An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Make Your Bed in the Morning — Starting your day with a good, disciplined habit sets the pace for the day. This has become so important for me since having kids. It’s chaotic in my house, and this is the piece of control that I have on my day and it sets the bar.
As a part of our series about “5 Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Dramatically Improve One’s Wellbeing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas DeLauer.
Thomas DeLauer is a Nutritionist and Expert in Diet, Cognitive Nutrition and Performance. He is motivated by a guiding ethos of integrated optimization: if you perform better, so does the world. Thomas reaches more than 15 million viewers monthly (on average) through his Youtube channel, where he translates experience and learning from his own health transformation utilizing intermittent fasting and other forms of nutrition into actionable steps for his dedicated community of 2.85 million subscribers.
Can you share with us the story about how you first got involved in fitness and wellness?
I had just gotten out of a high stress, corporate career and it was beyond critical that I started focusing much more on wellness and lifestyle. Although I had a history as a student as an athlete, I had let it all go during my early healthcare career. For me, it was really coming down to life an death. I was close to 300lbs and not going down a good route.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Still to this day, it is people coming up to me in the store or on the street and thanking me for how I have impacted their lives. It is always interesting to me, because each person has a different story and reason for why they made a change.
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
At first, my wife was my videographer. Shooting with an iphone. It was always comical how I could see a certain look in her eye when I said something that she questioned or perhaps stumbled over my words. The amount of trust and how much the judgment of our spouses or loved ones weigh is so immense. It just became comical. We were trying to make a perfect masterpiece the first time through, and now, that is just comical to think about!
Can you share with our readers a bit about why you are an authority in the fitness and wellness field? In your opinion, what is your unique contribution to the world of wellness?
My unique contribution is the ability to distill complex subject matter and biochemistry in a way that people can understand and put into practice. I’m not a clinician, I am some guy that has been through it before, but I also have a knack for explaining how the body works.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I am exceptionally grateful towards my wife. I know it’s cliche, but without her trust and her encouragement (even when she looked at me funny during filming) there is no way I could be doing what I do now. She trusted that I would build a business out of this one way or another and she never questioned me. It allowed me to dive head first into what I believed in.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. We all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, exercise more, and get better sleep etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the 3 main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?
Sustainability — Being able to do it for the long term. Sometimes, subconsciously we don’t even start something because it seems like it’s unrealistic to keep it going.
Education — I always say that education leads to adherence. Without educating someone on how their body works, how can they trust to make the changes. They need to know the WHY, even though they may not say it.
Social Pressure — Social Norms are super important. If your new routine is not “cool” or accepted widely, it is going to be that much harder to stick to it. So do NOT make it a big deal. Don’t even mention that you’re changing your lifestyle if you don’t want. Actions speak louder than words.
Can you please share your “5 Non-Intuitive Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Dramatically Improve One’s Wellbeing”? (Please share a story or an example for each, and feel free to share ideas for mental, emotional and physical health.)
- Make Your Bed in the Morning — Starting your day with a good, disciplined habit sets the pace for the day. This has become so important for me since having kids. It’s chaotic in my house, and this is the piece of control that I have on my day and it sets the bar.
- Close it down after 7pm — Simply put, eating later in the evening is when we run into trouble. This was my biggest issue. By simply having a contract with myself that unless it was an unusual circumstance like dinner with friends, etc, I would stop earring by 7pm. This made such a difference in my sleep, and I ended up consuming about 300 calories less per day.
- Bigger Breakfasts, Smaller Lunches, Smallest Dinners — For me, this was a game changer. I used to always go for a light breakfast, and then I found that later in the day I was exhausted and making bad decisions PLUS very hungry. This has been a gamechanger for me, not to mention there are some interesting studies to back it up.
- 10 Minute Walks vs Long Workouts — I will tell you, what made the biggest change to my body during my weight loss wasn’t just going to the gym. I realized that on an active day, I would walk 20,000 steps, vs 5,000 that I might get in a structured workout. It’s the perception of a hard workout that really tricks us. You will burn more and become a healthier person just going for multiple short walks per day. Try to get out a few times for just 10 minutes. Amazing stuff.
- Get out in the sun consciously — Vitamin D is becoming so much more important than what we thought years ago. Really set specific time to get outside and absorb sun. Mood, Weight Loss, Immune Support, you name it, because Vitamin D is a very active hormone in our body and we are designed to see the sun!
As an expert, this might be obvious to you, but I think it would be instructive to articulate this for the public. Aside from weight loss, what are 3 benefits of daily exercise? Can you explain?
- Sends signals to the brain to keep the metabolism elevated and healthy. Exercise is less about the literal effect of exercise and more about the benefit that comes from muscle as an ORGAN that signals the body to burn more and ultimately be healthier.
- Mood — This is a big one. Cerebral blood flow (blood to the brain), serotonin that helps us feel better throughout the day, SLEEP — cannot over emphasize how this affects our mood!
- Longevity — Being able to support the cells and the mitochondria (what makes energy in a cell) can allow us to use fuels like carbs and fats better throughout the long haul. This can protect a cell and keep it running at it’s max potential for longer. Especially cardio!
For someone who is looking to add exercise to their daily routine, which 3 exercises would you recommend that are absolutely critical?
- Squats/Deadlifts — Maximizing as much muscle usage as possible. Bigger muscles require more metabolic demand. The larger the muscle, the more metabolic effort it takes to compensate for the workout. These moves use very large muscle parts plus help activate and stabilize the core.
- Walking — Do Not stop walking. Even if you’re resistance training, walking should be a staple in your daily life in order to keep muscles stimulated but also to keep consistent movement throughout the day.
- Thrusters — This is where you do a squat movement while holding dumbbells at your shoulders and then press up into a shoulder press at the top of the movement. You only need to do 8–10 before your heart rate is nice and high, giving you a great cardiovascular workout alongside activating large muscles like the legs and shoulders.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
“The Magic of Thinking Big” Such a simple read. It helped me understand belief systems and that anything is possible if you just simply develop the right thought patterns and outlook. I was depressed after exiting my previous career, thought that I would have to settle for the same kind of corporate grind. Reading this book forced me to put things into proper perspective and stop doubting myself.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I want to start a movement to reinvigorate family values in our world again. I think much of health and fitness is so focused on vanity these days, sometimes we forget about the real reasons that we are working on our health and wellness, and that is to be able to live a vibrant, full life. Sometimes in the age of digital media we lose sight of the things that are truly important. I want to inspire parents to instill healthy habits in their children as well.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
“Money Doesn’t Wait Atop the Hill, Glory Doesn’t Wait Atop the Hill, all that waits atop the hill, is the top of the hill” — This was actually a quote from a Nike ad decades ago, but it’s so important, it’s tattooed on my shoulder. Don’t do it for any reason other than to just do it. The amount of times I have been paralyzed by my own thoughts, waiting for the perfect scenario or setting is countless. I have learned that a minimum viable product is much better than no product at all. Just get it done and get moving. No more motivation, 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?
It is a big mission of mine to make a big impact in Formula 1 and Motorsports in general. My father was a racecar driver (he passed away a few years ago) and it’s been a big driver for me to focus on cognitive nutrition in motorsports. I think that if we can spread the word of health and wellness to a younger generation that is into performance (motorsports, formula 1, etc), we can make a very big change in the world. I’d love to sit down and have breakfast with Zak Brown (CEO of Mclaren).
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
Definitely YouTube — http://www.youtube.com/thethomasdelauer
IG — @ThomasDeLauer
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Thomas DeLauer: 5 Lifestyle Tweaks That Can Dramatically Improve Your Wellbeing was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.