Chantel Ray: Hi, guys, welcome to today's episode, and we have Graeme Currie, who is the author of The Fasting Highway, and our title today is Tips and Mindset to make intermittent fasting easier from someone who's lost a hundred and thirty two pounds doing intermittent fasting. And he lost it in 15 months. So, Graham, welcome.
Graeme Currie: Thanks so much. Chantel, I've followed your podcasts and your book and so forth, and I'm a big fan. Thank you.
Chantel Ray: Great. Well, let's talk a little bit about your journey and what kind of brought you into intermittent fasting and how you really can give us some good tips on how to make that mindset and any little things extra to make it easier.
Graeme Currie: Sure. Well, I'll just give the listeners a bit of a back story, sort of being heavy all my adult life up to about 14 was pretty normal, really. And then I just started growing and didn't help my parents for a convenience store. And I spent three years of my life in the store and eating all the wrong things and drinking gallons of coke. And I just basically got more obese as the years rolled on. And then once I got into my twenties and thirties, I discovered the party circuit went pretty out of the ball, that all while I was just getting more obese and gathering more weight and then I guess roll the clock forward to twenty seventeen at the end of what had a big week in Sydney and my in laws and just drank and like all week was a Christian slowly and honestly felt like I was just going to blow up. It's no other way to describe it. And I got onto a plane ready to come home to Perth and had that Catalyst's moment where I couldn't do up the seat belt on the plane I could hardly fit into the seat was taken out of my seat. I've got to do something here. I really do. This is this is it. For whatever reason, I try a lot of things in my life Chantel to lose weight. And I've done that to a degree. But the would always come back home like there was nothing ever sustainable. And I'm sure a lot of us have done that, Yo-Yo. Dieting over the years. And so are you, that all the sugar and fast food addict, that was no two ways about it. So I got home to Perth and I went about trying to find out how I was going to address that issue, especially that sugar, which you was my main problem. And so the fast food addiction just give you a picture of that. I was going to the drive through maybe three times a day for years. The coffee's muffins in the morning after breakfast. So, you know, I didn't really need it, but it just became a habit. And that habit became a habitual thing for life, really. And then so I set about learning about sugar. So I got hold of this book called Life Less Sugar, which is written by a New Zealand woman called Amanda Tiffin. And it really shocked me when I looked at all these titles of how much sugar was actually in food, something I never really looked at before. And all my favorite foods were things like baked beans, all full of sugar, tomato sauce, full of sugar. And then I went down to the local supermarket once I got my head around how to read a nutritional label and I spent about three quarters of a diet really just going through every single thing I could look at and learning what sugar was in food. And it really shocked me because it just wasn't the sugar that was there on the packets. It was all a hidden sugar is the Dick Tri's and Miltos and corn sirup and all that sort of thing. And, you know, I knew that it just wasn't an issue. It was all the added sugars as well. So that took me a while to get my head through that, and then I started going through this really, really bad addiction, withdrawal from the sugar, and that lasted about three weeks and was horrific, to be honest. So much so to the point I spent two days in bed with the donor over my head. And, you know, I was really gone through climbing the walls. And I don't know what drug addictions like Chantel, but, you know, withdrawing from that, but withdrawing from a four decade abusive relationship with sugar. And that three weeks was pretty, pretty awful, to be honest. But I started coming out of it. And the fast food side of things like I just stopped it, cold turkey just stopped going to the drive thru or even got to the point. I made sure I had fuel for my car on the way to work and I took my money with me. I didn't take any charge, nothing, because I thought, well, if I don't have any money on me, I can't go and feed this addiction. And so that actually helped me a lot, even though I might be running around that money, but that's what I did for a few weeks and then the sugar, I slowly started getting let out of my life. I went to the pantry or checked out what food you can't give away, really happy food, that sort of thing. So I went through the pantry and I checked out all the things that I thought were high and sugar and no good for me. And I basically had to reset my mind to get into a place where I had to learn which foods I could have and which I couldn't. And then the fast food, obviously, that was out of my system. And I started eating more Whole Foods and claim to type foods. And I started feeling quite good. And I guess what brought me to intermittent fasting was I was Googling one day and I found a single one meal a day lifestyle. And I thought my reaction was what sort of weight? Ozzy wants a day coming off as a guy that was eating 20 times a day at one point. And it intrigued me. And I looked into it and I discovered Gene Stevens, of course, who we both know and love and appreciate the light on tonight. And the light bulb moment went on. I thought, OK, this is something I can do. All I've got to do is delay the day when I eat. And that's all I have to do. I have to do this clean fast, which Jim talked about in the book, and I claim fasting the black tea, black coffee, water, sparkling water, plain green tea. That was it during the fasting period. And then I started with the twenty three and one protocol, and I did that basically the whole way through the weight loss journey. So that's basically how I got started with the intermittent fasting.
Chantel Ray: So tell us a little bit about how you changed your habits. So when you changed your habits, like give us some ideas, because one of the things that people say is that if you you know, so many people who are listening, maybe they were accustomed to having the three meals a day plus that snacking style of eating. And it's easy to feel like, you know, you should take a meal or take a snack even when you're not hungry just because it's lunch time or because you're so accustomed to eating those snacks. And I think one of the things I love about fasting is that it really helps you to understand, am I really hungry or am I not? And and people have gotten so far distance from paying attention to their body and their hunger cues of knowing if they're hungry or not because they've created these habits of up. It's 12 o'clock up at snack time up. It's this. So what were some of the habits that you did that you replaced with other habits that said, OK, you know, I want to make sure that I'm really creating these new habits instead of some of the old habits.
Graeme Currie: Well, I guess after a great deal, I don't and I hate the tools of how to stop or if that was the first thing, the second thing was the mind set. I was so laser focused Chantel. I don't I can't tell you for whatever reason, but I was just so determined to get this weight off. And I thought all I've got to do is do this clean, fast way to five o'clock every day, eating a pattern of time between five and six p.m. And I did that in a style restaurant sort of style meal where you open with that snack and then you had your mind and then dessert if it was required. But the mindset was, you know, I visualized about what was my life going to be like this way? What can I do? What are the things I haven't been able to do? And so I wrote a list of all the things in my life that I couldn't do that would stop from doing things like not being able to get on a helicopter at the Grand Canyon. I got kicked off because I was too heavy, you know, things about not being able to fit into an airline seat probably, you know, in the terror on people's face when you walk down the aisle and how anxious I used to get to nearly throw up because I was so anxious every time I flew about my size. So it was all those things that I thought about, you know, what is my life going to be like? And I get this vital. So every day I used to say to myself, and formational to the biggest thing was I needed to start loving myself first, to turn my mindset around because I'd had 40 years of not talking to myself, positively talking to myself, negatively hating the image that I saw in the mirror. So how is that going to turn it around? So every day I would wake up and I'd say two or three positive things about me, about things that I loved about me. And I slowly started getting them loving myself first escaped into my life. And once I did, that positivity of being able to fast became easier. So that was a really good habit to get into. The other sort of habits I got into was that I just set myself a goal of each week. I counted it down in weeks. So week one week to week Shrek's Sitra, I didn't sort of go any further than that. And one of the things I did was a light every day. And for me, the wine every day was a key to my success. And I know a lot of people don't like wine every day. You know, a lot of people it messes with their mind. But for me, the scale become my best friend because as I saw the light going down and I was taking the wine every day and averaging out in the week. I could see that what was happening was that I was losing weight, so that really helped my mindset and it kept me motivated, you know, staying plugged in to things like Facebook groups and reading great people like yourself and Jen Stevens and all those people in the groups and keeping that focus and reminding myself that it was possible. So, yeah, are you had a mountain to climb and it was a big mountain know. Three hundred and fifty seven pounds. When I started, I was pretty heavy and on six foot five. So the tall guy. So I was pretty imposing. So it was drawing on all those things in my life that happened to me in my school. Life became horrific. The more I cycle more bullied I got at school, my high school years were terrible. It became one big fight was like going to a USSI cage fight every day because the bullies would be waiting for me and they would always pick on the fat kid because in nineteen seventy five to seventy seven, it wasn't many of these kids at my school and I, it's probably only one of about three out of a thousand kids. And so you became a bit of a target. And Nina was the greatest day of my life when I left school, and then I started seeing discrimination when I left school, my first job was in a butcher shop. I was so happy to be apprentice butcher. And I was hired by a manager. The owner came into the store and he said, what? I said, fat slob doing up in front of my store to the manager. And I said, What me? And so that was pretty devastating. So I had to draw on all those things. So when you think about all of those things, it was so horrific in your life and you find something that's starting to make you feel good. You can see some results. And it was easy that that was a thing or since I was easy, it was simple. And that's what I loved about Jim Stevens. Still, I don't deny it made it all so simple. So, yeah, there's a few mind set tricks, but visualization was probably the biggest fun, writing it all down and then thinking about what is my life going to be like when this white ass off?
Chantel Ray: I think that, you know, the positive affirmations and repeating all of the benefits that you are going to have, like you can fly in the plane and fly in the helicopter, but also just telling yourself, you know, this is going to be great, like think about all the new things I'm going to be able to do. And taking pleasure in the idea of it can make it so much easier, like convincing yourself that you want to do it and that you'll feel so much better if you stick with it is easier than trying to force yourself into it. And I know one of the things that some of the thin women that I've interviewed, they all say is like when they hear their stomach growling or when they get hungry, they are in their mind thinking, this is awesome. Like, this is great because I'm burning fat right now. I'm now getting my fuel from my fat and from my hips and from my thighs. And so instead of saying, oh, gosh, I'm so hungry, it's really creating that positivity. Instead of saying that fasting feels too hard, it's really just a matter of saying this is great and changing that mindset is so important. So talk about anything else about like maybe keeping yourself busy, like, is there anything that you do to kind of keep yourself busy or make sure that you have back to back meetings if you're doing, you know, like a longer, fast or anything like that, that's made it easier for you to stick with it.
Graeme Currie: Does let's talk about the hunger for a minute, I guess in the early stages. I really had to learn about hunger because there's two points of hunger on this hunger and especially hunger. So within hunger, it's that hunger, the hunger where you go, wow, I'm so hungry. I could eat a horse and jockey. Right. But you're not really hungry. You just have that wave come over you and usually you'll have a big glass of water. You get distracted like you say, and you'll get stuck into your work if you're at work or you go for a walk or you do something to distract you. Or usually that feeling passes. And then there's that belly hunger where our bodies are telling us that I sometimes you don't feel great. You might feel a bit off, you might feel a bit shaky. Or does he at some point and I guess you've got to listen to your body at that stage. And there were days where I opened my window a bit earlier because I could recognize that different form of hunger. And when you have that hunger where you just say, well, I'm hungry, I could eat that. We walked past a bakery and the smell was triggered, that you go, wow, I'm really hungry. You just got to try and maybe just walk away, distract yourself, bring a friend. You might not talk to somebody for a while, pick up the phone, ring me, or go and do some shopping or do something else. It's going to distract you away from that feeling. And if it doesn't pass and it persists, then you start feeling awful. You're not feeling right. And you really got to listen to your body because that's a different type of hunger. That said, hunger. Well, sometimes you just got to eat and it's important that you recognize the two forms of hunger. So I guess the other thing is with distraction, I know some days are beginning to the final stages, my window coming up and I did twenty three and one. Right. So I've got to say, I never fasted past twenty three hours. Only once I did that was by mistake. I got home late from one night. I've been watching the country and I just couldn't be bothered. I just had a long drive. I got out of the car and you know what, I'm just going to be so that was the only time I fasted past twenty three hours because for me it was important that I had to have that mindset of at least I could eat once a day. I was never into the longer, fast exchange fasting the IDF, the ETF, because I didn't really know about them, because three years ago when I first came to intermittent fasting was pretty simple. Most people just did. I met and it wasn't a lot to talk about the IDF and all that sort of thing. Back then in the groups, it was just more of an unmanned stall. Was it a one meal a day lifestyle group? So, yeah, for me, extended fasting has never been a thing. I can understand why people do it and what the benefits are. And I always sort of keep my eyes aligned fast. And I really appreciate that everybody has a different story and different fasting protocol and they're looking for different results. So that's another thing, too, is don't compare yourself. I think a lot of people fall into that trap when you're a beginner. They'll look at photos of people in the groups that have been doing it for five weeks, have lost 20 pounds. They might have lost three. But it's really important not to compare because comparisons a thing for Joyce Chantel. And when you stop doing that, you're going to be that's negative. That's the mindset is not to have that you're an experiment of one. And it's important to keep your eyes on your own experiment. You do you and let them do them. Because if you start knocking yourself and I know you read into groups people after we change, I really beat themselves up. And that's just self-destructive. Instead of beating yourself up, if you have had an excess on the weekends and turn around on Monday and say, OK, OK, I'm on the scales, up a few pounds, whatever, you know, I haven't gained four pounds of fat overnight. It's just water retention and the extra carbs and so forth. And then just go back to your normal fasting protocol and don't beat yourself up or think you have to do a 40 or 50 out fast to make up for it. And that's really important when you're a beginner. It's just to remain calm when nice things happen and just continue on and trust the process.
Chantel Ray: So what does your eating window look like? And I want you to talk about the different ways that people do one meal a day.
Graeme Currie: Sure, well, one meal a day, you know, sometimes is known as the iPad as well, one place where people just have one big plate of food and that's it. Whereas I would say the majority of people that do I may look at it in a restaurant style, as I mentioned before, where they'll have to start up and they'll have a mine. So my sort of M.O. with it was five o'clock would come out open with something like cheese, tomato crackers, but or call me something like that. Maybe I'll have a coffee with cream in one small window is open. So what I normally found with that was in some people you'll hear is they say that they binge in a window like they can't wait to the window, open to night, get ravenous. And I open the window and I just eat. And then I find that they overeat past it. Satiety signal. And I think if you're doing that in one tip you could probably use is trying to open your window with a higher fat, maybe something like avocado or something heart fat or cheese or something, just to take that edge off because that will stop you bingeing and just sit back, have a race and why you got. So I think that's important. But Tom. Yeah, there's a lot to be said about your style. I mean, some people do. I made some people do IDF, as you know. And, you know, I think everybody's got to find your own niche. And with made I mean, you can do 16 tonight. And if somebody's sitting there wondering how to stop, my suggestion would be that they stop with the six tonight. So what that means is you'll do a 16 hour fast and you'll eat in a night out window. And it's important also to understand when you have that eating window, whether it's one hour, two hours, four hours or eight hours, it doesn't mean that you eat for one hour, two hours, four hours, eight hours, constantly. What it means is you eat in a pattern of time and then that eating window eat to satiety. So after a while, with the life, as you know, Chantel, we get what's called appetite correction. Wear your body almost gives you that automatic single signal, sorry that you've had enough. It's almost like a ha moment. So some days for me and then one hour window, it might only be twenty five minutes of actual eating. And I'm done. So I don't just look at the clock and think, wow, I've got an hour to go now. So I might have something else to eat, something else to eat, because it's an hour to go. So that's really, really important for beginners to understand. You've got to eat that full signal and don't eat past it just because you have an extra 40 minutes in your window to go.
Chantel Ray: I am so glad that you said that, because that is something that really drives me crazy, because then you're defeating the whole purpose of eating from hunger to fullness. And so people are like up. I still have a little more time. Let me try to shove in some more food. And having that kind of mindset is just a disaster. So I love what you said about my book called One Meal. And a tasting is really about having that tasting is really what kind of helps you to not binge when you have that main meal. And so the way you kind of set it is having like one meal a day and having a starter and then a main meal. So you could say it in any way that you want, but you kind of like that starter. And I think that starter is really important because it gets you to kind of calm down, because if in your mind, if you're trying to do one meal a day and you're only eating that one meal, I feel like sometimes people get to ravenously hungry and then they can't control how much they're eating and then they're ending up overeating, which is not what we want.
Graeme Currie: No, correct, and I think one intermittent fasting does, too, it helps you with mindful eating Shantelle. So for me, mindful eating was actually starting to enjoy food. I mean, when I was obese and I was addicted to processed food and sugars, I wasn't tasting food. I was tasting my addiction. And then when it came to getting over that starting intermittent fasting, after a while, I really started savoring the food that I could taste it and I enjoyed it. And the flavors were amazing. Woolas beautiful whole food that I was eating. And to give people an idea of what sort of things I was eating, given the fact I was a sugar fast food addict, obviously I wasn't eating a lot of that. So I guess I was eating Akito, which sort of style food as well. I like meat or big steak and lamb, chicken, any of those sorts of things. Also, seafood, massive seafood lover. I'm lucky enough here in Perth, Australia that we have an abundance of lobster fish, beautiful fresh fish. We can get to stay on the road here. So we had a lot of that and really are focused on that. My biggest issue was the social aspect of how I was going to handle business meetings, catching up with friends and they say and special occasion, its dimensions and input. But unfortunately, a lot of special occasions are on Saturday. So I had to learn how to get around it because I was a party board Chantel Ray what I mean, it was no two ways about it. I love the lifestyle, always a party and I love to party. And I was known as the life of the party. I mean, people used to gravitate towards me because of that. And then when I sort of started my journey or so laser focused, I withdrew from that and that was hot. The social aspect was hot because like you, I couldn't do that anymore. And I was stuck on the public. My friends, I wasn't running around three cafes and a day to catch up with people. You know, I wasn't going down to lunch time with my work colleagues. And so I've got a bit of stick about that from people, but you just have to stay on your journey and be focused about what your health goals are. I mean, do you want to please everybody else around you, everybody that's giving you grief about your lifestyle? And one of the things I found is I didn't really tell too many people when I first began intermittent fasting when I was doing the reason for that was over the years, always announce these diets I was doing, hey, this week I'm doing sit idle. This week I'm doing that diet. People just say, oh, you held second, last. And so I thought once I found out intermittent fasting was working for me, I thought, you know what? I'm just going to let results do the talking here. And after a while, it lost the faith and white people started asking me, hey, what are you doing? What's going on? And I sort of said, well, you know, I'm doing a single bit of fasting and people were interested. But, you know, your friends said, you know, you're very sociable with that. We sort of started getting a bit snarky about how come you don't come and helped us so much. So for me, the social aspect was difficult, but I learned to get over that. And then also I was a beer drinker, so I thought, what can I do to change that? So I started drinking vodka and soda, which obviously was a lot less on my belly, that sort of thing. And I still got your party in it, you know, socializing with people, but not as much. So if anybody asks me what the hottest part of my journey was, it was definitely that. I mean, I went to a lot of conferences. I organized conferences for a living. I work in agriculture. So that was always difficult, too, because know work colleagues would always want to catch up for breakfast, lunch and, you know, you sort of fasting at the time. So there were some days to where I sort of did a couple of times a day. I just didn't do the I meant and it's important to be flexible in this lifestyle because if you decide it's going to be for life, then you've got to try and fit those things in. And I'm sure you've had business occasions yourself where that's happened to.
Chantel Ray: Well, one of the things that I loved, what you were talking about is just really chewing your food slowly and swallowing it. I had a lady tell me one time that it was a little bit older. She said that an old name for a flute food blender was a Flecha riser. And I guess there was a guy named like Horace Fletcher, and he had lost weight and gain better health by chewing his food well. And so he had recommended 30 to choose for each bite. And so he's like she said, yes, you need to flex your eyes, your food. And so you basically try to chew each bite at least 15 times. Ideally, I guess he recommends 30 to choose for bite, which is really difficult. But you you start with 15 and then you work your way up to around 30 to thirty two bites. And so it's a constant reminder to say, OK, Chantel, you need to flood your eyes, your food, because for me the number one thing that I still could use improvement on is slowing down and making the point of pausing and pausing at the beginning of the meal, looking at each item of the food, you know, looking at its colors and textures and, you know, kind of smelling the food almost like a wine connoisseur or taste the wine, you know, like, you know, how they with the wine, they first sniff, you know, the wine first and kind of like first smelling it and, you know, rolling it around in your mouth and savoring it and figuring out what items you can detect. But that, for me, is one area that I'm still continually working on. Do you have any tips for eating a little bit more slowly or really savoring that food?
Graeme Currie: Yeah, well, one of the things I found was a presentation of your plate, and for me that was like, you know, it almost became theater, if you like, you know, preparing a plate and putting everything on the plate, making it look really lovely, getting some color in there. And, you know, people look at my meal picks and I said, I always look so lovely. But, you know, I take time because, you know, when I was I'd be excited and it was just like, what is whatever was eating normally was eating out of a paper bag. So with intermittent fasting, what it taught me was prepare a presentation, enjoy, savor, taste. And so your eyes eat first. Right. So when you get your plate and you put beautiful food on it and has lovely colors and like you said, just taking that time, chewing it, savoring it. And I really love what you just said in about one concert because I feel like that to that food will become a bit of a connoisseur about and I just love it and I love it. When I look on Instagram at the foodie sites and I see these beautifully prepared meals and there's a site I go to the window with which this lady has these magnificent prepared meals with beautiful colors. And I think that's really important to take time with the presentation, put color on your plate and sit there and mindfully eat and, you know, just start chewing like you see it and really thinking about it, man, how good this is. Food, taste and appreciating it. And then when you get that aha moment and that's sort of kicked in for me about six, eight weeks and almost it became deafening. It was like a single I was just like, OK, which all you done. And whether that was twenty five minutes into my window or 30 minutes into my window, some days maybe even shorter than that, I was done and I didn't eat through that. And then just close off and then at the end of my one hour window, I want stop and fast again and there to twenty three hours until the next day. And I mean, there was people always say to me, when you started, you did twenty three and one that was pretty radical for a person just starting. But I didn't really know any different, I didn't really think about it. I just thought well what suits me, I get high around quarter five, I'll get out of the car, you know, gunsel, I prepare something and I'll eat between five and six. And then I had that time in the evening to reflect and I used to always reflect about my one meal a day or two about how I could improve it, what I could do different, and my cooking skills certainly improved. I mean, I'll be honest, that were wonderful before I can do a little bit of fasting and shopping. And then I got recipe books and I looked at the pictures and I thought, how how can I replicate that? And I followed some people into groups that were fantastic at their meal presentation. I copied some of them. And so, yeah, that was really important. And just sitting there and being mindful, grateful and thinking about their presentation.
Chantel Ray: Mhm, yeah, and I think it really matters as far as you know, if you're looking and if you're really struggling to try to do Omayyad and or even if you're doing a six hour window and you're really struggling to kind of make it to your next meeting, when no. One of the things that I always ask myself is, you know, what was the last meal I ate before I started my fast? Like, did it have enough fiber? Did it have enough protein? Did it have enough fat? Am I hydrated? You know, filling up with balanced and satiating foods before your fast will help you feel full longer and not have you kind of get up the next morning like, oh my gosh, I have to eat something. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Graeme Currie: Yeah, and I think dad comes to the point about don't eat for future hunger, and that's why when you feel satiated, you feel really good. And it's important to get to that point. Like if you're not satisfied with food, then you haven't had enough to eat for that that period when you're eating one day, because, as you say, you'll wake up the next day and you'll be ravenous and you'll want something to eat. Whereas when you eat to that point of satiety and you feel satisfied but not stuff, that's the important message. Feel satisfied but not stuff. Don't feel so stuffed that you have to go on the couch, undo your pants for half an hour because that's the wrong way to go about it. And a lot of people I know and I mentor and they come to me with problems and they say, OK, you know. And I said, well, what are you doing in your window? What's going on? And they tell me that, well, well, my window is open for an hour. So I for an hour I said, look, don't do that. I just keep eating you guys satiety signals. Because what will happen is you'll be so full and stuffed, you'll feel horrible. You won't be able to sleep, particularly if you have an evening window. And that's important to you to think about. I don't want to go to bed so full. I can't sleep. And then you're going to get ratty. You're going to feel bad, you're going to feel horrible. Wake up the next day and want to be truth. So, yes, I agree with you. Don't eat for future hunger and think, oh man, I've just got to keep eating because I'm going to be fasting for the next twenty three hours. If you're ready to satiety and you fall, you can get used to that every day. You'll be, you'll be well on your way.
Chantel Ray: And I'll give one more tip. I was out to dinner the other night and I was just eating that was my one meal for the day, and I made sure I told the person, you know, don't. I said they said, you're not really drinking a lot of water. And I said, you know, I try not to drink during my meals. I try to have a lot of water. But one tip that I have is because if you're drinking too much water at your meals, it messes with your stomach acid. So I'd love for people to listen to that episode I had about stomach acid. But one of the tips that you can have is even enjoying what you're drinking by holding the liquid in your mouth for a few seconds and kind of swirl it around and enjoy the taste of it. You know, kind of like pretending like you're on a TV show and you're showing the audience how much you're enjoying this drink and almost even taking. I had a friend who was French, and when he took the water, he literally took the water and like, swirled it around in his mouth. So he had the enzymes digesting it, you know, and he was just putting down his utensils. Every single time he'd put a bite of food in his mouth, he'd put down the fork. He didn't pick it up again until the bite was completely chewed and completely savored. Sometimes I watched he put the the fork with his non dominant hand to even eat a little bit more slowly. And so it's just it's really fun to watch people who really savor their food. It it really you try to find friends that do that because it'll really teach you how to eat more slowly. Well, anything that I haven't asked you that you'd love to share with listeners today.
Graeme Currie: Yeah, I guess I'm the guy that lost one hundred and thirty two pounds, right? And I want to emphasize that it's not all about the weight loss. I had so many great health benefits and in his face and non scale victories, as we call them. And so after about three months of fasting, one of the things I had in my life was psoriasis. Well, I've my hands backs, my knees, elbows. We had quite a few places. I'd been to three specialists over the years. They all told me the same thing. You'll never get rid of it. It's nothing to do with your diet. It's just in your DNA who you are. And after about three months of intermittent fasting, I noticed it fighting. And by the six month mark that psoriasis completely off my body, there was no sign of. And so many other things, things like my vision improved, I know that sounds really wacky, but when I was obese, it was almost like I had this fog over my eyes and I'm in the game for the first. I chased after about eight months of intermittent fasting. And the guy said to me, Your eyesight lately has improved since the last time you were here. And I said, Well, yeah. And he said, What are you doing? And I said, well, what do intermittent fasting needs? Well, he said, this isn't the first time that I've had people that have come in here and said they had similar things. And I just noticed how sharp my vision was. So that was the second thing I noticed things like just my hair, my growth in my hair was just so thick and it was crazy. It's kind of the Bible, like every three weeks, just things like I had arthritic pain in my fingers. So every day I wake up in my life, I was almost like I put it up in my hand in the mornings, particularly in the winter. And I had it for so many years. And again, after about six or eight months of intermittent fasting that went away, it's never come back. And now my skin's clear, my head, all the psoriasis like my hands. And people used to say to me, how come you've got rid of that psoriasis that you had to wipe your hands and elbows and knees? And I said, well, I don't know the scientific reason, but all I can tell you is I'll be doing intimate of fasting. And an interesting thing about the psoriasis is Chantel. I've interviewed several people that have reported similar things that the head of the body and left them. So that's a really interesting point. Just all sorts of things, really. Nijole growth. Just Clair's skin. Yeah, just mental clarity, energy. Exercising became a joy for me. And I'll have to tell people when I lost the weight. One hundred and thirty two pounds, the first sort of eight months, I lost one hundred pounds. I didn't hardly exercise at all because I needed general daily stuff. What we live on a horse property. We've got a few acres. So general stuff we had to do around horse property, fencing, that type of thing. But I didn't really do any aerobics. Things like I have run walk, so I was walking a bit but not running or anything. All that new went on because my theory was I need to get this weight off first. I need to get in control of my food first. I need to be able to get into good habits with my food. And because it was so many aspects to this I know in the past brought down these things will exercise calories in, calories out, and I flow myself with exercise or somebody else would follow me and try or whatever. And I knew I resented it because I felt so awful being so heavy. And once I got the weight off where I've got one hundred of hundred pounds, I started enjoying it. I was walking longer and I was out one day and I actually broke into a jog and was the first time I realized in my adult life that I could run. And I know that sounds sort of corny, but it was a bit like Forrest Gump with the Clippers breaking off his legs and all of a sudden I could run. So that was a huge thing for me. And then I got a rowing machine, started rowing and I started swimming pool. I couldn't swim to save myself. Now, I ended up doing thirty laps of an Olympic pool one night, fully fasted and always exercise, fully fasted. So exercise had become a huge part of my life. Now every day I try to do something. So sometimes I say to people, don't just think about the exercise. If you're really obese, try and get your food right. And then once you get your weight down a little bit, then try and do the exercise. And I know people worry about loose skin and that sort of thing. Losing one hundred and thirty two pounds is a lot of weight. But I'm a tall guy, six foot five. So I was really lucky with the loose skin. I didn't really have that issue. I had a little bit under my arms, which over the last two years being a maintenance, continuing my fasting regime, it just seems to tighten up. So yeah, exercise is important, but. What do you think when you first start that you need to get really hooked up on and just concentrate on nailing that clean fast, that's the first thing? Absolutely. The second thing is try and gravitate towards what I call a world, you know? And the third thing is pick up some exercise when you feel that you're able to.
Chantel Ray: That's awesome, and one thing I do want to say about the psoriasis is that I have heard that with people who have gone to an actual twenty three one eating window, that they've had great success with psoriasis. But people who only did a six hour eating window or an eight hour eating window, they did not see that kind of success. So I have seen different people who have been like, oh, my friend says she's doing, you know, intermittent fasting and they're healing from psoriasis. But I'm doing it and I'm not. And I will tell you, it's funny that you say that, but the people who have done the twenty three one eating window, I have seen those people have very good success with the psoriasis. And I think it's just the extended fasting window. It's just allowing your body to heal your gut a little bit longer. And it's also, I think, about what you're putting into that eating window as well, is that are you putting still putting in fast foods and tons of sugar and tons of junk into your body, or are you eating more Whole Foods and stuff like that? Well, this has been wonderful. Graham, thank you so much for being with us. Tell listeners where they can find you and where they can follow you.
Graeme Currie: Door, they can come to my website, the fasting highway dot com Mausi, the author of the fasting highway book, which I wrote about my journey, you can pick that up on Amazon. A few other places come to my website site also. But also, I have a Facebook group, the same name, try to keep everything the same, the fasting low, I know more so on Instagram, scry and carry on the school. Sixty three. And my passion now is to pay for Chantel similar to yourself and help other people find your path toward auto pilot wellness. And so, yeah, if anybody wants to reach out, omotoso happy to speak to them.
Chantel Ray: Well, this has been great, you guys stay tuned, we have another episode coming up in just a few, but bye for now.