Episode 034 – Instantly protect your overall health, what to eat and drink every day, the importance of sleep, improve vitality to transform your daily life and more – Part 1 – Episode 034

Harms: Welcome to the Seekardo podcast.

If you are listening to this now and you have become aware and suddenly conscious about the importance of your overall health to protect you, yourself, your family, your loved ones and give yourself the best chance of protection against external factors.

And if you’re listening to this at this moment in time, we know that there is a global virus, pandemic floating about, so this may have raised this topic to your awareness.

If that is the case then you will love today’s episode, and as we know the number one thing we can do to protect ourselves from the current and future diseases that we have within our control is to take care of our health.

Now on that note, the immune system would be the number one place to focus on first. But on this subject we brought in two amazing experts into the Seekardo podcast to talk about this particular subject that was Dr Rob Verkirk and Mel Aldridge, and they deep dived on this particular subject of your immune system.

On that note, I highly recommend listening to that episode, it is essential listening.

So what is the next thing to focus on? That brings us to today’s podcast we want to share with you a bunch of next steps to suit your situation right now.

Ro welcome and a question to you is just a general what do you think of when you think of the word health and how shall we structure today’s episode for the listeners so at each point they have an actionable and almost maybe a menu that they can pick and choose from.

Dr Ro: Hi folks, and thank you Harms welcome to another episode of Seekardo, and today I’m super pumped because this fits into a life philosophy that I’ve had for many years, but also the recipe for success. You asked a question Harms health.

I think if you were to ask me to summarise, the word vitality comes to mind more than anything else. The idea of being vital, the idea of feeling alive and vibrant and being engaged with every moment. Feeling as though you’re not just getting by. As we see so many people I mean how many people do you see down the street plodding along, and they seem to lack the sense of direction, purpose, and vitality.

To me that’s somebody that doesn’t appear to be healthy.
A lot of people think being unhealthy is sitting around slobbing, watching the TV not necessarily going for a run every day, but I think it’s a more holistic approach for me. I believe you have the same philosophy.

I just want to share with you the philosophy of the recipe for success. Every single one of us on a day-to-day basis I believe there are five areas that really make up who we are.

There is our mind, which is the conscious place in which we play on a daily basis.

How we manage our time, how we interact with other people, how we live an adventurous life for example, the practical, more conscious life and how we exist.

Then there’s the body which is how we look after what we do with our body, what we eat, what we drink, how we stay healthy physically as well. There is self which is to do with things like identity, beliefs, values, et cetera. Then there’s relationships which is the fourth ingredient and that’s about relationships like we have a great friendship or intimate relations, family relationships, huge subject in its own right. And then, finally, money.

The sound of money and the feeling of money.

Our experience of money, our relationship with money that includes what we earn, how we earn it, our jobs, careers, wealth. Five core areas and actually what we do in Seekardo is we pretty much address into each of those areas.

Dr Ro: This is part one on body and I love that word you used which is a holistic approach. So what I hope you, the listener will take away by the end of this episode is this feeling of having a holistic approach and holistic understanding of the body and different things you can tap into, rather than I need to go for a run and that will take care of my overall health.

I think you said something brilliant. You talked about the immune system and I want to give the quote here because health is also about keeping ourselves safe, protecting this temple which is our body and our physical, emotional state. Hypocrite said it best, “Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue they come about through small daily sins against nature. When enough sins have accumulated illnesses will suddenly appear.”

He’s talking about how on a daily basis if we can look after, maintain, and keep that sense of vitality our body pushes away those illnesses, but actually most people blame something that happened. It’s nearly always a series of small activities that we don’t do well to protect ourselves.

Harms: What people don’t understand is these activities can accumulate over years, over decades 30, 40, 50 years, then all of a sudden somebody may approach and Ro talking to your generation into the 40s, 50s, 60s, all of a sudden a serious catastrophic illness appears and they feel like it happened at that moment in time.

Dr Ro: Exactly, and interestingly enough so prior to us recording I happened to share with Harminder a photograph of a friend of mine I’ve known for many years. Bearing in mind I’m 54 now so Harms is making a very good point here.

Certain things take years to manifest. I showed him a scar which was pretty much two thirds of the skull and he had one the largest brain tumours that had been seen in UK medical history. From what I understand, and the doctors said it had taken something like 13, 14, 15 years to manifest that size. When somebody gets into their 40s and they start to show these illnesses and it quote on quote suddenly appears actually that probably started in the 20s and he actually openly admitted he’d been somebody who had eaten a lot of meat, drank a lot of beer and not looked after himself and now that coupled with other factors this is where things manifest.

It’s about the manifesting of illness over time. How can we mitigate against that, how can we keep ourselves healthy and vital. If you’re listening in your 20s and I am talking to Harms age group you think screw that Ro we’ll worry about that in 10, 20 years’ time. But by then whatever’s got hold of you may have already taken a really deep-rooted effect on your body.

Harms: Agree it’s almost like the damage is already done. Take this episode and the message that you will learn in this episode very seriously.

Let me take a second to expand on the recipes for success because one of the perks a Seekardo supporter will get is 52 exclusive special emails that on a weekly basis give them a set action to do within mind body, self, relationships and within money. Almost a go to action point you can do within that particular week you could do it in one day, you can spread it over the week. You can get your family involved, your kids involved and your partner involved. However you want to do it, but it’s very much a prompt.

Dr Ro: That’s 260 ingredients spread into those 52 weeks.

Harms: That’s incredible.

So you get that directly into your inbox as a perk for becoming a Seekardo supporter that perk you can get access to as one of the easiest posted access to by just supporting the podcast from as little as £1 a month and you can do that instantly @growthtribes.com.

Ro I’ve attended your live events and I had a realisation five, six years ago when I attended turning point and I unfortunately haven’t had the pleasure of attending your health event, which was a one-off exclusive. Now on these events we talk about what is important to a person and another way to define that is what value does somebody live by now? Often somebody will come up on stage or they will have a conversation with you or one of your coaches that support people in the event and will say okay, my top value is wealth.

My top value is family. My top value is maybe money, maybe activities, these are the values I like to live by. After a discussion and it often doesn’t take long, maybe five to 10 minutes and a bit of a coaching process, they realise that actually there is a very important value which should sit either number one or number two.

Can you expand on that and what you observe there.

Dr Ro: Part of it is because I quite openly reflect on what happened to me. I had a big burnout in my late 20s, early 30s, I was working long hours, and wasn’t looking after myself health wise. I was pursuing success, I was pursuing success, I was pursuing success and I was in the era where it was all about getting a good career.

I was starting up different types of businesses looking for opportunities and in that space was not looking after myself. I feel indestructible. I’ve always had a high energetic output, a lot of vitality. You couple that with someone in their 20s who just eats pumps it out, although one thing I was very good at was physical exercise.

But I grew up in an area of just throwing down a bottle of milk and having a KitKat that you sorted for the next four hours. The energy thing was our misconception and I think it still goes on but people are a bit more conscious now.

The key thing for me was I started to push my body to a point where even I couldn’t cope with it and I went through a process of what’s called values hierarchy exercise. Where you look at your core values you list your values out. I very quickly realised that I had been living with health about number seven, eight, nine or thereabouts in my list and above were other things.

It was very frustrating because I just genuinely wanted to make a change, so this ties into your question. When people come up to me they usually list out a whole bunch of values and health is in there and when I ask the question, if you had to choose between these two values to live by success or health.

Which one is more important?

They look down and I say I’m going to take these away from you, imagine living a life without health, without being healthy and vital versus living a life without success. Nine times out of ten I get them to picture them in each hand as I’m pulling them away they grab their health, meaning that’s the one they want to hold on to. If you do that genuinely health comes above everything else you want to have a loving relationship you can’t if you have really poor health. You want to be successful, get out to work, build your business and how can you do that if you’re really unhealthy. You’re sleeping badly, you feel low on energy, you can’t engage with people. I want to go out and be adventurous and travel, that’s another value of mine.

How are you going to do that if you are not healthy? 

I discovered very quickly it was the foundation to everything else I did so the choice became then to live by that value first and off the back of that I already start to feel more successful and have better relationships.

Harms: I love that and I think the word successful should be ringing in people’s ears because certainly people in their 20s or 30s pursuing a business or entrepreneurial opportunity. Often, health gets really just pushed down the value hierarchy as such, to the point where it’s just not relevant and it becomes a statement.

The statement becomes well I’ll deal with health or I’ll start exercising, I’ll eat healthy once I make this much money or once I achieve this. 

That’s very common until you frame it with them and say okay if you had to choose right now, what’s the point of pursuing success for 30 years based on the quote you just introduced to you that if there is a catastrophic illness because you’ve disregarded your health for 30 years was it worth it?

Was that success and money worth it if in 30 years’ time you’ve got cancer, or you got something similar.

Dr Ro: The key thing here is and the younger generation need to listen carefully to this is that I think you and we’ve all been sold it. You get it through social media now that you want to be successful. Why don’t you just fit your health in around what you’re doing. 

We get all these quick fix diets.

You know these products that produce that will do the same thing as having a good quality healthy meal and I think at the moment I’m seeing a lot of younger people still being drawn to those. 

Although there is a change in philosophy, there is definitely raising consciousness. Veganism has become huge now in terms of awareness, so too has a vegetarian based diet.

But reality is you can be a vegetarian and eat pasta all day and still be unhealthy. You can be vegetarian or vegan and have products that have no dairy, but they’re completely processed, there’s no live food and no exercise for the whole two years so you’re still unhealthy.

Dr Ro: They actually didn’t have it as a meal as such, we had two models we ran one was everything was raw, juices and raw food. For the most part they just had smoothies and juices for the whole of the event. Imagine sitting in a seminar that goes from about nine till eight at night and all you’re having is water, juices and smoothies, oils.

They only had nutritionally what their body needed, but in a form that helped them cleanse. Most of them got pissed off, got frustrated, angry, not towards me but because they felt their body detoxing. If anyone’s ever done this cleanse it takes three days typically for it to really hit a low and you just go right down into a dark place.

Harms: They are a tough three days; we do one once a year.

Dr Ro: Even if you’re fairly clean any toxins are going to come out. You’re saying to your body I’m going to stop loading you with all the sugary, energetic uppers the processed food processed salt that you thrive at the moment and all you’re going to get is pure, clean food.

The body goes right. I can detoxify now and that detoxification means that your liver, kidneys, your lymphatic system, your blood goes great, all the fresh stuff is coming through.

In answer to your question people got grumpy.

A good friend of ours Ravi he came through and at the time he was beyond his normal weight, and he literally did three days of this he was throwing up on the first day because his body was releasing toxicity very quickly.

It’s safe to say when somebody enters a cycle of I’m tired, I’ve eaten poor food and I’m eating food that is not clean, it’s not satisfying to then go and grab a healthy meal.

There might be a feeling of psychologically or consciously at least I’m eating something healthy, but the mind plays tricks because after a day or two, how come I still feel shitty? This doesn’t work. This healthy stuff doesn’t work.

It takes 30, 60, 90 days of consistency before your body really cleanses right through. Certain parts replace virtually every cell within a period two, three months.

I was starting up different types of businesses looking for opportunities and in that space was not looking after myself. I feel indestructible. I’ve always had a high energetic output, a lot of vitality. You couple that with someone in their 20s who just eats pumps it out, although one thing I was very good at was physical exercise.

But I grew up in an area of just throwing down a bottle of milk and having a KitKat that you sorted for the next four hours. The energy thing was our misconception and I think it still goes on but people are a bit more conscious now.

The key thing for me was I started to push my body to a point where even I couldn’t cope with it and I went through a process of what’s called values hierarchy exercise. Where you look at your core values you list your values out. I very quickly realised that I had been living with health about number seven, eight, nine or thereabouts in my list and above were other things.

It was very frustrating because I just genuinely wanted to make a change, so this ties into your question. When people come up to me they usually list out a whole bunch of values and health is in there and when I ask the question, if you had to choose between these two values to live by success or health.

Which one is more important?

They look down and I say I’m going to take these away from you, imagine living a life without health, without being healthy and vital versus living a life without success. Nine times out of ten I get them to picture them in each hand as I’m pulling them away they grab their health, meaning that’s the one they want to hold on to. If you do that genuinely health comes above everything else you want to have a loving relationship you can’t if you have really poor health. You want to be successful, get out to work, build your business and how can you do that if you’re really unhealthy. You’re sleeping badly, you feel low on energy, you can’t engage with people. I want to go out and be adventurous and travel, that’s another value of mine.

How are you going to do that if you are not healthy? 

I discovered very quickly it was the foundation to everything else I did so the choice became then to live by that value first and off the back of that I already start to feel more successful and have better relationships.

Harms: I love that and I think the word successful should be ringing in people’s ears because certainly people in their 20s or 30s pursuing a business or entrepreneurial opportunity. Often, health gets really just pushed down the value hierarchy as such, to the point where it’s just not relevant and it becomes a statement.

The statement becomes well I’ll deal with health or I’ll start exercising, I’ll eat healthy once I make this much money or once I achieve this. 

That’s very common until you frame it with them and say okay if you had to choose right now, what’s the point of pursuing success for 30 years based on the quote you just introduced to you that if there is a catastrophic illness because you’ve disregarded your health for 30 years was it worth it?

Was that success and money worth it if in 30 years’ time you’ve got cancer, or you got something similar.

Dr Ro: The key thing here is and the younger generation need to listen carefully to this is that I think you and we’ve all been sold it. You get it through social media now that you want to be successful. Why don’t you just fit your health in around what you’re doing. 

We get all these quick fix diets.

You know these products that produce that will do the same thing as having a good quality healthy meal and I think at the moment I’m seeing a lot of younger people still being drawn to those. 

Although there is a change in philosophy, there is definitely raising consciousness. Veganism has become huge now in terms of awareness, so too has a vegetarian based diet.

But reality is you can be a vegetarian and eat pasta all day and still be unhealthy. You can be vegetarian or vegan and have products that have no dairy, but they’re completely processed, there’s no live food and no exercise for the whole two years so you’re still unhealthy.

Harms: I think that’s an important point. It doesn’t matter if you’re a meat eater, vegan or vegetarian, you get nine hours sleep at night, if your food is awful and you’re eating processed food then it becomes pointless.

Harms: What’s a quick list of things to avoid?

We have mentioned a few but what are the nutritional things to then take on board, especially if the listeners aren’t doing this right now.

Dr Ro: I mean, essentially for me I’m looking to avoid chemically heavy foods. Foods that have got a lot of E’s in them, loaded up heavily processed foods. If it is like quote on quote a meal in a box, how has it got there?

How comes it can stay on the shelf for so frigging, long?

If you took a cabbage or beans or blueberries and you left them on a shelf for four months you are not going to touch those because nature said nutrients are gone now let’s let the bugs and everything come in, break it down, take it back into the ground. Let that nutrient feed back into the soil and then go back into the tree and go back up into a new fruit.

Harms: Isn’t that interesting nature will want the blueberry back, but they won’t want a burger back.

Dr Ro: Someone was telling me that there was a burger that had been found in a bunker and it was years, years later, in this original package when it was opened up it still looked fresh. Sugar-based drinks.

When I say that I mean stuff where you know they had to sweeten it. If they say no sugar they may have used a sweetener. The play on the words is where it comes in. This is my personal view sugar is like heroin to the blood and it is so damaging I think there is enough evidence now to show this is.

There is a massive consciousness about sugar at the moment.

Dairy is a subject which we could talk about for a whole podcast, this is an optional one for you. For me, I do have dairy occasionally. Harms is pretty much 100% vegan. I have been in and out being vegan, our kids probably are about 85 to 90% dairy free. Where I tend to have dairy myself is if I’ll have maybe an ice cream if I’m out occasionally with the kids.

What we don’t want to do is teach you something and say we’re gods and angels and gurus in this, we’re not. What we’re doing is talking about having a pragmatic approach to this because I found in the past if I go out I try to avoid everything equally that can be frustrating that can create stress on the body and that stress can actually put an unhealthy feeling in your body.

Tony Robbins I learned from him years ago. Think of zig and zag. Zig is where you go in the right direction and zag is where you have the occasional treat. So we have zig zag days and roughly it’s about 85, 15% switch.

Harms: My version of that is the 8020 principle, I will be as good as I can for 80% of the time and I’ll look at a week.

Just take your seven days, five out of the seven days’ worth of meals are they clean?

Dr Ro: Classic example is pretty much on my doorstep there is an amazing organic farm and people come from all over the country to go to it. There is a café attached to it and they make milk from the farm and its raw milk and I’ve never tasted a coffee like it with this particular milk.

If I’m having a dairy-based coffee, for example, I might have that there but then later in the week if I’m out with Harms I’ll have an oat milk latte. It’s important we make this point because people think this too much work. I’ll get some fast food, but here’s my challenge to you right now if I was sitting opposite to you right now and we were sitting in my car together and there’s a burger joint right next to us and you go, I’m going to get a burger.

And I go why?

I need some energy.

I held out in a split second, a banana to you there is your fast food. How can it be any faster than that?

It’s in your hand you’ve got a banana.

Harms: If I’m in the back seat I’ll peel the banana for you.

Dr Ro: It’s a misconception that we use this term fast food.

It is also a marketing ploy. Fast food is a slogan that’s been embedded into our psyche for a long time now, so I do understand why they think that’s fast food, but there is food that’s faster.

Then you get to the counter and it isn’t so fast, would you like some fries with that? And all of sudden that’s 10 minutes.

Now fast food has become an exercise for processed sugar.

Harms: Is there any other things somebody should avoid?

Dr Ro: I think you look at the first things where they talk about reduced fat. There’s a whole new revelation on the studies around fat from the 70s. the research showed that you had too much fat in foods it can cause you problems with your health and everyone talked about cholesterol.

One study came out, which a lot of the big food farmers and industries could never reproduce that same research, and it was so skewed that a whole new generation of buying and selling came into place. Which basically cut fat out of your diet. What that meant was, by stripping out the fat you lost the natural flavouring that things have. There’s even fat in avocados, for example, and that was replaced with sugar and then suddenly it became a sugar addicted culture.

The other thing is freeze or not to freeze and I think you’ve got to be careful and a lot of processed frozen food and if it’s processed there is no nutrition. If it’s plucked and not organic and then it’s frozen, how long was it plucked for before it got frozen?

There is a difference between plucking something and instantly freezing it. For example instantly freezing it when you can lock in some nutrition, versus something that is left frozen later and has no nutritional value.

Consider how much of your food is frozen versus how much is fresh.

Harms: We’ve discussed the things to avoid and hopefully if you’re listening to this be critical on what you eat.

Be honest, be open, have a look at the last 24 hours. Have a look at the last week. Have a look at the last month.

Now the next question Ro is what should we eat?

What should we be replacing these things with? 

Because the truth is, this makes up most people’s diet and what is an approach they can take or a way that they can quickly understand what kind of nutrition to have instead.

Dr Ro: There are different approaches to this and everybody has a different concept of what the food pyramid is. I’m not referring to the government food pyramid and there was a government American food pyramid and there was a UK based food pyramid and I’m not here to put any of these down, but it was very convenient that food pyramid included certain foods that were arguably heavily processed or possibly even had some financial benefits for having promoted.

We’re going to talk primarily from a nutritional perspective and there are various people that have talked about it. You may have heard of Dr Todd. He had a super food pyramid many years ago and there are different versions of it. This is sort of philosophy that myself and Harminder adopt, and you may have heard in our interview with Dr Robert Verkerk and Mel as well and we talked about the colours of the rainbow.

Let’s start with the bottom of the pyramid, quantity wise it’s more at the bottom.

Lots of leafy greens as fresh as possible. Kale if you can break it up. Rub some olive oil into a tiny little bit of sea salt for example, that’s lovely to have in a salad. Lot of people think you have to boil kale. 

Personally, if I’m going to cook kale I’ll lightly steam it. Kale, broccoli, cabbage.

Harms: What’s interesting is I’ve seen your kids eat broccoli like they are crisps and I was just amazed. I did not think that was possible for kids. I was like I need to get my children to eat broccoli like crisps.

Dr Ro: We dehydrated them so they became crispy. Look for these leafy greens. 

Other things you might want to consider are your curly kale, dark kales. Also, we tend to often as we can, we will put salad leaves with food. Try and go for a mixed salad, so rocket, normal, lettuce, cucumber, lots of fresh greens, so if you’re looking at doing a mix you might have a salad added to something in the afternoon and in the evening you have your heavy green based food as well. 

The reason it is at the bottom of the period is you can have a lot of it. You can digest a lot of it and it is not bulky and it is so alkalising to the blood and it’s got loads of good nutrients for you.

Harms: Amazing and what I love about the leafy greens is you can have most of them raw. Now if we take a step up that super food pyramid and again there are lots of versions of them. The next thing we want to introduce is colour. 

We’ve got the greens and the next thing we want to think about is how do we add a big touch of colour and think about this with the phrase rainbow veggies. Vegetables that have colour associated with them think about celery. 

Think about peppers and red, green, and yellow peppers also in this category are onions and garlic as well. So now we’ve got this base. Think of the base as a strong foundation and this is a step up from that of rainbow vegetables.

If you’re walking round the supermarket they are striking because they are colourful, so they’re very easy to pick up. 

Ro after rainbow veggies what comes next?

Dr Ro: We want to start bringing in some natural, balanced proteins and there are different ways to look at this. 

We have been big fans of quinoa. Quinoa is such an easy food to eat, you can soak it and then mix it with a salad. You can add flavouring to it, but it is really, really rich in protein. For me that’s a big one. 

Peas are another one. If you’re training there is a pea protein-based protein powder. if you’re a heavy train and do a lot of sports then often people say I need a certain amount of protein which is correct, but there are ways to get it without having to turn to meat. Couple of things as well, so looking at legumes, you’ve got things like red beans, green peas, edamame, kidney beans. 

Be mindful of too many of these so again I’m not going to tell you how much, but in proportion. For example, if you’re somebody that goes for lentils or you go for kidney beans if you have too many in your meal sometimes you can get bloated. That’s partly because of the breakdown of carbs versus protein in some of these, so it’s mixing it with the greens. 

Remember when you have greens they are neutral, where the conflict comes is when you start mixing too many carbohydrates with proteins, so the greens become neutral. Vegetables are great, you might add in chickpeas, quinoa or you might add in some lentils, but you wouldn’t have too many. You wouldn’t have lentils and chickpeas, quinoa legumes all at the same time.

Harms: As we go higher up the pyramid we’re having less and less of these for various reasons and the next item we want to consider is we discussed rainbow veggies but now let’s talk about rainbow fruits. The bananas, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and the list goes on. 

These are fantastic fruits to introduce you won’t be having as many as you have in terms of vegetables and leafy greens, but you want to include them in your diet. 

They have their own special section in supermarkets as well, so those are rainbow fruits. Less of them in terms of leafy greens but do include them they’ve got fantastic properties.

Dr Ro: The other thing as well as with blueberries the darker the berry as a rule of thumb, the higher the antioxidant content and the philosophy is when berry or some fruit has to fight hard to come through and fight the temperature, the climate it produces a very robust berry. That berry is often extremely high in antioxidants. 

The açai berry is another classic example of that which you can get in a juice form, you get the berry form it’s quite bitter and that’s one thing about these types of berries they are very bitter, but a massive antioxidant. 

Very good for fighting problems we have with oxidation. If you have fried foods that degrade the blood. Then we go to omega three, it can be through fish oils but it can also be through nuts, seeds. With omega 3, one of the main things is with Omega three, three is big because it is very good for reducing inflammation. 

There are a lot of arguments to say that it helps with heart disease. This is why doctors always encourage people to have either fish oil tablets or if not, you can turn to flaxseed and get flaxseed oil. One of the things that we’ve done historically is you can put flaxseed on salad as a salad dressing or you can mix it into a smoothie. It doesn’t have the nicest taste. Chia is very good as well. 

Chia I’m okay with my kids make chia puddings, but I can’t have huge amounts of chia. I find it globular for me.

Harms: Yes, it is quite granular and it is very hard to wash off a juicing machine.

Dr Ro: But it makes a brilliant sweet. You can have it as a pudding with some fresh berries on top and it’s amazing. You’ve got all your nuts and seeds so many of them go and look up mega rich fats in seeds and nuts.

Harms: Some of them are so potent and powerful. For example, a Brazil nut or a walnut and you only need to have one every couple of days or one a week and you get your kick for that week. 

That’s how potent these nuts are.

We’re going up the pyramid so remember less in quantity compared to, say, the leafy greens.

One of the final things to consider is functional foods, so functional foods would probably play a part in everyday cooking. Think about herbs and spices. Spices such as turmeric, chili powder.

Each of these have some very good benefits when mixed in certain proportions.

A tip on turmeric is a pinch of black pepper helps the digestion of turmeric. We introduced that recently to allow the turmeric to absorb a lot easier, then you’ve got things that you can add into porridges and natural raw desserts. For example dark chocolate, cacao powder and these amazing additional supplements.

Dr Ro: We did a section on the health event. We introduced Macca, medicinal mushroom there are some really powerful stuff and can taste quite strong but can mix them into teas. That’s kind of a balance.

Harms: Before we move onto drink another reference point to this and me and my wife spent probably a year studying this book and the book is called how not to die. 

In the book it describes the daily dozen and the daily dozen gives you a list version of what myself and Ro have just described. Some people prefer a list, some are visual and that should hopefully help you get started. So if you can include that daily dozen every single day then, in terms of food you are so ahead of the game in terms of taking care of your body. 

Harms: Ro what do you want to discuss when it comes to liquids?

Dr Ro: Just think pure. 

If you’re drinking a heavily sugared, artificially flavoured soda drink, you’ve got to ask yourself the question when I evolved as a human being was that around? When I was running around a thousand years ago was there a café fruit machine that sold soda drinks and the answer is no. 

I think naturally we turn to it because it’s quick. I had a bunch of builders on my site before Covid and afterwards there must’ve been 20 or 30 cans of red something basically caffeine, sugar-based drink. 

Again the body can only take so much and the impact of it on the internals, the amount of sugar is quite scary. Keeping it simple Harms it’s basically water and then derivatives of that so I tend to wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is I will just have a clean glass of water, not about tap water ideally mineral water. 

There’s spring water near us, so we’re quite fortunate to get that because it’s so close. It’s called a break fast, depending if you’re intermittent faster or not. For me I like it because it also helps the facilitation of cleansing in every way. I.e. go for a pee or poo the body lets toxicity out. Usually when you wake up if you jiggle or move around that starts the lymphatic system, the blood system starts to pump as you’re now vertical. This whole concept of having water versus going to sugar, caffeine, tea which are not really natural as you have a mint tea. 

Another couple of derivatives for that, this morning I had two glasses of salt water, meaning half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of Celtic sea salt. It is like a mineralised drink and if you use Celtic sea salt that’s got like 80 something minerals packed into it. 

I’ll take that first in the morning so I’ll do clean water and then two salt, one salt and another salt. Spread over every 20 minutes, so it’s not a rush into the body.

 Why this is important I think, is that if you are defaulting to tap water or whatever it is a lot of the minerals have been extracted from this in the cleaning process to make sure it is clear for the general public. 

This is a process of remineralising that water.

Lemon can do that. 

Lemon alkalises the blood so it might be acidic by nature, but alkalising to the blood, so lemon squeezed into water is also very cleansing. During the course of the day if you can, myself and Harms because of our busy schedules sometimes we will actually drink a green drink. It’s a very specific developed drink, which has 70+ different minerals and vegetables, and greens. 

It’s balanced in such a way that it hits the main body systems and it’s phenomenal. I interviewed the scientist who developed it, and we’re going to be getting in a specialist in a couple of weeks to talk about this. 

But ideally if you can make yourself a fresh juice. Now if you did 10 apples and a whole bunch of sweet things like carrots and made a juice from that, although it’s fresh and natural you wouldn’t naturally eat 10 apples.

People make the mistake of having lots of juices, but in a disproportionate amount of vegetables or fruits they would normally have. So given a choice I’m going to typically go for a green juice with maybe an apple squeezed into it. I get my liquidity from something like cucumber, some water in there and celery et cetera so that’s also very healing celery.

Harms: If you want to go hard core with this, which I’ll be honest we do on a daily basis that food pyramid we just spoke about we literally blitz up that proportion in a blender and drink that. We will have the leafy greens, rainbow veg, balance proteins, omega-3’s and it’s pretty hardcore. It doesn’t always taste nice every day, but we use that sometimes as a meal replacement.

Dr Ro: The message here is if you’re juicing not too many fruits and just think about clean and through the day, keeping that topping up of water and that’s something I’m sometimes prone to not doing if I’m really engaged with my speaking. 

I have to sometimes be prompted by my team and it doesn’t always help to drink a lot of water in one go. Some people literally dehydrate massively but I somehow manage to find the balance, but I can usually tell it. Your dehydration will come from your lips typically, your tongue getting sticky, a slight heaviness and when you blink you feel a slowness.

Harms: Linking this whole section back to the recipes for success and if you were to receive this email as a Seekardo supporter you’d get one direct action to just prompt you to give you an idea, to get you doing something. 

What links to the last thing we just mentioned is one of the recipes for success, ideas for a particular week and remember there are 52 different weeks talking about this particular topic around health is one, make yourself or buy a fresh green based juice without any additives. 

Number two, just as a caveat to that is pretty hard to get a green based juice without any additives. That’s from a regular supermarket. It’s pretty tricky, so we would encourage you to make yourself one and make it a bit of an experience as well. Any blender will do just use what you have. Have fun with it, taste it the first time you have a green juice like this from my perspective, it was not a pleasant experience. That’s the first action point and note to make. 

Now that’s the first headline we’ve spoken about your diet and the liquid and the foods that you will take in as part of that diet. 

Now the next critical component and it is arguable that this is possibly the number one consideration based on the science that’s now appeared in recent times and that is sleep. 

Harms: This really came into my awareness Ro when I had read the book, why we sleep. There is another great book which came before that which is called the sleep revolution which has more of a story around it. That’s from Huffington, that incredible entrepreneur. She is amazing and she spoke about how her sleep exhaustion led to a point which was collapsing in the office.

Dr Ro: I think Arianna Huffington when she wrote that really woke a lot of people up to the fact that I thought I’m performing well but actually my body is being affected by this lack of sleep.

Harms: The whole success versus health discussion we had at the start of this podcast. There is a book which came alongside different authors where they really just dived into the facts and the science of this. 

Great audiobook, great written book, but it’s a beast of a book called why we sleep by Matthew Walker. Here’s a fantastic one paragraph summary I found online, so credit to the person who wrote this. 

I found it to describe the importance of sleep in a nutshell. 

Sleep enhances our ability to learn, memorise and make logical decisions. If you are struggling to make decisions quickly then it could be a lack of sleep is making that decision slower. Sleep recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, which is critical right now as you know. Fine-tunes our metabolism and regulates our appetite. 

Now, lack of sleep is also associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, immune system failure, stroke, heart failure, cancer, dementia, skin problems and overeating. The food stuff we already discussed with you. 

Think about what we’re going through right now Ro in the global economy, the pandemic, job losses et cetera which are already going to initiate this feeling of anxiety depression. Pair that with somebody sitting at home, maybe going to sleep later, maybe starting to watch films, documentaries on streaming services. They spent overuse of time on social media and are pushing their sleep back further and further which will have a further impact on the depression, anxiety, which later down the line that ticking time bomb is stroke, heart failure, cancer, dementia. 

This doesn’t just turn up overnight, but sleep has now been discovered to have such a contributing factor to avoiding some of these common diseases, overly common diseases. Deep breath that may have been a lot to take in in terms of importance of sleep, but we sleep approximately a third of our life and it was that thought that made me want a deep dive into the subject. 

But spending time with Ro and having a look at his past events he also showed me that he’s been talking about the importance of sleep for decades. 

Ro over to you on the topic of sleep, what can someone do and what have you done personally because I asked this question to you because you are a go-getter, you’re somebody who runs events and these events can mean you have very little sleep. 

The high-performance activities and tasks you do mean you work late into the night, you prioritise family first, you spend quality time with them in the daytime, which means you sometimes work in the strange hours of the night.

What’s your thoughts on sleep and how do you feel it’s impacted your life?

Dr Ro: This is a great subject and one I’ve kind of flowed in and out of had a love affair with sleep, a frustrating wrestling match with lack of sleep. 

There’s been now sufficient studies to show that and I can’t remember the exact number of hours you need to sleep less, but it is a matter of days before it has effect. But by only sleeping again don’t quote on this, but I think it’s if you only average six hours a night or two, three nights it’s equivalent to having an alcohol level which is above the legal limit for driving. If you were tested on it your cognitive response behaviour and your reaction time is that of someone who has actually been drinking.

Harms: Interestingly enough lawmakers are now discussing if you had an accident and it was severe. Now they will look at your phone patterns, they will understand what was your usage of social media. 

When were you online the nights before because you drove and you were tired and that resulted in the accident because of that drunkenness level that Ro described, then you know you are guilty in that scenario. Sleep is now being taken seriously even by lawmakers.

Dr Ro: We’re talking about all major industries now the flight industry, pilots, train drivers there is a genuine concern that we have completely underestimated and overlooked the impact of lack of sleep. 

I think the reason I took an interest in it is because I found myself, and I studied professional speakers and people out there and I grew up in the era where you sleep when you die. Edison talked about the same thing when Edison invented the light bulb part of his philosophy is we don’t need to sleep, if we create light bulbs we can work through the night et cetera. He was one of the early purveyors of the concept of who needs to sleep. We’ll work late. 

But he didn’t have a very good ending. 

I think he had problems with a number of things, one of which I think it was to do with blood sugar problems, et cetera but diabetes potentially. 

A lot of people that have historically politicians, et cetera that sleep very little, have struggling periods in their later age. We even now know that Alzheimer’s disease, for example, has been coupled with memory loss is significantly linked with lack of sleep, to the point where now the study shows that during your sleep your short-term memory uploads to your long-term hard drive memory, the short-term day memories. 

Somebody that does not sleep and they’ve proved this during daytime naps, someone who doesn’t sleep properly or misses that window when melatonin kicks if they go to bed too late their short term memory does not upload, so they start to get forgetful. If you have a long period of no sleep you just forget things or you can’t remember things short-term as we haven’t actually uploaded it to our long-term hard drive. 

This isn’t a metaphor that is actually scientifically proven, there are actual signals they can see they’ve nailed it down to precise brain pulses. 

So going back to your question, I had to really review it because I was modelling people who I was inspired by, but actually if I look at them now they’ve had some pretty tough physical reactions to lack of sleep. 

I found myself in the early days I could quote on quote go for an hour of sleep, get up the next day and then keep performing, but I didn’t attribute that fuzziness, the forgetfulness, frustration, irritability, starting to feel the aches and pains. I didn’t attribute that to lack of sleep. I thought it must be a diet, it must be hereditary.

Harms: It might be because you’re doing the event you’re on your feet, you must be tired.

Dr Ro: In reality, we aim to get seven to eight hours sleep we’ve got two kids, so if you’re a parent you know that’s not necessarily achievable, but the problem is when you want to achieve a goal, pursuing a purpose or building a business and if you’ve got children by the time you put your children to bed, you should really go into the night time routine which nature would have allowed us to do. 

It gets dark, we go to sleep, get up when the sun rises, there is your eight hours. We don’t do that; we switch on a light and now we’ve got artificial light that allows us to stay up all night. 

We have had a history in our family to eat back those lost hours. That means going to bed later and then still getting with the kids which might be 6 o’clock so then you’re averaging six to seven hours. It has been a slow progress to me. 

I think there have been periods where I’ve been really good and other periods where I’m intensely working, but I had to start to monitor it. if you said to me what’s the main thing I’ve done is I genuinely monitor my feelings. I look at my body and I used to blame it on too much exercise or I’ve eaten badly, but I can eat really freaking well, I can exercise well and if I go for three, four, five hours sleep, I can feel like shit.

It feels like it eradicates all the good work.

We can eat really healthy but if we keep doing some late nights to try and catch up with stuff it neutralises it. I honestly believe above everything else outside of breathing properly.

Harms: I agree because I was very strict on my sleep and seven, eight, nine hours, just standard that would be if I didn’t have that I wouldn’t operate. 

For some Seekardo members that are aware I’ve just had a new born baby who is three weeks old and now I am experiencing the description that Ro described, the irritability, the feeling of fuzziness, not being able to focus. 

I can tell you from somebody who went from a really great sleep habit to someone who hasn’t it’s painful. I’m going to be working out how to manage that myself if it is manageable with a new-born.

Dr Ro: What he talks about really well in the book is power naps and the benefit of a 20, 30, 40 minute power nap in the course of the day is without a doubt, scientifically proven now to allow your body to consolidate memories to help with the immune system, to balance out some of the hormonal changes that happen in the course of the day and bring back a little bit of swing into your mojo. 

I started doing that after our kids were born. I used to resist it. 

Arianna Huffington talks about having an area where people can go to sleep. You walk past someone’s office and they’re sleeping at 1:30 in the afternoon. In the old days when I grew up you were chastised. You’re told to do that again you’ll be fired.

Harms: Is this a cultural thing because some cultures already understood this before this book came out. South America, the Japanese places in Spain. This is a standard process for them and it gives them a fresh energy, fresh vitality going to the second part of the day.

Dr Ro: If you go to Barcelona during the day everything is shut as they are all having a siesta just relaxing and sleeping, but we in this western northern hemisphere it’s do, do, do.

That’s quite counterintuitive because sleep would actually help better productivity, but by saying don’t sleep our productivity gets affected, they almost haven’t grasped the understanding of it.

If you want a big red triangular warning sign for those of you who are parents, if your kids are going to school and this is a conflict we’ve had more recently and we’ve made some decisions off the back of this as well. 

Your kids go to school where they start at 8 o’clock actually, that does not fit with their circadian rhythm. Our natural circadian rhythm has a point where between 11 and seven it goes into this curve where you sleep well and you go through the production of melatonin. 

Melatonin is one of these amazing hormones produced around one, 2 o’clock in the morning there’s a peak period and it helps the body go to recovery, repair. It has antioxidant and anti-cancer benefits, it’s really powerful, and that inhibits the proliferation of a wide range of cancer cell types and is proven now. 

So lack of that if you eat into that people who work through the night that go to bed at one, two, three, four in the morning then there’s been signs of their body now manifesting illness. Which other people who sleep through the night properly don’t. 

Kids who are forced to get up early, are still being woken up during a part of their circadian rhythm during the part of their sleep patterns where there is recovery, memory reallocation going on and we’ve got rem deep sleep, et cetera, and we’re disrupting it with digital products like phones with lights. We really have fucked around with sleep over the years.

Harms: Agree and the interesting thing that really just stood out to me was think about the circadian rhythm as a cycle you will go through throughout the night and it’s a perfect cycle built for you as an adult. Now the child/teenager’s circadian rhythm shifts slightly, it just shifts slightly later. 

Actually their circadian rhythm and that process of sleep actually ends later in the morning, so when your child is going to school at seven, 8 AM they should actually just be waking up.

Especially early teenagers. Parents get frustrated because the kids haven’t gone to sleep.

But it’s essential so that lie in and I used to get my arse kicked. 

What I didn’t realise now the science is out is my circadian rhythm was shifted that way. So parents, don’t be too hard on your teenagers. But if you want to be serious about this, go deep dive into the subject of sleep and you may ease off them slightly.

Dr Ro: What fascinates me when I went through his book as well, is now, schools in universities even in places like the states are becoming aware of this and are shifting the study times. They’re testing it. they’re starting the kids later, kids are happier performing better, enjoying the experience of studying. Whereas you go to a typical school, 8 o’clock 9 o’clock start kids are like being dragged to school. Their body has not woken up at the natural evolutionary circadian rhythm, it’s designed to take us through that process.

Harms: It’s almost like as an adult species we just never wondered why all kids are resistant to waking up at certain times. We just never put two and two together.

Dr Ro: If you’re thinking surely you can change this, you can manipulate the body. They’ve done tests in chambers, they’ve taken people deep dive underground where there’s no light and tests have been done and the body still sits in this 23, 24-hour rhythmic process and it’s slightly different the older you get by the way as well. 

But we can’t fight this and we are because we created natural light and Eddison with this amazing invention and unfortunately people have taken it to the extreme. 

I have been through that I experienced. I got to a point where I was getting erratic heart rhythms occasionally and I started to log it and it always tied in to an extremely late night. Dropped back to normal sleep that was it.

Harms: If I were to say what’s one big major negative effect of just really not taking sleep seriously, disrupted night late night et cetera, what’s one massive key component which almost is so important to just having an amazing day.

Dr Ro: Vitality. 

A shitty, low vitality and that is the word to me that encompasses you asked me at the beginning what is health it’s vitality. There’s a thing called the Oura ring and we’re going to push hard to get an interview with the inventor. This ring was recommended to me by a good friend called Yvonne. I’m not a big jewellery person, but this thing is amazing and the set technology is constantly being uploaded a bit like my Tesla. 

They can reprogram it and add new things about my body temperature, my skin temperature, my rhythmic behaviour, my heart rate variability. When I first got it I thought let me test it, and I do like gadgets and things. 

But actually, I’ve noticed certain things. I just want to share a few with you. So for me this is such a powerful tool that I can tell from the patterns what I’ve been doing in the days before because of the number of times I’ve recorded it now. 

If I have a late night, if I have interrupted sleep, if I’ve done too much physical exercise too late in the day, if I’ve eaten eight, nine, 10 o’clock at night, if I had a drink occasionally. I think you and I had a beer about three, four, five months ago. Half a can each and even that had an effect on my overall sleep. 

If I’ve had caffeine too late, or if I’ve drank something too late before going to bed. All these things are recorded by the ring because it’s measured my body’s rhythmic behaviour, et cetera and it’s crazy and if I’ve been on screen as well. I can actually see the patterns. 

I showed you my sleep heart rate variability and my body temperature. I was saying to Harms that’s when I went to bed and got eight hours, five hours and you could see the change. This thing literally measures biologically how my body is being benefited or screwed up by lack of sleep.

Harms: What I love about that is one it gives you a readiness score on how great your day is going to be, how ready you are for your awake time now. You’re showing it to me right now and your readiness score is 68, which says pay attention and watch your steps because your readiness is on the low side, so Ro needs to take sleep seriously after this podcast. 

Some people say I need six hours sleep well actually Ro is an example who eats super clean, super healthy but even six hours sleep has reduced his readiness score to around 60, which means regular score is low and that means he won’t be at his optimum, optimum I’m saying it twice because even when his readiness is at 60 he can shoot a podcast like this.

Dr Ro: I called you this morning and said I’m feeling flat and that’s my description of low vitality that’s different to energy.

If you record it or measure it like this everybody has a list or here’s some things you should go to do in order to improve your sleep whereas this tells you exactly what you are doing wrong.

Incidentally it will affect your income. 

It will because if you’re not performing well. I was speaking at an event some months ago and that weekend I was all over the place. 

My temperature is the only time in the last year that my temperature showed a spike. From a business perspective if you’re not performing well, you can find yourself in a situation where you are blaming anybody else but I just wasn’t in a good place. I hadn’t looked after myself, there was a lot going on, got run down. I fought back very quickly and I was back in action in a day and half, but the ring gave the clue it was a rise in temperature.

Harms: They are in association with the NBA, so the players can feedback to them their sleep habits and how to improve and optimise health and that peak performance that they are involved in. 

On that note, let’s give you one item. Ro has been covering sleep for decades now in the education that he shares with people and one of the recipes that you will receive as a tip and that is go to bed earlier than usual and ensure that you have at least not six hours at least seven to eight hours of sleep today. Ideally, you want to be winding down and getting to sleep around the 10, 11 o’clock mark and the seven to eight hours after that rising and what you’ll find is after doing this for a couple of weeks you will naturally start to rise and the alarm will go away. 

So that’s the tip.

If you’re wondering why that happens is because the circadian rhythm literally starts to move you into the lighter sleep as you’re coming through to that six, 7 o’clock, so you naturally will wake up there and this is the beauty of this natural rhythm. But you’ve got to let it be natural because if you force it you’re jumping into it and it hasn’t finished the process.

For people who are maybe questioning the sleep and you think you might be a night owl, day owls just have a read of the book, but you still have to manage your sleep as a night owl. 

That doesn’t mean you can be awake during the night and the day which is the trap they may fall into. 

I’m a day owl, but it’s happened over time. I used to be a night owl, I very much started to flag at nine, 10 PM. The final category that we’re going to discuss is vitality and vitality Ro has mentioned is such a powerful word. 

Number one what is vitality and number two what is different between vitality and energy because in the past I used to get confused with this and often people do confuse energy and vitality.

Dr Ro: I think we have described a lot of it already, but for me, vitality is just that feeling of waking up and feeling really on point, everything falls into place. You’re in your flow things are clicking, your communication with people is great, you’ve got a much greater awareness of acuity, your ability to pick things up around, your radar is crystal clear and you are tuned into the universe around you. 

Such that synchronicity happens when you say the right things, you feel really successful, what that means to you and you’re just aligned with people. 

That is that really vibrant feeling that you are on top of the world in a physical, emotional, and energetic way.

Harms: I feel so alive today that’s another way to describe it. For me vitality is I feel that same level of vitality throughout the day. I feel consistent.

Dr Ro: That’s exactly right. It’s a consistent vitality. You asked about energy. Energy to me is if you’ve got lots of energy it just means you’re buzzing a lot. Someone who is bouncing around a lot can appear to be vital, but they may not have all the characteristics. 

To me just drilling down a bit further it’s clarity of mind. 

Really clear thinking in any situation, vitality is in that moment of what do we do now? 

How do we get through this problem and you’ve got this sense of vitality. It also has a great sense of purpose, so you are really focused but you can feel this drive and nothing is stopping you, and it’s non-stop. The thing about vitality is it’s an emotional, physical, spiritual, and bodily experience whereas energy is essentially just a fuel experience for me. 

How much can you burn before the energy runs out?

It’s almost like the person who’s had a low day, maybe skipped breakfast. They had a poor breakfast, early coffee or the night before eating poor food or they’ve just grabbed a hash brown and an egg sandwich from the burger joint. 

But before they get to their critical meeting, a pitch, an important client they’re talking to, they psych themselves up and have an energy drink. 

They just fuel themselves up for that moment in time and then there’s the peak.

Come away from that they appear energetic during that period and if you talk to them an hour later they might hit a flat. So that’s not vital. 

That’s like energetic bursts and you can have the two marry each other, if someone has great vitality they should have natural energy anyway. 

Other things to look for is physical vitality, so they just feel more physically engaged, emotionally more stable under pressure. They are much more alert. They don’t seem to be phased.

 Yes, they might feel what is going on, but also they’re steady and it’s not just a static steadiness or a burst. When you talk to someone that is vital they’re totally present, you feel the energy at that moment. They’re in the moment with you but they’re listening, thinking through. Whereas someone who is very energy burst they’ll go down one rabbit hole.

Often people who have a high energy will pick up a couple of words and focus on that. Whereas the person who is vital has a consistent energy can listen to the whole conversation, the context, what’s not being said, what does this person need? 

How can I help this person? 

That comes from having that vitality.

When I look at someone and they’ve got radiant energy, eyes look clear, hair looks clear, the skin looks good and they’re talking to you with their eyes versus somebody that looks completely knackered but they’re buzzing as if they’ve had a quick sugary drink. That’s a totally different person that is a radiant emission of that human soul.

 What’s the best way for either somebody to notice this with themselves or what action can they do in order to either track their vitality, understand their vitality. 

Make sure they’re not focusing on energy, but instead are starting to tune in with how vital they are.

Harms: A logical way to do this is to get people to track it leading into the event is number one on an hourly basis and if you can really do it every half an hour, but even over a day if you can get 12 hours of this it’s amazing. Every single hour you just have a log and the log states how you feel from a vitality perspective. 

If you want to do it kind of physically you can have a table that is my physical vitality, my emotional vitality, my mental vitality.

Dr Ro: You could do spiritual vitality. That’s four things logged every hour or you could just say my overall feeling of vitality on a scale of one to 10. One is you’re feeling really shitty and you just don’t feel vital. 10 is you’ve got a clear mind, clear body, thinking clearly, emotionally stable and you feel spiritually connected. 

So if you can do that on an hourly basis throughout the day, you will 100% see a pattern without a doubt, this ties back to sleep and the diet. Step two is note what you ate and drank. 

Again, this is another thing we used to do just a food diary, so it’s like a food diary. You’ve got to tie that into these hourly checks as you go through the hours some things will change. You’ll go up or down or stay the same. What did you eat just maybe, the first couple of hours before that? 

In between these hours what are you doing with your body? 

The vehicle that is carrying you through. 

Are you fuelling it? 

If you’re fuelling it what are you fuelling it with? 

Food and drink, and it has to be done on an hourly basis. Step three is what are your moods? 

What we’re doing is at that moment in time we’re logging our overall vitality. What we ate and how is your mood? 

Are you feeling happy, sad, depressed, angry, aggressive, frustrated. Try and put a word to it and keep it simple because there will be a pattern.

Irritable is often one, very reactive someone says something to you and you just bite back or something like that often appears. I feel that sometimes. So yes, note your mood and emotional step, that’s step three.

The fourth step is to do this early in the morning. 

What was your sleep like last night?

It is not only just last night it is also the two or three nights.

It needs to be ideally the last few days before. 

What I do now is I can add this into my app if I’m having a tough day or feeling odd, I will make a note of what happened the night before. Try and do it as early as possible, so you’re honest with yourself. I woke up at seven, I went to bed at two. 

Now then let’s see what happens during the course of the day, how’s your vitality?

Why that is important is because when you sleep less your memory will fade so you will make up the time.

Unfortunately, it’s not like a bank account you can’t really catch it up. Step five and this is an ongoing process, do it for two weeks, don’t do it for a week, don’t do it for a few days. In an ideal world do it for a month but even if you do it for two weeks that is 14 days, you can start to see a pattern. 

You can’t see a pattern over a few days and you have to do it consistently over two, three, four weeks and you will start to see this is where I’m feeling like this and now we can start to work on your vitality and what things you can do to improve that.

Notice when you feel most vibrant and what triggered it. 

Harms: Was it certain foods, certain drinks, certain sleep, and that’s why we put these items in this order leading up to vitality. On your events I have heard you share and is normally in a private arena or private audience setting where you’re helping inspire or educate somebody to give them a bit of guidance and direction on your value as health and what your statement is around that and I wondered if you would like to share it with the Seekardo listeners.

Dr Ro: This is a purpose statement or a vision statement. I prefer to call it a vision statement as a purpose statement is slightly different and that’s a conversation for another one of our podcasts. 

Essentially for five or six areas in my life I have a statement that relates to me as an example as a partner in a relationship, me as a parent, a professional speaker, an entrepreneur. How my relationship is with money and health as well. 

I’ll read it to you, I wake up every day with a feeling of purpose and passion towards what the day will bring. I have a purpose to help others and love being healthy and vibrant, so I can serve my family, my friends, and those who are on a path of true inspirational growth. Bear in mind when I write a purpose statement down everything integrates across who I am as an individual, so it’s not designed to be specific to health. It’s part of who I am, so you’ll notice the emphasis on helping other people as well.

Harms: As a listener of the Seekardo podcast, you are on a path of true inspirational growth so I love this because this statement would have been with you a long time and you’re embodying the statement by what we do here on the podcast as well.

Dr Ro: Thank you.

With each deep breath I remind myself that I can and I am a beacon of light. I have boundless energy and always fuel my body with live energising foods. I start each day with neutral food and a drink that cleanses my body and my soul, which allows me to release toxins from the day before. I remember to rest to meditate and to keep myself topped up. I love to stretch and exercise my body and carry myself with dignity. I shine like the sun and I walk with the strength of the power and the confidence of the last Samurai. I choose to live a long and healthy life so I’m able to inspire others and lead by example. My body is my temple and I feed it with clean, vibrant, live food and water with passion. I help my body and mind to grow younger every day. I love my life. I love my body and I love my soul, which is why I choose to cleanse it, flush it, and honour it.

Harms: Amazing, thanks for sharing that which I know has only been shared in a private setting and giving us permission to put it on the show notes as well. 

I think that’s an amazing way to finish part one, about talking about a holistic approach on how to approach health and your body, especially in the incredibly strange weird time that we are in at the moment. 

Thanks for ending on that note, that’s myself and Ro signing out from the Seekardo’s podcast. We shall see you for part two to close off the discussion around this holistic view on the body.