A SMARTER WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT THROUGH BIOHACKING | KELLY ATHANASIDOU | HABITS FOR HUMANS

 Hi, and welcome to Habits for Humans, the podcast where we explore the patterns, behaviors, and internal operating system that shapes our lives. If you're working towards a more intentional life, the science is clear. Sustainable change comes from the habits we build, not willpower.

Or diets as we're gonna be talking about today. The future you want is created one small habit at a time. And full disclosure, this is the third time I've started this podcast because I'm trying to get Kelly's name right. She's a beautiful name. She's from Greece. Her name is Kelly Du though Kelly, will you tell us how to say your last name again?

Okay. It's quite difficult. It is Avu. But you can, yeah, you can call me Kelly. That's as simple as that. We're gonna go with Kelly from here on out, but I love the name Ana. Yeah. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah, so we're gonna be talking about what biohacking really is and how to use it to lose weight without fighting your body.

Kelly, it's perfect timing today because I am at, you know how your weight fluctuates up and down. I'm gonna buy heavy weight right now, and I'm not loving it, and I'm laying awake at night in my bed thinking I know how to conquer this. I'm gonna cut out all sugar, all dairy, all everything, only eat meats and vegetables for three months, and then I'll get thin and then I'll gain it all back.

And so I'm tired of that process of extremes of doing like this, right? And so I'm delighted to talk to you today. It's perfect timing. But before we get into the meat of it with Kelly. We do have several giveaways for our listeners at the end, so if you like free stuff, stay tuned until the end.

And a quick word from our sponsors. Sponsor number one is a Phoenix Retreat center. Come to Costa Rica for your beachfront, reset and accidentally leave with friends for live. That's Phoenix retreats center.com. Phoenix with an F and the Beyond Human Lab, which is. Kelly's business. It's her biohacking company that provides practical programs to support physical, mental, and spiritual health so that you can be the driver of your own life.

So stay tuned to the end for a special discount. So welcome Kelly. Kelly is a biohacker and author and a human performance researcher who blends science. Ancient wisdom. Love that. And modern wellness with degrees from Aristotle, university of Thesal, Leki, I'm probably saying that wrong as well. The Athens University of Economics and Business and the University of Bremen.

She works she brings a global academic foundation to her work. So welcome Kelly. Tell us your story. How did you develop an interest in biohacking? Hello everyone. To all the listeners, before I tell you my personal story, I would like to comment on like your story and your fight and struggle.

Like what I heard from you is, again rules. Do this, do that. Don't do this. It's not gonna work this way. And we have to realize it. If we permanently want to lose weight, if we permanently want to change our life and to become more he healthy, we have to get rid of the old patterns. Most of us have already had more than 10 times in our lives. We have had any type of diets, any trends, and anything that we have listened to or like with a professional help of a clinical dietician or our gym instructor. But yet, if you are listening to these podcasts, probably none of these 10 times has worked already.

Obviously we are doing something wrong and by now what we know is that our body, before we try to find out what is happening in the physiological field, we have to investigate what is happening in the psychological and behavior of field. And even before that, we have the spiritual. Here is where I'm going to drop my story.

On how I started with bio hiking. As you already mentioned, I do have academic studies and so I've been raised as a very practical person myself. But since 2010 out of a very personal experience, out of the loss of my father he got quite sick with lung cancer. And he actually passed away in nine months.

So for me, at the time, my father was a role model of safety, security. He was the man the provider of the family. So seeing him decay and actually dying was a great shock for me, and that was the time that I realized that. Okay, this is it. This is your lifetime. No one knows if you have 60, 65, 73 years or whatever, but it really doesn't matter when I'm going to pass.

But what it matters is that I would like as long I live to have a healthy and happy life, to be able to move myself around, to be able to enjoy all the happiness around me, to be able to enjoy nature. To discover new stuff. So this meant for me that I have to find a way to maintain my health. I'm not saying not to be sick.

I don't like these words. I am meant to be healthy. We are meant to be healthy. You are the human body consists of about 33 billion, sorry. No, it's 33. Trillions. Yeah, that's the translation. Trillions of cells. So are you still fighting with your ego, do you think? You are one united form of energy, 33 trillions of cells.

They united each other. They communicate with each other, they interact with each other. If something happens to group A, something else happens to group B. Or something, they have this inner communication and all of them, they have only one cause. Only one is the region of their existence.

And this cause is to stay alive, to be to keep on with existence. So every cell in your body wants you to be alive, wants you to be healthy. Then why do we get sick is the question is the environmental situations, the benefits and the benefits, sorry. The beliefs that we have the inner beliefs that we are raised, this is a cultural thing.

This is a linear thing from your heritage. So by now it. Humanity doesn't eat well with ultra processed food starches, things that they actually make us sick. But before we analyze what we eat, we have to think about how we sleep, how we hydrate, how we breathe, how we connect with nature. I'm talking about grounding.

How we spend our time under the sun. Try to think what are the basic things that are required for something to be alive? You need oxygen. No one taught us how to breathe by now through biohacking. We have over 30 different protocols of breath work, different protocol. When you wake up. To activate your body, different protocol before you go to sleep, to slow your rhythm down and let melatonin rise up this hormone that will get you to REM sleep.

So we have so many different types of breathing that we actually don't know about. Would you like? So if I can interrupt really quickly. So what I'm hearing is just synopsizing. It's not oh, I need to lose 10 pounds. How do I do that? That is so far from the mark. What I'm hearing from you is, let's dial that way back and start with the foundation, which is general health.

And general health has so much more to do with everything and not just. The food we're putting into our bodies and rules. We're getting rid of rules, going all the way back to foundation and saying. Body's health is sleep, hydration, breath, grounding, sun, all of that, even before we start coming up with a plan for eating diet rules.

Okay, so I'm on, I'm tracking here and I'm intrigued. And then the next question I'm gonna have is if we start all the way back with breathing, I actually wanna lose weight, right? And so if I just focus on my breathing, I'm like, I'm not gonna lose weight this year.

What do you think? Okay. You are, if you are recalibrating your system. So if you are, if you begin breathing well properly, so you put oxygen in your body with a proper way, if you begin hydrating yourself properly so you maintain the levels of water in your cells. I'm talking about homo hydration.

So even the phrase drinking water is wrong for me, is completely wrong. You drink water whenever you're thirsty, but that's not the point. You have to put certain quantities of water inside your body, every one hour, every now and then, so your body relaxes and understands that I am working on a safe.

On a safe environment. Every now and then I am getting a certain qua quantity of water. So it is okay for me to function properly and I don't need to keep that water in. Also, if you learn how to earth yourself, just walk barefoot on plain earth. This is the easiest and the cheapest way to detoxify yourself.

Actually. Because the, this is the way to lose your free radicals. PH, so it's like possible hydrogen, which is actually positively charged ions of hydrogen. They are all over your body. Oxidating everything. Actually try to imagine it as bringing rust. Around your cells. So the best way to get rid of them is by using the free electrons that they are around the surface of the earth.

So if you place your skin on the earth, these electrons, they actually insert your body and they ute neutralize. Sorry, my English is your perfect. They just, yeah. You just close the circuit the circle, the circulation. So thi this is the whole point, and yes, you are losing your weight, not in a year, but in about six months when your body is ready to get more tension.

That is then is the correct time for you to put some pressure on that. Is the correct time where you can actually implement a diet program, a nutritional program? Yes. Okay. So I am fascinated by this conversation. So I'm in the US right? And everything in the US is, let's throw a pill at it and fix it tomorrow.

So all the GLP ones are happening right now, right? Where you're like, oh, I can pay a thousand dollars and I can lose this weight in three months. And it's rapid and it's as false of weight loss as you could possibly get. As far as, it's not even like you're paying to ignore your body's signals of hunger.

And I get like on a psychological level that we are really walking away from being able to listen to your body, but you're going even more and saying. You don't even think about putting dieting rules and regulations in place until you've set this like breathing, hydrating, grounding kind of pace.

And so six months before I'm ready to put in some dieting rules, there is absolutely no point to put more pressure in your body before fixing the basics. You are not losing weight. If you have anxiety, which means high levels of cortisol, so if we haven't fixed your ability to deal psychologically with your fear and your stress, you are not losing your belly fat because when you produce cortisol, this is the role of cortisol as a hormone to protect your inner guts from this danger that you feel.

So if you have stress, cortisol is produced, which means that a layer of fat is developed around your gut, so your guts are protected. So what is the point to count your calories? Of course you are getting a program. You begin slowly to understand what type of food you are supposed to eat, and you are trained to eat natural foods.

This is what we do through this. It's not exactly six months, I'm saying six months to exaggerate a little bit because for every person it is different. And through these six months, you will learn. To distinguish the foods. So for example just to make sure that what you are about to eat is good and beneficial for your health or not.

You just simply have to ask yourself two questions, okay? Hold it in your hand and before you put it in your mouth, consider number one was it born And number two. Did it grow? So is it either a plant base? Did it grow from the earth or did someone gave birth to it? If it's neither, neither from the earth, nor like no one gave birth to it, simply do not eat it.

It's not edible. It's not good for you. It is as simple as that. Learn how to read the label, the labels, you go to the supermarket. Next time people know that you're listening to me next time you go to the supermarket, just take a moment, breathe in and try to see to look around. You will understand that almost 95% of the products that they are.

Given to you, they're presented to you as food. They're actually not edible, they're not food. So just turn around, look at the label, and when you see that you have more than two words that you cannot understand, tro whatever, throw something. This means that this came from a label, from a laboratory.

So it's not natural food. I'm it feels like it's the same rules in air quotes, the same rules, but a different way of looking at the rules. So instead of saying this is what I can, this is what I can't, it's, is this edible, is this real food? And really getting, I like the principle of holding it in your hand and saying.

Is this edible? This is exactly the way of thinking. And through biohacking, you obtain knowledge, you obtain the ability to be in the driver's seat. Your body is like a supercar you have a Ferrari or a McLaren, like a super supercar. So you need to learn how to drive it and. Before we get into how many calories you are going to consume before we get into concepts like calorie deficit, and if I need this type of energy and what type of exercise I will do, of course we will do exercise.

There is no way for you to survive without moving your muscles, without making your muscles stronger, without making your joints stronger in order to get. Your body into aging. Being 80, 90 years old, everything dries up if you don't work on it. So of course you will do it, but you will do it when the time comes, if you try to implement it now that your life is still a mess.

You are so super stressed with everything and all that people think is that I need a quick fixed solution. So I'm willing to pay loads of money to get the golden pill. Okay, you get it and then you pay it for five months, six months, a year, whatever. But when you cut it, then in another six months, everything will come back because your concept, your mentality has not changed.

You didn't learn how to be healthy. And you have to understand that losing weight and actually losing fat is a way of being healthy because your body is supposed to have a very specific percentage of fat around your body. So we need fat, okay? But we need a very certain percentage of it. If we have excessive fat, this is not healthy.

You, there's something seriously wrong with you, and this is the cause of so many other diseases. So for me, losing weight, losing fat actually is not a matter of aesthetics. It is a matter of maintaining my health and giving me a healthy lifestyle through whatever years I have in my life. Yeah, that makes sense.

Okay, so if people work with you so I'm super curious. You start with hydration, sleep, breath, grounding, and you do that. And at what point are you like, okay, now they're ready to start putting, I think you said putting pressure on what are the signifiers that you're ready to start putting pressures on for that?

For every person it's different. First of all, before we begin, everyone has to fill up a questionnaire of 125 questions. You'll need about two hours to get through this questionnaire, so I need you to be very focused and very relaxed and very sincere with yourself because the more sincere you are with yourself, the better data I will get and the better profiling will be.

For you. So it's actually a neurobiological profiling. And this, through this profile, we will create the blueprint of the strategy that has to be implemented to you specifically because biohacking is designed for each person separately. The ways the, of course we have some general rules, but the ways we implement them.

They have to do with yourself alone. So we have to monitor how your yourself reacts. I cannot tell you from now if you will be able to handle pressure, diet, dietician pressure, or exercise pressure in three months, in one month, in five months. I don't know. We will see Normally there is a tracking procedure because I ask you.

Week by week, there are some protocols that we have to implement in your life. Easy protocols. Okay? And week by week we put more protocols and you have to track them down. So this will give us the feedback of how strong you are now, and if now is the time to start eliminating a little bit your what you eat.

So at first you take general rules. Okay. Cut all the starches, the hyper processed food. Learn how to read the labels, cut the sugar, of course, change it into stevia or monk fruit or something else. Natural sweetener, not artificial sweetener. Get rid of all the artificial stuff. This is what we do first with your nutrition.

When we realize that you're more ready than we start looking to say, okay let's implement some fasting protocols. So create a window, six, eight, you 16. Eight. So you eat whatever you eat without counting the calories through this window. After 10 days, maybe we start counting the calories and say, okay, let's create a caloric deficit.

Something that is, you can live with it like 300 calories, which is okay. It's not five or 600 calories, which is super low. It would, it'll definitely block your metabolism. What we begin, and it's super important for everyone, is sleep. Like guys, if you're not able to sleep. You are not able to be healthy.

And what I usually say to my public speeches is if you consider yourself a supercar, okay. Every manufacturer of a car signifies and says that, okay, every 30,000 miles 40,000 miles, I don't know. What do you have to do to your car normally? Probably oil. Oil change. Yeah. You have to go and service.

You have to go to to, to maintainance. Okay, so human body needs a service every 16 hours. Try to think of it like that. Sleep is not the time that we rest. Yeah, it happens. Okay. You do get rest. This is what you understand, but sleep is the most important time for your biology because that is the time that everything happens, all the functions that the the repairing functions.

They, the, this is the exactly the time that happens. And immunity. This is the time when if you are sick, if you are cold, if you ca catch a cold when you sleep, is the time that your body actually heals and your body actually repairs itself. So your body, your physiology, says that every 16 hours you need to sleep for at least eight hours in order to be able to perform best for the next 16 hours.

This is it. People think it's all about rest and say that, oh, it's okay. I can stay without resting that much. I can see that I am strong and I can sleep for four or five hours a day. And I keep going and my program is so fed up, so fixed. So what is the outcome? You just burn yourself out.

Nothing wor works properly. And not even thinking about fat loss and losing, losing your weight is, it's a joke. You are not even healthy. Please. Yeah. I love that statement. Focusing on losing weight is the, is a joke. That's not where it's at. It's at this holistic view. And the goal is not to lose weight quickly.

The goal is to get healthy in your body. So I love this and we have to wrap up at this point, but I know there are, including me. A lot of listeners who'd be very interested in starting this process and taking our focus and our emphasis off of, I need to lose those 10 pounds in the next two months.

Kinda taking it off of that versus I'm gonna take a year to actually get healthy. I'm gonna take however long it takes. I'm going to start slowly implementing these habits so that I can actually. Be healthy and it doesn't start with weight loss. So Kelly, thank you so much for being on our show and sharing your experience with our listeners.

How can people get in touch with you and we'll have these links in our show notes as well. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Through my email. So it's like [email protected] through my website. You can find all the contact if info and my personal contact info.

I have WhatsApp. Okay. I'm in Greece, but people, we can contact each other through Viber, through WhatsApp, and through all the social platforms that I'm on. Thank you very much for having me here. It's a pleasure to speak out loud for trying to make people. Change the direction of what they're actually thinking that is beneficial for them.

Yeah. So important change though. It's not how can I lose weight? It's a much bigger conversation and I'm really seeing that. So we have an offer to the listeners today from Kelly. It's from her biohacking business Beyond Human Lab. And it is 15% off of a three month [email protected], you're gonna use the coupon code habits for humans, no Spaces all spelled out.

We're gonna have that in the show notes as well. Anything else you wanna say about that? That program, that three month program, is that what you're talking about? That starts with the the Neurobio profile for the blueprint with the weekly tracking. Is that the program that you were talking about before?

Of course all of our programs begin with that because we do need to profile you before we start implementing any tactics on you, any tactic to hack your biology actually and to make it work for you and not against you. So we do offer a three month program, a six month program, and a year program. Three months is.

For someone who has no idea what I'm talking about is the first time that you listen about biohacking and what is this Greek lady is saying that she's trying to express it in rough English, but okay, we all understand what is going on. So it's a way to get to know each other. And then we see how we go on, and then you see how your body reacts and how your body responds to these new changes.

Awesome. I love it. I'm super interested in that. I'm gonna be checking that out. I would love to work with you, Kelly, and our second sponsor is Phoenix retreat center.com. That's Phoenix with an F-F-I-F-E-N-I-X. Check out all of our upcoming retreats from birding retreats to mermaids, to relocating from the US to lesbian and queer women events.

We've got all kinds of retreats. Come to Costa Rica for your beachfront Reset. And accidentally leave with friends for life. So thank you so much, Kelly, for joining us. Thanks to our listeners, 📍 this is Habits for Humans. Remember to check our show notes and get all of your free gifts in the links. Thank you in advance for leaving us a positive review as well.

Have a wonderful day.