Hangout On Air w/ Arianna Huffington and Dr. Mark Hyman

hello I'm Ariana Huffington president and editorinchief of the hington post Media Group and I'm delighted to be here in our Google Hangout with the great Dr Mark Hyman who is Chairman of the Institute of functional medicine he's on the medical review board at The Huffington Post and he's the author of five number one New York Times best hey now how many now eight oh my God eight you will correct that eight number one New York Times is including the latest that we're going to talk about today the blood sugar solution 10day detox diet so it's kind of interesting mark because I often um Thrive my new book by talking about my being in a pool of blood on the floor of my office after I Collapse from exhaustion and burnout and you're dealing with blood in a different way inside our bodies and how can we be healthier by detoxing so let me just uh first of all explain to everybody watching that the way this is going to work is that I'm going to ask more questions for about 10 minutes and then another 10 minutes of questions both about the book and other things that he's um doing to help us lead healthier life and so a total of 20 minutes and then Mark is going to ask me questions for 20 minutes about Thrive and um we would love to have your comments and to have you engage and participate in every way possible so let me start by asking you a very simple question which is how does the 10day detox diet actually work like what foods are eliminated what foods do we stock up on and how are is struct well it's really critical Ariana to understand that the reason that we need to detox is because many of us are addicted to sugar and flour in fact you know we eat about 146 pounds of flour and about 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and they're biologically addictive they actually work in the brain exactly like cocaine or heroin in fact it's eight times as addictive as cocaine they put Rats on an electric pad and they shock them while they're drinking sugar they'll keep drinking the sugar it's that powerful so that's why I created the detox and essentially it eliminates the triggers that drive our hunger Drive fat storage and obesity really the biggest driver of obesity and diabetes in this country is sugar and it's BL blowing up our digestive tracts and our bellies and it's actually driving this epidemic so the way we do the detoxes get people off of the process foods off of sugar and flour off of The Addictive substances even caffeine and alcohol just for 10 days and then add in all these wonderful Foods fresh fruits and vegetables uh clean animal protein nuts and seeds some fruit and what that does is that resets the body so the food industry has literally hijacked our brain chemistry our hormones our metabolism our taste buds even our kitchens and in 10 days you can take it back and reset everything and actually begin to feel what it feels like to have yourself back and that's the power of this it's very powerful and just 10 days you see a dramatic shift and most people have never given themselves the gift of 10 days of nurturing their bodies and their minds and their heart in a profound way and that's what this is about it's really realizing you're only a few days away from health and happiness and basically what you are saying just to stress this point is that it's not enough to just change our eating habits we need to do that detox for yeah exactly you know many of us just try to make incremental changes and so we don't see a big change you know there's a rule in functional medicine which is if you're standing on attack it takes a lot of as to make it feel better but if you're standing on two TXS it takes it's not going to get 50% better if you take out one t so you have to remove all the factors that are disturbing your equilibrium and allowing you to thrive which is really what your book is so profoundly stressing that we need to shift our thinking about how we live how we eat and how we take care of ourselves so we can thrive in fact let's talk about that because your book focuses on the physical detox but it also acknowledges the importance of the thinking patterns or habits um that um lead to a kind of emotional detox that's right in order for the physical detox to be really effective yeah this is actually a very carefully laid out strategy that I've created for people to detox not only their bodies but their minds so there's a lot of journaling involved reexamining your thinking looking at the beliefs and theories and attitudes that actually keep you stuck and keep you from being healthy so uh we have attitudes oh it's hard to lose weight or you know how am I going to ever get rid of my Cravings

or I you know I can't get rid of all my symptoms but most people have never actually done a complete reset where they've looked at their thinking and beliefs theories and they actually begin to shift their thought patterns and their feeling patterns so they actually can engage in behaviors that make it work for them and that's why every day is a theme like nurture and think and listen and notice and they're very reflective aspects it's not just about food it's really about all the aspects of healing and rebooting your life I love the way you've connected everything and that's why I think your book is so important and truly um is going to make a huge difference I have no doubt at a moment when we need it more than ever when 75% of our health care costs are for preventable chronic um diseases many of them related to um diabetes obesity cardiovascular disease a lot of them affected by the kind of food eat absolutely I mean it's really we have chronic disease as a foodborn problem and we don't actually apply food as medicine and that's the whole principle of functional medicine is using food to heal and it's very powerful and you know I was sort of uh surprised I was in a school this week in Park City I was giving a talk to a bunch of Jor high school students and uh you I asked them how many of you have this list of symptoms and I you know listed fatigue brain fog insomnia digestive issues allergies and a whole list of problems and I thought you know these are teenagers they're going to be pretty healthy almost every single kid raise their hand and I realize that the diet that they're eating is driving them to feel what I call feel like crap FLC syndrome you know many people walk around not feeling great and they don't know it's connected to actually what they're eating and that's the power of the 10day detox it gives people a chance to understand the connection between how they eat how they live and how they feel and begin to get their life back and you also make the connection between sleep and physical activity levels and our food addictions yeah absolutely lify plays a huge role it's not only the food you eat but you know for example if you don't sleep you raise your cortisol levels which makes you hungry and crave carbohydrates and sugar so if you deprive yourself of sleep and I've done this you know even I'm thin and pretty healthy but if I don't sleep enough I'm looking for the sugar and that's our body's natural way of staying awake when we haven't had enough sleep when you don't exercise you actually lower dopamine levels which is the hormone I mean the neurotransmitter that keeps you alert and awake and helps you feel happy and gives you pleasure well the way to get that is sugar so you use sugar instead of exercise and if you are under chronic stress the same thing happens you increase cortisol so the book has a lot of really simple practices like the take five breathing break or the ultra detox bath which is fun and pass it and the um you know simple suggestions about yoga and journaling all of which profoundly shift your body from the stress response to the relaxation response you lose relaxing and also you addressed the question of how unhealthy food good habits and poor diet affect us mentally and emotionally would you talk about that you know one thing people don't realize is that uh the body affects the mind right so the Mind affects the body we know that our thoughts and feelings and beliefs affect our physical health but our physical health affects our mind so I always say it's hard to meditate your way to happiness and health if you're eating Doritos and soda if you're not sleeping if your thyroid is not working your B12 deficient or your vitamin D deficient if you're eating junk it's very hard to focus pay attention and be present to life so if you actually create a sacred place that your body lives in which is a place where you can Thrive using good food to nourish it I mean most of us don't realize that our bod is this gift that we have that's very sacred it's very special and if we don't care for it won't serve us and we can't then engage in the world in the way we want we can't work fully we can't engage with those we love we can't do the work we want in the world we can't serve and so really it's a powerful strategy to use your health by changing the food you eat to actually be more engaged fully in your life so what is interesting is just how interconnected everything you are writing about and speaking about is because you are also very interested in how mindfulness and meditation can help deal with our addictions to certain foods tell us about that absolutely most of us you know eat unconsciously uh they've done studies where they for example put a bow of food with a false bottom and they keep filling it up and if you're watching TV and just eating you're just going to keep eating and eating like if you go to the movies and have a big thing of popcorn are we don't actually consciously eat so if we stop and be present to the food we're eating if we don't eat on the Run don't eat while watching TV don't eat while doing something else and we stay present to The Taste and the flavor and the enjoyment of food we actually will notice what's happening in our body we'll notice when we feel full we'll notice the taste of the food and we'll get actually pleasure from it and so if we shift to mindfulness and

eating we literally change not only our enjoyment of food but our amount we eat and also even the physiology what happens when you digest your food so you actually metabolize it better and how does the good physical health you know if we follow all these rules how does a good physical health actually make it easier for us to tap into our own inner wisdom and um to operate from a space of clarity and vital it yeah well I think that's a really important question Arian because many of us don't actually care for our bodies in a way that allows us to tap into being awake it's hard to be awake when we are tired when we're eating food that makes us feel sick when we have brain fog it's hard to connect to our inner wisdom when we're not caring for our bodies and we have what I call FLC syndrome so the key to this book the key to the attendee detox is to give people the experience of what it feels like to actually be themselves to be free of the encumbrances Of The Addictive substances we have to the processed food to the sugar it's literally stealing our brain chemistry and our biology so when you actually care for yourself you can be more focused present you can be more engaged you can love better you can work better you can think better you can be better and that's really what you write about so beautifully which is how do we Thrive and it's really about all these things and how they all connect no I love how we started from very different um starting points and we've reached a very similar conclusion absolutely you actually take it a step further because you look at what diseas is and you have some pretty radical ideas about what is actually disease and the fact that Health you say is a state of balance and disease imbalance that's right you know what I do Ariana is as you know it's called functional medicine which is the science of understanding how the body works as a system and when you're sick you're out of balance and when you're healthy you're inbalance and most chronic diseases are related to some level of imbalance in one of the basic systems in our body so what we have to ask what is it that affects our biology how does disease get created it it's created through stress would you right about food through environmental toxins through allergens microbes like our gut flora and all these things are dynamically interacting and the most powerful thing you can do to ship them is to change what's on your fork it's the most powerful lever you have you know the problems are Global but the solution is as local as your fork and if you shift your approach to thinking about your health by understanding that everything you do with every bite of food you take with every thought you have with every way you are in every moment affects every cell in your body affects every microb that's living in you literally can transform your health very quickly and you begin to actually start to shift disease and we see really remarkable recoveries of people getting rid of diabetes getting rid of autoimmune disease getting rid of uh depression I mean we at Saddleback Church where we did this uh Daniel Plan we had this woman who was you know in any uh depressing in a depressing state for a long time she was in mental hospital she was having a marriage of falling apart she was really not thriving at all and after three days changing her diet she said Dr Heyman is it possible that I could have my depression lift so quickly by simply shifting what I eat and by doing a few simple practices that help me Thrive and she's like I said yes that's what happens we're that close to health and happiness you know it doesn't take long to get sick but it also well I love that because it's such an optimistic message and I know from myself that when I gave up sugar completely and um it's been just absolutely amazing I now um don't even feel like I want to have it you know if it's presented to me that's right even occasionally how much what about your own relationship to Sugar I mean have you given it up completely or you know we're all programmed to love sugar our bodies are designed to love sugar and to crave sugar so when you eat it you want more of it and do I eat it yes I have dark chocolate I my favorite device is dark chocolate almonds but I understand it's a drug you know if you if you're having 152 pounds of sugar a year you're addicted to a right if you're having a soda which has 15 teaspoons of sugar if you don't realize your tomato sauce has more sugar than two cookies or that your morning yogurt has more sugar than a can of soda you're unaware of what's happening but if you understand you know when I have a tequila or a drink I know I'm drinking I know I'm using a drug when I have sugar and so I'm very careful with it and I can enjoy it from time to time it's not that you have to completely eliminate it but you have to reset for 10 days because if you don't then you can't actually break the cycle it's like

well just have one line of coke or just have you know one hit on a crack pipe you know it doesn't work like that you have to really reset and when we understand the biology that is as addictive as cocaine or heroin then we have to come to grips with that and then the movie that I was telling you about the Fed Up which is coming out in May 9th about childhood obesity and about the food industry and about sugar is really calling out this problem that we have to go on a national Sugar Detox and address this problem which is driving so much of the chronic disease and our economic difficulties affecting National Security because kids are too fat to fight affecting our global economic competitiveness because kids are having an achievement Gap where we're like 30s something and 80 something in math and reading I mean these are serious Global problems and we're spreading this across the world we're produced the worst diet on the planet and we're exporting it to every nation and 80% of the world's diabetics now are in the developing world so this is a global problem and the solution yet is very local it's the choices we make that impact what we do and what happens and so if you change your kitchen and your life and your school and your workplace and your family and your church or your faith-based organization it changes everything and it requires though um a lot of messages like this to reinforce going against all the signals and all that is available constantly in front of us it's true in the supermarkets in the fast food stores so I think what everything you are proposing is easy and at the same time it requires a very definite stand against a lot of what our culture makes available to us absolutely you know we know from the data that people for example who live in areas where there's more fast food restaurants and commun stores are much more overweight than people who don't and kids who have availability of more fast food and commun stores are more overweight and you it's possible to change you know as part of this movie I went down to South Carolina to uh place called Easley which is a remote area of South Carolina they had one of the worst Food deserts in America there was a family there that were very overweight they were part of this movie this boy Brady was you know probably 50 60 pounds overweight the mother was probably 100 pounds overweight the father was about 50 pounds overweight and he had dialysis uh and kidney failure at 42 years old and he was going to die but he didn't know how to lose the weight and they lived on food stamps and disability and they had $1,000 for food stamps and dis for food and they were eating everything in fast food restaurants or everything from a factory a box a package or can which was full of trans fats high fructose corn syrup and they couldn't get healthy they thought Diet Mountain Dew was healthy they thought that you know cheit were good because they were baked and not fried they had no idea they were eating peanut butter with trans fats and high fructose corn syrup and so I simply went to their trailer instead of giving them a medical prescription I went to their trailer and I cooked a meal with them I gave them uh a guide from the environmental working group where I'm on the board called good food on a tight budget which helps you eat food that's good for you good for the planet and good for your wallet and I made turkey chili and a salad and roasted sweet potatoes and they loved it and I gave them my cookbook uh this guide and I said you can do this and you have enough money they were in one of the worst Food deserts and they did it the mother lost 90 pounds the son lost over 40 the father lost 45 got a new kidney and it just shows that people with the right information and the right knowledge have the capacity to resist what's out there it's just that most of us don't have the right information and really that's what's so great about the huffing and post it gives a form for communicating ideas that you can't read about anywhere else I mean there it's really democratizes information in a way that is really revolutionized what's happening out there and you know as you know most the media is controlled by large that are influenced by advertising and what's happening it's very difficult to say things that are against the grain and yet you know you give a platform for that which I'm really grateful for well we love working with you and we love seeing the impact you you're making it's so inspiring and to know as you keep stressing that the solutions to all the a lot of the global problems that we are facing are really right in front of us and depend on the simple choices that we make every day and the thing that I love and I want to stress it before we turn the tables and you become the interrogator I want to stress the fact that we are talking about 10 days yes really be able to do anything for 10 days that's right and uh and that's really what is such a cause for optimism and hope um that if we can detox in 10 days and change the triggering mechanisms in our bodies and our minds and have all the steps and the Practical tips that you are offering in the book to sustain this um is just amazing I mean I haven't been as um optimistic b in a long time yeah

well it's powerful you know if we realize that most of us don't realize that our health is so close and then in 10 days you can reset everything and that this is a biological problem most people blame themselves they have guilt and shame you know I can't lose weight I have cravings I can't stop it and it's all about personal responsibility you know we actually blame the victim in this country and say it's your fault you're fat because you don't uh practice moderation you exercise not enough you eat too much so if you just exercise less and exercise more and eat less everything's going to be fine that's an implicit message that blames the victim what I'm saying here is that a lot of the drivers of our eating Behavior are because of the processed food because of the sugar it's hijack our brain chemistry and our hormones and in 10 days you reset all that and you get to have your life back and then you get to decide what to do you get to actually see oh my God I can feel good in just a few days and that's really why I wrote the book because people can do anything for 10 days I love that Mark thank you so much for writing the book and for being such an evangelist um with this message and taking it all over the country I love the fact that you are taking it to churches at to areas where the problem is most acute and thank you so much and we love to continue working together and spread the word I think that's inevitable it is inevitable so now we get to talk about thriving from your point of view which is really important and I think that you know I I um you know read your book and I gave you a quote for the book because it really moved me and last year I was part of your third metric conference in your apartment where we had I don't know a thousand people switched in your apartment it seemed like and we had conversations about what's working and what's not working in our culture what's working about how we live how we work and what we do to take care of ourselves or not and I really you know applaud you for being honest about your own experience and making this personal and talking about how you were a victim also of this constant overdriving success and really measuring success in ways that didn't serve you so you know I think you know when you wrote Thrive you really talked about our need to redefine success Beyond money and power to include things like well-being and wisdom and wonder and giving and I love how you open the book talking about your own personal story how you collapsed from exhaustion in 200 seven and you had a broken cheek and you were in a pool of blood and you went to doctors and had tests and you were just running on empty and I think you know we really want to hear more about how this led to your wakeup call and your shift in your thinking and your way of being around this and actually your inspiration to call all of us to wake up and show up in our lives well thank you Mark um really doctor's waiting rooms um where I was um going through tests like Echo cardiograms and MRIs to see what was wrong with me because you know there was the fear I could have had a brain tumor a heart problem that led to my collapse so doctor's waiting rooms while you are waiting for results are very um key places to ask yourself these questions like what is success what do I value in my life and that's when I started really looking at how if we are going to change what we prioritize in our lives we need to change how we Define success because if we continue to define success there way our culture does in terms of money and power then we will continue making choices that undermine us and as I did and you know by this definition of success I was successful but by any sane definition of success if you're l in a pool of blood you know on the floor of your office you're not successful yeah and that's when I made this distinction between succe succeeding and thriving which is very different that's so great I mean thriving is so important that's what we all want and yet many of us pursue it in ways that take us away from that so we know that stress really impacts our well-being and that's really why I love how you talk about meditation and um you know last night I was at an event in New York at ABC Carpet with deac choer and Tim Ryan who wrote a book called The mindful nation and they talked about how this was not only uh changing the way we think about how we work but they were bringing it to schools sports I think the Seattle Seahawks meditated their way to the Super Bowl uh we know that there were Marines there last night who were talking about how it helped them deal with the traumas of war and how students were able to focus and pay attention and be more present in school and was decreasing conflict and increasing performance in school so how do you see the power of meditation to relieve the stress and bring balance to our lives and how do we bring that into every day to restore what we're doing and tell us more about how you actually do this for yourself so you know what I love about your book and U I do it in Thrive also

is to be very practical you know to give very specific small microscopic steps that people can take right now to change their lives and because if we attempt to do it all at once it becomes overwhelming if we take the small steps it's very doable and very manageable so in at the end of each of the four sections that you mentioned well-being wisdom wonder and giving I have three small steps and um at the end of the well-being section the first step is H unless you are one of the few wise people who get all the sleep they need start by getting 30 minutes more sleep every night and you'll see immediately the transformational impact that has the second step is to start by meditating for five minutes every day and just five minutes where we are quiet with ourselves without any distractions without any smartphones we begin to see the power of reconnecting with ourselves and very often we kind of forget that there is something to reconnect with that's right and for me that's the power of meditation I mean I um I now know that anytime I'm feeling stressed or distracted Ed I can just go to that place that every religion every spiritual teacher and many scientists now yeah have identified as that Center in us that Center of peace and wisdom and strength it's so powerful it's the five minute diet really in five minutes you literally can change your biology you can reconnect with yourself and you change the hormones that are floating through your body you change the brain chemistry that's happening with five simple minutes and the science is so clear on this and the breath is such an easy way to do this and I love that you make it so practical and simple that's what we need and it's and if you say well you know I don't have five minutes then you really need to reexamine your life I think that's key yes now one yeah I think that's a very key point if you don't say if you say you don't have five minutes it means that you've really Fallen victim to that Collective delusion that the way to succeed is by working 247 and you know what I have found um Mark over the last week as I've been talking to audiences around the country I found just how incredibly entrenched is this delusion yeah I was um doing an interview with Opera for Super Soul Sunday that's airing on Mother's Day and Opera said to me you know when I started I would go to bed in my clothes because I was so exhausted I didn't have the energy to take my clothes off yeah and we were talking about the fact she became who she is not because she worked in this obsessive way but because of her talents and gifts and ability to connect with people and we forget that because all around us we have all these role models who overworked we think that there is a correlation between just how crazily they work and how successful they are so I think get getting rid of that delusion by having new Role Models yeah who succeed in ways that are sustainable that nurture ourselves that tap into their own wisdom is going to be essential it's so key I you know I love this quote by Evie white that says you know every day I wake up determined to change the world and have a hell of a good time but that makes planning the day very difficult so you know I think it's thinking about how do you incorporate moments of joy and pleasure in your life and delight and it's really possible I work very hard at it and I know you do too and I think you know you over Christmas did something called the digital detox you talk about important aspect of disconnecting from our constantly connected State you and I both are in that we're both in the world we're both highly connected you know Facebook Twitter all the things that we're doing the media you run a big Media company but you write about it and talk about how important it is to sort of take a pause you know I call it hitting the pause button and uh and I first heard about it from uh one of the CEOs from a large major digital company last year at your third metric conference where she said you know I disconnect and like how do you disconnect you're about a digital company and and you do the same thing and I just love that inspiration and can you tell us more about why you think that's so important well that's actually one of the points um at the end of the wisdom chapter which is um at a certain time at the end of your day turn off all your devices and gently escort them out of your bedroom love that I think this is critical

because we find how many people keep their smartphones by their beds and in the middle of the night they wake up to go to the bathroom whatever and they are tempted to look at their data and I have as you know Mark because you read the book and gave me this lovely quote H 55 pages of end notes scientific end notes yeah that show among other things that when we allow our day life to intrude into our night time for Renewal and restoration we wake up not feeling as recharged and vital and is it really worth it that's so true so I you know I've been amazed um by how when we look at our iPhone say we get all these warnings at 20% of battery remaining 177% of battery remaining we so good at taking care of our smartphones we have little recharging shrines everywhere you know in our offices in our homes but we are so unconscious about when we need recharging and becoming more conscious which is connected to what you are saying becoming more conscious about what you are eating um when we need to recharge ourselves is going to be transformational absolutely I mean I in fact that's one of the things I WR about in the book that I wrote 10day detox is about doing a media fast just for a week 10 days cutting out all the extraneous things from your life that you really don't need to focus on if you need to do it for work rate but if you can do a digital detox it really resets you I mean I try to do this a couple of times in fact after this book tour I just on was you know exhausting I'm going to Costa Rica for four days where there's no phone there's no cell phone coverage there's no internet and I'm going to be completely cut off and it's in the jungle it helps me reset you know I I'm lucky enough I get to do that but it's a powerful way for me to really get back connected to myself so I can be out in the world and do the things that I want to do to change the world and and be a force of good in the world and just even in my own family and the people I love because if you can't connect to yourself and you're connected to everybody else but you're not connected to yourself you really can't love and this is really what it's all about so absolutely um you know one of the things that I got so inspired about was your sort of conversation about the third metric and you gave that talk at Smith last year here I think it sort of inspired you it inspired them it created a spark you created the third metric conference just almost over like a week of thinking about it seem like it was kind of materialized out of nothing and now really it's a movement uh and it's become a whole section of the huffing post and I'd love for you to tell us more about what is the third metric and what does that mean and how do we think about that so the third metric is what goes beyond the first two metrics of success of my money and power and it includes these four pillars well-being you know taking care of ourselves in the course of our work and our lives wisdom connecting with our own inner wisdom because as um Bill Clinton whom I quote in the book said um the biggest mistakes I made in my life I made when I was tired did not specify what mistakes but we can guess important you know for us to make that connection between uh being tired being burnt out and actually making mistakes which end up basically affecting our careers and um and our health so I think recognizing that and recognizing that um contrary to the delusion that uh that through burnout we succeed taking care of our well-being and connecting with our wisdom actually are performance enhancement tools that's right and you mentioned the Seattle Seahawks what I love and that's why I have a whole section about sports in the book is that athletes because all they care about is winning are actually ahead of business people in incorporating sleep healthy eating meditation breathing in into their practices because they can see the incredible impact it has on their performance yeah the other two aspects of the third metric Beyond well-being and wisdom are wonder which is exactly what you're talking about bringing joy into our lives that is for me essential how do we bring joy into our everyday life Joy is not something for the weekend after we do our work we need to find joy in our work in everything we do in every moment and that doesn't mean there

aren't going to be challenges obstacles problems but dealing with whatever life brings us in a way that is more centered and more joyful is key absolutely and the final thing is giving you know we now have a lot of the science that shows that we are wired for giving and that when we give when our pleasure comes from giving a lot of the inflammatory markers that are precursors of disease do I don't do I sound like a doctor I do it's great I love it it's fantastic they actually go down and when our pleasure is what they call honic you know totally about self-gratification and of course life is a mixture of both right but self-gratification pleasure tends to in to see all those inflammatory markers going up so it's just amazing how our genes are wired for giving absolutely you know Gandhi said you know the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others and I wrote a Blog called a guaranteed path to happiness which is about service in fact we know that altruism and giving and service stimulates the same brain receptors as sugar so it's a way to sort of get off the sugar wow is by loving and helping others and it Prof find I mean for me it does I've you know volunteered in Haiti I volunteered in orphanages in India and I I do whatever I can in churches to make a difference and that gives me the most pleasure and more than anything I do that you know brings me an income giving and serving give me the most pleasure and I really focus on it because I know how much it gives me and it really helps me Thrive and I think you know what you're talking about is such an important component of life and you know we know that if you're stressed and tired if you don't sleep it's equivalent to being drunk you know in terms of performance so imagine going through your life drunk and trying to work and learn in school and perform and succeed in your company and to love your partner I mean how can you do that drunk when you're tired and burnt out and stress and you're not thriving forget about it you know what it's so interesting that you said that because it just makes us realize how absurd it is that in a lot of uh corporations people are still praised for working 24/7 which would be the equivalent of saying you know George is amazing he like comes to work drunk every day and we need to celebrate him so that's we need to change the language that we use in um in Corporate America I mean like language like we're killing it we're crushing it that reinforces all these ways of working and living that basically undermine us and undermine our performance absolutely it's so important and you know you're right I mean it's it's such a key issue and you're right the sport Sports athletes are much more focused on this because they use their bodies to achieve results but you know CEOs and entrepreneurs government leaders you know I don't know if they're really hearing these messages and I even you know students in schools and you know they're not quite getting this um how do we sort of get them out of that how do we change these I think 2013 was a turning point because um I write in the book about how many CEOs in 2013 came out not as being gay but as being meditator so suddenly you had um Ray doio the CEO of Bridgewater the biggest hedge fund in the world saying that he's been meditating for over 30 years and considers it um one of the main reasons for his success you had Mark Benny of the Sea of Salesforce saying that he's been meditating for 25 years you had Mark bertolini who was at our conference in my living room talking about how meditation yoga and acupuncture helped him deal with his um injury after he broke his um next ski and uh made them available to his 49,000 employees and broke brought Duke University in to examine the impact and they found a 7% reduction in health care cost and a 69 minute daily Improvement in productivity so that's really what's going to turn things around in Corporate America the fact that we now have a growing number of CEOs and companies H including Etna and um General Ms and Target introduced the stress reduction practices into their workplace it's huge you know Ariana there's $2 trillion dollar lost every year to productivity because of people being at the job but not being on the job it's called presti and it's both related to the level of stress and also their level of Health

connected to what they're eating and I think when we change both of those things in the culture of Corporations we're going to change everything about our world all the things that matter which is happiness which is you know I spent uh 10 days in trekking in Bhutan and they have a gross national happiness index which is what they measure success by I mean that would be great if we started shifting or thinking about how we measure success and that's why this conversation of a third metric is so important and I I'd love to sort of hear more about how you think women are important in this message because I think they have a unique role to play and I think you've spoken at Smith which is a women's college this is where this all came from and there was a reason you did that I'd love to hear your thoughts about how women really can take the lead in this well actually um because the world as it is now was designed by men and um that excludes all the good men like you and the ones I mentioned before women have to take the lead in redesigning it and uh one of the incentives that I have is that women internalize stress differently as you know women in stressful jobs have a 40% greater risk of heart disease and a 60% greater risk of diabetes so we actually cannot afford H to Simply climb the career ladder the traditional male way because the cost that we are paying is enormous and so my message to women everywh is um instead of just saying I want to be at the top of the world with you we need to be saying I want to change the world and men are going to be incredibly grateful to us because Mark you know you treat a lot of this hyper successful men yes who end up with the heart attacks in their 50s and uh um high blood pressure and diabetes and they need to start making the connection between how they define success and the impact that has had on their health I mean how can it possibly be worth it yeah I know it's absolutely true it's not and I think you know that's what strikes me so much when I see world leaders when I see heads of Corporations when I see people who are at the top of their game they're often at the bottom of their game when it comes to their relationships to their health to their happiness to their well-being and it doesn't take very long to shift them if you just incorporate some simple practices it's really about practical real things you can do every day to shift your life from surviving to thriving it's it just makes all the difference so Mark and we've come to the end of our Google Hangout and I want to sort of wrap it up and then I want to ask you for some closing thoughts but I feel that um you know your book and mine are actually um very aligned and they both come out at a time when um we are living through this amazing perfect storm where you can see both the worst examples of burnout stress um bad eating habits and also see the new world being born um with um a lot of people a lot of Corporations um actually acknowledging what needs to be changed and beginning to change it and I'm so excited to be on this journey with you and uh to look at what you're doing and to see how you are helping us get to critical mass faster uh by making it simple for people uh to get of bad habits that are so undermining our health our creativity and our happiness so thank you so much uh for everything you do and thank you for taking part in our Google Hangout and thank you for all your great questions about Thrive thank you Ariana that's great you I just you know someone asked me the other night you know what's my mission in life and I said it's just to relieve needless suffering for millions of people through the power of helping our bodies heal and love and social connections and that's really it's really that simple and if we understand the principles of that you no one gave us the operating manual for our body when we were born and your book is part of that operating manual and it's really about how to thrive and the 10day detox side is a simple guide to how to reset and Thrive again and that's really all I want from people is to understand how close they are to feeling well and to getting their lives back that's beautiful thank you so much and look forward to seeing you at our third metric conference that you and Lori David and Katie kurick are taking part in New York for those of you who to join us H the 24th and 25th of April

thank you Mark thank you I'll see you in a few weeks in a few