Ep 27: Model Health with Shawn Stevenson
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The Way to Model Health with Shawn Stevenson
Episode 27: Show Notes.
Today’s guest is one of the smartest, best-informed, and most insightful voices on all things health and wellness. His name is Shawn Stevenson, and he is a highly sought after speaker, the author of the best-selling books, Sleep Smarter and Eat Smarter.
He is also the host of the very popular podcast, The Model Health Show. Listeners will discover that Shawn is basically a walking health encyclopedia with an extensive knowledge of hormones and biochemicals, and he can cite from memory obscure studies that either prove or disprove the point he is trying to make about what's healthy or what’s not. His true gift, however, is making all of this complex information accessible for the average person. That's why his platform has become the go-to place to find out about the efficacy of various health studies and claims.
In this episode, Shawn shares a bit about his own wellness journey, from a fast food-eating, pill-popping couch potato to the model of health he is today, and he talks candidly about the serious health issues he suffered from and how he has healed himself by changing his diet, exercising regularly, and getting enough good-quality sleep.
His message is about reclaiming his health, and his mission is to help others do the same. Find out about Shawn’s childhood, his health journey, and the genesis of his skill to make information accessible and digestible, as well as some crucial and valuable information for finding your way to model health. Tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
Shawn’s favorite childhood memories center around the ThunderCats and his grandparents.
Why Shawn grew up with his grandparents and not his mother, who had him at 18-years-old.
Shawn talks about his perception of race as a child and what his mental state was like.
Shawn shares the story of when his mother got stabbed to articulate the polarity between the bootstraps mentality and a broken system.
How Shawn learned the ability to make something out of nothing from his mother.
A Wiffle ball incident that inspired Shawn to always seek and speak the truth.
Where Shawn’s high level of self-discipline comes from – his grandparents and sports.
What Shawn’s life aspiration was and how that was influenced by his environment.
Breaking his hip at 15 and being diagnosed with an incurable spine disease and how this impacted Shawn’s view of pharmacology.
When nutrition became important to Shawn, after two years of living with chronic disease.
Once Shawn started asking himself what he needed to get healthy, that led him down paths of research and discovery.
Shawn asserts the importance of diet, exercise, and sleep, and how they changed his life.
The backdrop of racism and police brutality during Shawn’s health journey in Ferguson.
Discovering nutrition and realizing he was living in a food desert at the time.
It’s important to Shawn that listeners understand this: There are many paths to a goal.
The genesis of Shawn’s skill to make complex information accessible to the average person.
The people that Shawn attracted to his practice were often told they had incurable conditions.
Why it is important to Shawn to translate the data from scientific studies into simple language.
Taking Shawn’s model as a template and building a unique health and wellness model from it.
Shawn talks about why he always wears a baseball cap – we don’t need to look a certain way to be successful.
Shawn’s current definition of success is, quite simply, health.
Tweetables:
“Everything is so polarizing right now. There's these two camps of just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, just work harder, you can achieve it, you got to take care of you. Nothing’s stopping you today. This other side of just like the whole system is against us. You don't understand that, no matter what I do, the system needs to change, so I can change. When, in truth, it's both. It's both.” — @ShawnModel [0:21:08]
“Your brain is controlling so much of what your biology is doing. It's a very powerful pharmaceutical production facility. The most powerful pharmacy in the world is the human mind.” — @ShawnModel [0:38:19]
“[My recovery] was the inception of wanting to share this, not because I had the idea to, but because somebody saw me on campus and they were like, ‘What did you do? Can you help me do the same thing?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely.’” — @ShawnModel [0:55:10]
“For some folks, their bridge is going to be through self-development, their bridge is going to be through meditation, their bridge is going to be through movement. It's many different bridges. Food was the thing for me, and that's why I really invested myself in becoming a nutritionist.” — @ShawnModel [01:08:00]
“I was told that I had an incurable condition. There's nothing you can do about that. To go from that place of such darkness and being told that you have something that's incurable, to no longer having that thing, it creates a level of certainty and power that you can't really put into words. Even in the texture of my communication, and my voice, and my passion, people could see it in my eyes, I attracted a lot of people who have been told the same thing.” — @ShawnModel [01:13:04]
“To take somebody's [health and wellness] model and to build on it, it's incredibly powerful. The template is there, the insights, the tips, the tools, the strategy, the inspiration. You can use that model and then create your own from it.” — @ShawnModel [01:27:55]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: