Ed Latimore: If your health matters, ask the hard questions - #67

As an ex-professional heavyweight boxer with a physics degree, Ed Latimore can surely explain how lipolysis works for the audience to understand. Not all healthcare professionals can do that. He’s also not the type who would buy any information just thrown at him without digging and understanding especially if it’s his health that’s on the line.

The creator of “Coffee So Black” memes, he offers so much knowledge in this episode, sharing his personal experiences on losing weight as a professional boxer and how he attributed this to cutting carbohydrates and eating a heavy meat diet. Listen to him as he states why saturated fat is bad for us is a myth, what our body prefers to burn vs what it actually burns first, and how this affects our metabolism. As this media influencer with 200,000 Twitter followers sums up, let’s make our health the number 1 priority because no one else would do that for us.

Quick Guide:
01:56 Introduction
12:44 Take responsibility for your own health
18:05 The experience of a fighter cutting carbs
21:52 How our bodies function to get rid of glucose
31:58 Choosing which to believe
45:59 The challenge of sobriety
51:51 Making a change and following through
1:01:51 We have the power to do something about it

Get to know our guest:
Ed Latimore is a former professional boxer, who has written several books under his name. He’s also a veteran of the US Army, a media influencer and a highly successful business person who teaches self-improvement.

“Because if it's simple, and it's easily transmittable and easy to digest, you can dig into the jargon and the specifics for your own entertainment. But if you want to transmit an idea and get it to stick, you need to be able to simplify that idea and get to the bare bone's essence of it.”

Connect with him:
Twitter:

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Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings

Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Transcript

S3E13 Ed Latimore

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, understand, eat, health, ed, doctor, big, question, talking, cholesterol, latimore, bro, discover, learned, habit, fat, trt, weight, burn, glucose

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Jack Heald, Dr. Philip Ovadia, Ed Latimore

Announcer  00:10

He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Jack Heald  00:36

We're live. Hey, it's the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia, ifixhearts at Twitter. I'm the talking hairdo, Jack Heald. And when I saw this guest’s name show up on the calendar, I went, woohoo. We've got Ed Latimore today. Phil, I got to tell you, I really, none of the people that we've ever talked to were people that I knew prior to meeting you, except for Ed Latimore. And I actually bought something from Ed, I don't know, three years ago, probably. Welcome to the show, Ed Latimore.

Ed Latimore  01:17

Hey, man, thanks for having me out. Your name. I, just looking at the Jack and I'm like, Jack Heald. I've seen it. Some names. 

Jack Heald  01:25

We actually, nah, several years ago, we actually exchanged a couple of three emails. You have several orders of magnitude more Twitter followers than I do. So, I'm not offended. So, it's normally the folks we're talking to, Phil, are health care practitioners, or somebody who's at least healthcare adjacent. Why do we have an ex-boxer on our show?

Dr. Philip Ovadia  01:56

Great question, Jack. But yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation and to have Ed on. I think we're going to discover through the course of this that Ed is certainly healthcare adjacent, but really comes at it from a very different angle, very different background. And I think his story around just health nutrition and really, messaging is what I'm hoping we're able to educate the audience on today. So, in certain circles, I would certainly, I would say that Ed needs no introduction. He is very well known in the Twittersphere and in the social media world, but my audience may not be familiar with him as our circle’s only kind of peripherally cross, it would seem, but hopefully, they will know him well after today. So, as you said, Ed's background, very varied, professional boxer, media influencer, highly successful business person, and looking forward to discovering how this all interacts with health, which it very much does, but before we get too much into it, Ed, why don't you fill in a little bit of the details and introduce yourself to our audience.

Ed Latimore  03:20

All right, I'm gonna do the abridged version so I don't take up too much time, I hope. I’m Ed Latimore. I guess my claim to fame is that I was a boxer, that a highly successful amateur career and turn pro and had some decent success and as a professional, but one of the things I realized right around the transition from amateur to professional, is that that stuff would not last forever, and I needed to also make some changes in my personal life as well, otherwise I destroy myself. So, in 2013, simultaneously, I turned professional, enlisted in the Army and started sobriety. I've been sober now for the nine years since December. And also, in 2014 I took my first class in school and ultimately graduated with a degree in physics at the age of 33. So, I've been writing ever since. I was writing during my career as a boxer, I continue to write now. I'm on them this close to signing a pretty major book deal and I'll continue to write and learn and educate myself on all things life, including health and metabolism. That's actually been one of my most recent obsessions. So, this is an awesome bit of timing...

Jack Heald  04:42

Well, tell. Finish the story that you, that I stopped you from telling before we were recording, because I think that it sounded like it was gonna be fun.

Ed Latimore  04:51

Oh, no, I will. What I was saying is as I took some blood work, because I'm a big proponent of there. Earlier you get in front of something though the more you're able to influence it, if you take it a degree of five years out, you can drastically alter a thing but if you leave it a degree modified or altered and you just let it go, you can't see anything. So, I took a massive blood test and get really curious and the thing I noticed was my fasting glucose was 92, my hemoglobin A1C was like, it was like 5.3 and also had really high cholesterol but very low triglycerides. So, all as I'm like, this is crazy. This semester, I just dug into everything I could to understand and learn how this was going about. And that led me to realize that my fasting insulin as it kept creeping, oh crap, fasting glucose before I can get into the insulin measured. My fasting glucose has continued to creep up and my hemoglobin, it was creeping up. It was like, okay, I need to modify diet, because at this time, also, I was entertaining the idea if I could drop the weight naturally, without having to go through a weight cut, I'd fight again but at a lighter weight class, but I could not get my body to go below 230 or my waist circumference to go below 37 by the way, and I was like, what is going on?

Jack Heald  06:23

6’1”, 230 There's a lot of muscle there in there.

Ed Latimore  06:29

Oh, quite a bit. But I wanted to be

Jack Heald  06:34

6’4”, 205. 

Ed Latimore  06:36

Goodness, man, I wish six... My mom was 5’9”, my dad was 6’3”, and I got shortchanged, my sister is 5’11”. I always tell her, I was like, if I was as tall as you are for a guy that you are for a girl, I'd be, that'd be 6’4” or 6’4”, 6’5”. And I just got shortchanged. But I went through all of that. And that led me to discover all types of things. Also, I really got tired of seeing the fitness bros on social media, talking about how you can eat carbs, and still lose weight, which is true, you can, but they need to, I felt they were being dishonest, almost intentionally, by not making a distinction between refined carbs. And, and well, I guess the other type, I don't know what the, I know simple and complex. I don't know what the opposite of refined is when we talk about carbohydrates in this regard, when I use that adjective, but...

Jack Heald  07:31

I gotta press pause here real quick, Phil, I'm having so much fun because I feel like this is Ed and I are, we're on the same page here. I'm not trying to do this rapid translation of all the scientific stuff. And most of the time our guests are like way over my head and say, please translate it to English for me. So anyway, go ahead.

Ed Latimore  07:56

I am incredibly simple. Because if it's simple, and it's easily transmittable and easy to digest, you can dig into the jargon and the specifics for your own entertainment. But if you want to transmit an idea and get it to stick, you need to be able to simplify that idea and get to the bare bone's essence of it. But digging a lot out, I realized okay, little things I didn't think we're making a difference. For example, I love popcorn and popcorn is a relatively healthy carb, but I would always have it at like 10pm before bed. I was like, okay, that's causing an issue. We got it, we got to drop that, okay? Anytime intermittent fasting probably is one of the single biggest things that change my body's ability to release. First of all, anytime you fast, right, and your insulin goes below a certain point, you start to activate lipolysis, right, where the fat comes out and break, makes a huge difference, right? And then on top of that, so all of this is kicking. So finally, my weight starts getting smaller. And then like I couldn't figure it out, I googled it. It's amazing. You think Google is this big reservoir of information and it is, but some things, they're still behind on. I couldn't figure out why my cholesterol, both HDL, well, HDL was very high, LDL relatively high, but my triglycerides were like, way below normal. We're talking like 45, 50 And so I looked this up on there like ah, you don't normally see that and it must be an abnormality. Turns out when I discover and dig deeper and discover HOMO-IR and I plugged the numbers into that. I'm just a really healthy MF-er, right. I could probably stand to lower my LDL do a little bit. But as I understand it, the big deal was when it becomes oxidized or glycated, you know what I mean? A bunch of sugar and stuff like that, then it becomes an issue. So as long as... TL; DR: I figured that should probably just cut back the refined carbohydrates. And that has led me to eat a heavily heavy meat diet. I'm not like carnivore, right? But I'm probably closer to, I don't know what you call it, probably closer to paleo, I guess. But more or less, big fan of meat. I actually stopped drinking protein shakes. Because I said, let me get my protein from a source that is more bioavailable, and also comes with a bunch of other stuff that you lose when you process something that completely, I love my health is now and now I can like, see the difference in the numbers. And that's what I think is the most important thing because you can look at a person and be like, boom, and all of a sudden you drop dead. So, one of my worst fears through my overly healthy. And I'm 37. So, I'm like, I know people who are good and quick, not so much. But then you will end, but I didn't want that to be me. And I also started doing a lot of research into some of what they consider, well one of the top causes of killers in America, prior to COVID, six of 10 after seven of 11 top and all of them are either direct symptoms or results of metabolic syndrome are what I would say derivatives of them. And I was like, okay understanding that you can jump, you can leapfrog yourself, oh, and then I got into understand that makes you lose your hair. People don't know that it's really metabolic syndrome is plays a role in it. Not a significant role.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  11:53

I found out about it too late, unfortunately.

Ed Latimore  11:55

But that's how all that happened. And I know, we probably went down a bit of a...

Jack Heald  12:01

No, no, I love it. Phil, would you please translate some of the stuff because, well, it's still over my head a little bit.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  12:10

I want to bring out that you're probably I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you're the only former boxer with a physics degree who knows what lipolysis is in the world. And what's really most impressive to me is you just, you figured it out. And you just explained what honestly, 90% of my colleagues who deal with heart disease every day, haven't been able to figure out and see when it comes to the real causes of heart disease.

Ed Latimore  12:44

It's nuts to me, because the data is there. Now. I am not a doctor. I mean, obviously, but I'm not a doctor, and I haven't gone to medical school. So, I don't understand. I don't claim to know what the what the rigors are of the profession, or the preparation is like to do it. What I can confidently say though, is that I think there's something wrong, if I can find this information, like if I understand the reason why cholesterol tends to be higher, and people who have heart attacks, well, because the cholesterol was showing up. What's the analogy? You don't blame the firemen for being there when the building’s burned down, you will go, oh, they're here because there was a fire and they were trying to put it out. That's kind of the analogy I remember learning. I don't know if I got that from your book or someone else’s podcast about why cholesterol and to see that and go, that's amazing, why and see all the other research that confirms this. And then they don't get me started on the on what I consider one of the greatest lies that has been told to certainly the American people and then it's propagated around the world is how saturated fat is bad for you. And that by itself actually wouldn't be so bad. What is bad is how we crafted a food pyramid where the majority of it gives you things that contribute to heart disease, and Ottawa and all types of metabolic syndrome. So, I think what just happened I mean, part of my upbringing and part of how I've always lived, because I don't expect anyone to save me. And so, I needed to go dig and understand this myself. And unfortunately, you know that I'm not an idiot. And I was born when I was born so I have access to the internet and so I can look this stuff up and learn it and then I don't have to wait for go ask my doctor to write a prescription. I paid him money to get my bloodwork done. Look at it and if something's wrong, I take it to him and go, hey, what's up with this, and even still that I've, we've had some friction, I'm probably going to change doctors, but that's what you have to be in this world is you have to take responsibility for your own health and like no one else is going to do it for you.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  15:18

Yeah, that's a big part of what I try to get people to understand is that health is your responsibility, and hopefully your doctor will help with that. At a minimum these days, I say, hopefully, your doctor isn't actively interfering with that, which unfortunately, is all too often true. But ultimately my role as your doctor is not to make you healthier. My role is to help you make yourself healthy. 

Ed Latimore  15:51

Absolutely.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  15:53

And that’s what people need to understand.

Ed Latimore  15:55

And what's amazing to me is not just the doctors, because I genuinely believe they're doing, they're acting in their best interest. I think most people are, in fact. What bugs me is how much traction certain ideas get, and how powerfully they stick around in society. Even to the point where one causes into question evidence presented, independent studies done, they go, that's a really bad idea, there's still people that prefer margarine, and live by the food pyramid. And they don't understand why fat free anything is generally worse for you, even if they don't put something in it to make a palatable, just removing the fat from something like cheese or milk. That's kind of what the point is, like, those are good calories. And so, if you take those out right now, but how do we get here? How do we get these ideas in our head? So, it's a big lesson of whether you've got to study and you got to understand that. And then maybe you can get through, but probably not.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  17:14

Yeah, and I, really brings up my journey was seeing the fallacy in that theory, that hypothesis first, and the messaging went into getting that toehold and looking back seeing how that was ingrained in me, how I was programmed to believe this stuff. And ultimately, I was able to find that information for myself, by myself outside of the medical education system and ultimately come to these conclusions. And then seeing how that same kind of messaging is in everything, whether you're looking at our financial system, our education system, all of it.

Ed Latimore  18:02

Oh, it's wild, man.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  18:05

You and other guys that I've learned from who come at it from a different approach. And then come to discover how this affects our nutritional messaging. That's what's really been fascinating to me.

Ed Latimore  18:21

I think once you recognize one, it doesn't have to be, you don't need more than one, you just need one. And the more of it, the more your life, this one lie with effects, the more powerful you become when you see the truth behind it. And a lot of us end up on this kind of independent health path, independent money path, a lot of guys in the house, certainly in my age range, end up on this because they learned about, that they learned the truth about dating and what girls really are interested in, as opposed to what society tells them and that's a big, such a big deal, because that's like, the most important thing a human wants to do is reproduce and if you've been misleading them on the best strategies to do that, the end and they’re like, that's why we're failing. But they said do this and they said, okay, no, here's what you really should do. It works and then and now you got to see in your mind, and it doesn't matter what that seeing comes from, that's just I think, the most popular way for a lot of guys to end up there. Whether it's through health or whether it's through finances or even something as seemingly innocuous as well no, no, not innocuous, as media oh, you question one thing you go, oh, if they can do it here, I don't know where else they can do it. But here's what I do know. I'm not getting results. At the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters, you get results with what you do. That's what bugged me is that every guy I've worked with, they told me to do, they said do one thing that drop body fat. And because I had already, when I was a fighter, one of the things that I did before I went pro, I actually had to cage rights. Now I'm already a small heavyweight, but I'm an even smaller MMA heavyweight, because even though they have a weight ceiling, which boxing doesn't, that heavyweight division MMA, the heaviest you can be is 265. And boxing, there's no limit. There's a ground element, and that completely changes the game. Alright, so what I did when I fought both of those fights is I cut down to light heavy. Yeah, alright, it's either heavy or light heavy, I can't remember it's called. The division that has the weight maximum of 205. And both times I did it, I did it in six weeks. And I did incredibly well with all my strength and all my health and tech. I didn't do it by cutting calories. I did it by cutting carbohydrates. And I only found out later that this is like, keto. And, but I know it worked. Because I've maintained all my strength, my endurance actually went up. And I just recently learned why that happened after the initial decline. And I got rid of...

Jack Heald  21:25

We had an exercise physiologist previous episode, who really knows her stuff, but she's also an expert in the field. I'd like to hear from a non-expert, from just a guy, a layman. Why does cutting the carbs, why were you able to drop the weight, keep your strength, keep your endurance? What from your understanding?

Ed Latimore  21:52

I get you, my understanding, kind of the street knowledge? Street knowledge of this, right? Okay, so I always understood this is that, and I'm going to keep it simple, because I do know a little bit more now than I used to know. I always explained it to people, you have two gas tanks, one gas tank is full 87 or 89. Right, that's what it is. They have one gas tank full 89, the other full 93. All right, which means what? The 93 burns better, it's gonna... But that 87, that's not cheap fuel, you can easily get it done. But you got two of those tanks. And what your body prefers to use, unless you train it a certain way, which your body prefers to use is that cheap gas. Because that cheap gas, it comes in, it's easy to break up, it's easy to combust, and it is super, and it's easy to replenish your tank, right? To continue with the analogy, your tank for holding the cheap gas is orders of magnitude smaller, but you got the money to just keep popping it in. And it's easy to use, okay. But that other tank, oh, the problem with that tank is you can, you got to carry that around with you. You can do nothing with it. Not only can you do nothing with it, because it's so expensive and it takes so much energy to break apart, your body ain't gonna touch it, it's gonna consider a reserve. Until what? Until that first tank is empty and then is gonna break into that next one. And then that analogy, the cheap gas was glucose and the expensive gas were lipids, right? And as I remember, right, it's like what, the energy in a fat model and a fat particle was like twice as high as an over twice as high as this, this is the equivalent size glucose particle. So, like getting rid of it, if I stopped bringing in glucose, my body still prefers to burn it. So, it's gonna burn up all the reserves and when it's done, it's gonna be like, ah we can make a little bit of this. But now it is energy intensive, much more so than it is to just burn the other stuff. That's like, as simple as I can get it.

Jack Heald  24:23

I love that analogy.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  24:25

The only thing that I would refine I think where this gets a little bit misunderstood. It's not that your body prefers to burn glucose, it's that your body knows that glucose is toxic and it needs to get rid of it. So, our bodies prefer to burn fat and if we just don't shove a whole bunch of the cheap gas in, our bodies would be perfectly happy to be running on the high-test stuff. Whenever you put the cheap stuff in, your body says I gotta get rid of this cheap stuff first because this cheap stuff is gonna ruin my engine. And so, we got to get rid of it as quickly as possible. That’s what it really comes down to and that gets misinterpreted, people think that because we burn glucose first, that must be our preference. But the reason we burn glucose first is because glucose is toxic, and we need to get rid of it.

Ed Latimore  25:21

No kidding. So, I'm actually, I'm reading this book right now. Maffetone, he talks about, it's this endurance training method. And his whole thesis is run slow to run faster. And by doing that you train your aerobic system to prefer to burn fat over sugar.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  25:50

Yeah. Phil Maffetone.

Ed Latimore  25:53

Maffetone, I knew it was something and I'm just reading this and I'm like, no kidding and once I made the connection between the nutrition stuff he talks about and why your heart rate stays low if you're burning fat, I said wow, this is one of the, like it's one of those moments where you go okay, you have been, you have not so much been lied to as you have been misled. Misinformed is better.

Jack Heald  26:33

I love that. Reminds me of that line from Casablanca, where Louie and Rick are talking and Louis says, why’d you come... Or no, I don’t know who's Louis or that Nazi? It didn't matter. Why did you come to Casablanca? For my health, I came for the waters. Louis says, for the waters? Casablanca’s in a desert. Rick's responses, I was misinformed.

Ed Latimore  26:59

But it's so interesting to like, once you start looking at that and sugar is this many... People are really invested, I've learned in their positions, if changing those positions would cost them comfort. And you see this in, you see this no better than in any other place. But the diet industry and it really started to bug me because I already had my experience cutting weight, right? And getting shredded and leaning down and seeing how well it worked. So, I wasn't coming out, when I see a lot of the fitness guys selling this and making it a kind of a marketing thing. Oh, eat these carbs which you can, do what you want. My first thought I said, either you're lying, or you're leaving out that you're cutting out. Because nobody's got problems, no one's over eating carrots. Like, that's not, those aren't the carbs they're talking about. So, yeah, are you doing that? And I wouldn't have these discussions, and a lot of them are friends. So, I'm going to keep it simple. But I'm just like, I can't buy this because I know better from experience. And so, I just went and looked and kept digging, kept digging, kept understanding. And that just opened up a whole wealth of information about things. I wasn't like looking to understand my cholesterol. But lo and behold, I understand high cholesterol to the point where I won't get a standard testing anymore. I go get an NMR, NMR Test now. Okay, so actually, I actually don't know what that acronym stands for. But I can tell you what the test means. So apparently, it's not just LDL, low density liberal particles and high-density liberal particles. It is more about like, what else, how, what did they break it down into three different very small and light, not-so-small. So how many of those do you have? That makes a difference. Because all particles aren't created equal or rather LDLs aren't created equal. Some of them are dangerous. And some of them aren't, because some are too big to pass through your artery?

Dr. Philip Ovadia  29:23

Yeah, the lining of the artery.

Ed Latimore  29:27

The lining of the artery. Yeah. And so, most of them aren't a problem. But if you have too many of the little ones that, they can, you might have a problem.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  29:35

Once again, as you just surpassed about 90% of the physicians I interact with on a daily basis who don't understand exactly that.

Ed Latimore  29:47

And this is something that I struggled with because, and lately through a series of activities, I'm getting a lot more confident in this, because on the one hand, I understand that to do something that you've never done before, you should probably listen to people that that have done it and have their experience and, and so I'm very big on listening to the experts in the area where they are purported to be experts, right? On the other hand, I cannot ignore the reality, I can't do it. So, if I see something incongruent with what they say, I hear stories, I asked why, and I look in us, and then I had discovered perhaps, and one of the things that is really lended. This movement, we'll call it credence, is that it's not regular dudes like me creating content around this to other doctors, doctors like you who have said, this is not quite right, that really helps. Because if it was just the guy like me, and I'm a smart guy, but I don't have an MD and so the first thing that we're going to attack is my lack of that, and rightfully so, by the way, I think they should. But when I'm looking at, who's another big guy in this space, Paul, I think Paul Anderson, maybe it's named Paul, Paul...

Dr. Philip Ovadia  31:26

Allen

Ed Latimore  31:27

Some Australian dude. That's what I know.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  31:32

Australian guy, we there?

Ed Latimore  31:37

There are a lot of guys, and you just go. All right. We're not just talking about a bunch of bro scientists talking about real dudes with real credentials, who have, who are putting their licenses and their life work on the line saying this effectively, like if they're wrong, then it's a malpractice thing.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  31:58

Yeah, so what advice would you have for the people out there in the audience, and they come across me and the other physicians like me, who are saying these types of things about cholesterol, and you can eat meat, and you don't have to worry about saturated fat. And then there are other guys with MDS after their name, who say meat is the worst thing you can eat, and you need to be vegan, and it's all about your LDL cholesterol, you need to keep that as low as possible. So how does the common guy start to figure out which one of these experts they should listen to? Because that's really one of the biggest problems I see these days. When you, if you get on and you Google how do I prevent heart disease, you're gonna see the American Heart Association, and they're going to tell you to eat a low-fat diet. And hopefully, you're going to come across me or one of the other guys with a similar message. And how do you start to figure that out?

Ed Latimore  33:03

I answer that question. But let me tell you, man, about the American Heart Association. Once again, your heart breaks when you learn these things, but you're learning when you go. Well, that's how it is. When I learned about the collaboration between the American Heart Association and the people pushing seed oils. I was like, yeah, that's wild, man. Like, they pretty much, and I don't remember the story exactly, but I have the general details that are imprinted, which is seed oil as we're coming up, your polyunsaturated fats, your cottonseed oil, saffron, sunflower oil, all those things in vegetable oil. And they say, well, we need to sell borders. What can we do? And American Heart Association was like, oh, well tell people that this is good for your art health. Never mind the fact that it wasn't until we started consuming that stuff, what no, we haven’t recorded a heart attack instead of 1900, after we started consuming that stuff, and then that goes up as our as our consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids increase, but that's a side note. That really, I said, I can't trust anything I see from anything even remotely that looks like a government agency where they lobby and get money, but often, what can the average guy do? The first thing you have to have your health be number one priority, because if you don't have that, you won't do what it takes because this is not information this is going to be handed to you that I figured out because unless you get lucky and you end up with a doctor that is like on this side of the fence, you're not gonna get the information. You're gonna be given the other stuff and because you don't take your health see seriously enough to educate yourself on it, you want to do more than what they give you. So that's the first thing is you have to look at your house is more important than anything. Like it is, like I don't care what you do for a living. If you get if you get sick, you have a heart attack, that's it, you're gonna be beat down, you have a stroke, beat down, right? You get diabetes, goodbye to cookies, that's the most important thing is and if you have kids, man, it goes double, right? You want to have a long healthy life and not be a burden. So, you take your health important. You make the most important thing. And then, now you've got the motivation to do real research. You got the motivation to ask questions, when things don't make sense. And that's important you've got the motivation to question everything. Because look, oh, most people aren't gonna be as obsessed with me off the jump. But a lot of guys are gonna be offered what are we, I'm coming into my not quite in my 40s yet, but I'm 37 but what starts to happen around now. Okay, so they're gonna probably try and go oh, you might need some stands. Right. That's what my doctor will prescribe. We looked at my cholesterol. Okay. The TRT, that's what the bro sides is doing, right. So, it's not just the mainstream people getting it right and was kind of messing up. Because I noticed my testosterone was declining, and I actually entertained TRT and I said, wait a second, let me just understand this. Everything else I can understand. So, I want to understood it. and made some changes. And my last reading it was back into the eight hundreds. And um, okay, so now it's not well rockin and rollin. Right. But that's because I wasn't afraid to question on either side. And not whether question the doctor on that stat and stuff. Our question, bro scientists are like, yo, let's get on TRT every guy needs it. I'm like, right? There's got to be a different way, a better way. So that's the second thing. Don't be afraid to question stuff. And you shouldn't be if you're following number one, making your health the number one priority. And then number three is just kind the natural outcome of question and everything and making some a priority is once you recognize something and you feel even remotely solid, you got to pull the trigger. And you have to track things yourself. You have to be able to go okay, but what does that mean, we live in a great era. I can get almost anything. Yeah, not even almost, I'm pretty sure there's some shadiest doctors write me a prescription, if I really needed some pain pills or something. And this is awful. But like, yeah, those no pain clinics on for me or whatever, right? But you don't want to use it for nefarious purposes, you want to use it to acquire things and make a track, check your own blood work. So, you can see how it goes. Because once you take that step, and you see changes, during shit, anybody can tell you, because you'll see the results yourself. That's what ultimately led me to question these guys that were saying, oh, you can just keep eating whenever, you can have your foreign carbs and pizzas and be all good. And I'm like, nah, bro, I know this because I've done this to myself and seen it work and I know what doesn't work. So, I don't know what you're giving, maybe it's a marking the stick to pull them out on the front end and do a switch around when they get in. But either way, I understand something's off here. And I know that because I step three, I'd done it to myself. Now I didn't get to step three within that particular example are following step one and two, I had to make weight. But I got there but once you do it, you're good. So that those are the three things I think anyone needs. They need to be they need to put health number one. They got to question everything. And then when they get some answers, that looks like their work, they got to test them. You can't be afraid, look, your body and very few things are gonna kill you that you can get to make your health better. Like it's very hard to try I'm trying to think...

Jack Heald  39:21

That’s a really good way to say it. There are very few things that could make your health better that if you try it are going to kill you. I like that.

Ed Latimore  39:31

Yeah, so you gotta be willing to gotta be willing to have a little balls out here man. Like I'm trying to think of an example, right. Man, so just out of curiosity, I was like, let me try this Phentermine. Now, Phentermine, I tried it because I thought about the cognitive benefits, very close to meth, not meth, but very close to it chemically. It just so happens that its original use is for dying. So let me try it and see where we go.

Jack Heald  40:01

It's part of what, Phen-fen was, Phil?

Ed Latimore  40:06

And also right, what else did I discover? I discovered for you in this whole testosterone argument, right? I discovered that a, what is it hCG, does the same thing as testosterone without shrinking your gonads. In fact, we're pretty sure that's the reason why we're expecting a baby. I was on a CT. So, but that's the thing you're not afraid, I'm not afraid to test. So, you got to have a little bit of a maverick spirit. Because at the same time, if you're taking number one, well, before you get to number three, you're going to do your research. A lot of it like I'm not just popping pills randomly, willy nilly. No, no, no. Well, a whole research article is done, I'm probably going to publish on my website that I wrote for myself, so I could understand it. And I can cite these things. And like, I don't, I don't, yeah,

Jack Heald  41:00

There's something that I've never said this out loud. But I know some of the some of the bro science guys. And I remember very clearly the morning in my mid-30s, I was rail fan my whole life. And I ate like a garbage dumpster. I just, I could eat anything. And I did. And I ate mass quantities of it. And I never put on an ounce. And I remember a morning when I was 33 or 34. And I felt this little roll around my middle and I went where's that? What is that all about? And there's an awful lot of bro science guys who were late 20s, early 30s. And they work out like crazy. They're, they really do a good, they've made their bodies a priority in terms of muscle and the body fat percentage. But I gotta tell you, when I was 25, 7 29 31 Had I been working out the way those guys worked out, and I didn't, I had been ripped; I'd have been cut. And I was eating like a dumpster. And there's something that happens to guys in their mid 30s. So, my new rule is, I don't listen to bro science from anybody under 35. I hadn't hit that wall yet. But those guys who were 45 and 50 and had 10 or 15 or sometimes a lifetime of years behind them of not taking care of themselves and being in awful shape and then figured it out, those are the dudes I listen to, like I don't know Phil Ovadia.

Ed Latimore  42:58

Generally speaking, you're gonna do better that way anyway, because oh, well, when you're young, you can get away with a lot of BS. We, oh, not so much.

Jack Heald  43:09

Your thirty-year-old body is responsible for cashing the checks tour 20-year-old body was writing,

Ed Latimore  43:16

Man, that's brilliant. And it's the truth. But I'll tell you what, one of the things that I pride myself when, I take a lot of pride in this is people do not and I don't think I look particularly young, but they don't put me at 37 ever. And that's cool. But what that means is I'm just, I just, I don't drink I sleep well when I can, I ask somebody to go out the window for a few months. I eat well. You do very little, little things that that are within your control. And what I've learned is it's very easy to get a person to do something new. I can tell you go to the gym and workout and you can get somebody, you can really take somebody and get them in there four or five days week. We’ll just say all you gotta do is lift and run bro and I said what if I tell you to stop eating after 8pm and limit that cake, like cut that cake out and no more bagels, make eggs in the morning and bake him, oh maybe, now you're running into issues. It's hard because look, I don't think that's got anything to do with the addictive nature of sugar or anything I think it's like anything you make part of you, if you do it long enough it becomes a habit and now you have to exert real energy to change, this makes, I’m thinking of it from a physics standpoint if you like look at habits as having an inertia. It is it is hard to start a new habit, to move something that is rolling, right, an object at rest stays rest. But people don't realize the second part of that is that an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by another force. And it won't change its direction unless that force is greater in the opposite direction you wish to change it along. So, if you look at a habit like that, right? Look, if you have you eaten BS, I can get you to eat less of it. But to get you to start to prefer a steak, and to cook it, and to have that steak over your instant mac and cheese, if that's all you've been crunching for, you'll find every reason to not do it. It's too expensive. It takes too long. I don't like to taste the meat. The food pyramid said it’s bad for me, like you come up with anything to keep that habit in motion.

Jack Heald  45:56

And that's an interesting way to look at it.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  45:59

Yeah. And I'd love to hear your perspective on the interplay with the sobriety aspect of this, because we've actually had a couple of guests on who have talked about that there is a sugar addiction component to it, there is interaction between your metabolic health and your mental health. And I'd love to get your perspective as someone who has gone through that journey. It always amazes me and I haven't really been to AAA meetings, but every time you see something about an AAA meeting there's a table of doughnuts there and everyone’s drinking their soda.

Ed Latimore  46:39

Man, so, okay, the AAA meetings I've gotten to has always been coffee. So, there's that, but as far as the interplay, right, so you got to understand, so once an addict, always an addict is just what do you become addicted to. Some crackheads turn into crazy workout people. Others start a pillow company, okay. I said that to say you're replacing habits, what is this 552? No, this doesn't have caffeine in it. But this is coffee in his mug. And consuming, consuming five, six cups of coffee a day, decaf, by the way, because I had to switch to decaf, I was going to live like that. That's a much better habit than five, six drinks a day. All right. So, what I'm doing with that as a neuro, what is it from a neurological perspective, I guess I'm replacing the grooves that were carved out my brain from the habit of the mechanical habit. How these interplays with changes in diet and everything? Well, first is talking about the benefits of not drinking, as I understand it, and I could be wrong here, correct me, your body can't do anything with alcohol calories, and it knows that. So, the first thing it does when you take an alcohol, all of the burning goes to the back go to back and then your body focuses on metabolizing and excreting the alcohol, right? So that's some loss metabolism. And then those produce, oh, I can't remember what the words are. But I know they're bad. The byproduct of that metabolism. And you got to deal with that. So, there's a whole bunch of stuff that comes with that, your body doesn't like it. And, and so not drinking alcohol only benefit you and that's alcohol. We're not talking about the anti-testosterone effects of hops, right? Hops are fairly estrogenic if I remember right, so if you're a beer guy, now you got to deal with that, you got to deal with those already the alcohol is gonna lower your testosterone in general. And then you got to deal with on top of it something that is patently anti-testosterone or pro estrogenic. However, you want to look at that. So, I don't say look, if you drink whatever, right? But just know that you're paying a cost for that. And you can be disciplined with it all you want. But at the end of the day, alcohol is a known carcinogen. So, you can decide how much you want to play that game, how much you want to spend that revolver, and how, why it's a carcinogen likely due to how it affects your metabolism, and inflammation, same with smoking. So, there's that. But once you stop, you get a lot of clarity. For me, I got a lot of clarity. It's very easy. What does it mean? Once you do one hard thing that requires you to eliminate on old way, replacement a new way that is constructive, it is much easier to do that with other stuff. Because now you know, right? Yeah, and it's not the same thing. But it's the same way of doing the thing. You can easily have...

Jack Heald  50:21

It’s the same trajectory...

Ed Latimore  50:23

Yeah, same degree, different type kind of do, right? And it's just been beautiful because I understand, for example, that I have to stop. I had to stop drinking to make such changes that were important because I took my life important by the touch of my life seriously, more seriously, that's what made me stop. So, once I take my health more seriously, I'm like, okay. You know what I used to do, for example, I used to when, I was burning upwards, freakin 6000 calories a day when I fought, and I couldn't keep weight on. I mean, I had a bottom limit. But it was not the limit. We wanted me to fight that. So, I would, on the way home from practice, I used to buy box of Ritz crackers to hold the four holes. And I eat the whole thing and get home and have dinner. Can't do that anymore. And I love Ritz crackers. Love them. They're delicious. I had a rich cracker. Every now and then is a treat on a road trip. I'll get the little baggies. But the big boxes? No way. Yeah, never in the house, couldn't ever touch it. Because I know that I know what to do to beat, and I won't even say to beat addiction, I will say, to deal with a problem that is in the way, what between me being my best version and me being who I am now. So, I keep that stuff out?

Jack Heald  51:51

I want to ask you a question and take this the conversation in a slightly different direction. It's really cool to have a non-medical professional on talking this way. And what I'm hearing is a guy who's not in the health care industry, who recognized he had to do something about his health and made some changes. But there's also a commonality with other things in your life. You recognize I gotta make a change here. And do. I got to make a change here? And do. So, my question is what's the common factor that allowed Ed Latimore to recognize a problem and recognize that you had to make a change? And then most importantly, be able to follow through?

Ed Latimore  52:52

And you want to know the truth, man? Okay. Yeah, cuz I struggle with how am gonna impart this ability to my son, I have some ideas. But growing up, I've never got to entertain bullshit. Hey, I couldn't do it. And it's not like my parents were strict. You know what, my mom, whatever, no, it's just that there was no. When you're poor, you don't get a chance to believe in Santa. Why? Because ain’t nobody bringing you gifts anyway. Right? Kind of do. So, you realize very quickly, either Santa like your black ass or he ain’t real. It's one or the other. Yeah. So, well, with that said you see a lot though you grew up the way I grew up. And what that did for me, one aspect of my personality and it and I think it does this to every person who grows up like me, it's just there's other aspects that take them a different way. But the central aspect is you understand, viscerally. No one has to teach it to you. No one has, you don't have to go to a seminar, write a book, false metal, Twitter, whatever you understand viscerally, no one's come in to help you with anything and your entire existence for better or worse is up to you. I was probably the only kid that went to his own open house, because I knew that, uh my mom wasn't gonna go. Right? But I needed that information. I needed to know where I was at. Okay. I understood that I was the only dude that went to a city school. They weren't that serious about football, but I was in when I played, I was like, well, I got some ability. So, I was the only god in there making sure, 530 in the morning studying tapes from and trying to learn more, sandwich it with boxing, now when I fight, I took complete responsibility for my fighting career. And I'm happy I did it because there are things that would have turned out differently if I hadn't. And then when you do that, when you take full control and you recognize, okay, no one's going to fix this. And not only is no one gonna fix it, but if I don't fix it, when it goes wrong, no one's gonna be there to explain why we're wrong. It's just gonna be me, right? It's the and I got stories about that with sobriety. I just, I never would let myself believe that someone was coming to help me, come in to save me is even how I do things now. Even when there is somebody in the background that might actually be looking out, nah, man, I understand how to grow my own platform. And reach out and get people to find me and things like that. I'm talking to a publisher now, one of the big five publishers, which is very cool. And my agent was not major. Yeah, but he's probably going to be major. He said it's really impressive how you've managed to carve out this space out of nothing, really. And I'm like, well, who's gonna carve it out for me? I gotta write these articles. If I want this like, my life looks remarkably like the life I imagined 10, 15 years ago, where I have control of my time, I'm not starving, I got an excellent shit, sometimes better than I feel like I deserve is the wrong word. But I got I got really lucked out with the woman I'm with. And it's a good time, but it all started because you got to take control, like, no one's gonna give you a thing. Not only were they not give you anything, if you don't have an agenda for your own life, they're gonna put you as part of their agenda. And the way things go at a is almost never going to be for your benefit, it's gonna be to theirs.

Jack Heald  56:55

Yep. And tell me what you think of this. This has come to me. Sorry, Phil. But this is the way show’s going today.

Dr. Philip Ovadia  57:05

That was very, what I just said, applies 100% to your health. If you don't, if you don't have your agenda, if you're not managing it, you're gonna get what they give you. And we've said it many times on this show, what they give you is not good. Most of us are not healthy. And that's what you get if you just take what's given to you.

Jack Heald  57:32

One of the things that I've realized in the year and a half that Phil and I have been doing this show, and I thought I knew a good bit about the realities of health care. But this has really opened my eyes. This idea that you are responsible for you, nobody's coming to take care of you. And if you don't take responsibility for your own wellness, somebody else is has made you part of their agenda. If you don't have your own agenda, somebody's made your party their own agenda. Following up on your thought there, I realized somewhere here along the last year that by and large, what's called the health care industry is the disease maintenance industry. And we are not patients to be healed, but crops to be tended.

Ed Latimore  58:31

You ever seen The Matrix? Remember that scene when they break Neo out? What did they break him out of? What they actually use the word crops like when they when they're describing all of them, and they pull up because we’re just energy, we’re just sustenance for the system, until you break out of the system and you mature out of the system while you look at them. You go wow, that is fucked up. that's how it looks to you. When you see things after you break out the system and you free your mind.

Jack Heald  59:05

Free your mind. Wow. I gotta tell you, Phil, once again, I see Ed Latimore. I think he's got a big social media following, but why is he on this show? What are we going to do here? And again, this has just been so cool. I just loved it. I think that the things that Ed said, coming from Ed carry more weight than if they had come from a health care provider, at least for people like me, and I don't know why that is. I don't know why. Just hearing a guy, you know a guy it's for me, it's like, oh, yeah.

Ed Latimore  59:46

I'll give you my theory. Why? Because I'm just like you, man. I'm old. And when I say that, what I mean is I am not credentialed, I am not elite I am, I'm just a regular old dude, who's trying to not die too early. Right? And when I die, it'd be nice if I just passed out my sleep sometime around the 95 plus range, right? That would be ideal. And so that mean like, I don't have an agenda, man. I'm not trying to sell health. I'm not trying to take care of you, aren't you? I can't be a patient. I don't want you to even really find my doctor. Because then that's less time he's got for me. So, it's a very, there's nothing hidden. And there's nothing I gain whether you listen to me or not. Now, I think you should listen to me. But at the end of the day, what was that? Oh, Sandman. What you eat don't make me shit. Right. That's like, how it goes.

Jack Heald  1:01:02

It's good. Well, I would love to just keep going and going. But we try to keep this to about an hour.

Ed Latimore  1:01:11

Oh, wow. An hour has passed, man. Yeah. Those are the best conversations when you don't even know where the hell the time went.

Jack Heald  1:01:20

Yeah. Because I'm the producer, it's my job to keep an eye on the clock. And these are the kinds of things where I really wish I wasn't doing that. Phil, any last words?

Dr. Philip Ovadia  1:01:32

Just another great conversation. And I think bringing this perspective to the conversation we've been having now for, like you said, a year and a half or so on the show. But this will really, this just brings a unique perspective to him that I hope will connect with a lot of people.

Ed Latimore  1:01:51

I do too, because if you look at every metric, and I just learned about the United States and the United States is a great place to start, because our culture is very exportable. If you want to know how exportable our culture is, when we were living in Portugal, I was walking through portrait, not the main city, not Lisbon. Porto and we were just walking through this back alley. And there was some kids playing basketball and there's a mural on the wall. This guy, Allen Iverson, obviously not Michael Jordan, not Steph Curry. Iverson. It goes, I’m talking about practice, right? And I was like, wow, what a what a cool mirror. And I took a picture of it. But our coaches, it's exporting it, including our foods and with that our diseases. And if we can get people to understand that you can do something about this, you can train, gotta be something that just strikes at random willy nilly saying, well, heart disease, stroke, auto stuff, you can do something about it. If you get people to at least feel like they're empowered, you can change something. One of the saddest things that I was really frustrated more than sad, my mom passed, wow, I will say a year now. My mom passed about a year ago. And she was from complications related to COPD. All right, and COPD is something pulmonary chronic something pulmonary disease, right. I don't remember the O stands for. Obstructive. Look, there we go. But that's like, that's the straw, okay. But what was everything else on the camel's back? 300 pounds, smoking for over 40 years, drinking, no exercise, eating like garbage, just terrible eating it. And I used to have these arguments and resorts. When I said to her, I was like, look, ma, because every time I point out this was back in hospital, she goes no, it's because the sarcoidosis or because of the diabetes. Yeah, that might be because of the diabetes. I mean, look how much you’re eating, you’re like 300 pounds, like what the fuck but the connection was never made whether she was willfully trying to ignore it or not. It's yet power to do something about it.

Jack Heald  1:04:19

Oh, that’s good. You have power to do something about it.

Ed Latimore  1:04:23

Yeah, instead of waiting for the doctor to be like, oh, here's some medicine because that's all it was. I'm not gonna listen to you, wasn't the doctor. I'm like, okay. All right. And even a doctor like, you might want to not smoke. You got an oxygen tank. You know that right? All right. I'll never forget that day, man. I went over to her house. She had fucking oxygen and there’s no smoking and she’s smoking a cigarette. Like do you understand how this works? I had to give her a chemistry lesson on why oxygen and fire are a bad idea.

Jack Heald  1:04:56

You could do one or the other. But let's not do the both of these at the same time.

Ed Latimore  1:05:00

Never mind the implications on your health, right? You can read well, so we're just talking about the safety of every other person. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  1:05:13

That's exactly people need hope they need to understand that they can they can fix this for themselves.

Ed Latimore  1:05:22

Absolutely. And I would love to see if I can do it, you can do it too. But it's not like I was that jacked up because I was coming off boxing. But that's because I wouldn't let myself get jacked up. You know?

Jack Heald  1:05:34

Well, I think the subtitle for today's show is ain’t nobody coming to save you, but you can save yourself. Ain't that the truth? Man, you've got the power. And I appreciate it, man. This has been good.

Ed Latimore  1:05:50

I appreciate you guys having me on, man. When I saw, when I made the date, I was just like, let's hope the baby's not here. And he's not. So yeah.

Jack Heald  1:06:04

And best wishes on that one, keep us informed. Of course, you'll probably keep the Twitterverse informed.

Ed Latimore  1:06:11

Oh, man, I haven't... So, it's come up in different, whenever an interview, but I will not make it, I have not made a declaration because it's not. I'm not like a big star or anything. But I'm big enough to where I have had to do certain things and make certain decisions where I'm like, yeah, my privacy is a little more important. Yeah.

Jack Heald  1:06:35

Well, nevertheless, you've got our emails. So put us on that on that list that says he was born.

Ed Latimore  1:06:42

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it, man. It'd be exciting.

Jack Heald  1:06:46

All right. What's the best way for folks to connect with Ed Latimore?

Ed Latimore  1:06:51

So, I own Ed Latimore everywhere, man, anybody that comes with that, that wants to use that iteration, our version of Ed Latimore instead of Edward Latimore, they're out of luck. I'm Ed Latimore. On Twitter, I’m Ed Latimore on Instagram. My website is edlatimore.com. My Facebook, Ed Latimore. LinkedIn, Ed Latimore. Somebody beat me to it on YouTube. I'm EdLaddie1.

Jack Heald  1:07:14

I’m JackHeald5, and then there aren't, there's not a 123 and four, but there you go.

Ed Latimore  1:07:21

So, I bet somebody's holding a hostage, man and weighed down for frozen dough.

Jack Heald  1:07:29

All right, well, very good. We'll put those contact info in the show notes. And probably pick up a little more bigger audience there for you, Ed. Well, for Dr. Phil Ovadia, I'm Jack Heald. I want to encourage you all to go to ifixhearts.com and take Dr. Ovadia’s metabolic health quiz, if you haven't done so already, it's a real simple, fast and easy way to just kind of get a measurement of where you're at and compare it to where you could be. Ain't nobody coming to fix you. We will talk to you next time.

Jack Heald  1:08:07

America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia’s is operating table. This has been a production of 38 atoms