#17 The Warrior Diet, Intermittent Fasting and Stress Adaptation with Ori Hofmekler

Ori Hofmekler (0:01)

The definition of biological fitness is very simple and clear. Better survival, longer life. By taking advantage of stress, rather than falling victim to stress. Starvation and hardship are animal. Who want to be under that pain?

Well, your body want to be under that pain, because it's striving under that. Ironically, it's the stress that can kill you, that can also heal you.

Siim Land (0:36)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land. And today we have a special guest on the show. Ori Hofmekler, the author of the notorious Warrior Diet. If you want to know how to take advantage of stress and how to adapt to it, then follow me and let's delve into the world of stress adaptation.

SPEAKER_3 (0:57)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (1:01)

Body Mind Empowerment.

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Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (1:09)

Everything the body needs.

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Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:14)

It's an honor to have you here, Ori, and welcome to the show.

Ori Hofmekler (1:17)

My pleasure. Nice to meet you.

Siim Land (1:20)

Yeah, likewise.

Your biography says that you were in the military during the early parts of your life. How has the army service influenced your interest in this type of research?

Ori Hofmekler (1:33)

I think that early on in this period, I already start to experience what survival mean in practice, and how the body reacts under extreme condition that you usually don't experience. And I start to, through trial and error, I start to reach some conclusion, which initially led me that there is a method that if you follow a protocol, that if you follow properly, you're gonna handle stress, physical, nutritional, or even emotional, way superior to regular protocol that if you didn't know what to do, you probably would have follow.

Means we basically must change our routine in response to stress. We don't need always to think about it. We have today, I know that we have an inner program, science already recognize it, that is very, very alert and designed to help us respond to stress. But when this is happening, multiply other mechanism activated in the body that literally transform your body to become resilient to stress, adapt and improve. This very mechanism, this very system, it's part of the evolutionary process that help organism, not only low organism, high organism, mammals, animals and human, survive in a world that is pretty stressful. It was stressful, still stressful. So early on, I learned that during time of extreme physical stress, the last thing that you need is to eat. And I personally start to experience it. I started my first experience with intermittent fasting by the daytime. I realized that when I am in a during time, sometimes 10 hours at a time of physical drills, I should minimize my eating because it will be extremely counter-effective.

And since then, I started to improve this method.

Now, it's a point and I'll finish my point.

Yeah, we respond to stress, but there is this program that allow us to respond to stress. There is no reason we shouldn't practice it every day, even in time that we are less stressful. It is so beneficial for us. It is so beneficial for other animals and other organism that we need to learn from them. In fact, you probably are aware of the evidence, but then you put every single organism on this planet, on a nutritional stress, less calories or intermittent fasting. There is a major improvement in all the aspects of their biology. In fact, some organism and some small animals have been shown to double their lifespan under certain kind of stress. That's exactly my point. We need to learn from that and we need to apply to our lifestyle today.

Siim Land (5:22)

Yeah, like you mentioned that life itself is a constant process of adapting to stress.

Living organisms, they replicate themselves under the pressures of natural selection and so on. But living in this society, we don't experience these kinds of stressors anymore and we have to voluntarily create those situations ourselves. So what led you from writing The Warrior Diet to your latest book, The 7 Principles of Stress?

Ori Hofmekler (5:52)

The 7th Principle of Stress is actually a continuation of a long time of exploration in the area of human survival in today's world. You said it very correctly. We live in a society that not only don't help you understand what is your biology, in fact it's counter-effective to your biology. Look at our food chain and the food industry today is one of the worst things that we can do to ourselves. If we were another species, I would say, if we were animals, I would say that our food industry is a manifestation of animal cruelty. The way people eat today, if we were another animal, I wouldn't even feed, we have rescued dogs here and cats, I wouldn't feed my animals this way. It is cruelty. So we have a system that is designed to give us a lot of pleasure.