got no responsibilities,
So once we've done this analysis, this might take a couple of weeks. I can corroborate a lot of this with the doctor's blood work. So if my [00:08:30] symptomology analysis says you have a liver problem, and then I look at your doctor's blood work, and I can see high AST and high ALT scores in your liver profile, and then you tell me that you're smoking and drinking,
Sharad: But now
Alex Mearns: Then it's a question of discussing it with the client and saying, Okay. we're going to have the greatest impact in improving your physical and mental emotional health and working on this,
but that might not be where they have the capacity to start. So often you can start something simply personal because as soon as you start feeling better physically you then [00:09:00] build the capacity to take on maybe more challenging things.
Sharad: why,
Alex Mearns: Often, why people say to give up smoking, start exercising. 'cause then actually you're boosting your dopamine levels naturally so that the desire for that cigarette decreases.
And that's certainly with me. Once I started exercising, I didn't really feel as much the need to smoke, it was easier to quit.
Sharad: The first time we spoke, I loved what you said about C suite senior leaders who don't want to go into a gym and exercise. Because in the gym, you have these fit people lifting [00:09:30] weights, looking great.
So you have a gym personal training system, which is tailored to them, where they don't feel out of place, which helps them do it more often. So if you can talk a little bit about creating an environment, which makes it easy for someone to start a part of the process.
Alex Mearns: It can be a bit tricky. to, walk into the gym and get your top off and everything starts hanging out.
And that can be really difficult to deal with, particularly as guys, we're a bit more fragile, I think, in the ego So,what we do is we prescribe exercise like a doctor would,
we [00:10:00] develop these three hour movement assessments. with our clients. And they gave me that look no one's going to buy a three hour movement assessment.
we've got it down to an hour, So what we're trying to do is find out as much about you as possible in one hour.
putting it simply, we can work out what's where the weak bits are, where the tight bits are. where the imbalances are, in various aspects of the body.
We recommend you train with us twice a week for six months. Somebody might say, ah, 20 kgs. Okay, great. But first
in order to lose 20 kgs, generally you're going [00:10:30] to need to play with a diet and push a little bit hard on the exercise, And we need to build the foundations first before you can do that, because you've got weak ankles, flabby glutes, a weak core.
We can't be squatting and deadlifting going out running for miles because you're just going to get injured. And this is what happens when people get older. And often they go to the gym and they have got injured and then they like, and this is another problem with the industry, they'd say
I was working well and everything was going great. And then I did my back in. So I had to stop. And then all the weight came back or [00:11:00] something. And then they blame themselves. But was it their fault? Or were they prescribed the incorrect medicine?
Sharad: I had a similar thing as well because I started doing weights late in life And my biggest worry was that I'm going to injure myself. I went to one of the trainers, the guy would want me to measure my biceps and make me do all kinds of stuff.
And I was tight all the time. My shoulders are in pain. And then I went to another guy
He was all about posture, the right muscle moving, starting slow. And I thought that was useful because once the foundation [00:11:30] is right, then the achievement mindset can come in. Then you can want to improve and that becomes an activity system.
Alex Mearns: We're basically taking people through three stages: pain, problems, goals. If someone's in pain, the first thing is to do, what can we do? So if they're back pain, we need to get them out of pain. as quickly as possible by, say, improving the musculature around the core and the spine. If they have problems, we can fix those, and then we can move to goals. Okay, I want to play football again. I want to play more tennis. So yeah, this is
Sharad: That. And maybe related to this, when you think about fitness, there's [00:12:00] an aesthetic part to it. And there is a health part to
Alex Mearns: That's right.
Sharad: And if you can talk about the differences in the two and how that mind shift for a lot of people, as they get
Alex Mearns: The industry is totally messed up on that one. Because from both sides, when the clients want results quickly and there is a complete lack of understanding about how quickly and sustainable those results are.
And on the other side,
from the personal training side of things, they want to. say that they can deliver results very [00:12:30] quickly. And then they show these before and after pictures of people who are overweight and then totally ripped six weeks later. and they're under a lot of pressure to get your results quickly.
I studied at the Czech Institute in California under Paul Cech, who's basically the godfather of wellness and biohacking. He's an absolute genius, a little bit crazy, which is always nice.
When I studied with him, he said, look, if you want to clear out the garage and it took you 20 years to fill your garage with junk, it's going to take about 10 years to clear it out.
so if people want to [00:13:00] lose weight sustainably, you need to do it slowly over time,
Sharad: And the truth is that if you don't do it properly, you don't really lose weight. It always comes back, even if it's one year or two years later. we know it's unhealthy to be overweight, but just by focusing on the aesthetics and doing it quickly, you get a couple of Instagram shots, and then all the weight comes back, and then you feel like crap because you feel like you haven't got the willpower to sustain the diet or training regime, and it [00:13:30] makes you feel bad, so actually think these things negatively, contribute in the that makes a lot of sense. I'll just bring it back to this whole thought of upward spiral, which I found very fascinating.
You described how a person can get into it by building the foundation because of which the person feels better.
How would that upward spiral typically work?
Alex Mearns: If we take the most simple example of weight loss, people think, I'm gonna go on a hardcore keto diet starting from tomorrow. I'm also gonna cut my calories down from 2, 500 to 1, [00:14:00] 500 or something like that. And I'm gonna hit it hard in the gym three times a week.
What they're doing is they're jumping from where they are right to the top of the spiral where they want to be and missed out all the and it requires a phenomenal amount of willpower. Which is in finite supply to achieve that. So the likelihood that they'll be able to maintain that, it's very small.
Studies show only 5%. of people that go on a hardcore diet and
exercise. regime. Yeah. Actually maintain it for life and that's great. But 'cause they can maintain it for a long [00:14:30] time, but 95% of the people, they bounce back. So it's about finding the next thing on the spiral. So for some people it might be personal training, for some people it might be working with a life coach for example.
We're trying to build a lifetime relationship with our clients. So they can pop in and out at various points and think, oh let's check in with Levitas if they can help me on this one.
Sharad: I'll click into your knowledge on two things that many people at this age think about, which you mentioned. So let's talk about cholesterol. You read about cholesterol. You learned a lot about it in simplistic terms.
What really [00:15:00] is and how should people think about it?
Alex Mearns: cholesterol is the building blocks of life, there's 37. 2 trillion cells in your body and cholesterol, makes up the cell membrane. 60 percent of the dry weight of your brain is made up of saturated fat and cholesterol. the myelin sheath around your nerves, send electrical impulses all around your body, that's made up of saturated fat and cholesterol, and your sex hormones, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, the steroidal hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, it's all made up of saturated fat [00:15:30] and cholesterol.
LDL is a protein which carries the cholesterol from your liver to these sites. The HDL carries it back. Yeah, so all this stuff I was talking about is the bad cholesterol. So for a start we have been conditioned incorrectly by saying this is bad cholesterol. This is completely wrong.
The new science says that the problem is when this cholesterol builds up in the arteries. So having high cholesterol is not a big deal, but what happens if it builds up in the arteries? cholesterol is like glue, It can clog up your arteries. That's only happening [00:16:00] when it's oxidized. cholesterol oxidize? Because there's injuries. Why are there injuries? Smoking, drinking, sedentariness, ultra processed foods, not sleeping enough, This is what the problem is. And if you look at ancestral tribes that had high cholesterol, the Masai from, Tanzania
They only live off meat basically. And they drink the blood of their animals. They have high cholesterol, but they don't have heart disease or cancer and things like that.
When I look at a cholesterol [00:16:30] panel, I look at broken down LDL cholesterol, HDL and triglycerides.
And the first one I'm looking at is triglycerides. Because a lot of doctors say they want it over 150 milligrams per deciliter. I want to see it like below 100, ideally 50 to 80, because that's an indication of how much sugar
converted into fat.
Sharad: just going to put in a layman's term for people like me to understand. Cholesterol isn't the enemy, even the bad one that we call it. because it flows through the body, that's fine. [00:17:00] It can get blocked with certain things like stress, bad sleep, smoking, these kinds of things.
So if you're drinking. So the cholesterol level that you see isn't something you should be worried about. But you could look at other ways of their blockages because of certain lifestyle things, and that's when you want to tackle it.
Alex Mearns: giving someone cholesterol, lowering medication is not solving the root cause of the problem, which ties into what is holistic. Just like.
You've
got some wood, you've got more wood. That's not a problem. When you set [00:17:30] fire to it, if you've got more wood, now we have a
Sharad: a great analogy.
Let's talk about holistic health. how's, you talk about your approach as holistic health, and this is a word we've seen in many places.
What do you think about it, and how's your approach different from others that we see?
Alex Mearns: when I think of the word holistic, comes from the word whole, it's really looking at the big picture. For example, if we only did nutrition, it's very difficult to look at the big picture if someone's sitting watching Netflix at two in the morning and eating ice cream. As a [00:18:00] nutritionist, I could say, that's not very good for you.
But actually what they need is, Why is that happening? What are they stressed about? so we need to understand that the problem is not nutrition. The problem is the stress. So holistic is really examining everything. We have a process where we look at movement, nutrition, sleep, breathing, emotions, hydration, environment or environmental toxicity, social thinking, and sunlight.
So 10 elements of health, happiness. and longevity. I examine [00:18:30] all of those areas and see what's out of balance. And then present that this is where I think it could be out of balance. And this is potentially where we could start.
so that's holistic,
The second part is always making the best recommendations from a holistic perspective.
I say to people when I do a consultation, are you taking any supplements? Yeah, I'm taking vitamin B12.
vitamin D. Why are you taking those? is it helping? how about we get the B12 from red meat shellfish, oysters. Vitamin D, we can get that from the sun. The [00:19:00] vitamin C, how about we just add in more green veggies, like broccoli, which has seven times more vitamin C than blueberries, for example,And so it's oh, no, because I don't have time. too busy at work. what's the problem here, okay, is it that you don't have time or you're not prioritizing?
So that's what I mean by holistic, really drilling down into what is the root cause. And in that case, it's prioritization.
Sharad: And it's like mental related to physical related to mental related to physical, and you keep going back and forth.
Alex Mearns: so the world is full of specialists,
[00:19:30] chiropractors and osteopaths, you have the specialist personal trainer who just does iron man training and he only knows about cardiovascular and you have the doctors like the endocrinologist, the paediatrician, all these specialists.
So I specialize in being a generalist.
Sharad: You touched upon something very interesting about supplements. And I know you're not a big fan of supplements because exactly the way you described it,
I mean, there's an absorption issue as well. How do you get the things that supplements give you from food? So maybe we talk a little bit about that.
Alex Mearns: the problem is with supplements [00:20:00] is
Often we're taking them because somebody from a marketing perspective made them sound very appealing. Sometimes we're taking them as a quick fix because a diet's not good enough, it's very hard to know individually whether supplements are working or not. It's very hard for people to measure.
Actually people were taking, say, calcium, they used to give calcium to mothers, we now know that if you don't take calcium with vitamin D, it causes calcification in your arteries.
So there always seems to be new information. Some people take magnesium because they want to help them sleep, and it's [00:20:30] hard to get magnesium in the modern diet. There's 16 different types of magnesium, magnesium glycate, magnesium citrate, it's all these different ones, and how many components have we not even discovered yet,
What about polyphenols? These are all the plant compounds that are very beneficial. They're not listed as essential, but they're all helpful.
All these anti cancer polyphenols that you get in like bright purple, fruits, like sweet potatoes and things like that. Mother nature created food with synergistic components.
So if you eat the food, you are getting the calcium [00:21:00] and, maybe the B12 and a whole bunch of other things as well. And they're in synergistic form. So it's easy for your body to absorb. So believe if we eat. good quality food, we don't need the
Sharad: Let's talk about good quality food. And maybe we're in Singapore.
How do we figure out what's a good diet? How should we, how should a layman think about food?
Alex Mearns: a couple of things we do or we don't do, we focus on metabolic typing. So that's eating the right diet for [00:21:30] you. Instinctively, we should know it, but we spend so much time in our heads listening to our friends, doctors, and we've forgotten. Kids know it, as long as you don't confuse them with ice cream and stuff like that, they can do it.
I tested this on my son. But, so we look at metabolic type, what's the right diet for you?
We want to focus on good quality food, Which basically means moving away from
Sharad: food. to
Alex Mearns: unprocessed food.
we can look at that within two types of food. I could take two steaks,One [00:22:00] steak is from America, USDA. That cow will have been pumped full of growth hormones, antibiotics, vaccines, medical drugs. It'd been raised on a farm knee deep in its own bovine feces.
The water will have been shipped in. It'll be stressful. It wouldn't have had access to sunlight. This is a very poorly produced cow.
Sharad: almost processed. Wow. You could be having like a steak and it's almost processed.
Alex Mearns: Or you could get one from an organic state from Australia, where the cow's been running around on grass for [00:22:30] all its life, under the sun, drinking rainwater, not pumped full of crap, eating, it's a cow diet.
That is a good quality product, both steaks.
We focus on the quality and what we found is when people improve the quality of their diet.
health gets much better. Weight starts coming down.
Sharad: Where do you get your meat in Singapore?
Alex Mearns: I've got a cut butchery. They've got one in Bucatimba Plaza, one in Thompson, and then there's another one I think Marine Parade. There's a Kirkbrook tree, they [00:23:00] do a lot of good grass fed steaks. Ryan's Grocery is pretty good, Butcher Box I like,
A lot of people like Hoobers, basically looking for organic, hard to find in Singapore. I'm looking for fresh,
as naturally raised as possible.
Sharad: As fresh as in not frozen,
And then you don't take good meat and freeze it on your thing.
Alex Mearns: I prefer to eat fresh. I've done a lot of work on frozen food, and scientifically, I can't prove that frozen food is worse for you than fresh [00:23:30] food. But I do know that when you freeze cells, they expand, because water freezes.
And that can break the cell membrane, and a lot of the goodness can leak out. So the argument is that food that is frozen and then thawed is less bioavailable. So yes, you're consuming it. If you test it, it's got all the vitamins and minerals in it, but is it getting into your body?
I suspect not, but I can't prove
Sharad: What about vegetables? What do you think about vegetables?
Alex Mearns: I eat quite a high meat based diet, but I reckon I eat more veggies than most [00:24:00] people. Vegans and vegetarians. I eat a lot of vegetables.
Sharad: how many meals do you have?
Alex Mearns: I do three meals a day and, and I want, protein carbs and veggies with every meal.
I'll honor my cravings and I'll always eat green veggies with every meal. I particularly like cruciferous vegetables from the brassica family.
western vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, things like that. eastern vegetables like, cancon, kailan, bok choy, this kind of stuff.
I know we can talk [00:24:30] about dieting a lot, but there are other things we should touch upon. One of the things that a lot of males hitting 40s and 50s do is testosterone. How does that work? What happens?
worked with a lot of people with low testosterone levels, so boosted them holistically. But. A couple of my clients, against my recommendations, get testosterone shot in the butt. They felt
Absolutely amazing. So that's when I realized that testosterone is not just a sex hormone and a hormone for building muscles. It's actually a happy brain chemical.
I put it in the same [00:25:00] bucket as dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, and testosterone.
and it also helps with drive and determination. Men, we've got to keep it as high as possible. and it falls as we get older, which is okay because muscle mass decreases. Maybe we're not having sex as much, maybe not working with retirement, but it needs to be at the level that we need it to be at,
there's different, whether you look at imperial or metric, we're looking at 200 to 800, but some ranges are like 150 to a thousand, but it's just a crazy [00:25:30] range because we know that the lower you are, the more crappy you're going to be feeling. so we want to get it as high as possible and there's no reason at our age we shouldn't be around 600 to sort of 800.
if you're stressed, when you go to bed at night and repair, your body will repair adrenaline and cortisol first. It'll then repair insulin. So it can get energy into cells. It'll then repair your thyroid hormones,
Which runs your metabolism. At the end of the night, if there's any time left over, your body will be like, we've got a bit of cholesterol [00:26:00] left, let's make some testosterone. if we don't have the time to make it, it's okay because we don't need to make babies. Tomorrow we need to focus on the host.
When your body makes excess testosterone, it just keeps making it until you wake up. And then if it makes excess, you wake up with a boner.
so that is a good
Sharad: sign. All right. Good to
Alex Mearns: we want to be waking up
With women, obviously, it's much harder to tell what you find with women if they've been through a particularly stressful month.
At the end of the month, when they have their period, it will [00:26:30] often be a lot more problematic, maybe more bloating, heavier, last longer, maybe their mood is not so good. So they have more of a a lagging indicator where men have a more immediate one,
Sharad: You said, less stress? I guess sleep as well? Because there's more time to do the work, versus if you sleep less, then again, there's no time for converting testosterone.
Saturated
Alex Mearns: fat and cholesterol, making sure there's enough in your diet. It can be very useful doing a vegan diet for three months to clean up the body.
Sharad: But often people have been on it for a couple of years or [00:27:00] longer, they can see all these hormonal problems because not enough saturated fat in the diet, not enough cholesterol in the diet. There's not enough B12, taurine, creatine, and they need to start supplementing and you can see they get very angsty. very argumentative, becomes like a belief system. I feel this is a direct kind of, opposite correlation to the amount of testosterone levels they have, men and women. And in all the things you talked about, there's of course sleep and stress as a core component of a holistic lifestyle that you need to manage.
[00:27:30] How do you manage that?
Alex Mearns: I always try to get into bed by 10 o'clock, so I'm 10 to 6, pretty consistent.
even at the weekend, I find by forcing myself to do that, the body loves
consistency. But what's very important is that your life must feel fulfilling in the daytime. So today I feel like we're having a very productive
Sharad: I'm going to
Alex Mearns: podcast, right? So I'm going to be grateful for that, and I'm going to put that in the win box. And I feel I've done something productive rather, rather than answered a lot of emails from my boss who's on my [00:28:00] back about X, Y, and Zed about something I really don't want to do,
doing something productive for the day, even if you are in a job you don't like, doing something for yourself in the day. Exercise is a great one, even if it's just 20 minutes, five minutes of meditation, something for your mental health.
That's how I manage it.
Sharad: I think the one thing I want to touch upon deeper into is biohacking.
So there are a lot of folks who are already very strong and doing well, but they're biohacking to maybe live longer and do stuff. So if you can explain the concept of biohacking, what do we make of it, what do we know [00:28:30] is true, and how can we do that?
Alex Mearns: biohacking
is a way of hacking your health or hacking things that you do in your life in order to make it better.
And they could be holistic things, alternative things, could be modern things that haven't been proven yet, a whole bunch of things so I think wanting to be better and healthier, that's fine, I don't have a problem with doing stuff. But, if we're biohacking to cut corners, to not address the root causes of issues, that's when I have a problem.
for example, if you are supplementing, [00:29:00] because you don't have time. To eat a good diet it's kind of judgmental. But if you just want to continue eating processed foods and then you want to talk about supplements, that is where I disagree with it,
There are some things which would be considered biohacking, like full spectrum infrared saunas, those are amazing.
fantastic for detox because it penetrates like two or three inches into the skin.
It's great for reducing your cardiovascular disease risk. Anti toxins. It's great for boosting your immune system.
Even traditional saunas are great as well, then there's some from a philosophical [00:29:30] point of view,which something that I like to do, is wellness stacking,
If you're busy, how can I get the most value from my health and wellness journey with a minimum amount of time? I lie on the ground and meditate,
for 20 minutes. I'm lying flat on my back, good for my posture because my posture is not great. Second thing is I'm getting grounded,
I'm in touch with the earth. Uh, the third thing is the sun's out, I'm getting vitamin D, infrared, solar energy in my body. And the fourth thing is I'm [00:30:00] meditating. And when I meditate, I'll listen to binaural beats at the same time, which possibly would be considered biohacking, which puts your brain into a certain state, which makes it easier to meditate.
five things at once. So that's called wellness stacking.
Any other examples of wellness stacking?
Do you know what the most nutrient dense
Sharad: No, what is it?
Alex Mearns: world are? So that would be organ meats, liver is the most nutrient dense food in the world.
So from 200 grams of liver to get the equivalent amount of nutrients from spinach, you need a bin liner [00:30:30] full of it. You could also look at shellfish like oysters and things like that.
Sharad: In biohacking, one of the things people think about is life extension. I don't know if something in that movement resonates with you, and what science actually works there.
Alex Mearns: There's a chap that came here to run a biohacking summit. Brian Johnson. Yes, and apparently takes a hundred
Sharad: 130 spills every day.
Alex Mearns: let's look at the actual people that do live to 100, there's the famous ones from the blue zone. which Dan Boettner has talked about in his book, and then he did a recent Netflix
[00:31:00] documentary.
That would be like Okinawa, Sardinia, the Cretans, the Nicoyans, and the people from Loma Linda in California. There's also some that he didn't study as well, the Hunza from northern Pakistan, the Abkhazians, and a couple of other groups. And all these people live uncommonly long so I studied them in depth, and looked at what they have in common. All their diets are actually quite different,
the Huns of northern Pakistan, what are they eating in the winter when the ground is covered in snow and they're up in the [00:31:30] Himalayas?
They're either eating what comes out of the goat, which is, milk, kefir, yoghurt, or they're eating the goat.
it was the Sardinians during Lent when they weren't eating meat.
So he said it was a high vegetarian based diet, which I thought was quite manipulative.
Sharad: We can look at these, but what do they have in common? All the food was good quality, unprocessed food, whether it was a high veggie or high meat, it doesn't matter.
How does processed food affect us? Just science, if you can break it down.
Alex Mearns: packet of Skittles, which is the multicolored candy. [00:32:00] If you read the ingredients on the back, and you can't pronounce any of them, andI actually do this at one of my, corporate workshops.
I pass it round and say, who's going to volunteer? They put their hand up and say, can you just read that on the back? And people really start, it's quite, it's quite mean actually, because people really struggle and feel a bit shy, right? But it's like, do you think that's healthy?
And at the end, I put broccoli out of the bag of pasta.
Can you just read out the ingredients on that? It's broccoli.
Sharad: Broccoli!
Alex Mearns: That's called a
single ingredient diet,
The three most common ingredients which [00:32:30] are in all processed foods would be White sugar. It has many names. like glucose, sucrose, high fructose, corn syrup, beet syrup.
But basically, refined sugar, white flour. So cakes, cookies, bread, pasta. It's not the most evil, but we basically eat too much of it at the expense of good quality stuff. And vegetable seed oils, which are really becoming big now with RFK in America. He hates his staff.
I have done a recent blog where I looked at [00:33:00] ADHD, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia, and all these different diseases. And there is a high omega six to omega three ratio, high vegetable seed oil consumption element.
Actually, vegetable seed oils look more like plastic under a microscope. So what happens if we're now making our nerve endings out of plastic? And our cell membranes out of plastic? Surely that's going to have some implications. Is there enough science to support that categorically?
No. Am I going to hang around and wait until there is no, [00:33:30] I'll just do what we did for 2. 4 million years and eating real food. and then, you know, the governments and politicians and healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies, they can all argue over it. Meanwhile, I'll
Sharad: the biggest villains in processed food is if there are too many ingredients, that's one sure sign
vegetable oil.
that's clear that unless you have pure olive oil,
Alex Mearns: olive oil is basically fine.you take an olive, you squeeze it, out comes the fat. Coconut oil. Vegetable oil.
Sharad: [00:34:00] Vegetable oil is, is,
we keep coming back to diet because you have so much
Alex Mearns: flour bread.
Sharad: the white flour, the white flour bread. Bread is part of our life. and even wholemeal bread isn't. Perfectly right. So how do we think about bread? How do we get some bread into
Alex Mearns: funny. This is a great question because this actually brings us full circle. It almost feels like it was planned, which it wasn't , but remember when I told you I was feeling dizzy in the afternoon?
And when I look back, I realized what I was eating at [00:34:30] lunchtime to give me this blood sugar swing so I have something at lunchtime, high blood sugar, and then it drops and you feel dizzy. It's a classic pre-diabetes or diabetes, blood sugar rollercoaster. I was thinking of having a. Big white baguette from a sandwich shop on Robinson Road, uh, with turkey and lettuce in it.
Sharad: it.
Alex Mearns: So you would think, like, you know, that's pretty healthy, right? It's a sandwich, it's healthy. But actually, it's just that, my Achilles heel is white flour. I can't digest it properly. It raises my blood sugar, [00:35:00] and it stays there for ages.
so it's fattening for me, raising my blood glucose, causing insulin problems, all sorts of things.
Sharad: it has some gluten
Alex Mearns: Yeah, there's a lot more gluten in, um, and I also have a massive gluten intolerance as well, because I tested myself for that. So that was,
white flours tend to have a lot more gluten these days because it makes the bread more fluffy. I don't say that bread is bad.
the Swiss from the Lauchenstau Valley, lived a diet a hundred years ago on a lot of bread, but it would [00:35:30] all be made,
grinding their own wheat berries, and making it fresh, but it'd all be sourdough. Good quality, using the whole thing.
It's basically just the wheat berries ground up, water and a bit of salt. And then they make the sourdough. And then they would cover that in like cheese and just eat loads of cheese. And these guys are so tall and so handsome,
I used to think like bread was the devil's food. Until I read about these guys, I thought, okay, there is a way to do it properly.
Sharad: So it's doing it fresh. Yeah.
one last question. What is this one piece of advice that you'd like to
Alex Mearns: We talked about [00:36:00] the spiral a couple of times. What is the
next thing for you on that spiral?Do it and make it happen. Twice as easy. Let's say I'm going to go out for a 2km run. Don't go out for a 1km run. Yeah. I'm going to meditate for 10 minutes. Don't meditate for 5 minutes.
I'm going to do it every day. Do it every day. Yeah, that's it. Is this now a habit? It's good stuff.
Sharad Lal: Got so much knowledge and you make it so accessible to [00:36:30] people and you're willing to share. So thank you very much for spending time with us. Thank you, Alex, for such an informative and powerful conversation. For more on Alex, please check the show notes. What's the small step we need to take to get into that upward spiral? How can we make it easier? Is it meditating for a minute? Running one key. Or something else? All the best. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next one will [00:37:00] drop two weeks from now. Do join us for that.
Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.