Business Owner Health & Human Performance with Dr. Randy Knipping | E022
Making the most of your health to enable you to make the most of your wealth.
In this episode of Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, talks with Dr. Randy Knipping, Medical Director of the Deerfields Clinic. The Deerfields Clinic is an integrated medicine clinic that focuses on human longevity and performance. Dr. Randy Knipping talks about health challenges facing business owners and how integrated medicine can help fix those issues and get ahead of challenges in their health.
Episode Highlights:
● 01:16 – Dr. Randy Knipping explains his medical background.
● 06:24 – What does he see different in his business owner patients than others?
● 08:55 – How does he calculate their biological age against their birthdate age?
● 14:52 – What is the negative impact on a business owner's relationships and their business when their health is out of whack?
● 18:00 – How does integrative medicine course-correct health problems?
● 23:00 – What kind of feedback has he received once people adopt the approach?
● 26:05 – What are some best practices that people can implement to build resilience?
● 36:15 – Having 10 minutes of meditation daily for 8 weeks shows changes in the brain that can be seen by an MRI scan.
● 39:53 – Deerfields.ca offers an initial complimentary virtual needs assessment with Dr. Randy Knipping.
3 Key Points
1. Stay on top of your health by measuring it on a regular basis instead of waiting until something goes wrong.
2. Dr. Randy Knipping uses biomarkers to measure your physical and mental functional capacity and then track it on a quarterly basis to see if the patient is reaching their goals.
3. Resilience is the ability to have and maintain a calm, clear, and stable state of mind in spite of what is going on outside of your mind.
Tweetable Quotes:
● “Most people who have chronic disease or worse, you can identify factors 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years before they get sick.” – Dr. Randy Knipping
● “Typical clients that I’m seeing coming into my clinic are 40, 50, 60-years-old . They’ve made their $10-$15-$20 or more millions of dollars. But they are 5, 10, 15, 20 years older biologically than their birthdate.” – Dr. Randy Knipping
● “The future health of the couch potato is clearly going to be much worse than the amateur athlete.” – Dr. Randy Knipping
Resources Mentioned:
● Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
● FintechImpact.co – Website for Fintech Impact
● jasonpereira.ca – Website
● Linkedin – Dr. Randy Knipping’s Linkedin
● Deerfields.ca – Website for Deerfields Clinic
Full Transcript:
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners Podcast. You will hear about industry insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur, Jason Pereira. Through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice, you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur, plan for success and make the most of your business and life. And now your host, Jason Pereira.
Jason Pereira: Well, welcome to Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners Podcast. Before we get started, just a reminder just sign up for my newsletter at jasonpereira.ca.
Jason Pereira: Now on today's show. Today in the show I have Dr. Randy Knipping, medical director of the Deerfields Clinic. The Deerfields Clinic is an integrative medicine clinic that focuses on human longevity and performance. And I brought him on even though this is not a conversation about money, to talk about health challenges facing business owners and how integrative medicine can help basically fix those issues and get ahead of challenges in their health. And with that, here's my interview with Randy.
Jason Pereira: Hello Randy.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Hi.
Jason Pereira: Thanks for taking the time today.
Dr. Randy Knipping: It's my pleasure.
Jason Pereira: So Dr. Randy Knipping of the Deerfields Clinic, tell us about what it is you do before we get started.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So to put it in context, I started off my career as a cell biologist before I went to medical school and published a couple of articles in neuroendocrinology, which is brain hormone chemistry. So I really thought when I got to medical school, I'd end up being like a doctor researcher, but it was actually in med school that I got inspired. And what I observed is that most of the patients you see in the hospital who are sick actually did not get sick overnight. I was one of those docs, somebody would throw a chart my way and say, "Knipping, go see the chest pain in room 403." And I'd say, "Does the chest pain have a name?" Because I kind of wanted it to be.
Dr. Randy Knipping: I was interested in the story and the narrative. So I usually tried to figure out the context. And it turns out that most people who have chronic disease or worse, you can identify factors five, 10, 15, 20, 30 years before they get sick. And I felt that conventional medicine, which is really important, we need diagnostic and therapeutic solutions for when people get sick, but we spent essentially no time identifying the health trends that lead to sickness. And that really was the first thing.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And then the second thing was I was a cell biologist. So if you look at how medicine is organized, we have generalists, the family doctors and that and we have specialists, but the specialists are all organized as organ systems. But it turns out that organ system dysfunction occurs at the level of the cell. And it was surprising that there isn't a specialist in clinical medicine who is a cell biologist. Think about a clinical biologist.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And so I was really interested in the cell biology of sickness, of aging, and so on. So after medical school, I made sure that I did postgraduate training in conventional medicine, but I spent the last 35 years training in nutrition, fitness, stress, sleep, toxins, gut health, epigenetic, metabolic, hormonal balancing and optimization. And so that really is sort of my DNA. That's what I was interested in.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So Deerfields came around as a result of really a number of different attempts to try to bring preventative medicine. So what happened was my practice, my medical practice has always been sort of a combination of conventional medicine, so family medicine, emergency medicine, trauma, excetera, some aviation medicine and then preventative medicine and executive health. So I was the founding medical director for the Cleveland Clinic in Canada. And when I started with them 15 years ago, I really wanted to bring functional or integrative preventative medicine into the mainstream, unfortunately at that time, there was still a lot of resistance to bring functional medicine. Even though it's evidence- based, most of the literature is in the cell biology literature. The clinicians typically are involved in disease care. So they don't know the literature, they prescribe drugs for diseases, and they don't understand how to take a history, a lifestyle history, they don't understand metabolism and that, so I was unsuccessful.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So one of my clients, Jim Wilson, who owns Wilson truck lines and a number of other companies, we decided to start Deerfields. And so Deerfields is essentially an executive health clinic with a focus on preventative medicine and integrative health. And that's what-
Jason Pereira: Excellent. Well, it's interesting because I feel like we can all find periods throughout history where some line of business or some field gets caught up in an old paradigm and it takes a while to change, right? I mean, even something as simple into our day now, as germ theory took a long time to be adopted, right? Just washing your hands and sanitizing before medical procedures was laughed at for a while until it was absolutely proven and became second or a preconceived belief.
Jason Pereira: Now, I mean, what you're kind of describing is what was almost the industrialization of medicine within the cohorts of individual use cases, as opposed to the integrative approach, which is, again, human beings are not cars, right? You're not fixing the brakes, the engines, everything else separately, they all work together. So compelling story. And as I'd mentioned in the intro, I brought you on, you're not a financial conversation directly, but you are indirectly. And what I mean by that is, it's pretty straightforward and obvious anyone who's ever started a business or runs one, that the stresses that business owner face are substantially greater than that of just having to go and be the simplest form of an employee, which is show up to a job, go home, leave it all behind. We never leave it all behind.
Jason Pereira: So I wanted to talk to you specifically about the health challenges facing people in most situations and how some other questions around basically how to treat that. So in general, the first question is, what do you see from your business owner clients that is different than everybody else?
Dr. Randy Knipping: Yeah, so that's really interesting. And I think your intro is really apropos because no, when you have the responsibility and the sweat equity to grow and develop and expand and stabilize a business, your attention is laser focused on that. Most entrepreneurs have an incredible capacity to concentrate and actually to concentrate at the expense of everything else.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Typical clients that I am seeing is when they're coming into my clinic, they're 40, 50, 60 years old. They've made their 10, 15, 20, or more millions of dollars, but they're five, 10, 15, 20 years older biologically than their birthday. Think about that for a moment. So they have-
Jason Pereira: That's a high price to pay for wealth. Congratulations, you have it, but not much time to enjoy it.
Dr. Randy Knipping: But you see, they don't know it. So if you understand something about an aircraft, an aircraft can continue to fly quite successfully until it slows down to the point where the aircraft stalls. And so there's this sudden and catastrophic loss of lift that occurs. And so it's the same thing with human health. As long as you wake up in the morning and nothing is physically wrong, you will continue as if it's the same as yesterday. But if then underlying biological process has resulted in an organ system to reach a point of threshold failure, then suddenly you're going to experience symptoms of that organ failure, whether it's a heart attack or whether it's diabetic symptom, or something like that.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So I have a lot of clients who come in who have experienced pretty significant financial business success, but they recognize at some point in time that they've paid a price. And when they see their family doctor, the family doctor might do an examination and say, "Well, you're fine. You're normal." But that doesn't mean that they're optimal. So they often find themselves continuing to ask the question, "I don't feel like I am as healthy as I was, and I may not be sick yet, but what can I do?" And that's when I get involved, and when they asked me for my advice.
Jason Pereira: So let's talk about what you mentioned earlier about, they come into you and biologically they're older than they are according to the calendar. What does that mean, and how do you determine that?
Dr. Randy Knipping: Yeah, so I mean, it's the same thing as looking at people's physical activities, right? If you take the average 30 year old and you compare their strength and their cardiovascular fitness, you're not going to find a homogenous group of 30 year olds, you're going to find some who might be amateur or professional athletes, and their functional capacity is at the top end, maybe the top 5% for their age. And you'll find others who have spent the last 15 years practicing becoming a couch potato. And they can barely go up a flight of stairs without getting short of breath, but they're technically not sick.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So if you look at the bell curve, the continuum of what conventional medicine calls normal, those two 30-year-olds are considered normal, but clearly it defies logic to think that they're not in some materially way different. And what's important is that just because you're normal, doesn't mean that it poses no risk to you. I can tell you that the future health of the couch potato is clearly going to be much worse than the professional or amateur athlete. So if you think about things like nutrition and fitness and stress and sleep and toxins and so on, you can imagine that what conventional medicine can think of as being normal is just, "Well, you're not sick yet."
Dr. Randy Knipping: I think that most people, if you want to purchase a service, you want the best service that you can purchase. If you want the best performance from your body and brain, then you need to know what the best practices are. If you're going to invest your money in a business, you're going to want to know how successful this business is and where does it match up to the competitors. And you're going to want to pick the top 10 competitors in the industry and say, "Are we engaged in best practices." But that doesn't happen in clinical medicine, clinical medicine is, "Are you bankrupt yet?" And if you're not bankrupt, then you're fine. See you next year.
Dr. Randy Knipping: It's completely crazy if you think about it in financial terms. So for me, my clients get very interested in, "I want to be in the top 5% or 10% of my age group, so that physically and mentally, not only can I withstand stress and perform better, but I want to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I don't want to retire with $20 million and spend the rest of my retirement seeing conventional doctors and having surgeries and medications."
Jason Pereira: It's almost like the difference between, "We're just going to put out the fires," versus, prevent them from happening in the first place. Right? But when the fires happening, there's a toll that's been taken.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So there's a really nice analogy that you can use to describe in detail what the difference is between an integrative doctor and a conventional doctor. And the analogy has to do with your financial performance. As a business owner, how often do you check your balance sheet and your cash flows.
Jason Pereira: Depends on how neurotic you are about it, but if you're responsible and you're a successful one, it's probably daily to weekly, but no less than monthly,.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Right. So in traditional business, you would want to have at least a quarter, want to see what your quarterly performance is-
Jason Pereira: Absolutely.
Dr. Randy Knipping: ... and your year to date and your historical information, to get a sense. So imagine that you had a financial advisor and the financial advisor says to you, "Don't worry about your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly performance. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do an assessment at the year end and see whether or not you're making money or not. And if you develop symptoms of bankruptcy, we'll deal with it then."
Jason Pereira: Randy, unfortunately you just described the conventional advisor relationship, unfortunately.
Dr. Randy Knipping: I can say I'm blessed because you're my financial advisor. I think it's important because people understand how important it is to keep your fingers on the numbers.
Jason Pereira: Exactly.
Dr. Randy Knipping: You've got to know [inaudible 00:12:56] on, because if you're beginning to decline, if you're taking withdrawals from your equity and you not making deposits in your equity, then what's happening eventually, you're going to run out of equity. Well, why can't we measure health like that? Why do we have to wait until there's a symptom or a bankruptcy state or a deficiency? It's like, if you take your car for a drive, let's say you wanted to drive to London, Ontario, or let's say even further, let's say you wanted to go to Montreal or Winnipeg, how do you know when to fill up the gas tank?
Jason Pereira: There's an indicator.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So if you're not measuring your health, then how do you know until you run out of health?
Jason Pereira: Yeah. Exactly.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And this is what I do, is we use biomarkers to measure your physical and mental functional capacity and then we track it on a quarterly basis and see whether or not you're reaching your goals or not. And for some people, it's a big shock. They come in and they had no idea that they have so little balance left in their health account. And that's often the motivational factor for them to make changes in their daily, weekly lifestyle, improve their metabolism, their hormone balance, and so on. And it's very gratifying because people actually feel better and look better, and they are better in the short and the long term. And that, for me, as a former emerg trauma doc, I'm actually feeling I'm having a bigger impact on someone's life than jump-starting their body or whatever else I had to do as an emerg doctor.
Jason Pereira: Well, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? So let's talk about the negative implications of the status quo. So, you see a lot of people who are business owners, executives, high performers in what it is they do, what is the negative impact on their business performance, on their personal relationships? I mean, we we're talking about health, how does that all boiled down to how is it negative, a net negative in their lives?
Dr. Randy Knipping: Well, I mean, it's a good question. And I would say that there is empiric data on this. When we've studied executive performers, for example, with respect to stress, the ones who seem to have the greatest resilience during times of unexpected economic downturn are the ones who have actually invested in their mental health by making sure that they have a robust lifestyle.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So we know that people who exercise regularly, who eat healthy, who get a good night's sleep and who have skills that help them master stress. So they have behaviors, they have a person or a behavior or a skill or an activity, maybe some mindfulness, and they have trained themselves to become so resilient that when the stress emerges, they have more mental bandwidth available to them to actually problem solve.
Dr. Randy Knipping: If you're spending 50% of your bandwidth thinking, thinking, thinking, worry, worry, worry. Well, when you're thinking and worrying, you're not problem solving. The resilience is the ability to have and to maintain a calm, clear, and stable state of mind in spite of what's going on outside of your mind, that's true of CEOs, it's true of military commanders, it's true of anyone who's responsible for financial or public safety. You've got to be able to have all of your resources available to you to bring to bear to the problem solving.
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And that's really where conventional medicine, I mean, just literally fails to provide that for people.
Jason Pereira: It's funny, there's kind of a saying or known phenomenon is, if you're at a conference in my industry, and you want to see who the top performers are and breakfast is at eight o'clock, go to the gym at 6:30, because-
Dr. Randy Knipping: That's funny, you'd say that. I was at an integrative health conference in Las Vegas about three years ago. And I get up very, very... I've a very disciplined early morning ritual, I call it TBM, training the body and mind. So I get up around 4:37 and I do my hour, an hour and a half of training the body and mind. So the gym was open at 6:00 AM, and in Las Vegas in the hotel, there's nobody in the gym at 6:00 AM.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So I get there about five to 6:00, and there's a lineup of about 30 doctors. I've never seen it before. And the trainer comes in and he's looking around like, "What is going on?" They open the door, within five minutes, the gym is filled and the trainer asks, "What's going on." He says, "These are all integrative docs. These are all guys who walk the talk."
Jason Pereira: They all care about performance, right? That's it?
Dr. Randy Knipping: I have never, ever seen a gym full in Vegas at 6:00 AM.
Jason Pereira: So remind me never to book a conference in Vegas when there's an integrative health conference going, I'll never get in the gym. Okay. So let's talk about now, course correction. So beyond the conventional medical system of basically putting out fires, how do you with integrative medicine help course correct the negative impact of their health? [crosstalk 00:18:03]
Dr. Randy Knipping: The first thing for sure is engagement, It's very important for my clients to know that I have listened mindfully to exactly what their symptoms and signs are. And it's very important that I speak to them and I communicate to them mindfully to help them to understand precisely what they can do to achieve their goals. So unlike most doctors who ask you, "What are your problems?" I do ask those questions, but ultimately I come to what's called your goal list.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So whether it's optimizing your body composition and your physical functional capacity, or whether it's optimizing your libido, your sexual functioning, or optimizing your metabolism or reversing cardiovascular risks, whatever those goals are, I try to make sure that the goals that we work on are the ones that you have picked and that are important to you. And then I articulate a set of daily and weekly lifestyle rituals, epigenetic, metabolic, and hormonal optimization to achieve those goals.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So the initiation of this really begins with an engaging conversation and process of assessment and collaboration to establish the plan. And then what we do, that's also very different is that I see my clients every quarter. And so what we do is we measure progress. And in the first quarter we have a lot of touch points. So I have other staff, exercise, physiology and nutrition and clinical assistant staff. So in the first quarter, the touch points are usually weekly for the first month that bimonthly. So that by the time the first quarter rolls around, I see three kinds of outcomes. Number one, I see individuals who are early adopters, these are the ones who do exactly what we agreed to and they are experiencing results. Then I get the early relapsers, they're the ones who start and then somewhere along, they got too busy to keep doing this. So I see those.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And then I have the ones who I call failed implementers. They're the ones who come in, they spend the money and the time, we get the program going and they don't even start. But I want to see all three of them because all three of them have specific needs. And what's important is that my job is to inspire all three of those to start again, start again, start again. If you wait for a year, you've lost the opportunity, but a lot of times, a little coaching, a little encouragement, and guess what? The ones that didn't knock it out of the park start to get results. And then that becomes the wind in their sails.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. As a former failed implementer, there is something about the accountability of having to come to you every three months and make excuses that on some level they're true on some level they're BS and you just know it, right? And that constant coaching [crosstalk 00:21:00]
Dr. Randy Knipping: [inaudible 00:21:00] is that I don't use the word accountability and the reason for it, I mean, I spent a lot of time training in behavioral medicine and psychology at [Canache 00:21:12]. And one of the things that people assume is effective when it comes to lifestyle behavior, is guilt, shame and fear. Well, it turns out that the empiric research suggests that not only does guilt, fear and shame, not work, it's actually counterproductive. If you make a patient feel guilty or ashamed or afraid, they won't come back to you.
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Dr. Randy Knipping: I prefer to use the term inspiration. I would say to someone, "Imagine if you had 20 pounds less belly fat, imagine if you woke up in the morning fully rested that your joints weren't painful. Imagine that you had no brain fog, that you were able to very effectively cope with the stressors of the emails and the demands and so on. And imagine if you felt younger and your sexual functioning was better and you felt your relationships were improved, how would you feel about that?" Well, that's completely different than, "If you don't follow my advice, you're going to die a miserable death with a limp, you know what."
Jason Pereira: Fair enough.
Dr. Randy Knipping: [inaudible 00:22:20] is vision, it's passion, it's being realistic. And it's the engagement and the fact that I'm here to serve you, I'm not here to judge you. If you want somebody to judge you just talk to your mother-in-law.
Jason Pereira: Okay. So let's now talk about the end results. I want to talk about the feedback you've gotten. I mean, we've personally shared stories about the impact you've had on people's lives, but I think it's important to talk about these. So in general, the feedback, once people finally decide to, as I say, when you ask me, "What inspired the change and for you to actually start doing this?" Is I just realized I need to just shut up and listen to you. And when I did, I was better off for it. Tell me about the feedback you get from people once they've finally adopted the approach.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So, I mean, obviously in any medical practice, you've got a continuum of success, and you're asking me about the top 30% of my clients who are successful, and there's no doubt that it's life changing, but it depends a little bit on what their starting position was. So, clients really did have a lot of needs who actually followed through the results are pretty astounding. So, I have clients who have lost a hundred pounds of fat. I have clients who have stopped all of their diabetic prescription medications.
Dr. Randy Knipping: I've had clients who have had angina and problems with a coronary artery disease who either couldn't or wouldn't have bypass surgery or angioplasty stenting where were able to reverse their coronary artery disease using evidence-based medicine. So a lot of lifestyle changes epigenetic, metabolic, hormonal, culation therapy. All of these things are things that a conventional doctor might get hairy eyeballs, but actually, if you look at the actual published data, there's good evidence that supports an integrative approach. So I would say that in terms of physical and mental wellbeing, it's definitely very, very satisfying for me as a doctor, former emerg trauma doctor, to see the kind of results and clearly fits in I want.
Dr. Randy Knipping: But not everybody is a responder. So, the challenge always is, how do I pick up where my patients left off when they have relapsed? And those are the patients actually, I have the most interest in, because as a psychologist, I'm very interested in what are the real or imaginary obstacles. And what I find is over a one, two and three year period, I can convert probably 80% of those back into the mainstream of optimal health. And that's even more heartening. I mean, if you think about it, those are the individuals who have really been failed by the conventional health system, but it takes one, two or three years.
Jason Pereira: Yep.
Dr. Randy Knipping: As long as they don't get sick and tired of me, and they keep coming in, it's like they eventually realize I'm not there to judge them and eventually make changes. Those are the ones that are the most fascinating to me.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. I mean, I think the fact that there's a price tag attached to this too, is valuable. Because I've found myself asking myself at one point like, "If I'm not going to listen, why am I paying for this? And I'm not going to stop paying for it because it's only going to better me. So my only other optionable choices is to actually start implementing and stop making excuses." Right? And I think that's the internal chat that many of us have to have when we're making excuses for ourselves in progression, but eventually it works.
Jason Pereira: So let's talk about, I mean you've given me several kinds of productivity hacks over the years. But I want to focus on for when I get to those, but I want to focus on first, just some best practices that people can implement that are going to have an impact in their lives beyond the conventional exercise and eat right. Those are the things we hear from everywhere.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Right.
Jason Pereira: What can we do? What can the average person, the average business owner who's starting out do to build that resiliency in their lives?
Dr. Randy Knipping: So the first thing I'm going to say, this is a medical disclaimer, do not take anything that I'm recommending right now as medical advice. You do need to make sure-
Jason Pereira: That's right.
Dr. Randy Knipping: ... that before [inaudible 00:26:31] anything I'm about to tell you about that you have a competent physician who's trained in the area an expert in the area before you start. So here's a couple of things that I find very helpful when I work with business owners who are too busy. And the way I work is instead of telling you, I am going to ask you some questions. Now you probably know the answers, but I think it's important for the audience to have a sense of how do we come to these kinds of conversations. So the first thing is, what is the minimum effective dose of exercise in minutes that has a meaningful and measurable benefit or outcome, minimum? What do you think most people say?
Jason Pereira: Most people are going to say, half an hour or an hour or 20 minutes. Yep.
Dr. Randy Knipping: There's no doubt that 30 to 60 minutes of exercise, four to five days a week is considered optimal when it comes to fitness, but four or five hours is more hours than most executives would actually perceive to be doable. So it's a non... They will not do it. So what I say to them, I say, and as long, and again, here's the disclaimer, as long as you don't have underlying coronary artery disease or other diseases, I say to them that if you did 10 minutes of high intensity interval training, and I'll tell you what that is in a minute, three times a week, that's a total time of 30 minutes.
Dr. Randy Knipping: That is equivalent to doing 50 minutes of continuous aerobic activity on the same machine, five days a week." So three times 30 is 90 minutes, Five times 50 is 250 minutes, "Dr. Knipping, you cannot possibly tell me that doing three, 10 minute exercises," so 30 minutes a week, is equivalent to 250 minutes a week. And so I tell you that's not my opinion, this is absolutely empirically true in the exercise physiology literature, but it's not 50 minutes of just continuous activity.
Dr. Randy Knipping: What you do is you do two minutes of a warmup, let's say on a bike or an elliptical trainer, and then you do a 20-second, all out 100% sprint, two minute active recovery, 20-second sprint, two minute active recovery, 20-second sprint, three-minute cool down, you do the math, It's 10 minutes. That is equal to 50 minutes of just sitting on the bike and doing continuous activity. And it's because it creates such a supply, demand mismatch that it stimulates the genes to build up capacity.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And that's what you want. You want the metabolic effect and the cell biology effect of exercise. And so what happens is, my executives will say, "Hey, I can do 10 minutes, first thing in the morning." And then they do it. And what do they find? "Well, I got more than 10 minutes. I can maybe throw a few weights as well. And so now
Jason Pereira: Yep.
Dr. Randy Knipping: ... you understand the most important part of lifestyle medicine is it's not about starting off with a perfect program, but it's starting off with a ritual. If you can ritually do exercise every weekday morning, first thing in the morning, before your morning shower, then you are three times more likely to exercising a year from now than if you do anything else, including joining a gym, spending money and spending an hour on a machine, which involves half an hour of getting there and half an hour of getting out of there, takes two hours out of your day, get out of bed, 10 minutes hit, you're done.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And I'm going to tell you that has been probably one of the most outstanding bits of advice I've given over my career, because it initiates people who are not exercise people, gets them started.
Jason Pereira: Yep. And I'll tell you, it sounds like it's not much time and you're not really pushing yourself for that long, but my goodness do you feel it? The-
Dr. Randy Knipping: Another example would be, it's stand desk? Most people spend most of their time as an executive sitting on their butt. And the problem is, is that's the worst thing for your knee and your hip health. Sitting is the greatest risk factor for developing arthritis at the knee and hip, but more importantly, is that your metabolism is lower when you're sitting. So you're much more likely to accumulate belly fat. So another thing that I suggest my clients to do is to get a sit-stand desk, but the reason why they should use a stand desk is not their health, it's their performance. So it turns out when you're standing, you are about 20 to 30 times more productive and resilient and creative than when you're sitting. Do you know why?
Jason Pereira: I don't know the answer to that. Now, why?
Dr. Randy Knipping: Because your nervous system is more alert when you're standing, because evolutionarily, when you're standing in the field, it means that you're subject to predation and competition. It's an evolutionary survival mechanism to be more alert and sitting is halfway to sleeping. So imagine if you stand up and you have 20% more productivity, that means you get 20% more emails done for the same unit time.
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Now what's the value proposition?
Jason Pereira: [inaudible 00:31:35].
Dr. Randy Knipping: Everyone that does it, they never sit down again. They like the productivity too much. And the side effect is they burn a few more calories and their knees and their hips don't hurt as much, bonus.
Jason Pereira: Yep. It's interesting because this is one of your tips that I adopted and at first I was like, "Standing desks really?" And then it was like, "Okay, it's not that big a priority." Then you mentioned the productivity boost and I was like, "Okay, now you're talking my language," and I kid you not. I remember the first week I had it, I was also in ketosis, which you can talk about later. And it was like someone just lit a match under me. And I was like, "I can not believe how much more productive I am at this.
Jason Pereira: So I can testify with certainty that that is not just a claim, my own user review is, "Oh man. Yeah. That helps." In fact, I will say, as we're talking, I opened up the VariDesk website because now that I'm working from home more, I don't have a standing desk at home and it's been bothering me. So I just need to bite the bullet and get it done.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Yeah. So, I mean, you can get these little scissor lift platforms you could put your computer and keyboard and mouse on and just put them on your dining room table and then just be able to lift it up and down. I mean, that's what I have set up at home, but I can tell you, I mean, I invested in my staff and Jim invested in Wilson and trail con. So everybody got a sit-stand desk, was their option. Everybody's using the stand part, go figure.
Jason Pereira: Yep. And I will say that I will probably spend about 80% of my day standing and about 20% sitting down. Sooner or later you want to sit down and relax for a little bit. But yeah, I mean, and there's other... I mean, I've been hearing for years about always take phone calls while standing up because you're not more aggressive, but you're more alert and attentive. And I did that and I found it to be true. So this was just kind of an extension of it for me, so, "Highly endorsed this change," is what I'm going to say. What other little hacks do you have for us?
Dr. Randy Knipping: Well, so, I don't want to get away everything.
Jason Pereira: No, not everything, of course.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Say probably, and I wouldn't even call it a hack. I would say that most business men and women have adapted to very demanding business environments and relationships and issues. So stress is probably one of the key factors that distinguishes what you can get from an integrative doc and from conventional doc, because for stress to become an issue for a conventional doc, you have to have a diagnosis of anxiety or depression, well, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the moment to moment thinking, thinking, thinking, worry, worry, worry, worry. And so one of the areas that I found to be particularly effective is the teaching of my executives, the skill of mindfulness.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Now I started meditating in 1971 and I started teaching meditation in 1986. So I've spent all of my adult life in the world of mindfulness. And it's really only been really the last 15, 20 years that it's become mainstream. And it's become mainstream because it's no longer presented as a Buddhist or religious or mystical phenomenon. Neuroscientists and psychologists all over the world have adopted this as an important tool in their practice because it's effective and it's something that you can do for yourself.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So in a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to observe your conscious mental stream without judgment and without engagement. In other words, imagine that your house is about to burn down, where would you rather be? Would you rather be in the house or would you rather be on the sidewalk watching your house burn down? Where would you rather be?
Jason Pereira: Definitely on the sidewalk.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Now in both cases, it's a horrible thing to see your house go down. But in the second case, you're not burning. So mindfulness is the ability to observe thoughts and feelings that are unpleasant without experiencing the magnitude of unpleasantness, which leaves enough mental bandwidth for you to actually make important decisions and judgment. And this is... It's easy for me to say this, it's when a client agrees to a one hour introduction of mindfulness and actually can experience it, that I find that's when they really can hit a home run, because then they do their 10 minutes of high intensity interval training in the morning, they do a 10 minute meditation. That's another thing.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Most meditation instructors have no clue what executives have in terms of demands. So if I tell you to meditate for an hour every day, it's a nonstarter. But empiric evidence suggests that 10 minutes of meditation every day for eight weeks, begins to produce changes in the brain that can be detected by functional MRI scanning. So there's actually chemical and structural changes in your brain that occur with a 10 minute morning meditation. And so there it is, TBM, training the body and mind. 10 minutes of high intensity interval training, 10 minutes of meditation, you take your 10, 15 minute shower, you take your morning hot beverage. And afterwards you go, "Guess what?" That makes a huge difference in the course of the first quarter and every quarter there after.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, that was one area I did not resist. I'd actually meditated for a while before we met. It actually came out of me listening to a lot of Tim Ferriss's podcasts where he'd interviewed a lot of top performers and he'd asked about rituals routines, and it was one person after the other, Meditation, meditation, meditation. And finally he said, "Okay, you know what? I got to try this." Downloaded an app, never looked back. And I find I go through periods where I get away from it and come back-
Dr. Randy Knipping: [crosstalk 00:37:21]
Jason Pereira: ... and I can tell you this much, two weeks after, if I don't meditate for two weeks, I feel an actual impact on my ability to cope with stress. It's quite remarkable.
Dr. Randy Knipping: I just want to make one more comment and it's, I think it's really important to understand that meditation is something that really most effectively has to be taught by an experienced instructor. There's a lot of individuals who believe that you can transfer this particular skill using an app or using a passive form of video education or YouTube videos and so on. And there's no doubt that any form of learning when it comes to mindfulness is good, but the empiric literature is very clear that being trained with a qualified experienced teacher is superior. I'll give you an example. If you wanted to go fly in a private aircraft with a pilot, who would you rather fly with? Someone who had attended ground school and had a flight instructor teach them how to fly or somebody who learned how to fly from the internet?
Jason Pereira: Yeah, 100%, it's an obvious question. It's funny because the corollary with my industry is, do you want to listen to the DIY stuff out there or do you want to go to someone who's actually got the credentials and the history and the experience, agreed. There is no substitution for professionals.
Dr. Randy Knipping: This is definitely kind of off topic, but we've seen an erosion of the value of the professional in the last 25 years.
Jason Pereira: Yes, we have.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Because of social media and because of internet, everybody can do everything. You can buy your own house, you can navigate your own mortgage, you can do your own divorce, you can do your own renovations. And people think that simply knowing something makes them professionally competent. What they don't know is all the problems and pitfalls that you have to anticipate. And it's only a professional with experience like you, that really knows how to navigate the financial waters. And be very careful not to sort of establish too much deluded pride, that just because you intellectually understand something, you therefore are an expert.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. There's a difference between reading a couple articles and living a life within it. And unfortunately your right, society all too often tries to discredit it. Also, because I think there's a misconception of what professionals are in that, "Oh, they're supposed to have the right answer at all times." And the answer is no, we're not, we're not going to have the right answer at all times. We're going to have more informed answers than the average and probably have better outcomes because of that information. But that's a side note, Dr. Knipping. This has been fantastic. I certainly enjoyed it and I hope everybody takes away the key hacks. Where can people find you if they want to reach out?
Dr. Randy Knipping: So, Deerfields Clinic, we're online. So deerfields.ca, that's, deerfields with an s.ca and we offer an initial complimentary virtual needs assessment with me. So what I do is I spend about 20 minutes with prospective clients, usually telephone or zoom. And I basically spend a lot of time listening mindfully to what it is exactly that's going on in your body, your mind, and what your goals are. And then I make recommendations that you can choose to adopt or think about. And I find that the personal needs assessment is probably the most powerful tool to help people understand what it is that we do here at the clinic. But the website is pretty extensive. We have a very, very active social media. So we prepare and print out information on a daily basis, on weekdays, sometimes we even post on the weekends.
Dr. Randy Knipping: And of course I've got a whole team of healthcare professionals we're growing, we'll have four doctors by the end of the year and developing some very interesting additional programming. And it would be wonderful to hear from some of your clients.
Jason Pereira: Oh, this is out there for anyone who wants to listen, not just my clients, but I will endorse your services. I've been a client for many years and it has definitely had a significantly better impact in my life. And I get to... Well, I get the reports and come home. My wife makes sure she reads them every time and seeing the positive progress is definitely valuable.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Well, I want to also mention that when I first met you a few years ago, one of the things about being a doctor is that doctors have a tendency to think because they're good in clinical medicine, that they're good in everything else by some sort of general osmosis. And clearly my financial acumen was not great. So I got to tell you that within a very short period of time, you discovered a tax issue that ended up putting an additional $750,000 into my pocket. And I had been with accounting firms and other tax lawyers and so on, and no one had picked up on something that had such a profound impact on my financial status.
Dr. Randy Knipping: So I was very impressed with the fact that you're not just a tax person and you're not just a financial planner and you're not just a security planner and you're not just about life insurance and so on, but you do that full circle and I've got to tell you, it has made a big difference in my life. So I'm equally admiring your professionalism and I'm grateful for it.
Jason Pereira: We do have mutual admiration society going on that's for sure. And I will say this much, the corollary there is both of our practices are about the client's success. And we can only measure ourselves through their benefits. So, we'll also say anyone who's wondering what that is, that opportunity is now closed, thanks to a couple of budgets ago. So unfortunately that's the end of that. But nevertheless, we did get you in time. So, that was fantastic.
Jason Pereira: Randy, thank you yet again. Very much appreciated. Thank you for the ringing endorsement. And again, I do encourage everybody to take a look at your fields and the services offered.
Dr. Randy Knipping: My pleasure. Thanks very much everyone. Clean your hands, wear a mask. The future is going to be not face-to-face meetings, but mask to mask meetings. And don't let the invisible zombie apocalypse get you down.
Jason Pereira: We'll come through this. Take care.
Dr. Randy Knipping: Cheers.
Jason Pereira: So that was my interview with Dr. Randy Knipping of Deerfields clinic. I hope you enjoyed that. I can see, we do have a mutual admiration society thing going between the both of us, because we've quite frankly had very positive impacts in each other's lives. So as always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you see your podcast until next time, take care.
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