[Transcript] – Can Exercise Cause Depression?

Affiliate Disclosure

Transcripts

Podcast from:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2015/07/can-exercise-cause-depression/

[00:00] Introduction/NatureCBD

[02:37] About Wesley Chapman

[06:17] Wesley's Childhood

[11:46] Wesley's Rehab Path

[19:10] Importance of the Colon

[26:50] Exercise & Depression

[32:04] Anti-depressants

[35:15] How People View Fitness Today

[47:23] Benefit of Action

[58:25] About Being Honesty

[1:03:00] On A Human Project

[1:07:54] End of the Podcast

Ben:  Hey, folks.  This podcast is brought to you by Nature CBD which you can check out over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/cbd.  This is hybrid, nano-engineered cannabis extract.  Specifically the cannabidiol, and it's the stuff that's 100% legal in all fifty states in the USA.  It's the non-psychoactive form of marijuana that helps with things like peace and calm and focus and sleep.  It's also blended with ashwagandha, the Indian herb that has an intensibility to be able to relieve stress and to protect your brain cells against the deleterious effects of our modern lifestyle.  It's also got lemon balm in it.  Lemon balm provides your body with a calming effect.  It's used for things like nervous agitation, sleeping problems, gastrointestinal complaints, menstrual cramps, you name it.  That last thing that this stuff has is curcumin.  Curcumin is the one of the most potent anti-inflammatories known to man, and they’re wrapped this all up in one capsule.  So it's cannabidiol, ashwagandha, lemon balm and curcumin.  It's called NatureCBD, and you can get it at bengreenfieldfitness.com/cbd.  Check it out, and enjoy this episode on exercise and depression with Wesley Chapman.

In this episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast:

“The misconception we have about suicide is that they think that it is somebody giving up, and the reality of suicide is it's an escape.  It's an escape of a reality that you're trapped in.  So if you're in a bad situation, if you're in pain, you're going to do whatever you can to get out of pain.” “When you're depressed, you're going through a state of feeling like you don't want to do anything.  Exercise is a logical combatant for that because it forces you to get up and do something.  In that forcing of you to go up and do something, usually you're doing it outside, around somebody or something else which creates seratonin, which creates dopamine, which creates adrenaline.  So it's a natural process.”  “Just google “Gym Selfie” and you'll find out about forty pages full of articles that talk about the correlation between a gym selfie and narcissistic behavior.”

Ben:  Hey folks, Ben Greenfield here, and my guest today is Wesley Chapman who I actually first met over at the 431 Project on a Spartan CEO, Joe De Sena's farm, back during the Spartan World Championships, and then ran into Wes again on this Spartan cruise.  He actually has an incredible story.  Wes was abandoned at one year old by his father and then at six and a half by his mom.  He tried to commit suicide 12 times before his 16th birthday.  He was on 25 meds a day for about a decade.  His liver failed at age 16 and he was given a 20% chance to live, and now for the past nineteen years, he's been studying health, the brain, alternative methods to field treatments for depression and today, we're going to actually talk a little bit about the kind of shocking link between exercise and depression, along with Wesley's amazing story.

So Wesley, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Wesley:  Hey thanks, Ben. I appreciate it.  It's been fun.  Every time we're hanging out, we're always doing something crazy, so it's good.

Ben:  I know, it's kind of weird.  We must be adrenaline seekers.  You know the first time I met you, not to start this podcast of on too depressing of a note, but first time I met you, you told me that you tried to commit suicide twelve times before your sixteenth birthday.  Why, what happened?

Wesley:  You know, it's a big question, and obviously I think when we first met, we were both keynote speaking at an event.  Just so I know, I don't just walk up to people and rant to them and say, “hi, my name's Wes.  I tried to commit suicide twelve times.”  We were in conversation, but the reality of where I was between the ages of really 0 and 26, but the highlight of years is the year between 16.  There's a ton of dysfunction.  There was abandonment issues, there was self-esteem issues, and there was the drug themselves.  As you mentioned, I was on 25 different medications every single day.  I was labelled with everything you could imagine from post-traumatic stress to bipolar to ADD to anxiety.  I mean, I had all the pretty little labels, and with those pretty little labels came a lot of medications.  I really just didn't feel like myself, and I think this misconception we have about suicide is that they think that is somebody giving up, and the reality of suicide is it's an escape.  It's an escape of a reality that you're trapped in.  So if you're in a bad situation, if you're in pain, you're going to do whatever you can to get out of pain.  Like if you do some adrenaline seeking thing, and you tear a ligament or you do something, you're going to put a brace on it.  You're going to do whatever you can to escape the pain.

And mentally, people are in pain, and 80 percent of the American population at my time, now I think it's like 72 percent, believed in God, and people here talked about there's Heaven and Heaven is this amazing place, and Heaven is this glorious next chapter of your existence.  And so if you're stuck in this horrible life, you're stuck in this horrible world, then why wouldn't you want to get out, and I think too many people don't understand that about depression.  And so thus, the cure for depression and people who are suicidal isn't to tell them that suicide is wrong, and they shouldn't feel that way.  It's to give them an alternative, it's to give them an escape.

Ben:  So, when you were diagnosed with the ADD and all these issues when you were a kid, what was going on?  What was your household and your upbringing like that that you would have been diagnosed with all of this stuff? You're just like a troubled kid at school, or was it going on with your upbringing at home?

Wesley:  Yeah, I was a sport-ish border thing.  So first and foremost, my father left when I was one, my biological father, and then my mother remarried very, very quickly, and she married a very dark individual, and Ben when I say quickly, we're talking within a couple of months.  I don't know if she got legally married, but she’s living off this dude, and he was incredibly abusive, sexually abusive, physically abusive, and emotionally abusive.  I was tied up to dog houses, I was tied up to chain fences, and I was a play-toy for his amusement.  The type of sexual abuse that I went through wasn't just I don't know if this is politically correct to say, but it was a stereotypical, just being molested.  It was “tortured, played with and used as a prop” for punching his brothers and things like that.

As I developed, I had a younger brother who's exactly ten months younger than me, and he's my full brother.  He is mentally handicapped which is a surprise as why I'm not with the drugs and the different things that my parents were doing in their lives, and there's all kinds of stuff that happened before I was even born with different stories.  But there was just a lot of chaos in my life, and what was really unique about me and what really started my journey through the system was my first documented suicide attempt was when I was four and a half years old, and that's really weird.  That's really odd, and psychiatrists and psychologists weren't just like, “holy cow, what's going on here?  Why is a four and a half year old suicidal?  How does a four and a half year old even have the concept of life, let alone death?”

Ben:  What did you try to do when you were four and a half years old?

Wesley:  I ran out in front of cars.  I don't remember this.  This is all documented in my custody report, but I ran out in front of cars screaming I want to die, I want to die, and someone kill me.  So it was just very painful.  At the age of five, I was pleading with neighbors to take me, and people didn't understand it.  They thought it was some weird thing, then of course I threw temper tantrums, and that lead to when I was six and a half years old.  My mother left me at a hospital, and she never came back.  And so that started a whole journey of where do I belong, who am I, where am I going to go?

I lived in hospitals for years, and I did the math last year, and I'm a 2.1 million dollar experiment in brain, in neural stuff.  I had all kinds of things attached to my body, and they studied my sleep behavior, they studied my patterns, they studied my handwriting.  All the basic stuff, and the reason it was 2.1 million was the time.  I spent seventeen years under the microscope in the psychology world and being told at seven and a half years old, I was told I would never succeed.  I would never become anything.  The diagnosis by psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, everybody was.  Basically put me in a boy's home.  They were going to put me in a boy's home of the extended psychological assessment ‘til I was twenty one years old.  At twenty one years old, I could be released into society, and their only hope was that I would be stable enough, that I wouldn't do something horrific like murder or something like that.

So that was my prognosis at seven and a half, and luckily for me, there was a woman who came into my life who did believe in that.  She believed in me as a human being.  She believed that I could become something, and obviously none of those doctors were right.  It doesn't mean that I haven't had my trials and my difficult times to get over, but they weren't right in the fact that I wasn't worth anything to society and that I was too damaged.  So that was my upbringing, and that was kind of, this is what you're going to be, this is what you're going to get.  In a lot of kids, it's like oh, you can be Spiderman or a firefighter.  For me it was don't kill someone.

Ben:  So when you say a woman came in your life, you mean a relationship or was this like a connection?

Wesley:  No, she became my mother.  She was my mother's mother, so she's my grandmother on my mother's side, and she lost contact with me for about two years.  There's a whole fun story where actually, the Mormon missionaries were volunteering in our hospital, and they would come up to our wing, and I was in the inpatient wing for children, and they come up there, and they'd come up there and visit the kids.  They visited me and found out some things about me, and they did some genealogy and reconnected me with my grandmother, and then she was able to start the battle and attempt to get temporary custody which lasted until I was eighteen.  I was never adopted or anything, but she finally got temporary custody granted to her when I was nine, nine and a half years old.  That started kind of the rehab journey for me.

Ben:  Wow, so in terms of you studying depression, obviously something that you struggled with and something that you have a pretty intimate connection with.  What lead you down that road?  Did you start looking into alternatives to the meds that you were on?  Did you start looking into health practitioners who could help you out?  What happened as far as the search for alternatives to treat depression?

Wesley:  Yeah, so I believe all great discoveries are found when human being’s back are up against the wall, right?  That's when we really, truly come to the strongest point of who we are and what we will become is really an impression.  For me it was that I was in this circumstance where I've been given all these labels.  Yes, now I had somebody who loved me and cared about me, but I still have a lot of things to get through and I had a lot of anger and a lot of hate and all these different things.  And then drug, their whole intention is to numbify you, to make you feel calm.  It's to stop the chemical reactions that are happening on hyper-drive in your brain, and so at sixteen years old after taking 25 medications every single day of my life for ten years, my liver failed and my back was up against the wall.

Ben:  Were they all depression medications?

Wesley:  Depression and anxiety, post-traumatic stress and then about half of them were drugs to offset the side effects from drugs that I was on.

Ben:  It's crazy that a lot of people don't realize that this stuff gets metabolized by the liver, and they assume it's like a free pass with the liver.  I was actually just talking with somebody today about not a depression drug, but Modafinil or Adderal, that a ton of CEOs and soccer moms, all sorts of folks are using for cognitive performance and that stuff goes straight to the liver as does a lot of things that people are using for either energy or depression.  It's like you have one liver, which you know obviously.

Wesley:  Yeah, you have one liver, and I mean it's funny that we talk about that as we look at alcohol like, it's so bad for your liver.  The body doesn't like, “oh, this is alcohol.  Let's pass this through the liver.”  As you know, the body does everything with everything the same way, and what we put through it is going to depend on how well that system works.

Ben:  Yeah, I do actually when I'm using some kind of a capsule or a tablet or anything that can be dissolved sublingually or in the mucus membrane of the lower right lip.  I go straight to that even for things like THC or whatever, just because you can at least bypass the liver and go straight into the bloodstream when you dissolve in that area in your mouth.  But still, I mean 25 different meds?  Dude, I can't imagine the stress on your liver.

Wesley:  Yeah, and as you know the liver, the colon, and the pancreas.  I mean all of it works together in this digestive process, and so my liver failed and I was back against the wall.  It's interesting, and it's interesting how whether you want to say how God or the universe works is that certain things get placed into your life at certain times, and about three months prior to this happening, I had been exposed to colon therapy and to colonics, and it was one of those things where as a teenager you're like, “really, you're going to stick that there and do that?  No way, it's not going to happen.”

I remember laying in this hospital, and these doctors were the same doctors that have told me that I was never going to amount to anything.  I was a crazy, horrible person.  I'm just worthless, all this stuff.  Take these pills and your whole life will change.  These same doctors are now telling me “hey, guess what?  You only have 20% chance to live.”

And in that moment, I'll never forget it, I remember just thinking to myself up to this point, I have had a dad who left, a mom who was troubled.  I've had a step father who was crazy.  I've lived in all these different homes, and through all these things I experienced all these adults, all these doctors, everyone told me what I'm going to be.  Maybe it's time that I decide what I'm going to be, and in that moment, I told the doctors to shove it literally.  I said you know what, I'm tired hearing about all your guises, even the scientific data as to why I'm not going to be something in life.  Now I'm going to die because of the same things that you guys said were going to save me, so I'm out.  Chapman out, I'm out of here.  This isn't going to happen anymore, and I left the hospital and talked to my grandmother and said, and I call her mom stuff, I still do everybody just realize that.  But I talked to her and I said this is my plan.

I'm going cold turkey off all these drugs, and I'm going to figure out what is going on with my brain and my body, and I'm going to research this stuff.  That's what I'm going to do.  And she had been in the chiropractic industry and that was her profession.  She obviously knew alternative medicine well and not as well as now, as we'd know it as a family, but we had a decent background in it.  And in that moment, I studied everything about the liver, everything about the colon, everything about digestive system, how the colon is actually the second brain, and a lot of our chemicals that fuel our brain and our body are actually produced in the colon, and if our colon is lined with plaque and crap like how's it supposed to get, like you said, through the bloodstream.  The drugs are nothing more than a manipulation of chemicals in the brain, so I just started studying all this, and I was lucky.  I got into a colonic and spent three or four days going through a colon therapy and just flushing out my system and drinking an immense amount of water.  I spent three days in the field position of youth.  If anyone listening has ever had any kind of draw from any drug, legal or illegal, it's difficult.  Just imagine that times, 25.

Ben:  Especially with anti-depressants like that, that directly influence neurotransmitters.

Wesley:  Exactly, it was physically, emotionally, spiritually.  Every piece of my body was going through some type of withdrawal with some type of alter psychosomatics in that situation.  So it was painful, but when I came out of it, I had this immense clarity about my existence, about my life, about who I was, about why I had gone through the things that I had gone through, and in that moment, in that time period of my life, I decided to change everything, and I was already a pretty active person, and I was big into rollerblading.  It was big in the 80s and roller skating and all that stuff, and so I turned to that, and I would go for eight, nine, ten hours a day to a roller skating rink.  I go straight, jumping over four, five garbage cans figuring how to do tricks, rail grinds.  I remember staff at the roller skating rink just coming up to me and they're like, “how can you keep going?  We've never seen anyone do this.  You're here six days a week for eight to ten hours a day.  Do you ever stop?”

And I told them, I said. “I can't stop”, and that was the beginning of my exploration into physical activity and figuring out how to read, how to manipulate my own mind in my chemical make up to create a well-being status where I could function as a normal human being in life.

Ben:  I want to ask you actually about this link between movement and other depression or lack thereof, but there was something really interesting you hit on.  We actually haven't talked about it before on a podcast, and that's the link between the colon and the brain.  Because we talked about the gut-brain access and the connection between the vagus nerve and your central nervous system and your enteric nervous system.  The fact that the bacteria in your small intestine can help with neurotransmitter production, and we've had those kind of discussions.  The last one I think was with Alejandro Junger, the author of “Clean Gut” who we interviewed.  We went into that, but we haven't talked much about the colon.  Can you touch on the link between colon and brain function and some of the things that you learned or some of the things that you discovered as far as where people might be missing out or how people can take care of that area of their body?

Wesley:  Yeah, the colon is fascinating.  The brain is obviously the most misunderstood organ in our body.  We're still figuring out how the dang thing works, but the colon has been as well.  From Crohn's disease to irritable bowel syndrome, medical science has been if there's a problem with the colon you cut it out, or you cut a portion of it out or whatever, colon cancer, all these different things.  And at the same time, it's one of those things no one wants to talk about 'cause it's “gross”.  I mean talking about stool and bowel movements and all those kind of things that aren't sexy.

Ben:  Even though we talk about it on this show all the time.  So we're cool with it.

Wesley:  Exactly, so when you look at what's going on in the colon and what's happening there, as you've talked about, small intestine, some have delivered, all these things.  It's the last place, right?  It's where everything is really settling out, and the body is saying, “okay, have we gotten everything out?  Is everything there?  Has everything been distributed the correct way?”  It's like if this was a manufacturing plant, this is quality control, right?  This is us checking and making sure that everything that the body needs has been distributed.  What more could be distributed?  All these different factors, and so what we put into our body's just a bunch of crap and a bunch of different things.

The body does two things.  Everything is perfect if you're those one out of a million blessed human beings on the planet who can eat rocks, and rocks come out.  Everything's fine, like you don't have to worry about what you eat.  Then the body flushes out the crap.  But for the 99% of us, the body gets stuck.  All the little things that happen in the colon, and it creates plaque on the walls of the colon, and just like you'd have plaque on your teeth.  They're just like you'd have plaque on anything else in your body or anything else you could use your imagination for, and that tissue that lines the colon walls, it's not absorbing anything.  So the quality control of these last pieces are not happening.

And with all that quality control, that's where the body is sending a lot of the chemicals, the seratonin, and the dopamine.  That's where a lot of the stuff is being produced, sent, distributed throughout the bloodstream throughout the body, to help break down things, to move things around, and if that plaque is there, stuff can't get out, stuff can't get in.  And so now, you start building up plaque which now will, just organically, start creating a smaller cavity which creates where things can't go through, and now you start having blockages.  And through blockages, we know all the different things that happen, but now you start having all the different, even positive foods, even good foods for you.  If you're not flushing out what your body's not using on the toxicity level or even on the high level, like say sugars, now the body is trying to figure out what to do with those, and that can turn into fat, or it can turn into a chemical manipulation in the body that's the opposite of what you're trying to get.  You can have too much of good things just as much as you can have not enough good things.

Ben:  So were you, before you did this colonic and got rid of this plaque which I know some people believe in, some people do not in terms of the toxic mucus layer, but as far as your bowel function.  Were you constipated, were you having issues in addition to the neurotransmitter issues?  Was that kind of a problem for you?

Wesley:  Not extensively, not in a medical aspect where it was like, “holy cow, where am I going to go, what am I going to do with this?”  I-can't-go-to-the-bathroom type of a thing, but it was definitely, it wasn't healthy.  It was obviously runny, smaller pieces.  It wasn't a healthy output in my colon.  And in some cases, depending on the drugs and going back to those give me some kind of laxative drug that was supposed to change that.  So it was never natural and healthy.  It was always something that I was dealing with.  It was always something that I was going through where the part of the colon, the traverse colon, where a lot of this stuff gets stuck.  That was really plugged back up for me, and that had a lot of different things that were happening in that area of my colon.  But I still had enough passage, the things that are happening, but just not in a healthy way.

Ben:  Interesting.  Well I think that this link between your colon and your large intestine and your brain actually is really fascinating, and I realize some people snicker and some people think this is pseudoscience or alternative medicine when you talk about things, everything from mucoid plaques to colonics to enemas.  But I know when I started doing, I do coffee enemas.  I do once every one or two weeks now.  I've caught a lot of flak for that 'cause people thinks it's just complete bunk, but honestly you feel like a million bucks afterwards.  And it's not just the caffeine because it lasts for days.

And it's a cleanser.  You're cleansing your liver in that action.  See, this is the thing that I found is that this planet is filled with everything we need.  It's got it all here, and science keeps finding that.  Every fifteen years, we make some amazing discovery and it’s like oh, walnuts.  Oh, papaya.  Oh, marijuana.  I mean, whatever.  There's always something that science is coming and saying, oh look, this plant that's been here since the “dawn of time” can help us.  And caffeine and coffee beans, it's the same thing.  It's a cleanser.  It's a natural cleanser.  We come up with all this household do-it-yourself things, and it's like use coffee to clean.  If you've got an antique, you can use coffee to restore your antique.  Wonder why?  It's interesting, so I'm right there with you on that.

Ben:  Yeah, and if you go to the Wikipedia page on mucoid plaques, which is one of the reasons people talk about colonic cleanses and doing colonics and colonic therapy and stuff like that, you see a host of quotes from physicians who say they've done thousands of autopsies and never found any mucoid plaque whatsoever, and this idea you can have toxins in your colon is complete bunk, but then, and this is kind of gross, but if you go and you look at pictures of the stuff that comes out peoples butts and they do things like colonics, it's pretty disturbing.  It's pretty nasty, and you combine that with talk from guys like you who have healed themselves or who have begun to fix things like depression and neurotransmitter repletion through something as simple as therapy for the large intestine.  There's definitely something to be said for it.

Ultimately though, this is a rabbit hole I didn't plan on going down.  I actually wanted to ask you about kind of what you started to elude to when you were talking about rollerblading and exercise and depression.  Because one thing that you actually e-mailed over to me was this Live Strong article about exercise causing depression.  Can you talk a little bit about that, about your experience with it and about what you found, why you're interested in the link between exercise and depression?

Wesley:  Yeah for sure, and just to tell on the colon thing, one last piece is that now for the last fifteen years, my mother is a colon therapist, and she's actually one of the top colon therapists in the world, and you would be blown away what comes out of people.  So it's real.

Ben:  Does she have a website?  Like if we want to go check it out.

Wesley:  Yeah, I'll get it for you, and it's naturalcleanse.net, I believe it is.  But I'll get that for you for the show notes.  Anyways, so exercise.  So we are commonly told, and there's a lot to this study on this Live Strong that you put out there, and there's been another study by Newsweek and it's quite a bit of stuff that goes into this topic because we've been told, and it is true, that exercise is actually something that can help with depression, and the reason for that is very simple.  When you're depressed, you're chemically depressed, you're going through a state of feeling like you don't want to do anything, get up, brush your teeth, comb your hair, make food, do any of these things.  Exercise is a logical combatant for that because it forces you to get up and do something.  In that forcing of you to go up and do something, usually you're doing it outside.  Usually you're doing it around somebody or something else.  You're doing, and you're becoming active which creates seratonin, which creates dopamine, which creates adrenaline, which gets the brain refiring, gets all the neurals happy when things start happening.  So it's a natural process.

Ben:  Most people know that.

Wesley:  What people don't understand is that through exercise, you can actually create, and especially people who are depressed and especially people who find exercise and physical activity makes them feel better.  You can actually create, I believe they call it over training  syndrome, but you can actually create the opposite of fact where you come depressed through exercise, and it's a very fascinating thing, and it’s definitely something that makes people raise an eyebrow.  But it's real, and jut to give a little clarity to, or I guess not clarity but a little bit of backing to what we’re talking about here is that my life is now dedicated to this.  Last year though when I was in front of 50,000 children between the ages of and that's what I focus on is youth, between the ages of twelve and eighteen.  I was in front of 50,000 people, and this year alone on 2015, we've worked with over 300 youth who are suicidal, and everything that we're talking about today in this episode, we combat with them.  Their digestion, their eating, their exercise level, all of this.

Ben:  Really, do you recommend like colonics and stuff?  For these kids?

Wesley:  Oh yeah, hundred percent.  All of it.  And it's because again, it worked for me, not just for me, but in my life I've helped thousands of people who suffer with chronic depression.

Ben:  Do you run into, 'cause I know you're not a doctor.  I don't know if you have physicians on your staff or whatever, but do you run into liability issues when you're recommending things like colonics and alternative medicine for kids for depression?

Wesley:  It's interesting, most of the parent that we work with, literally, they'll sign their kid over to me, so legally we haven't yet.  I'm sure we will.  I'm sure we'll have some parent who stands up and says I can't believe you did that.  And we're in that.  I started this journey about two years ago, so we're infinite, and I'm sure were going to get people, but I'm also, which is why I do have a team of lawyers, and we do have people that are starting to you come in and protect us 'cause I'm the last guy that really cares about that stuff.  I really care about helping people and making it work.  I'm not politically correct.  I'll say things in public schools that “are going to make some drug company mad”.  I've already had drug companies contact me.

Ben:  Really?  What did they say?

Wesley:  I'm the wrong guy to ask about that.  So people aren't happy with the messaging that I'm very vocal about.  I think there is a place for drugs, I do.  I think there's a place in time for morphine.  I think there's a place in time for antibiotics.  I think there's a place in time for things.  We wouldn't have created them, but I also think that it's a business and that there's a lot of lies that are told to people, and when we're talking about the psychology of the human mind, we are told that we have to be dependent on a drug or a drug company.  I mean just, and this is a rabbit hole for sure, but understand that every school shooting that's happened in the United States, every school shooting, the child that pulled the trigger was on anti-depressants.  That's not propaganda, that's not off some third-party website, google it.

Ben:  What's an example of an anti-depressant that these kids are on?

Wesley:  There's so many.  I mean you've got zoloft, you've got pamelor, and you’ve got prozac.  They're all over the map.  I was on an anti-depressant, I believe it was called pamelor.  That had been on the market for ten or fifteen years before I got onto it.  So a safe drug, supposed to be one of the safest.  About five years after I said I'm done, pamelor was pulled off of the market, and one of the reasons pamelor was pulled off of the market.  So ten years before me, I'm on it for ten years.  Five years after, I get off, so it's twenty, twenty five years.  I may be wrong on the dates, so please don't, whatever.  It had been on for a long time, it gets pulled off.

One of the reasons it was pulled of the market is they found, after let's just say fifteen-plus years of being in the marketplace, that it possibly stunted growth in human beings.  Since 9th grade, I have been 5'11 and a hundred and forty five pounds.  I maintained a hundred and forty five pounds.  I can go up, down whatever, weight is not a problem, but my height, 5'11.  My mom's almost 6'2, my dad's pretty tall.  Everyone in my family, my biological side is fairly tall.  I'm one of the shortest, and my grandmother is 5'11 and a half.  She's the same height as me.  She's a woman and 5'11 and a half.  So 9th grade I stopped growing.  Everyone thought I was going to be this six-foot, seven-foot kid.  I was a tall kid.  I stopped growing, coincidence?  Maybe, I don't know, but I was also on that drug for ten years.  The safe drug.

Ben:  There's no research that you know of about that?

Wesley:  That's one of the thing that came up, the reasons they pulled the drug, but going into this rabbit hole a little further, they pulled the drug, renamed the drug, relabeled it, put it back on the market.  So, again.  It's just one of those things.  I'm not saying drug companies are horrible and they're the devil.  I'm saying when we understand, going now to this exercise thing, we understand how the brain works, we understand how complex it is yet how simplistic it is.  It starts giving us new light.  It gives us a new understanding.  One of the reasons in this article on the Live Strong didn't take it to the next level, but one of the reasons that physical exercise becomes such a depressant is the reason behind why you get into physical exercise.  If you're getting into physical exercise because it makes you feel better, it makes you feel more alive, it gives you more energy, it makes you have a better relationship with your wife, your husband whatever, those are sound fundamental things that you're going to continue doing that exercise for because they're life oriented.

Unfortunately, fitness has become such a fad, that people are getting into exercise, and even if it's like a healthy start, like I'm depressed.  I start working out and oh, this makes me feel better.  Now all of a sudden, you start doing a natural thing.  Posting selfies, putting it out there.  Now you get into this competitive world of exercise and fitness, and now it starts ruling you, and now you're like oh well, yeah.  I guess I'm really into fitness because I need the six-pack, or I'm really into fitness because I want to be XYZ on an obstacle course race, or I want to do this.  Now your fitness psychology is changed.

Ben:  So are you saying that it's not necessarily like, well let me ask you this.  A lot of people aren't over trained, they're sore.  But over training, honestly it's pretty hard to get over trained, and I 100% agree with you that when you're over trained, you can't produce cortisol, you have a hard time creating dopamine and seratonin unless you're jacked up on coffee and glucose or sugar or candy or chocolate.  We've talked about over training on the show before, and yeah, I would absolutely agree that chemically and hormonally, it actually is pretty similar to depression when you're over trained.  Total lack of motivation, whatever.  But what you're saying is that even if you're training at a level at which you're not over training, when you're not exercising or when you haven't gotten your exercise session in for the day, you can become depressed because you've allowed exercise to define what it is that makes you happy and gives you meaning in life?

Wesley:  Exactly, it's like food.  Let's take food.  I love the quote, and I don't remember whose it is.  I'm sure a hundred people have said it, but food was never meant to be enjoyed.  It was never meant to be enjoyed.  It was meant to nourish, that's food.  Now we can go in extreme, and we can say extreme on one side is no, you should enjoy food 'cause it's amazing.  But just think about that for a minute.  Think about what food has become in today's world.  Food is no longer something we go to for a nourishment source or a source of nutrition and energy.  Now again, the audience listening to this.  It's different, you and me.  It's different, but the world is a hole.  It's a social thing, it's something that we do, and we don't really care what we're eating.  We're just putting stuff in our mouths.  It's become a huge, huge part of the financial part of the world, especially in first world countries.  So, again the purpose of what we do is really the critical thing.  We can now as healthy people look at food and say wow, there was a point in my life where I had a really unhealthy addiction to food or I had an unhealthy relationship.  These are like buzzwords that people use.

Now we're seeing this creep into the physical world, Instagram and selfies and gym selfies.  People want to say that, there's tons of studies.  If you go and Google, “Gym Selfie”, that's all you have to do.  Just google “Gym Selfie” and you'll find out about forty pages full of articles that talk about the correlation between a gym selfie and narcissistic behavior.  And I don't think that it's just about narcissistic behavior, it becomes, as you said, its part of the identity.  It becomes part of who you are on the level deeper than just making yourself feel better.  But and you said, my fiancée, Jodie, she has an incredible story of almost dying and having this, not similar to mine.  She actually lived a picket-life fence, but her family's relationship with food is very emotional.  It's very stereotypical, not a bad thing.

They're great people, that's not what it's about, but she had to go through a journey, and fitness became something that she found relief in but, and this is about four years ago.  This is why this started really getting my investigative personality going because she would go work out and feel amazing.  But then instead of it being just one hour workout, and then she would go on with her day, and do the rest of her responsibilities, it became a three-hour workout and a four-hour workout and a five-hour workout.  And then it just became more and more and more, it was never enough, and she was beautiful.  And you met her, she's beautiful.  She just naturally doesn't need to use fitness to make herself “more beautiful” in the world's eyes.  She already is, she was born that way.  It's amazing, but for her it was never enough, and it was this competitive look-at-this-girl and look-at-this-girl.  We do the green smoothies, we do this, we do all the healthy stuff, and we've been doing it for years before it was a fad.

But now she looks on Instagram and it's like well, look at this girl in a bikini holding a green smoothie.  Nobody's going to think that I'm healthy if I don't have that body, and she went through her own development, her own thing.  We came out the other side of it, and everything's great, but I started looking at it.  I started watching it, and then we started with all these youth that I work with.  So looking at it, I started saying wait a minute, we all need to calm down because the one thing, well two things that can single handedly shift somebody's life, food and exercise.  Food has been manipulated to such a degree we don't even know.  We're guessing all of the time about food, and it's sad and it's so ugh.  I just want to reach out to the world and say it's this simple.  Let's not over-complicate this thing, and now the secondary thing that did save my life, that changed me, exercise, physical activity, adrenaline junkie, all this stuff.  Now we're seeing this thing be as the phrase goes, “marketers ruin everything”, and something as powerful as fitness is becoming something that is getting very, very dangerous and is getting very, very, very scary because it's become competitive outside of your own lifestyle and your own existence to a status of who you are in society and in the world…

Ben:  Is this just blue sky thinking though? Do you know of people who have been diagnosed with depression or who showed the chemical or the clinical signs of depression who maybe aren't over trained? Like let's say we take somebody who exercises regularly, like your exercise enthusiast, and you strip them of exercise for whatever, three days, four days, five days.  Has anybody actually ever gone in and done a neurotransmitter evaluation or blood test or something like that to see if that induces depression-like symptoms on a biological level in folks?

Wesley:  You know, I'm not sure if they have or not.  I know they've done the stuff with body image issues, and I know they've done research with over training.  To say that something that as a blue sky, I don't know.

Ben:  Are you talking about body dysmorphic disorder?

Wesley:  Yeah, exactly.

Ben:  I've had that.  I mean, I used to be a bodybuilder where if you wake up in the morning and your six-pack does not look exactly as you want to look and your biceps aren't popping when you do your flex-off in the mirror, you get depressed.  Like you desperately want to drop everything you're doing, and go to the gym.

Wesley:  They have done studies with bodybuilders that exactly that has happened, and so I guess since your question is just that fitness.  Like let's look at fitness ten years ago, fifteen years ago.  What was it?  What was the fitness industry?  I mean it was an order tract, it was the thigh master.

Ben:  It was like bodybuilding or aerobics or marathoning, right?  I think those are kind of like the big three.

Wesley:  And now fitness has become as common as coffee.  If we're taking a sampling from the top 1,000 followed Instagram and social media iconic people.  And I'm not talking celebrities.  I'm talking about the people that kids are looking up to, that housewives are saying oh, I wish I was like that, whatever.  Who look at those types of people?  And I would say that you and I are in that kind of a classification.  We both have a fairly large body insulin, we're both doing something on a grand scale.  They have this thread of fitness, and fitness is part of their life.  For you, putting a rope a hundred feet up in a tree and climbing that height is just as normal as the guy who goes and gets his coffee in the morning, and it's just part of your routine.  It's part of your daily life, it's part of what you do to feel a certain way to have the lifestyle that you have.

And so fitness is now becoming part of the formula to a happy successful life.  Which it's always been, but again, understanding where we're going, not where we've been is the key.  It's always been there, but now what we're doing with it is we're creating the illusions of grandeur in mass states.  For you to climb that rope up a tree, hundred feet probably an exaggeration, it's probably forty feet, whatever.  For you to climb that rope, it wasn't just that you threw that rope up one day, and you just did it.  It was a process for you to get to that point.  It's a process to do a Spartan race.  It's a process to do a Death man race.  It's a process to do things that these fitness individuals make look like.  It's just an everyday thing.

And so a person, let's take a child, a fifteen year old child who's dealing with a parent who is, everything is processed food, everything is processed sugar, going out to eat means McDonald's.  Those are stereotypical mid-American type families, and there's nothing wrong with that.  I'm just saying.  But then that child is suffering with all the things that they're dealing with.  The one billion impressions that they're getting in their life of add materials and all this stuff, all these pictures and keen shots and selfies and all this stuff, and then they find fitness, and they say wow, this makes me feel better, this makes me feel good.  But maybe, now let's take it as a girl.  They're a size 6, and they're a healthy size 6, and they can go and do their workouts, and they feel good about themselves.  Then they start placing themselves in a happy place, right? They start taking selfies, they start taking pictures, they start doing things.  Then they start following gals, like our wives.  They start following other people who've had a journey of tempting teen years to get where they are.

And all of a sudden this sixteen year old from New Hampshire, I don't know.  Making it up, who's finally starting to feel good about themselves, now looks at somebody who's prophesying that health means XYZ, green smoothie bikini, green smoothie six pack, green smoothies, whatever.  And I know this is kind of a sad thing, but what we're seeing happen is now that child sees exercise and does one of two things, gives up or goes extreme and starts going as hard as they possibly can, and then that leads to failure because they can never live up to the status quo.  They can never live up to this dusk.  Now you've created this recycle of depression.  Much like a bodybuilder has at that extreme, so is there any science to back this up? No.  Will there be? Am I confident, will I put my name on the line and say that there will be? Yes.  I guarantee in ten years there will be some scientific study that's done.  I'm starting to collect data now on all of this.

Ben:  You mean a scientific study that shows that exercise, even when you're not over training, can cause you to become depressed if you miss your exercise session?

Wesley:  Yeah, depending on where, and I think the caveat to all of this is where is your mind in the purpose of your exercise? Again if your mind is I feel good, I want to live a healthy lifestyle, I want to be healthy, then I think you're going to be just fine.  But if your mind starts there and then you get the social pressures that exist out in the market place that aren't true when they're there, that's where I see the danger.  That's where I see, and we see it all the time and that's why I said we'll start doing data.  Will we do blood tests and things like that? No, but we'll do pattern, behavioral data of course, but that's where I see the problem, and that's where it becomes the issue.

Ben:  You know I agree with you, and I've actually seen data on changes in white matter, changes in the way that the amygdala is wired in something like body dysmorphic disorder.  It's very similar to OCD.  You can actually change your brain, your ability to be satisfied and also what happens is you wind up having an OCD-like focus on your body and your muscles and your fitness.  You know, I'd like to hear what you think about this, but I think that from an evolutionary standpoint or like a survival standpoint or an ancestral standpoint, that there is a certain amount of benefit to not feeling good unless you've moved physically because everything from hunting to farming to gathering to surviving to providing would be dependent upon you getting out and moving around and by not doing so, and by feeling crappy if you don't do so, it's kind of a built-in survival mechanism to just get out of bed and go make stuff happen, right? So I think that, and I want to make sure that I clarify that, right? We're not talking about lowering your level of physical activity during the days you don't become dependent on it.

But I think there's a big, big difference between me standing at a standing workstation while I'm talking to you and making it a point 'cause I do this or making it a point to walk down to my mailbox a few times a day rather than driving my car even though my mailbox is a quarter mile down the road and engaging in light, low-level physical activity during the day.  And I know that keeps me happy, but it's not something that's wrapped up in fitness or in looking good or in a six-pack, and what I've always said to people is that I don't think what I do is healthy.  I don't think the Spartan race is, and Ironman and stuff like that is healthy.  For me I do it to put a notch in my belt, to scratch an itch, to get out of the office, to get dirty, to get in nature.  It's part of my living, it is part of my identity, but ultimately I think that to be happy, all you really have to do, and they've shown this in the latest book “Blue Zones” by Dan Buettner that you need love and you need relationships and you need family and you need real food and all this stuff, but then the other thing that you need is just regular amounts of physical activity during the day.

That can be like gardening, pushing a wheelbarrow around, building a rock wall, whatever, and it has nothing to do with whether or not you look good.  It has more to do with what you've created, what you've produced, what you've provided for, and so I think there's that distinction between whether or not you're exercising for your body or you're exercising for something very functional.  And I know I'm kind of going on and on here, but that is one of the reasons that I've personally gotten more into the hunting scene, and what I considered to be the most appropriate form of functional fitness, like going out, hiking, being in nature, getting an animal brain back to your family.

Same thing with wild edibles, I'm doing a lot more foraging now with my children, and I think that kind of stuff, like having a purpose, a greater purpose for your movement, makes what some people call exercise, what others would call physical activity, more appropriate.  And I think that when you stop doing that stuff and if you completely lie around, yeah, you might become depressed.  You might feel crappy.  You might show those same signs and symptoms of depression that the person who's going to the gym for two or three hours feels when they start exercising, but I think it's kind of like for two entirely different reasons that you feel crappy.

Wesley:  I wholeheartedly agree, and I think there's a lot of power in what you just said.  I did a keynote on the power of dirt and the psychological power of dirt and everything you just talked about.  We forget, and you brought up some of those points that we need to feel needed, we need to feel appreciated, we need to feel loved, we need to have food, we need to have shelter and movement and we also have to have the sense of accomplishment, and there's nothing more satisfying to the human psychology than us producing something that benefits someone else.  So the act of service, right? And when you think about dirt, when you think about farming and you think about all these different things, what power is in growing a tree?

And again, it takes time, and this is a maturity thing and you go through this, you find a step back, but you think of the childhood.  If you were lucky enough to have a childhood home that has been in a still in your family, you can all right now, and I can do a whole thing with everybody right now as I can have you mentally go to that home, and mentally see a tree that has been a part of your life since forever.  You can remember it forever, and where does that tree come from? Who planted that tree? Maybe you planted that tree?  Maybe there was something that you did it with your father, and maybe your father's not here anymore, but that tree's there, and that's part of your identity, your existence.  Makes you feel good just by walking by that tree, gives you a rush, an endorphin, and it's a chemical reaction, and so the power of dirt is amazing and of getting out in dirt planting a garden.  Doing that, feeding your family as use of foraging, going out experiencing, doing all these things.  And physical exercise, my recommendation to people is that do whatever physical exercise is easy to implant to your daily life.

So everything you just mentioned, I hate gyms.  I've never liked gyms.  It's not because of any one particular thing.  I'm just not a gym guy.  I don't like to go to the gym because that's XYZ out of my day.  Yeah I'm exercising and I'm feeling good, but there's a million other things.  I have an obstacle course in my backyard.  That's my gym.  Every morning I get up, I go run my obstacle course, and it's got everything from climbing trees, throwing spears and lifting rocks.  That's just something that I like to do because it was fun, but I will tell people wholeheartedly the more adrenaline that I got out of all of it, all the excitement, everything was actually built in the dang course.  That was more entertaining to me than running the course.  If I could build my course over and over and over again, that's what I would do.  I'm telling you that was some physical exhaustion in putting pulleys forty feet up in trees and moving rocks around and digging holes and all this stuff.

So, I was getting all of that, but my point is that if you're somebody who, I'm sure 99% of everyone who's listening to this, who's into exercise and fitness and everything, but look at your fitness schedule and figure out what, and I know what level you said, identify what's not healthy and you're just doing, because it's a notch in your belt or it's just whatever reason and then identify what is healthy and what is the movement that's creating that healthy thing, and just be honest with yourself.  To your own mind, tell yourself I'm doing this over here because it puts a notch in my belt because it satisfies something for me, and it's okay to “have those kind of emotions”, there's nothing wrong with that.  It's identifying that and being honest with it, so that the subconscious and the conscience are communicating in your brain.  So you're not creating a chemical warfare, you're not creating a chemical war inside of your own mind, and then focus, like you said, on the simple things that will just keep you healthy.  Standing desks save lives.  More people die sitting than smoking.  We have this data now.  Taking a walk is the first thing we tell every suicidal child, every suicidal youth that comes into our program, we tell them take a walk.  It's the first thing we tell them to do.  I do marriage counseling very little, but I've helped a few just based on the fact we'll have a child that comes into the program, and then mom and dad won't help.

One of the things I'll tell mom and dad to do is take a walk every night, and take a walk and talk about the things they love about life, the things they love about each other.  They're like oh, why can we just do that inside?  It's hot outside, it's that it's cold, it's whatever.  Just take a damn walk because in doing that, again it's a simple act of movement, it's creating those chemicals and those endorphins and then they're able to take all that positive energy, and they start remembering things, and I've had, and again, probably only about thirty, forty couples that I've helped.  But of the thirty, forty that have done the lock, I'd say about 80% of them reply back to me, and the wife will.  She'll be the one that tells me this strict.  You know what's weird is that half way through the walk, he put his arm around me.  He held my hand, he made me feel like I was safe again.  It's like wow, I'm getting to the point now, and I don't mean this facetiously.  I'm like wow, it's so surprising.  That just blows my mind.  It's not, it's simple.  Science is simple, and as human beings we want to make every term complex, so we're trying to hack the body which I think is beneficial.  I think that's part of evolution as you said.  I think that we can always become better, but I think we need to also push the pause button sometimes, and see why are we becoming better?  Are we becoming better because we want to have more medals on our wall? Are we becoming better because we want to have a stronger family, a stronger bond, a better sex life with our partner? Do we want to feel more connected with our children?

Those things are amazing, and as you said, like a Spartan race.  I mean, I tore my freaking ligament in my last Spartan race in my thumb of all places.  So that's not a healthy place to maybe be all the time, but hey.  I love doing them, and they're fun, and I love meeting guys like you.  So just be honest with yourself as to why you're doing it, and I think that's what going to change the landscape of the fitness world.  But it's going to happen.  I don't think it's blue sky stuff, I think we're going to see the same thing we saw happen with food is going to happen with fitness and it's just natural, and I think it's evolution of social media and self-glorification.  Bodybuilders were a secret group of people that only the people in that niche really paid attention to.  Now we have social media which makes almost everybody a bodybuilder.  I mean, I think that's kind of a clarity point is that everyone is kind of going through that same thing that a bodybuilder would go through in a competition state, that hundred days before competition that bodybuilders went through psychologically and the post-performance.  The depression that bodybuilders went through after they performed and were on the stage.  Now just think of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Vine and you know, blah, blah, blah.  It's kind of like a 24/7 cycle of bodybuilding.  So it can be interesting what we're going to see happen in the next five to ten years here.

Ben:  Yeah, it is interesting.  It's tough because some of the stuff like selfies and social proof and extrinsic motivation can be used for good and can be used to drive you off the couch and get you well and burn fat and reverse diabetes and heart disease and all these good things, but then at the same time it's a catch 22, it's a double-edged sword, so it's interesting.

Wesley:  I think it just comes down to honesty.  The first step in my module for psychology, which is a free program.  If anyone's going through anything, I have.  It's a free, I've written 365 e-mails, 6 hours of videos.  I just had Tony Robbin's guys go through it and said it was some of the best stuff.  I was flattered, it was awesome, but it's a free thing.  It's called superhuman.life.  That is, and it's not .com, it's .life.  So superhuman.life.  Totally free, I get nothing out of it.  It's all there for you, and my first module that I talk about is honesty and the power of honesty, and we as children have been taught how important it is to be honest.  Don't steal, don't cheat, don't do this stuff, be honest with your fellow man, all these things.  But the hardest person to be honest with is yourself, and in that moment of honesty comes clarity, and that's where you start the journey of power and that's where these things don't affect you as much.  Caveat, we're human beings, we're all going to have our moments, but when you can be honest with yourself, that's when everything changes.

So just be honest with yourself about why you're in fitness, why you're so aggressive, why you're so passionate, why you're so this.  Be honest with yourself, and then create your own whatever it may be.  Some people need to put something on social media, so they have that.  Some people talk to their wives about it.  Have some kind of checkpoint so that you can say, “hey, I was honest about this.  I told this person.”  Manipulate your mind to work for you, not against you, and that's it.  That's what I learned, and I'm trying to bestow on as many people as I can.  I have a goal of reaching 25 million people before I die.  25 is a very significant number in my life, but I was finally able to realize that the manipulation of my brain was doing against me and making me feel sad and depressed, and all these things that happened to me were me, I'm a victim.  All these horribleness and me, me, me.  It's just awful.  All that stuff that was controlling me, if I could just spin it, just 180 degrees and just spin it and see things as I was the only one who could go through that.  I'm a hero, I'm powerful, I'm enough, I'm strong, I can make this, I can do this.

If I manipulate that and manipulate my mind and then use all the things that God put on this planet from food to exercise to relationships, all these different things.  If I could just figure this out and simplify it, then I can be happy, and at sixteen years old, that was my mindset, and it took, whatever.  It took about ten years to really master it and really feel like you know what I'm in control.  I do believe this, this is where I'm at, and then to re-engineer that and go back and say, “okay, what worked, what didn't?”  They figured out look, this can be replicated.  I'm not some superhuman, weird anomaly.  I'm just like everybody else who's had a tough life or who is going through a tough time in life, so if we could just package this into a simplistic formula, then can it work?  Two years ago, I went on that journey.  Now we're in seven countries and thousands of people and all these thing are happening in youth and adults.  I mean, it's working, and it's working very, very effectively, and again, I was guinea pigging people along the way.  I've got a lot of my good friends who call me or who tell me thanks for making me your guinea pig.  But it works, and it's brain hacking.  It's hacking, it's all that stuff.  So I think it's good that we evolve in that status because we can become less dependent on artificial substances, and the less dependent we are on anything that's artificial, the more dependent and the more we have ourselves, to blame ourselves, to respect which just leads to a healthier and happier community inside of our families which leads to happier communities in our cities and our states and then our country and then eventually, our world.  But it's got to start with ourselves, and anytime it's artificial, that means it can be manipulated just as easily as it can be created and a drug and the mind, we know this.

Why do we have to have vaccinations every year? Why is the flu vaccination completely altered and modified every year? It's because the body and the flu, the virus itself, adapts because it's artificial.  So anyway, we can talk for hours about it, but that's just what I would tell people.  Get honest with yourself as to why you're doing what you're doing, and then really start focusing in with that honesty and that clarity. Where do I need to be spending a lot of my energy and my time so that I'm moving myself forward, not getting myself stuck?

Ben:  Yeah.  What is the website for the service that you provide to kid who are depressed? Is that your Human Project website?

Wesley:  Yeah, so it's Human Project.  So A as an apple, ahumanproject.com, and we have a whole back end system which you and I need to talk about in soon.  We have 52 lessons that the youth go through, we have a point system, we have a summer camp that we're starting next year, and I'm looking for about 300 guest lectures that will come into the system and create content for these youth.  And it's all about empowering youth.  I've been in the self-help world for a while, I dabbled in that.  I have a whole entrepreneurial story, I became very successful in the entrepreneurial world, and we just kind of combined everything into the system, and it's very, very effective, and it's working very, very well, and our problem is in inventory.  We can run a social media campaign and have a thousand youth enroll in our system in 24 hours.

This is an epidemic.  This is something that people are dealing with.  It's getting more and more conversation about suicide and depression, it's happening more.  Robin Williams' death who was a huge movement in a positive direction for people talking about depression, talking about suicide much like raw food diets and stuff started getting people to talk about bowel movements twenty years ago.  Now people are starting to talk more about the psychology and depression and feelings of worthlessness, and we're seeing things we've never seen before.  Our children are spending more time in artificial light than natural light.  That's having an effect on their brain.  It's having an effect on their chemical development.  They're spending more time in front of artificial screens than they are outside.  Kids don't play with blocks and mud anymore.  They're playing with iPads, and I'm not saying that it's bad.  I'm saying it's different, and with that different is coming, we're having to figure out how to work inside of those things, and it's all new.  We've never had to deal with this before.  We've never had this in the history of humanity, and so it's lading our children down paths of confusion, of self-identity issues.

There's a lot going on in our world.  There's a lot of noise, anywhere from three thousand to five thousand depending on who you talk to.  Ads are being displayed to our children every single day.  Our kids are texting between three to five thousand times a month, and gain we we're taught from the very young age if you really want to know something, you say it, you see it, you write it, right? That's how you would study for a test.  Say it, see it, and write it.  That's what our kids do all the time, and think of what they're saying, think of what they're seeing, think of what they're writing, and so there's just a lot of new challenges that are happening to our children right now, and statistically in the United States, there's 25 million children who are living in some type of dysfunctional situation, whether that's a divorced home, whether that's abuse.  One in three girls by the age of eighteen will have some kind of sexual assault that is given against them in their lives.  These are just statistics that are used in agendas, and I'm not a huge statistic guy but it does give us a glimpse into the world that we're dealing with.

So my whole mission and what I focus on and my life and my story and all these different things and the year of time I spent studying the brain and psychology and nutrition and exercise is now put into helping youth realize the simplicity of they’re enough and giving them the tools and the power that they create that.  It's not dependent on me, it's not dependent on our system.  It's not dependent on a drug.  It's dependent on themselves and their own will to survive and live and succeed and operate, and I could tell tons of stories about that.  It works.

Ben:  Yeah, cool.  It's good stuff man.  I know you love to talk about this stuff, and you've got a great YouTube TED talk, and I'll link to a lot of the things that we've discussed today over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/wesleychapman.

If you want to check out Wesley's Human Project or learn more about everything from coffee enemas to body dysmorphic disorder.  I'll put some good resources out there for you.  Wesley, you've been really generous with your time.  I appreciate you coming on the show.  I know your hacking right now for a trip to Las Vegas, so I know you took some time out of your day to present this stuff to us.  I hear the passion, man, and I appreciate what you're doing.

Wesley:  Hey, you too man.  It's awesome.  We've got to get together, and hang out and play on each other’s obstacle courses.  I know you've got one up there, so we got to hang out next time you're in Southern California.  Let me know, and vice versa.

Ben:  Awesome, we'll make it happen.  Alright, well folks again, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/wesleychapman if you want to learn more about Wesley and grab the show notes for this episode.  And until next time, thanks for listening in, and have a great week.

 

 

Meet Wesley Chapman, pictured above.

He was abandoned at 1 by his father, then at 6 1/2 by his mother.

He tried to commit suicide 12 times before his 16th birthday.

Wesley was on 25 meds a day for 10 years.

His liver failed at age 16 and he was given a 20% chance to live.

But for the past 19 years, Wesley has been studying health, the brain and alternative methods to failed treatments for depression, and today, we specifically discuss the shocking link between exercise and depression.

-How Wesley detoxed off 25 different medications and healed his liver…

-The little-known link between your colon and your brain…

-How exercise can make you depressed, even if you’re not “overtrained”…

-Why pharmaceutical companies have been writing Wesley angry letters…

-What types of physical activity and exercise can actually make you depressed…

Resources from this episode: -“The Human Project“

–Coffee enemas

–Body Dysmorphic Disorder

Read more at: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/can-exercise-cause-depression/

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *