The theme of tonight’s interview was expressed by Richard Bach, who said, “Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and sickness, to riches and poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.” Christopher Guerriero has been helping people reclaim their power over their own health and happiness for more than 17 years.
Christopher is the founder and CEO of the National Metabolic and Longevity Research Center. In the Research Center he and his staff study all the weight loss, metabolic enhancement and longevity programs they come across to determine exactly what effect they have on improving a person’s metabolism, longevity and their ability to burn fat.
Christopher has spent over 17 years studying people who have successfully mastered their metabolism and their ability to look and feel young long into their golden years. The main goal of the Research Center is to develop programs that are all-encompassing, ones that include every factor that could have had a profound helpful effect on a person’s metabolic health, appearance and longevity.
Christopher is the author of several books, including the worldwide bestseller, Maximize Your Metabolism, as well as The 2-Day Workout, The Psychology of Weight Loss, The Art of Living Thin, and literally thousands of other articles, reports and books. Maximize Your Metabolism became the foundation to a company that now includes a speaking career through the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, as well as an online business, a series of books, audios, videos, software and a full coaching program. Christopher and his clients have been featured in national magazines and on television and radios stations across the US, Canada, Australia and the UK.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Chris, thank you so much for being with us tonight.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Thank you very much.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Could we begin by you just sharing with us how your passions, the things that you care most about, led you to the work that you do today?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: I think for all of us, our passions mature with us. I’ll tell you what really was in my heart when I first started, and it’s something that’s driven each one of our companies over the years. It’s the focus or the goal to help the greatest number of people possible to live life in their dream body.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I love that phrase, ‘dream body’.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: It’s been a driving force for me from day one, and this probably leads us to the story of how I got started. On day one I started as a personal trainer. This was years and years ago when personal training was a fad, when not too many people knew what it was, and not many people had personal trainers. I started there with that goal, again, to help the greatest number of people possible live life in their dream body.
However, as a personal trainer, I was only really able to help a small number of people-only five, 10, 15 people a week at the most-because your time is limited. Then I went on from that to getting other personal trainers to work for me. I created a personal training company, and we had over 150 trainers who were attracted to us because of this vision we had, who we were able to get clients for.
Then we went from being able to help only 10 people or so to being able to help hundreds of people. Then I got into the health club industry to be able to help more people, and we were able to help tens of thousands of people a year. The vision, as long as we kept that vision instilled in all the companies, really helped us to grow massively. Then the first book came out, which was Maximize Your Metabolism, and that helped us to reach out to hundreds of thousands of people.
Then we went virtual. As soon as we went online, we were able to help millions of people around the globe. That passion, that one thing, has kept us focused and has been the driving force that has built this empire. As you mentioned, in that time we started the organization called the National Metabolic Longevity Research Center, which has been a great tool for us to determine what really does work and what really doesn’t work for people.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Will you talk a little bit, Christopher, about how you really began to focus on metabolism in particular? There are a lot of weight-loss programs out there, and we all sort of understand that metabolism may have some important value in it, but what got you focused on metabolism specifically?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: I’ll start generally, because if this interview goes where I hope it’s going to be going, I think we’re going to get really specific for everybody today. I’m excited about what I’ve got to share with all of you. I’ll start by saying that when we were studying all this stuff and we started focusing on the metabolism, it became very evident that the human body, especially with the metabolism at its heart, is just an amazing machine.
If you think about this, we can train our muscles to grow. That’s pretty simple; everybody knows we can do that. We can train our brains to hold more information; you just study and you can do that. You can even train your lungs to hold more air. What’s even more incredible is that the exact same science, the exact same tools and tactics that we use to do that kind of stuff, at least on the most general term, we could use to boost your metabolism, to train your metabolism, to either increase or decrease, not within a few years or a few months but in the next few days.
That sounds pretty exciting to some people when I initially say it to the audiences when I speak around the globe, but here’s what confuses so many folks and what stops them dead in their tracks. What we found is that our metabolism, what our metabolic needs are, change every year or so. Think about it. That’s due to improper eating habits, hormonal changes, menopause, age-related issues, or whatever. Keeping up with those changes is what determines whether or not your body is going to keep getting better, better looking, healthier, fatter, more sluggish, or whatever it is.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Are there external factors that lead to the changes in metabolism, or is it a natural process of aging and growth? What is it? This is the first time I’ve heard-though many of listeners may have heard-that our metabolism changes on, apparently, a rapid basis.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: It’s everything. Every factor inside of our environment will affect our health in some way, shape or form, including internal stuff. External things will affect your metabolism over time. Internal things will affect your metabolism immediately. If you think about this, you’re going outside; it’s a dull, dingy day and someone cuts you off on the way to work.
You’ve got this cloudy day, you’re already in this poor mood, somebody cuts you off on the way to work, you get a little bit upset, and now you’re creating this acid environment inside your body. You get a little bit depressed. That depression, when you’re a little bit depressed, doesn’t just affect your thinking. It doesn’t just affect the way you walk. It affects every single thing inside your body, including your metabolic rate.
When you are mentally or physically depressed, your metabolism is depressed, which means you digest your food a little bit slower, which mean you absorb your nutrients a little bit less efficiently, which means you have a little bit less health and less mental clarity. It’s a vicious cycle. I know I’m getting ahead of myself, right?
CHRIS ATTWOOD: No, it’s okay. I think many of us have heard, particularly in America, that the incidence of depression, unhappiness, and all of that is major these days. Do you think that’s the major factor, or are there other factors that have led to so many Americans becoming overweight? We’ve sort of become known now as the overweight nation.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: I think that’s a factor, but I certainly don’t think it’s the factor. I think all of these little factors together have a profound impact. Individually, they do not have a profound impact. Individually, they don’t; together, they do, which is exciting to me. When you understand this concept it should be very exciting to you all, because individually if something affects your day, that could have an affect on your metabolism, on your weight, on your health, on everything.
However, what if you have all these other little triggers set up that are doing good things in your life? For instance, you know for a fact that you’re going to stop your day halfway through and go get a little bit of exercise, or you’re going to stop your day halfway between breakfast and lunch and have a healthy snack, or you’re going to do a breathing exercise, or you’re going to a relaxation exercise, or you’re going to do something. You have these other little healthy triggers.
The combination of whatever the dominant thing is is what really is going to pull you in that direction. If the dominant things that you’re doing in your life are all healthy, if they’re bringing you in a healthy direction, you’re going to win out over these little itty-bitty things that are happening. If you go through a little bit of depression, it’s not going to affect you nearly as much if you have these other healthy triggers in place in your life.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: That makes sense. One of the statistics that Janet and I call on frequently in the context of The Passion Test is that 80% of Americans are not passionate about what they do. They’re not happy about the work that they’re doing in their lives. I would imagine that what you’re talking about builds up over time.
If you don’t love what you’re doing, if you don’t like the things you do, if you don’t have those, as you said, breaks scheduled in, things to look forward to, then that has to lead a lot to overweight people. However, the other side of it is that many people find it very difficult to lose weight once they’ve got it. Why is that? Why is it so hard for most people to lose weight?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: I’ll give you the answer; this is why. Think about your metabolism like a tabletop for a moment. Each one of the legs that supports your table is another technique that you use to support your metabolism. There are some smart people who say, “If you want to improve your metabolism, exercise more because it’s about calories in and calories out.”
They use one leg to support their table; they exercise more. Some really, really smart people combine two things, so now they have two legs supporting their table. They have diet and exercise. However, that’s still a very weak table. Think about that for a second. You take that table with just two legs, and even if you push it up against a wall to support it by the wall, the first big breeze that comes by is going to knock that table right down.
The first big breeze could be a high school reunion, or it could be your in-laws coming over for the holiday meal and you just gorging because you don’t want to listen to all the yelling. It could be so many of these little things that will knock one or two of those legs down, and then your metabolism drops. What is supporting your metabolism is just not there anymore.
What makes it hard for most people to lose weight-to answer your question-is the fact that they focus just on one or two little things, as opposed to focusing on setting your environment up, setting your life up, so that it’s easy to be successful and have that lean, tight, healthy, sexy body that you’re looking for. I could give you a couple of specific examples of why people don’t do this and how they could fix it.
First, your body just can’t lose weight if it’s in an acidic state. It’s very difficult for your body to drop weight when it is trying to store weight to protect itself from all this acidity inside your body. One of the main causes of acidity is this blockage that so many people have inside their colon. I don’t want to turn this into a colon talk.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: We need a colon cleanse.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: In essence, you need a healthy colon. There was a study done several years back-and this was an amazing study; I love citing this thing-where these researchers took these cadavers, people who’d died of natural causes. These people didn’t die in a car accident. They didn’t die from cancer. They died from just natural causes, and they were between the ages of 60 and 90 years old.
What they did was dissected these cadavers. They took out their colons, they sliced their colons, and they opened them up. They scooped out this matter that was left inside of their colon, and they studied it. They did all these analyses on it, and what they found in that matter that was still stored inside their colon was evidence of medicines and foods-not particles of food, but little chemical substances from these foods-that they had not eaten or taken since they were children.
They know that these foods or these nutrients had not been ingested since then because these are things that were found in their native lands before they traveled over to America. Or, these medications were things that they had not taken for many, many years. This is what we have. I’m going to expand that and say the average American, Canadian or Australian, because all our diets are about the same nowadays, who fits into this category is storing between five and 10 pounds of fecal matter in their body at any given point in time.
This is fecal matter that’s been around in our systems for quite a long time. If you think about this, you’ve got this stuff sitting in there and it’s got these chemicals in there. It doesn’t just sit there and not do anything. The chemicals absorb through your colon wall, go through your bloodstream, go through every organ in your system, go through your brain and make you a little bit less mentally alert.
Then they go back into your liver, go back through your system, go back into your colon, and sit there again and get reabsorbed. It’s a constant state of your body reabsorbing this “crap” that’s inside your body. I don’t mean that literally; it’s just this disease that’s inside your system. It’s constantly making you more and more acidic. Here is something for anybody who thinks that they’re going to jump on the next diet and lose weight really quickly, or lose weight and then keep it off without fighting to keep it off.
Without first cleaning out all that matter that’s been stuck in their body, it’s absurd to think that that’s possible; it’s not a healthy alternative. That’s the very first thing that we address.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: It sounds like, from what you’re suggesting, the first step before try to begin a weight-loss program has to be to cleanse out the colon.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Yes, and we talk about that in all of our programs: Total Body Transformation, Maximize Your Metabolism, and any of the programs I teach people. We’re always showing them first how to gently and naturally clean it out. I’m not talking about enemas; I’m not talking about talking these crazy supplements that could be harmful to you.
We teach people a vegetable juice cleanse where you just drink vegetable juices and use vegetables in order to clean out your system, so you’re not dropping everything to run to the bathroom halfway through the day. It’s a natural cleansing and a saturation of nutrition on yourself at the same time.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: It’s wonderful, and I so appreciate that you’ve offered all of our listeners a special report on the Golden Rules of Dieting. You said that people can lose 10 pounds within a month, which sounds fabulous. I’d just like to tell everyone who’s listening, to get that special report you can go to www.HealthyWealthynWise.com/weightloss if you want to learn to be able to put this stuff into practice right away.
Some of us aren’t as knowledgeable as you clearly are about the effect that metabolism has on our weight, on our health, on how we feel. Will you talk with us just a little bit about how changes in metabolism affect our experience of life and, obviously, our weight and the state of our bodies?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: I’m stumbling because I just don’t know where to start with that. It has such a huge impact on us.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I’m going to make it simple, because some of us are starting from a very simple place. We all know that sometimes our metabolism goes very fast. We know that when we’re exercising, when we’re running, and when we’re breathing hard our hearts are pumping hard, so obviously we’re metabolizing energy and calories very quickly.
There are other times when we’re sitting and our metabolism is slow. What happens when the metabolism is faster or slower? Why is it so important how our metabolism is working in losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Why is it? The healthier your metabolism is dictates your body’s ability or inability to burn fat for energy. When we’re speaking about burning fat here, I don’t want anybody to mistake what I’m saying as referring just to burning fat so you can have a tight, lean body. That’s not what I’m talking about here. That’s a side effect of what we’re talking about here. I’m talking specifically about health here.
Instead of talking just about burning fat for looking great, what we’re really talking about is burning the most efficient fuel source that your body has, and burning it in a way that increases both your mental and your physical energy. Think about this for a second. What would be better in your life if you had just 20% more mental energy to be able to make those split-second decisions that you want to make when you need to make them?
What if you have 20% more physical energy to do all the daily tasks necessary to enjoy life so you get everything done and you still have a lot of energy to spend time with your family? By improving the health of your metabolism, you could literally double your energy overnight. I know that’s a huge claim, so let me just explain that before anybody jumps in and says, “Oh, my gosh! This is crazy!”
Think about it this way: 70% of all the energy a person uses during the course of a day is used just to digest the food you eat. This is in extreme layman’s terms, so if there are any physicians and scientists on this call, I understand that it’s not exactly 100 grams. We’re using this for illustrative purposes here. Say it took 100 grams of energy for you to just digest the breakfast you had today.
If we could tweak a few little things to get your body to digest your food using half of that-let’s say 50% or 50 grams of energy-then you immediately have more mental and physical energy to enjoy the rest of your day with fewer cravings and with less effort on your part. It’s just tweaking a few things so your body can digest the food that you’re eating. I’ll give you a specific example.
The foods that the majority of people are grabbing and eating, the ‘comfort foods’, when they combine these things it makes it extremely difficult for your body to digest them. If you’re having lots of bread and meat at the exact same meal-let’s call it a hamburger-the digestion of the bread and the digestion of the meat take two completely different environments inside of your belly in order to properly digest.
They combat each other in order to digest properly. Thus, neither one of them digests properly, and you have the fermentation and all these other things that go on in there. However, what if you were to add something with live enzymes to that, if you were to have the meat with a salad? Instead of having a hamburger with a bun, why not have a chicken salad? You can go to a fast food restaurant or you can do this at your house.
You have the chicken, the high-protein source, and something with a ton of live enzymes, all those vegetables that have those live enzymes in there. God put those live enzymes in there to help that food digest inside your body, and put so much inside of there that there’s enough to help your body to digest the protein, as well. That’s just one little technique that addresses combining the foods like that.
I’m not talking specifically about combining your foods at every single meal. I’m saying that with a little bit of common sense, you add some vegetables to your normal meal. It’ll just help your body to digest that food faster, and you’ll have a ton more physical and mental energy.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: To review what you’ve been saying so far, what I’ve gotten is that, number one, it’s important to cleanse the colon, to be able to clear out all the garbage that may have been there in the past to prepare the ground. It’s sort of like tilling the field, it sounds like, if you’re getting ready to plant something. Then it’s critical to understand and to be able to combine foods properly. When we do that, I heard you saying, then it will take less energy to digest those foods, which means that we’ll feel more energetic and we’ll have more vitality as a result.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Exactly. For everybody who gets to listen to this who thinks, “Gosh, now I have to think about every single thing that goes into my mouth,” that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that if you try that you’re going to get so frustrated and overwhelmed that you may stick to it for a week if you’re really, really strong-willed, but then you’re going to have this yo-yo effect.
What I’m suggesting is that if you’re going to have a hamburger or if you’re going to have something that you know is not combined well but you really love that meal, throw into that meal something that has a lot of live enzymes, as well. Throw in some live vegetables, some raw vegetables. The enzymes in there will help the rest of that meal digest properly.
It’s not giving you the huge benefit of just having the lean protein and the vegetables; however, you’re still better than you were before, and you have a little bit more energy. Instead of double the energy, now you have 20% more energy, which is still a lot better.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: You mentioned raw vegetables. What’s the difference between eating raw versus cooked vegetables?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Cooked vegetables digest substantially faster, and raw vegetables still have all the live enzymes and all the nutrients, including the phytonutrients that your body needs to convert food to energy.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Got it. Is increasing metabolism one of the goals in the programs that you promote? Is increasing metabolism a good thing or not?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Increasing the efficiency of your metabolism is always a good thing. You want to make sure that every single one of your organs is as healthy as possible so that your food digests quickly and so they can extract all the nutrients from your food, go into your blood, and do all of the wonderful things that food can do inside your body when it’s digested well.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier in the interview. You talked about the external factors-and we’ve been talking about those a little bit-that affect weight and weight loss. You also talked about the internal factors, and I wonder if you could spend a little bit more time on what role having a positive self-image or feeling a sense of confidence plays in a weight-loss program? What kinds of things do you suggest for people to be able to be most effective?
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Are you talking about self-image?
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Self-image, yes.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: What role does it play? It plays the number-one role. How nice and quick is that answer?
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Why is that? Why is it number one? A lot of people would think other things would be important.
CHRISTOPHER GUERRIERO: Yes, and that’s why we have such a massive yo-yo effect. That’s why we can have over 50 to 100 new diet books every single year introduced to the market that hit the bestseller list. That’s why the majority of people who buy a diet book can go to their shelf and see five or six other diet books there collecting dust. I’ll give you another specific example.
We have Maximize Your Metabolism, and the number-one chapter is not diet. The number-two chapter is not about diet. The number-three chapter, I think, isn’t even about diet in that particular book. We talk to people about mindset first. We’ve studied the way people are reading these books. We have certain free gifts inside of all these books that people have to go back to our website to download, so we know what chapters they’re reading first.
The great majority of people who buy these books in bookstores go to our Diet chapter first, which is halfway through the book. They download that free bonus over there before they go back to chapter number one, which is about the foundational things, if they ever go back to it. This is the mindset piece. The people who follow the mindset, the people who get the self-image proper first, are the ones who are successful the most on any diet program, and they’re getting “permanent” results because they know how to self-modify things.
That’s why it’s so darn effective. I’ll give you what we’ve found, two techniques that really work staggeringly well with our clients. We teach people a concept called BHAR, which stands for Big Hairy Audacious Reason. Before you get started with anything, you have to have a huge reason why you’re going to do this, and it’s very rarely, “I just want to be healthier,” or “I just want to look better,” or something like that.
It’s, “Because when I get out of bed in the morning and I walk away, I want my husband to watch my butt as I’m walking away.” That’s a big, hairy, audacious reason that a woman may have. It gives her goose bumps when she thinks about it, or it gives her tingles up and down her spine. It could be, “I’ve got a high school reunion coming up and, my gosh, I’ve got one or two people who I really want to see. I want them to see me in a tight, lean body.”
Or, “I’ve got this dress that I know I look so dynamite in. Without a doubt, I’m going to be in that for New Year’s Eve.” They are very specific things, and this is a whole seminar. It’s a very specific process that we walk people through. If you’d like, I have this program that I’ll give you all for free; it’s a $29 program; I’ll give you a behind-the-scenes link to it if you want it. Go to www.PowerfulReasons.com.
The only people I’ve ever given this link to are people to whom I go onstage and speak when they cut my time out, and I don’t have the full two hours to speak on stage. This is so vital to people’s success that I set this audio up and this one link that you can get. Just go there and download it for free. You can have the whole thing. It’s 30 minutes and takes you step by step on how to build a big, hairy, audacious reason for yourself to reach your goal. When you do that, that motivation will keep you persisting past where most people give up.
The second big thing that we teach people …
To hear the full hour long interview for FREE ==>Click Here
For more information about Christopher Guerriero and his work, please go to http://www.christopherguerriero.com/.
