Gavin Sinclair, Ryan Copleston: Episode 745

Transcript

[0:00:31] DA: More people than ever are struggling with chronic disease and relying on medications to manage it. There’s a science-based program that enables you to achieve optimal health without the need for drugs by harnessing the innate intelligence of your own body. In their new book, The Simple Science of Wellness, chiropractors Gavin Sinclair and Ryan Copleston explore how small incremental changes in movement, nutrition, and mindfulness will result in massive long-term improvements in your physiology and mental state. Their FIT 5-40-5 plan is designed to maximize your intelligent body’s intrinsic ability to move naturally towards optimum health, helping you to become stronger, sharper, and more energetic, whether you're a couch potato or a fitness fanatic. The book aims to show you how to take responsibility for your own physical and mental wellbeing and achieve an understanding that your greatest source of health comes from within. Hey, listeners, my name is Drew Applebaum and I’m excited to be here today with Gavin Sinclair and Ryan Copleston, author of The Simple Science of Wellness: Harness the Power Within for a Full Innate Transformation. Gavin, Ryan, thank you for joining. Welcome to The Author Hour Podcast.

[0:01:43] GS: Thanks for having us.

[0:01:44] RC: Thank you.

[0:01:45] DA: Now, I know you two work together but I’d love to hear a little bit about that story, how you met, how you worked together, and if you can, respectively, just give us a brief rundown of your professional background.

[0:01:56] GS: Okay, well, I guess I’m a little bit older than Ryan myself so I’ll start the story with me. I’m a chiropractor, second generation chiropractor, my father’s a chiropractor. Both my brother and sister are chiropractors, we’ve got a couple of cousins who are chiropractors so it’s definitely in our family. I went to University in Canada, I studied chiropracticology in England and then came and started my practice in Scotland. That’s kind of a fast-track story of where I am now, I continue to practice here in Scotland and then a little bit of automatic joint journey. Ryan came up and joined us up here. I actually met Ryan in a seminar in just before we went to the seminar I actually met him in Spain and shared a few dinners together in Spain at a seminar and a few drinks as well, then the conversation led on. He was a little bit intrigued about what we were doing in Scotland and it wasn’t too long after that that he came up and joined us up here and that’s kind of where the story begins with the two of us.

[0:02:58] DA: You two worked together at the – what’s the right word for it?

[0:03:01] GS: Chiropracticology is what we have. I mean, Ryan came, okay, I’ll elaborate on that, what happened when Ryan came up, we were just kind of expanding our businesses at the time and that’s where we introduced this new program and Ryan’s really into health and wellness. He’s a big fitness guy, I was coming off the back of a kind of the better part of the decade where I was focusing more on business than I was on my own health and at that time, the two of us, he saw what I was trying to do mainly for myself and something that I was delivering for my patients. Then when he came onboard, his passion for fitness and nutrition was just kind of an inspiration to me and between the two of us, we really just took our program to the next level in our clinic and which ultimately has become clinics up here as well. I’ll let Ryan fill you in on where he started from and how he ended up here from his words.

[0:03:48] RC: Yeah, my journey started – I actually don’t have any family chiropractors so I started my chiropractic journey in Bournemouth, the same university that Gavin went to and that’s how we first met. It was a conference probably about six months before I was due to graduate and we met at the bar, had a few drinks and he told me about everything that was going up in Scotland so I decided to go up and visit. Not long after that, I came and joined the team at Scotland and from there, it just developed. I came up with an interest in fitness and nutrition because it was very personal to me. When I was young, I was overweight, suffering form a lot of health issues and all of the stuff that Gavin was doing in his clinic was stuff that I was doing myself, so we just wanted to help other people, patients, achieve the sort of, the results that I had personally and it grew from there, and here we are.

[0:04:51] DA: Now, why was now the time to share the stories in the book? Did you two have an “Aha!” moment? Was there something really inspiring that happened to you or did enough people just tell you, “Hey, you really need to write this down, you really need to reach a mass audience?”

[0:05:05] GS: I would say it was more of a natural progression. We had a little fitness suite in one of our clinics and that started to get really popular. We were doing that kind of the full innate transformation. That was the program that we claimed the name for that, FIT 5-40-5. It started to get quite busy with our patients, it started to get quite popular, the space really just wasn’t big enough. Really, it was the difference that we were getting, we really put a lot of time and effort into trying to make the program as palatable for most people. We took in to consider a lot of people’s personal situations, circumstances and we wanted to kind of target the biggest, largest number of people we could and get our biggest audience but really, it started as a handbook, a handbook for this program for our patients and friends of our patients who were joining. Then the handbook really started to grow arms and legs and that’s kind of — I would say, when Ryan started to jump in and he started to write about nutrition and I would come back and start of looking about the neurology of movement. Before you knew it, we had, would look like possibly chapters coming together. By no means were we writers as such but the book that we were putting together was getting longer, was getting bigger and it was getting read by more people. Eventually, we just decided to – I would say, more, bite the bullet. It wasn’t a big vision that we had to write a book but it was serving our purpose well and we thought, “Well, let’s go ahead and do this and see if we can put pen to paper and make this happen.” It was that just kind of a natural progression that it was for us and really, I mean, now is just the time that it’s coming, there’s a lot of things coming for us right now but it’s taken us a little bit of time to get to this stage.

[0:06:37] DA: Now, wellness is a pretty broad term, right? Who exactly, when you sat down, were you writing this book for? Is this for people who need to lose weight, is this people who are recovering from an injury?

[0:06:49] GS: No, I would say, more people that were just – I mean, Ryan and I had this attitude that we just wanted to help people experience life better and that became the foundation for what we were doing in practice and then into this program as well. I’ll let Ryan elaborate on that question because we both came with different attitudes. He said when he was younger, he had weight issues and some health issues. I actually grew up feeling quite good and it was only until my 30s where I started to get weight issues, where I was prioritizing everything else and I started to have some health issues. At the time, Ryan had met me, probably saw a little bit of his younger self in me with the weight issues but it was just our thoughts coming together at that time that it was the majority of people coming into our offices would have some ailment, chronic diseases on the rise. We thought, it’s our time to not only just be looking after these patients for the immediate reason they’ve come into the office but it give them an opportunity to work towards a better life in the future and understand the level of health that they may not have had and kind of get more empowered about being healthy or living healthier lives. Yes, it was people with injuries but really, it was just anybody who felt a little bit, they wanted to be a bit more empowerment and be healthier and it was probably 90 percent of our patient base.

[0:08:01] RC: For me, it was, when I was going for my own changes growing up, it was, I’m sort of my own guinea pig. I was trying all these different diets, all these different exercise regimes and then it wasn’t until very late on in that process, I had a good few tips and tricks that I used myself and I wanted to pass that on. Because I looked at myself and I’d think back to myself when I was younger and I thought, “What would the key things that I wish I did earlier” and that’s essentially what’s in the book. Looking at nutrition in a certain way, doing the exercise in a way that’s time efficient because I actually didn’t realize how busy a life can be when you're full-time working. Most of the people get the results through the program, they are struggling with time issues because they’re looking after their families and working long hours so they don’t have time to learn about all these stuff in a way that is too expensive so we really tried to simplify it. What people get is just what they need and nothing more.

[0:09:05] DA: Now, you bring this term up in the book and I’d love for you to define it for us here. What exactly is a “toxic lifestyle” and what does someone experience when they are living a toxic lifestyle?

[0:09:22] RC: Toxic lifestyle, I think a lot of people may have a toxic lifestyle but they don’t really know it. If you break it down, three main areas, nutrition, fitness, and mind, a toxic nutritional aspect is junk food, it’s processed carbohydrates, it’s sugars, it’s trans fats, it’s pretty much the western diet if you didn’t look into it too much. Then if you went into the fitness, it’s often just the deficiency of movement or sitting at a desk too long, driving to and from work. And then the mindfulness, stresses at home, family, finances, all of that builds up to become very toxic to somebody’s, somebody’s life.

[0:10:04] GS: Yeah, and then chiropractic, we always talk about those in terms of chemical, physical, and emotional, that’s how we’re going to break them down so as Ryan said there, the chemical generally what we eat or what we put into our bodies. Emotional is a big one, most people have a certain degree of stress and the toxic life, that’s expected in life. The problem is that we have this kind of ongoing levels of stress over an extended periods of time, the body is not really designed to do that. Unbeknownst to many of people, they’re suffering a chronic stress response just because of their normal living standard and that’s kind of – as Ryan said, people are busy. Very quickly, life can get overwhelming when you start to have a career and you start a business, family. There’s a lot of facets that you’re trying to hold together. Just time alone, the time commitment or trying to make ends meet for everyone, keep everybody happy. There are a lot of things that will keep your stress response slightly elevated. For many of us that just becomes the norm. Having said that, it’s not normal, it’s not normal to have a chronic stress response over a period of time. That will ultimately become sickness and disease. The toxic lifestyle ends up becoming probably pre-symptomatic and then eventually symptomatic. It can be anything, it can be pains in the body or it can be – obviously lead to cancers, diabetes any kind of chronic sickness or disease that you’ve been living in it for so long and all of a sudden, your body’s starting to express that and you get a diagnosis for it. For many of us, the disease process begins long before the diagnosis actually gets made and that’s the result of the toxic lifestyle that we refer to in the book.

[0:11:38] DA: Yeah, you talk about that even low-grade stress and a toxic lifestyle can just really lead to chronic illness. Is chronic illness actually on the rise and is it entirely avoidable?

[0:11:53] GS: Well, “entirely” may be a tough word but I would say, predominantly is. It’s definitely on the rise and we’re seeing, I think we quoted in the book the amount of increase in pharmaceutical medication kind of in the last five years in America. I mean, there’s no difference here, the pharmaceuticals on the rise here in the United Kingdom as well. In the western world, we use over 60, 65 percent of the world’s pharmaceuticals. These are, you can compare our cultures to some other cultures and we can see other cultures that live a little bit more balanced life and they’re not suffering to the same degree that we are. So, our lifestyles are definitely, well, to a point and it is the rat race that we talk about and it’s hard to get out of that. Once you get into it, it’s hard to leave it because all other things that we begin to like and we get to appreciate, we think are important are the things that we have to continue chasing, working harder for, making more money for, making more time for. It is totally about – well again, it’s predominantly avoidable, but it’s important to find a balance, you know? You can’t go after, you can have everything you want, that’s important to know what you want is really what you appreciate.

[0:13:00] DA: What do you say to people that say, “Hey, okay, maybe I realized I am a little stressed out or I am living a toxic lifestyle. I’ll just do a quick fix, I’ll eat less bread and I’ll go for one walk a week.”

[0:13:15] RC: Well, I think that’s – you should congratulate them because they recognize that they’re not in a good place but you should also tell them that there is no quick fixes and what happens once they get a fix? Do they go back to the same old lifestyle that created the problem in the first place? You’ve got to try and instill certain, not rules but things that they can do repeatedly over and over again that come easily. In the book, we talk about our core 40 which are 40 foods. Now, that’s not a lot of food but it’s somewhere out there but it’s 40 foods that you know you're going to get a good amount of quality nutrients from and if you do that on a regular basis, you’re going to improve your health massively and the same is for fitness. Do something small but regular and it will add up to a huge difference in the long term. So yeah, often, when people start making the changes, get them visualizing the long term, make sure they know that it’s a lifestyle change, it’s a wellness lifestyle that they’re going to commit to long term.

[0:14:16] GS: I think it was a good point that Ryan made there about, you know, just applauding the fact, that the fact that somebody recognizes the issue and is looking for a solution and sometimes people just aren’t aware of what exactly needs to be done. Most things that Ryan highlighted there are exactly what we highlight in the book. We make it very manageable for people to understand how these small incremental changes to lifestyle can have massive outcome changes to your overall health and wellness and your quality of life in the very near future and for longevity.

[0:14:45] DA: Now, Gavin, you sort of mentioned this earlier but some of this stress happened with you. You were working long hours, you weren’t in what you would consider optimal health, so you tried something new and what did you try, what changes did you make and what organically happened from them?

[0:15:04] GS: Yeah, so I was kind of just exactly the person that we were kind of creating the program for. Life just got busy from personal circumstances. I was traveling a lot so between traveling and time, spending time with my kids and trying to build a business, the thing that went on the backburner was my health unfortunately. Although I was a relatively pretty healthy guy, I probably had a little bit of room, so I had a little bit of leeway I guess but it didn’t take too long. Over the next kind of— I’d say the better part of a decade but certainly within the five to six year period, I started to realize that I needed to make some changes. My energy levels are down, I was starting to have some digestive issues and certainly gaining weight. I had actually just bought a small property connected to my existing building and put a little gym in there for myself. What we did was this program. I was looking for I needed a time efficient program to exercise. I needed something that gave me a little bit of diversity in food so that I could enjoy the things that I like but gave me enough structure and guidance so that I could keep the right foods in the fridge and being able to eat periodically throughout the day because I was working really long days. Then also, making sure I was taking time to do work on just me, you know getting a little bit of balance, relaxation, rest and breathing and meditation. I combine this program and it just kept reading more research. I got – like Ryan, I tried a bunch of different things but then it was time for the rubber to meet the road and I needed to really look after myself. We got stuck in, focused on what works and what works for a lot of people, there is fantastic programs out there. There is tons of things that works for everybody but we wanted to get something that if we found the fundamentals that the majority of people were going to get results and I being one of them. When it was working for me and I was having a great result and some of my patients were seeing new workout at my own little gym, I started to build these little chambers for everybody and let people join me and then before you knew it, we just designed the program that way. That’s exactly what we did and kind of birthed this whole project.

[0:17:02] DA: The project itself is called FIT 5-40-5. It is what you eventually came to, it’s what you thought was really optimal for most people to really get their shit together, for lack of a better term, right? Can you talk about what FIT 5-40-5 is?

[0:17:22] RC: Yeah, I’ll go ahead. The FIT stands for Full Innate Transformation, innate because you’re also using, harnessing the power of the body, the natural body and then transformation because you are going to make some huge changes. 5-40-5 is describing the main type of exercise that we do, which is burst string or high intensity intervals and we do five exercises, 40 second bursts, five times through, a minute rest in between and all of the exercises would involve all the lengths to make sure you get an entire body workout. Then with that, we then created the core 40s, so there is five groups, there’s 40 foods overall. We try to keep this pattern within the whole program and that’s where it came from, 5-40-5.

[0:18:11] GS: 5-40-5 yeah, so the nutrition basically meant that you were getting a nice broad based different foods in the system rather than eating the same things overtime. You are making sure that you’re choosing from the different food groups within the core 40 food group and that would make sure that you were getting a lot of good nutrient dense foods and a good variety of foods to make sure you are getting all the vitamins and minerals that we need to thrive. That’s why we designed it that way and we went to kind of seeing what is it that we need a lot of, what does it does a normal diet or average diet deficient in, and then we created the 5-40-5. So the theme 5-40-5 was that it started like 5-30-5 but the work kids work long enough, so we needed – there was a trip and doing the burst and so burst training has a lot of fantastic benefits. There are a little few drawbacks and we felt that we needed to add a little bit more endurance in there as well for more well-rounded workout. It was all based, as Ryan says, the full innate transformation was trying to harness the power of what’s happening inside. Doing things to facilitate a process inside the body to maximize your output for health and wellness.

[0:19:12] DA: Now, you say FIT 5-40-5 is for everyone in the book but it is also not a one-size-fits-all program, so how can folks look at the program from the outside and actually customize it for their own lifestyle?

[0:19:25] GS: Well, that was the main thing, it had to be versatile because you know, think of us as chiropractors, as professionals. A lot of the people coming in would have quite chronic back pain or very acute symptoms, so we had designed three different levels for it. It started off as a beginner, intermediate, and advanced but individually, each person can push themselves to their limits but again, remember you are starting somewhere. Every exercise isn’t a one-size-fits-all but you are going to find the exercise as the work for you to begin and there is going to be a progression with that. The same thing with the food, you know some people aren’t going to be able to spread their interest too far in different foods to begin with but then you begin to appreciate what you have available to you and need a little bit more. Very much it depends where you’re starting but we try to meet people where you’re at. Irrespective of where they’re at on their journey, so to speak, our goal is to make sure that they start. So if you read the book, you will be able to see that we – the program itself is very accommodating to the majority of people and that’s I think earlier, you asked the question, who do we think it was for, right? That’s why we think it is for so many people. Generally people are getting to that stage of life, they’ll find themselves at different levels of health but when you see in the book, you will see that all right, it is very enticing because we make it incredibly easy for anybody to get started and to see results at a relatively short period of time.

[0:20:47] DA: Now, when you say a short period of time, what do you think folks can really expect to see, let’s say they completely buy in and they start following the program for let’s say 30 days and then what can they expect to see maybe at the three-month mark?

[0:21:00] GS: I mean, you can just look at ours— I mean, there is up on the website, ourselves and our patients. It’s remarkable. I mean it’s what again, just sticking to the fundamentals. 30 days, yeah, you are probably going to lose somewhere between seven to 12 pounds for people who are needing to lose weight but I think one of the best things is within 30 days is people begin to feel empowered. They really try to feel like they are in control and they are doing something that is moving them along that spectrum of health towards health and wellness. At 60 days, massive changes but I think you know, if we are looking at some of our talking in terms of weight loss, yeah, definitely at 90 days we’ve had people lose 50 to 60 pounds, things like dropping dress sizes, waist-sizes, but we try not to focus too much on just numbers with everybody and just focus on the idea of living a healthier life over a long period of time because the rest comes with that. If you’re thinking you just want to lose weight, we always say you got to attach more to that because it’s easy to get motivated to lose weight to try to look good in a bathing suit for the summer holidays but it doesn’t last. A lot of what we are trying to do is to get people to think 30, 60, 90 days and then really, nine years down the road. How do you want to look? How do you want to feel? And that is really where we got people motivated to take action steps from this program.

[0:22:12] DA: Now, you actually offer a ton of resources towards the back of the book in the appendixes. Can you talk about what’s there and what kind of knowledge is contained, what the subjects are?

[0:22:23] RC: What we give people is basically a three-day plan and you can repeat that as much as you want. It gives you 15 different exercises that you can put to the 5-40-5 workouts where you can do it daily or you can do it three times a week, four times a week. As long as people start by doing something and working their way up, that’s the goal and then there is a three-day meal plan. Just take some simple meals to encompass the core 40 food groups that people can use. Then there’s a link to the meditations that we use in our program as well at the back of the book. With the book, they can get started of the three-day journey and if they enjoy it, they can repeat and then start diversifying. What’s interesting is when you’re using the core 40, you can swap and change the ingredients, so if there is something you don’t like, you can easily switch it and try to change the meals about to keep you interested.

[0:23:21] GS: Yeah and then in the appendixes as well on top of that the three-day program, I think we added those, you came up with your – the main supplements.

[0:23:28] RC: Supplements, right.

[0:23:29] GS: Ryan is really into nutrition and again, you could get a whole breadth of supplements out there but yeah, over and above what we’re talking about in terms of the food, obviously you want to get most of everything you can get from a food that we eat but where there tends to be some deficiencies and you can read the book to find out what that’s all about, Ryan has kind of put together things these are worth giving some serious consideration to and so I think it is this top kind of fix for what supplements are good for most people. Then we have some websites to go to, one is our actual FIT 5-40-5 website but we also put in our, one of the person we use for a lot of our mindfulness components, we put his website on there and he’s a Scottish guy. We like him, he goes deep, he’s pretty real and he’s got quite a history himself. He’s got a free resource, I mean, on his website, you can jump on there and you can get your first month of coaching for free as well. That has nothing to do with us, we just put it in there because we thought it was such an awesome asset for a lot of people and we find it very beneficial. Yeah, the appendix there, there’s a lot of stuff that you can get for absolutely free and just get started and start to dive into it and get your journey going and there’s a lot of guidance in the book that helps people explain the ‘why' behind doing what they do.

[0:24:41] DA: Now, what impact do you hope the book will have on a reader and what steps are you hoping that they’ll take immediately upon finishing or by getting to a resonating part of the book.

[0:24:53] RC: I would just hope that people realize that there’s something they can do straight away and make small changes that build up to have a massive change in their life. Often, there’s a minefield when you’re looking at these areas individually but we want to try and give people tools that they can use consistently and they don’t get overwhelmed and give up because you can get confused by a lot of things, it just allows you to take action steps.

[0:25:22] GS: Yeah, I think what Ryan said there is I find that really important, the minefield so to speak. There’s a loads of information out there and a lot of really good information. What I hope is, I hope that we were able to break a lot of the fantastic information down, make it so it’s understandable for people and make it so that as I’ve said multiple times you’re all right, it’s empowering for them to begin to make the change because yeah, we’re here one time and it is much better living life when you’re feeling good about things and you’re moving better and you're living better. Ideally, what I want people to do is start thinking about where they are now and how they want to live the next 10, 20, 30 and even 40, 50 years of their life because it is the decisions that we make now, the way we live now that are going to dictate the quality of the life that we have down the road. That’s one of the things for me, I’m not an old guy but as years go by, you begin to appreciate that we’re not going to be around forever, and it doesn’t take hard to look back 20 years and realize it’s gone pretty quickly. I really hope the power it has on somebody reading the book is that they think they have the ability to live a better life once they’ve read it, they have the guidance and the information they need to make the decisions and the action steps to get the life that they want.

[0:26:38] DA: Well, Gavin, Ryan, we just touched on the surface of the book here but I just want to say t hat writing a book where you’re really helping folks heal and become healthy is no small feat, so congratulations on having your book published.

[0:26:49] GS: Thank you very much, I appreciate your time, thanks for having us on.

[0:26:52] RC: Thank you very much, thank you.

[0:26:54] DA: This has been a pleasure and I’m excited for people to check out the book. Everyone, the book is called The Simple Science of Wellness and you could find it on Amazon. Gavin, Ryan, besides checking out the book and you just listed your website, is there anywhere else where people can connect with you?

[0:27:08] GS: Yeah, I mean, you could connect with us on LinkedIn. Both of us have our personal profiles on there. We’re planning to be a little bit more active on there but predominantly, obviously the website, that’s where easily be contacted with.

[0:27:22] RC: If you're in the UK, any of our clinics.

[0:27:24] GS: That’s it, yeah. If you're in the UK, mapleclinics.com is where we are. But yeah, LinkedIn is the easiest way to get a hold of us, I’m not a big Facebook guy, nor is Ryan for that matter so your best bet is to find us there and we’ll happily communicate with anybody.

[0:27:39] DA: Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for giving us some of your time today, talking about your new book, and wish you nothing but the best of luck.

[0:27:47] GS: Thank you very much, appreciate it, thanks for your time as well.

[0:27:50] RC: Thank you very much, Drew.

[0:31:12] DA: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can get Gavin Sinclair and Ryan Copleston’s new book, The Simple Science of Wellness, on Amazon. Also, you can also find a transcript of this episode and all of our other episodes on our website at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thank you for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.