It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the "F Word" here - Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same, and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
Bob: Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the Alive and Free Podcast. Today, I have with me a special guest. I brought you guys a treat because I want you to win. Today, we're going to talk about how it's all about the chemistry, and yes, relationships are all about the chemistry. Addiction is all about the chemistry. There's a certain chemistry that you and I interact with all the time. I deal a lot with the breath aspect of what you're interacting with all the time, but I brought on with me an expert who knows more about how you eat and how to work with your food and what you stick inside your belly than pretty much anyone I know and I wanted you guys to have access to his massive brain of knowledge and experience. [0:01:18.6]
He's worked with thousands of people. Right? Thousands of people over the last umpteen years. He has like a 92% success rate in helping people find their weight loss goals and get their energy back and find their mojo and all kinds of other stuff. He's a beautiful human being and I almost feel like I'm waiting for an applause here. Welcome to the stage, Belldon Colme. I don’t even know if I said your last name right. What's your last name?
Belldon: Colme. You said it exactly right. Silent E.
Bob: Alright, Belldon Colme. He works with and he is the kind of founder of Nutritional Fitness and I'm going to have him introduce himself a little bit basically kind of tell you his story about how he arrived at being a cellular biologist who helps people become radiant human beings through their food. So take it away, Belldon. How did you get started with all this stuff? [0:02:11.3]
Belldon: "Kind of founder of Nutritional Fitness" I like that. "Kind of" …
Bob: I didn't know what your title was, so I made it up.
Belldon: I actually like that, though. I actually like that because getting started on this path was me…
Bob: Yeah.
Belldon: …but it was a lot more than me. There were a lot of elements that fell into this. One of the elements that fell, that kind of got me started thinking this way a few years even before I started down this path was my dad. My dad was diagnosed in, gosh, 1992 with prostate cancer, stage D4 and for frame of reference, D5 is dead. Right?
Bob: Okay.
Belldon: And then…
Bob: What's the D stand for? Dead? Dead 4 or 5?
Belldon: A, B, C, D are the stages and then they have sub-stages, but the bottom line in my dad's condition is when he was diagnosed, they gave him six days to live. [0:03:03.0]
No lie. Six days and they said on the outside, you might get six weeks. So we're sitting there going, Jesus, Jesus, God, what do we do? Right? You're kind of in desperation stage at that point. So there's a cancer researcher from University of Washington that we got a hold of, long story, but to make it short, we got a hold of this guy and he told my dad, "You know, look, you've got nothing to lose - right?" "Yeah, I got nothing to lose." So this researcher said, "Here's what I want you to do. I want you to eat only what's on this list," and he gave my dad a list. He said eat only, don’t eat anything else. If you're eating other stuff, get rid of it. Just eat this stuff. Okay? Fast forward to 2001, almost a decade later, I get a call from my dad and he's like you know what? All those things that I needed to get in order a decade ago, you know, when they gave me six days to live, all that stuff that I didn't have done and I wanted to get that.. well, it's done now. I'm ready. Right? So I was driving back from Whistler. Don't ever, ever, ever call your kids when they're on the freeway to tell them that you're ready to die. Just don’t do that. It's a bad idea. [0:04:08.5]
Bob: He has a point, folks.
Belldon: Yeah, yeah. But he gives me this call, but the thing is, my dad lived a decade more because of what he put into his body, the changes he made in what he put in his body. It's like get this shit out, put that shit in. Now my dad's cancer was so far advanced when they found it that it never went away. It never went into remission, but just the food he ate slowed it down so much that he had a quality of life for another decade to get those things done that he wanted to get done so that when he checked out, he checked out with a good feeling about it. And it's like, I'm sitting here at the time going, you know, I don’t understand what just happened. Right? Clearly, what we put into our body has something to do with how our body is working, but I really didn't get it and it was quite a few years later when I was 39 and I woke up in the ER myself, not with cancer, this time I woke up with my first of three major heart incidents and I honest to God didn't think I was going home and my one thought, sitting there in the ER, was I didn't say goodbye to anybody. Right? [0:05:11.3]
My one thought was, shit, I didn't get to say goodbye, and I really thought that was the end. I thought it was over right there, but I lived through that. When I lived through it and I got home and I'm relating, you know, where I'm at, what happened to my dad, what I've seen happen in other areas of life and it was pretty clear to me what I needed to do and that's I needed to find out what was going on. Right? What made that change in my dad? What got me in the ER at fricking 39 years old? I have got to be careful. I don't know what your language rules are in your program here, but.
Bob: I don't know who's listening, either.
Belldon: Yeah, so. I'll be…
Bob: Keep it really clean.
Belldon: I'll be careful. I'll be careful. But to me, I just needed to figure out how it works. Right? Because I have tried stuff to get myself healthy. I know my dad had too, and here comes this thing a researcher told him that just turned his life around for a decade, and I just wanted to know how it worked. Because if I know how it works, I can make the right decisions for me. [0:06:10.6]
Bob: Yeah. Same thing with … you know, people go through this all the time.
Belldon: Totally. Totally. So I'm sitting here thinking, how do I figure out how it works. Right? Doctors don’t know how it works. Doctors just keep throwing pills at stuff. They don’t fix it and nutritionists don’t know how it works, even though food is involved. I knew that from my dad's case, but nutritionists…
Bob: What do mean "nutritionists don’t know how it works" because you know, I'm a lay person here, and I'm like, oh - they're a nutritionist, that means they understand this stuff - and then I find they don’t know how it works because you're coming at it from a cellular biology. So why is there the gap? What's the gap?
Belldon: Now see, you're getting ahead of my story there, Bob.
Bob: Oh, sorry.
Belldon: Yeah, it is a good question. What do I mean when I say "nutritionists don’t know how it works". The thing is nutritionists, registered dieticians, their scope of study is very narrow - very, very narrow - it has to do with what's in food. Right? [0:07:05.7]
And that's great. It's a great place to start, what's in food, but what's in food does not always align with how your body uses that food. We'll talk about that more when we get into this conversation here, how your body uses food. Sometimes it's radically different than what's in that food. Right?
Bob: Okay. Cool.
Belldon: So you get nutritionists and registered dieticians, they're like yeah, vitamin C does this and vitamin D does that and vitamin E does this in your body and I'm like, okay, great - these are elements, but what's the bigger picture? So I went, like you said, into studying with biology, specifically with the focus on metabolism, metabolic cellular biology. That's my term. There is no degree for metabolic cellular biology, but it was what I focused on because metabolism is what we are. Metabolism is what does the work in our body, so it was my area of focus and what I found out right away, straight up, was what body chemistry was all about and I when I started to learn about body chemistry, oh dude - shit just started clicking into place. [0:08:09.7]
All of the things that were wrong with me, all of the things that went right with my dad for that decade and when I look out and I see people everywhere from obesity to addictive behavior, all of this falls into place in the world of cellular biology and body chemistry because we are and dude, I've asked this question of I don't know how many tens of thousands of people over the last 15 years - if I tell you we're just a series of chemical reactions, that's what we are - true or false - I have never had a single person say false, from doctors to lay people, they're like, yeah, that's true. We inherently know this. So isn't that what we need to be starting to look into and study if we want to improve this?
Bob: Yep. Yeah. I'm so excited to dig into this. It's crazy.
Belldon: Yeah, so that's how I became the kind of founder of nutritional fitness. The kind of founder, because you know, my dad is the kind of founder and other people that have fallen into place, they're the kind of founder. It's all a piece to the puzzle that just lead me to where I am right now. Where I am right now is the most beautiful, fascinating place to be, to study and to learn. Dude, I'm pumped. So that's how I got where I am. [0:09:24.1]
Bob: Awesome. And so what about your health journey? So you were there. What happened with you?
Belldon: So, I'm going to tell you one of the most shocking things I learned when I dove into what the metabolism really is, how body chemistry works, what's really happening. One of the very first things I learned, and dude, this is such common knowledge in the world of cellular biology - why it isn't being taught in schools I don't know - one of the first things I learned is that weight, and I thought weight was my problem, right - I was 105 pounds overweight. I was bordering on morbid obesity. I'm sitting there in the hospital going, of course I'm in here with heart problems. I'm fat dude. Right? This is causing all these problems. You know there are eight other words on the tip of my tongue, dude. I'm being careful here. [0:10:14.0]
Bob: I'm fricking a fat dude.
Belldon: Fricking a fat dude. And I'm sitting here, my health is obviously because of being overweight, right. So when I went back to school and I'm studying metabolic cellular biology and I'm sitting here learning immediately fat doesn’t cause anything. It's a symptom of what's going on inside. It's not the cause of me being sick. It's happening because I'm sick inside. My chemistry is out of whack. My cells aren’t working properly. Nothing inside is functioning. It's not functioning because it doesn’t have what it needs to function right. I haven’t provided a chemical environment. It's packing all this body fat on as a response to being unhealthy. So all this work that we're doing trying to fight weight as a problem is no different than taking aspirin for a headache while we have still got an aneurysm going on in our head. [0:11:09.8]
Bob: It's the same with addiction. Right? Get rid of the behavior and you still haven't solved what's under …
Belldon: 100%
Bob: …all the psychological stuff and so, what are you going to find? Just a different symptom if you manage to do the whack a mole of the first problem.
Belldon: 100% and it's why certain groups out there, I'm not going to name names, but there's certain groups out there helping people with their alcoholic addiction - I'm not going to name names, but they're doing it not by getting rid of the addiction. They're doing it by transferring the addiction to something that still maintains that altered, whacked out, screwed up body chemistry.
Bob: Yep.
Belldon: But doesn’t use alcohol to do it. Right? But it doesn’t get rid of the problem. It doesn’t get rid of the base problem.
Bob: Yeah, so I've talked in past episodes a little bit about the body and emotions and how like the chemistry of emotion is something that tends to either amplify or break down organ function quite a bit and so a lot of the work that we do kind of helps people 1. Manage their chemistry through blood ph and breathing and stuff like that but 2. Through understanding their emotional states and what's causing them psychologically, but you're coming at this from this very building blocks thing, which is so fascinating and cellular biology, it says 1. Okay, cool - if I give the body the right building blocks, part of those building blocks from where I stand is like, if someone asks me are you just a series of chemical reactions, I would say, my body is a series of chemical reactions. [0:12:36.1]
Who I am, as a being, is inhabiting that body, but it's definitely not just chemical reactions, so I might be your first measure of falsehood answerer because there are two parts of the puzzle. But we talked about that kind of before we started recording, too. Right?
Belldon: Yeah.
Bob: There are two pieces to the puzzle. Let's talk about the physical piece first. Chemistry. What is this like building blocks thing you're talking about in terms of the cells?
Belldon: So when we talk about building blocks and through my program, we're talking about the stuff that you're made out of. Right? Quick example - top layer of skin, the epidermis - that stuff replaces every 28 days. You have a brand new layer of skin. Obviously, you don’t shed your skin and put a new one on, but you know, through that time, every single cell in the epidermis is going to change. [0:13:26.5]
Bob: Right.
Belldon: The old one goes away. A new one comes in. That's stuff. I mean, that's matter. That's physical stuff. You can touch it. You can feel it. It is. What's it made out of is the fundamental question because we have this thing, in America in particular, but it's growing throughout the world where we're reducing food to an energy calculation.
Bob: Mm-hmm. Yeah, calories.
Belldon: Yeah, food as calories. Take in less calories than you need, blah, blah, blah, and then we have reduced all of our food to three, we call them macros today. When they were invented 150 years ago, I shouldn’t say invented, discovered - they were called the Atwater Factors back then. [0:14:06.7]
Today, we call them macros. Where we say, you know, fats have 9 calories per gram, carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, proteins have 4 calories per gram, and we have reduced all of our food to this energy calculation. Right? But the thing is our cells don’t fall into that energy calculation. It's like, great, I have this much protein, this much carbs, this much fat, but there are 93 things that we know of today that go into building a healthy, vibrant cell - 93 that we know of and we're discovering new things all the time that are the physical matter, the stuff. So if we want to give it an analogy to bring it somewhere we can understand it, if I'm going to build a house and I say, great - I want a house. I'm going to build it out of concrete, wood and roofing material so it doesn’t get wet. These are my three macros. Can I build a house out of concrete, wood and roofing materials? Well, yeah. I can. [0:15:05.4]
Bob: I can build this house.
Belldon: It'll be strong enough and I can keep it dry and I can keep it up out of the dirt on this foundation so I can build a house that I could actually live in but how functional is it going to be? Without any copper for electrical wires, without any …
Bob: Plumbing.
Belldon: … nylon for water tubes - right - without any glass for windows, without anything to bring in heat, without anything to warm up the floor or to keep the walls insulated, you know, all of these hundreds of building materials are the difference between a house I could live in, yeah or a house I can thrive in.
Bob: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Belldon: Now, if you take that analogy to your cells, can I build a cell out of generic fats, proteins and carbohydrates? Sure I could. People do it every day. That's all they fricking eat.
Bob: There was the guy with the Twinkie diet, right?
Belldon: Exactly. Exactly. But when I was 39 years old, I was lying in the ER. [0:16:03.1]
So many people these days are having heart attacks in their 40s. people have diabetes in their late 30s and 40s. People are developing high blood pressure in their 20s. Yeah, they have a shell that they're walking around in, but what's the quality of that shell? And that's where this principle of building blocks comes into play. Yes, you can have a cell pretty much no matter what you eat, but is it going to be a high quality cell in which you can thrive and it's going to stand the test of time and it's going to make you an active, truly active 90-year-old as opposed to somebody that's on life support when they're 62, and by "life support," I'm talking drugs and/or medical equipment. The average American today is on life-sustaining drugs by the time they're 62, before they even retire. Right? Clearly, that's not high quality, thriving, cellular structure for their body. So we talk about building blocks and I use the analogy of Legos, right? If I give you three colors of Legos - red, yellow, blue and they're all square blocks, you can build stuff and your kid's probably going to build amazing stuff because of his imagination but it is still going to be pixelated red, yellow and blue. [0:17:14.2]
But if I give that kid every possible Lego and say, build stuff, oh my God, what's going to come out of that imagination is amazing. Same with the body. Give it the building blocks. So when we talk about building blocks, that's the long way around what we're talking about. It's the stuff to make you thrive.
Bob: So then what your…well, I imagine what people listening are going to be like, oh, man, that sounds complicated. That sounds like it's really hard to maintain. It sounds like, oh what if I like prefer vegetarianism or whatever and I'm traveling to Turkey or something like that or what if my family doesn’t like all these foods or like different things. Is it going to be super expensive? All the questions that people are going to have. I've seen some of your posts where you talk about a very different paradigm and this is what we're all about here, especially is to challenge limited thinking and the thing is, the people, there are some people who have an agenda when they're like pushing limited thinking. Right? [0:18:09.9]
But a lot of them are just pushing it because that's all they know. You know, they believe, for instance, that a nutritionist knows everything that you're talking about or that a doctor knows everything you're talking about, who gets way less nutrition training than any nutritionist ever did, if they get any. We believe that and they're just offering the advice that they've been given, not knowing that it's really bad advice or incomplete. So we're here to break that. We want a new paradigm. How hard is this to maintain, Belldon? What's the … what's…
Belldon: I have a client and I love the hell out of her. She's posted more than once, "This is the most ridiculously simple thing I've ever done." Ridiculously simple. And if we engage the brain a little bit, we know it is because for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, we did this without even knowing what a cell was. [0:19:01.2]
Had zero knowledge of how food interacted with our body and somehow we managed to do this and live reasonably healthy into our 80s and 90s without life-sustaining drugs or medicines. Right? We did this for thousands of years and then in the last 60-70 years, we have lost touch with all of that. Now all of a sudden, it's hard. Well, what's the difference? Well the difference is we have a few people with an agenda who have co-opted the education by which we learn about our bodies and nutrition. We don’t learn about it in schools. I mean, think about, just for a moment, how much about your body that you know or think you know - how much of it did you learn in school?
Bob: Yeah, let's see - that I think I know - there was a sex ed class at one point. There was a …
Belldon: Boys have a penis. Women have a vagina.
Bob: Yeah, yeah. Good old kindergarten cop there. And there was the food pyramid. I'm just trying to wrack my brain here because like, what's … what muscles are - what tendons are - what … I mean, I learned way more in my own healing training anatomically than anything I ever, we ever touched in school. Like we have a body and most of it was like, you know, there's the food pyramid and sex ed and you know, make sure you exercise kind of stuff. That's about it. [0:20:24.8]
Belldon: Cellular level, you basically remember nothing...
Bob: Right.
Belldon: …that you learned from school, and that's the problem because that's the case today. When I was a young kid, and I've got a few years on you, Bob, and you may not remember this time, but when I was first starting school, there were posters in my school and there were posters in the post office even - I remember this pretty clearly - of an apple and underneath the apple, it said, "You are what you eat." You are. ..that's what we were talking about, right? The building blocks. You are what you eat. All of that is gone now and all of that was gone before I left grade school. [0:21:02.7]
All of that was gone. And almost 100% of what we think we know about our bodies and food today comes to us from marketing. It comes from what we have seen on TV, in movies, on advertisements, on posters. It comes from marketing. And today, the food industry has enumerable blogs and blog posts talking up the story that they need you to believe in order to buy their products. And thus, we get more and more focused on calories and macros and less and less focused on what the building blocks are that make a healthy human body and as we do that, we watch the average healthy lifespan, which is different than the average lifespan - the average lifespan in America is 78 years - average healthy lifespan is 62 because that's when we get life support without which we could never live to 78.
Bob: Wow.
Belldon: So, the average lifespan is decreasing while we're getting our food education from those few people that are agenda driven. [0:22:01.9]
Most people, they're repeating what they know. You're right. But they've learned what they know from an agenda driven marketing machine and it's just crazy. This isn't something that you have to take my word about, you know. Most of us can just sit here and do what you just did - how much of what I know did I learn at school? Well, damn - not very much. Well, then where did it come from? Most of us can just walk through the process and recognize where it came from.
Bob: Yeah, so what's fascinating here and I just kind of want to pull an aside. You know, a lot of … I'm going to like maybe frame this a little bit - like the conversation around people who are struggling with emotional stuff, mental disorders and other things, there are diagnoses and there are a lot of drugs that are out there to help you manage your internal chemistry because there's an imbalance or there's something going on and I'm not taking away from any of that. Some of them have done a lot of good work. Some of them have done horrible damage and some of that depends heavily on a person and when they're trying to figure it out, often it is a … like I have a client that I was just talking to last night who came to one of our events. [0:23:07.0]
He was on Adderall for 10 years and he was just frustrated because he was like, uh, I … they had to … they had to just experiment to figure out which drug was right and then once we figured out which drug was right, then we had to experiment to figure out the right dosage and it left me on the other side, more angry. It like changed my personality a little bit, but it did manage the other stuff. He came to one of our events and we taught him how to breathe, which is the fastest way to alter your blood ph is just respiration, but it's not going to build…it's not going to give you building blocks for all your cells, so if all you do is breathe, your body might wither away.
Belldon: Breathing is good. I mean, we don’t last long without it.
Bob: No, no. It's really, really important, but don’t forget that there's food involved unless you're at a really high level of enlightenment, which I'm not, so I can't speak from that place. So you know, he learned how to breathe and then I talked to him like six weeks later and he's just like, no, I stopped taking Adderall that day. [0:24:04.2]
Like this is way better and I'm happier and my personality is better and like I can manage events and now I have to pretend I'm not as happy as I am because it freaks people out. And I was like, sweet. So we have managed this chemical thing and one way to look at the human life is look, chemistry is the way we're interacting with the world. Everything is chemistry. The food you eat is literally a whole bunch of chemical reactions that breaks down and builds the cells of your body. People like, light is chemistry. They wanted me to go out into the sun to get vitamin D. The sun is not radiating vitamin D, folks. I just want you to know this. It's actually a chemical reaction that happens in your body because of sunlight, its response to sunlight. So there's chemistry in that. When we're dealing with people who have pornographic addictions, like they're looking at something and then their mind is creating a bunch of chemistry because their body is in such a toxic state that it wants to change quickly. That's why they don’t have conscious control over it a lot of times is that just the body is literally reaching and screaming out for help.
Belldon: I can't wait until we start talking about this. Go ahead. [0:25:12.8]
If you, or someone you know, is looking to drop the F Bomb of Freedom in your life, whether that's from addiction or depression and anxiety or just anything that's making you feel flat out stuck, but you have no clue how to shake it and just want help doing it, head on over to LiberateaMan.com and book a call, where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you've been missing.
Bob: Yeah, so with that chemistry, so then now we're creating chemistry by belief system. Like I'm imagining something and it's altering the chemistry in my body. Your beliefs itself, whether you're a faith-based and religion person and you have beliefs in God, that's also going to cause a chemical cascade down inside of your system. So everything in one way or another boils down to yes, there are chemical reactions that are happening and there is a consciousness under this that is driving some of it, but there's definitely a wisdom inside your body and in the end, your body is not craving something necessarily. [0:26:16.3]
It's not… what I'm telling people like, they're like, oh man - I really want to go look at porn, for instance. You don’t want to look at porn. You're interpreting that. What really is happening is your body feels bad and it wants to feel better. That's it. And that's chemistry, to a certain extent. So your exercise will change your chemistry. Your thoughts, what you read, what you listen to, the people you hang around, the environments you're in, smell is an altering of chemistry. All the electricity in your body, your thought processes go through chemicals to like pass the message along. Like everything is chemistry, to a certain extent. One thing Belldon does is understanding this, he like helps you get the building blocks, but then he doesn’t leave behind this other piece of the puzzle. So, how much do you dive into that, the other piece of the puzzle, the thought processes and the things that...? [0:27:07.8]
Belldon: Pretty extensively because you know, honestly, people that come to me typically come in thinking "I need to lose weight." Right? That's what brings them to me and you know, that happens. It's a side effect of what we do and it happens faster than it will happen when people focus on weight loss. Letting it be the side effect it is and treating the cause makes the weight go away faster than if you're fighting the weight but not the cause. Right?
Bob: Same with addition, we talk about this extensively. Right? Fighting the addiction. Solve the problem.
Belldon: Mind blown, right? Solve the problem, the symptom goes away. It's crazy. But the thing is, if I could just come up with food lists and give it to everybody and say, "Hey, you just do this - you're going to be thin in 28 days," dude, there would be no obesity problem. How many people… I mean, who would not come in and say, "Here, take my money for that." [0:28:01.0]
But the thing is, that's not why people are overweight. People are overweight because they have become addicted to food. They have addictive behaviors surrounding what's going on and if we don’t address that directly and dive right straight into it and get messy with it, guess what? We're never going to solve the obesity problems. Never going to…
Bob: What do you find is at the bottom of that? Like what do you…they're addicted to food - they have these behaviors. In your experience, what have you seen is at the bottom of that?
Belldon: So you've got to understand, I come at everything from a scientific point of view. Whenever something comes along and there's like, oh, that's woo woo, let me figure out how that works, right? Because all woo woo is is science that we haven't discovered yet.
Bob: Yeah.
Belldon: That's all it is. That's all magic is. It's science we haven’t discovered yet. We're going to and as we do, it's like I totally love this stuff. So here's the deal and I'm going to over simplify a process here, but it is the process that creates addictive behavior. [0:29:01.7]
It starts with exactly what you just said - people don’t feel good. Now, either they don’t feel good physically because they haven't been creating the body and building a cellular body that can feel good or they don’t feel good because of a set of circumstances that they've interpreted negatively and they feel bad emotionally. Now, emotion is two things: Number 1, it's the release of a hormone, number 2, it's the way we mentally interpret that stimuli. You can have the exact same hormone hit two people - one person is going to get flooded with cortisone and say, oh my god, the world is ending; the other person is going to get flooded with cortisone and say, damn, I've got a challenge - let's go do this stuff. I almost did it again. I'm working on it. Let's go do this. The exact same hormone though - right - just flooded two people's bodies but the way they interpreted that stimuli was different. Now the person who interprets that stimuli in a negative way is going to feel bad. The person that interpreted it in a positive way is going to feel good and this is where we're getting into the mind body connection. [0:30:09.3]
Bob: Right.
Belldon: Right? How we interpret things is solidly based in what we believe and when we get this thing that flood our body, what we believe is going to dictate how we interpret that feeling.
Bob: Yeah, the next step in like the chain reaction. Right?
Belldon: Totally. Totally.
Belldon: What … I was just going to ask - what does the body want? I mean, what does any body or mind want? To feel bad or to feel good?
Bob: Yeah, totally - 100%. Like operate in joy. If you had a choice, people, you want to feel … Nobody is like, no, I need to feel bad because you're, the only people that feel like they need to feel bad, like people who do something "bad" they feel like they need to feel bad, but that actually makes them feel good that they're solving the "I'm supposed to feel bad" problem. It's a weird messed up reality, but …
Belldon: It is.
Bob: … you're getting a payoff for feeling bad about something. [0:31:00.8]
Belldon: It is. It is and there's like chemical scientific basis for that one, too, which is a lot of fun. And to me, understanding this stuff helps people to make better decisions, if they just understand how the mechanism works. So here's what's going on, man. You feel crappy. You feel crappy. You have a part of your brain called the ventral tegmental area - no, we're not going to test you on this later - but you have this part of your brain that registers that. You feel bad. You want to feel good. This is a part of your brain responsible for creating a chemical called dopamine and it's just waiting for stimulus that it can use to do that. That stimulus might be a drug. Cocaine will directly stimulate that - boom! Straight to this part of your brain, make dopamine - do it now. Oh, okay - cool. I'm going to make dopamine. You know what dopamine does? It feels good.
Bob: Yeah, it does.
Belldon: And as soon as somebody who feels bad feels good, this part of the brain says, "Whatever you just did…
Bob: Let's do that again.
Belldon: …"do more of that."
Bob: Yep. [0:32:04.4]
Belldon: Yeah, do way more of that because that feels good. So the person is driven to do that. Now here's where you get into that weird cycle that you were talking about a minute ago. Right? The thing. That pleasurable feeling, this is not me coming up with this - look this stuff up if you want to have a deeper knowledge of it - that pleasant feeling lasts 2-3 minutes. Minutes. And it's immediately followed by a wave of guilt and shame for doing this bad thing, whether it's taking a drug, drinking the alcohol, masturbating, indulging in pornography, whatever it is that you interpret as bad - you have to understand, it's …there's an interpretation involved there. Is eating bad? No. Is eating bad food bad? Well, yeah, we're going to interpret it that way. Right? And there's a simple fix to this in a second that's really, really powerful we can talk about too. [0:33:05.6]
But as soon as you do this, bam - oh god, that felt good. And then 2-3 minutes later, it's like, oh god, now I don’t feel good because I feel guilty for doing that and I feel shame for doing that. What's the only way I can get rid of this guilt and shame? Well, go do that thing again. And you've got this part of your brain telling you, "Whatever you just did, man, go do that again." And that dopamine goes straight to an area called the nucleus accumbens, which says, "Oh wow" right? But now here's the really, the really catch 22 about this, and I know you work with this with your clients too - you get that increase of dopamine and sometimes, depending on how bad this thing is that you did or how potent the drug or even now we're building this into food by how we engineer, how we engineer flour is specifically designed to hit this part of the brain and create dopamine. [0:34:05.4]
We're actually engineering this into food to make food addictive physically as well as psychologically but once you get that - boom - this activity, if it's intense enough, can 10x the dopamine released from this part of your brain, 10 times the dopamine, and it gets up there to the nucleus accumbens and says, "Oh this is awesome ahhhhh - more, more, more, more!" Right? But at the same time, Bob, this part of our brain is saying "You're over stimulating me" and because it's over stimulated, it reduces the number of dopamine sensors and makes them less sensitive. So now to get the same feeling, what do you have to do?
Bob: You go to get more.
Belldon: You got to get more, and we all know that drug addiction, you tend to normalize it - that's a physical response in your brain of reducing the dopamine sensors. Now I've got to get more to get the same feeling, and you get into this cycle where it's never, ever, ever enough. [0:35:08.1]
Bob: What's fascinating about this is the instinctive, inherent wisdom in the body where it says, "No, that's too much. You only think you need more, but I know when it's too much for me," and the body is auto regulating to try and make sure that it survives. And most people don’t realize this. They think that addiction is like some weird moral feeling or they think that addiction is, which definitely muddies the waters, you know, quite a bit so they think it's a moral failing or they think it's just like a willpower thing or they think it's a disease, all of which are attempts to explain something that they don’t know how to explain. But the reality is, no, what we call addiction, which doesn’t actually exist as a thing, it's just a label, it's really your body being the smartest possible thing it could possibly be to help you survive longer in the world at the most optimal state, and you're trying to override it with more stuff because you haven’t figured out how to like actually tune into that wisdom and do what's needed to live at a higher level. [0:36:12.2]
So when I talk to people, I'm usually talking about a ladder. Like look, if you're living on the first rung of a ladder and the substance you're taking is rung two or three, you're always going to have it on the menu as an option to help you. But if you learn how to live at rung 10, the 3 is still on the ladder, but you're not going to look down there and be like, you know what - how about I fall seven steps and see what it's like to pick myself back up? It's just not going to show up as an urge anymore because you're so functionally optimal. You've got the chemistry that fertilizes what it means to really grow as a human being and people talk about happiness being the goal. Actually in my book, happiness is the fertile ground out of which a real human being grows. Once you have got the chemistry right, now what's possible for human kind actually can show up. Until then, you just have a caged animal that's doing its best to survive. [0:37:05.6]
Belldon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Totally. If you go back…I'm a huge believer, and I know you are too, because we have talked about this before - what was before this? Okay? You're here. What was the step that brought you here? Now, what was the step that brought you there? And what was the step that brought you there? And sooner or later, you get back to what the root causes are. That's where you want to do your work. Right? Is where you find those root causes and what we just talked about physiologically, and there's a mental and emotional layer on top of this too… what we just talked about physiologically started because we don’t feel good. And we want to feel good. So it’s a root cause. What's one thing that we can do? Well, put the right stuff in your body so you can feel good. And then all of sudden, you find that what you're doing to feel good, you don’t even want because you don’t feel bad. Right? Trigger is gone. And I know that sounds so over simplified. [0:38:07.4]
Bob: It's not, though. That's the thing. Like for instance, sometimes we'll have people trace their emotional pattern states. I don’t know if you do this, but since we deal with people who are like, almost everybody who is addicted, not everybody but almost everybody is depressed or dealing with anxiety and if you just trace it for a couple of weeks and have them track their emotional state, baseline, there are certain patterns that they go into. Most commonly it's what? Okay, I wake up in the morning and I don’t want to get out of bed and I feel miserable and it's like…so they're in a low state in the morning and then they manage to get themselves off to work. They're busy enough during work that they can't let their psychology run amuck, and then after work, they kind of start to wind down and by the end of the night, they start to get a little bit low again and then they go off to sleep and the cycle repeats itself every day. If, in that space, and this is a lot of the work that we do, using the body to actually reshape the mind and how the mind thinks without having to dig into all of the psychological stuff, because that's like a rat trap sometimes, you can get lost in it. [0:39:07.7]
No, I'm not sure if that's the root issue - what if it's this one - what if it's that one? Like dude, come on - let's just find it and we can find out where it is in the body because every thought you have creates a chemical state. It changes your breathing patterns. It changes the mechanical tension patterns. It changes your posture. It changes your electrical patterns if you're thinking in thoughts. It changes everything.
Belldon: It changes your physical strength. You become weak with weak thoughts and you become more powerful physically with powerful thoughts.
Bob: Yes! And so like every thought you have, that means if you have these root causes, guys, whether you're dealing with nutrition problems and weight or something else, that is a map, literally, of what your mind is thinking. Your body is the map. So what we'll have them do is like, okay, cool, we found the times of day and the patterns of emotion, and then what we'll do is we'll have them do a routine at that point in time. It's not even food. Food is another atom, right? Do a routine at that point in time that makes their body feel good. So their brain is going downhill, like "we're supposed to feel bad right now," and their body is like, "Actually, I feel pretty good." And the brain is like, "No, but we're supposed to feel bad."Like, "Yeah, but I'm not in the mood." "No, but like, aren't we supposed to feel bad right now?" "Nope, I'm good. This .. I have to do more of this." And then over time, that creates a little bit of confusion and then a new pattern can emerge. [0:40:22.6]
Belldon: And physically, yeah. How you feel physically is such either a trigger or a counter trigger to what you're going to do next. Just how you feel is such a determinate. Can I share something, Bob, that I'm… I mean, just a simple exercise people can do…
Bob: Yeah.
Belldon: …that I know this pattern prevents people from reaching out to me and saying, "Hey, I want to get my body in control," right. I'm overweight. I have no physical energy. I'm not even talking emotional energy. I have no physical energy. I've got chronic disease and yet, I'm going to talk to you, even though I know you can fix this and I know in the world of addiction, porn addiction, other addiction, I bet this stops people from talking to you too and if people do this one exercise, what a difference it will make. [0:41:12.1]
This is the exercise of releasing good and bad. Alright? We define things this way. This is good behavior. This is bad behavior. This is good food. This is bad food. This is good company. This is bad company. Now, if you have a bad label on a thing that you enjoy, what's going to happen psychologically?
Bob:: Massive conflict.
Belldon: Massive conflict. So, you did this bad thing and now you've got what we call cognitive dissonance. You've identified this as a bad thing, and yet, you did it so can you be a good person? Hmmm. This is problematic. But what happens if I do this bad thing two or three or four and five times? I absolutely cannot be a good person because a good person cannot do bad things like this. [0:42:02.3]
So I just released my cognitive dissonance by coming over and being a bad person. Now, I've just started addictive behavior. How do I get it back because the thing is - a bad person can't do good things. So we have just locked ourselves in to repeating this bad cycle because the way we have been taught in our belief system and you can blame this on parents, teachers, religion - we can blame this anywhere we want because we get it from everywhere when we're kids - bad people can't do good things.
Bob: It's not just we have internalized it. We make it up too. So.
Belldon: Yeah, we do. We do. It's true. But good fruit doesn’t come from bad trees - right? Bad fruit doesn’t come from good trees. This has just been so deeply beat into us, so now we have become a bad person. And as a bad person, we're going to continue this addictive behavior forever because I can't go talk to Bob. That's something a good person would do. I can't go talk to Belldon. That's something a good person would do. I'm not a good person. [0:43:04.6]
And the first step to being able to release that tension, to break the cognitive dissonance so that you can reach out to help, to get help - the first step is just to release those two labels. This is behavior. This is food. This is driving fast. This is gambling. This is pornography. This is whatever it is. It's not good or bad. It just is what it is and then the next question is does that behavior serve me?
Bob: Right.
Belldon: It's not good. It's not bad. It's not in between. I'm not going to heaven. I'm not going to hell. Purgatory - don’t have to worry about that. The only question is - does this behavior serve me? And if we can just release the labels and ask the question, that's the first step to being able to reach out, to Bob or to Belldon or to anyone else to get help for where you're at - if it doesn’t serve you. [0:44:07.1]
If you answer that question, "It serves me," knock yourself out. Go have fun. If you answer that question and you're like, this doesn’t serve me - well now we're not even talking addiction anymore. Right? We're talking what really is the problem and the problem is this stuff is making me sick. It's breaking my body apart. It's ruining me emotionally. It's got my body chemistry in places body chemistry does not belong and it's just going to rip me apart in every way, and it all happened because I called it bad. Root cause. Get rid of the label and just ask the question, "Does it serve me?"
Bob: Yeah. And that's beautiful. You know, is it working, does it serve me? And for those of you who have moral judgments about those things, you want to like, as a final note to challenge some thinking - let's assume this - some man finds a, because we have only got a couple of minutes left and I want you guys to find out where you can find Belldon and ramp up your life in a big way. [0:45:05.6]
So imagine some explorer just discovered an island off the coast of Greenland that barely got uncovered by the glaciers. We didn't know it existed, but for some magical thing, it happened where there was an ecosystem under the ice or something. Explorer finds the land and finds all of these animals that have no corollary in the rest of the world because it's so isolated and they evolved in a different way, whatever. He comes back and he's talking about things that sound partly like dragons, partly like dinosaurs, partly like horses, partly like whatever, gerbils that happen to have like wings off of their nose and all kinds of whatever and we think we understand what he's saying because well, I know what a horse is and he's describing it like a horse, so I'm picking together my ideas about what I know and I'm making a fantasy image that I say, oh, okay - I got it. But the reality is until you actually see the animal, you don’t got it. Whatever Jesus said so many years ago, he was speaking as someone who like didn't suffer from psychological psychoses. [0:46:05.5]
If he was an enlightened being, like wasn't struggling with all the things we struggle with, was experiencing dimensions of life that we have never touched some of us, and we're saying, well no, I got it. I understand it. When there's no way you could possibly understand it. There's a guy who purportedly died, three days later so that we're sure he's dead, came back and is telling you what it's like on the other side and your only reference point is your life. So you're naturally making up stories to try and make sense in what it is. The same thing with this good and evil piece. If you believe something is good and evil and like there's just the thing - well, no, this behavior is bad. Maybe we're understanding it in no so helpful of way and maybe understanding it like it doesn’t actually serve my body in this life is a really powerful way of doing it so that you can live like Jesus said to live, which is my yoke is easy - my burden is light. Well you can only do that if you're living a certain way and that does include how you honor your biology and your chemistry. [0:47:04.1]
So, Belldon - okay, how can they find you? If somebody was like, dude, I need to change my life, where is this massive, amazing fellow called Belldon?
Belldon: BelldonColme.net and because I need to change that to something super, super easy for people who can't spell Belldon Colme, it's b-e-l-l like a bell that you ring, d-o-n, Don of Spain, c-o-l-m-e, it's silent - b-e-l-l-d-o-n-c-o-l-m-e.net will get you onto my website and would love to talk to anybody with issues as it surrounds addiction and food, obesity, chronic disease, illness, for things that have to do with more emotional-related addictions, pornography and so on. That's kind of a one two punch. It's like addictive behaviors from all sides and I'm going to tell you, I've lived with addictive behaviors. I have. It's what got me into the situation that I was in. I know full well what they're all about. I'm also going to tell you I live with addictive behaviors now. The difference is I now am addicted to things that serve me. What a difference. [0:48:13.0]
Bob: What a difference. Guys, this is Belldon Colme, the master of awesome human biology and helping people actually live a life that is full of energy and put yourself in a place where happiness is a possibility at a cellular level. He came, gave his time to just offer you some things. If you want to go find him, go find him at belldoncolme.net. If you want to talk to us, you know where to find us at TheFreedomSpecialists.com. It's been a pleasure, Belldon. Thank you so much.
Belldon: Bob, thank you for having me. This is really, really cool because I know the work that you do. I honor the work that you do and really glad that you and I got to know each other along the way.
Bob: Yeah. Cool. Awesome.
And that's it for today's Alive and Free Podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from, and while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you, and plus, it's just nice to be nice.
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
