JLD: What’s shaking Fire Nation? JLD here and wowza, do we have an audio master class for you. How to Hack Your Health, physical, emotional, spiritual, and financial game changing practices with Allison Melody. Now, who is Allison? Well, she’s an echo entrepreneur with a passion for film, fitness, and food. Her endeavors include podcast hosting, film making, and motivational speaking. She hosts the top ranked Food Heals podcast, owns the film production company Melody Productions, and speaks at events across the US and Europe. Now we’re gonna be diving into some amazing things that I am super passionate about. You’re gonna be able to hear it in my voice, Fire Nation, as we go through this audio master class, one that you do not want to miss. We are gonna dive in when we get back from thanking our sponsor.

Allison, say what’s up to Fire Nation and share something unique and interesting about yourself.

Allison Melody: Hey JLD. Hey Fire Nation. I’m so excited to be here today. So something that most people don’t know about me is that before I started on this crazy entrepreneurial journey that we’re all on is that I was in film school and I was in college and my first job in college was actually – I was a stand-in on a little show called Dawson’s Creek. When they do the lighting before the actors come out, I would stand-in for Michelle Williams who is now Oscar nominated actress and so I’m just so excited and proud to see how far she’s come. I just remember I started on a little show, my whole career, on a little show called Dawson’s Creek.

JLD: Well, I love that and I can’t believe I didn’t know that about you because you and I actually go back a little ways. You were actually part of the first round of Puerto Palooza. You came down last year to Puerto Rico with four other incredible people for a nice three-day weekend and got to hang out with myself, Kate, and just really get to enjoy the Puerto Rico vibe. We did a couple of days of real business stuff, but then we got out on a yacht and we got to see the Caribbean a little bit too.

Allison Melody: Yes. If you need a testimonial, I will be your testimonial. Everyone now that knows that I’ve done this is like when can I go? When I can I sign up?

JLD: Oh, I love it and what I loved about learning about you, Allison, is just how focused you are on the health, and the spiritual, and the emotional, and the financial, like really the full spectrum. Because I’m telling you right now Fire Nation from firsthand experience, you are not gonna win at a high level unless you’ve really got a well-rounded balanced mentality about health, about wellness, about finances, just about business.

You need to have the full package because if you’re just too one-leveled in any direction something’s gonna be off. Like if you’re too focused on health and not enough on the business then your business is gonna dry up and if it’s the opposite, it’s the opposite. So, you’ve gotta really be having all these wheels moving and that’s what today’s master class is gonna be about Hack Your Health, physical, emotional, spiritual, and financial game changing practices. This is gonna be so valuable. It’s gonna be one that you go back to time and time again to just remind yourself like am I doing these things? Am I balanced? Am I centered? Because these are things that are gonna make your entrepreneurial journey worth journeying. Because I can tell you I’ve had these, again, off balance in my life and then I’ve had to pull them back in and when I do things align correctly.

So, Allison let’s start off with No. 1, which is something that I really like talking about because I’d say it’s probably my biggest right now and that’s mindful eating. Let’s go into that because I think it’s something that a lot of us lack for many reasons but kind of break this part down for us.

Allison Melody: Absolutely, and I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. Mindful eating is really about as entrepreneurs we’re on the go, we’re always running around from appointment to appointment, meeting to meeting, or we’re recording I don’t know how many podcasts you do a day anymore, but 10 or 20 podcasts a day.

JLD: Just 8. I’m down to 8 now. It’s very reasonable.

Allison Melody: Okay. That’s still quite high.

JLD: You’re my eighth interview today and I’m like, is it really over. I wanna talk to some more people. I hope you can hang out after this call.

Allison Melody: That’s great. Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re not supper exhausted.

JLD: No.

Allison Melody: So we’ll still have a great interview.

JLD: I love it.

Allison Melody: So, yeah, mindful eating is really just being mindful about not only what you put in your body, which we’re gonna talk about, but how you’re eating. If we’re mindlessly watching TV and stuffing our face with food and at the end of a long day, that food is not gonna serve our bodies. We’re gonna have poor digestion. We’re not going to be easily absorbing the nutrients from that food.

Mindful eating is really about appreciating the food that you are eating and allowing it to nourish your body. I almost see it as a break and a meditation in my day. So, if I was doing 8 podcasts, let’s say after 4, I was gonna take a lunch break or perhaps a dinner break depending on when I was recording, I would sit and I would take that 30 minutes and I would eat in silence. Sometimes I’ll put music on. Music or silence, but I’m not gonna put TV on because that’s really a distraction. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna eat. I’m gonna enjoy the flavors. I’m gonna be grateful for the food that I’m eating and then I can think about some creative ways to improve my day instead of eating mindfully, or eating on the go, eating in the car, or just not nourishing your body with food. So that’s what mindful eating is, and it really does make a difference.

JLD: This is huge for me. I really feel like I am one of those people that are just like, okay, it’s break time. I wanna eat some food and I wanna pop on my favorite show, like Billions or West World, and just kick back and just eat. It’s become like a habit for me. It’s become like an escape for me. Because I love to work hard and I love to be able to focus, but I love to be able to take a break from that working hard and focusing and to just completely relax.

At the end of the day, Kate cooks a great meal and it’s like 6:30 or 7:00 p.m., she makes a big bowel. It’s a healthy bowl of food but it’s a bowl of vegetables and quinoa and different things but then what I am doing? I’m sitting in front of the TV and she’s sitting in front of the TV, and we’re just spooning food into our mouths kind of mindlessly. You’re right. I’m not thinking about how good this food tastes and I’m not chewing it properly. Guess what, I’m probably getting full but I’m still eating because I’m just not thinking about it. I’m enjoying the show.

So, that’s where that word mindful I think really comes in. I’m gonna tell you right now, I’m making a commitment to you, Allison, and after this I’m gonna to talk to Kate as well. I wanna start eating out on that kitchen terrace. We have the beautiful kitchen terrace overlooking the Caribbean. Why are we not just sitting out there eating, enjoying the food, enjoying the ocean breeze and doing it that way instead of mindlessly down in that little entertainment room pit that we have watching a show?

Allison Melody: Absolutely. I love that visual of you two sitting out there and just enjoying each other’s company. I will say that I don’t do this at every meal, JLD. I certainly watch my Beverly Hills Housewives and eat sometimes. It’s not something you have to practice every single day with every single meal but the more you practice it, the better you’re gonna feel.

JLD: You also have some things in this area about more plants, food allergies, blood type, vitamins. Let’s kind of talk a little bit about that before we move onto the next section.

Allison Melody: Yeah. Besides being mindful while you’re eating, you gotta be mindful of what you eat and so I discovered this in my 20s. When I was growing up, we had no awareness of food, or health, or nutrition. I didn’t care. I didn’t know about it. No one was talking about it. It wasn’t of interest to me and it wasn’t until I had struggles with both of my parents where my mom was suffering from multiple sclerosis. Then unfortunately, she got cancer shortly after. The doctors at the time didn’t tell us anything about nutrition or the power of the body to heal itself. All they said was drugs, chemotherapy, and surgery are your only options, but she’s probably going to die anyway because the cancer is far too advanced.

I had to sit there and do nothing because I didn’t know anything and watch my beautiful mother pass away one month before I graduated college. That was really a turning point for me when it comes to health because I saw Western medicine completely fail my mother. I realized there had to be a better way to heal your body and I was like on a mission to find out what it was.

Slowly over the next few years, I discovered nutrition and I realized that the body has the ability to heal itself if given the tools that it needs to do so. This was a wakeup call for me. I started lecturing my father on his excessive use of pharmaceutical drugs, of his poor diet just eating whatever was in front of him, or getting fast food, not cooking and really enjoying food, and not choosing healthy choices. He was also drinking and smoking. But he didn’t wanna listen to me. That was another lesson in my life that just because we have a spiritual, emotional, or physical awakening, it doesn’t mean that someone else is going to. So, as I am learning about health and healing, he is actually getting worse and worse to the point where he got cancer as well. So, here I am, I’m 25 years old, and I’ve lost both of my parents to cancer and again I’ve seen Western medicine fail. That basically catapulted my mission to make sure that no one ever had to suffer the way that they suffered and no one should go through what they went through and what I went through as a daughter losing both of them.

That’s my mission today is to really teach people the healing benefits of food, that there is so much power in plants and if we choose every day to put something in our body that truly nourishes us, we can live till we’re 100 and we can still be hustling our entrepreneurial life. I have people that run marathons across Australia in their 60s, survive breast cancer. I’ve interviewed people who have done incredible things and it’s all because they hacked their health. When it comes to nutrition, and diet, and exercise, I’m a proponent of learning your food allergies because everyone is different. For me, I found out, this is terrible, but I had a food allergy to coffee.

JLD: Oh no. Was it coffee or just caffeine in general?

Allison Melody: It was coffee beans. I wanted to cry but it didn’t mean I could not have it all. It just meant I could not have it every day. That’s something that I have to have every few days because it takes my body a longer to process it than it does someone else’s body. Someone else might be totally fine with it. Right? And so it’s discovering what works for you. You can get a food allergy test and find out what your body is allergic to. I also had dairy. When I gave up dairy, my life changed. I can’t even tell you. My face cleared up. I have not had acne or a single pimple, or a bump on my face since giving up dairy. My digestion changed. I started being able to absorb the nutrients from food better. I started feeling better. All these things really added up to the fact that I was discovering what worked for my body and for me it’s a plant based diet. It may not be for everyone. I eat a whole foods plant based diet and it’s completely changed my life.

JLD: Wow. I don’t know if you were here or if I had this product but they’ve been a sponsor of Entrepreneurs on Fire for a while, Four Sigmatic which is mushroom coffee. Does that work for you?

Allison Melody: Totally. I love Four Sigmatic.

JLD: Oh really?

Allison Melody: Yeah. There are a lot of herbal things that I can do, and I still drink coffee but just not every day.

JLD: Let’s talk a little bit about blood type.

Allison Melody: This is a tough one because there is a lot of science behind it, but there are also a lot of people who say it’s BS. You have to do your own research and decide what works for you. But the first time I ever went to an acupuncturist and chiropractor, this was actually in North Carolina while I was going through my health discovery. When I was in North Carolina losing both of my parents, there weren’t juice bars in every corner and people in lulu land on yoga mats, green smoothies everywhere like there are today. But what happened was, I was in North Carolina and I went to an acupuncturist for chronic fatigue. They did a food allergy test and they did a blood type test.

I discovered my blood test was A which you should eat, according to the blood type diet, a vegetarian diet. That’s when I started getting off all of the meats. That completely changed my body too. I was losing weight. I was feeling better. I was less fatigued, all of these things. I did it slowly. I didn’t do it overnight. None of these are overnight cures. Some people can do things cold turkey. I wasn’t able to. I’m giving up things over time and my body is starting to heal itself and become better and better. The blood type diet is something that if you wanna look into, you can go to a holistic health practitioner and they can determine your blood type, and there’s a book you can read. It tells you exactly what foods are best for your blood type.

JLD: I actually read that book. I don’t remember what O positive was. Do you know off the top of your head?

Allison Melody: I think that’s a meat eating diet actually.

JLD: Meat eating? Oh give me that filet. Give me that filet.

Allison Melody: I believe. You’ll have to check. I’m not an expert on this.

JLD: Okay. I think I read it back in 2012 actually. It’s been a while. I’ve gotta go back that for sure. Let’s talk about some vitamins. What’s the deal with vitamins?
Allison Melody: Yeah. This is a great one. All of these tests we’re talking about can actually be done at a functional medicine doctor’s place. What they can do is they will test your blood, your, tool, your spit, your hair. Everything you can think of, they will test and you can find out what vitamins are you actually deficient in in the current diet that you’re eating. I live in a completely different place than you do JLD and so you may have different vitamins in your soil in the fruits and vegetables that you’re eating than the ones that I do. For me, I could be deficient in something that you’re totally not or vice versa because we live in different areas. It depends on where our food is coming from and of course what kind of diet we eat. So, when I discovered I was deficient in B12, I had to up the levels of B12 in my body to bring my body back to homeostasis. A functional medicine doctor like Dr. Steven Cabral, who we both know from Puerto Palooza –

JLD: We both know and love.

Allison Melody: Love. Yes. He is one of my favorite go to people on this. You do the tests yourselves and then what happens is a functional medicine doctor, such as Dr. Steven Cabral, can recommend you exactly what you need to get your levels in balance so that all of your hormones are balanced, all of your vitamin deficiencies are addressed, all that good stuff so you are at your best. There is no perfect diet and vitamin combination for anyone. It is all individualized depending on your individual needs.

JLD: His book the Rain Barrel Effect is out. Have you got to read it yet?

Allison Melody: It’s sitting in front of me right now because he was just here. He was in LA a couple days ago.

JLD: Oh cool.

Allison Melody: We did a live podcast. Yeah.

JLD: Sweet. Yeah. He’s such a great dude. Actually an alumni of Providence College like me. He was two years ahead of me and he has a great daily podcast called The Cabral Concept. Actually, while we’re at it, let’s talk about the Food Heals podcast. What’s going on with that Allison?

Allison Melody: Sure. Well, I started in 2015 and Food Heals was just my passion project and I was like let’s see if this can fly. As Pat Flynn says, “Will it fly?” It flew.

JLD: It flew.

Allison Melody: Yeah. And I was listening to your how to start a podcast. I remember I would be at the gym, and I would be listening to your podcast and coming up with ideas for my podcast. So I definitely appreciate it. I was sales funneled. Now I’m a member of Podcaster’s Paradise, and it’s been hugely beneficial to me and the work that I do. So, it’s been two and a half years and it’s been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done because I’ve gotten to meet people I would never get to meet. Like, I can’t ask someone like Gabrielle Bernstein to go to coffee with me but I can ask her to be on my podcast and I have a platform to share her story and so it’s a --

JLD: Amazing.

Allison Melody: win/win for everyone. Yeah. So on the Food Heals podcast we just interview people who have healed themselves of chronic degenerative diseases and how they’ve done it through nutritional, through spirituality, all kinds of stuff, alternative medicine and that’s really the mission is to share other people’s stories to inspire others that we can heal ourselves. Our health is in our hands.

JLD: Because food does heal Fire Nation. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years as I approach by 40s now is so many people get obsessed with chronic cardio and working out, working out, working out because guess what then I can cheat with this, that, or the other thing. Listen, you can go that route and you’re gonna struggle or you can just really be intentional and focused on the stuff you’re putting into your mouth and the food that’s going into your body. That’s what’s gonna be the game changer.

So Allison, let’s talk about intermittent fasting. There’s a lot that goes around about intermittent fasting like some people do the two and five where five days regular eating, two days of fasting. Some people do the 16 and 8. So, can you kind talk a little bit about that and the benefits of intermittent fasting?

Allison Melody: I love intermittent fasting. I was under the wrongful impression that for my body and this is because a long time ago, maybe four or five years ago, a holistic health practitioner, she was a nutritionist, told me that I needed to eat every few hours because I had low blood sugar. I subscribed to that myth for years, JLD. I really thought, I have to eat every few hours. So, I would always have something near me. Now, is that true for some people? Sure, 100 percent. I’m not knocking it as a concept but for me, it could not have been further from the truth. Here I am eating every few hours. Even if I’m eating healthy apples, salads, nuts, whatever, juice, I was still never feeling like I was thriving. I was still having bouts of energy up, down, up down, up down like you have with sugar or coffee. And I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I thought I was doing everything right.

Then I decided to try intermittent fasting. I had done juice cleanses before. I had lost 5 pounds on a juice cleanse in five days and the health benefits, my face, my skin, I looked young in five days. I mean the health benefits were incredible. So, I was definitely interested in fasting but I had never tried intermittent fasting. The way I started was, I already didn’t eat breakfast. I’m not a big breakfast girl so it was actually kind of easy for me to skip breakfast. But what I ended up doing was pushing my smoothie. I started out just not eating until 12:00 or 1:00 and then making sure to wrap up and not eat again until after 8:00. I was like, oh, this is easy. I can do this. Then I shortened the window. When I shortened the window, I started feeling fantastic. I had more focus throughout the day. So now if I don’t eat until 4:00, my hustling entrepreneurial self can get way more done in that span of time and for me it was a game changer.

JLD: What I think is important, Allison, and you’ve made this very clear but I wanna make it even more clear for you Fire Nation is Allison is not saying this will work for you because it works for her. She’s saying, just like I’m saying, this works for her. This is what works for me. The best thing that you can do when you’re listening is say, hey, how’re things in my life working right now. If your answer is not so good health wise, energy wise, facial complexion wise, all these different things, then you start testing some things. Then you try intermittent fasting. Maybe then you have your last meal at 8:00 PM and your first meal again at noon. And then if that works and you wanna try to shrink it and then guess what, that might not work for you then you bring it back out.

To me it’s all about your body is so unique. As similar as we are in so many ways, different people, we’re so different at the same time. What’s great for me could be horrible for Allison and vice versa, or somewhere in the middle so test, test, test. That’s one thing that I’m kind of excited about, Allison, is I know that till the day that I die I’m gonna be continuing to tweak and adjust some things and to me, I love that.

Allison Melody: Yes, exactly. I’m a biohacker. Like what else can I try?

JLD: Yes, I love that. So, what are some of the benefits of intermittent fasting? There’s that cleansing, detoxification. What are some of the real benefits that you found throughout that?

Allison Melody: There is the notion that after a certain amount of hours your body starts burning fat. I love that because who doesn’t wanna burn fat? I still have love handles. I’m like what are these doing here. If I can burn a little fat, I’m all for it.

JLD: Bye-bye muffin top.

Allison Melody: Exactly. Exactly. When I started, JLD, I lost 10 pounds right off the bat without changing anything else. I was like, oh this stuff works.

JLD: Now what do you do day to day to move your body? That’s one thing that we haven’t chatted about yet. What do you exercise wise, yoga wise? What is nonfood wise that you’re doing to really make this happen?

Allison Melody: Okay, so my two go tos, which again just like you said, find what works for you, but it took me a long time to discover what I really loved and making sure that exercising was something I wanted to do and was not a chore that I was subjecting my body to but instead was a joy to move my body. My two favorite things are running and Pilates. Now, I’m not a fast runner. I’m not a marathon runner. I’m not a sprinter, but I enjoy jogging to music or jogging to my favorite podcast. It brings a much needed break into my day. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel powerful. I like listening and absorbing information. Just like while people drive they like listening to audiobooks or podcasts. Just like when I run, I listened to the entire first season of Serial while jogging.

JLD: I actually did that. What was the book, Born to Run, which is the autobiography of the guy that created Nike. I’m telling you that was an 8 hour audiobook and I was out running and I’m like I just don’t wanna stop. Yeah, I walked plenty but I listened to the entire thing in one day. It was unbelievable.

Allison Melody: Oh my gosh. Now I have to listen to that. That sounds so great.

JLD: If nothing better to me was to be outside and then to just be listening to this book about running and the birth of Nike. It’s such an entrepreneurial story. It was so cool. So, I recommend that to anybody listening, Fire Nation. It’s awesome.

Speaking of biohacking, there’s definitely been something that’s been coming up because I’ve been studying a lot of this myself. I’m actually about to do a decade in a day which is gonna be a really great one day thing where I’m gonna end up going through all these different tests and different things. One of those is gonna be involving the Wim Hof breathing method. I’ve been seeing that, and I’ve been really focusing more myself on breathing and really learning how to belly breathe and to deep breathe and not be a shallow chest breather. Talk a little bit about the Wim Hof method like what you’ve discovered and how you use it.

Allison Melody: Oh my gosh. This is one of my new ones that I’ve become recently obsessed with. This is what I do and maybe a lot of you can relate. When I discover something new whether it’s something in entrepreneurial space or something in the health space, I become obsessed with it for a little while and then it kind of tankers off when I see how I’m gonna incorporate into my life.

The breathing is part one and then the cold therapy is part two. If people don’t know about cold therapy, there are many ways that you can do this whether it’s in an ice bath in your home or whether it is through cryotherapy which is something that you can do at a practitioner’s place probably somewhere in your town. It’s gonna bring your body temperature so severely down that your body has to heal itself. It send out all these healing endorphins and your body is gonna completely transform in that small amount of time. The Wim Hof method is all about exposing yourself to that cold but you’re also gonna do this breathing exercise that really heightens your oxygen levels, and it gets you into this place of meditation that I’ve never felt before.

The point of all this is you’re gonna get clarity of mind, more energy. It’s gonna reduce your stress levels. It’s gonna boost your immunity. They will do this with a lot of cancer patients in alternative healing methods because it is something that can get your body to heal itself very quickly when practiced regularly. Now of course, like everything, this is something to try. The first time I tried to put myself in an ice bath, I almost thought I was going to die. I was like this is not for me, and he has trips where you go to the coldest places in the US.

JLD: Right. He’s crazy.

Allison Melody: Yeah. I’m not ready for that. I will tell you. I like the at home version that I can do. Like everything else, please consult a physician. Do not take my advice on this but as an explorer in holistic health, I love this stuff and the breathing.

So, there are a few different types of breathing exercises that have truly gotten me to a state of mental clarity I have never been to before. Wim Hof teaches this. You can watch the videos online of how to do it. There’s a breathwork circle here in LA where they do this breathing work that takes me to another place. Sometimes you’re having a memory or you’re crying and sometimes you’re just feeling the most peace you’ve ever felt. But these are super healing because when we go into our psyche, into those buried emotions that we’ve pushed down and we allow them to come to the surface, we are truly healing ourselves mind, body, and spirit. That’s, I think, part of Wim Hof. It’s also part of kundalini yoga.

Breath of fire is something that has completely changed my world, rocked me to the core, where it also can get me into a state of peace like I’ve never felt before. So, if you’re one of those people that say, I can’t meditate. I can’t quiet my mind. I get you. Oh my God. I’ve been there, 100 percent. But if you look into Wim Hof, if you look into kundalini, you might just be able to get there and you’ll be in this incredible state where you’ll have so much clarity whether you need clarity on your business or you need clarity on a relationship. It’s like tapping into your own psychic ability where you can create the path that is best for you by doing these breathing techniques.

JLD: Kind of maybe quickly go through, not through the whole technique, but what does it look like doing the Wim Hof breathing technique, the Breath of Fire?

Allison Melody: Okay. You sit down in meditation. I cross my legs, but I open my hands. You want to make sure that you expand your lungs. You don’t wanna feel constriction. You wanna do this alone. Don’t let anyone be home. Maybe put the dog somewhere where they’re not gonna bark. I know dogs go crazy when the mailman comes over and all that stuff because that’ll kind of take you out of it. You wanna do it after waking up. You don’t wanna do it on a full stomach. You wanna do this, kundalini yoga, anything like that on an empty stomach before you eat all that good stuff.

You’re gonna do inhaling through the nose or the mouth and you’re gonna exhale through the mouth. These are gonna be short and powerful. I can try to do it real quick on here but I’m gonna be like [breathing]. Can you —

JLD: Yeah. I can hear it.

Allison Melody: Kind of get it? Okay. You’re gonna do this as many times as you can. Sometimes people will set a timer. In class we do it for three minutes straight. Some people you wanna do it for 30 breaths just to start to see how far you can go. You’re gonna start feeling lightheaded. That’s usually –

JLD: A little tingly in the fingers sometimes.

Allison Melody: How I feel. Yes. You know what I’m talking about, right?

JLD: Oh. I’ve done it. I’ve done it.

Allison Melody: Okay. Yeah. Feel free to weigh in if your experience is different. Yeah, you’re gonna start feeling tingly. You’re gonna start feeling calm. Then what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna hold your breath as long as you can and then you’re gonna let it out as long as you can. Okay? You’re gonna do it for, when you’re starting out, try 30 breaths. You can work your way up to say five minutes or more. It really depends on where you are in your practice. There are some times when I can go longer and sometimes I can’t even get through 30. It depends on where I am. Where’s my emotional state. What am I feeling that day? How has my week been? What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna slow down and then you’re gonna recover. When you feel like you’ve gone far enough, you’re gonna hold your breath until you absolutely need to let go and then you’re gonna let it go. Now you are in recovery. Okay? Yes. Yes.

JLD: Fire breath.

Allison Melody: Yes. Fire Nation needs to do fire breathing.

JLD: I will say, I’ve had a lot of luck. Just go to Google. Type Wim Hof. That’s W-I-M H-O-F and then just breathing. There’s actually a really cool one. I don’t know if you’ve watched it yet, Allison, but with Lewis Howes at Lewis’ place. He’s lying down on the couch. It has 1.6 million views with Wim Hof right there over Lewis basically guiding him through that method. It was a pretty cool video.

Allison Melody: Okay. Don’t listen to me. Watch that video because that is probably much better.

JLD: It is from Wim Hof after all. Fire Nation value bombs have been dropped. More coming up when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

Allison, we’re back and I’m gonna throw a little bit of a curveball because this actually isn’t something that we’ve talked about previously but what are your thoughts on infrared saunas? Do you have any experience with that?

Allison Melody: I’m obsessed. I own my own infrared sauna that I bought off Amazon. They’re not even that expensive, a couple hundred bucks. According to Dr. Steven Cabral who are both friends with and we mentioned earlier, 19 minutes a day in an infrared sauna can actually reduce the risk of heart attacks by over 60% and most causes of death like chronic debilitating disease by 40%. I don’t know of any drug that can do that.

JLD: No drug can do that. No drug can do that. I’m actually really glad you are on board with this because I will say I looked at Dr. Cabral one day. We were just hanging out. I think I was actually at my lake house in Maine. He came to visit and I go, Dr. Cabral, what’s one thing, one thing, there’s a million things I could do, but what’s one thing you think I could implement into my daily routine that’s not obnoxious, that doesn’t make me buy an $800,000 freezing plunge pool or something, but something that’s reasonable that I can do every single day that’s going to massively impact my life? He didn’t even blink or skip a beat. He looks at me and he goes, buy an infrared sauna. I was like seriously? He was like yeah.

He gave me the link. Mine was actually a little more expensive than yours. He recommended a Therasage. I think it was $750.00, $800.00 bucks and it’s not big by the way. It’s not like this huge sauna you’re probably picturing Fire Nation. It literally packages down to like a mini little suitcase. But then when you expand it out, you sit in the middle of it, you zip it up to your neck, and you turn it on and then boom. I do that now, Allison, 30 minutes every single day. I’ve probably have averaged over the past four or five months 5.5 days a week. I almost never miss my 30 minute at 150 sitting in that infrared sauna. I love it.

Allison Melody: I am so impressed by you because I only use mine three times a week, and I think that’s pretty darn good.

JLD: It is really good but I’m just that kind of person Allison. For me, it’s either all or nothing. Either it has to be part of morning routine, or it’s dead to me. It’s like one of those things. I have to make it every single day and it’s like seven days a week when I’m in Puerto Rico. The only days that I’m kind of [inaudible] [00:31:38] traveling for conferences and stuff like that and I obviously don’t have it with me. But it’s something that I do every single day that I’m here in Puerto Rick.

You sit and you just sweat for 30 minutes. I don’t know how people feel about sweating. I’ve always loved it because I’ve always kind of assimilated it with sports, and activity, and just healthiness and all this stuff. But I can literally just feel my pores opening up and just emptying out the heavy metals and the toxins and just releasing all that stuff. And after the shower, after my infrared sauna, it’s just like I’ve never felt more fresh. That’s the freshest I’ve ever felt.

Allison Melody: Okay. I have a question for you.

JLD: Go for it.

Allison Melody: Do you do it after you do a run up Submarine Hill?

JLD: Fire Nation knows Submarine Hill. I’ve talked about it enough, and the answer is I do. I do. I’ve done that many, many times. Typically though, my morning routine now is I wake up civil twilight, which is about 15 minutes before the sunrise where the sun is still 6 degrees below the horizon. I start my yoga practice.

I don’t think I’ve even told you this yet, but I’ve actually started doing daily yoga now. It’s new for me. I’m on day 40 of daily yoga right now. I get up. I do Yoga with Adrienne. It’s an awesome free series on YouTube. I highly recommend it. It’s amazing, Yoga with Adrienne. And I just do it and it’s a daily practice. I do yoga and the sun comes up over the Caribbean. It hits me in the face. I’m doing yoga. Then after yoga, I either, 1.) Do 20 minutes on my rowing machine, or 2.) I have my workout with Jeff McMahon my virtual trainer and then after that is when I sit down in my Therasage in my gym down there that you’ve seen down by my pool and I do my 30 minutes of infrared sauna. That’s my morning routine. In the evenings now, I still sometimes do go for runs, up Submarine Hill, probably like three days a week I’m averaging right now and I will say that when I get back from those runs and if I haven’t done a morning infrared, I definitely do one then.

Allison Melody: Beautiful. I love this and the reason I asked is because I had someone on the podcast and I showed them the infrared sauna. We were talking about fat burning and they said one of the best ways to burn fat is to exercise to sweat, whether it’s running or something else, and then sit in that sauna for 30 minutes. That’s gonna detox out of your tissues even more than you could have detoxed if you did it without sweating prior. I think that was really interesting. I do try to incorporate them both at once, when I can, but I don’t always. Just like you. It’s what can you fit into your day that particular day. But one thing we haven’t talked about is detoxing and an infrared sauna is a huge addition to any type of detox. We are exposed to toxins on a daily basis that we can’t control even if we are health hackers like it sounds like you are and that I am as well.

JLD: I’m getting there.

Allison Melody: Yeah. You’re working on it and you think you’re doing your best but we’re still exposed to toxins whether it’s in our shampoo or lotion or environmental that we can’t control from outdoors, from in the paints, from off-gassing, from things that we purchase in our home, from the food that we purchase that we thought was healthy that still has something in it. We’ve got to continually detox. Now, if you read about detoxing on the internet, they’re all these articles that say, oh well the body naturally detoxes and so all the detox stuff is a myth. Let me call BS on that right now because the truth is that we are designed to detox and that’s why our skin is the largest organ of detoxification and why sweating it out really helps. But we are bombarded with more toxic materials than we have ever seen in the history of the world. We have to assist –

JLD: Have to.

Allison Melody: Our body, yes, in the detoxification process. Infrared sauna is a great way to do that.

JLD: See, this is why I love biohacking because you can just learn so much more every single conversation you have. Now, I’m gonna be so excited when I work up a little sweat with Jeff in the morning or after my rowing machine and I’m like yes, now I’m sitting in that sauna and I’m gonna be like yes, I’ve got a little bit of a sweat going on now. It’s gonna even help out more now with my next 30 minutes. It’s just these little things that you stack on top of each other and they might not seem like a lot at first but then that compound effect happens Fire Nation. It just happens.

Now, let’s kind of move a little bit into a non-workout kind of area which I think has been a huge benefit for me. I saw that you had it down here for your master class so I really wanna talk about it. Because I think it’s so important for entrepreneurs and that is blue light blocking. Talk to us about that.

Allison Melody: Okay. Studies basically tell us that 60% of people, which is most of us, spend over six hours a day in front of a digital device whether it’s –

JLD: That’s me.

Allison Melody: Yeah. I do it too. I’m totally guilty. Right now I’ve got two computers and a cellphone sitting right in front of my face. I’m so guilty of this and that’s why I need to be more aware of this. Most of us are. Oh, and my iPod too. I’ve got four digital devices in front of me. Again, this is stuff we’ve never seen before so we’ve gotta deal with it. This lighting is something that can really affect our health and it makes it really hard for a lot of people to fall asleep. Between that and having all of these internet connected devices, and your neighbor’s wireless internet, it’s all affecting us. What we wanna do is minimize our exposure to some of things. So like EMFs and things like that. I’m going off on two things, blue lights and EMFs but I feel like they’re so related.

A couple of things that you can do to avoid EMFs and to avoid being bombarded by blue light all day is that when you sit in front of your computer, there are glasses. They have a yellow tint and they block the blue light. Again, if I didn’t get into what blue light can do, it actually can cause macular degeneration over a long period of time. It causes a lot of people headaches. It causes a lot of people chronic fatigue. You’re wondering why, I just worked really hard for five hours and I’m exhausted but I have five more hour of work to do. It could be solely because you’re sitting in front of the computer and your retinas are exhausted by all of this blue light coming in from all of these devices. The sun is blue light as well. I’m not anti-sun. I’m all about getting that vitamin D but at the same time, this is actually causing people to have insomnia because if you don’t power down those devices and stop seeing that blue light at least two hours before you go to bed, many people literally cannot sleep because of this.

Most cellphones, I believe, have it where you can set a time. You can say at 9:00 PM, at 7:00 PM, whatever, I do it at sunset. I try to stay close to sunset where it turns off the light. I don’t know the light is called. I should have looked it up, but it creates a light that is not harmful. It blocks the blue light so that before you go to bed, a lot of us are staring at our phones, which we shouldn’t be, but we are. What you can do is block that blue light so that it’s not exposing you to that right before bed and preventing you from sleeping and having that deep restful sleep.

JLD: I’m telling you right now, I’m wearing my Swanwick Blue Blocker glasses as we speak. This has been something that I wished I picked up years ago. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I only picked it up really about a month ago. But I’ll tell you, wearing these blue blocker glasses, I look a little dorky, not too dorky, just a little dorky, but the eye strain has gone way down. Even though it’s 10:00 AM or 1:00 PM and I’m wearing these things, I just notice that I’m just not having that eye fatigue.

I used rub my eyes a lot, and sit back, and just close my eyes and roll my eyeballs around a little bit to try to get them some, what I thought, was needed recovery. But wearing these blue blockers it takes that strain away. I’ll tell you, it’s weird how quickly I adjusted to them because now when I’m not wearing them, I’m almost squinting. I’m like how did I ever do this for hours and hours at a time. I still do it for short periods of time. I go back and forth, but like you said, come 6:00 PM, 7:00 PM the sun’s going down here in Puerto Rico, I’m going blue blockers. If I’m watching TV, I got blue blocker glasses on.

I’m literally trying right now two things actually. 1.) I’m gonna try that terrace thing of eating out on the kitchen terrace with Kate, not in front of the TV and 2.) I really wanna start putting my phone in airplane mode and just done for the day when the sun goes down. I just want that to happen. Because I don’t do anything valuable or productive on my phone after 7:00 anyways so why do I have it? I just find myself just going on Instagram. Nothing wrong with that but I don’t need to do that after 7:00. I can do that during the day when I’m actually doing business stuff. So, just things like this really stack up.

And one thing I wanted to mention to you, Allison, because you’ve already given me so much value on this call today, is you mentioned that you have your cellphone on your desk and I do as well. I actually have it right to my right. It’s on a little stand and I was listening to do a podcast about two months ago and they said that there’s just been all these studies that have been done where if your phone is within visual range of you, even if you don’t actually look at it, 5 to 10 percent of your conscious and subconscious is being tugged towards that phone. Like oh, should I check because I have it on silent. Did somebody maybe call? Do I maybe have a text? I can just reach over and touch it. What time is it? Let me touch my phone. Let me touch my phone. Let me touch my phone. And it just tugs on your and it really makes it hard to focus at the highest level. Of course you can focus but we’re trying to maximize what we’re doing so they said the simple act of taking your phone and just putting it 10 feet behind you on a table behind you just so it’s out of sight, out of mind. Don’t put it in another room. You don’t have to. Just put it behind you so it’s not right there on your desk basically being like, look at me, look at me. Somebody might be trying to contact you. That can be an absolute game changer.

I’m telling you Allison, it’s too early for me to tell to be honest but I’ve started taking my phone, I put it on my table behind me now and I found myself reaching for where it used to be on the stand. And I’m like, why did I just do that? The phone’s not even there and that made me realize, I’ve this habit of whenever I start thinking hard, my mind wants to quit thinking hard so it looks for that easiest excuse. What’s an easy excuse to stop thinking hard? Let’s open our phone real quick. Let’s see what’s going on in there. And it just happens. Get that cellphone off your desk. That’s my challenge to you, Allison. I’m gonna take up that challenge as well. Again, I’ve been doing it just for a little bit now. I really can’t wait to be able to proclaim that it really is helping me because I can’t tell yet, but I hope it does.

Allison Melody: I have to add one thing that’s so fascinating. Have you ever done muscle testing? It’s another way to test food allergies where they hold the food up to your body and see how your body reacts and see if your muscles can stand, then your fine and if your muscles go weak then the food is near you, then you are allergic or your body does not like that food.

JLD: No. I’ve never even heard of this.

Allison Melody: Have you ever tried this.

JLD: No.

Allison Melody: Oh my God. Well try it. I’m sure Dr. Cabral can tell us more about this but it’s a fascinating phenomenon where you can take things out of the fridge, hold them to your body, and see how your muscles react. And when you hold a cellphone or any digital device, your body reacts just as if it was a food that it was absolutely allergic to so another reason to get those cell phones away from your person, away from your body as much as possible. Certainly, do not sleep with them in the same room as you are sleeping. Because just like you just said, that is such a distraction and it can keep you up all night just the fact that it’s in the room plus the EMFs. We really don’t know the detrimental effects yet. What I have study, and learned, and heard, is that these are cancer causing devices and as much as I need them in my life, as much as I can turn them off I will.

JLD: Yeah, Fire Nation and we haven’t even been able to get into EMFs. That’s a whole other topic but right now as I’m speaking to Allison, I’m at my standing desk and what am I standing on, a grounding mat. I’m on a grounding mat and under my pillow I have a grounding pad as well. These are just little things that just ground you, that really detract from the EMFs that are there. They’re all around us. This is the thing, people that aren’t into this stuff, Allison, are just like, oh my God, this is so overwhelming. There’re so many things to worry about and yes, it is. But you just have to look at it like a game. Like Allison is saying and I’m saying, just try one thing at a time. See what works. See what doesn’t work. If it really makes you feel better, you’re probably gonna wanna keep doing it, if it doesn’t then just forget about it because you can’t do everything.

One of the things I really do wanna move into as we get towards the end of our chat here is meditation, that whole attitude about gratitude, forgiveness, journaling, manifestation. Can you move into that a little bit and talk about how you’re implementing that into your life?

Allison Melody: Yes. One of the things I’ve learned on this journey is first; I discovered the food and the physical. And I was like, alright, I’ve got to do my diet and exercise. Once I had kind of conquered that, which I’m still conquering it all, but once I had discovered –

JLD: It never ends, in a good way.

Allison Melody: Right yeah. But I was like, there’s still something missing and for me I realized that I hadn’t dealt with the grief of losing my parents. So, here I am, eating the best food I can eat, doing yoga, doing cleanses, all this stuff, but I’m still not 100 percent at my best, thriving and happy. I realized that I hadn’t truly grieved. I didn’t know what that looked like. No one teaches you in school that there are seven steps of grief or how to deal with that. I just pushed it down. I didn’t know any better. I really had to uncover that.

The thing that I discovered that was most impactful for me was that forgiveness opens the door to freedom. Forgiveness can be, you may have to forgive a parent, or you may have to forgive a friend, or in my case, I had to forgive the pharmaceutical companies that I blamed for murdering my parents. Whatever we’ve conceived of in our minds that is only true to us. It isn’t truly reality but it’s the truth that we have concocted based on our experiences. We have to let go out of that and I had to do a lot of forgiveness work not only on others but also on myself. I had to forgive myself for the judgment that I made at the time.

One of my big ones that I judged the world and I judged that I was alone because my parents left me and so I had to do everything on my own. I created this judgment around the world, which had some good things. It made me a hustler but also had some bad things. It got me to the point where I wasn’t even fun to be around because I was so concerned with how I was going to make in the world because I had been left and I was on my own and no one could help me. I made all of these decisions that weren’t reality. I had to go back in time and forgive myself for the judgments I made at the time that I made them. I made them because I was in fear. I was in terror. I was a little girl who lost mommy and daddy and I didn’t work on that. I pushed it all down.

For me, I have a lot of practices that have worked like writing things down. If I’m currently in my present day and I’m driving and someone cuts me off and I’m like how dare you, you piece of… right?

JLD: Totally.

Allison Melody: Am I really mad at that person? I’m mad at myself. There’s something unresolved that I need to work on. Now, I’m not saying that that guy was not an A-hole for cutting me off or whatever, sure, but what am I really upset about? Because if I’m in my peace and I’m in my loving state, I’m gonna say, you know what, I hope you get to where you’re going with grace and ease. That reflects back to me, I’m in a good place. But if I’m angry as heck and I’m screaming at that guy, I know there’s something unresolved within myself. I’m all about forgiveness because forgiveness is freedom.

Once I started implementing these practices into my life of forgiveness, things started to change. I started to show up better in my life with people that I loved. I was able to be there for them in a way I wasn’t able to before. I was able to show up for myself and love and respect myself in a way that hadn’t been able to for a long time since I had been through my trauma. Trauma is tragic but it’s also opportunity to heal ourselves and to become better versions of ourselves so that we can heal ourselves and heal others. I’m all about self-forgiveness and meditation. The ways to get there are through breath and music for me.

JLD: Totally and this is actually so powerful because, Fire Nation, meditation, gratitude, forgiveness, journaling, manifestation, they play such a huge role in my life. Obviously, both the freedom and mastery journal that I’ve created those have been great business successes but they’re also great personal successes because I use these tools to help me every single day. There’s a reason why both of those journals start with I am grateful for colon because I know that when I start my day with something that I’m grateful for, it changes the entire energy and vibe of the entire day that’s in front of me.

What I was just recently thinking, Allison, I’m going to stop doing a daily show with Entrepreneurs on Fire. That was a really tough decision on my part but I said what can I bring to the world that is something daily, that is of value. I just love the fact that I was putting something out in the world daily that was of great value for 2000 days in a row. It was part of my identity, but I knew it was time to move away from that for an interview based show and into a more audio master class like this. We’re moving onto minute 51 right now. You and I could have never had this conversation on the old format because I had my interviews stacked up, 40, 40, 40, 40 and I’m doing 15 to 20 minute interviews and we’re getting great stories. But they weren’t getting out and it’s done. This is a different interview. This is gonna be an interview that I know certain listeners are going to listen to six, seven, eight times because it’s gonna be just that impactful for them. It’s gonna be that audio master class.

I knew it was time to shift for that reason to make some incredibly impactful episodes, but I still wanted to give that daily value to the world that I really built my brand on. That’s why I launched the daily podcast, The Daily Refresh. When I was coming up for the concept for this, I was like what are the three things that I do every single day that really move the needle that I can bring into a podcast. There’re a lot of things I do but what are three things I do that really move the needle that I can bring into a three minute podcast. I came up with, I read quotes. I love quotes. They inspire me. They make me think and so the Daily Refresh starts with a quote to inspire the minds. What’s something else I do, I start my day with gratitude because gratitude sets that mode, that mindset like I shared. That’s No. 2 with The Daily Refresh. I share something unique to be grateful for like the other day, Allison, was jokes, a really funny joke. I actually told this job on The Daily Refresh and it was just cracking me up and everybody that listened to it was like, that was so funny. Tell more jokes. I was just like no that was just for that episode. This is not a show about jokes.

The last thing I do is I do guided breathing. I do the Sama Vritti, equal breathing practice of five cycles of four in, four out. It’s not meant to be this perfect breathing practice. It’s meant to just get people quickly in the morning to be intentional and thinking about their breathing and doing belly breathing, not just chest shallow breathing and really getting the good oxygen into the world. It’s just a quote, gratitude, and guided breathing, boom in three minutes, and it’s a podcast. It’s part of your Amazon flash briefings. I have to whisper that or Alexa will start talking to me right now. But as part of that as well, I wanted to just make it available to the world because those three things are huge.

Allison, that being said, we are coming up on an hour, which is crazy, of us chatting right now. It’s been an amazing hour. Why don’t you just take minute? There’s no rush at all. Take your time. Maybe, kind of button this chat up with a few final takeaways you wanna make sure that we have and then give us a parting piece of guidance. Then we’ll say goodbye.

Allison Melody: Absolutely. I would love to. We could talk forever. This has been such a great conversation. I love your other show too. I think the only thing that we didn’t get to, and I love the gratitude piece because that is the piece that I go to after the forgiveness work so that’s perfect. The next step I had to do was find my financial flow. A lot of times what we have to do is we can be hustling and not making money and not understanding why because we know that we have a message to share and make an impact on the world with. Sometimes we have to let go of these childhood misbeliefs around money and around what our parents told us.

What I realized for myself was that my self-worth was my net worth. We have to realize that our financial situation is a direct reflection of how you feel about yourself. Right? If we’re sitting here feeling like we can make a difference but we don’t deserve money to make that difference then we will stay in poverty. So, I’m all about money mentality, and affirmations, and all of that stuff. But an affirmation doesn’t work if you don’t do the inner work. If you don’t go back to that childhood moment when your dad said, money don’t grow on trees, or whatever memory it was that created that misbelief in your world. I’m all about figuring it out, healing it in the past so that it heals in the present so that we can accept all of the abundance that we deserve to truly serve the world and make ourselves known in whatever mission it is that we want to accomplish in this life.

JLDS: So if we wanted to get more greatness from you and we talked about the Food Heals podcast, what are some other ways that we can connect with you and any goodies you have for Fire Nation? Then we’ll say goodbye

Allison Melody: Of course you now I made something for Fire Nation. It is Health Hacks for Busy Entrepreneurs and it’s really about how to transform your health and business in under 30 minutes a day. You can get that www.foodhealsnation.com/fire. We gonna talk about a lot of what JLD and I have talked about today but we’ll get more in depth into some of the things we didn’t get to. I’ll teach you how to burn 100s of calories in just minutes a day, a motivation method that increases productivity by 80%. I’ve got a healing cocktail that boosts your immune system and one thing you can do every day to reduce your risk of heart attack by 60%. Actually, we talked about it. So, the quiz is, do you know what it is?

JLD: It rhymes with demfared bonna.

Allison Melody: Yep. You got it. So you can go to www.foodhealsnation.com, click on health hacks or www.foodhealsnation.com/fire.

JLD: Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you’ve been hanging out with AM and JLD today so keep up the heat and head over the eofire.com type Allison in the search bar. Her show notes page will pop up with everything that we’ve been talking about today. These are the best show notes in the biz, timestamps, links galore, and of course for your health hacks for busy entrepreneurs, and we all know that you’re an entrepreneur, and we all know that you’re busy, visit foodhealsnation.com/fire. Allison, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flip side.

Allison Melody: Thank you so much.