090: Heal Your Eyesight with Jake Steiner

Can you heal your eyesight? Our guest has and he’s helping tens of thousands of other people do the same.

Jake Steiner is a (semi-retired) stock trader and investor. His personal passion is understanding human eyesight – and has spent the past 20 years in vision biology science, exploring natural myopia control. Jake hosts the Web’s largest vision improvement communities with many tens of thousands of participants and has written over 1,200 articles on vision biology and myopia control.

His quest began 20 years ago: he had grown up with glasses. They were so thick his eyes looked tiny in the lenses. Over time he wanted to heal his eyesight, and do it naturally. Today he has 20/20 eyesight without glasses and without surgery! He figured out how myopia actually works and how to reverse it – and the answer is not eye exercises.

Jake’s method of improving myopia is a natural way of focusing your eyes to view at a specific range of distances, where the edge of blur happens. By doing so correctly, and incorporating it in your daily life, your eyes can actually focus further and at darker scenario as time goes by until 20/20 is finally achieved.

Jake explains why this was a long-term process for him and why we all should be skeptical of anyone who says they have done it in a year or less. He also tells of discoveries he made on this journey: when he was visiting Europe all the optometrists he spoke with told him to only wear glasses when he absolutely needed them. They also confirmed what he had found in his own research, that wearing glasses makes your eyes weaker.

Although some people have opted to get rid of their glasses and fix their eyesight by never using any kind of corrective lens, he doesn’t recommend it. Instead, he suggests lowering your current prescription bit by bit.

On this episode of Awesome Health Podcast, he explains in detail on how to do this and even what to say to your eye doctor, and why you don’t need prescriptions that get your eyesight to 20/15 and why doing so is actually worse for your eyesight than using a 20/30 prescription.Jake also gives his opinion on why LASIK is not a good option, and much more.

Be sure to hear it all when you join us for this eye-opening edition of Awesome Health Podcast!

Episode Resources:

• End Myopia Website: https://community.endmyopia.org
• Jake Steiner’s End Myopia Facebook group: https://web.facebook.com/groups/endmyopia
• Jake Steiner on YouTube
• Masszymes: https://bioptimizers.com/product/masszymes-250-caps/
• P3-OM: https://bioptimizers.com/product/p3om-120-caps/
• Awesome Health Course: https://bioptimizers.com/awesome-health-course/

Read The Episode Transcript:

Wade Lightheart: Good morning, good evening and good afternoon. It's Wade T Lightheart from BiOptimizers with another edition of The Awesome Health Podcast. And I am so excited. I'm up late at night here in my office, working here in Venice beach, California, because we have none other than Jake Steiner on our podcast. And we are going to talk about myopia and vision biology. And what's interesting about Jake, not only is he a semi retired stock trader and investor, his personal passion is understanding human eyesight and he has spent for the last 20 years, envisioned biology science, exploring natural myopia control. Jake hosts the web's largest vision improvement communities, with many tens of thousands of people of participants and has written over 1200 articles on vision biology and myopia control. Here's his origin story. He grew up with glasses. That's a 5.0 diopter high myopia. He'll talk about that in a minute. And today has 20 20 eyesight, no surgery, no glasses, figures out how it works and how to reverse it. Nope, not the eye exercises. His method of improving myopia, I always say that wrong myopia, myopia, whatever you want to call it, in short is a natural way of focusing your eyes to view at specific range of distances, where the edge of blur happens and by doing so correctly incorporates it into your daily life activities and allow your eyes to focus further and at a dark scenario at times, go by increasing the distance of this edge blur bit by bit until 20 20 vision is finally achieved. He's joining us today from Thailand, so he's actually joining us from tomorrow, today. When you get this podcast, a few weeks have gone by and we'll be rocking and rolling. Jake, welcome to the podcast.

Jake Steiner: Wade, that was the single greatest introduction I've ever heard.

Wade Lightheart: Thank you. We got something right. Well, I am so pumped about it. I'm going to share a backstory. So folks, a lot of people don't know, I have worn a contact lenses since I went to university. I was put on glasses in grade five. I hated my glasses. I was all excited, when I got into contact lenses, because it was better, I didn't like wearing glasses and stuff. I don't wear sunglasses a lot either, cause' I like natural light hitting my eyes. But people always said: Wade, why don't you get laser surgery? Because I had heard these stories. I heard these stories about mystics in India that corrected their health. I read about a guy that was blind and corrected his health. Even bought his course. It was this complex thing that I didn't think I could possibly do.

Wade Lightheart: And little by little, year by year, decade by decade, I've thought about, you know, one day I would like to correct my vision naturally, because I believe it's possible. And I've always held this deep and within my heart. Never talked to anybody about it, actually. I never really said about it. It's just one of those little things that never go. And then I heard about Jake and I heard he corrected, and I'm like: I wonder if I can correct mine. Maybe you can correct yours. Jake, can you tell us, how did you discover this incredible thing that most ophthalmologists say, this is not possible, can't happen, won't happen, but you figured this out? What makes you different from all these millions of experts around the world?

Jake Steiner: Well, I am no great expert. I want to tell the story. I wish I could tell a story of how I went to India and I found the mystical guru on top of a mountain, but the actual story is far less fascinating. I started this whole thing, like 20 years ago. Back then there was no easy internet Google scholar, where you can just look up science from your living room. I went to libraries and basically the short, short version of what happened originally, I had the minus five, I mean, relatively, super high myopia. My glasses were so thick that my eyes behind the lenses just were tiny. I had these little piggy eyes and I was a single guy and there was a vanity thing. I went to the optometrist, because I couldn't see well at night and they said I need stronger glasses.

Jake Steiner: And there was something about that moment where I was just, it felt like it had enough. It felt like I didn't want any more higher glasses. And I just asked: like, what causes this? And you kind of told in the beginning, my background is investing in stock trading and all things that are incredibly just analytical. You're digging for details and you spend weeks and months digging into contracts and charts and stuff. So I'm used to digging. And I'm used to asking questions and understanding what's coming back for answers and when I asked the optometrist, what's wrong with my eyes, I didn't get an answer. And that started the whole 'wait a minute' thing, because I'm like: okay, so how can you treat a thing that you don't understand the cause of? And they said: it's genetic. And for me, that's always been a red flag. Whenever I hear genetic kind of a cop-out.

Jake Steiner: And so I started going to libraries and I started reading about vision biology. And it turns out that the cause of myopia is incredibly well understood and has been for anywhere from 50 years to the 17th century. The cause of it's been clear, right? So I started there and that's where the whole thing really kicked off and I'm like: okay, so we know what causes myopia, but the optometrist either does not know or doesn't tell me, so what else is going on? And that turned into this whole journey that eventually led to me, reversing my myopia.

Wade Lightheart: Wow. How long did it take you to reverse your myopia from the time that you said you started digging and then you figured out? So there's one that you start digging into how this happens and what goes on, but then you figured out I'm going to fix this. Like how long did it take you to go from, I want a different plan to I've got a plan to fix this?

Jake Steiner: The fixing it took me a long time, I want to say like 10 years. The last doctor was off and on, off and on. Like I would still wear glasses a little bit. I would wear glasses at night. Took forever, because there was no clear plan. The first step was understanding and I've really recommend for anybody, everybody's listening to this scholar.google.com is Google search engine, just for clinical research science. So if you want to find studies, right? Like peer reviewed clinical studies, I'm not saying they're all true, obviously, but if you want to dig into the real stuff, scholar.google.com. The first thing you type in there is pseudo myopia or an ITM, new induced transient myopia, that will show you tens of thousands of results, quoting peer review clinical science of what, where myopia starts. Right? And to get back to your question, I started with understanding what causes the thing, and then figuring out that vision biology, like your eyeball actually has a mechanism built into it that continually adjust itself.

Jake Steiner: So, I didn't know that you could fix it, but I was reading these books that are saying your eyeball elongates, because of lens wear. You're wearing glasses, your myopia gets worse, because your eyeball elongates, but this elongation goes in both directions. There's a mechanism built into your eye that continually adjust the length of your eyeball throughout your whole life for perfect vision or for what it thinks is perfect vision. That's why I got the hunch that maybe I can reduce the eyeball length and that turned into, I didn't know how to do that, so I spent a long time playing around with different kinds of glasses and trying to figure out what kind of stimulus would work. Where today, now we're 20 years later, I can definitively tell you, you can improve by about diopter a year and it's pretty straightforward to do

Wade Lightheart: Wow. The diopter per year. So now I want to know, there's so many questions I have. I guess the first thing is like, how did you handle? Obviously you probably drove a car, and you had to deal with driving and not driving. Obviously it's a safety risk. One of the things that I was like, I had heard about a medical doctor that just gave up his trifocals and fixed his glasses. He just decided that he was not going to wear glasses anymore and fixed his eyesight miraculously, and it took him three or four months, but he almost killed himself a bunch of times driving a car. I thought that's a little too extreme. I want to fit within. I don't want to endanger anybody iin my journey to bring back my eyesight the 20 20. So what are some suggestions or what did you do in that kind of situation?

Jake Steiner: So, I'm always very dubious of claims of miraculous and very rapid change, because the root of the whole thing is your eyeballs too long. And your eyeballs too long, because you've been wearing stronger and stronger, and stronger classes. I'm giving you the super short version. And it takes time for that eyeball to change shape. And I've seen people, who've done it faster than diopter a year. It happens. For various reasons that we can talk about, but in general, that's about right. So anytime somebody says weeks or months complete 20 20 vision, maybe, but I haven't been able to validate any of those cases, because I've contacted a bunch of people. Who've said they've done that. And generally it's been pretty sketchy. I'm more of the conservative one, who says, takes time. For myself, I didn't know what I was doing, so in the very beginning, actually I went from a minus five to minus three.

Jake Steiner: Based on the biology that says, you have the retina in the back of the eyeball and you have the lens in the front. And the lens is a flexible piece that adjust the light to where it hits the retina. The retina process the visual information and the shape of that continually changes. It changes based on something called myopic or hyperopic defocus, where the light hits the eye. Trying to make it not too long in science-y, but that's the basic principle. So the idea is if I wear slightly weaker glasses, I'm getting myopic to focus, the light focuses a little bit in front of the eye and hopefully the eyeball was shortened. And the key there is, if you reduce too much, then you just get a bunch of blur and you're not going to improve, ideally you want to reduce a tiny little bit.

Jake Steiner: I didn't know that at the time I went from minus five to minus three, I was just starting somewhere and actually went on a trip only with the minus three glasses and it was just a bus ride and a little town in the middle of nowhere. And I couldn't see anything. It was a terrible experience. Whenever people say: I just got rid of my glasses, I'm like: maybe you can do it that way, but it is not going to be fun. Like the short, short, short version key is small reductions.

Wade Lightheart: So in this case, you would have went to maybe minus four on your glasses instead?

Jake Steiner: Thereabouts, right? You buy an eye chart, you print an eye chart, you hang it up at home and you measure yourself to where you're comfortable, like 20 30, for example, right? You don't need perfect vision all the way to the moon. You want to see. You want to be legal to drive, which is 20 40 in the States, in most cases. You want to feel safe and comfortable. You want to recognize people's facial expressions, but you want a little bit of that. You see a license plate across the street. You have to challenge your eyes to clear that up. That's the level you want. You just want a little bit of challenge.

Wade Lightheart: Wow. That's really cool. So walk us through, as you went through your own journey, what were some of the obstacles that you had to overcome in this process?

Jake Steiner: Well, first I had no idea if it was possible. It was just, I'm not going up and the real interesting thing is doing the timeless traveling a lot. I remember in Italy, I met a couple of optometrists, who said: glasses make your eyes worse, right? Like only wear them when you need them. Older guys, super interesting. And I was in Russia, Ukraine, actually, same thing, all the optometrists saying: only wear them when you need them. And that is absolutely the correct advice, because the first thing that happens is the first time you get glasses, they're not that strong. And if you were to take them off, when you're up close, when you're looking at a screen, your eyesight wouldn't really get worse, not notably. So I found clues along the way, because mostly optometrists were just super dismissive. I made a habit of every time I went to, I would just go to an optic shop and ask the same questions.

Jake Steiner: But I ran into these guys who were like: yes, it is the glasses, and I'm like: that's what I'm finding in the scientific journals. I'd go to libraries and dig around in libraries back when that was a thing. So I found all these bits and pieces, but nobody said reversing as possible. There were some books, right? Like Bates method and various things. I've tried all of those, they didn't work. I was fairly discouraged. And then I wore those minus threes for a year and don't ask me why, I don't know why did that to myself. But by the end of the year, I could sit in a subway and I could read the little sign on the other side, what the next stations were, which absolutely couldn't do in the beginning. Just because of persistence, I eventually ended up at the point where I could wear the minus three and get about 20 30 vision.

Wade Lightheart: Wow. That's amazing. Now what about things like sunglasses and things like that? Did you wear sunglasses during that time or did you avoid wearing sunglasses? Cause' there's kind of camps about whether sunglasses are good for your eyes or bad for your eyes?

Jake Steiner: My personal rule and this is not anything scientific is if I'd squint, otherwise I wear sunglasses, if I don't, then I won't.

Wade Lightheart: Got it. Okay.

Jake Steiner: Have those transitions ones that just kind of clear up and get darker? That's kind of my favorite thing there.

Wade Lightheart: Okay, great. So, take a guy like me, that's running a minus 3 in one eye and minus 2 25 in the other. And they actually changed, cause I was at minus 2 75 and I've progressively gone, I think I started at two and then I've gone up to 25 to 30, over the course of 30 years. Maybe a little bit more than that actually. I want to reverse that trend and I actually experienced the reverse, there was a period in my life, where I actually went down and the eye doctor was, I went from 2.5 to 2.25. So I had this little experience at one point, I was like: geez, I wonder what happened there. That was about 10 years ago and that's when I started researching, could I do this? Then I got distracted and didn't go down that road, because of the inconvenience and not understanding what it would be. So what would your suggestions be for a guy like me that's done that? I guess you would get out of contacts and probably go to a regular glasses, because it's much easier to start playing around with things. Would that be accurate?

Jake Steiner: Yes. My biggest thing is I don't promote eye exercises or anything that is a significant lifestyle change whenever possible. So if you're comfortable with contacts and you don't want to change, you can definitely also do contacts. The first thing and the first thing to address is doing close-up, like us having this conversation, you're looking at the screen, you should be wearing something that's only strong enough to let you see clearly to the screen. There should be a little bit of that same challenge, right? When you're sitting at a comfortable distance from the screen, you're not squinting at it, but you're reminded that you're making eyes clear up text. I call it active focus, but your eyes are sandbagging a little bit. You can see better than you think if you challenge yourself.

Wade Lightheart: Right. I experienced the symptoms. I wake up in the morning without my contacts, let's say, and some days I can see really pretty darn good in the first five minutes and then it sort of fades or whatever after a little bit. Is that kind of like what's happening? Is it because theres a relaxation effect or is there some other factor going on? Any ideas?

Jake Steiner: You vision might be better than you think. This has turned what you said in the beginning, I've written like 1200 articles, because there's so many nuances and details I've found that you don't really need, but one of the things I always tell people is start off your day, the first 20 minutes, without any correction. Of course, if you don't have super strong glasses. But in your case, I'd be like, see how much of the morning you can go through without putting in those contacts. Appreciate the blur, appreciate the challenge. See what you can actually see that you didn't really think you can see right before you put in the contact lenses. And then the next thing is, you don't need the ones that you have. Go diopter lower, but start your day out with as long as possible without anything and then it put in a slight little contacts and you're not even going to notice a difference.

Wade Lightheart: Beautiful. Now, when you're going through this process, let's say, I'm going to initiate this process with myself, how do you kind of deal with the doctors or the eye doctors that have their version of what you should do? Or they say: hey, you're minus three, you want to do a minus 2.5 or minus two or like? How do you deal with all that stuff?

Jake Steiner: I don't.

Wade Lightheart: I love it.

Jake Steiner: I'm kind of in two camps with this, because I think modern medicine has done amazing stuff. Just amazing stuff. Eyesight, in my opinion, is not a medical condition. It's a refractive state. Your eyes hundred percent, perfectly healthy. There's no illness. There's no condition. Eyeball has slightly elongated as a response to the lens wear. And you needed the lenses in the first place, because the focusing muscle in your eye from too much being tense for too long, cause you're in close up for too long, has a spasm. When you look up pseudo myopia in Google scholar, pseudo myopia is the muscle in your eye that controls focus is tight, when you look at something up close, and if you spend seven hours with that muscle tight, it doesn't fully relax. It's a spasm. So early myopia, that one to two diopter, the first pair of glasses you get, is a muscle spasm.

Jake Steiner: It's nothing else. There's a ton of lit literature that's all in optometry and ophthalmology clinical journals that validates this. So from the beginning, you're being sold a treatment for not a condition, right? Like it's literally called pseudo myopia, pseudo as an not a real thing, right?
Wade Lightheart: Wow. Wow.

Jake Steiner: And those glasses, I'm going to throw this in here also, just as a little extra comment, I have all the wholesale prices of pretty much all lenses being sold and most lenses that have all the codings and all the fancy stuff, brand names between two and $5 wholesale to the optometrist. Two to $5 for those things. I'm not saying there's any malice. I'm not saying there's any conspiracy, but their training and their focus, and the business model is throw those things on you, you have an instant fix and you come back next year and buy stronger ones.

Jake Steiner: So let me ask you a question. Would you go off to like a Walmart or something and buy the super cheap glasses or whatever for 20 bucks? Like, tell me about that, cause' that's what a lot of people are thinking to do. You would go to your eye doctor, get a prescription for 2.0 or whatever and move on. How you would go about it?

Jake Steiner: By the way, whenever people say prescriptionthose clear curved pieces of plastic only became prescriptions, when lens manufacturer spent millions of dollars lobbying for it, right? Like if you think about it, they're just pieces of plastic. How is that a prescription? It never was. And in lots of countries, it isn't. But for example, in the US they want to control how you get to those things. How do you charge a hundred or $200 for something that costs five bucks, right, like you limit that.

Wade Lightheart: Prescription. Make it fancy. You get a guy in a white coat, you get an authority, you get these big machines. Must be true.

Jake Steiner: Yeah. And again, I'm not saying that everything is wrong, but in this case is what happens and most people want the quick fix. Most people don't want to go through the effort of figuring this out. They don't want to spend the money it would take for an optometrist to do all this stuff for you. One of the things technically, and it depends on the country and it depends on the municipality, and your optometrist's friendliness. There's no law that says they have to give you glasses that give you 20 15 vision. Like the DMV says 20 40 is legal. Legal requirement to drive is only 20 40. So if you went to an optometrist and said: hey, listen, 20 30 is what I want. There is no law or rule, at least for California that says, you'd have to. They don't want to do that though, because they don't want you to come back next week and, because you fell for some internet unicorn farming thing, and you're like, I hit some car, because I couldn't see with your glasses. A lot of them don't want to do that, but there's some that do. Like, we have this big Facebook group and there are stories all the time of supportive optometrist and you bring donuts and coffee and you say: hey, listen, these super-strong glasses give me headaches or contact lenses. I'm super great with 20 30, can we do that? And some of them will be like: yeah, fine, whatever.

Wade Lightheart: Is that where you're usually starting point would be 20 30? Or was it just based on, whatever's better from where you are. So if you're a minus four, you want to go to minus three, is it one unit? Is that your typical movement?

Jake Steiner: The first one. And it depends on the person, right? It depends on how strong those glasses are. Like if you print an eye chart and hang it up, and you can see the 2012 line with your glasses currently, you can probably go down by whole diopter and still see 20 20. The first one is a guess. And I always start out with close up first. Don't mess with the distance at all. Just keep whatever you're wearing for distance, figure out what you need for close up first. So everything stays familiar when you're driving and walking. You start to experiment, just sitting in your office, looking at your computer. If you've got minus two point something now, get a minus one pair of glasses or minus 1.25, and then see how you adjust to that. Spend a month or two, just getting active focus, wearing those lower corrections. And then when you're all into it, and you fully understand your eyesight, then lower the distance.

Wade Lightheart: Got it. Got it.

Jake Steiner: You're working in a controlled environment. You're not outside. You're not figuring this out while you're driving around in a car. You're just sitting in your office and you'll lean back from your screen a bit and you go: wow, this is where it starts getting blurry. And you get familiar with that whole thing with your eyes.

Wade Lightheart: And then I guess, as you start to see improvements, this starts to build confidence and motivation. It's like saying: hey, I'm starting to see some positive shifts here.

Jake Steiner: Yeah. And that's really where you're starting out. We have an app now. We have an Android app, actually, and we have an iPhone app. The iPhone app just came out, so it's still terrible. That allows you to measure distance. So if you have a phone that does face ID, you install this app, of course it's free, and as you hold it in front of your face, it tells you how far it is from your face. If you pick the distance where blur just starts, you can take that number, a hundred divided by that number is your diopters, because diopters is just a distance to blur, right? So literally with this app, you can measure how strong your glasses need to be. Except we only give you a distance, because Apple's not going to let us talk about diopters.

Wade Lightheart: Got it. So, if we give that formula again, it is the distance divided…

Jake Steiner: The distance in centimeters.

Wade Lightheart: Distance in centimeters?

Jake Steiner: Is that equals diopters.

Wade Lightheart: Equals diopters. So for example, if it was 50 centimeters, that would be a minus two diopter. Is that right?

Jake Steiner: Correct. Yep.

Wade Lightheart: Okay, great.

Jake Steiner: And also just a little side note, this is a rabbit hole of a topic, and I never imagined myself being this guy, talking about this stuff. All those fancy machines, all this stuff that goes on in your quote unquote exam. The only thing that happens is a measurement of distance before you see blur. That's it. It's kind of a charade, because with this iPhone app or with just a measuring tape, where you just sit in front of a book and you go: okay, everything's perfectly clear, you keep moving it back a little bit back a little bit and then all of a sudden you see the text, doesn't look quite as clear anymore, measure that distance, a hundred divided by those centimeters. Those are your diopters. That's it.

Wade Lightheart: Wow. That's so cool. That's so simple.

Jake Steiner: It is so simple. But it's a $2 thing that they try to sell for 200 bucks, right? Like that's the underlying theme.

Wade Lightheart: Right. So they've got to create the grand Poobah show, like the King has no clothes. Okay, great. I want to get into… You've got a website, you've got an app, you've got all these people in the Facebook group. Tell me about that, because it seems like this is a pretty extraordinary quote unquote movement. When did that all get started?

Jake Steiner: Oh boy. Because just like I want to tell you the story of finding the guru in India, I want to talk about I'm just as selfless, amazing person that built all this stuff, which is absolutely not, wouldn't be the truth. Actually. In the beginning, it was a blog where I was just ranting about optometry. Like I was making terrible Photoshops. If you go back to that day. It was basically, coffee in the morning, I'd spend an hour or two, just letting it out and then getting back to my real work. And that's just what it was for the longest time, and then people started participating, and eventually somebody said, we have to have Facebook group and we have to have a forum and you have to make videos. And you can tell, like, when you look at the whole thing, it's not very professional, right?

Jake Steiner: Like the Facebook group doesn't even have like a banner thing. We didn't have a logo for the first 10 years. It became a thing, because more and more people were participating and more, more people are pushing towards better answers. Like a lot of this stuff we know now, is not me. I didn't figure this out. You take 10,000 people, right? Like a lot more than that. But dozens of people that have tried different stuff and let me know, this works and this doesn't work, and we built this system just out of the community. So when you look at the site and you look at the YouTube videos and you look at how everything is a little janky, it's because it came from there. And I never really intended for it to be some polished internet course sales thing.

Wade Lightheart: But that's the internet, it just kind of starts to scale and all of a sudden that's out of control, right?
Jake Steiner: Exactly.

Wade Lightheart: So in these groups, are people sharing their stories or they're sharing what they learned, or what's going on inside there?

Jake Steiner: Facebook group is kind of the lightweight version, there's like 18,000 or so members now a lot of improvement stories, a lot of questions, a lot of beginners going, is this a real thing and getting feedback. It's really interesting just to join and scroll through, because you get a little bit of an insight of how people interacting with this, because before it was just the website. Then we have the forum, which is where the nerdier stuff happens. Like there's a guy who bought the machine that measures the axial length of your eye. Costs thousands of dollars. Like it's only ophthalmologist buy that thing, and he's been measuring his actual length. And there's a huge thread of discussion about that. And people talk about how red letters versus green letters tell you if you're over prescribed, under prescribed or corrected rather. So the deep dive topics are in the forum and the little, dip your toe in, is the Facebook group.

Wade Lightheart: Wow. That's really, really, really cool that you kind of got. I think, it's really neat, because it's one of the things that we love at BiOptimizers. You start experimenting. It's all great to hear peer review. It's all great to read all the documentation or listen to the expert. But at the end of the day, it's all what's applicable and how you can do for yourself. We do hundreds and hundreds of tests on ourselves and then collectively with group, you do thousands of tests and then you start to see patterns. And then from these patterns we can kind of collectively learn.I think this is really cool. So realistically, you think, someone that has a minus three could potentially, if they follow everything, correct that in the next three, four, five years?

Jake Steiner: Yeah. Easily. One of the biggest factors is how much are you addicted to your phone screen? And do you have any sport or outdoor passions that you engage in regularly? We've got a little tiny podcast. I talked to two participants recently that are surfers. Just coincidentally. Two completely different guys, one from California, one from Ireland. Those guys always improve a lot faster, because they spend a fair amount of time using their eyes in a real way. Unavoidable, you're out there in the ocean, you have to see the waves. If you're wearing a lower glass or contact lenses, in that case, you will use your eyes. Those guys improve. I mean, if you said you're at a minus two, 2.5 or so, and you surf, I would say in two to three years, max, we should chat again and you're going to forget that you have ever a worn contacts.

Wade Lightheart: Wow. Now is there any age restrictions in this? Cause' some people say, as you get older, it gets harderor younger. What's your take on that? Is that just another story?

Jake Steiner: 97. That's the cutoff. The actual change of the eye works all the time. Also in some of the podcasts, like there's some fantastic, slightly older people that are doing great work. And I think for them, in a way it's something super invigorating, because your body kind of declines as you get older and here's a thing that you can actually affect that makes you feel younger, because you can see the way you saw 30 years ago, you know?

Wade Lightheart: Wow. That's pretty powerful. I know, I've used to experience that, when I used to train like senior citizens and suddenly they would have trouble walking or being steady and then we'd put them through a weight training routine and after three months they didn't need their walker. They could walk very good or they were able to do things, or they started to notice that they didn't lose their balance, and they started the dance again, and all kinds of fun things that can happen. It's interesting what's possible for humans. Now I understand that you offer courses, you have a program online. Can you tell me a little bit more where people can find out more about this, how they could get access to this, all this sort of stuff?

Jake Steiner: I make a real serious point about putting out everything for free. Because this is not how I make money and I didn't want to make it a thing where you're like: Oh, you want help from me? You got to pay. Super important. Everything you need is absolutely free. The articles, there's a bunch of How to guide, there's a bunch of videos, there's a bunch of stuff. Don't need to spend money. There are some courses for people, the value of their time is higher than their urge to do DIY stuff, right? So there's some super simple courses that basically the community, put them together. They took the 1200 articles I wrote and condensed it into something that you can get through in a week, that just gives you all the things that you need as one option. And then there is a more serious like, I just want the steps, just tell me what I need to do today all the way through, till my vision is perfect again, also an option. It's under the resources link on the website. It's not super obvious, because again, I'm not really promoting to sell them. Largely, it's again, if you don't want to do DIY stuff and also it helps fund all the fun stuff, like the apps and things.

Wade Lightheart: I'm all about those too. I'm all about the fast track. I'm the guy that doesn't have the time to read through everything. I want to know, where these links are, so we can put them in the show notes so I can grab them myself. I'm totally being selfish here. Any other things that you can say, well, we can put those links into the show notes, if you can tell us where those sites are, do you have those sites handy or?

Jake Steiner: Yeah, it's just endmyopia.org. That's the only site you need. And at the top of the page, one of the links is called resources and under resources there's the courses, and there's a Facebook group, and the YouTube channel. Everyarticle also on the bottom has the option to sign up for a seven-day email guide that kind of walks you through, cause' it's like a lot of stuff in the beginning. It's kind of overwhelming, so I broke it out into seven days. There's no sales pitch attached to it. So it's literally just, here's where you start. It gives you kind of a week of overview and I broke it down into week, cause if you skim through it, you get nothing, right? So I give you a day's worth of: here's a starting point. And then if you're bored and you want to read more, you can go through the site. After week, you got a pretty decent grasp. And from there you can decide if you want to just DIY through it, as most people do or try a course options. I recommend people do like the seven day thing first. Again, there's no sales pitch attached to it, just to see is it for you? Are you tempted by this? Is this a project that you want to take on?

Wade Lightheart: Now what do you think would be the time investment involved in this? Is there any specific time investment that you say that you're going to have to or there's a bit of time and effort involved in? What do you think is realistic for people to expect?

Jake Steiner: Learning curve. A hundred percent is a learning curve. I would say the first month or two, think of it like a new passion project, right? Like you're learning a new sport or you're getting into a new thing you expect to learn. Like people will go, just give me the steps, what are the steps? Not going to work. Like you're going to immerse yourself. You're going to understand something about vision biology and about optics. I want you to have that understanding, because I want you to know what you're doing. So when you see various internet exercise schemes you can ask the question, how does this affect my sight? That's really kind of where I would start out and then after that it's autopilot, because what I found, eye exercises don't work, because nobody has time for that. So once what I told you, for example is where minus 1.25 for your close-up. Figure that out and then adjust your distance correction a little tiny bit. And once you are on that path, it's all working for you, the time investment is close to zero, because it's just habits, right?

Wade Lightheart: Yeah. So you can build the atomic habits kind of philosophy, of how to do things is gradual integration. That's really good. Now what are some of the mistakes that people make? I guess we'll start with that one first.

Jake Steiner: Going too fast. That is the number one thing. People get excited, which is great. But then they did, for example, what I did. I went from minus five to minus three, where they try to get rid of the glass completely, or they try to make a huge change to their lifestyle, which doesn't take. So it's really hard for people that are excited about this, to temper themselves, to go - I'm going to buy these glasses or contact lenses and for the next three to four months, that's what I'm wearing. And it's a small reduction that I barely notice. And you're not just quitting your job and becoming a Forester or something. It's not entirely uncommon. Especially younger people get super excited and then they circle back around a year later going, well, I guess. And then they do it slowly, just as a habit, because it's like diet or gym and exercise, it's not about getting to this result, it's a lifestyle change.

Wade Lightheart: You wouldn't expect to go to the gym and squat 500 pounds in your first week, you got to go up progressive, so you're really doing a progressive practice to retrain your eyes in order to see perfectly.

Jake Steiner: Yeah. And you addressing habits too, especially, because, for example, you're lucky minus two, minus three, that's not a big deal. A lot of Asian populations, in particular, there's some genes that have been found that are associated with how the eye elongates, that is more present in some Asian populations. I have a lot of Asian participants that are minus eight, minus nine, minus 15. And they also have a real problem being addicted to phone screens. That's where you run into trouble, because now you have high myopia, so it's gonna take you a while and you need to address your lifestyle a little bit. Like you can't spend 10 hours in front of your work screen and then the rest of the day in front of a phone screen.

Wade Lightheart: Yeah. That makes so much sense. And what about people who have had eye surgery? What's your take on people that do eye surgery? And what's maybe some of the liabilities of that coming into a program? Because I've heard some people will get surgery and then like 10 years later, they need it again. Or can people who have had eye surgery use this as a way moving forward? What's your thoughts on that?

Jake Steiner: Eye surgery… The contact lens that you put in your eye changes, where the light hits in your back of your eye, right? Lens that changes, where light moves. Surgery does the same thing, except it permanently cuts that lens into the front of your eye. So if your eyesight has been getting worse slowly before you had the surgery, the same thing will continue, right? If you've been at minus two for the last 20 years and nothing's happened and you get to surgery and you have 20 20 vision, it'll probably stay that way. But if in the last two years, your eyes have gotten worse, quote, unquote, worst, like they just elongated, then two years after the laser surgery, the same thing will have happened again, because the surgery addresses nothing, it just cuts a permanent lens. If you look up more Morris Waxler, the guy at the FDA who got LASIK approved in the first place, if you just Google Morris Waxler you will see the guy is very firmly against LASIK. Now he said, it's a huge mistake, should have never been approved. Lots of issues, like that flap doesn't properly heal. Lots and lots of issues. The problem is that if you run into a problem, like suddenly have dry eyes or Starbursts or whatever, you can no longer correct that. That is a permanent move. So it's really risky as an elective surgery, in my opinion.

Wade Lightheart: Beautifully saidThis has been fantastic. I'm speechless that you've made this so clear and so simple, and so factual base and research base, and stuff like that. Any other things that you have noticed that people have trouble with or things that people should do or where they would get started? What would be your recommendations if they want to get started and following this process?

Jake Steiner: The best thing is to experiment. And then my favorite thing to start with is measuring the distance. We've used measuring tapes for forever and now there's apps. The apps are still very early, early, early stages, they're nothing fancy, but just measure your distance. Measure in the morning and measure it after four hour Netflix binge, and measure in natural daylight, and in an artificially room and notice how that distance changes, meaning your diopter changes. It's not static. So if you make that measurements, once, twice, three times, five times, you're going to realize there's a pattern. Four hours Netflix, afterwards your vision is notably worse. Artificially lit room, your vision is notably worse. That experiment gets people into the rabbit hole, like doing a tangible thing where you go: huh, this changes, so maybe I should put my office near a window. Like you start taking baby steps in the right way.

Wade Lightheart: Activates curiosity, right? That's the one that always gets you. Now you talked about an eye chart, about getting an eye chart. Where do you get an eye chart?

Jake Steiner: Just Amazon or print one. If you search for eye charts online, there's 10 bazillion options. Lots of free ones. The one other thing, the biggest problem that I've been finding and it's super alarming and really, really frustrating to me. I get hundreds of emails a day and they used to be just people asking about the eyesight. The last number of years, it's more and more parents with more and more younger and younger children going: we went to the optometrist, my kids need glasses, and what I always say and what I wish everybody knew is iPad, not a babysitter. Like putting your small child infront of an iPad is a super bad idea and pseudo myopia will start, and then you take them to an optometrist, and then three year olds, five-year-olds end up with glasses. And when they do the eyesight will adjust to those lenses every year, right? Every year and every year, it's diopter worst. So super bad idea for letting kids play with iPads, I always say it, as little of that as possible.

Wade Lightheart: Beautifully said. Any other items that we should know before we go forward on thi? I'm going to give this a shot. I'm really excited about it. It's been something that's been on my mind, I'm making a commitment to it, to see what I can able to do, cause' I think it'd be just something. It just seems like such a fun experiment. I want to give it a shot.

Jake Steiner: Set yourself some goals. Like three months goal, six months goal, a year goal, just so you have, because you're going to be excited at first and then it gets lost in a million other things. So just the first goal, get yourself lower correction for closeup, so you have that active experience that you can't avoid every day. Try the first 20 minutes without glasses and then set yourself a little reminder three months from now or two months from now, two months is enough actually, to maybe reduce the distance correction a little tiny bit. And if you preset yourself like a little monthly thing, then you're much more likely to have success with it.

Wade Lightheart: Beautifully said, well said. Jake, you are amazing. Can you give us that site one more time?

Jake Steiner: It's endmyopia.org

Wade Lightheart: Ladies and gentlemen, Jake Steiner, the man, who has a plan to correct pseudo myopia. Don't rush, but it's worth it, if you do it, he's corrected his vision, there's a Facebook group. You can connect into, check it out, take the seven days course, learn this. The bottom line is at BiOptimizers we're all about biological optimization and your ability to heal, your ability to regenerate, your ability to achieve your dreams is far greater than you might expect. Don't let some authority convince you about the innate power within you. It's Wade T Lightheart from The Awesome Health Alliance, excuse me, from The Awesome Health Podcast and sponsored by BiOptimizers. I want to thank you for joining us today and we'll see you on the next thing. And we will give reports of just how well I've done with Jake's program. Thanks so much for joining us Jake. Take care, everyone. Have an awesome day.