The Craig Van Cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
The Craig Van Cast
Your Body Compass: the only way to guarantee energy, clarity and longevity | 60
That afternoon crash and brain fog aren't normal. It's a signal that supposedly 'healthy' foods are destroying your focus from the inside out.
This video gives you the system to decode your body's signals, end gut inflammation, and become the Pilot of your own biology, not a Puppet to the diet industry.
✅ EAT System | Get Your FREE Action Plan:
► https://craigvan.com/eat/poster
––– THE CRAIG VAN CAST –––
The full script for this video is also available as a newsletter.
✉️ Read the newsletter: https://craigvan.com
––– SYSTEMS & RESOURCES –––
🌐 My Website: https://craigvan.com
––– CONNECT WITH ME –––
X: https://x.com/craigvandotcom
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craigvandotcom/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigvandotcom/
#eat #guthealth #cognitiveperformance
@craigvandotcom (on all channels)
Website: https://craigvan.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/craigvandotcom
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craigvandotcom/?hl=en
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHJ9dnY6Vj7BVNNCMQ72hbQ
Your afternoon energy crash isn't just an inconvenience. It's a thief stealing your most productive hours, and the brain fog. That has you rereading the same email three times. That's not just a nuisance. It's a direct tax on your clarity and decision making ability. So you reach for another coffee thinking you've solved the problem, but you've just silenced your body's most sensitive feedback system and you've borrowed energy from somewhere with interest. Your body is screaming performance data at you, but everything you've been taught about nutrition has conditioned you to ignore it. We've been, we've all been approaching nutrition completely backwards. The diet industry has turned us into puppets. Following generic rules while our bodies send desperate signals that our cognitive function is tanking. But what if you could become the pilot instead, puppets follow hard coded rules. Pilots read data and respond to reality in real time every day you ignore these signals. You're not just feeling worse. You are programming your body for chronic inflammation, which is the root cause of cognitive decline and burnout. In the next 15 minutes, I'm gonna show you the exact system I used to decode my body's language, the system that revealed how supposedly healthy foods were secretly inflaming my gut. And killing my focus as a consequence and why the diet that works for me or for your favorite biohacker might be poison for you. And this framework is not another diet. It's an operating system that makes all diets obsolete. By the end of this episode, you can have your own body compass, a framework for personalizing your nutrition to unlock the energy and clarity that performance requires, and to make this dead simple for you to apply, I've distilled the entire framework into a one page navigation tool that I will give you for free at the end of this episode. Let's stop this dietary puppet show once and for all and put you back in the pilot seat of your own biology. Before I give you the flight manual though, let me tell you a story about how supposedly healthy food, how a supposedly healthy food was sabotaging my focus. For a long time I just accepted a lot of discomforts as normal brain fog here, digestive weirdness there. You know, I'm also a high performer, so I just pushed through. One of the most educational experiences I had though was with the food I thought was a cornerstone of my supposedly healthy diet nuts. One afternoon at work, I had a small handful of almonds. Within 15 minutes, I went from comfortable to feeling stuffed. It just didn't make any sense to me, so I got curious. I started paying very close attention, and I noticed that wasn't actually just fullness as I knew it. That was a signal, a sensation of stiffness. Or even hardness in my belly. What I didn't know then was that I was experiencing localized inflammation. Those nuts were triggering my immune system, and that tight hard feeling was the alarm. When your gut is inflamed, its protective barrier gets compromised. Scientists call this increased intestinal permeability. You might know that as leaky gut. Think of your gut lining as a high tech firewall. When it's inflamed, that firewall gets breached. Suddenly, things that should stay safely inside your gut, like bacterial toxins and undigested food particles start leaking into your bloodstream. They don't belong there. Your immune system treats these as foreign invaders, launching a full body, low grade inflammatory response. And where does this information show up first? As that brain fog, the lack of energy and the decision fatigue you believe is just part of the grind, unavoidably part of the mission. A few months after my almond incident. I had a comprehensive set of blood works done with a functional medicine doctor. The results confirmed that the single most reactive food group for my body was nuts. My body had been shouting the data at me for months. The link was clear for me. Nights were fueling a fire that was dampening my comfort and performance. When I removed them, my energy improved. My focus sharpened my capacity for deep work grew. And the most important thing to know is that my trigger is not your trigger. Each of us has a completely unique gut mi microbiome. Trillions of bacteria that act as our second brain and like a fingerprint. Your microbial ecosystem belongs only to you. It dictates how you respond to every single food, how you uniquely respond to every single food. A food that's a neurotropic for me could be inflammatory for you. This is why the one size fits all approach to nutrition always fails. It turns us into puppets mindlessly following the rules from a book or guru, while ignoring the most important data source we have available to us. And that's our own body's feedback. No diet has ever failed you. The model, the one size fits all model of any diet failed you. It is time to stop being a puppet and become the pilot of your own biology. It's time to learn the language your body is speaking. So how do you do it? How do you go from being a puppet who is confused and foggy? To be in a pilot that's confidently in control of your energy and focus, you adopt a systematic approach. Now the body compass, which is the framework I'm about to share with you, isn't something I invented out of thin air. It's my personal synthesis of a few proven protocols from functional and integrative medicine distilled into a simple framework that I now use to decode my own biology. Now you can use it too. It organizes all food into three simple color coded zones. First you have the red zone. Think of these as the universal triggers, processed sugars, industrial seed oils. Uh, everyone should avoid these, period, no exceptions. That's the point of the red zone group. Next is the green zone. This is your high performance fuel. This is high performance fuel for all of us. Quality proteins, vibrant vegetables, healthy fats, super foods. All of these foods decrease gut inflammation and actively heal the gut too. Well. They're actually decrease systemic body-wide inflammation and heal the gut and like I said, for all of us. So we. Try to eat as much of these foods as possible. Finally, the most important area is the yellow zone. This is where the real personalization happens. This zone contains foods like dairy, nuts, uh, some and grains. Some grains. Some grains are red zone, some grains are in the yellow zone, but these are all foods that are. Good fuel for one person, but poison for another. It depends. You are unique. So red zone, bad for all of us. Green zone, good for all of us yellow. It depends. Now to turn these three zones into actionable steps, we can implement the body compass in two different ways. One is a. Uh, big effort, big reset. The other is a more gradual iter, iterating and improving version. So the first path, the big reset is to remove all foods, all foods from the red and yellow zones for 30 days, removing any potential, uh, reactive or allergenic food. Then after the 30 days when we have come back to baseline, we should be at a much improved symptomatic baseline. We should feel much better. Then we slowly reintroduce the yellow zone foods one by one very carefully testing our responses and figuring out what actually belongs for us as individuals on our personal green or red zone. This is the big reset and this is the quickest way to get the most information and the, and the greatest amount of change. The second part, which can also be, which is really something we move onto when the big reset is done, or I have found it useful, um, as a way to not be overwhelmed by the needs. The high bar of the big reset. So the second path is one of smaller wins and step-by-step progress one by one, we remove foods from the red and yellow zone. Of course, we prioritize removing foods from the red zone, picking one per week, and choosing a food that's higher up on the quality ladder. And then over time, basically moving up our food choices per food category, from red to yellow to green, or from red to green, if possible. Both paths lead to the same destination. A diet built, not on theory, but on direct experience. To make this as simple as possible, I've put the entire system, the food zones, the two parts, and a complete re-introduction guide onto a single page poster. It also includes an extensive list of symptoms to watch out for and foods within each zone that we can refer to to find options. You can download the poster for free and stick it on your fridge to guide you. I've done it myself and it's, it's amazingly useful and it's something I'm realizing is being installed into my way of thinking. Well, for me, it has been installed. I've been using this for a long time, but it's still ingrained in itself more and more, and having a nice visual representation of all the information has made it so much easier for me to just remember it as a. Decision making framework from moment to moment so that this really does become a form of embodied wisdom intelligence. So you'll find the link for the poster in the description below. This system isn't about restriction, it's about cognitive freedom. The real change this system offers isn't just weight loss or a flatter stomach. Those are not nice side effects. You will get. But when you stop gut driven inflammation, your mind changes. Your energy stabilizes because your immune system isn't constantly fighting. Your brain fog clears because inflammatory molecules are no longer crossing your blood brain barrier and disrupting your neurochemistry, your brain's chemistry. Your capacity for deep work expands because you're not wasting mental energy, fighting fatigue, and the science is dead clear. Gut inflammation isn't just about how you're feeling and performing today. It's the engine driving most chronic diseases, autoimmune conditions, heart disease, diabetes, even depression and anxiety. By healing your gut, you're not just optimizing today's focus, you're preventing tomorrow's burnout and disease. What makes this approach so effective is that it's not based on my rules or anyone else's rules or anyone else's opinions or thoughts or beliefs. It's a process guided by direct feedback from your own body, which makes the result something you can trust and build on yourself. You can feel a massive difference super quickly, especially if you go with a big reset, but even with the iterative improvement, if you cut out. You know the handful of extremely toxic foods for you straight away. You can get massive changes very quickly depending on how you get started. This will obviously dictate how quickly or how significant the, the results are that you get. The system is also designed to be empowering, not punishing. The focus is on adding healing foods that boost performance, not just on taking things away. We make sure, and that's the point of the poster and having all the options available. We, we make sure that we know of many better options. As easily as possible to replace the foods we need to avoid. This has been one of the biggest struggles or journeys of learning for me and improving my nutrition is it's a really a process of figuring out which foods can I replace if I can find another food to replace the one I shouldn't be eating that I like just as much, and that's just as convenient as the one I need to avoid. The change is almost automatic, but it's. Not knowing the options. I believe that makes a lot of the change much more difficult than it needs to be. So stop asking what diet to follow and start listening to what your body is telling you. The answer isn't in a book or a generic meal plan. It's in your own biological data. You just need a system to help you read and understand it so that you can respond better. The body compass your body's compass is that system. If you ready to stop guessing and start knowing if you're ready to go from being a puppet to a pilot. Then I want to give you the tool that makes that possible. So one last time, I've consolidated everything into a single page to make it as easy as possible for you to understand and implement this information. To get your copy, find the link in the description, print it, stick it on your fridge, and start your journey right now. So you can even take a smaller step just before that. Right now, I want you to answer one question. What is the single most important signal that your body has been sending you? The one that you've been trying to ignore the most? Let me know in the comments.