seasons

Four Seasons and Harmonious Health

Dr. Trevor Cates: Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I am Dr. Trevor Cates. On today’s podcast we are discussing the four seasons and how to live more in balance with them, for our health and wellbeing. My guest is Dallas Hartwig, who is well known as cofounder of the wildly popular Whole 30 program. He is a functional medicine practitioner, nutritionist and physical therapist, but his true profession is a lifelong learner. He has presented over 150 nutrition and physical performance seminars focusing on catalyzing positive change. He is a New York Times bestselling author of It Starts With Food and The Whole 30. He has appeared on the Dr. Oz show, Good Morning, America, The View and Nightline. His work has been featured in hundreds of print articles worldwide. He also has a new book, The Four Seasons Solution. In today’s interview Dallas shares his transition from Whole 30 to Four Seasons and what his research writing his latest book helped reveal about living more in balance. He shares how the seasons tie into specific hormones and he provides recommendations for sleep, movement, food, and relationships that are more in harmony with our natural rhythms. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Dallas. It’s great to have you on The Spa Dr. Podcast. Welcome.

Dallas Hartwig: Thank you so much.

Dr. Trevor Cates: You have been busy. You have your second book now, and two books now on food. So tell us about your newest thing about The Four Seasons.

Dallas Hartwig: My new book, The Four Seasons Solution is kind of zooming out from food as a focal point. My earlier work has been mostly around food and of course, a lot of people know me for my work on The Whole 30. The first concept when I first started speaking and writing on food, was it starts with food. That is the important idea, that it is so profound, influential, and that is still true and there is more to it than that.

Dallas Hartwig: The four seasons solution has kind of been the paradigm or the framework that has been kicking around in the background of all of my other work for about a decade. I tried not to write this book. I tried to leave it in there and just to leave it alone. It has been kind of boring it’s way out of my brain for a while. I gave in and tried to put my ideas down into one place.

Dallas Hartwig: The Four Seasons solution really is a prequel or sort of the larger framework to all the rest of my work. It is the broad perspective on food and movement and sleep. But not just sleep, but the sort of the light, dark, circadian rhythm, which of course includes sleep. Then something I have been talking a lot more about the last few years is connection. And that is connection to self, connection to place, connection to other people.

Dallas Hartwig: It is the obvious one and then also connected to a larger sense of purpose and contribution to something bigger than ourselves. I took those four pieces and nested them into an oscillating model. Really what I was trying to get at there is, biology, nature, is highly dynamic. It’s highly oscillatory. We have this expansion and contraction cycles on all different timelines and all different body systems and across all different species.

Dallas Hartwig: The modern world that has become so increasingly technological, has really become very binary. It is very off and on, black or white, ones and zeros, and that is not the way our bodies work. I think trying to fit our very flowy, fluctuating, oscillating bodies into a very linear and binary world has really come at great cost to our individual and collective health. And so reintroducing some of that oscillation is an important idea.

Dallas Hartwig: That is really what the central idea in The Four Seasons Solution. We would all do better to reintroduce some of the oscillation that has been largely lost through civilization and the industrial revolution and the technological and digital revolutions. What I tried to do with this book was to try to give people very practical tools, to still live in the modern world. I am not saying we should get rid of electricity or have to grow our own food and be homesteaders. But the more connection we can have to those natural rhythms, the better off we will be.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, that’s so great. It is a big project to take on writing this book. I remember you and I had met at a coffee shop years ago, and you were just formulating the idea for this book in your head.

Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. It’s one of those things where it is such a comprehensive and integrative approach that it is really hard to talk about different specific behaviors on different timelines with different symbolic patterns. And I mean, the seasons are literal seasons, but they are also symbols for different experiences in life.

I mentioned expansion and contraction are two sides of the same coin, but that observation has been kicking around in my head for a long time. And so this has been layer upon thin layer over many years. And you are right. Trying to formulate and trying to figure out how much I can put in the book and how much I can’t and trying to get it down to a thing that can be organized well, was a real challenge to wrestle, for sure.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Right. Especially having a book like Whole 30, and it being on New York times bestseller list for, I don’t know how long, do you?

Dallas Hartwig: I don’t know. I lost track. I think like 80 weeks or something, it was something crazy, I forget.

Dr. Trevor Cates: For a diet book, that is really amazing. And it is very specific to food. Your new book is much more broad and all encompassing, so. Wow, amazing. I’m glad you got it done.

Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. Thanks. The whole writing experience was a totally different experience because it is an entirely different kind of book. And so the way you have to construct it is entirely different. And you are right. The Whole 30 was very specific and very tangible and very prescriptive. This is almost the exact opposite of that.

Dallas Hartwig: This is a big think book about how to notice new patterns in your own life, your own intuition, and to bring those forward in ways that feel really healthy and natural and grounding and intuitive. But it is not a prescriptive book. I make recommendations. I say, here are the things that I think work better based on the research and my experience, but it is not to do this thing in exactly this way for a specific amount of time, then everything is going to be wonderful.

Dallas Hartwig: There is a lot of responsibility, if that is the right word, given back to the reader to say, Hey, this is your life. You have to figure out what works for you. There is a very wide degree of personal accountability to make it work for individuals. Because we all live differently. We are all different people. We have different values and priorities and different biologies. It is a big broad book.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. Is there anything you have learned from The Whole 30 and writing that and getting that book out there and all the work that you both did to get that book out? Is there anything that you felt helped you transition into this book? I know that you were not prepared to answer.

Dallas Hartwig: No, it is totally good. That is a great question. I am sure I learned a lot of things that got lodged in my brain that I eventually used. But because it was such a different kind of project and different kind of book and a different kind of launch and a different kind of audience. I kind of felt a little bit like a fish out of water with this project. My personal audience is much, much smaller than The Thole 30 audience was, and it is a different kind of book, and there are different media platforms that are interested and not interested.

Dallas Hartwig: I just felt like I was almost basically a first time author. I think the thing that I also realized was I have a bad habit of coming up with ideas, sitting on them too long until I think they are refined enough to put them out there. By the time I think they are ready, they have been sitting in my brain for so long, but then I am no longer excited about them.

Dallas Hartwig: I had a little bit of that experience with this book. This is speaking candidly. I have been thinking about this seasonal model for so long that even when I sat down to write it and then to do planning, speaking campaigns and media campaigns, I was like, doesn’t everyone already know this? This has been around for years, but it has really only been around for years in my head.

Dallas Hartwig: I think that the lesson I learned there both with The Whole 30 and with this book is, if you have an idea that you want to share, just do it right now and don’t wait until you think you have got it all dialed in and fine tuned perfectly because then you are probably, at least if you are like me, you will probably end up losing interest and going on to other related or unrelated things.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Right. That is great advice in writing a book. I think there are so many people that want to write a book. I think so many of us have a book in us and it just stays there and we are like, I want to write a book. Writing a book is like birthing a child. It is your baby. It is a lot of work and I enjoy it, I love writing. I keep thinking about my next book. So keep percolating on that, you are right. You just have to do it. You have to get going.

Dallas Hartwig: I think the gestating comparison is a great one because I feel like I gestated this book for a decade. By the time I actually had the baby, I was just sick of being pregnant with the baby. It is a great comparison actually.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I think it is really interesting though. When you talk about this, there was a lot going on in your mind, you are thinking about it a lot. Yet with these changes that have just occurred with the pandemic and people staying home, and actually some of the things that are happening, like people gardening, more people getting in their backyard, going on walks more, getting back into nature. Do you feel like with these changes, do you feel like maybe this is a good time for people to embrace your book and the message in it?

Dallas Hartwig: I think it is actually the perfect time. I think it’s a great point. In the latter part of the book, I talk about this sort of pivot out of a chronic summer mode. I talk about this change, which is essentially a shift from perpetual expansion and stimulation and being on the go and focusing on productivity and whether it is career or raising a family or whatever. And we get to this point somewhere often in our kind of thirties or forties, and we are like, what is going on?

Dallas Hartwig: I am thrashed. What I write into the book is this opportunity, a suggestion for a pivot, a directional change, and really it is just slowing down. I think what we are getting collectively with the pandemic is a forced slowing down in a lot of ways. We are certainly not physically moving around as much as we were. Schedules may be different, but they may actually just be a little bit slower and less hectic.

Dallas Hartwig: I think all of that’s a good thing. In a way, this particular moment in history is a perfect opportunity to change the way that we have been moving through the world individually and collectively. In a direction that is more slow and present and grounded and connected to the things that matter most to us, people in places and the natural world. I think a lot of people have really done that already. Like you say, people are outside, they are gardening and they are hiking and they are riding bikes and they are doing that just by virtue of being spring.

Dallas Hartwig: And it feels good and we are limited on the other stuff we can do. In a way, I really think this is a great opportunity to jump on that train, because it is also something that is now much more common and socially acceptable. Whereas six months ago, if you would have said, I am not going to all of the social events and I am going to stay home more and I am going to spend more time by myself and I am going to spend more time in my home.

Dallas Hartwig: People might say, well, that is fine, but that doesn’t sound very fun. Because there is a lot of judgment of people who are more slow moving and introverted and who are more selective about their social engagements and who manage their time with a lot of good healthy boundaries really. Now everyone is forced into that. So actually it is a little more socially acceptable to do more of that. I think that’s a great opportunity. So yes to your question, for sure.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Let’s talk more about what these four seasons are and does it tie into Chinese medicine? I think that that is one of the things that is on my mind,

Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. The short answer is no, I have no background in Chinese medicine. I am only in a very cursory fashion, familiar with it. I have had quite a few practitioners come to me and say, Hey, I read your book. It sounds a lot like TCM or sounds a lot like Ayurveda in terms of the Phasix seasonal kind of approaches.

Dallas Hartwig: I think in a way coming from more of the scientific research clinical end of things, I sort of made some of the same observations and unbeknownst to me at the time of writing the book, that do line up a lot with Chinese medicine and stuff. Then there are some similarities and some differences. I am certainly not saying that mine is more correct.

Dallas Hartwig: It’s a slightly different way of looking at it. But the concepts of different behaviors and different experiences at different times of the day, different times of the literal season, different times of the year and on the longer timeline, the seasons of our full lifetime timeline. That is something that this model shares with all of those other models that we should be doing different things at different times. And we haven’t done a very good job of accommodating for that in the modern world.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. Okay. When you talk about summer, that was one of the things that we kind of get caught up in this chronic summer. You mentioned that, what does that mean? What does summer represent and why are we in a chronic summer?

Dallas Hartwig: I will back up and start with Spring, because that is the comparison of seasons going to time of day and going to our live Springs in the beginning, right? So spring is the time of energy and anticipation and excitement and looking forward and being naturally propelled into new things and it is novelty seeking and you think about the titillating experience of spring.

Dallas Hartwig: We are excited, there is new stuff. We want to get outside. We want to start an exercise program and we want to clean out the garage. We want to get working in the garden. And those are just spontaneous things that arise in us in the springtime. That is basically an analogous to waking up in the morning and it is also analogous to the spring, the early years of our life, kind of like childhood and adolescents and young adulthood.

Dallas Hartwig: That is the beginning part. All of that from a neuro-transmitter standpoint aligns with the experience of dopamine. Dopamine is excitement, anticipation and reward, and it is fun, fun, fun. And that is the time of looking forward and moving forward to chasing after something. That happens in the morning when we are getting going and looking forward to the day, it occurs in the Springtime. Like I just spoke about and occurs in the spring of our lives as we are looking forward.

Dallas Hartwig: I am going out into this bigger world, we are expanding out into the world. Then summertime is the time of maximum expansion of success and stress and productivity and lots of new ideas and new people and new places and new activities. And it is a time when we apply everything. We have all of our juice, all of our energy to doing the thing. That is the midday, or early to midlife, the big productivity years of let’s say 25 to 50.

Dallas Hartwig: It also becomes the literal summer when we are really pushing hard, we are doing lots of stuff and that is all normal and that is all good. I say stress because it is the time that we are moving fast and working hard, but that’s a good thing. Right? And so the hormone adrenaline, is the symbolic measure or the placeholder for summer, because it is something that makes us good at doing the task at hand, whatever that is.

Dallas Hartwig: Stress is not bad. Stress is totally appropriate episodically, but the way civilization is built and in particular, the accelerating digital, modern civilization is built around maximum stress and maximum stimulation and maximum productivity. There is no natural down cycle. Across the course of a year, there would be Spring, then Summer and then Fall, and then winter. Summer would be a quarter of that, roughly.

Dallas Hartwig: But that is not how we live. We live like it is summertime all the time with long days, short nights, chronic sleep restriction, chronic stress. We either exercise in the same way year round, meaning there are no changes season to season, or we push ourselves super, super hard in both mental and emotional and even physical realms in the sort of neurotic I have to lose weight. I have to be healthier.

Dallas Hartwig: I have to achieve a certain body image kind of way. All of those things are summer behaviors. They are not wrong in their time, but when we stretch that out indefinitely, that is hence the term chronic summer, because the premise written into the book and certainly fundamental there, is that chronic summer begets chronic disease. I hope it is obvious then that one of the solutions to chronic disease is actually rebalancing those seasons, those different modes of behavior and modes of experience.

Dallas Hartwig: That includes eating differently, moving differently, sleeping differently and connecting differently at different times of the year and different times of our lives. Moving from the chronic summer overstimulation into a more fall restorative, healing contractive mode is that pivot that we can start to do now during a pandemic when their schedules and lives are a little bit different, and then we can extend going forward so that our lives look a little bit slower, a little bit more contracted for a while, because then we can start to reintroduce that natural rhythm again.

Dallas Hartwig: There is this therapeutic intervention, if you will, to offset the chronic summer and then there is the reestablishment of a normal rhythm beyond that. It is sort of a phasic approach in that sense.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, absolutely. Then fall and winter, can you explain that a little?

Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. If spring and summer are the stimulating stressful, expansive seasons, then fall and winter, there are the restorative contractive seasons. I talked about hormones and neurotransmitters, sort of placeholders or symbols for that. Well Fall, and if you think about Thanksgiving specifically in North America, that is our fall experience, one we really identify with.

Dallas Hartwig: But fall is about slowing down and coming home and contraction and feeling grounded and feeling reconnected when we have been away and we are not coming home to reconnect with the things that matter most to us. It is belonging and community and gratitude and contribution, and a sense of legacy of something bigger than ourselves. What often happens when you have that really grounded, grateful experience is spontaneous gratitude and generosity that goes in there.

Dallas Hartwig: That is the whole experience of fall. So much of that is around or produced by the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin of course is known for belonging and community and closeness and intimacy, and that is the experience of fall. That can only happen when we come home and slow down that can not happen when we are going crazy out there in the world.

Dallas Hartwig: That experience of slowing down and contracting and being more present in the fall continues to an even greater degree into the winter because winter is analogous to nighttime, to sleep. It is a maximally contracted, maximally restorative experience. I argue that a lot of the downturn in mood that a lot of people experience in the wintertime, that we think of as, Oh, I am having depression because it is dark and cold. I argue that a lot of that is actually fairly normal.

Dallas Hartwig: That in the winter time, it is normal to feel more loss and grief. It is normal because again, part of this kind of larger societal or kind of civilizational premise is that things should be fun and happy all the time. That is not the worldview that I hold. I don’t think that joyful and happy and fun and energetic is actually normal to have a hundred percent of the time.

Dallas Hartwig: Then winter is slowing down and contraction is an opportunity to heal and grieve and let go of things, and also to restore ourselves so that in the next step, in the next phase, we are able to go out and have that Spring time or morning energy again. One of the other premises in the book is that if we don’t complete each of those phases in turn, we are ill prepared to experience the next phase, the next step, the next stage, the next season in its entirety.

Dallas Hartwig: I think winter going into spring is the really obvious example in the same way as if you don’t get enough deep restorative sleep at night, you don’t wake up in the morning, feeling energetic and motivated. You feel like that same flat, low energy depressed mood kind of thing that would be normal to feel going into the evening and sleeping and quieting down and contractracting.

Dallas Hartwig: If you feel that in the morning, it is because you didn’t get enough sleep the night before. The same thing is true if you feel that in the Springtime, because you didn’t do the winter restorative components as completely. The winter then, the hormone that goes with winter is melatonin. Because in the winter, it is normal for us to get a lot more sleep, to spend a lot more time in darkness.

Dallas Hartwig: Not just on the circadian on the daily timeline, but also on the longer timeline of going into each winter season, we should be getting a lot more deep restorative sleep and all of the wonderful antioxidant properties that go with melatonin.

Dallas Hartwig: The thing that I also find fascinating, that really got me thinking about this is you have to do the things in phases, is the fact that each of those sequences like dopamine gets biochemically transformed in your body into noradrenaline and adrenaline. Serotonin gets biochemically transformed into melatonin.

Dallas Hartwig: There is literally a biochemical sequence there. Not just a human experiential sequence. I think that is super interesting that the way our bodies, the order they do things in is the order that we should do things on longer timelines. I am just fascinated by all the fractal patterns.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love this idea that we can learn so much from nature. I mean, of course as a Naturopathic physician, I truly believe in the healing powers of nature. The true underlying meaning of that is actually nature, not just like supplements in a jar, but like putting your feet in the grass and the dirt and reconnecting with nature.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I love that I have had more time to do that lately, to really just sit. I actually spent a day going out at different times. One morning I woke up at five 5:55 in the morning and the sun was coming up and I was like, I need to get outside. I actually sat in the grass and just felt what it was like at that time of the day. Then I would go back in the same spot throughout the day at different times just to see how the world felt differently.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I think that we forget that there are so many answers to our health and happiness that are just around us. I love that you have connected this idea of seasons and that what we can learn from nature and these cycles and the importance of all of it into your book. Let’s talk about how practically speaking, what does this mean for people? How can we learn from this model of how we live our lives differently and so that we can achieve better health?

Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. I said earlier, this book wasn’t particularly prescriptive and I don’t feel like it is, but I do have general recommendations because people need starting points, right. There is this big, kind of nerdy idea of this oscillating model and all this. I also like really simple heuristics. Across the different areas of food and movement and sleep and connection, I give a central of guiding principles, or what I call anchors, of things that people should be doing year round and the most central things.

Dallas Hartwig: The heuristic for food is really easy. I have been saying this for a long time. It is eat whole foods that are plants and animals that still look like plants and animals in their whole unprocessed form that are available locally and regionally. Full-stop. That is it. It is that simple. We make dieting extremely complicated. I think it can be a lot simpler than it is for a lot of people.

Dallas Hartwig: Because what I noticed over the years is that the more connected I am to my body’s own innate wisdom, my own intuition, the more I know what I need to eat at any given time of year. Almost always that looks like eating the food that is available in my garden or at the farmer’s market. In the springtime, that looks like a lot of greens and in a general way, it looks a little bit like a Mediterranean diet.

Dallas Hartwig: I am fascinated by the idea also that a lot of the nutrition research, I am just going back to my nutrition background, what I noticed is there are a lot of the well supported nutrition approaches to diets, if you will, that have fairly strong research behind them. On one hand, it is really confusing because you can look and say that a plant based or vegetarian diet or vegan diet has all of the supporting evidence.

Dallas Hartwig: On the other hand, you can say, Hey, a low carb, high fat or ketogenic diet has all the supporting evidence. They kind of seem to be mutually exclusive there. You can look at the paleo diet or you can look at Mediterranean diet and each of those things start to look a little bit like one of the seasonal diets when you nest them in with what is available locally.

Dallas Hartwig: Mediterranean diet might be Spring, a diet rich in plant foods that tends to be higher in carbohydrates, somewhat lower in fat. A summertime diet would be a plant based or vegetarian diet. The fall might look like a low carb, high fat, or paleo type diet. The winter might get as extreme as a short term ketogenic diet.

Dallas Hartwig: What you have is opportunities to have all the physiological adaptations to each of those dietary approaches for the short term, without the negative effects of trying to make those diets work for any individual for an extended period of time. Which is what I saw as a clinician, so often people would do really well on one of these approaches for three months, six months a year, and into the second year into the third year, things started to really go a lot less well.

Dallas Hartwig: I think what we can do from a nutritional standpoint is just basically immerse ourselves and go back to that simple heuristic of eating the food that is available locally, and everything else takes care of itself. You get all of that physical obstacle adaptations along the way, and you don’t have to weigh and measure and track and get kind of neurotic about it.

Dallas Hartwig: You can just literally eat what is around and everything else sort of just sorts itself out. On movement, it is going back to the simple heuristics. What we see in the research that makes people strong and independent into their much later years is that they maintain physical strength, maintain muscle mass. Along with that comes the bone density and bone strength, and they maintain mobility.

Dallas Hartwig: They maintain joint and connective tissue mobility. That comes from regular applications of functional movement patterns and moving joints through motion. Then the anchor behavior for movement is strength training, done several times a week. And again, the exact number is less important than the principle. So you keep your body and your connective tissue strong and mobile.

Dallas Hartwig: Then in the spring through fall, you do an increased amount, increased duration of general movement, which is kind of what you want to do anyway. In the spring, you are excited to go out and do more movement and be outside more in the summer. You want to be going on long hikes or long bike rides or going to the lake and swimming and just messing around. It is this extended duration, but relatively low intensity movement.

Dallas Hartwig: In the winter, it is a lot more compressed in the high intensity interval training or strength training and not many hours a day of just general activity. So again, it is what your body tells you to do at any given season. It usually ends up working out pretty naturally as you tune into that to be an anchor of strength training, and then longer duration stuff.

Dallas Hartwig: Then in the warmer months sleep is also really easy. The sleep guideline there is the closer you can get to your own circadian rhythm as anchored to the light in your environment, the closer you can get that to what’s going on with the sun outside the better off you are going to be. It is actually that simple. So what that means is you are up early and you are up late in the summertime and you’re sleeping in a bit more and going to bed much earlier in the wintertime.

Dallas Hartwig: The spring and fall are mid points there. I said to my girlfriend just a couple of days ago, I was waking up earlier and it was like 8:00 PM and I had not even had dinner yet. And I was like, Oh, I’m so ready for this to be over because I am already tired and it is not even the longest day of the year. But that is the sensation that so many of us end up with over the course of the years and decades is that long days, short nights, tired, beaten down.

Dallas Hartwig: That is a normal feeling in the summertime. I am actually just over it, like, nevermind, I want to go to bed early. Then the anchor for connection is obviously the most important people in your life, whether that is a romantic partner, close family, closest friends. In a way calling for leaving behind the huge amount of social stimulation that is normal in the summertime of traveling, meeting new people, neighborhood barbecues, block parties, and the big social events.

Dallas Hartwig: I lumped social media into that same type of social interaction where it’s relatively superficial with a large amount of people. I am encouraging people to contract and slow down and move back towards fewer people and much more deeper vulnerable connections. I think that a lot of people in general are noticing the need for and including the specific pandemic time is that we are doing that naturally. In a lot of ways, even forced. So all of that is a good thing, I think.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, that’s amazing. I love all that insight and it completely makes sense. And I guess one question I have is obviously people around the world have different types of seasons. Like the type of seasons that you are talking about. You and I live in Utah, and there are definitely different distinct seasons. But even between the 30 minute difference of where you and I live, it’s different up here. We have a much shorter growing season up in park city.

Dr. Trevor Cates: We have snow on the ground longer. I love going down to Salt Lake City in the spring because I see more flowers earlier. Even within our little 30 minute difference of time, there is a difference in the seasons and what we experience. Then of course there is Alaska. Do you focus on where you live, where your ancestors lived? Or do we meet somewhere in the middle?

Dallas Hartwig: That is a great question. I thought about that a lot in putting this model together because obviously the world being kind of as global as it is, and most of us being somewhat mixed, of ethnic and racial and genetic descendants. Lots of times our ancestors were from all over the place and if you have ever done a 23 and me or anything like that, you’re like, Oh wait, I have ancestors in Mongolia.

Dallas Hartwig: But the short answer is, it is a mix heavily weighted towards what your local environment is. You could consider your genetic background, where your ancestors were from, but even still looking at the evolutionary timeline and still focusing on the very recent past. I am zooming out even farther than that saying, what is the broadest brush I can paint with here.

Dallas Hartwig: And the broad brush is human physiology adapts to the local environment, whatever that local environment is quite quickly and quite significantly. Even though we have all sorts of genetic splicing gone on in the last several thousand years, the key principle is that our physiology is dictated by our local environment primarily.

Dallas Hartwig: That is sort of 80 or 90% of the influence. I had a friend whose family is from India, who immigrated to the UK when he was a kid and he is like, what do I do? And I said you pretend you are from the UK. You go with your local environment, even though your blood is from elsewhere. That is an imperfect, sort of non quantifiable answer.

Dallas Hartwig: But in my experience, working with people when you go to different places like that local environment is by far the strongest influence. I did a podcast interview just a couple of days ago with a woman who was from South Africa who had then moved to Texas. She was like, we only really have two seasons in Texas. It is like ungodly hot or it is kind of cool.

Dallas Hartwig: The way to answer that like, what do you do then way is, you still check in with your local environment, and let that guide you because there are still changes in that sort of expansion and contraction pattern. Even if you live close to the equator and there is not a significant length of day changes, you are still using your local environment as your guide.

Dallas Hartwig: If you have very minimal seasonal oscillation, months upon months or year upon year. What that means is that you have to take all of your behaviors and sort of compress the amplitude down to a midpoint. Chronic summer is actually one pole way out here.

Dallas Hartwig: Actually if you live at the equator, I am kind of generalizing here, but if you live at the equator, since spring and fall are the mid points between the extremes of summer and winter, spring and fall would actually be a good generalized way of living from a style standpoint.

Dallas Hartwig: If you live at the equator and there wasn’t a really significant variation season to season rather than choosing summer or winter as the fixed point. Because we basically, globally in the modern world have chosen summer as the fixed point. We have missed out on this entire rest of the range that we should be oscillating through every single year. So super good question.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Great. That is amazing. Dallas this has been so fascinating and of course I can keep asking you questions and talking about this for a long time, but I’m sure people would love to know where they can get your book and find out more about you.

Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. You can get my book pretty much anywhere books are sold on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I really encourage people to support their local independent booksellers. Some of which are starting to reopen. Many of which have online websites or online ordering systems. I really encourage that. They are really wonderful supporters of authors in general. I always like to send people that way. You can check out my website, Dallashartwig.com. I don’t do a ton on social media, but I’m kind of medium, somewhat active on Instagram and that’s just @Dallas Hartwig. So check me out.

Dr. Trevor Cates: That’s great. I am going to give a little plug for my local bookstore just because. Dolly’s bookstore is our local park city bookstore. They’re fantastic.

Dallas Hartwig: I love the King’s English here in Salt Lake.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. Perfect. Well Dallas, thank you so much for coming on today and all your valuable information and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.

Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. Thanks so much.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dallas Hartwig. To learn more about him and his new book, you can go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. And while you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. Community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information. If you haven’t already taken the skin quiz, I encourage you to go to theskinquiz.com, find out what messages your skin is trying to tell you about your health and what you can do about it at theskinquiz.com. Also invite you to join The Spa Dr. On social media, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. You can find us there at The Spa Dr. And I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.