On today’s episode, I’m joined by the founder of Tolleson Health Advisors, Shawn Tolleson. Shawn is a former Major League Baseball player who felt stalled out in his health journey, battling lack of energy, chronic pain and inflammation, and weight gain. We discuss how Shawn discovered functional medicine solutions and reversed the effects of his years as a pro athlete. We also talk about going against the norm for raising a family and his top recommendations for optimizing your health.
On today’s episode, I’m joined by the founder of Tolleson Health Advisors, Shawn Tolleson. Shawn is a former Major League Baseball player who felt stalled out in his health journey, battling lack of energy, chronic pain and inflammation, and weight gain. We discuss how Shawn discovered functional medicine solutions and reversed the effects of his years as a pro athlete. We also talk about going against the norm for raising a family and his top recommendations for optimizing your health.
After discovering out-of-the-box approaches that helped crack the code of his genetics, nutrient deficiencies and sleep patterns, Shawn says that he feels better at 34 than he did at 24. Shawn started his company two and a half years ago with the mission to help his clients feel the same and turn back the clock on their health.
His wellness breakthrough also led to rethinking how he and his wife wanted to raise their family. Shawn and I discuss the pressures that parents face to overextend themselves and their children with activities and how to instead slow down, reconnect, and consider the bigger picture.
Listen in to learn more about how Shawn redefined his ‘why’ for taking care of his health and his favorite tools and practices for longevity.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or on your favorite podcast platform.
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[00:00:00] Dana Frost: Welcome to Vitally You, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host, Dana Frost, a wellness expert, life coach, and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect: conversations about vitality from the inside out with guests experts in the field of health, culture, and spirituality. And solo episodes along the way from me, where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger while growing older, this is the place for you.
Welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. I'm so excited to have this week's guest. Sean Tolleson. He is a former major league baseball player and the founder of Tolleson health advisors. After a career of working harder, left him tired, hurting, and literally broken. He began to question the status quo.
Shiny reached a point in his career where the same foods and exercises just weren't cutting it anymore. He experienced lack of energy, chronic pain and inflammation, and began to gain weight. And I am sure many of our listeners can relate to that place. Many of you have been in that place in your own health journey.
Shawn's career was derailed by. He used a combination of genetic insights, food supplements, exercise, and recovery techniques to climb back to the top of his game, retired from the game of baseball. Sean wanted to begin a new career that included his newfound passion of optimized health. He founded Tolleson health advisors, so they'd be, could help others rethink their approach to health and wellness.
When I met Sean, honestly. Over new year's Eve at a wedding, we began talking about health. The groom is one of his best friends and wanted us to meet because he knew we had a lot in common and I pretty much after, you know, a very short conversation wanted to bring him to the podcast. So, Sean, welcome.
Thank you for joining.
[00:02:18] Shawn Tolleson: Yeah, thank you for having
[00:02:19] Dana Frost: me. So Sean, just to preface, Sean's coming to us from Dallas and Sean, could you just start by telling us a little bit about your story? I found your health journey really fascinating because you came from as most of us come from the realm of following conventional medicine.
[00:02:36] Shawn Tolleson: Yeah, no, I'd love to share my story. You know, probably my story goes all the way back to being a child. You know, health was something that like my family preached, like we took it serious, but not from maybe the way that I think about it now, it was always that kind of mentality to work harder. Right. And that's kind of how you Excel.
That's kind of how you get to the top is by working harder. And to some extent, that really is true. Right. And I'm so thankful that. Really my father instilled in me this work ethic, like no other. And I think that's probably a huge reason why I was able to, you know, reach major league baseball is because I had this work ethic.
I had this, this drive. But there is a balance between working hard and working smarter. I just, it got to a point where me staying healthy became a chore and it became hard. Right. And I don't like to do chores. I don't know about you. I don't mean they're not fun. Right. And I think I began to notice that more and more and more people.
Kind of viewed their health as a chore, as something on their to-do list that they have to cross off. And I kind of began to question that a little bit. So my baseball career, I was never the strongest, the fastest guy, but I could really throw a baseball. Like I was, how was it? That was, I was really good at throwing a baseball.
I was a pitcher and, and got to the major leagues and had some success. And, you know, after. Uh, three or four years, uh, just began to have kind of injury after injury, after injury. And what's interesting is that, you know, you go and you have a surgery done and the Dr. May say, okay, it's going to be four to six month recovery.
Like I could just multiply that by two and that's how long it would take me to come back. And it seemed like with every injury that came, my buddy just took longer to heal and it wasn't despite my efforts. Right. I was doing everything that I was told to do and kind of through this journey, just my athleticism began to suffer as well.
I, I started putting on weight so you can't see, you can only see me from my chest up right now, but I'm about 200 pounds right now. Kind of, really at my. Pitching kind of, when my career started to kind of derail, I was probably about 200 4245 pounds. And not like in a pretty healthy way, you know, if you Google pictures of me pitching, like you're like, whoa.
Yeah, he was bigger than when I met him at the wedding over new year's Eve.
[00:04:55] Dana Frost: Well, because it's hard for me to visualize you without much extra weight on it. That's a lot of extra
[00:05:00] Shawn Tolleson: weight. It's hard for me to even remember. And I'm glad I don't, but it wasn't just the weight. You know, I also just felt bad. I was, you know, at this time I'm like 27, 28 years old, and I literally cannot bend over and touch my toes.
Like there's just so much pain in my body that it's not going to happen every time I pitch I would go home. I remember going home to my, to my wife and I. I don't know if I can ever do it again. I was like, it just hurts so bad and it's just kind of, everything just was kind of the snowball effect. And it kind of led into poor sleep, which led into stress, which led into probably some poor eating decisions.
And, but I was still working hard. I was still doing all the workouts I was supposed to be doing. I was still, we had a nutritionist. I was still eating and they weren't wrong necessarily. They were right. But then. That wasn't the only two pieces to the puzzle. Right. You know, we always try to draw this.
It's like, if I'm, if you're living in a home and it's raining and there's water coming through the roof, It's usually not just one hole or two holes when it comes to your health. There's usually a lot of things going on. And even if you're able to plug up one or two holes, like it's still, your body's still not optimized.
And so I really just decided, you know what, I'm going to start taking an outside the box approach. I started kind of seeking counsel with some functional medicine providers around the country and became a patient of one of them. And really starting to crack into like my genetics and supplementation and nutrient deficiencies, and then some other things like how do we optimize my sleep and how do I, what is meditation?
How do I do that? Um, red light therapy, ozone therapy, I mean, uh, all sorts of cool stuff. And I geeked out. I get down on a heart and I began, I began like listening to every podcast. I could have been reading, you know, I'd be reading stacks of books on anything I could find. Cause I became just, just mesmerized by this whole area of health that I had never heard of.
And I'm a professional athlete at the highest level, and I've never heard of any of these things. And I'm like, wait a second. Why is not why isn't not everybody on the team doing this stuff. So kind of through that journey. I was well into it and I was feeling better. I was looking better. I was moving better.
I was just had more joy in my life. And my health didn't seem so much like a chore anymore. And my dad kind of, out of nowhere was diagnosed with two forms of stage four cancer. So my dad, you know, growing up, he was like my guy, he was like my best friend. He was the person who instilled this work ethic in me.
And he's really my mentor. And I'm so grateful that my dad was my mentor. Like, that's so cool. But so th that news hit me really hard. Right. And he was given months to live and he really wasn't ready to just peel over and die because he kind of had that mentality of. No, I can do it. I can do it. I can do it, but he wasn't just going to do it without changing some things and kind of thinking outside the box.
And so I encouraged my dad. I was like, Hey. Let's go about this a different way. And he began, you know, eating differently, exercising more than he ever had things that really don't make sense to somebody on the outside. They're like, wait, wait, wait, you just got diagnosed with two forms of stage four cancer.
Now you're going to now you're going to retire from your job and exercise all day long and sit and ozone saunas and infrared saunas. And anyway, he started taking supplements and my dad ended up living. For five and a half years with this diagnosis never got rid of his cancer, but also never really got that sick, not until the very end.
And he was able to see six more grandkids get born and all this kind of stuff. So when he passed away, I was just like, you know what? I had been so concerned with my health from a performance standpoint, but I hadn't even, I haven't even began to think about from a prevention standpoint and. What I try to do with the clients that I work with now is a strike this balance between performance and and prevention.
Because to be truly healthy, you have to prevent the diseases that are coming for you because they're coming. I mean, we know it, we, there's not a single person listening right now who hasn't been either personally stricken with a disease or someone really, really close to. That's the reality of the modern world we live in, unfortunately, and it's really not going to change.
It's definitely not going to change anytime soon. And there's just a lot of things that we're exposed to now in a modern world that that caused disease. That's just the reality of it, but there's, that doesn't mean that there's not things that we can do right now to kind of prevent them. So. It's kind of that balanced approach.
And that's kinda how that's kinda how I got into this. So I, I started this company about two and a half years ago, uh, and have been partnering with individuals like on a one-on-one basis to really, I say, turn back the clock on their health from every aspect of it. And we. With a few different companies that re rethink corporate wellness.
So when we don't come in until you eat fruits and veggies, like we really tell you what you really should be doing. And yeah, that's
[00:10:08] Dana Frost: what I'm doing. Well, that's just, yeah, it's such a powerful story. And this podcast is all about. Turning back the clock on aging. And that's one of the things that really drew me to you is that, that focus of yours and just thinking about your dad.
It reminds me of one of my motivations early on. When I, for me, even before I was at all involved in health as a business, I watched my grandmother die at a young in her sixties from diabetes inflammation, adult onset obesity. And she was this. Super vibrant woman. And she was my person and it was hard to lose her at such a young age today.
We think sick, you know, sixties, very young. I don't know how old was your dad when he
[00:10:53] Shawn Tolleson: passed? He had just turned 67. Yeah.
[00:10:57] Dana Frost: So that's, that's really young. Thankfully you were able to have him for five rich more years, but I watched my grandmother go down that road. Of chronic disease. And then I watched my dad and, and then I watched my mom and I thought, I just don't want to age that way.
I one, when we think about our future and what do we really want? I love what you, the way that you were talking about helping your clients have the self-determination and think, we gotta think, what do we want in the future? Because everything that we're doing today determines how health expresses itself in the future.
Absolutely. It's never just one thing. This is, you know, I'm a functional nutrition and lifestyle practitioner. It's never just the food, usually not the food. Uh, what makes optimized health?
[00:11:50] Shawn Tolleson: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, you can, there's all sorts of longevity gurus out there now on the anti-aging scene.
And I try to be very clear, like upfront. I am not. I'm not necessarily after anti-aging from an aesthetic standpoint. Right? I truly want you to feel younger if there's anything else. I want you to have the energy that you had 20 or 30 years ago, you know, in some of these doctors that, that I even had an opportunity to work.
They are brilliant. I mean like brilliant, brilliant minds, but I don't know that their purpose for doing what they do necessarily resonated with me. Sometimes it almost feels like they're trying to go out and prove a point. My formula will get you to live to X number of years. And I don't like I get really turned off when people put a number on it really turned off, um, because it's not what matters.
Like I want to live a full life till the very, like, I just want to die really quickly. I just want, wanna, I want to have a really good. I originally to have a really quick death and I want to feel good to the very, very end. And I think everybody wants that.
[00:13:04] Dana Frost: Yeah. What do you want to be doing? What are the things that you want to be doing in life?
I mean, you can, I agree with you when you say it's not about aesthetics, that's not at all. What then? And I made that point early in this podcast. This isn't about looking younger. While growing older, it's about feeling younger while growing older. And that can be found in many different types of bodies.
Absolutely.
[00:13:28] Shawn Tolleson: Absolutely.
[00:13:29] Dana Frost: And you don't have to be, you don't actually have to look per se, like you're completely physically fit from a visual perspective to be. Truly feel vitally yourself. And how about
[00:13:45] Shawn Tolleson: no, I do an exercise with clients usually when they're first starting to work with me, but, you know, I just want them to think about most of the clients I work with, you know, they're business owners or CEOs or executives.
It seems like everything's clicking on all cylinders for them. And it usually is. I mean, they have a successful business. They've got a family, they've got a nice house. They've got a good retirement account set up. They've got, you know, it's like, think about all these things that you've done. How hard have you worked to kind of set up the end of your life?
You know, the last 20 years of your life, like look at all that you've done to prepare for that. But what about your health? And if you don't really have your health, even if you don't have half of your health, how much are you going to really enjoy all the fruits of your labor? Right. And what I really want people to do is to think about the people.
Right. If, you know, imagine yourself 15 to 20 years from now and who's there and think about those people and like, that should be your motivation for taking care of yourself. And sometimes it's, sometimes it's a spouse. Sometimes it's their kids. Sometimes it's grandkids and thinking about, well, man, what kind of grandparent do I want to be?
[00:14:59] Dana Frost: I am tracking with you 100%. I often tell people that early in our role as parents, my husband and I decided. That we, our goal, we decided what's our end game, raising children. The end game was to be, want to be together when they're adults. Yeah. And so if that was our end game, if we knew that that was our end game, there were all these things that we needed to be doing all along the way of parenting.
And I think it's so easy to get swept up in the direction of culture. I remember this one story and I think that this is, it just always really rings true to me. We had lived abroad for 10 years. We moved back and. You know, as a family, we established a certain familial culture that was, you know, living abroad and we were foreigners in a foreign land.
And we came back to our home country and truly didn't recognize the way people were raising children. And so we, you know, we started doing what people were doing, the travel sports and, you know, the activities and it didn't feel right to any of us. Where's our Sunday. Like we had sacred Sunday, our entire, you know, family life.
And at that point it had been, you know, close to 20 years and we just had to decide that two parents chasing different kids separately. And not having cohesion is not going to give us the end game where we want to be friends with our kids. If we're pushing them, pushing them, pushing them, we're not going to have the end game that we want.
And I think the same is really true with health. If we're, you know, just going with what the culture is doing, we're going to get the end result that the culture is getting, which is auto-immune chronic disease inflammation. And a diminished end of life outcome, which is what we see. We see as people grow old.
They're life force diminishes their vitality diminishes. So I'm appreciating everything that you're sharing. Sean, thank you.
[00:17:16] Shawn Tolleson: I'm appreciating everything you're sharing. Cause I'm sitting here. I wish I had a notepad cause you know, I've, I've got three kids and they're young and my wife and I are already having.
Similar conversations to what you're talking about. And it's just, it's amazing how distracted and busy we can easily become as families right now. And it's, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm reading a book right now called take back your family. And it's not because I feel like I've lost my family. Like, I feel like I'm doing things, but, but I have to be one step ahead of the culture because.
Even now I've got my oldest kid seven years old, seven years old. And he's, you know, I love to coach their teams, but my wife and I were like, Hey, you can play it. You can do one activity at a time. And there's so much pressure to like, get them in. And I we're, we're doing this and this and this and this and this.
And we're like, We're just going to do one. We're going to pick one.
[00:18:08] Dana Frost: I fully support you in that. And I think that it's really tempting, especially as young parents, it was in some ways I think that it was easier for us because we were already different from the environment where we were raising our kids.
It's much harder to, to be different in your own environment. It's funny that here I have a professional baseball player on the podcast because. My husband and I used to say, these parents are chasing this dream of their children becoming professional athletes. And really what's the percentage of people who become professional athletes.
I don't know if you know the percentage, but it's, I don't know exactly what it is. It's very small. And so families are really devoted. Most of their time, most of their free time to those pursuits. And I'm not saying that they're wrong, nothing is black and white. And I had several different people in the community where I live, you know, debate me in essence on this idea.
But it's few people who are, whether it's a professional athlete or the great pursuit in our community was professional athlete, Ivy league education, professional performer. And those peak performers are just a very small minority and what's the cost. What's the cost to health of repetitive, always doing the same thing over and over again.
I think you could speak to that. What's the cost to longterm family stability and cohesiveness. I think we're definitely tracking, tracking Hondas. No, we
[00:19:43] Shawn Tolleson: are. And sports or sports are great. Right? Kids can learn a lot of things from sports that you are hard-pressed to learn anywhere else, but you have to keep a focus on those things.
And as soon as the sport is no longer supporting the values, when you first got into it, then you need to kind of rethink what you're doing because you're right. Not many people are gonna be. Pro and whatever they're doing very few. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't play sports. They should, but yeah, it's, it's all about, it's all about the purpose that, that you're playing a sport and the purpose isn't to be a professional, right?
The purpose is to learn life skills.
[00:20:19] Dana Frost: Yeah. And I think Sean, we could take that back to what you said. It's a, as soon as whatever the activity, it could be professional sport. It could be any activity. As soon as that activity doesn't support your values and what your end game is. It's time to rethink it's time to, you know, look at the situation differently.
And I think that that can also, we can say that about health. If we are, you talked about not wanting, you know, pursuing health was a chore. And I think a lot of people have that idea that it's just a chore, then we're going about it in a different way. And we need to reframe. What is our why for taking care of our health?
[00:21:02] Shawn Tolleson: Yep, absolutely. You know, and, and I know, you know, this, but being healthy is like so much more than taking an hour out of your day and doing a workout and drinking a big jug of water and approaching shake. Like it's really, truly how you go about every single day, every
[00:21:19] Dana Frost: single moment. It's your thought and how you are present in every moment.
You mentioned a lot of modalities when you were talking about your own health that I use and I've been exposed to, and I'm a huge fan of what are some of your favorite tools that across the board you really like to expose your clients?
[00:21:42] Shawn Tolleson: Well, I could just take you through my morning routine this morning.
There's quite a few modalities that went into that. So, you know, I, I wake up every morning and drink water. Okay. So, you know, call it a modality or not, but water is. Thing to, to consider, especially when you first wake up. So room temperature, water. When you first wake up, I'm a water connoisseur. So some people can do wine or whatever.
I don't know what other things you can be a kind of sort of, but truly I, the kind of water you're drinking makes a big difference.
[00:22:14] Dana Frost: So tell us what kind of water you're drinking, because I'm really interested
[00:22:17] Shawn Tolleson: in, so I never drink tap water, really? Never, almost never. I use a filter, uh, at our house. That's it's a reverse osmosis filter.
So it's really filtering everything down to zero, but then it re mineralizes it to kind of mimic what it would look like coming out of a natural spring. So it's structured water. Yeah. It's structured water. So yeah, it's structured water. So that's what my family drinks, like, that's what we cook with.
That's what we drink. That's what we wash our fruit with, you know, so I drink a big jug and, you know, a big jug. I drink like 32 ounces of that. When I first wake up, I usually will alternate, uh, Of putting in like sea minerals and to that water as well. And then the next week put in molecular hydrogen. And I kind of just go week on, week off that.
And then I go to my closet, my kids call it daddy's closet, which sounds really, really strange. I understand. But I've got a closet. We have a Jew. I converted the guest bedroom until like a little gym at our house. Um, because I'm all about convenience. And the closet that's in that bedroom. I converted it to kind of like my biohacking little closet.
So I lay down on a PEMF mat and. For reasons that we can talk about if you want to, but, and then I suspend these red lights over my body and I turn those on and I sit there and usually spend about five minutes in prayer to start my day. And then I'll try to memorize a scripture from the Bible. I will sometimes meditate sometimes not, uh, sometimes read the Bible sometimes just read a book, just kind of whatever I have laying there.
And I do that for about 20 minutes together. And then, then I get up and. I go to a power plate, no matter what a power plate is, but I have a power plate. Yeah, there we go. So I get on the power plate and I have like, I love my power. It's telling you efficiency, efficiency, and convenience. So I get on there and the morning is like just the best time to do that kind of stuff.
But for those that don't know what a power plate is, it's like a vibrating platform and very intense vibrating platform. And you can build quite a bit of strength and flexibility and mobility and engage your lymphatic system. Right. When you wake up in the morning, which can help with just detoxifying your body.
I have like a five minute routine. I have a few different five minute routines that I just go through on that. And then I do a workout and it usually never lasts longer than 20 minutes. I just
[00:24:39] Dana Frost: want to preface again. We don't have to work so hard. It doesn't have to be I'm in the gym every day for a, have to be there for an
[00:24:48] Shawn Tolleson: hour.
No, not at all. I enjoyed doing that. So if I had, you know, if I didn't have three kids in a career and I had time, maybe I would, you know, for sure, but I don't. So I, I get it done before anyone's awake. That's my time. But I will say my number one, favorite modality, and I do this. Every day in the winter and hopefully someday we'll figure out a way to do it in the summer, but I do a cold punches.
I think cold thermogenesis is the number one, ancient practice, biohack, whatever you want to call it. I think it's the number one thing that people should be doing for their. I think it's probably number one. I mean, outside of, you know, like sleep and that kind of stuff, but I think there's so many benefits that come from doing cold therapy.
Do
[00:25:34] Dana Frost: you do that in your bathtub at home? Or how do you do it? Do you have,
[00:25:38] Shawn Tolleson: yeah, so luckily right now in Texas, it's finally cold enough. I know you're you're in Miami, right? So you don't really have that option, but right now I just get. Oh, cause that's easy, but there are like cold plunges that you can buy.
They'd stay at a certain temperature someday. I'll get one and you know, there's cryotherapy and things like this. Those are great. Like they really work, but they don't work as well as getting Coldwell.
[00:26:03] Dana Frost: What's the temperature of your pool water in the winter.
[00:26:05] Shawn Tolleson: It's usually anywhere from like 45 to 60, somewhere in that range.
Yeah.
[00:26:11] Dana Frost: And how long do you stay
[00:26:12] Shawn Tolleson: in? I stay in about three to five minutes, something like that. So it doesn't take long. If you're trying to lose weight, you could argue staying in longer and not, not taking a cold shower, like letting your body heat up naturally because you'll burn a ton of calories doing that.
One of the things that cold water does is it helps. You're white fat, which is like the bad fat to brown fat, which is very metabolically active fat. And that conversion process is not easy, but getting in cold water, like actually makes it pretty easy. Like it makes it happen. That's one of the things I never, you know, people, sometimes clients come to work with me and they want to lose some weight and I'm like, great.
That's awesome. That's not how we're going to measure your success in this program is by how much weight you lose. But I understand. For you to feel healthy, you want to lose weight? I get that. But my process to do that is I could help you lose 40 pounds this month if you want to, but you shouldn't want that because there's a difference between shrinking fat cells and losing fat.
cells And I think so often these diet approaches will help you lose weight. They'll help you feel better. You'll look better. Your body fat percentage will go down, but all you've done is taken a million fat cells and shrunk them down. I have to be careful to say this. That's not bad. That's not a bad thing.
Like good for you. Good job. But as soon as you change something, As soon as you change anything, as soon as a stressful event in your life happens, as soon as you have a few nights of sleep deprivation, as soon as you get off, whatever crazy diet that you're on, those fat cells very easily. And they will be very happy to enlarge again, very happy to.
Yes. And so there's approaches to fat loss where you actually just lose the fat cells or convert the fat cells. And that's really what you want to do. That's an
[00:27:58] Dana Frost: awesome clinical Pearl.
[00:28:02] Shawn Tolleson: You just have to, and it takes a little longer, but you gotta, you gotta be patient.
[00:28:07] Dana Frost: And what are some of the other practices that support that process?
Besides the exposure to cold
[00:28:14] Shawn Tolleson: therapy? Fasting is probably the first one that comes to my mind besides the cold therapy. So, you know, there's a million different types of fasting protocols. Intermittent fasting is great. Everyone really should be eating within an eight hour window every day. And. Then, you know, you go to 24 hour fast and 36 hour fast and 48 hour fast and 72 hour fast and week-long fast.
And yes, if you're like thinking I'm crazy, no, you can actually do it and you'll feel just fine and you'll be totally healthy. You know, that's something, we, we take our clients through a, an extended fast, most of our clients are on an eight hour eating window. Not, not all of them, but most of them, but every week or every month, they go through one extended fast.
Even the people who are at an ideal weight, do this. Even I do this because this is a longevity hack. This is a way for your body to take out the trash and clear out damaged DNA and damaged cells and misfolded proteins and fast. And it's like really the best way to do that. And it's totally free. It actually is better than free.
It saves you money. So just do it.
[00:29:16] Dana Frost: Yeah, well, you know, I always like to bring people back to our ancestors. They were hunters and gatherers and they weren't eating all the time. Fasting was just naturally built into the way of life. And we've just come so far from that where we have an eating cycle.
That's, you know, we're eating a little bit all the time, as long as we're awake.
[00:29:39] Shawn Tolleson: Yeah. We, you know, having the 24 7 access to food like we do is just not. It's convenient, but very unnatural, you know, door dash and grub hub and Uber eats. That's very unnatural and, you know, and, and fast thing doesn't always have to be so structured and planned out either.
I run a free fasting community. That's just delivered through text message. So if you just text the word fast to the short code, 7 7 5 1 3 every week, we send out a fasting state. So like, and even like a little picture, you can save this, the background in your phone, like Monday, I'm going to eat between these hours, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'm going to only eat dinner.
So we take people through this process and usually once or sometimes twice a month, we'll do an extended fast together. I love that. I
[00:30:25] Dana Frost: want to make sure we get that in the show notes. So yeah, that's,
[00:30:29] Shawn Tolleson: it's, it's been really cool. And to see some of the feedback we've gotten from it, and I've had people say like, why don't you charge for this.
'cause fasting's free.
[00:30:39] Dana Frost: Yes. I love that. Shawn. It's
[00:30:41] Shawn Tolleson: just free. You should just do it, but it's, it's amazing. I've had like, even so many people that I know personally are like a part of that. And I think it's probably, you know, there's probably five or 600 people that are all doing it together and
[00:30:54] Dana Frost: I'm gonna sign out because I fast, regularly, but I do it on my own.
And I love that idea of community. Last February, I did a seven day water fast and. I think what we need to remember. It's not just something that impacts us physically. There's a whole, it's a spiritual experience. It engages the mind. It engages the
[00:31:18] Shawn Tolleson: emotion. It changes your perspective on food. For sure. It changes your perspective on food because you, you learn to really appreciate the food that you're eating, the food that's in front of you and what happened.
With anybody who goes through these fast, because you appreciate the food so much, you don't ever eat food that you don't appreciate. And what do I mean by that? As like, You know, I, I appreciate homemade oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies. I really appreciate them. And, and like, I'll eat them because I really like them.
And I like, there's some love and some time that went into that, maybe I made them, but you know, if I go to a party and there's just like grocery store bought cookies or cake, or like, I don't appreciate. And because I use fasting and because I appreciate food differently and I see it in a different light, like I seem to only eat foods that I really appreciate.
And it doesn't mean that they're always healthy. Does that make sense?
[00:32:19] Dana Frost: Total sense? I love the way that you frame that shine and I'm going to use that going forward, eat the food, you appreciate them. And that's just a beautiful way to, to frame an engagement with feeling.
[00:32:31] Shawn Tolleson: You know, people ask me all the time, like, oh, I bet you just, I bet you just eat this strict diet all the time and no car.
I'm like, not really. I mean, it's like a Saturday night I had Saturday night, I ate a whole large pizza. Okay. And entire large. And I really, I enjoy it, but it was from my. Favorite pizza. Like it is like my pizza place. Like this is my spot and I, when I go there, I like, I eat it up. I just love it. But, you know, I, I also make good decisions all throughout the week to be able to do things like that, but it really is all about kind of appreciating the food setting, really high standards for what you eat is a good, another good way to think about it.
You know, like I love beef. Okay. I do. I love it, but I have very high standards for the beef that I. So that doesn't allow me to eat beef three times a day, every day. It just doesn't. Um, and so when I do get to eat it, it's like the best quality beef and because it's expensive and because it's hard to find.
I eat it a couple of times a week. And that's it.
[00:33:40] Dana Frost: I love that. I just want to go back. Is there anything else in your morning practice that we
[00:33:44] Shawn Tolleson: missed the workout cold plunge? Mm, no, not really. Well. I do. I do. I mean an Ayurvedic practice of like coconut. I use coconut oil to like oil pulling on my, in my mouth.
So I do that every morning. I do that while I'm showering after the cold plunge. So, you know, I don't brush my teeth twice a day. I hate to just share that with your whole audience, but I don't, I don't, I do oil pulling in the morning and I brush at night. So yeah.
[00:34:13] Dana Frost: Cool. That's awesome. We'll shine. We are nearing the end of our time together and it's just been so wonderful to get your perspective and to share your perspective with our listeners.
Where can people find you? And I really want to make sure we get the fasting, your free offer to the world. I want to make sure we share that with everybody, but where can
[00:34:35] Shawn Tolleson: people find you? Yeah, so the fasting community, just text the word fast, F a S T to 7 7 5 1 3. 7
[00:34:44] Dana Frost: 7 5, 1 3. Okay.
[00:34:46] Shawn Tolleson: Yeah. That'll automatically roll you into the fast, her the texts.
And we usually, we used to text like twice a day and then we're like, what are we doing to people? So we send you a schedule on Sundays and then we send you like usually one or three, like supporting texts throughout the week. Uh, cause we don't want to just load your phone down the other place to find me as my website.
Tolleson health.com. From there, you can read about my one-on-one coaching. You can read about my pods, which are, you know, groups of like three to seven people who are like minded that want to go through a program together, by the way, those people have the most success because they have people to do it with.
And you can read about any of that social media. Great question. Find me on the website and find an email and email us social media. I'm just, I'm I'm disengaged, to be honest with you. I'm very disengaged from social media right now. So. That's fine to get an email.
[00:35:43] Dana Frost: Awesome. Okay. And Sean, I always like to ask my guests, what does feeling younger while growing older mean to you?
[00:35:51] Shawn Tolleson: What does feeling younger while grilling older mean? You know, I would say it's never too early to think about your health. It's never too late to think about your health. It's never too early to think about. I'm 34. It's never too early to think about prevention. And it's never too early to think about what you want the end of your life to look like.
And if you're 65 or 70 or 75 years old, it is never too late to think about your health and what you want the end of your life to look like because our body. Were created by something so powerful that, I mean, we are the, we're the most intelligent operating system ever known to man. And our bodies have the innate ability to heal themselves when provided with the right stuff.
So figure out what the right stuff is. And it's never too. I've got
[00:36:50] Dana Frost: goosebumps. I did I'll explanation point. I love everything you just said. Thank you so much, Sean. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And till next week, everybody streaming love from my heart to yours.
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