I was 21 years old and I was
sick, I mean really sick. I mean, I'm not talking facing death sick,
I'm talking that I couldn't breathe through my own sinuses, I had
gut pains that were so bad that I couldn't think. I had horrible cystic
acne that was painful to smile and it was my life. I always had that tissue.
I was that kid that always had the tissue in their pocket. You know the one.
You know, I was that kid. And I went to doctors.
The doctors want to help me. They didn't go spend six, eight
years in medical school because they didn't want to help people, but were
they empowered at medical school to help me?
No. No. No, they weren't.
But I didn't know that. Hell, my dad was a famous orthopedic
surgeon. My uncle was a well-recognized orthopedic surgeon. We had doctors all
over the family, and so I trusted doctors and I visited them for year upon year upon
year. And you know what they gave me? Pills, inhalants, injections,
and then finally, surgery. Yeah, you know what?
It seems like God or evolution, whatever your belief,
accidentally put tonsils in my throat. Total accident. "Got to take those babies
out." That's what they said to me. Luckily for me, some friends of
mine sat me down and said, "Eric, I think you need to consider some
changes to your diet, just for a month." And so I did. And so over the next -- I'm
telling you, two weeks -- my body started to change. Two weeks later, no acne,
no allergies, I had dropped 35 pounds off my body. I was completely transformed.
And then I became deeply curious, I mean, deeply curious. How is it, how is
it that I can spend year upon year upon year visiting doctors and get no
result, and then I could just simply change what I put in my body and
I could get all the results? And so I asked a doctor one day, I did,
I asked a doctor... I've now asked hundreds of doctors in countries all
around the world the same question. But I asked a doctor one day,
"How long did you go to medical school?" Can you imagine being a doctor and
a kid says, "How long did you go to medical school?" "Six years."
"And how much time did you spend studying food?" "Uh, uh, not very much."
"How much specifically?" "Well, none." I'm in an event in Germany about a year
ago, there's about a thousand and a half people in the room, and there's
a doctor sitting just about here. And in the middle of my talk, I go,
"Do we have any doctors in the house?" He raised his hand, he says, "Here."
I get a microphone to him. And in front of a thousand people in
Germany where I've never asked this question before, I asked him, "How
long did you go to medical school?" He was a general practitioner, 6 years.
I asked him again, "How long did you study food?" Microphone in his hand,
cameras around, thousand and a half people watching, he says, "None."
And for many of the people in the room, the penny dropped. They suddenly
realized what the significance to that question was. And I'll put it to you
another way, in case you're still wondering what the significance is,
how many of you would be happy to take your car to a mechanic who had
never studied fuel? It's funny, right? Had never studied oil?
Had never studied anti-freeze? Would you take your car to that mechanic?
Then I suggest you rethink your relationship with your doctor.
And then one day, I'm on a plane and I'm on my way to Africa doing a wildlife
photography thing and I'm reading this article. And in the article, they talk about elephants being
captured and put in zoos and circuses, which I'm no fan of. So I was curious because the article was
the history of it. And it said that 100 years ago, when they took these
elephants and they put them in the zoos and circuses, they would make a lot of
money because they would attract audience, right, but the elephants would only
live for 6 or 7 or 8 years, maybe 10. But nobody knew that that was a problem.
I mean, they made their money back in that 10 years and that was the main
concern for them, until they found out that elephants in the wild could
live 70 years. And suddenly, they became deeply concerned about their
investment. I'm sure some of them were concerned about the elephant,
but I'm thinking it was mostly a profit-loss question.
And once they had that profit and loss question,
they were forced to do the very simplest thing, they were forced to
evaluate elephants in the wild. Sure, they could have conducted a
multigenerational macro-nutrition and micro-nutritional study on elephants
to try to figure what's wrong, or they could just go and look at
the ones that are getting the result and duplicate that. Does this make
sense? And so that's what they did. And they found out that elephants
in the wild eat 200 kilograms, 500 pounds of fresh grass and bark and
fruit when it's in season and they drink 70 liters, I don't know how many gallons
that is. It's a lot. Every single day. And when they duplicated that for the
elephants in captivity, look at that, 70 or 80 years. I became fascinated.
Because as I was reading this article, they were making a massive
grammatical mistake in the article. They kept referring to the elephant's wild
diet and the elephant's captive diet. Let me just back up for a minute.
The elephant was on a captive diet when it was on the zoo, and when it was in
nature, it was on what, the elephant diet. Not the wild elephant diet,
the elephant diet. And the grammarian in me wanted to take out a red pen and
circle every instance of this wild diet rubbish in the thing. Like that's
not… It's the elephant diet. And as I want to do this,
I start thinking to myself, oh, elephants have a diet. So does
every other organism on Earth. Every organism on Earth has
a diet. An oak tree has a diet. A cheetah has a diet. Its diet
is 2.5 kilograms of fresh meat every day. It won't eat existing
meat. It has to kill it itself. A hyena doesn't have that issue,
right? They have different diets. The leaf-cutter ant has
a diet. What does it eat? Ants.
You might think so, but they don't. They go out and they collect leaves and they bring them back and they
compost them and grow fungus, because they're fungivores. And
if you try to make them eat leaves, they would die. Diet is specific,
and humans have one. Humans have one. And I know that some of you are going to
go, "Yeah, but what about the blood type diet? And what about
the genome testing diet?" Okay, raise your hand if you need
Vitamin C. That should be everybody. And how about omega fats, who need
those? Oh, yeah, everybody again. And how about this, anybody needs calcium?
Anybody up for iron. Hang on a minute, what about the blood type diet?
What about the genome diet? What I want to suggest to you is that
every homo sapien on Earth needs the same stuff. We have some different
production capacities, some of you are gluten-intolerant. Some of
you have issues with lactose. And I get that. But what I would suggest
to you is that that so many of us have an issue with lactose is a clue and
that if you are not sensitive to lactose, I feel bad for you, because it
means the alarm's been turned off. You don't have the pain so you just
keep having it and that will give you, according to Harvard Nursing School,
a 30% uplift in your opportunity to develop ovarian or prostate cancer.
Milk, it does a body good. It does not. That's why you will never see those ads
again. You look, you will not, in Britain, Canada, or America ever see an
advertisement from the dairy industry ever again telling you that milk is
good for you. Diet is specific, guys, but what we have to do is get to behavior.
And that's what truly gave birth to WildFit. I got to tell you something,
that whole conversation, you know, Vishen and Allen wants an inspiration
and Emily Fletcher, like I want you to hear something. When I created WildFit,
I knew that what I wanted to do was have massive impact, like we need to turn
around the lives in the health of billions of people on this planet
for the planet. It has to be done. We're arguing about Obamacare, Trumpcare,
national health care in all your different countries. Stop it. Who
here would be happy to buy car insurance from a company that charges the
same amount to you as to a 16-year-old child with five accidents under their
belt? Who wants that insurance? I'm sorry, you want insurance based on your risk
factors? I'm not interested in universal health care. I'm interested in universal
self-care. You know how the diet industry works. You write a
diet book, 10,000 people buy it, 5 people get really good results,
you get their before and after pictures, you sell more books. What if instead,
that every 100 people that does it, 90 of them get really good results?
What would happen then? Big change. And I want to tell you why we're able
to create that and that is that lasting transformation is not about giving
people a bunch of restrictive rules. It's not about telling people you can
and can't do this. It's about changing your psychology. When we
created WildFit, it was really simple. I knew I could coach people one on one,
but what I knew I had to do is I had to put them together. And so
we created a community. And that really gelled people together and
it's one of the big reasons we've been so successful. I want you to think about
that when you're creating transformation for people. You want to make sure
you're changing the way they think, you want to make sure they're
community. But here's the big one. You need to treat them like the
whole frog in the hot water thing. How many of you that had done WildFit
showed up on Week 1 and thought that I was actually crazy? How many people?
How many people realize that it's not crazy at all, it's just crazy enough
to be making a dent in the universe? That's what Week 1 is all about.
It's about easing in and learning some things, because if we want to get
different results, we're going to have to do different things. And that's exactly
what that's all about. Your health is far more determined by you getting enough of
what your body needs than by removing stuff. If we tell dung beetles, "Dung
beetles, stop eating poop. That's gross," they will get sick. They need what they
need and you need what you need. Does this make sense to you? And so all I'm going to say to you,
even for those of you who haven't even begun yet the WildFit Quest,
what I want to suggest to you is just do this, before you eat the other garbage,
get all the stuff you need in first. That is the primary thing you need
to be doing to turn things around. And with that, you can begin
to change the industry.
