Julie Hilsen

Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another episode of Life of Love, where we spend our time interviewing amazing people producers, and creators and they give us tips on how to live a life of magic and joy and show up every day as our best self, and so I’m super excited to introduce Adam Hart today. He is an amazing journeyman of health and wellness and inspiration, and I read his book and I’ve explored his website and his work, and I’m just honored to have him as a guest. I know that he’s going to give us some great ideas and some insights. And just welcome, Adam, thank you for being on Life of Love.

Adam Hart

Guest

00:48

Thank you, julie, I appreciate you having me.

Julie Hilsen

Host

00:50

Adam is the founder and CEO of Power of Food. He has a website called PowerofFoodcom and a book, power of Food. You know where he’s at it. He’s presented his life wisdom in over 400 presentations which guide others to reclaim their health and happiness through enhanced emotional resilience.

Transforming Lives Through Nervous System Regulation

01:13

Adam, it’s just such a pleasure to have you here today and you know, the whole idea of living a life of love is what your book is centered around, and it’s self-care and it starts with having the most resources available. So you know if you can show up in your most healthy state. It seems like from what you were writing about, what I read is that you can show up with the most resources that you can have. You can deal with stress and emotional conflict so much better when you’re in a good place in your body. So I’m just really excited and I would love for you to share your story and how you were in your 20s and your body was aging and giving you signs and what you sort of live through to get to where you are now as an advocate.

Adam Hart

Guest

02:02

Yeah well, and I appreciate it and I would imagine lots of us out there can relate. At a young age, I had a very poor relationship with food in particular, and the stress that I was going through as a child led to me having a very strong sugar and food addiction. That led to me becoming pre-diabetic and overweight and suffering from ADHD anxiety and depression. So lots of self-worth, self-esteem, guilt, and frustration thinking.

02:35

And I had my rock bottom moment in my mid-20s and I guess I got to that point where I just surrendered because I had tried so many diets and I tried so many fitness programs and I tried meditation and I tried yoga and I tried medication and I tried therapy and doing what society was always telling me I’m supposed to try to do to feel better, but nothing was working and I just got to that rock bottom moment and I was like, okay, I give up.

03:06

What do I do now? And that’s when I discovered what I discovered and it took me on this beautiful journey of an internal exploration into how I could optimize my mind, my own body, and how to utilize that through. What I figure is probably the missing link for most of us is a deeper connection to our ability to regulate our nervous system, and when I began that journey into nervous system regulation and learning how to use practices and tools that fit my life, it transformed almost immediately my relationship to myself and my relationship to everybody else around me in the most beautiful ways.

Julie Hilsen

Host

03:52

That is lovely, and self-regulation is huge because it’s you, you’re owning it. It’s the ultimate empowerment, it’s knowing where you are and what you need, and I love it because that’s where the magic comes in. When you surrender and you’re like, well, what am I missing? What do I need to see? And that question of you know you’re not going to get spoon-fed, it’s not someone else’s responsibility. It’s on you to figure out what works for you. And I love how you were looking for fitness and you didn’t like the gym, and so would you share with the audience about your, or getting your, passion for rock climbing?

Adam Hart

Guest

04:34

Yeah, you know, the climbing was such a beautiful manifestation. Again, it was that rock bottom moment where I was just giving up, didn’t know what else to do, and I just happened to stumble upon an indoor rock climbing gym and I got motivated to go inside. And right away I was looking around this indoor climbing gym and I was starting to go into a panic attack, without even getting on the wall, but I still. There was something about it that I said okay, I’m going to try this.

05:04

And I got into the harness and I started climbing up the side of the wall I went into a panic attack and I started to yell at my buddy to let me down. And you know, you let me down and I could feel my nervous system just going into overdrive. But there was something about it that was quite appealing because it was an immediate recognition that the more I was climbing, the more I was starting to understand how I could regulate my response to the anxiety of it. And when I recognized, wow, I can control the anxiety when I’m climbing. It took me quite a while to understand it because I knew climbing was helping me feel more peaceful, more calmer because you’re just so focused on the movement and your breath, and I became addicted to the freedom it was giving me from my mind. But as I got involved in climbing and took it to a higher level, that’s when I deepened my understanding of I’m spending hours and hours a day, multiple days at a time, in the immersion of my nervous system regulation, because it’s a real fight or flight scenario when you’re climbing outdoors and you’re high up on a mountain which is where I eventually took it and you got all this beautiful exposure down all around you and your mind would love to disrupt that in a big way. And my ability to reset my mind in those moments and bring peace calm and strength back.

06:41

I said to myself, okay, there’s something about what I’m doing in terms of being able to regulate my nervous system in the moments of life where my brain is trying to trigger me In the moments was the key, and nobody had ever told me that, hey, adam, you can work with the moments of your life and teach your brain to let go of the use of certain triggering thoughts so that you can become more immersed in your own body experience of life, your heart experience of life.

07:13

And so when I started to understand the full extent of what I was doing with my nervous system and what the biology was, I said to myself, okay, what’s the first place I could bring this into that?

07:25

I know that I have anxiety in these other areas of my life and the first one I brought it to was my sugar addiction.

07:32

And I said, okay, every time I have a craving, my brain tries to get me to react to sugar, I’m going to pretend I’m on the side of a big cliff and I’m going to do the same nervous system resetting practice that I do in the moments climbing, but I’m going to do it before I react to eating the sugar, and it was the first time that I had ever found something that worked in a way where I didn’t have to restrict myself through any crazy diet that created more stress and more frustration and more guilt and brought me immediate relief, and all I had to do was just be so disciplined in the moments I was craving sugar to do this actual reset, which is called heart flow.

08:18

It’s a 33-second breath practice that teaches your nervous system, and your brain that it’s safe, that it can let go, and it began to change the way I was craving things, in particular to the foods that I was stuck addicted to, in a way where I had more space to start to manifest all the rest of the beauty of food that became the Power of Food book. All came from working with the moments of life in this way.

Julie Hilsen

Mindful Eating and Self-Love

08:49

I heard you talk about mindfulness and the whole idea of the heart flow being connected to the heart and knowing your goal. Your goal is you know you set your goal, your intention and we talked about it in the pre-interview. Everything starts with the intention that you are not going to have that sugar. The sugar was harmful, is inflammatory, it was preventing you from showing up as your best self and you took the heart flow breathing and used it. It’s beautiful and when you’re, I want to. I want to quote your book and you say you wrote in your book strengthening love, care, and respect for yourself. Eating living food is another very powerful act of love. So it just makes sense that you went to a heart-breathing technique to get to your food goals, because it all comes back to self-love and what your body needs. It’s so powerful.

Adam Hart

Guest

09:48

Yeah, I mean, there’s an element of what many of us are stuck in terms of the daily grind and you know I’m speaking out she specifically to the parents out there because that’s me and I know what it takes to be a present parent. And we’re kind of in an epidemic now where we aren’t providing a safe, emotionally safe environment for our kids because our nervous systems are just so disrupted by the way the brain operates. And so food is just one of those beautiful opportunities to notice how you’re being triggered by food and begin to work with those triggers in a way where you’re not stuck in the frustration of your reactivity. But how can I use the frustrating thoughts and in those moments, how do I transform my relationship with my brain’s use of those thoughts? Because that’s where it’s coming from. The brain has just learned that you are easily triggered by a certain thought and we don’t realize that that’s just the brain wanting to feed off of our fight or flight stress response. It likes the adrenaline and unless we in those moments teach it that it doesn’t have to do that, that it can let go if we don’t teach it to let go, we’ll be stuck living most of our lives as a cerebral brain-based experience and that denies us the ability to utilize our heart, which has so much more power and so much more freedom and fulfillment and presence.

11:19

And that’s the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s most of us again, and I talk about, in the power of food, this idea of the 80-20 rule where 80% of my diet was processed and kind of the dead types of food you know, the 20% being the living types of food. Well, when you start to switch that around, you feel the difference. Well, the same works with the dominant energy of your nervous system. As you shift your nervous system energy from being dominant in the sympathetic, where most of us are 80% just reactive to life and uncertain, and you know there’s a lot of fear and anxiety and what ifs and how do I? And we’re just so stuck in these past and future focus thoughts, which is all the fight or flight response.

12:07

When we flip the switch on that and start to live from our parasympathetic, calm, rest, and digest state, we feel the significance of what that provides. And it provides a very healthy mind and a very healthy body and a way that most of us aren’t connecting to. Again, we’re very stuck. I have to fix something. So I’m going to try this. I’m going to try another fitness program, another diet, another, this, another that yeah, but the foundation is still off and it’s all about the nervous system and my discovery around. That Just made it so much more smooth and joyful to explore food in my life in a way where it didn’t have to be stressful or didn’t have to be all about restricting, and it could be about the joy of it and the manifestation of more of what works for me in my particular body, in a way that just kept me feeling happier and more fulfilled so that I was showing up for my kids in that energy as well, which Made a huge difference so far for how they’re being raised.

Julie Hilsen

Host

13:16

It’s so huge and I want to encourage people because what I found from your book was that it’s In your philosophy and eating. You know it’s not a one-size-fits-all-all. If you can introduce these high-nutrition foods, your power, your power foods that you talk about, the living foods that you know, just having those in your diet can help you be more present because you’re going to have better energy from them. After all, you’re going to get away from the GMO flower as you said, it’s just empty calories you’re going to get away from the pesticides, you’re going to get away from the sugars and the additives and I would. I mean, it was crazy. My husband brought home a bag of chocolate the other day and I was like, oh, you know, let me try it, I’ll have it. It was really good, it hit nice. I was like, wow, this is good. Cookies and cream, chocolate bar. It was like whoa. And then I read the label. It said maybe produced with synthetic. It was, it was Biosynthetic. It wasn’t even GMO. It was something Like artificial, complete, artificial in and I was like whoa. I just threw the whole thing away. I was like I’m not eating anything that’s not, that’s beyond. Gmo like this is crazy.

14:43

But the thing is, when you’re, when you’re implementing these small changes, to say, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to eat more from the outside of the supermarket, I’m going to stay away from the inside isles, then all of a sudden, when you eat like that and you limit your sugar, you have more energy to do things extra besides just existing, and it’s a reciprocal thing. And so that’s why I want to get people. Hope is that it’s just baby steps and, like you said, you know, just count. You know what you had for lunch. If you had, if you had, you know, a pepper and a piece of lettuce, that’s two points. If you had bread and turkey, that’s two minutes, but sort of evens it out, and starts getting you.

15:30

What you do is you start to raise people, people’s awareness of the positive and negative and how they can equal out and how you can, you can tilt the scales to be more toward your advantage. So it’s very empowering and you know, in the whole, the whole thing about food and it being important and being something a ritual. It helps the family unit, it helps the kids know that they’re cared for and that they’re in a loving home when you sit down and you share food and you explore flavors. And maybe it didn’t turn out the way it did last time, but that’s a talking point and it’s it’s like a whole. I know that our family dinners are my cherished times and even when I’m worn out I don’t feel like cooking I throw a meal together and we can sit down and enjoy it. It just changes my day. It’s just, it’s a very important thing. It’s no coincidence.

Adam Hart

Guest

16:30

Yeah, you know it’s. It comes down to recognizing that everything has an energetic code to it, right, if we look at the science of it, so quantum physics everything is made up of energy and we’re vibrating an energetic force, and I think it’s measured as six feet outwards from our body. And so if food also interacts with that, well, let’s not look in terms of what I have to eliminate. Instead, why can’t we look at it in terms of what can I add? And then adding in. If you’re in tune with your energy and you’re not stuck in frustration about the diet you’ve been told you gotta go on, or the fact that you wanna stop craving the alcohol or craving all the sugar or whatever it is that you’re stuck somewhat addicted to, as an escape to how you’re feeling emotionally, and you can start to pull some things in that are a source of light. That is a great approach that can allow you to lift your spirits a little bit by adding hemp seeds.

The Power of Food and Presence

17:38

For me, hemp seeds were the one food. That is where the title of the book came from the Power of Food. I couldn’t believe that I discovered this beautiful plant-based protein source that was making me feel energized, was making me feel less hungry more sustained, and more focused, and all I had to do was add these seeds into my processed food and I was feeling better from it. Eventually, that source of light, which was just the one food at first, took over some of the processed foods to where I was like, well, I don’t like eating processed cookies anymore as much as they were the number one source of my sugar addiction, and that’s where the peanut butter hemp cookies come from in the book. It was like I wanna learn how to make cookies out of these hemp seeds that I now know are so much better for me.

18:26

And so it kind of evolves into this beautiful energetic experience of how I started to add more food in, more food in and learn to play with it as a manifestation of that energy, to where it just took over and the way I was feeling every morning getting up and the motivation and the focus in my mind, now that I wasn’t stuck on trying to go after the next fix of whatever that was. I had so much more space to explore what was possible and the nutrition just evolved, getting creative in the kitchen, because I had the space and the capacity to go and experience the joy of what being in my kitchen was providing me, which I never would have got there from following a restrictive diet that, again, I was told to do for so many years that it’s not the right approach. The more we focus on what can we add, that are a source of light and we learn to be present in that experience. The energy of that is gonna guide us where we wanna go.

Julie Hilsen

Host

19:32

It’s so beautiful and it’s a shift of mindset. Again, it’s abundance, it’s you have everything you need, it’s just getting it. It’s not a lack, it’s not a deficit, it’s the abundance mindset. So it’s just so dear to my heart and I love in your book how you talked about how you were a human because you were conditioned by negative thoughts to live a life of constant stress and do, do, do. And I just picture you in that little windowless office at the furniture shop doing and doing and doing. And then you decided you wanted to be in the powerful, energizing existence of a human being. And that’s what you’re speaking about being a human being, not a human doing, like experience being that moment. So it just rings true, it’s just so, it’s so amazing, it’s just insightful, really appreciable.

Adam Hart

Guest

20:30

And you know, presence is not, it’s not something we’re taught to know as a feeling experience. What does it feel like to be in this moment, right now, and recognize the energetic power of being present in the moment? We have glimpses of it. Anybody you chat with and you say well, what are the moments that you were feeling most excited in your life? You know, and you’ll get the when I met my partner, or when in the birth of my child, or maybe it was during a very intense sport, where you have this moment of connecting to what’s known as the flow state, and that’s a presence that’s not being lost in the 70,000 thoughts that we have on average every day, that’s being at peace at the moment and that has an energy to it and has a feeling to it. And it’s something that I never knew that I could have such a deep, intimate relationship with when I was stuck as a human doing.

21:29

And modern society has us in a state where we have lost the ability to adapt to the amount of pressure, the amount of urgency, the amount of agitation, and fear that’s being thrown at us from all the different aspects of society, that we just get lost in our minds and we don’t even know what it feels like to be present.

21:53

We’re just stuck in this constant looping pattern of the way the brain likes to lock us into our past and our future. And so as we learn to utilize our biology, and our nervous system in particular, and learn what regulation can bring us in terms of that experience of feeling presence, you start to recognize that that’s it, like that’s where life has lived, and from there, you get to have a different relationship with food, you get to have a different relationship with fitness, you get to have a different relationship with your sleep, with your kids, with your partner. It all comes from cultivating a deeper relationship with presence, and presence is a biological state, it’s a state of your nervous system, and it can be optimized if we have the right tools and the right support around us. And that’s my mission, especially for parents, is to have access to what are those tools and how you bring that energy into your own life, into your way of being, and into the lives of your kids and everybody else around you.

Julie Hilsen

Host

22:59

Well, that segues into my next question, Adam, because I wanted you to talk about the first 10, your first 10 practices, and that could be something you do with your children. It would be a very nice thing to do before breakfast or just after breakfast to set the tone of the day. I’m not sure if that’s ever you’ve ever thought of that. But yeah, can you share with the audience about your first 10, because I thought it was amazing.

Adam Hart

Guest

23:26

Yeah, I appreciate that.

23:27

Yeah, I mean my first 10 practices which are all my clients. This is kind of the key. Next step there’s kind of a six-step process I call the Unleash your Energy Roadmap the first step is to just get very familiar with some of the trigger points in your life, what’s poking at you more than any other area, and there’ll be some dominant themes that show up. And then it’s a matter of being able to start to work with some of those triggers to teach your mind to let go, like to let go of your kids as a source of the trigger, to let go of your partner as a source of a trigger, to let go of food as a source of a trigger. Then the next step number three, is to get in touch with what you do want, like how do I want to feel around food? What do I want that experience to be like?

24:15

And as you get into steps four and five, that’s where my first 10 come in and that’s the process of becoming very familiar with the emotional expression of what you do want and how you spend the first 10 minutes of your day connecting with the vision of who you choose to be around food or around those other areas that are triggering. You know, I appreciate that I wake up every morning feeling so abundant, so excited to be with my kids, so in love with who they are and how they are. What’s the emotion that that feels like? So that when you do go downstairs and you are being triggered by your kids in whatever ways they might trigger you maybe they’re being loud or they’re fighting, or they don’t want to get their clothes on, to get out the door and you’re reacting those are the moments that you can then do a nervous system reset, which is heart flow in that moment and bring that vision work in the 10 minutes that you just spent before you went downstairs connecting to who you choose to be.

25:16

Now you are very familiar with that emotional state so that when you reset it in that moment, you’re with them. You can bring in the feeling of who you choose to be with them in that moment. And it’s the most amazing thing how quickly you start to notice that they begin to shift their behavior. You’re shifting your behavior because you’re not reacting to what your mind is telling you and now everybody else around you begins to feel you’re no longer contributing to their reactivity. So there’s this space for growth and I think once we, once we start to tune into how this works and we have these practices like my first 10 to learn to optimize this, you get access to choice and that’s the most beautiful thing possible because you get to choose what serves you so much more often than not, and that leads to the more abundant ways of our ability to live.

Julie Hilsen

Host

26:14

Yes, and it’s one of my main proponents is every moment’s a chance to live the life of your dreams.

26:22

So it ties right in with everything I’m about.

26:26

So it just resonates with me so much that, even if you do fall into that old pattern or what you weren’t visualizing and you can just say, you know, I am not going to show up that way anymore and this isn’t serving me, and you just, like you said, it becomes more of your default that you’re in this heart space and this present, where you’re, like you said, your field of up to six feet, you’re influencing everyone around you and I think if everyone understood the power of that not even just saying or doing anything, just being present in your six feet and knowing that affects everything and everyone around you.

27:08

I mean you look at the water studies that Dr. Imoto Well, Veda Austin, she’s taking it one next level from MOTO and if you can check out her on YouTube, she has these pictures where she captures crystallized water, where it’s reacting to things around it and even taking on ships, and it’s just like holy cow, like if we understood the power that our heart presents, that we do. We do live a lot more responsibly. You know anything that we expose ourselves to, any thoughts that we have, like the whole thing, and you know actions. It’s, it’s just amazing yeah.

Adam Hart

Guest

28:01

Yeah, you know, and the thoughts we have directly impact the way we perform. Very much like the water experiments. So when we clean up our mind and start to think about what we’re doing to our mind and start to have our mind let go of some of the self-sabotaging thoughts that I’ve been holding since we were kids, because we kind of held back from feeling emotion. After all, we were hurt in some capacity when we were kids, well, that’s damaging ourselves into adulthood because of the thoughts that keep ruminating on that experience. And unless we provide space for our mind to let go of those patterns, we won’t know the feeling that’s available for us at this moment. And you know, knowing what I know about my past and how I’ve supported my mind to let go of the use of not feeling deeply loved by my father when I was young and all the mechanisms that I used to protect myself from feeling because I didn’t want to get hurt again.

29:05

Well, it’s the same.

29:07

It’s got the same mechanism in terms of denying me the ability to feel my abundance right now.

29:12

When we teach the brain to let go of those patterns, it’s amazing what you can start to experience and how things can show up with so much more ease and flow and guide you to being in a deeper level of service to others because you’re no longer holding back from your self-love. You know the co-regulation experience is real. The ability to be regulated yourself is key to really embracing what it feels like to co-regulate another human being, and for me, that’s been the ultimate manifestation is being able to be in my self-love, in the presence of another human being who I can feel where they are at because their thoughts and their words have a frequency to them and I don’t have to say anything. It’s just my way of being in their presence is providing them with access to that feeling, in a way where they might not understand it, or they might. They might, but they’re going to gravitate to you and you’re going to manifest more people who want access to that feeling, and that’s that’s been the ultimate manifestation.

Julie Hilsen

Host

30:22

It’s such a gift and I appreciate you sharing that with us. Adam, we’re reaching the end of our episode, our time here together, so I do. It’s just been a delight and I just wondered if there’s anything else you’d like to share.

Adam Hart

Guest

30:38

Yeah, I mean, if anybody does resonate with this and you know I mentioned I have a stick-step process for doing this work. It’s called the Unleash your Endure Roadmap. I do have a free copy of that for anybody who would like to get access to it and it kind of goes through each of those steps in more detail. And I do have that on a website, the website’s clearimpact.com, and you can grab a free copy there.

Julie Hilsen

Praise for Easy Versatile Cookbook Recipes

31:06

Oh, great, Thank you, and I mean I would recommend your book because it has some delightful recipes. I think it’s. I didn’t get to hold the paper copy because you sent me the PDF, but I bet it’s over half the recipes. There are, I believe, almost 100 pages of recipes.

Adam Hart

Guest

31:22

Yeah.

Julie Hilsen

Host

31:24

So, and I love that some of them are five minutes or less, like that’s amazing. And then some are going to take you a little time with the food dehydrator, but I love how it can meet you where you are on that day and you can just work some of those, those tips into your life, like right away.

Adam Hart

Guest

31:41

That’s great, Julia. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Julie Hilsen

Host

31:47

Yes, yes. Well, I look forward to sharing this and I look forward to following you and all the wonderful things you’re doing and thank you for your contributions to humanity.

Adam Hart

31:57

Thanks so much. I appreciate that.