EP 181: Chef Andrew Garrett's Take on Natural Living and Foraging

Chef Andrew, a firm believer in the power of local ingredients, gives us a riveting account of his life journey—from his roots on a fruit farm to his experiences with modern city living and his enriching experiences with hunting and foraging. 

This is not just about food; it's a deep dive into how these experiences have shaped his philosophy of cooking. Of course, we also delve into the serious side of things— the effects of industrial farming on our health, athletic performance, and the planet. 

Chef Andrew shares invaluable insights into how clean and organic food can enhance performance and recovery, and how sustainable farming practices can lead to a healthier and more vibrant life. 

But it's not all about food. We also explore the importance of disconnecting from technology and immersing ourselves in the natural world. We encourage you to take a refreshing outdoor walk, appreciate the rustling leaves and feel the cool breeze against your skin. 

This episode is a profound exploration of our relationship with food, nature, and ourselves. We wrap up with a discussion of guided foraging trips and cooking courses with Chef Andrew, a unique opportunity to deepen your connection to the food you eat. Embark on this journey of self-discovery, health awareness, and the joys of foraging and wild game cooking.  Enjoy!

Andrew Garrett is a published and award-winning chef who has a passion for food and life thanks to countless adventures and travel around the globe. Having grown up in Sonoma, California, Andrew quickly developed an appreciation for all things local. While serving for the U.S. Army in Germany, he was able to spend many weekends traveling to France and Tuscany, where he felt right at home enjoying local delicacies, such as wine and cheese and in his leisure, foraging and taking up butchery. Andrew is enamored with French and Italian culture and cuisine and its regional diversity. His passion for ingredients is quintessential in bringing his patrons the best possible recipes and sauces. Andrew is excited to share his sense of adventure and thirst for knowledge and inspire anyone with a passion for great food.

Connect with Andrew here:
Instagram:  @chef_garrett

Website:  www.chefandrewgarrett.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

Your life is your greatest work of art, and it all relates back to the synchronicities.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Welcome to Integrate Yourself. I'm your host, alison Pillow, and you can find me at finallythrivingprogramcom and alisonpillowcom. You can find my book Finally Thriving on Amazon or any other place you can find a book, as well as Audible and any other places you find audio books, as well as on Spotify now, so you can listen to it there too. It's a great gift to give to people this time of year. If you do want a signed copy of my book, if you'd like that to give someone else or to gift yourself, you can email me directly and we can go ahead and make that happen. I will leave my email address on as a way to contact me on the show notes today. I hope you're all enjoying the holiday season. I hope you're giving yourself the gift of presents as well and creating that space for yourself this holiday season. If you want to know more about how to do that, I talk about it in my last episode, my solo cast, about giving yourself the gift of presents and how important that is this time of year and what that leads to as we approach the resolution time of January, how you can make it much easier for you to resolve what you need to resolve that time of year when you start to practice prioritizing time with yourself. Now Registration for my finally thriving program. My next class is open now. You can head over to the link in my show notes as well to go ahead and sign up for that. It starts January 22nd, so if you'd like to be a part of that class it's a companion program to my book Finally Thriving. If you want to get familiar with the information, go ahead and order the book and start reading that now and you will have a good idea of what we go through in class.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Together we go deeper into these concepts of aligning the mind, connecting with the body naturally, and learning how to listen to our spirit, connecting with our soul on a deeper level, which brings us into a place of inner calm and peace where we know ourselves, we can feel our own energy and we can move into life, and connecting with others in a very easeful, graceful way. It's a pleasant, pleasant way to go through life and I've helped many people with this process and I frame it. You know I have a holistic wellness lens here for this class. It's from the lens of wellness on all levels and all aspects mind, body, spirit and I give you many, many ideas on how you can build your own wellness practice and make that a daily practice so that you can bring that health on all levels into your body and be more aligned in your mind, so you can attract more of what you really want to create in your life and then learn how to focus in and pay attention to the messages your spirit is asking you to pay attention to. That goes for intuition, that goes for all of the higher senses and appreciation for the beauty in our life, the people in our life, the connections. This is what happens. When we can connect with our spirit, we can go through life much more joyfully. So if you want to be a part of that class, it's a 12 week course and coaching program and I take you through some very practical steps which are very transformative for people's lives. They've already been, people have already been or how do I say this? Their lives have already been changed. Yeah, it's just amazing to watch the personal growth of my students. So if you want to be a part of that, if you're ready to take that next step and manage your wellness and your emotions and your mindset and really get clear on what your body needs, this class is for you Head over to the link in the show notes to sign up.

Speaker 2: 5:08

So today's show I have Chef Andrew Garrett, my dear friend Andrew, who is on the show today. We've been wanting to do this show for some time. We finally got around to doing it. He really shares so much wisdom about food and foraging and abundance in nature that we can find in our food system here. So you know, we tend to think of food as coming from the grocery store, but really we're really built to be able to see and find food everywhere in nature. So this is really true empowerment when we can start to see how much abundance there is and how much beauty and appreciation we can have for our food this way. He works with athletes. He's also been on some reality TV shows and he's owned his own hot sauce business as well. So he has got a lot of experience in the food industry and he has a lot of wisdom to share today. So, without further ado, it is my honor and my pleasure to introduce you to Chef Andrew Garrett. Enjoy. Your life is your greatest work of art.

Speaker 2: 6:49

Today I'm here with my good friend, andrew Garrett. He is a published and award-winning chef who has a passion for food and life thanks to countless adventures and travel around the globe. Having grown up in Sonoma, california, andrew quickly developed an appreciation for all things local. While serving for the US Army in Germany, he was able to spend many weekends traveling to France and Tuscany, where he felt right at home, enjoying local delicacies such as wine and cheese and an as leisure forging and taking up butchery. Andrew is enamored with French and Italian culture and cuisine and its regional diversity. His passion for ingredients is quintessential in bringing his patrons the best possible recipes and sauces.

Speaker 2: 7:38

Andrew is excited to share his sense of adventure and thirst for knowledge and inspire anyone with a passion for great food. He's also been on Chopped and Supermarket Steakout, which was really cool to be on. I'd love to hear your experience about with that, andrew. He's also just an amazing chef and we're going to get into how he got into that and the type of chef he prefers to be, local food forging and those kinds of things, as well as just what he's doing with it. Now. We're just going to get into all of that. I'm so excited to have you here, andrew. Andrew's a good friend and this has been a long time coming. I'm so excited we're finally doing this.

Speaker 3: 8:28

Yeah, we finally made it happen.

Speaker 2: 8:30

Exactly. We kept talking about it for a while, then finally we did it. Yeah, andrew man, you have such a diverse background. You've been on reality TV shows, you have your own hot sauce business, you've been a chef for professional athletes. Kind of just give my audience an idea of how you got to be doing what you're doing. It's really special. It's a special thing to offer people. I would love to hear more about that, how you got there.

Speaker 3: 11:26

Absolutely. Thank you for the introduction. Yeah, very, very, very stoked to be here and talking to you about about me yeah, it is my favorite subject. So but how I got started? Really it goes back to growing up.

Speaker 3: 11:42

My parents were caretakers on a 12 acre fruit farm in a little town called Glen Ellen, which is just outside Sonoma A lot of people just kind of group it together with Sonoma. But I grew up there as an only child and so I had a plethora of chores and my dad worked early in the morning, my mom worked through mid to evening, so I was home alone a lot and you know I have to get myself to the school bus, get off the school bus, get back to the house and then take care of whatever chores I had to do. But with that growing up on the farm, my father was a great cook, fantastic cook, and a lot of times you know we were just going out to our garden and picking fresh vegetables and cooking straight off there. I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of weekends hunting with my father, even just days that we would walk out to our front porch and you could shoot quail straight up the front porch. You know there's a flock of 50, 60 birds right there and you know, shoot them, go out there, clean them up, take them inside and cook them alongside, like fresh zucchini or fresh jalapenos, fresh cayans, like you know. All these my experience was so different. I mean even the crick running behind the house, you know, you go out there and I could catch three or four trout and bring them upstairs and cook them. So growing up, that was my experience, you know. And just the hills around that area were also full of chanterelle mushrooms and so, you know, in the fall we'd go pick mushrooms and that was my introduction to the. In my mind, that's how food was.

Speaker 3: 13:20

When I got to 12, my parents had divorced. When I was six we moved into the city and I was far away from that and that's when I got introduced to things like fast food and it was so much different than actually walking out to the garden and you know I found myself really missing it. At the same time, I was very fortunate to be a really good athlete. You know, I was good at sports. Just kind of naturally I picked them up. They made sense. I love team atmospheres. So I was playing all these different sports and my performance is when I reflect on it, like at that time I had no idea what I'm talking about. At 12 years old I wouldn't know what it you know. When I reflect back on it, I look at the correlation between how I was eating from six to 12 versus 13 to 20. And my performance was in line with that just my energy levels.

Speaker 3: 14:24

But again, being so fortunate to grow up in a place where riding my bike every day throughout the summer, riding it for miles at a time to go to a fishing hole or, you know, go out to the mountains and go hunting, that's really where my passion for food really settled in. I think the bigger part of it really was in my formative years, my parents were at odds on a regular basis. There's a lot of arguing, a lot of bickering, and the only time that things were ever calm or settled we're at the dinner table. It was the only time that we ever had any kind of you know, calm or consistent was in those moments, and so I think, especially you know, as funny as after reading your book, it really helped me to dive into some of those things that were experiences that I didn't realize had such an impact on my long, long term life and goals and feelings and emotions. And so that's it.

Speaker 3: 15:33

That's where the real depth of food and dining and eating really came together for me after reflecting on this, where I landed?

Speaker 2: 15:45

Yeah that's incredible, yeah, and so it really cooking for you and in providing people with this kind of service, really provides a service to yourself on a deeper level to connect more with your family and when you felt like that was really, those times are really good, right, it has like that, that feeling for you that you're continuing to revisit, you know, through your cooking and offerings that way.

Speaker 2: 16:12

So that that's incredible and, yeah, it sounds like that. You got that early on that, that connection with food that many people don't get, you know, and that's so rare these days. But it's amazing when we take those experiences and share that with other people, because it's it really does connect us into even the deeper aspects of what you know meals like you were saying what meals really mean to us, what this time spent together eating really means. You know it's changed so much through the nutrition industry, the fitness industry. You know it's like it's just gotten so convoluted and complex about how we eat, but really it's so simple and heart centered in a way, right, and that's what I love about what you do and what you offer people.

Speaker 3: 17:02

Well, it's a trip, so I collect cookbooks back behind me. I mean, a lot of those are cookbooks and I have a handful of books that are from the 19, early 1900s to, you know, mid 1940s and then from the 40s to the 70s, to the 80s, 90s into present day, and it's really interesting to watch. You look at recipes from 1910. I've got a better homes and garden cookbook from 1915. And you look at that book and you look at the recipes and you look at. You know you go out and pick time from your garden, you go out and get eggs from your coop. You know the, the, the instructions are the, almost a manual for homesteading, what we would call homesteading now.

Speaker 3: 17:46

But that was life. And then, you know, you fast forward to 1940, 1950. All of a sudden everybody's coming home from the Great War. Life is. It becomes a lot faster, it becomes a lot more important. You know we have two parents that are both working and so the time that we were taking to cook is now reduced. You know we go from 1214 hours of preparation to this. You know 45 minute window.

Speaker 3: 18:16

And then you fast forward to 1960, 1970, and that 20 minute window turns into a 15 minute window, then the 80s and 90s, and we're going to a five minute window. All of a sudden, you know, we have to hustle and move and hustle and move and hustle and move and that's just not the way we're designed as humans, in my opinion. In my opinion, but I don't think that's the way we're designed as humans. You know, we were designed to be outdoors and and experiencing nature and exploring and foraging and finding these ingredients. Now it's it's a game of convenience, you know, and I think somewhere in the late 60s, early 70s, food manufacturing really took advantage of that and we started to look for ways to how can we can things and make them last longer than they already do. How can we add preservatives that we don't necessarily need food? And so you look at the transition from manufacturing ingredients being vinegar, some spices and herbs in a jar that you can to oh, here's this ready to eat meal that's full of sodium, sodium by drowsy, and then, in 2008, green-lidded sugar, chloride, chloride dioxides and then any other number of hidden ingredients, you know, and it's really fascinating to look at that and kind of see where we're really taking a hard veer in our food chain.

Speaker 3: 19:52

And it's all down to me that, you know, and there's folks that are my age that have eaten that way their whole life. They've never experienced and, like you said, it's like having that experience growing up is. No one gets to do that anymore. You know. I mean even now, you know, I've got a handful of friends that have kids and they're constantly going from one thing to the other, one thing to the other. You know you have to be. It's almost like folks have to be doing things.

Speaker 2: 20:19

Yeah, it's like a trauma response, like busyness, right. It's so interesting to me too to think about that, cause I've done it. I did it in my life. I was a you know, an athlete, so we were running from you know one thing to the next four hours in the gym, coming home like at eight or nine o'clock in the evening. So it's like there wasn't really a lot of space for cooking and my parents were always driving us places and so we had to go to McDonald's sometimes, you know, because that was really the only the only way to kind of fit that meal in.

Speaker 2: 20:52

But even before I really got into athletics, like I remember my dad really spending time on gardening. He had this huge garden out back and we'd get a lot of our food out of the garden. So with my relatives, you know that lived in the neighborhood as well, and so most of my food my aunt, who I'd stay with in the summertime, most of her food came from her backyard garden. You know that we'd eat, she'd make us for lunch, and so I was so happy that I got to experience that before I started to experience the life of the athlete, you know, and the rushing around, and because it really did. You know, as I got older, I have come back to, you know, what is very simple and natural and like what's the most natural thing is for us to grow food right it's and pick it out of our backyard and we all have access to that. It's just prioritizing the time to do it and learning about it, you know. And so, but many people don't make time for that because we prioritize so many other things that in some of that, I think it just it isn't like progress, like it feels like progress, but when you look at it is it really progress, you know.

Speaker 2: 22:06

And so, getting back to what is real, because you know we're all doing things a lot on the computer. I'm one of those people and is that really the real world, you know? Is that a reflection of our real world or is it what we're looking at outside, you know, and seeing what's growing in our backyard, seeing what we can, you know, being still and present for our meals so we can have a healthy digestion, and really having gratitude for that, like true appreciation. And so that's where I think that space taking that space with your meal is. This is something I teach my students, and my program is how to just be present with your meals and even go through some kind not necessarily a religious thing, but like blessing your food and appreciating it and like sending that energy into the food before you bring it into your body, because that is really an important intention to set. This will help you be more healthy and have just more of a view of abundance in your life. That's a little bit different than material goods or money.

Speaker 3: 23:17

A lot of folks just don't. They never have that opportunity. It baffles me still today that I run into some clients, that I work as a personal chef with a lot of clients and some clients have no idea where things come from. Still, I grew up raising hogs and steer, so I know that when I put that time and effort into raising this animal and then it's on the dinner table, I don't have a Disney. I guess that's really what it is. I don't have that Disney association to it is. I don't have that. Oh my gosh, that's the pig that talks. That's not like. Oh no, that's Amos. We're going to eat him in six months, when he's big enough to harvest at a proper size, and we're going to feed him all these good ingredients. We're not just going to toss him in a pin stacked on top of six other animals and then well, I guess it's time and then throw it into a giant processor.

Speaker 2: 24:14

Yeah, so you have respect for the animal right. It's a respectful process and it's so, it's so. So most people are exposed to conventional ways of doing that right. So would you want maybe share just the difference between that and a more restorative or regenerative farming technique?

Speaker 3: 24:38

The way that that again kind of getting back to my timeline there of the 50s to 70s I guess we could expand it a little bit is we went from raising these animals ourselves to going to our local butcher who's getting their animals from their local rancher, and we're talking 500 to 1500 head of cattle. And then all of a sudden we're in this oh my God, we don't have time in the 70s and 80s and we start to see the real rise in industrialized farming. Right so we start stacking animals in the smallest possible area and it creates so many problems. Because now we're, you know, if you think about you know, a human living. Right, like humans, living stacked on top of each other is not an ideal situation for humans and a lot of times we see a lot of illnesses that are psychologically, emotionally established in those areas. Right, so animals are the same way. And when we start stacking these animals and just like, we need to just turn, turn a process, turn a process, turn a process. We need to produce, produce, produce.

Speaker 3: 25:46

The invention of mass freezing, right Like the amount of, and again there's now, for me, there's nothing wrong with frozen protein, frozen fish, frozen meats, there's nothing wrong with it. But when we're producing something to store it for future use, that's where we start to get into these problems, because now we're just turning something over. You know, canning is a great example of that. In overall food manufacturing, I think in America today we produce something like 890 trillion calories a day. We consume as Americans, something like 350 trillion. So we have this deficit. Deficit, that's almost 500 trillion calories, right, but yet we have people starving in America because they're not being, they're not receiving nutrient dense food, they're not actually eating things that are close to them, they're eating things that are from thousands and thousands of miles away.

Speaker 2: 26:42

So even like, even chemically like laden stuff too, right I mean yeah.

Speaker 3: 26:46

Exactly, yeah, and it's not. In my opinion, it's not how we're supposed to eat. You know we're not supposed to eat these things that have all these preservatives and you know we're hunter-gatherers and for my own personal, you know, I feel the best, I perform the best, when I'm eating something that is gone from a raw, fresh state to a prepared state, versus canned or fast food. And don't get me wrong, like I indulge, I indulge, you know, it's one of my things. But, yeah, the disconnection between where our food comes from and how we consume it. We really don't spend that time and I think that's why I really like most about the personal and private chef work that I do now Is I get to enjoy those dinners with my clients and you know, even though I'm preparing them, they're my animals.

Speaker 2: 27:49

Is that?

Speaker 3: 27:49

your cat. Wow.

Speaker 3: 27:52

They know I'm doing interviews. So, getting back to the story, you know, taking that time to slow down with a client and seeing their progress, you know I and it's really cool working with these professional athletes Because there's a tangible result from my, my experience and my cooking is I can see how well they perform or how, what, how good they feel when they're training or weightlifting. Because I think in you know your athlete, the old school idea of chicken and rice and tuna, chicken and rice and tuna, chicken and rice and tuna, eat a bunch of pasta the night before your football game, like that whole mentality of like car bloating the night before, has completely been debunked. But yet we're still. There are still places where these athletes are coming from, that those are. That's still the standard.

Speaker 2: 28:50

Yeah, I can see that.

Speaker 3: 28:51

Yeah, it's hard to break that, and so I've had clients ask me to make them chicken nuggets. I'm like sir.

Speaker 2: 28:59

That's the funny thing I've noticed too, like being being an athlete coming out of that world.

Speaker 2: 29:04

You would think that, as times have changed with our awareness of organic food, higher quality food and those kinds of things that would have trickled into the athletic arena, but it has not, and it seems to be that even with a professional athlete, so it just surprises me, but it's starting to.

Speaker 2: 29:25

There are some athletes that are starting to realize how, how beneficial cleaner organic food does for their performance. You know, one of my mentors, paul check, works with, I think, first Kobe Bryant and changed his mind about that, and I think then he influenced some people when he was alive in the NBA as well, towards that. And then so you're doing the same thing. You're just educating them like, hey, you know, yeah, you can do this, you can, you can perform at a high level with this crap diet, but could you, could do even better, even better, like because athletes are looking for that edge right, even better for restoration, coming back from injuries, those kinds of things with a cleaner organic diet, you know, and it's really easy for them to implement because they it's not about money for them really, and you know so, it's just about education, right and value.

Speaker 3: 30:25

Yeah, it's an athlete that I'm working with right now currently, actually, you know he's, I it's. We've worked together for three years during his off seasons and it's taken that amount of time to build that trust of like, look, what I'm going to give you is is going to help and what I'm recommending is going to help. And you know, we're three years in and he's like, yeah, you just do whatever you want. Chef G like, you know, whatever you tell me to do, I'm going to do it. You know, I brought him two courts of beef bone broth, right, like real beef bone broth. And he's like, hey, when you're hungry during the day, like if you're snacking, drink eight ounces of this. And you know, don't snack, just drink this. And we've done that for three weeks. And he's like I don't want to snack because you're totally satiated. Right, because you're getting these really nutrient dense ingredients that are, you know, helping helping to curb those those, you know, instant gratification moments of like, oh, I'm just going to grab some chips. Oh, you know, even though this, this beef turkey, is seemingly healthy, it's not, you know.

Speaker 3: 31:34

And so it's fun to help folks learn and then watch them feel better, play better and just have these, these really cool growth opportunities. You know, I've got him eating no carbs, right, no carbs in there. That's, that's my role for him. I'm like, look like, if you're gonna eat carbs, even in the morning, and do them with a, you know, an oatmeal or something, that's going to be a simple, quick digesting, you're going into your game. And then watch going into your games like it'll burn, right, because before the mentality of, oh, I'm going to eat all these carbohydrates at night before I go to bed and then wake up, oh, my gosh, why am I sluggish? Why do I feel so bad? Because our body doesn't process him. It's not taken me a ton of learning, right, like I'm learning everything I was ever taught.

Speaker 3: 32:26

Playing athletics at a medium high level is like Whoa, and I'm fortunate because I've had a handful of mentors who have taken the time to talk to me about these things. Yeah, liam is probably my number one resource for hey, what do you think about this? Because he dives into things so deeply. You're another one of my resources. Like, hey, what has this been like for you? And even like reading your book is going through, and the parts where you're talking about how you were eating and why you were eating. I related so directly to that and unlearning it for myself so I can pass that to others is that in itself is a great experience for me, right? Thank you, yeah.

Speaker 2: 33:13

Yeah, it's all about hormonal balance too, you know. And so with athletes, they're always a lot of them do the what is it? Hormonal supplementation, like testosterone, I don't know what the name of it, all those are, but they get growth hormones and stuff. But really like you could do that naturally with your food if you knew how to do it right. And that's one of the things I do talk about in my book. It is more for kind of more for people who are just super busy and have a low thyroid function, low metabolic function, and how to change their hormone to favor their metabolism.

Speaker 2: 33:54

But with athletes, I mean, it can be a similar thing, you know. So, because a lot of them are just working so hard and it does slow down their metabolism if they're not keeping up with it, with the food aspect. So that's why they might need the hormones sometimes, because their metabolism is actually slowing down because they're not able to give it enough fuel or the right fuel to run, you know, properly, like it's supposed to. So because they're just putting so much stress on their body and you know, being an athlete myself, I can understand that. But so that's why I tell my clients is the recovery process that to focus on, and part of that is food right, eating the right foods, right time, just really supporting and nourishing yourself and not depleting too much. Depletion is going to lead to low energy levels. It's going to lead to your body breaking down over time your connective tissue as well. So this is so important for us to really bring in that high quality food intentionally in the diet, especially for doing a lot of activity. Yeah, right.

Speaker 3: 34:59

Yeah, it's wild. I mean the way the body reacts is have you seen the recent information they've been putting out about caffeine and cortisol production?

Speaker 2: 35:09

No, but I have my own thoughts on that. But what have you seen about it? What are they saying? These days.

Speaker 3: 35:15

There is a direct correlation between caffeine and cortisol production in the human body. So caffeine is a stimulant and it gives us that same like fight or flight essentially is, what is triggering? Is that fight or flight mode? And what they found is that later in the day, if we're drinking caffeine, say past two, three o'clock in the afternoon, some people are like, oh, I'm going to be eating the caffeine but I can't seem to lose this belly fat. Well, the group of researchers looked at it and they realized that people that were drinking caffeine later in the day, their cortisol production was like way, way up and you know. So I personally stopped drinking caffeine after 11 am and I immediately noticed, within three to four days of, like, my energy level being significantly greater, going through the day and then waking up without that like hormonal hangover, you know so you know, my body didn't feel like it was in fight or flight mode all night and I make nice hard night rest asleep.

Speaker 3: 36:19

I use to drink caffeine just all day.

Speaker 2: 36:22

Well, yeah, that was the nature of your job, right being in the restaurant industry so many people do that.

Speaker 2: 36:27

Yeah yeah. So my thoughts on it are, yeah, similar. I agree it's. I do coffee like. I usually do one cup in the morning. I do my best to eat with the coffee. Like I always tell my clients, don't just drink coffee by itself first thing in the morning. If you have to do that, then just eat pretty soon after so that that will curb the cortisol, the excess cortisol, because we already have a lot of natural cortisol going in the morning. That's natural for us to do that.

Speaker 2: 36:57

The sun, actually it actually activates that cortisol production naturally in your body by hitting you, the sun hitting your skin, yeah, so, which is, we're supposed to have that to wake us up in the morning. But then, yes, if you keep trying to keep your ramp, your nervous system up through the day with that, then yes, you're going to. It's going to be unnatural for you to be doing that, because as the day progresses, you should be lowering your cortisol levels so that you can have a nice restful sleep at night. Of course, screens will do that too, if we're not wearing glass, blue light glasses during the evening to watch our TV or do something on the computer for stressing ourselves out mentally, emotionally, right before we go to bed, same thing. So all these things, yes, can produce cortisol. But yeah, just yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:48

Eliminating coffee later in the day, make a rule no coffee past, like I don't know, like 10 or 12 noon or something. It could do something if you're really into it. But I usually just drink one cup in the morning, I'm good to go and, yeah, like you said, I think then you just get back to your natural circadian rhythm, which is not being up all day like crazy adrenaline levels. Right, we have to curb those adrenaline levels a little bit, and we do that through food as well. So food helps us regulate our blood sugar, so our adrenaline levels stay at a certain level during the day. Our stress hormones aren't going off all the time, you know, and that's another thing that leads to not great sleep, as if we're not handling the blood sugar during the day too. So, yes, all those things, I agree, caffeine does have some health effects that you can benefit from, but you do have to do it, you do have to use it wisely. So, like you know earlier, in the morning and with food is what I recommend.

Speaker 3: 38:56

You hit on something that also is just like been hot with me right now. I bounce from what's hot and what's not, you know, every week there's something new. But I recently read a book by a gentleman named Michael Easter. It's called the Comfort Crisis and he essentially he asks a ton of questions of really intelligent people, researchers across the globe, and seeks out answers to why things you know, why the human body reacts certain ways, different things, and one of the chapters he goes into, why people that spend time in nature have such a lower level of anxiety, depression, stressors overall. You know, and he's one of these people, like he worked for Men's Health Magazine, he was editor there and you know he lived in big cities and he was one of those folks was like, oh, you know what, the city doesn't bother me, like you know, I'm just doing my daily thing, doing my daily grind.

Speaker 3: 39:58

But the reality that he found was that living in the city, surrounded by so many millions of people, really does a number on us, and even though we've trained ourselves, myself included, to have this idea of like I must constantly be going, I have to be around people that are constantly going. We don't stop to go outside anymore. And what one of these studies that he found in Japan is?

Speaker 3: 40:27

they go out and they do what they call forest bathing, and they spend 20 minutes, three days a week, in the woods, no cell phones, no earphones, just in the woods around nature and this is within city limits, like you know just being around trees and bushes and greens and shrubbery. The people that do this, their anxiety level drop by like something like 25 to 30 percent this just ungodly number and I was reading this, I'm like that's absolutely nuts and I happened to be in one of my grooves where I was outside hiking every single day, every single day, 45 minutes. I was going for a walk. I live in a neighborhood that's surrounded by trees, in nature, no headphones, no phone, just walking. It was amazing to see the calm that I experienced in my life is like just being outside. I just got back. I spent the month of June working as a camp chef for an outfitting guide in Idaho.

Speaker 2: 41:28

Oh yeah.

Speaker 3: 41:28

No cell phone, no internet, no emails, no cars, no buildings, just trees, tents, camps, fire, that's it. And adjusting back to real life in the beginning of the July, it's taking me, it's August, so it's taking me four weeks to really settle back into being in a city, because it just feels so unnatural to me, it's just, it's blowing my mind. I'm just like elk season starts in 32 days, and so now I'm just like counting the days until I get to the woods again, and so it's yeah, we don't spend enough time outside, and I think that that's one of those things that if folks just took that 20 minutes to go stand by a tree and enjoy the calm of that, it would decrease so much stress in their lives.

Speaker 2: 42:18

Yeah, Wise words. Wise words, yes, yeah, that's so true and it's so simple. But, people, you know our mind, our ego, wants to make everything so complex, right? So that's it's the ego that wants to make your life complex and make it hard. And it's really easy, it's just.

Speaker 2: 42:38

I think the hard part is for most people, especially if they're addicted to busyness, which we all are, you know, to some extent, right, I think the problem lies is prioritizing time for yourself, like having enough self worth to even give yourself that space to do that, because we always feel like we need to fill that space up with things, like we must be doing something, we must be, you know, productive and and like we've been told, you know, this is what you know, a program to do these things. But if you really get to the heart of who you are and find the truth within that, then you understand that really, you don't really have to do anything. And if you come from that center place of peace within yourself, then you get to actually do what you want to do instead of doing what you feel like you should be doing. So that's a big energetic shift right there, and so I feel like there's nothing better than nature to show you that because we are nature, we're a part of it and when we get out in it we connect with it because that's our natural space. What we're doing right now is so unnatural, but we've been living in it for so long. We think it's natural, right, but we're learning is no, that's not the natural way to live, it's not organic. You know, this is not organic life. Life is nature. So because our bodies are our nature, you know it's organic. Our bodies are organic life, you know. And so when we connect with that, we connect with the messages that you know.

Speaker 2: 44:10

I've even been like looking into telepathy lately, like how we have this natural innate ability to have telepathic communication. It sounds really out there and something super scientific, because that's what we've been trained to think about that. But it's actually if you thought about it, it's you do it, you've done it before. You know. It's just that now we have computers and we have phones, that kind of provide that synthetic telepathy for us. But if we were thinking about our innate natural telepathy, when we go out in nature we actually hear. We hear, you know, sounds, we connect with the voice of nature, so to speak. We feel more in tune with ourselves, which helps us really being in tune with others. So you know, in a way, just you know thinking about someone or you know them thinking about you and then you're, they pop in your head Like that's a form of telepathy.

Speaker 2: 45:08

But we it's hard for us to connect with those kinds of ways of communicating and connecting when we're, when we're all caught up in the old programming of what we thought was natural right in the modern life. So I think that it's such a profound experience and lesson to start doing that force bathing, even just a little bit, like you're saying, 20 minutes a day, we'll build into so much more and you're going to, you're going to really build your inner, knowing your intuition, and you know that form of communication that goes beyond what we're using right now. You know it's. It's like this is amazing to think about, for me anyway, you know.

Speaker 3: 45:50

Yeah, no, it's crazy If you, if you think about you, know the original humans, your original hunter-gatherers, right, and scientists and biologists and what's the word anthropologists look at. Oh well, they didn't have a written language.

Speaker 3: 46:09

They do these pictures. So if you think getting on the telepathy side of things is like these folks were communicating from long distances, hunting and gathering with one another, like there, we are wired as humans and even you know, I can see, you can see it in nature, you know, if you watch a predator hunt, it's prey. Or you know wolves are. A great example is watching wolves work together without any noise at all, like there's this, this symbiotic relationship that exists between all of them and the way that they work together and that's the way humans are. So, yeah, the telepathy side of things, I definitely, yeah, it's a trip to think about it and you know, but it's one of those things that definitely exists because it happens in daily life when you let go of things you know, and you know I wouldn't be experiencing what I'm experiencing now.

Speaker 3: 47:05

You know I read your book when I first started reading again. You were my first book and it really unlocked like the joys, and one of the things that stood out to me most was like being in the gym, because I love going to the gym Like that's my sanity, but it's always a very serious thing. I got to go and when you speak to letting your inner child out and dancing in the gym and being barefoot in the gym, and just like enjoying that moment in there. When I started doing that, it unlocked this whole new world of oh, I could actually get going this gym and I could listen to some ridiculous music. I could listen to Paula Abdul and have a great time dancing around barefoot in my gym, right. And then I go into reading Michael Ester's book and it's like your book unlocked the door and opened it for me. And then I get into his book where he's talking about all this nature and like all of a sudden, like everything is just like expanded further and I don't, you know you nail it as like we don't, we take ourselves way too seriously, you know, and that's the way we're programmed and you're right.

Speaker 3: 48:12

It's like the ego. Is that that driving force of why we're just way right? Because we have to be, we have to be next. And then we live in a world where, you know, we have false idols that are millions of followers. Oh, I've got a million followers. Oh well, that person must be what I'm supposed to be. And then we chase that and you know we're chasing someone else's goals. We're not setting our own personal goals, we're not doing what's right for us, we're doing what we think is right for others.

Speaker 3: 48:39

But our ego becomes so attached to that we can't separate. You know you mentioned the hot sauce company earlier. You know we closed that two years ago and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, not from a business standpoint but from an ego. Self perspective is like people know me as the hot sauce guy, I'm the sauce guy. Like, oh, you're the hot sauce guy, you know, I've got the tattoos.

Speaker 3: 49:08

And separating myself, like the loss of that ego was huge and I had no idea I was experiencing it and it's taken me two years to really finally realize oh, I'm just Andrew, I'm not Jeff, I'm not the hot sauce guy, I'm just Andrew and that's all I have to be Like I don't have to be chasing dollar bills every day, and that's the other thing is like as soon as I stopped chasing dollar bills, my life got so much simpler and just sort of doing the things that I like doing and my bills are paid roof over my head, like just day by day, like everything's gonna be okay. But it starts with separating that ego and just being okay, being me right. You know, tomorrow what's the day? It's the third. Tomorrow I'll be 16 years, sober.

Speaker 2: 50:00

Right Congratulations.

Speaker 3: 50:03

Again, it's like a miracle in and of itself is. But again, you know, I was using and drinking because I thought that I had to be this person. Like I wasn't comfortable with my own skin, like I couldn't go to an event, I couldn't go to a party, I couldn't go to work unless I was high or drunk. I couldn't do those things because I was so associated with you know. Oh, I have to do this to be cool, I have to be the center of attention. I want people to know me, know who I am, know who I am. And you know, after I cut that off and I, you know, probably five years before, I really was like okay, being me, you know, there's five years of like just really uncomfortable and then finally just kind of like settled in. But again, a lot of that was getting back to spirituality and being comfortable in my own skin, having a strength that is not me, because, at the end of the day, like I'm not the center of the world, no matter how much I want it to be, I am not the center of the world. And so it's been this yeah, it's a trip to see how deep we'll go just to chase our ego, just to fill that, you know, false sense of pride that we think we have to have. We're to hold that image and food is one of those things is, you know, we're constantly presented with the ideal human body Like this is what we're supposed to be, this is what we're supposed to be, this is what we're supposed to be, and it's not like it's not. You know, we can achieve these things through nutrition, through health, through activity. You know we can achieve whatever we want, and I think that we get lost in the idea that, oh, this is unachievable, but it's like it's just. It seems so insurmountable, right?

Speaker 3: 51:47

You know, for myself, at my heaviest, I was 260 pounds, just completely obese, couldn't do anything, just tired and sluggish. And you know, it was such a big idea to stop eating candy, right, just walk away from candy, to walk away from Big Macs, to walk away from all these things. And someone at that time said to me it was like, just, stop one thing. Why do you have to do everything at once, right? Why can't you just, you know, let go of candy this week and then, you know, maybe next week you don't need a Big Mac, right? And that was so hard for me to understand.

Speaker 3: 52:27

But when I did it, when I took that little tiny step okay, no sugar this week then everything else kind of you know becomes easier. You know it's a sugar is one hell of a drug. People talk about cocaine, but I tell you what sugar like that is the number one for me is. You know, I still, if I get on a binge, I will binge and I go until I'm sick. And you know again, like having a head full of knowledge doesn't stop me from experiencing these poor choices, you know.

Speaker 2: 53:01

Right right.

Speaker 3: 53:03

Unless I really have goals set in front of me, I am susceptible to 100% of everything that I preach against. And so I've really tried to be more transparent with clients too, because a lot of times I share all this knowledge with my clients and they're like oh man, you must eat like this, you must work out every day. You've got to do all these things. All the things are right Like whoa? Nope, that's how I got my ego in the bad place to begin with. I have to tell you the truth here.

Speaker 3: 53:32

No, I ate three of these natural candy bars yesterday. Like you know, I didn't work out. Today. Like you know don't get me wrong like I have the knowledge that I can share, but putting the discipline into action is on the individual right, and that starts with me, and it's a hard. It's a hard post while I was talking to a friend on a hike. You know, I went for a hike this morning and I was talking to a friend about it. It's like it's so easy for me to make the right decision on my own health and nutrition, but it's even easier to just like sit and sloth right, it's just.

Speaker 3: 54:07

It's so easy for my brain to be like ah, you can take the day off today and then all of a sudden, three weeks later, I'm like man, that was a long day off and so well you know, I think it's, I think it's a matter too of like finding that balance because, yeah, there are some days you need some rest, you know.

Speaker 2: 54:23

And then you know, and I think sometimes, when we are so tired that it takes us so long to get back to it, is that we have overdone it, you know. And so finding the okay, so is this too much? And so that's what I think happens in the very beginning for most people is like when you I love how you say it's take the small steps, because the small steps will bring that awareness to, are you overdoing it and you can start to pay attention to that more instead of doing everything all at once and it's kind of hard to figure out like and also to stay consistent with something, because it's almost too overwhelming. Because we're creating new patterns, we're creating change in our life, and so we it needs to happen one step at a time so we can integrate that. So that integration process is, I think, what people tend to bypass within this. They think just, you know starting, you know just starting the action, or you know, is only like the first step, and but really, what comes from that is, you know, old wound healing, like cause we're really navigating from old wounds until we become aware of that. When we become aware of that like you have, andrew, then you, then you start to understand how much easier it is to stick with habits because you value them. Now you're looking at it from a different perspective than you were when you were wounded right or traumatized and or programmed a certain way. So when we can just kind of lift those blocks and become aware of those, then it becomes much easier to take full responsibility for that, like as a mature adult. Because now we are, you know, we're lighthearted, we're not super serious like we're, but we're sincere about what we value, right. So we follow through with that and that's what mature adults do, you know.

Speaker 2: 56:19

And so I just think that is so beautiful, the process you've gone through, because it's exactly where you need to be and you know it's like giving your space, self space, for it to be awkward, you know, cause there's gonna be times where that's gonna happen.

Speaker 2: 56:35

It's gonna feel really weird, you know, because you're just stepping into a new part of yourself, like you haven't been yourself for a long time. I know that as a you know as a people pleaser and a perfectionist in the past, like you were so much trying to be somebody else and fit in and get people to accept you and affirm you, that you forget who you really are. And when you start to go towards who you really are, it becomes like really uncomfortable cause. It's like you're just kind of exposing yourself, you know, in a way. So it really takes a lot of courage to go down that path, and so I really congratulate you for that, because you've come so far in your realization and so you're helping so many more people with that now, because you have that awareness of how to show up as yourself and you can help other people with that too, through, you know, honoring the value first of like what you're eating, what you're putting in your body, like that's important, you know.

Speaker 3: 57:32

And that's where it all starts. You know it begins with that first bite of whatever it is, and you know when you're eating, when I'm eating clean, when I'm eating like home cooked food, like real ingredients, not a bunch of processed stuff, I feel better and it's so much easier for me to just make the right decision, cause I'm already eating this way, so I might as well go for a walk, cause you know why am I gonna? You know what else am I gonna do? You know I should read this book because I feel good about what I'm doing right now.

Speaker 3: 58:03

And you know, again, that gets back to mentorship and having people men in my life that have taken the time to really you know hey, this is gonna help you, but never shoving it down my throat, you know, never forcing me to like, hey, this is the way I think, so you have to think this way, it's? You know? I have a mentor now who really asked me a lot of questions Well, why do you think this? This is what I think, this is what I've found, what do you think?

Speaker 3: 58:32

And having someone that does that or like questions me or kind of forces me to to slow down and think about how I'm gonna speak or what I'm gonna say next or how I'm gonna use my words, is is been huge in my life, right, like I mean, even you know you get again. I'm kind of bouncing around. But getting back to to egos, you know, being on on food network, right, being on chopped or being on, you know, supermarket steak out is all of a sudden millions of people know who I am for 30 minutes, right, and so that 30 minutes of the idea in my head, like this is why I have to be, because millions of people know me. No, they don't, they know, they don't. They know me for 30 minutes while I'm on this show. That's, that's the extent of how long they know me for, and you know it's so easy for you. Oh, you don't know who I am. You know, and it's it. It feeds my ego and periodically, you know, I'll run into situations where I'm currently a rerun.

Speaker 3: 59:32

Oh, yeah, yeah my top episode is on this rerun cycle and it's not on any of the it's not. It's not on any of the streaming platforms, but you can catch it on a rerun. And I was at the gym and there I am on TV and this person on the treadmill next to me looks that the TV, looks at me, looks at the TV, looks at me.

Speaker 3: 59:53

I'm like I have to walk around the gym with my chest pumped out and like you know but you know I get back to the mentorship is like having having someone in my life that can ground me and help With hey, no, this is the task at hand. Like how you can do that, like what's your process, what's your thought?

Speaker 2: 1:00:17

It's huge, you know so yeah, so we don't get caught up in the shiny objects right in our life, because I've done that too. Yeah, it can be very enticing.

Speaker 3: 1:00:30

My goal great yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:00:32

Yeah, yeah. But then when you start to heal, heal yourself and and become aware of like those, those Deeper programs within you, it's like, oh my god, like no, I don't want that at all. Yeah, you needed it for some reason, right?

Speaker 2: 1:00:52

Right that's awesome. Well, andrew, I feel like we covered just about everything like this was an amazing interview. Do you? Will you just Share, like what you're offering now, what you want to share with in closing for our interview today, because I know you offer a lot of amazing things you do. You do also do like private Bo hunting. You do, well, you do, bow hunting on your own, but you do these private hunting Events right, and what else is there that you that you offer you also?

Speaker 3: 1:01:29

Everything, all the personalized Realm. You act as a personal chef for folks that just want to, you know, have a properly cooked meal in their home. Once or twice a week I Go camping with people and so if folks want to go camping and they don't want to do food, or they want to have an upgraded experience of food in the woods, I travel for that. I'm also gonna be.

Speaker 3: 1:01:53

This fall I'll be doing guided foraging trips on chanterelle, bulit, mushrooms, stuff, like that, and then I also offer wild game cooking courses and butchery. So folks that are out there learning how to hunt, I love talking to them and kind of consulting them on how to do things and saving them time and money on how to process in our own animals and how to eat the whole animal and not just throw away the liver and the kidneys and the heart and the tongue, so that. But you know, I anything that has to do with food. I will spend time talking to folks and see if I can help them with, you know, just developing some recipes that are easy to cook at home.

Speaker 2: 1:02:33

So that's amazing. Thank you so much, Andrew. Thanks for being there.

Speaker 3: 1:02:36

Do you have?

Speaker 2: 1:02:37

a. Do you have a website, by the way, that you can mention.

Speaker 3: 1:02:40

Yeah, it's chefandragarrickcom, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 1:02:44

And I'll put that link in the show notes as well. All right, thanks so much, andrew oh it's my pleasure.

Speaker 1: 1:03:09

Your life is your greatest work of art, and it all relates back to the sacredness of Jesus you.