Good Stress with Jeff Krasno
Today I'm speaking with Jeff Krasno on the Longevity Optimization Podcast. In this episode, we explore his transformative journey from the music industry to the wellness space, where he shares the profound impact of 9/11 on his life, the founding of Wanderlust, and a personal health crisis that ignited his passion for metabolic health and the concept of good stress. The conversation also touches on the launch of a female health community and the challenges of modern living, emphasizing the need to reconnect with our ancestral roots for better health.
Jeff Krasno is a visionary entrepreneur and wellness advocate, best known for creating the Wanderlust festival, which celebrates mindful living and holistic health. His experiences have shaped his understanding of the challenges posed by modern living, leading him to emphasize the importance of reconnecting with our ancestral roots for improved health. The discussion delves into the impact of modern consumerism on health, particularly through the lens of the footwear industry and its profit-driven motives. Krasno advocates for a mindset shift in how we perceive and respond to stressors, highlighting the physiological responses to stress and the necessity of self-imposed stressors for emotional regulation. The episode concludes with reflections on the misaligned incentives in health and the empowering notion of agency in shaping our health trajectories, along with insights into Krasno's upcoming initiatives in the wellness space.
Follow him on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/jeffkrasno/
Timestamps
04:11 The Journey from Music to Wellness
10:50 Personal Health Crisis and Awakening
15:52 The Launch of a Female Health Community
19:15 Understanding Good Stress and Its Benefits
24:55 The Comfort Trap and Modern Health Challenges
33:30 The Profit-Driven Footwear Industry
34:54 Mindset and the Perception of Stress
36:49 Understanding Stress Responses
40:02 The Challenge of Modern Chronic Stress
43:26 Practices for Emotional Regulation
44:50 Dietary Protocols for Health
49:40 The Power of Cold Water Therapy
52:33 Exploring GLP-1 Agonists and Weight Management
55:27 The Misaligned Incentives in Health
01:00:20 The Age of Agency in Health
01:02:16 Upcoming Book and Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00.270] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Welcome to the Longevity Optimization podcast, where we discuss longevity, optimal health, nutrition, peak performance, cognitive excellence, and so much more. All right, Jeff, it's a pleasure to have you here with me today.
[00:00:13.990] - JEFF KRASNO
Kyla, thanks so much. I really appreciate you having me here.
[00:00:16.770] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
It's such a pleasure. I was on your podcast or doing this fun event in February, All Women's Luminescence event. But you also have another big exciting announcement. You wrote a book.
[00:00:29.490] - JEFF KRASNO
Oh, Man, a book. It's like a pregnancy, although I wouldn't equate it quite to that level. But you know what it's like. It's the gestation period, I guess I would say, for ideas and distilling them and synthesizing them and then getting them out into the world and then getting your book deal and all of that stuff. It feels like it's a long time coming. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it.
[00:00:54.740] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, of course. Well, you've been in this industry for a super long time, right? Give the listeners just a rundown. How did you get into it? What made you become so passionate about it?
[00:01:06.890] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, it's a strange entree into health and wellness. It really started with 9/11. And Why? I'm a refugee of the music industry, really. I grew up playing music. I'm in a super musical family. My brother's a professional guitarist of some repute. And I was running a record label in a management company down by the World Trade Center in Lower New York, in Tribeca. Then that event happened, and we were in this tiny little perimeter, in that three or four block perimeter around what became Ground Zero. We couldn't access our office for a number of months. Then finally, we got back in and it was just inundated with soot and ash and every nook and cranny. And sometimes, colossal events like that really inspire people to do cookey crazy things. And my wife was one of those people. And so above my office, she opened a yoga studio literally out of the ashes of 9/11. This was called Kula yoga project. So kula in sanskrit translates as community or intentional community. That's what it became quite quickly for the grief stick and beleager denisons of Lower Manhattan. This was not at all like the Tony Equinox yoga studio.
[00:02:43.310] - JEFF KRASNO
This was a cockeyed one-room yoga studio, four flights of lime green stairs. The bathroom was actually in the studio. It was like the width of a bread box, and there was a radiator whistling in the corner all the time. I remember we used to try to actually pitch our homes at the beginning and end of class with the radiator. This was just right upstairs from my office. My wife had been a yoga practitioner for a long time, but this was her first swing at a community enterprise, is what she called it. I got a front row seat to seeing the power of yoga and sweat and really community, the power of those things to heal. I would linger up in this tiny little vestibule outside of the yoga studio about the size of this room. There was a futon on the floor where people would collapse after class. You'd see all these yogis emerge open-hearted, open-minded, and then go up on this little futon. And again, this was right in the aftermath of 9/11. I think she opened in January, February, 2002, and people were still just shaken, especially the people that lived right there.
[00:04:13.510] - JEFF KRASNO
And I saw these people heal, Kayla, in front of my very eyes. I saw them laugh and share their stories and cry and hug. And I was like, wow, this is This is powerful. That bent really the arc of my professional and personal life. From this little studio, she started leading these retreats to Costa Rica, to the Osa Peninsula. This It was fairly rare back then. Now Costa Rica, it like tipped, jumped the shark a little bit. And I would bump along in the name of yoga. I wasn't really a practitioner per se, but I would go on these retreats and it would be like, 27 millennial women, two gay guys and me, basically. We'd bump off in a puddle jumper, and then in the back of a truck, and we'd go out to this amazing eco-paradise. There we were, getting up with the sun, surfing, meditating, practicing, cooking, and then also hanging out at night. It wasn't overly sanctimonious. People were drinking just enough wine or tequila, and there with all sorts of titulating hookups in the bushes. I mean, it's just like fun stuff and storytelling and music playing. And I was like, wow, these are people that are really fully living.
[00:05:43.480] - JEFF KRASNO
They're embodied being true vitality. I mean, you would see these people often from urban areas, from Chicago and from New York, they'd show up, and three days later, they'd be like jungled out. And then it was It was really there in the middle of the rainforest in Costa Rica that I had what I, in retrospect, call a incredibly male idea, which was, how can I scale this? As if this little immersive, intimate thing was not enough. That was really the provenance of Wanderlust. I was like, if we could make this more affordable, more accessible for people, put it somewhere in North America, or I should say in America, in the United States, in beautiful places, not the rainforest, but these beautiful mountainsides, could we really, literally create a bigger tent for this practice and all of the different lifestyle modalities that went with that practice. This was the idea for Wanderlust, and that propelled me on a long, cookey, jagged, crazy upside-down journey of creating what became the largest series of wellness events in the world. We started with one in Lake Tahoe. We invited all the biggest yoga teachers. We essentially created little mini yoga lebrities.
[00:07:21.610] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, I believe that. Which put them on stages with sound systems and really celebrated it. I have a lot of misgivings And we had a lot of feelings in retrospect about some of that, to be candid, but maybe that's a different podcast. But the intention was really good, and we brought together a tremendous amount of community. By 2016, we had 68 annual events in 20 countries, and that was insane. That was crazy. And I dutifully delivered three X chromosomes during that period. So I had three daughters that grew up within that mayhem, and we were just a traveling circus pretty much all year, traveling band of hags. You ever see the cartoon peanuts? It's that character that's always in a dust. Oh, the messy one. Yeah. It's a I was always in a dust cloud. That was basically us. I call it my estrogen footprint. It's like we were just always that chaos going from location to location. But it was a really exciting and vibrant time in my life. But, sadly, that journey into health and wellness took a weird personal turn into what I call wealth and wellness. For me personally. I was traveling 200 days a year.
[00:08:50.230] - JEFF KRASNO
I was not eating well. I had wicked, wicked, wicked insomnia. And that started to manifest into all of these different chronic conditions. You know, brain fog and chronic fatigue and dad bod and dynacomastia, which is a technical term, which you probably know. Definitely an insult to my vanity, those people listening can just look it up. And yeah, that really hit its nadir in like 2018, 2019, I exited from Wanderlust at that point, somewhat acrimoniously, candidly. And then our mutual friend, I can't remember when I exactly met Casey means, but anyways, I got into putting a little continuous glucose monitor on my triceps. And lo and behold, check engine light was on. I was at the very, very upper end of the prediabetic range, the lower end of the diabetic range. I think my fasting glucose was about 130 milligrams per deciliter with Swiss Alps-like spikes, postprandially up to like 250, 280. And that's where I was. And then I was like, whoa. And what's up? I'm the yoga guy, and I'm living in this nightmare of the chronic disease epidemic. I was right in the middle of that, even though I shopped at Whole Foods and I tried to huff it out on the treadmill every day, and I was paying my taxes and raising my kids and doing all the right things.
[00:10:33.910] - JEFF KRASNO
But so that's when I hit the wall, and I had to take a deep look at myself and do a lot of psychological and physiological inventory. And that really propelled me on the next chapter of my journey.
[00:10:50.180] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Well, I learned a few new things there.
[00:10:52.090] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, long answer.
[00:10:53.350] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah. Well, I see you still have a glucose monitor on. How is that looking these days?
[00:10:57.490] - JEFF KRASNO
I wear it more for Hawthorn effect, almost than anything, which is essentially the idea that under observation, a subject will behave differently. Even under my own observation, it keeps me in check. I don't actually look at it as much as I did. I was pretty fundamentalist about it at the beginning, as I probably should have been, although I am a little bit of a neurotic Jew, so I was checking it every five minutes. But then I was like, oh, what's it like now? Oh, pretty much the same. But then I got more curious about it. I'm sure people, your listeners, are probably pretty hip to the continuous glucose monitor or the CGM, but essentially it measures your glucose moment to moment through this little interstitial fluid, and it pops this to an app, and you can have a little dashboard into your metabolic health. I would look at it a lot. I'd be like, oh, that's interesting. Blueberries spike me, particularly if I don't have a bolus of protein or fiber first. So I started to use it to cadence my eating more intelligently. And why am I spiking in the morning after a sauna?
[00:12:19.710] - JEFF KRASNO
And then they did a lot of research in that. That felt that's actually quite okay and natural, and that will bounce back. So it just became a really a great tool for me, particularly given where I was. And then, yeah, I started to adopt all these different protocols that then really, really changed my metabolic health around.
[00:12:44.820] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
What a good feeling, right?
[00:12:46.770] - JEFF KRASNO
What's that?
[00:12:47.300] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
What a good feeling.
[00:12:48.000] - JEFF KRASNO
I know. And it's not too late. I mean, we think of health in downward spirals often, but lo and behold, the gospel, the good news, upward spirals are also possible.
[00:13:02.680] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Absolutely. I mean, I do like an insane amount of labs, and that's the most comforting part is that, let's say you were doing a lot of frequent labs before that, you would have saw the trajectory, whether or not your doctor told you, because the amazing thing about Western medicine is all of a sudden, you don't have type 2 diabetes and you don't have it and you don't have it. The next visit you do. No, we saw what was happening the entire time.
[00:13:29.460] - JEFF KRASNO
I know. It was crazy. And candidly, it's very funny. I was, again, quite neurotic about anything remotely medical. I would use any excuse to cancel my annual appointment with my PCP. It's like, okay, I've got to sure I'll pick up the kids, go to soccer practice and take them to dance. And now, of course, I want to wear a white coat five years later, provided that it's nicely fitted. But yeah, I became very conscious very quickly. And that was a really completely changed my life around. My story is candidly one of the most ordinary on some level, because the conditions that I had, all the ones that I have for mentioned, like rain fog and chronic fatigue and excess adiposity and low energy and irritability and inability to concentrate and my need to check my phone every 2 seconds, all that stuff, That's essentially everybody now. I mean, we have normalized the abnormal. My PCP, like you said, they're like, Oh, yeah, your hemoglobin A1c is like 5.4, and then it's 5.7. Then I'm finally put this on and I went in and it was like 6.2, 6.3. They're like, oh, yeah, well, that was the trend, but you didn't really fall into the diabetic range.
[00:15:12.700] - JEFF KRASNO
I'm like, What? It's like, what about instead of letting me get the disease and then treat me with metformin or whatever Ozempic, how about I just don't get the disease? We start to concentrate on the modalities that will actually keep me metabolically healthy from the beginning. I know.
[00:15:34.420] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I know. So frustrating. Yeah. Hi. We're taking a short break from the podcast to discuss a new community that I have launched. I want to preface this by saying that I will continue to post content on my social platforms and conduct interviews on this podcast that are both free and applicable to both sexes. But as a woman, I have unique insights and perspectives on female health. I recently launched my first ever paid offering, and this This is a female-only health optimization and longevity community. If you are a male, you can skip this portion of the podcast or you can forward this information to a female that you think would be interested. I set out to create the most valuable longevity optimization community for women. I have spent over the last decade dedicating my life to human optimization and have dived deep into the female-specific optimization and protocols. This is a place I want you to learn everything you need to know about optimization your health, longevity, and mindset. I made this a community only for women because I wanted us to be able to be open, which I didn't feel could be done in the comment section of my Instagram.
[00:16:40.880] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I also love the idea of women sharing protocols of what's working best and everybody within the community can offer valuable insights to each other and support. Members get weekly and bi weekly Ask Me Any Things, exclusive content and protocols like articles, videos, and a whole host of courses. And you'll receive up to date, Female Longevity is Science. You'll also get community and connection with like-minded women, access to virtual and in-person events with me, and your membership will help support female human studies in the very near future. You can learn more about this membership on my website, kailabarns. Com. We'll also fast forward now, see if this amazing platform, Commune. And I mean, all my friends, all your friends have been on it. We're going to do a course.
[00:17:30.320] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, I'm so exciting. I'm so excited about it. And what you've built here is truly exceptional and amazing. Yeah, just blown away. Well done.
[00:17:41.740] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Thank you. But we'll just give a couple of notes about it because I think it's an amazing platform that people should know about.
[00:17:46.550] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah. Well, candidly, you just heard a lot of my personal journey. Yes, I wanted the... I started the platform with the intention of helping people, but really it was also about helping myself.
[00:18:00.210] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah.
[00:18:00.780] - JEFF KRASNO
And so it was my own personal journey that was also reflected in my professional life. And yeah, so we built this platform, which as an elevator pitch, I suppose it's the master class for well-being. We have essentially every functional and integrative medicine doctor of note, tons of health experts, yoga, mindfulness, QiGong, regenerative farming, just anything the broadest definition of well-being. That was how we were thinking about it. We've been just so incredibly fortunate to work with just some of the most incredible people from Gabor Mathe to Mark Hyman. Sarah Godfried and Casey Means and so many of the people that have bent the arc of my health journey, and now you.
[00:18:52.210] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I know. I'm so excited. It is. And yeah, it's such a great platform. I love the feel of it and the education It's amazing. But your book is on good stress. I think most people, I get it, right? But most people think all stress is bad. Is that the case?
[00:19:15.160] - JEFF KRASNO
No. In fact, we evolved with stress. That's really the question I began to ask myself when I was pretty sick was, how did I evolve? How did this incredible organism evolve in relationship to its environment? And I started to think about that very question. We actually evolved with all sorts of Paleolithic stress. But this stress was generally acute and very short term. It actually conferred a tremendous amount of benefit. It activated longevity pathways, it activated resilience. It kept our body composition in good form. And I'm talking about things like, calorie scarcity. We evolved to actually be a little bit fat in the fall. Fruits would become ripe in the fall. We would gorge upon them. Our bodies would do what they were designed to do, which was store a little bit of extra fat because it knew that the paucity of calories associated with winter's fallow was literally just around the corner. Then we would need to shift from using glucose as a substrate for energy to fat and oxidize fat in our body. But of course, now when you come to the modern age, winter never comes, right? I mean, quote, unquote. It's just like we are inundated with a surfeit of nutrient-efficient, shelf-stable calories as a product of this military-industrial food complex.
[00:21:01.960] - JEFF KRASNO
We just keep eating and our body just does what it's supposed to do. It just keeps storing fat. That's why you have essentially like a 45% obesity rate in the United States. All of these things, we evolved with the stress of exposure to fluctuations in temperature. We have an internal thermostat in their hypothalamus that is engineered for homeostasisasis. It's like you get really cold, what does your body do? It thermoregulates and warms it up. You get really hot, what does your body do? It activates perspiration and sweating. I mean, we are incredibly designed for that. But now we don't use our internal thermostat. We use the nice handy digital one on the wall of the den. In fact, we don't need to even get up to turn it on. It learns our own behavior, and it keeps us at this thermo-regulated 72 degrees, which is awfully comfortable, but it makes poor use of our biology, of our engineering. And not only that, it actually hijacks its functionality. We become less resilient, we become less metabolically active. And you can go down the line with so many of these things. I wear these Vivo barefoot shoes.
[00:22:20.290] - JEFF KRASNO
They're wide, toe boxed and thin-soled. Why? Because they mimic more or less how we evolved. We evolved with very very, very minimal shoe wear or footwear. I mean, we did make shoes and make love. That was probably the first couple of things we ever did as humans. But they were made from sage brush bark or if you lived in a high latitude, maybe like rain deer hoofs or something. But essentially, we have all of this incredible biomechanical design in our feet. We have 26, I think it's like 26 bones and 33 joints and hundreds of thousands of nerve endings and tons of musculature. Then in the modern age, what do we do? We wrap them up in plastic and vinyl and high heels. And what How does that do? It's essentially akin to putting your arm in a cast. What happens when you put your arm in a cast, right? Yeah, weekends. Weekends, right? We look at the rate of sarcopenia, or I should say falls, and then because our feet are so weak because we don't have good musculature there. We don't have good proprioception because essentially we've made them numb. And then we get a little bit weaker with age and with sarcopenia because we're not...
[00:23:42.340] - JEFF KRASNO
We're also living sedentary lifestyles. And then we fall and we break a hip, and then we're dead within a year. So this is... So as I started to identify all these places where I had gotten soft and where culture had essentially hijacked my own engineering. My thesis was this, is that chronic disease is the result of chronic ease. Our lives today have been essentially engineered for convenience and comfort. That leads to really a lot of inconvenient truths and a lot of candidly discomfort in the long run. Good stress really is about self-imposing those Paleolithic stressors with which we evolved and doing it deliberately and intelligently and making the best of our engineering. We can talk about what some of these protocols are, but I've identified a growing panoply of protocols that I have experimented with personally that I slowly integrated into my life. They played a big part of essentially what I think of as realigning the way I live with the way I was designed.
[00:25:02.380] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I love that. I always try to think about how can I be more like our ancestors? Obviously, there's only going to be so much because we're over here living in Los Angeles. It's not like the exact same thing. But what habits can I do to bring it back, even as I've even taken my nutritional journey? I mean, now I'm so much more focused on regenerative, but also seasonal, right? Because we weren't supposed to just eat all the things all the No, I mean, now you can literally in the palm of your hand on a whim order like a summer squash in the middle of winter.
[00:25:38.730] - JEFF KRASNO
It doesn't make any sense. And if only that's what we were ordering, generally we're ordering like Chick-fil-A or McDonald's, But so, I mean, 100 %. We used to just eat what was available to us. We were opportunistic omnivores, more or less. We ate 800 different kinds of seeds and tubers and roots and vegetables. And when we were lucky and Kayla's stone-tipped spear found the belly of an ungulate or something, we'd eat some nice lean wild game and get some good protein. Obviously, we would eat when the fig trees ripened in the late summer and early fall, we would gorge on figs. We've gotten so far away, again, from how we ancestrally lived. It's very hard to keep time and perspective, but this is how we lived, not for just 100 years or 200 years. This is how we lived for 10 of thousands of years as Homo sapiens, probably 200,000 years, more or less. Then as homodid before that, millions of years. We evolved involved in relationship to our environment. It's only been the last really 75 years since this military-industrial food complex, or you can go back to the late 1800s, in the industrial revolution where we started to become more sedentary, et cetera, and have office jobs and not be outside as much and change our food patterns a little bit.
[00:27:28.840] - JEFF KRASNO
But It's really only in the last 70 years that we've fallen into what I call the comfort trap, and it just has gotten worse. I just recently recorded this project for Audible called The Comfort Trap. It was really interesting to see if we just hover over obesity, for a minute. Rates of obesity were actually very, very low until pretty recently. It was three in the United States in 1900. Then we had the dust bowl due to whatever changes in climate, but also poor agricultural practices. We had the depression, So there was not a lot of food. And obesity rates were very, very low through the mid '40s and into the early '50s. And then we literally took the products of World War II and put them into this industrial concept of farming, like ammonium nitrate, which we used in World War II to make TNT and explosives. We literally took ammonium nitrate and we put it because we had a surplus at the end of World War II, and we put it into the soil because the soil loves nitrogen. And so the short term impact of that was like, woo, party, let's grow rank on rank corn and wheat and sorghum and soy.
[00:28:59.250] - JEFF KRASNO
But basically what became these cash crops. And short term, that was great. But obviously long term, that decimated the soil, the microbial life, the microrisa, and started to desiccate the soil. And so there wasn't proper aeration in the soil, so the soil can retain water. Of course, it got worse over time. You had to add more chemical fertilizers and then glyphosate and et cetera. So I'm sure you've had plenty of people talk about all these kinds of things. But what that's led to is the food supply today, which is essentially could be categorized as ultra-processed and refined. I mean, we're getting 75, 80 % of our calories on average from these foods. The result is actually expected. It's not like a surprise result.
[00:29:56.220] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I agree.
[00:29:58.140] - JEFF KRASNO
It's like Gábor Maté uses this really great analogy. He's like, if you took a stem cell or any cell, like bacterial cell, and you put it in a petri dish and you put luscious carbon and nitrogen and actually fed the petri dish really well, well, then that cell would likely proliferate and be very healthy. But what if you put some caustic substance in there? If you put bleach or alcohol, the normal expectation for that cell would be it would weather and die. Well, you call that biological medium, you call it a culture. So what if you put humans in a culture of ultra-processed food, of loneliness, of temperature neutrality, of all of these conditions of modernity, the natural unexpected result is a deceased human. So what we're doing, we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be surprised by it. We are literally choosing the way that we die in the 21st century and not with tremendous thoughtfulness.
[00:31:05.860] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I agree. I mean, sometimes for me, I feel so removed because I have quite a small group of friends that are all incredibly passionate about help. Are we doing it.
[00:31:17.030] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah.
[00:31:17.980] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
It's wild because I've thought through and wrote down before what I have come to understand the average day is. It's like, wake up exhausted because you didn't go to bed, right? You let Netflix steal your whole night's sleep. Yeah. You're groggy and you're groggy and you're angry. And then you grab a processed carb to help to just get an energy burst. And then you go to your box of your car and then yell at people on the road. And you're mad. But I'm getting to the office, already exhausted. And you do some little computer work in a cubicle with a junk light and take your lunch break and do another highly processed carb and sit back in your chair. It's just throughout the entire day, go home and traffic, angry again, grab a beer, no neurotoxin alcohol with a really poor dinner, and then you just sit on a couch. It's like, that is so not what we were made to do. That is not the best life for us.
[00:32:23.560] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah. I mean, it seems convenient and comfortable from the outside. It's like, and I get humans do crave some degree of comfort. It's like when we discovered how to master fire, that was a boon for humanity in a lot of different ways. But just this ability to stay warm from some endogenous source, okay, great. But of course, as humans are apt to do, we've taken it all way too far. We're essentially always seeking out convenience and comfort, and it's had incredibly detrimental impacts. And I think the day in the life that you just described is all too common, really. And candidly, you just described more or less me, the way I was. Okay. I was going to say. No, not now. But I was the way I was. And I'm fairly educated about these things. But modernity has a way of sucking you in. In some ways, this has been engineered in the name of profit. It's like the fancy new Adidas sneakers that kids are lining up down the street for. They're made all of petrochemicals, and they undermine, as I say, all of the mobility muscle is shown the feet, but they also are made for unbelievable profit.
[00:33:58.580] - JEFF KRASNO
I mean, they cost like a to make, and then they're selling for hundreds of dollars sometimes, and they make 24 billion shoes every year. 24 billion shoes. I mean, I couldn't believe that number when I read it. 300 million shoes just in the United States end up in a landfill every year in the name of comfort and style and fashion and convenience. This is the whole point of good stress. Yeah, sure. It's taking the stairs instead of the escalator. It's rucking your groceries. It's little things day in and day out. But more it's like a mindset is that I need to live my life in accordance, in harmony with my design. Yeah.
[00:34:50.150] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
That was the next question, actually, mindset that I was going to ask you, because I think I have a feeling that people, they don't We had to do the hard thing for a few reasons. A, it's just hard. Our brains weren't naturally wired to do the hard things for long periods of time. But what about the way that you see stress? I'll tell you how I see stress and why I think that's put me where I am at today. I've always had this attitude of an I get to. I've had incredibly, let's say, stressful times. I spent the ages of 17 years old, up until now, working. I used to work 80 our work weeks. Very similar to you. I was building something. I didn't come from much, and I knew it was going to take this optimized being, this optimized version of myself. But there were very few, if any, times that I was feeling bad for myself because of that. I was so excited because I got the opportunity to be in this stressful situation. I started to run a business that was like my dream business. I started doing all the things, but I always had that vision.
[00:35:57.630] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I wake up every day People look at my routine and they are like, This is totally insane. This has to be like your whack-a-doo, and this is just too much. But no, for me, it's like, I get to. This doesn't have to be that, but it just within me thing. How do people start changing their perceptions around how they see stress.
[00:36:18.550] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, I mean, stress needs a new PR agent for sure, right? I mean, and of course, mostly people associate, for good reason, stress with chronic stress. Yeah. So, okay, we're up here in the hills. Have you ever gone for a walk up here and run into a coyote?
[00:36:36.410] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I have. Yeah.
[00:36:37.890] - JEFF KRASNO
And what's the natural biological bottom up response when you run into that coyote?
[00:36:44.090] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
The first time Yes, it was... Oh, yeah. But then it's mild, and then it was friendly.
[00:36:49.860] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, it's like, oh, my friend, the coyote. But the first time, I remember I was actually on a path right up there, and I'm pointing out towards the Hollywood sign, and I got my felt between a deer and a coyote. Oh, my gosh. That wasn't a great place to be. But here's my point, is that, okay, you have a natural bottom up involuntary response, a stress response that's actually totally adaptive and serves the biological imperative to survive. That's totally cool. Your respiratory rate and your heart rate quickens. Glucose goes to your extremities. You're ready to fight or fly. You get the aperture of your tension gets really tight. Your pupils might dilate. You start to become very distrustworthy of the world around you. You become very self-obsessed. Then what happens? The coyote is like, Oh, Kayla looks nice, and she's not going to be at lunch, and he like, lopes off. And then what have your body does what it does. It regulates, it bounces, bounces back to the middle. It goes back to homeostasis, right? You go back into your parasympathetic system and all your gut vasodilates, and you start to reactivate the neo-mammalian part of your brain, all of this good stuff.
[00:38:06.700] - JEFF KRASNO
That's what's supposed to happen. But for most people in modern life, it's like the coyote never really leaves. And I'm playing this out as a metaphor, of course, but many of us are just glued to our phones, to texts and emails and notifications and social media that is algorithmically prefenced to serve you up content that will stimulate and trigger that same human negativity bias that the coyote does. You're always in an amygdala hijacked state. We just had an election in this country. For the last year, we've been served up content that is specifically designed to either put us in a state of fear or in a state of outrage. If you're always triggered that way, you are always releasing some form of stress hormone that is undermining your gut health, that is undermining your ability to rationally process thoughts. I mean, it's undermining your immune system. It can actually give you diabetes if you really want to play it out physiologically, like the super overpresence of cortisol, which will trigger glucose, which will trigger insulin. Over time, that will create a resistance to itself, and you become insulin resistant, and then you can suck up glucose into your mitochondria for energy production.
[00:39:35.850] - JEFF KRASNO
But you'll get someone else to talk about that. But really, this is the reality of modern chronic stress. We need to actually... The things that we actually need to do to unwind that and untangle ourselves from modern chronic stress are actually seeing seemingly stressful in and of themselves. Sitting down and meditating, it's actually really freaking hard at the beginning. It's really hard. Getting into an ice plunge, I mean, that if you've never done it before, that's really, really hard. Even for me, and I do it every day, it's still really, really hard.
[00:40:21.810] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah. Cold plunge doesn't really get that much easier.
[00:40:24.820] - JEFF KRASNO
Not that much easier. I mean, you can continue to go in longer durations and lower temperatures If you want to keep progressing. But this engagement of self-imposed, deliberate stress, actually, what it does is that it trains your body to be able to emotionally regulate. Because getting into an ice plunge and that first biological bottom-up response, that thing, that's exactly like into the coyote in some ways, or it's exactly like seeing the latest thing that Trump did or the latest thing that Kamal Harris did or whatever. It's essentially it's the same biological response. But if you go into an ice plunge every day, then you have this opportunity. After that first initial reaction, you have that opportunity to put conscious top-down pressure on top of involuntary bottom-up response. Sometimes you do that through conscious breath. Sometimes you can do that through just leveraging your prefrontal cortex, and you push that stress down. These kinds of good stress protocols, they actually punctually regulate other parts of your life such that you can emotionally regulate when someone flips you off in traffic or when you get someone insults you on Instagram or when you get served up a piece of news that's designed to to enrage you.
[00:42:01.140] - JEFF KRASNO
You're just like, use that same technique that you use when you get into a 45-degrees punch. It's the same thing. I mean, I'm getting all this dental work done now. I hate the dentist, Kayla. I mean, there's very few things I actually hate more than the dentist. But when I see that appointment with Dr. Nicki, bless her soul, she's a wonderful, beautiful dentist. You I double down on my ice punch routine three or four days before because that experience of Dr. Nicki standing above me with a twelve-inch syringe that's about to enter the most sensitive part of my body, my mouth, that sensation is not that dissimilar, again, from getting into an ice punch or some other adversity mimetic. And so what I mean, there's obviously metabolic impacts of ice plunging, and there's dopamine, and mood regulation, and all these things I'm sure you've talked about a ton here on the show. But I find that the most potent impact for me was the emotional regulation capability that I got from that self-imposed short-term acute stress.
[00:43:24.100] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I love that. So what are some of your top practices? And then how do people get started, if this is totally new to you, how would you start?
[00:43:33.460] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, ease into it. You don't run a marathon the first time you go running. Although, with a caveat here, the first time I did get into an ice plunge, Wim Hof came and stayed in Topanga for three weeks, and he had a commercialized delivery every morning come, and a commercial wine delivery come a night. But that's a different story. He got the plunge right at 33 degrees, 34 degrees. It was basically ice. I would not recommend that for anybody. I would say these protocols are to be eased into. I think it was Paracelsus, he was like a Swiss physician. He said, The dose makes the poison, right? You don't want hyperthermia and you don't want hypothermia. You want to push the edges slowly to allow your body to to adapt and then bounce back to center. That's all about balance. It's all about your body's ability to come back to the middle. That's what health is for me.
[00:44:38.740] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah.
[00:44:39.530] - JEFF KRASNO
With that said, okay, let's look at a few different protocols. These are the ones that were probably the most key to me. I was 210 pounds. I got down to 142. That was too much. Subsequently, I put on more muscle, but this was that My weight loss all happened in six months or so. And there was a protocol stack that I just kept tinkering with that just was like, explosive for me. I love that for you. What's that? I love that for you. Yeah, it It was a epic time in my life, and my wife was like, whoa. You look like you're 22 from the neck down, anyways. So So for me, it was easing into a fasting protocol. And that started like not even 16:08. I mean, it started maybe 14:10, which is when you really examine it with any rigor, fairly easy. But when you really look at how, if you're really honest about how you're living and how most people are living, we're putting something in our mouth like 16 hours a day, a lot of people, even me, back in those days. Society essentially engineers it that way. If you go down the hill and you go to a Denny's or something, I don't think you're probably doing that too often.
[00:46:13.220] - JEFF KRASNO
No. But they have breakfast all day, lunch, dinner, and late night. There's four meals a day. That's what the typical American diet looks like. And so we're eating all the time. The first thing is consolidating all of my consumption of food eventually into an eight-hour window. And I was fundamentalist about it once I got going. Now it's like I play with the edges of it because I want to be friendly and have dinner with you or something. So I might eat a little bit around the edges. But at the beginning, I was pretty fundamentalist about it. Because of my particular issues, and because I think a lot of people are suffering from diabetes or prediabetes, I think we're up to 50, 55% of the country now is in that prediabetic range. 90% of those people don't even know it. I was one of those people. If you're prediabetic, you want to have some regulation of carbohydrate intake. Certainly, you want to eliminate your ultra-processed foods, but your refined grains and starches, you really just want to pull way, way back on that. What I developed, what I call more of a keto biotic or ketitarian diet at the beginning, it was fairly plant-focused, but certainly as I matured, I started to integrate more healthy proteins, and we could talk about that.
[00:47:44.820] - JEFF KRASNO
But Essentially, for me, it was like low glycemic diet. And so that was number one in combination with a 16-8 fasting protocol. So really what I was trying to do was really just lower glucose levels. And that was very effective, the combination of those two things. Now, obviously, like fasting, you're not going to necessarily lose weight with fasting. I mean, you could eat 20 pints of Chunky Monkey in a very short period of time. I mean, that would be hard to eat 20 pints, but you know what I mean? Yeah. But generally, if you're paying attention to and you become a disciple to a practice or modality, you're probably going to make better decisions about what you eat, and certainly I did. So weight loss was a component of that. And then there's all of these other associated biological processes, some of which really are more available with longer fasts, but I'm sure you've gone quite deep into autophagy and mitophagy and AMPK activation, which will stimulate autophagy, but also activate these sirtuin proteins that protect your DNA, et cetera. There's all of these other components to it. But what I found was the most obvious benefit for me was I just became way more metabolically flexible.
[00:49:14.140] - JEFF KRASNO
I could essentially shift like a preis between burning fat for energy and burning glucose for energy and get into mild states of ketosis. Okay, so I started to see really great benefits with that. The of accelerator was when I stacked this ketotarian approach and the fasting approach with the cold water therapy approach. And we may have talked about this offline before, but essentially what I would do would be mid to late morning before I would break my fast, I would ice plunge. Now, why would I do that? Well, I had a low glycemic diet and I was minimizing carbs, and then I was not eating for 16 hours, so let's say I was 15 and a half hours into not eating, I would have very, very little blood glucose. I'd be down to 75, 80 for a deciliter, maybe even lower. It would be some natural rise in the morning, but with cortisol, but pretty low. Then I would get into the ice plunge. And what would happen? Well, my core body temperature would plummet and my body would do what it's engineered to do, which is to bring it back up into the globiumxone around 98.6. So it would have to thermo-regulate.
[00:50:33.610] - JEFF KRASNO
So we go into this process of thermogenesis and make heat. But in order to make heat, it needed an energy substrate in order to do that. So it's like, okay, my My bronzacondria and my brown fat would be looking around and be like, okay, let's see, what do we got here? We got any glucose around? And I don't see much glucose around. So what are we going to do? We're going to oxidize fat. We're going to break down triglycerides in your adipose tissue into ketones or free fatty acids for the purpose of making energy to make heat to therm regulate and bring your body temperature back up. So I would do that ice bath before I would break my fast, I would get out. I'd let myself shiver And I won't say you could just watch the fat melt off, but pretty much. I mean, I lost a lot of weight in that period, 65, 70 pounds.
[00:51:25.940] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
And you weren't on Ozempic?
[00:51:27.460] - JEFF KRASNO
No. This is natural Ozempic. Right here. I just gave you the formula for natural Ozempic. And then, of course, I'm still on the natural form of it. Yeah, me too. And you have to be, Because if you go off Ozempic, what happens? It's very... Your basal metabolic rate is going to be so compromised. You probably will have lost quite a bit of muscle at that point, too, that it's very, very easy to put weight back on if you're going to be on Wegovy or Ozempic. And that's a whole other conversation, which I'd actually be really interested in having it with you at some point, because I'm reading more and more about GLP-1 agonists, like beyond the first couple and it's pretty interesting what's going on beyond just appetite suppression and gastric emptying and all this stuff. It's mostly focused on dopamine regulation in the brain. It's really interesting. And just to pull on it for a second, there's a really pretty good article in the New York Times recently about people, because it's regulating dopamine in such a way, it's actually changing people's taste buds in a way. It's like people aren't getting the same motivation, reward, dopamine system impact from Twinkies and ultra-processed foods because essentially Actually, there's something going on with the GLP-1 agonists that are essentially downgrading dopamine production.
[00:53:08.230] - JEFF KRASNO
So it has been actually pretty helpful at getting people not only just to lose weight, but also to change their food habits. And so anyway, so there's something interesting to pull on in there. It's very easy to villainize Ozempic. I do it most of the time because there's so many other ways at healthy body composition and weight management.
[00:53:31.710] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I think it can be super useful, right? I mean, we need it, unfortunately. Do I think people have an Ozempic deficiency? Of course not. Have I ever taken Ozempic? I have not. But just like you said, I know all so many of these tools that can get you back. Also, when you're paying attention to it a ton, you see those changes. For me, it's a non-negotiable. I want to be able to fit into the same pants that I wore in high school for the rest of my life, minus pregnancy and then some time after that. But that's just, and I'm not saying that's right. I'm just saying that's how I think about it. But I think that they're saving lives. And I've also done some interesting podcasts with people on more of these nuances is like other potential benefits.
[00:54:17.300] - JEFF KRASNO
Well, it seems to be effective for treating alcoholism and other drug addictions for the same reason because it downregulates dopamine. So That is useful knowing plenty of people that have had serious addictions, that can be pretty useful. Obviously, the people that have very, very acute weight issues. I think what happens I was like, where you get into this problem is really the misaligned incentives that exist really between the pharmaceutical industry, these pharmacy benefit managers, insurers, and then big food, and what's happening there around that structure, which is a really fascinating and interesting structure. We don't necessarily have to talk about that, but I've always wondered, how do insurers pay for Wegovy and Ozempik? And finally, I did enough research to actually understand what's going on there. But the problem here is that, of course, then you're on a drug for life and you're making other people rich. Instead of being able to really have a really just vibrant and vital life by living in concert with your biology and your design.
[00:55:51.170] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I love that.
[00:55:52.460] - JEFF KRASNO
But to finish that last bit, that stack, that protocol stack of a keto-focused diet, an intermittent fasting protocol, and the cold water therapy, that little trifecta, that was physiologically huge for me.
[00:56:10.130] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
And I mean, obviously you lost a lot of weight, but I mean, did you feel amazing? I mean, that back, your brain was probably just turned on, like no more brain fog. I feel great. Natural energy. I feel like so many people don't know what feeling good actually feels like.
[00:56:26.970] - JEFF KRASNO
Totally. Well, just think about it. My brain, the neurons, the cells in my brain were insulin resistant. So they were not able to actually leverage glucose for energy. And in the presence of hyperinsulinemia, tons of insulin, they could also not leverage ketones. So what was my brain leveraging? Nothing. That's brain fog, and it's eventually dementia. So by reversing my insulin resistance, it's just natural. It's just like, this is how the body is functioning. My brain got better at leveraging substrates for energy. And obviously, anyone who's listening knows it like I can barely shut up. It's like my brain is going.
[00:57:13.860] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah. I love thinking about if you think about health as just one cell and all of these things that you have described as this protocol stack that you were doing. If you think about the story I told about an average life or what I have come to understand versus this contrasted life, I mean, just think about how more happy and healthy and vibrant that one cell, just one cell is going to be. You're giving a little bit of caloric restriction, a little bit of You're restricted feeding, and then you're making the cell cold, and then it's all good to eat. I mean, this is just like, perfect. This is how we were meant to be living. It's so sad. I think I agree with you totally. We are so disconnected in all ways, disconnected from making contact with the Earth. You could either have a clinical-grade PMF machine like I have, or you could just go outside for free and make contact with the Earth and get these incredible benefits.
[00:58:13.350] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, I think that image of the single cell interacting in this very interdependent way with its environment, it's a beautiful way to think about it. Because we are impermanent and interdependent beings. I mean, the Buddha was right. Without the luxury of an electron microscope or germ theory or anything, he intuited that we are impermanent and interdependent beings, that we are changing moment to moment in relation to our environment. It took medicine another 2,500 years to figure out that we are not fixed human beings. The last 50 years of the 20th century was really grounded and anchored in genetic determinism. The discovery of DNA by Rosalind Franklin and Watson and Crick was incredible. The structure for these building blocks of life and how they replicate decently, not always perfectly. That gave us a clue into how we're built and how we're designed. But we became too anchored to that notion that we were essentially fixed, that our fate was written in the stars by our genes. It wasn't until really the emerging science of epigenetics, but also the microbiome and neuroplasticity, that we reconnected with this very metaphysical idea that we were these impermanent beings, all is changing.
[01:00:03.950] - JEFF KRASNO
We're this experiment of being human, this chemistry that's going on here. There's 37 billion, billion chemical reactions per second happening in the human body right now, and right now, and right now. I mean, it is incredible. We are nothing but change. When you realize that, it's both scary and empowering. That's scary because your health is on a trajectory or is on a spectrum, I should say. That trajectory on that spectrum could be towards wholeness, that's healing, or ailing, towards disease. So that's scary because at any moment, you could be up going upwards or downwards on that spectrum. But the empowering thing is that we have way, way more agency over that trajectory than we ever thought we did. It wasn't that long ago when we thought that at 25, essentially, it's just one big cognitive decline. It's like we can't make any more neurons and the synapses begin to degrade and stuff like that. Until now, of course, we've discovered that there's all these proteins that actually stimulate the production of new neurons and new connections. You can actually activate like BDNF, for example, by going out for a run or even going into the sauna Yeah.
[01:01:31.050] - JEFF KRASNO
This is what I call the age of agency right now is that we do actually have power over the trajectory of our lives. That's a very empowering thing. Part of that is leveraging knowledge. I mean, knowledge is power, and the lack of knowledge is really a lack of power. This is why what you're doing is so essential to human health, because you are helping people understand how their body works, and that knowledge gets translated to power.
[01:02:06.060] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah. Well, thank you. I love that. And yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. When does the book become available?
[01:02:15.080] - JEFF KRASNO
How did people get it? Yeah, it seems like never. It's funny. I pitched the worst idea ever to my publisher, which was like, instead of selling a million books at $25 a piece, what if we just sold one book for $25 million? I was like, We'll go at it like it's a piece of art. We'll go like the art industry. They're like, I don't think that's going to work. So hence the long gestation period of talking about a book and marketing it. But it's out on March 25th, 2025. Exciting. So I'm excited about it. It's called Good Stress: The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things.
[01:02:59.100] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Love it.
[01:03:00.010] - JEFF KRASNO
And I bought the fancy URL of goodstress. Com. Oh, wow. Yeah. So if you go to goodstress. Com, you can pre-order the book and you get really a ton of goodies there. I give everyone a sneak peek into the text and audio, the first few chapters. But more importantly, I have bundled in a number of courses featuring doctors that I talk about in the book. So There's a course with Casey, there's a course with Mark Hyman, one with Dr. Zack Bush, who was totally essential for me to understand my microbiome, my once leaky gut, and how to fix it. Then, of course, just this concept of epigenetic, which I've talked with him about many, many times. He has a course in there, My Betrothed and Better Three-Quarters. Skyler has some yoga in there. Then I have an online course called Good Stress as well. If you buy it, if you pre-order it now and inclined to support my fledgling writing career, you also get all of those bonuses included. So yeah, I'm excited about it.
[01:04:12.180] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Same. I mean, those are all incredible courses. It was all mutual friends that people can get a ton of value from. I love that you included that all with the book. Yeah.
[01:04:22.120] - JEFF KRASNO
Well, they really, in many ways, this book as an homage to the people in the white So it's like, I don't have any letters at the end of my name. Sometimes I pretend, but I would never content to be a doctor. So I refer and defer to the physicians. My angle at it is slightly more comical than clinical, or I try to teach through storytelling and make things more accessible to people. But Mark and Casey and Sarah Gottfried and Zack and all these people really have been so to me and taught me so, so much. In a way, this book is a squeezing of the sponge of everything that I've been able to learn and distill from people 10 times smarter than me.
[01:05:14.770] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I love that. Well, we'll make sure to include in the show notes. And what a fun hangout and chat.
[01:05:21.410] - JEFF KRASNO
I know. I love it. I can't believe that I'm staring out at the Hollywood sign in this beautiful haven that that you've created here with such care and thoughtfulness. That's really quite amazing, Kayla.
[01:05:34.630] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Well, thank you. I mean, your house is very similar. So we're both up in the jungle, nature sunken in.
[01:05:43.260] - JEFF KRASNO
Wait till you add three kids.
[01:05:45.020] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I know. A bit of a big steep down here.
[01:05:49.090] - JEFF KRASNO
That's okay. Don't worry. A little good stress, right? Exactly. Yeah. Our kids, they grew up mostly in Brooklyn until we moved out here, and we had all sorts of scary staircases and stuff. We were careful, but a couple of skin knees builds character.
[01:06:11.530] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
Yeah, I agree. A couple, you have to go get the eggs from the chickens that you have. I need chickens.
[01:06:16.440] - JEFF KRASNO
Yeah, we'll get you some chickens.
[01:06:18.170] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
I love that. Well, thanks for coming on.
[01:06:19.910] - JEFF KRASNO
Okay, Kayla. It's such a pleasure. Thank you. Same.
[01:06:22.670] - KAYLA BARNES-LENTZ
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Meeting Kyla Barnes does not accept responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of the information contained herein. Opinions of their guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical issue, consult a licensed physician.