Check out my amazing in person interview with the Robb Wolf!

Transcription:

Carole Freeman:              Hey there everybody. I’m Carole Freeman, the creator of the fast track to keto success program. I am here with the one and only Robb Wolf.

Robb Wolf:                          Good to see you.

Carole Freeman:              Oh my gosh. I’m so excited to be here. I can’t even believe it. We’re sitting out on … What do you call your ranch?

Robb Wolf:                          The lazy lobo ranch.

Carole Freeman:              Lazy lobo ranch, Reno, Nevada. It’s gorgeous. I had no idea the desert could be so beautiful.

Robb Wolf:                          Yeah, I mean, if you get some water on it, stuff grows every once in a while.

Carole Freeman:              Land of eternal sunshine and endless possibilities. Got a little tour of what you got going on here. Beginnings of some permaculture and animals and plants and chickens and all kinds of cool stuff. First off, I want to start. Not all my listeners are going to know who you are. I was really disappointed. I’ve been here the last four years. I’m like, I’m going to meet Robb Wolf. They’re like, oh, that’s cool. So, can you tell, who are you Robb?

Robb Wolf:                          It’s kind of funny because I guess I’m a little bit enigmatic within the keto scene which is funny in some ways because before I got into paleo, my very first foray into ancestral diets was a ketogenic diet. When I was super sick, ulcerative colitis, bad blood lipids and everything. It was actually the Atkins book I read the very first time. Interestingly, it described all kinds of GI problems and gluten intolerance. It’s really amazing what he had figured out even in the 70s. Went Ketogenic for literally the first time in my life I felt amazing.

Carole Freeman:              When was that?

Robb Wolf:                          That was in ‘98/’99.

Carole Freeman:              Which at that time, you were like bucking the curb.

Robb Wolf:                          Everything, yeah.

Carole Freeman:              ’98, that’s the height of the low fat craze.

Robb Wolf:                          Exactly. I mean, the only blip on the radar was maybe the zone and if you really dig into the zone, what Barry Sears had talked about is once you get lean and you need to start adding some more calories to the diet, he recommended fats, mainly monounsaturated fats. If you really dug into that, what Barry Sears was recommending for people to basically have about a 60-70% fat diet. Everybody was still so fat phobic, he had to basically hide that in the background and really the only people that were savvy to that were athletes and people that he worked directly with.

Other than that, blip on the screen, and then Atkins here and there. There really wasn’t a lot going on with higher fat eating. I had had blood sugar problems my whole life. Now that I look back at it, I just feel like my head was stuffed with fog. It felt like the world was happening out there and it was completely separate from me, and then this first time that I went Ketogenic which was coming off the heels of being a high carb, low fat vegan because I was really trying to figure out what’s the optimum way to-

Carole Freeman:              Not the first person I’ve interviewed that has had that story.

Robb Wolf:                          Shocker. It was a pretty profound experience and I shifted from a basic ketosis approach to a cyclic ketogenic approach, which the only problem that I found with that was that my carb load sucked. I didn’t look forward to them where some people look at that as their hookers and cocaine opportunity to kick their heels up. I hated it because I was so sick before and felt so much better when I was fat adapted that I was like, I really don’t want to do this, but I played with that. Everything motored along pretty well.

I was probably mainly Ketogenic for more than a decade and started ramping up my training with crossfit prior to that I did some gymnastics and some Olympic lifting, a little bit of short duration sprinting, and a ketogenic diet or a cyclic ketogenic diet worked great for that. When I wanted getting into crossfit in this really, really glycogen demanding sport, I just found some problems with it. It wasn’t really fueling that degree of activity, but then I noticed if I put in enough carbs to fuel that degree of activity, then I started getting back on the carb rollercoaster again.

Then I helped cofound the first and fourth crossfit affiliate gyms in the world and worked with crossfit for a number of years, and I found that this low carb approach working really well for leaning people out for at least a period of time, and then oftentimes they reached a point where reintroduction of some carbs tended to work pretty well for them. Most people worked better for them than what it worked for me, like they didn’t end up in these carb rollercoasters. They felt better.

We didn’t get any of that kind of adrenal fatigue burnout deal which that’s a whole interesting mixed bag that I think people will ascribe a lot of that to maybe not having adequate carbs in the diet but there’s also a reality that crossfit, when programmed in a neurotic crazy way, will beat you down and destroy you regardless of what you’re eating. It really becomes questionable whether or not it was the dietary intervention that was causing these problems and just too much volume and intensity. I’ve been mucking around with low carb ketogenic diets for almost 20 years now.

Carole Freeman:              You’re most well-known now though for your involvement in the paleo community, right?

Robb Wolf:                          Sure, yeah.

Carole Freeman:              You are a speaker, you’re a writer, a prolific blogger, and you’ve got a book coming out.

Robb Wolf:                          I have a new book coming out called Wired to Eat, and that is the looking at the neuro regulation of appetite. It’s still really heavy in this evolutionary biology story, but instead of starting it from this first principles of hunter gatherers and that whole story, still looking at this discordance idea of the way that our genetics were forged in the natural environment and how different things are with regards to sleep and food and exercise, and particularly all these things work synergistically to derail our neuro regulation of appetite.

We have some goats back here and these guys, if you give them the natural food that they eat which are grasses and hedges and even some more brambly type stuff, they’ll eat a lot but they’ll hit a certain satiety point and they’re done. We will give them a little bit of grain as a treat occasionally, but you have to really meter that out. Those guys will eat it until they die. This is something that Matt Milan pointed out to me that it’s really important to keep in mind when thinking about natural diets. A change in an organism’s dietary approach can be good, bad, or indifferent. It’s really important to remember that and good or bad can mean different things.

If from a biological perspective, if it makes an organism super reproductive in its youth, then that may be beneficial even if it kills it earlier in its relative old age. There’s relative trade offs to that, but really easily with these guys we can show a way where they can bypass the neuro regulation of appetite with processed foods and it can kill them, like literally in a day, or both in goats and in some other animals like donkeys you see, and actually all these herbivorous animals, you can see hyper insulin anemia becoming a problem because people are overfeeding them these refined carbohydrate treats.

They’re wired up to eat this type of stuff and they go through cellulosic fermentation which funny enough produces short chain fatty acids. These guys aren’t subsisting off of carbohydrate per se. They’re actually fat fueled. Then when we feed them a really dense carbohydrate source, we’re actually washing them with a macro nutrient that they’re really not evolved to eat all that much of and we’re giving them boatloads of it.

Carole Freeman:              You’re giving the example if you overfed them grain in a day they could die from it. The problem I think with recognizing in our population at large why carbohydrate overconsumption is such a problem is that it takes decades-

Robb Wolf:                          For humans, yeah.

Carole Freeman:              [crosstalk 00:08:32] to die from it. If we could die in one day of overeating carbohydrates, maybe people would open up their eyes a little bit more of hmm, maybe this isn’t so good for us.

Robb Wolf:                          Right. We’re omnivores and so we can get by on a lot of different stuff and even the most horrific eating approaches people can survive on it a long time. We’re really remarkably resilient, which is good in some ways but it’s also bad in some ways to your point because it’s kind of like the frog boiling in the water. You could be really far down the path to, say, type two diabetes and metabolic derangement and there’s all kinds of signs and symptoms that occur decades in advance of that, but we’re really not looking at that stuff in a good way yet.

Then suddenly one day the person shows up in the doctor’s office and they get the diagnosis of type two diabetes and there’s all this drama and oh jee whiz, but we saw this coming ages in advance. It’d be easy to identify biomarkers that would have told us, hey, we’re becoming insulin resistant, dyslipidemic, high blood pressure, all the metabolic changes that go along with that. It happens in a way where we can still keep going to school and being parents and working our jobs, even though we’re eating ourselves into an early grave.

Carole Freeman:              Yeah, right. I’m curious. What’s your story before 1998? What got you interested in nutrition and health?

Robb Wolf:                          Oh man.

Carole Freeman:              You’re from California, right?

Robb Wolf:                          I’m from Northern California. Both of my parents were pretty sick growing up, so looking back I now understand that both parents were type two diabetic. They were diagnosed with that later but I’m pretty sure just about my whole life they were diabetic, almost certainly my mom was gestationally diabetic. My mom had a couple of different autoimmune diseases which got worse over the course of time, but I had always kind of assumed that if you exercised and ate better than a cockroach that you could probably have some better health. I was always interested in human performance. I was a California state powerlifting champion at one time. Really interested in this stuff and just fiddled with as many ways of eating as I could figure out.

Carole Freeman:              Were you a vegan when you were powerlifting?

Robb Wolf:                          No, no. That’s potentially a fascinating story. I was eating a high carb, high protein body builder type diet which allowed me to get pretty big and strong but interestingly I was always pretty doughy through the midsection and I would have these carbohydrate blood sugar crashes like crazy. As I was wrapping up one meal, I was thinking about the next meal because it was almost like an emphysemic needing an oxygen bottle. I would get crazy, crazy hungry if I didn’t eat on a really regimented schedule.

This was right when the four food groups were ditched and the food pyramid came in and that was more carbs, lower fat, and being a counter-culture oriented youth, I was like, okay, that makes sense. Anything that’s not traditional Americana type stuff. There’s got to be something beneficial to that, and also academia and the media were saying that this was a good thing generally to do.

It was kind of a stepwise deal where I was eating about 4000 calories a day to support my powerlifting activities and that was kind of a mixed American diet. High carb, low-ish fat, but lots of protein and lots of animal products. I ate the same number of calories on a vegetarian deal and then eventually a vegan deal, but I ended up getting some GI problems which is probably gluten intolerance, some ulcerative colitis that was so bad that even though I was eating 4000 calories a day, right now I’m about 170, 175 pounds. I had malabsorption so severe that I was 130 pounds.

Carole Freeman:              Wow.

Robb Wolf:                          That’s when I finally was like, okay, there’s something seriously wrong here. The vegetarian folks that I would consult with, like McDougal and the Georgia Shala Macrobiotic Institute and different outfits like that. A year of them telling you, okay, you’re detoxing and you just need to get through. It’s kind of like a year I get, but three or four years and I’m at a point where I literally look like a concentration camp person. I finally was like, okay, there’s something wrong here and I had to start looking at some other options.

Carole Freeman:              I had the same spectrum of standard American diet, discovering power of healing and nutrition and whole foods, but then moving into vegetarian. About ’98 was probably my peak, my veganism, and raw foodist and I started getting sick very, very quickly, as well, anemia and stuff and my naturopath at that time was like you might have to eat some red meat. No. Finally I learned to listen to what I really needed.

Robb Wolf:                          Right. It’s funny. Some people when they shift from vegan to meat eating, they have some problems. My first meal was like a rack of ribs and I ate all of it and was like, oh my god, I feel so good. It was like that and a salad and some watermelon or something like that. It was pretty crazy.

Carole Freeman:              Your body is like, finally, some nutrients.

Robb Wolf:                          Yeah, probably the first meal that I had really absorbed anything out of in a couple of years.

Carole Freeman:              I’ve talked to people that are vegetarian or transitioning and they have this concept that meat is really hard to digest, but it turns out that for most people it’s much easier than the grains.

Robb Wolf:                          Than this stuff, yeah. Absolutely.

Carole Freeman:              Something we were talking about before we were on camera was your good friend, Stephan, was this idea of a higher palatable combination, kind of not related to what we’ve been talking about at all, but I think it’s a really interesting topic to cover, too. This idea that when we combine high fat and high carbs and/or sugar together, this ties into your book though, right?

Robb Wolf:                          Very much so, yeah. Again, this can get kind of airy-fairy but if you think a little bit about human evolution and hunter gatherer diets a little bit, it’s a reasonable assumption that one day we probably had a lot of animal products and another day maybe it’s like roots and tubers and it was unlikely that we had giant russet potatoes cooked in butter all at the same time. We talked a little bit. It’s like toast by itself, eh, it’s okay. Butter by itself, eh, it’s okay. You put some butter on toast and get it browned up really nice and get that crunchy [inaudible 00:15:25] you’ve got an entirely different animal there.

Carole Freeman:              You compare how much you can eat of each of those individually.

Robb Wolf:                          Exactly.

Carole Freeman:              How many pieces of buttered toast can you eat versus just bread or just butter?

Robb Wolf:                          Or baked potato or butter versus slicing the potato thinly, cooking it in butter, and salting it.

Carole Freeman:              And putting cheese in there for a Hasselback potato.

Robb Wolf:                          Right. In my book I actually mention an example, oh gosh, I’m blanking on the guy’s name. Man versus food. He does these eating challenges and one of them was this kitchen sink ice cream challenge where he has to eat six or eight pounds of ice cream in a Sunday, and there’s a set amount of time. He gets in and he starts eating this thing, he’s motoring along pretty well, and he gets about two pounds in and you can see him visibly turning green. He’s just like really bogging down. What he does is kind of crazy. He asks the waitress to get him some extra salty extra crunchy French fries.

From the standard dietetics model of if your belly is full, then you’re all done and all this stuff, but it’s bullshit. He shows that it’s bullshit because he’s already eating eight pounds of ice cream so you would think adding anything else in his mouth would be a problem, but he starts nibbling on these extra salty extra crunchy French fries which are as flavor and texture different as you can possibly imagine from the ice cream, and he’s able to finish the challenge by supplementing that.

Carole Freeman:              Wow. I love that.

Robb Wolf:                          We basically eat like professional eaters because we take this really broad mix of palette experience and flavor experience and we’re able to juxtapose them back and forth. For close to a hundred years there’s been this thing called the dessert effect where people eat a meal and they’re like, oh, I couldn’t have another bite and then the dessert tray comes out and it’s like, well, I guess I could have a lot more bites. Some of that is that we tend to … It just instinctually we stagger things from less palatable to more and more palatable throughout the meal.

Carole Freeman:              You have your salad first.

Robb Wolf:                          Salad first and it’s really interesting. We even have developed our cuisine in a way … And maybe in days gone by where we had very limited access to food and you had to take some kind of marginal food that didn’t taste that great, it kind of made sense to put some speedbumps in that process in the reverse order where you would actually induce yourself to eat more of the less good stuff because you knew the better stuff was waiting and you kind of had to finish it off.

I do this somewhat with the girls. We start with the less palatable things first. It’s like you have to finish all that and then you can get this and then you can get this, and then we’re able to get them to eat a little bit of greens and more the protein and all that stuff, and then we’ll finish off with fruit and maybe like a paleo baked deal like some almond meal cookies or something like that. If we started with the almond meal cookies, it doesn’t go the other direction in the same way.

Carole Freeman:              Yeah, you don’t want broccoli after you’ve had cookies.

Robb Wolf:                          Yeah, you really, really don’t. If you do want it, then you go throw it over the fence to the chickens.

Carole Freeman:              I don’t know if you’ve thought of this or not. I think I come up with ideas sometimes but there’s never an original idea, right?

Robb Wolf:                          Right.

Carole Freeman:              The idea of the fat and sugar together or the fat and carbs. There’s only one food in nature that exists that has that natural combination. Everything else is either high fat by itself or high carb or protein and fats.

Robb Wolf:                          Are we talking coconuts here?

Carole Freeman:              Well, I suppose that’s one but the other one it’s more primal. It’s more beginning of life.

Robb Wolf:                          Milk.

Carole Freeman:              Mother’s milk. That’s the only thing. The reason we have that part of our brain that loves that is to get us to grow as an infant. We get that first food and we’re … The kitty got a critter.

Robb Wolf:                          Oh nice.

Carole Freeman:              We get that first food and we’re training biologically to consume as absolute much as we can and override … And that’s why babies get that milk drunk look after they’re done nursing is because they actually get that huge … The reward center of their brain is really lit up from that.

Robb Wolf:                          That’s one of my answers to people when they’re like, can I have dairy? I ask them, what’s dairy really good for? Kind of look at me and I’m like, it’s really good at taking small mammals and making them into large mammals. They’re like, okay. I’m like, if you want to be a large mammal, knock yourself out. Granted there’s caveats to that like hard cheeses and that’s an interesting deal is a hard cheese or just butter tends to maybe be less palette stimulating than, say, milk or even like a yogurt, particularly yogurt that’s got some fruit flavoring in it and a little bit of sugar and whatnot.

Carole Freeman:              A lot of sugar. For a lot of people on a ketogenic diet, they’ll eat a lot of dairy but they cut out the ones that have the sugar and the dairy fat together, so not milk but heavy cream that has almost no carbs in it or the hard cheeses and things like that. That’s why that fits a little bit better because you’re not consuming …

Robb Wolf:                          All of them together.

Carole Freeman:              But you’re still getting some of those casein morphine compounds that light up the brain in ways.

Robb Wolf:                          Absolutely, yeah. I think that that’s an interesting thing that we would be lying if we didn’t say that a low fat vegan type approach doesn’t work for some people, but what are they doing? They’re limiting palette options and then the other side of the spectrum arbitrarily, but we’ll just say it this way, is the ketogenic approach which also is kind of limiting palette options. Any dietary approach that limits palate options works better than the American Dietics Association recommendation of moderation.

Carole Freeman:              Isn’t that Stephan’s idea or concept? I remember reading about it in his book.

Robb Wolf:                          Very much so, yeah. I talk at length about that in my book, as well. When you compare head to head the dietic recommendations versus any other approach which limits palate options to some degree, the other dietary approaches crush the ADA recommendations, and it’s kind of fascinating because the one thing that the ADA says is disordered eating is limiting palate options. The scientific consensus from most of our nutrition science representatives is guaranteeing failure for the vast majority of people, regardless if you’re high carb or low fat or what have you. Wherever you want to play out on that thing, there is a reality that if you’re not limiting palate options to some degree, it’s going to be very, very difficult to succeed.

Carole Freeman:              I see that when anybody adopts any new dietary approach. In the beginning they don’t know about all the almond meal cookies and things like that, and so they’re really limited and so usually in the beginning they end up with a lot more weight loss and then as soon as they start to look up all the Pinterest recipes and come up with all this crazy stuff they’re like, wait, why did I gain some weight back because they started creating their own highly palatable combo foods to increase calories and overcome that natural satiety. It happens out there.

We were talking about it before that happens with people on a ketogenic diet is they start trying to recreate these things that stimulate their palate like fat bombs and cookies and cakes and things like that, and then they’re wondering, wait, why is it not working anymore for me?

Robb Wolf:                          Right, the keto gains guys are really pretty phenomenal because there’s still some drama in keto-land where some people will claim that so long as insulin is suppressed that you can’t gain weight and these keto gain guys are pretty interesting. They still … You’ve got to induce some sort of caloric deficit.

Carole Freeman:              What is Louis’s phrase about like you’re on a diet, not a food buffet? I can’t remember. He’s got this great phase.

Robb Wolf:                          Right, something like that.

Carole Freeman:              It’s like it’s not supposed to be this joyous eating adventure. You’re supposed to do it because of the goals you have and the health transformation, not because you want to feed your palate. That’s hard for people to adopt.

Robb Wolf:                          You know, the same centers of the brain that deal with food are the same ones that deal with sex and reproduction and addiction. These are survival elements of the brain. These are the things that make us exist as a species. These drives are really, really powerful and they, again, using this kind of evolutionary biology framework, they developed within some certain perimeters and we were always looking for that thing that was a little better, the honey tree or the berries or the super fatty piece of meat. There was some great survival advantage in that, but now I can work from home, never really leave my desk. I could probably even set up my work station where I’m like pooping in my chair and have-

Carole Freeman:              Do you watch South Park?

Robb Wolf:                          And have meals delivered to my front door. Where I was biologically wired to move about seven to 10 miles a day and have sun on my skin and physical interaction with the environment and other people and have me be a certain perimeter of food experience. Now I can bypass all of that. I can be asleep during the day, awake at night, blue light in my eyes at a time when I shouldn’t be awake. I can have meals delivered. I don’t have to expend any activity. I can totally screw up my gut microbiome. It’s super easy to screw all this stuff up. I do make the point though that from a biological perspective, if you live in this modern environment and you are not fat, sick, diabetic, and broken you’re kind of screwing up in a way.

Like you should be eating everything that’s not nailed down and then you should lay down and sleep. That’s what you should do. That’s what kept our ancestors alive and made them successful. Understanding this neuro regulation of appetite should remove all of the emotionality behind this stuff. It should not be surprising at all that you want to eat all the cookies and all the ice cream and everything that’s not nailed down because that’s what kept us here as a species is seeking out these more palatable foods. Then you can acknowledge that but then there’s still the hard work of just deciding what am I going to do now.

Carole Freeman:              Finding the structure that fits your life that you can impose those restrictions, like you said, you’ve got to have, whatever those restrictions are, a livable-

Robb Wolf:                          Nature gave us lane lines before, but because of our technology and culture we’ve removed those lane lines and we can just do anything that we want and anything that we want can be really injurious to us. It’s not disordered eating to set up some guidelines for you to follow. Saving money is not an instinctual process. Money is this really weird deal and shopping and spending actually hits some of those same survival centers in the brain and has an addictive quality to it. You have to teach people about if you spend more than you make, then you’re going to end up in financial problems.

It takes discipline and lane lines for people to figure that stuff out, and why that’s not necessarily an emotionally charged topic or disordered, whereas food is, is just fascinating to me. Again, if we divorce this stuff from the underlying evolutionary biology, then it’s a parts and pieces approach and all kinds of weird morality and ideas kind of pop up whereas I think if we get this bigger kind of picture using nature as an informant about what’s kind of normal and then retro engineer the process, then that’s really helpful and not to diverge too far, but it’s interesting to me that a number of the people who are the best thinkers in this low carb keto space are engineers.

They’re people whose wives have type one diabetes or they were a 100 or 200 pounds overweight, and these engineers looked at the process not with the baggage of a medical background but as an engineer trying to figure out a problem. It’s like, okay, insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, elevated blood glucose levels. Let’s cut back the carbohydrate intake and suddenly things improve.

Carole Freeman:              I so identify with what you’re talking about from the traditional dietetics approach of restrictions cause eating disorders, because that is the training that I went through. I have a duel degree in nutrition and psychology, so I got that double. I came out of school espousing the mindful eating, intuitive eating, health at every size, and that you should never try to put somebody on a restricted diet because it was cruel and unusual punishment and they were doomed to fail and they could never stay on it long-term so might as well just embrace your plus size and just eat, enjoy your food without any judgments as you ate that and that’s how I lived and that’s what I was teaching my clients at that time.

I can tell you that two years ago I was 220 pounds and I was enjoying every bite of the desserts I was having but I was hungrier and hungrier and hungrier all the time and I was headed to diabetes because my dad is type two diabetes. I was headed to dementia. My lipids were terrible but I was not judging anything I was eating. It’s not until I had to change my diet because of the car accident and brain injury and all the other things going on that I was just desperate for a solution that I discovered by following the way that I do that I didn’t have the constant hunger cravings. I wasn’t obsessed with food anymore. It was like, oh, I’m hungry, I’m going to eat rather than what am I going to eat next like you were describing where eat meal you were thinking about your next meal.

This is the most peaceful calm way to leave. It’s not cruel and unusual punishment what I’m doing to myself. I’ve actually given myself life and happiness and calm and peace. It’s a complete 180 from where I was probably three or four years ago when I came out of school. I had to, even now, I get backlash from my own community. There was a post that I did not too long ago where somebody from my own community was saying that’s disordered eating, you don’t have a healthy relationship with food. I’m like, ahhh, I was there. I understand the thought but until you actually live it and you help people live that and the quality of life that it gives them on so many levels.

Robb Wolf:                          I have a chapter in the book devoted to this whole idea of cheating and actually the topic of a relationship with food, which I think if you start the conversation with an assumption that we need a relationship with food, I think you’re screwed right there.

Carole Freeman:              That’s interesting.

Robb Wolf:                          It is a guarantee. I’ve thrown this out at a couple of talks that I’ve given and some folks have gotten mad, and the folks who get mad inevitably are still super struggling with their eating. I don’t know what the full picture is but it’s just kind of on this gut level. I grew up, my parents were very well-meaning but it was a fairly dysfunctional family. My dad drank a lot. There was some codependency there. Now I’ve just got these … It’s like a hound dog. My ears go forward when I hear something that is disordered, codependent, I’m on that shit instantly.

There was something about this whole relationship with food that I was like, there’s something really fundamentally wrong with that. These goats don’t have a relationship with food. They eat and they eat to support themselves and I’m sure that they enjoy it and we should definitely enjoy our food, but if you’re starting this thing from the basis that you need to have a healthy relationship with food, I think you’re screwed. What you have to do is actually get more mechanistic and find a spot where the food is not a trigger and that you can work within the lane lines that you have. Some people will not be able to do it. Whatever their emotional baggage is or what have you, they’re just not going to be able to get to that spot.

I do think that looking towards trying to find a healthy relationship with food is steering you in the wrong direction, versus being a bit more mechanistic and reductionist in that situation. Tackling it more like an engineer. Bridges have been built essentially the same way since Roman times. It’s like concrete and rebar and triangles work great. Balsa wood and hexagons don’t. When we have some sort of breakdown in the neuro regulation of appetite, we really need to find foods that are not hitting that hyper palatable element within the brain.

The interesting thing is that ketogenic diets have been shown to fix some of the disordered or broken wiring in the hypothalamic HPTA access that’s dealing with metabolism and hunger. It seems to reset it in a pretty interesting way. Even if somebody doesn’t necessarily eat a ketogenic diet for life, it may be similar to dealing with traumatic brain injury where it may be necessary to do that to get a new baseline.

Carole Freeman:              What I’ve seen is that people end up having their carb tolerance level tends to go up over time and they can still maintain that state of just feeling optimal and really good and have a higher carb intake and move more towards the paleo type carbs in their diet.

Robb Wolf:                          Right.

Carole Freeman:              Is there anything else that you were hoping I was going to ask you? We could probably talk for days.

Robb Wolf:                          Oh man. You covered a lot of stuff. Just super excited you could make it to Reno and come check out the lazy lobo ranch.

Carole Freeman:              This is so great. I’m so honored to be here sitting with you and talking with you.

Robb Wolf:                          You got me at the good time of year, too. In November this isn’t as good of an interview out here unless we’re in [inaudible 00:33:47].

Carole Freeman:              One of the four days of rain you get and wind?

Robb Wolf:                          It’s funny. We go from not super hot but reasonably warm and then it snows, and then the sun comes out so it’s not terrible but it gets cold.

Carole Freeman:              I’ll be back in October again.

Robb Wolf:                          It won’t be snowing yet.

Carole Freeman:              Let’s see. I stole this question from Dave Asprey in one of his podcasts. If you knew it was your last day on earth, what would be your last meal?

Robb Wolf:                          Soup of some kind. I just like soup. It doesn’t even hardly matter what type of soup. I love Cioppino, I love pho. When I go to the pho place I usually do double meat, half the noodles, and then I don’t even eat all that many of the noodles unless it’s after a Brazilian Jujitsu session. Chicken soup, like caldo de pollo. I go to some of the Mexican places but I just love soup. It would be some type of soup.

Carole Freeman:              Salty brothy.

Robb Wolf:                          Yeah, something like that. Man, I love soup.

Carole Freeman:              Awesome. This is the first one, this response. That’s great. Again, thank you so much for-

Robb Wolf:                          My pleasure.

Carole Freeman:              [inaudible 00:34:59] sit down and chat with you. It’s been so great and so many great topics. I am so excited for your book. I can’t wait. Release in … Well …

Robb Wolf:                          March April of 2017. I’m in the final editing process and similar to wrapping up a graduate degree. I’m totally sick of it. I don’t want to do anything else with it, but it’s almost done so you just got to finish it up. It’s funny. The process of writing a book is interesting because you get so immersed in the topic that at some point you just get sick of it and then also I had to draw some boundary around what I was going to include on the research. Then my day-to-day reading and staying up on stuff, like I end up six months or a year behind because I just can’t look at anything else because it’s like I can’t go back and redo that section. At some point things just have to be what they are.

Carole Freeman:              I can imagine the rabbit holes you start going down.

Robb Wolf:                          It’s crazy and you just can’t … At some point you just have to put a sign that says ‘done’ on it. I’ll be really glad when it’s wrapped up but I’m pretty excited. I wasn’t sure if I would do a second book but maybe three years ago I started organizing some references and over the course of time just this idea of the neuro regulation of appetite and really trying to figure out how to de-emotionalize this difficulty around changing food. That was my big motivator, like is there a way that we could engage people so that they understood why this change is hard and then give them the tools to be able to move forward. I’m pretty excited about that. I think that we’re pretty on point with that, but we’ll see.

Carole Freeman:              Excellent. Thank you everyone for watching. If you like this video, give us a thumbs up.

Robb Wolf:                          Absolutely.

Carole Freeman:              Subscribe if you want to see some more and we’ll see you next time.