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084: Personal Tips from the UK’s leading biohacker with Tim Gray

October 29, 2020/
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Today you are getting personal tips from the UK’s leading biohacker: none other than Mr. Tim Gray. After years spent self-healing his body from chronic health conditions through biohacking alone, Tim embarked on a mission to educate and empower the masses. The Health Optimisation Summit, Europe’s largest health conference, was born.

As a psychology specialist, serial entrepreneur and successful businessman, Tim founded and invested in multiple 6-figure businesses, including several digital marketing agencies, and London’s first private hyperbaric oxygen clinic.

On this episode of Awesome Health Podcast, Tim tells us how his conference started as a result of monthly meetups he was doing. He also shares some of the things he has found to be essential during his own 10-year journey in this world.

One of his biggest realizations is how much his health accelerates when he’s utilizing nature. Often today we use technology to mimic the natural world. For example, if we aren’t getting enough natural sunlight we use red light therapy and Vitamin D. If he were to start over again he’d focus on getting his digestion working properly, making sure his hydration was good and getting out into nature as much as possible.

We dive into those arenas before talking about how hyperbaric chambers helped him heal and why he’s such a big proponent of them. Tim was trying anything and everything to heal himself, and when he heard Dave Asprey talk about the benefits of hyperbaric chambers he looked for any clinic that had one near him. The nearest clinic was two hours away by train from Tim’s home in London, but he made the investment.

He went a few times a week for a few weeks and wanted to continue using a hyberbaric chamber, but it was too much of a drain on his time. So he asked the doctor who was running the clinic to open one in London. Tim offered to set it up and build it, if the doctor would run it. The doctor agreed and soon the clinic was available for the public. He details the need for a tool like this one, especially for people living in the city where the air is more polluted: hyperbaric chambers work by administering 98% oxygen into the body’s cells, more oxygen is getting squeezed into the cells than at normal atmospheric pressure levels. Often people using hyperbaric chambers can heal wounds that otherwise hadn’t healed in years like diabetic foot wounds.

Tim saw this firsthand: he needed a surgery that he was told would require 2-3 months of recovery with the wound remaining open so it could heal from the inside out. Tim used the hyerbaric chamber for 1.5 hours a day along with red light therapy after the surgery, and within 3 weeks the wound had healed. The surgeon said he thought it was a miracle, Tim thought it was from the oxygen and red light therapies.

We also talk about how eating at certain times of the day impacts glucose levels and quality of sleep, plus grounding through nature and how to support your health even when you can’t get outside.

You’ll hear the wealth of his information and reflections on those topics plus so much more when you join us for this edition of Awesome Health Podcast.

Episode Resources:

Read The Episode Transcript:

Wade Lightheart: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. It's Wade T Lightheart from BiOptimizers with another edition of the Awesome Health Podcast. And today we have none other than UK's leading biohacker and the founder of the Health Optimisation Summit, as a psychologist, specialist, serial entrepreneur and successful businessman this individual has founded and invested in multiple six figure businesses, including several digital marketing agencies and is the founder of London's first private hyperbaric oxygen clinic. Tim Gray, welcome to the show.

Tim Gray: Hi Wade. Thanks for having me on.

Wade Lightheart: It's so great to have you here. You know, we were hoping to be in person at the legendary biohacking Health Optimisation Summit, which is the premier summit in the European Union or I guess maybe not the European Union anymore with Brexit, but the bottom line is everybody knows about this event. We were scheduled to go see it, go be there this year and participate BiOptimizers. I'm fascinated by events of, you know, taking a step back under these COVID conditions that we're all dealing with. And you, as an event creator, can you kind of share maybe what led up to, you go to the biohacking summit? I know you have these meetups every week, these started with a meetup, because I think the story of how you've created this as fascinating and how you've become one of the premier voices in this entire movement?

Tim Gray: Thanks. I've been into health optimization, in biohacking, for 10 years before I knew that biohacking was. I followed Dr. Mckenna's work religiously for a long time, reverse my mum's osteopenia from content I learned from his website that no one else seemed to talk about and I've been in it for five years. And then one day I heard about Bulletproof coffee and loved it, found that my brain switched back online after being ill for so many years and became a biohacker. After listening to Dave's podcast, Bulletproof radio, for a long, long time, I decided to go to the Bulletproof conference in Pasadena 2017. And when I came back to London, there was really no one except for the few people that were into health. So I decided to start the meetup group, biohacker London meetup group, and that group grew very, very quickly.

Tim Gray: It showed me that there was a lot of crazies out there like me. Then one day I told my mum about this group of biohackers and she said, what's a biohacker, so I said, well, it's people that optimize their health and track things and whatnot. So after that, I started, when I was talking to anyone, I would kind of listen out for keywords, cause' I'm a marketer by trade and health and optimization kept on coming up. I relabeled the Biohacker London meetup group to be Health Optimization and Biohacker London and it basically tripled very, very quickly. People kept on saying: well, these meetups pretty good, why don't you do a summit? And by that time, we were doing two to 300 people on a Sunday morning, every month, just on a little meetup. We're the biggest group of biohackers that meet on a regular basis globally in London. For us, the Health Optimization Summit kind of came about. I got to know the guys at Paleo f(x) and got to know Dave and his team at Bulletproof and ask them to support me in partner to build something. I built it out with their support and guidance and we had a 1200 person event in year one, and I got all the big names from around the world to London, which was pretty epic. So yeah, that's really skip through history.

Wade Lightheart: You know, that's such a beautiful story and I think there's so many people who may be in a country or in a location and they like, there's no biohackers here, there's no people around or they want to do an event or they think they need to go somewhere else… But what I think is really great about your story is you went to the kind of like the godfather of the industry, went to the event, saw what was going on and said: Hey, I want to see if I can connect with some likeminded people and started to simple meetup and that became the foundation. Now, did you draw team members or relationships and business arrangements from that group? Or like, how did that kind of more from a meetup every month till like a conference, which is… Let's face facts, running a conference is extremely challenging. There's a lot of moving parts. You've got people coming over, you've got booths. It's a tremendous amount of money on the line, a tremendous amount of organization. That's a pretty fast rise, how did you pull that all off?

Tim Gray: Well, number one is, if I knew then what I knew now, I probably wouldn't have done it. I had Keith from Paleo f(x) on a podcast two or three years ago, and he said: you'd have to be batshit crazy to do a conference, because you have to hold on for dear life and Dave's team over as well said the same pretty much. And when you start unpacking it, it's not just getting speakers, exhibitors and attendees in a room, there's just so many moving parts. It's scary. It's actually insane. But luckily my background is building, scaling, selling companies. So I looked at it not like an events person. I looked at it like a machine. So everyone that works in the summit, were pretty much early days meet up group people.

Tim Gray: As you know, in the biohacking and health space there's some really smart, driven, dopamine dominant people in it that don't take no for an answer and have to figure a way around everything. That's pretty much everyone that works in the company. It's funny, cause' the other day I saw a picture from the very first meetup from back from November, 2017 and basically my closest team and some of my closest friends are all in that picture and have helped built the summit as well. So it's been awesome with the odd exception, but yeah, it's brilliant. The summit came together with those guys and now we're a team of about up to 15 people depending on the time of the year and what we've got going on. I don't recommend it, as the amount of moving parts is just scary, but it's fun as hell. Really is amazing.

Wade Lightheart: You're doing such an amazing public service and one of the things I find also interesting, where we're kind of alignment is that is your use of kind of the biological optimization or health optimization. And you move to that particular title and, in your opinion, do you feel there's a difference between biohacking and biooptimization? I have my own opinions about it, but I'd like to hear yours.

Tim Gray: I think English are very reserved people especially compared to the Americans. It's funny, cause' my brother works in the States a lot and he's always say: the Americans are so open and they're very happy and it's a coffee fueled nation and then you come back to England and they're all stiff upper lip and miserable and vitamin D deficient. I think it's a very different world in terms of marketing and I think the English mentality is we feel sold to quite heavily and it works very differently, whereas in America it's more of a commercial mindset and a lot more hype and everything's times 10. I mean things like Tony Robbins events, for instance, were too much for English people originally, I think, but now the culture is spreading and it's becoming bigger.

Tim Gray: So when it comes to something like biohacking, it's a very funky forefront words that the media's actually pushed up against quite a lot and may try to make it look bad. You know, like the CRISPER or gene editing movements and transhumanism, and biohacking is really misunderstood as a result. And then English people are like: Oh no, this is a bit too in our faces for the moment. So with the label of health optimization, that is the goal of biohacking. We have an English expression for a product and the shops, which is: it does what it says on the tin. You know, if it communicates on the 10 clearly, you know what it is, you're going to have it, if it's a value to you. Why that's really relevant is, because when I stopped people on Oxford street in London and said to them, do you want to biohack yourself?

Tim Gray: I had less than a 10th of a percent of people that even knew what it was. And when we asked if you want to optimize your health and we had 95% of the people say yes, 4% of people said yes themselves or a loved one, and 1% of people, whether, you know, the typical London 200 miles an hour in between, on the lunch break or whatever, and rude and going for it. So it shows that by understanding the goal, people want it. Whereas biohacking requires an extra level of communication and can be misunderstood. That's why I think it comes together, but for me the goal is everything to one side of health comes first.

Wade Lightheart: You know, come to the same conclusions myself, even though most people know I'm transplant Canadian here in America, and I love the American brashness and marketing, but one of the things from my own observation, when we were looking at our company, what we're doing… I come from the bodybuilding world and I would say bodybuilders are probably the original biohackers. I mean, they were doing radical experiments on themselves. Number one, overcoming their natural genetic expression to lifting weights and getting them. Then there is the use of nutritional supplements. Then there is the use of variety of drugs and various training methods or activities for making changes and re partitioning water inside the body or creating form which are mostly a cosmetic ideal. Some of that's ended up spilling out into the performance area. And when Matt and I were forming a company, we realized there's actually three different areas that people address.

Wade Lightheart: There's the aesthetics. Most people are attracted into the health, because they want to look good for another partner. Then as life goes on, they're kind of dealing with maybe a performance model. Now, some athletes are into it just for pure performance, but certainly as you get a little bit more mature, you're like, well, I'm not so concerned if I'm shredded with a six pack, but I do need to be able to focus at a high mental level for my job and deal with my family, and my business, and all these other things. But ultimately at the end, the base of the triangle, we have this triangle is health. I mean, right now it would appear that the unintended consequences of the technological innovation in the last seven years has severely compromised human health in ways that we didn't anticipate.

Wade Lightheart: And I believe that health optimization is using concordance health technology to return and optimize our physiological conditions. Talk to me about some of the things, maybe that you feel are really essential that you've discovered over the last decade on your own research and your own work and from all of the people you bring to your conference and that come to your event and share their expertise and wisdom? What are some of the kind of things that you're saying: Hey, these are the things that I need that, that anybody that's into looking at optimizing their health should start here?

Tim Gray: That's a really good question. I was asked very similar last week. It was like, if you could do something differently, what would you do differently in the last 10 years? I think I've tried so many different modalities and so many different things that a lot of have been shiny toys. And it's always, like when you're super ill, you're just hoping it's the right thing to fix your health, it's the one thing that's gonna put you over the edge. It's almost like the dream. Like in pulp fiction, in the movie when they open the suitcase and all you see is this glow gold. It's like every time you open up a new supplement, or something, or other, it's the technology, it's like: I really hope it's this. And I think everything that comes back down to my health accelerates significantly when I'm utilizing nature and align.

Tim Gray: I say frequently in biohacking we use technology to mimic a natural environment in an unnatural world and that is, if you're not able to get sunlight, natural sunlight, then you use satelliting or red light therapy, and if you're not getting a much natural light and you're wearing clothes, and you're not in a brighter country in the Northern hemisphere or whatever, then you use vitamin D. If you're not getting clean, you use hyperbaric oxygen therapy or do Wim Hoff, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So really everything is reversing modern days to live like our ancestors would. I think why it's relevant, with you guys specifically, is, because we do have food that doesn't have as much nutrients in it, for instance. Our liver are definitely stressed, cause they're having thousands of thousands of times the amount of toxins to deal with that they used to.

Tim Gray: So therefore, they're not as efficient, which means obviously the bile and digestion doesn't work as good as it should do. So again, things like BiOptimizers digestive, MassZymes specifically are my very, very favorite. It's because we're actually getting the enzymes to break down the things like our ancestors would have done, cause' they would have had that level in their food and their digestions would have been working better as well. Again, even digestive enzymes are replacing or using technology to mimic the natural environment in an unnatural world. So everything ties back into this. For me, when I first saw a functional medicine doctor, she said, it's about your gut, interestingly. And I went: yeah, yeah, no, I've got this going on and that going on, but really deficiencies and how your car operates, when it's out of gas or hasn't got the right fuel or the right antifreeze in it makes a big, big difference.

Tim Gray: I would definitely say I would have started with my digestion properly and understanding that, instead of doing all these crazy cleanses and not necessarily understanding that, I could have been drinking Dettol from all the cleanses I'm doing in poster supporting the natural processes. I'd also ensure that I was grounding properly getting into nature and again, that's quantified, opposed to woowoo, which is what a lot of people do think about grounding. Making sure that I'm getting enough sunlight or natural light is another one and making sure that I'm hydrating properly. And again, I know you've got some hydration drops, which I use when I'm traveling, actually, as well as various other things. The basic building blocks for making the body operate correctly is digestion for you get the stuff from your food, it's the sunlight and grounding, so that your electrical systems working correctly, your hydration, so your electrical systems working correctly as well.

Tim Gray: And those are really the fundamental things that everyone should do before they start biohacking. If they can't get to nature, use the technology where you can. I think that The Paleo Movement has got the attachment to mainly food, it seems, but it's much bigger than that. It's about ancestral living and doing what the caveman would have done, but when we come up against something that the caveman wouldn't have had, hundreds of times the amount of toxins we need to figure out ways to get rid of that. That's how I feel that it comes together and not many people seem to be talking about it like that, strangely. I hope that answers your question, a little long winded.

Wade Lightheart: It really does because this is a kind of an observational point that I've made. I had the great fortune of growing up in a very rural community. I wasn't very happy about it at the time, I wanted to be in the city where all the technology and all my friends were and all that stuff, but I was literally living in the middle of nowhere in the woods for the telephone poles ended at my road and dirt road. But during that time, I spent a lot of time in nature. I worked manual labor outside every day. And my mom grew an organic garden. We made fun of her for it. But when I went to go to university and get into the city and study exercise physiology and these type of things, I found it ironic that I all of a sudden started to gain weight.

Wade Lightheart: I just didn't have the same energy and stamina that I had before. And I thought what's going on here? And then I realized there was problems with the food I was eating at residence. Then what I was subjected to, which, you know, we still didn't have the internet, like we do today, you had to go to the library and get books and things like that, so I'm dating myself, but that was my first interest or my first connection and then later on, as I moved into the business world, where we have a company that's based in technology, I was like: wow, I'm now subjected to sitting at a computer screen. I sit at my desk most of the time while I'm doing my interactions and I started to see that, wow, I really needed to look at how we have evolved as humans. And as I say, these unintended consequences of technological innovation, food production, food distribution, storage, chemicalization, you know, all the different things that have happened over the last 70, 80, 90 years. In your experience beyond what you've said, what are some things that you feel are important for someone's, particulary we'll talk about our UK audience that are living in the UK, as opposed to say maybe Southern California?

Tim Gray: That's a really good question as well. I think the vitamin D is a massive one actually and it may sound like it's a pretty obvious and eye rolling one to most people, but I think British people are generally more closed off and not quite so happy and when they go on holiday, they suddenly brighten up. I think vitamin D deficient and I think especially around Corona times at the moment, in some of the studies that have come out over the last few weeks I think it was 96% of the people that are deficient in vitamin D have medium to high response to COVID. Funnily enough, 96% of people that have high vitamin D get mild or no symptoms at all. In Northern hemisphere, especially if you've got darker skin then you're going to be even more vitamin D deficient.

Tim Gray: So I think that that's the first thing that should be optimized naturally through foods or sun, obviously secondary with a supplement. I actually did a post on it this week on Instagram, because so many people have been asking me about what I do or what I recommend, you know, for someone like my mum. Well, that's it, it starts with the vitamin D and I know Dr. Mccarter is also a huge advocate of vitamin D. He's been talking about it for a very long time, and obviously I'm a big advocate of him as well. Naturally I talk about that, but I think that in colder countries, vitamin D is definitely a way to go.

Wade Lightheart: I just want to comment on that for a second, cause' I think this is a really astute point and something that's so ironic. We're living in this world right now, where there's all this talk about race and division, particularly here in America there's a lot of conflict and politicization of this, but at the fundamental, if we just look at biology, the change, the color of a person's skin is a biological adaptation response to the amount of sunlight that you're getting. People who have lighter color skin, biologically their ancestors had migrated to Northern climates and their skin began to lighten so that they could absorb more sunlight, so that they could manufacture things like vitamin D and people who were migrated to a higher solar environments, they got darker skin, so they would be able to manage and manufacture the optimal levels of vitamin D without burning their bodies and stuff. That's it. That's the only thing. And people are politicizing, they're creating these stories, but I find it fascinating that this is just a biological adaptation. And nobody in the medical industry is talking about the importance of this, the science, the biology of why we need sunlight and how it's essential to our immune system. Does that just strike you as the biggest irony of ever you've seen?

Tim Gray: Yep. I completely agree. Absolutely. Let's throw more chemicals in for the body to deal with the poster, making sure that the most basic building blocks are in place. That's the stupidity of it, in my opinion, but I mean, there's industry and unfortunately that does change things somewhat, but at the same time, yeah, it's bonkers. It's funny, cause' there's studies on the vitamin D actually with darker skin in the Northern hemisphere, apparently guys, African descendant, have the highest rate of prostate cancer when they're in Northern hemisphere, because of the lower rate of vitamin D and also the same with colon cancer as well. So it's just really interesting how such a basic thing isn't optimized more and the same, obviously around osteoporosis, osteopenia and all these things as well. That's the base, that's the one go to I think I always would recommend first, especially around current times,

Wade Lightheart: What are some other things that you've discovered along your journey of doing so many different things? I find one of the things I want to talk about here particularly is hyperbaric oxygen. Obviously you've founded a clinic. I used, a lot of people don't know this, but I had a clinic in Vancouver, Canada, way back in the day. I think that was around 2007, 2008, 2009. One of my hacks when I made a comeback for the world championships, I got ready for the world champion or the national championships three and a half weeks, I was literally sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber that we had in clinic. Can you talk to me, and to our listeners, about what a hyperbaric chamber is, why it's so important and why you founded a clinic in London in regards to this, because I think this is a pretty phenomenal topic?

Tim Gray: Yeah. It's a really big one for me, actually. I had, funny enough, Dave Asprey talk about it on the Bulletproof radio. And he just said about hyperbaric oxygen therapy and he said, it is supposedly an amazing thing. He only mentioned it in brief, in like passing. So I googled it, looked at it and thought: wow, this sounds amazing, sounds too good to be true. There was one clinic and it was two hours outside of London. So it was two hours each way with an hour in between and a session in between and blah, blah, blah. I went a few times and I had chronic fatigue and had immune issues for quite some time. I was pretty knackered. I was trying everything. Everything, even growth hormones too, so you know at that time for quite a while.

Tim Gray: And I had one session in the hyperbaric and the doctor said to me: you know, you probably feel tired tonight, it's probably your body working, going to work. Anyway, so I had the session in a strange chamber, a diving chamber and my ears were like, it felt like they were going to pop or whatnot. When I got on the train on the way home, I fell asleep on the train, which just would not ever happen. I mean, my fight or flight is always on, I'm always aware of everything around me, I never switch off. I observe everyone and everything around me. So it was a bit of a interesting thing. I thought I'm going to try this again. So I did it twice a week for two or three weeks, but it was such a resource, time resource heavy. I just said to the doctor: I want a clinic near me in London. You know, if I build it, would you run it?

Tim Gray: And it was really that simple. He said: yes, cause' he was working in the middle of the country, didn't have a particularly nice clinic, didn't have nice chambers or anything. There's this city boy that, you know, obviously, got companies and stuff, that had the resources to do so. So I built the company over the space of two or three weekends, got the website up and running, got a clinic done, all of the chambers, got it all up, got the hyperbaric doctor to run it for me so it was really that simple with a lot of compliance in between. The reason why it's so good and I went through all of that, is probably more important to this is, what happens is we don't have clean oxygen in city air specifically.

Tim Gray: We're not breathing properly, we don't have the same posture, we're not using our lung capacity as we should do. We have a whole host of different things going on and therefore we don't necessarily get the intercellular oxygen levels that we should do. Now what hyperbaric oxygen therapy does, is it administers 98% oxygen at a greater atmospheric pressure, so it's like squeezing more oxygen into the cells, more than you could do at normal atmospheric pressure. So if you had a bottle of water, for instance, a fizzy water and you were to squeeze the air down it would actually compress it, well in the body that then gets into the cell. It's very well documented around diabetic foot wound specifically. This is an area of the medical world that does accept hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Tim Gray: You see, people that have got wounds that haven't healed up for years or for a very long time and they potentially have it amputated, having hyperbaric oxygen therapy over the space of six weeks gets them to heal up. Now, what that does, is it's like when you have a cut on your hand, if you put a plaster over it or a bandaid or whatever, it won't heal, because it's not getting the air to it and it's not healing as a result. If you rip the bandaid off then it heals a lot quicker. And that's essentially what the hyperbaric chamber is doing from the inside out into cellular oxygen, which means that it spreads out through to all the body, in areas it wouldn't necessarily get to that level of concentration. So the body can do exactly what it was designed to do. That's essentially, it's a diving chamber, so it's a tube about a meter round two meters long, and you sit with a face mask and just have oxygen and you chill out.

Tim Gray: I got such a pro at doing it I was having it every other day at one point. Obviously, cause' I had the clinic, I have posted notes all on the inside of the thing, working on my laptop while I was doing it and making every minute count and my brain was on fire and absolutely amazing. It's good for healing, energy, immune support. I had an operation that should have been two to three months of healing time where they needed to leave the wound open and let it heal from the inside out. It was a horrendous surgery and I was doing it for an hour and a half a day. And in three weeks the wound healed up. The surgeon said it was a miracle. I said it was hyperbaric oxygen therapy and red light therapy. He disagreed, but you know the history of hyperbaric oxygen therapy says otherwise.

Wade Lightheart: I always find it funny when medical doctors will oftentimes discount technologies just merely, because they don't know about it, even though they'll say: well, we don't know what that is, but it can't possibly be that, which is kind of interesting default position, not to disperse medical doctors, but I find that I never could figure that out why? Well, you can't describe what's causing the response, but you're quick to discount something else.

Tim Gray: Yeah. I mean they have to turn away a lot of things, cause' if they accepted everything they're told they would never have a baseline to work from, but sometimes it just takes a little bit of knowledge of looking at the data and seeing some evidence out there for them to understand how good it is. And I mean, it is growing very quickly now, actually there's a very dear friend of mine, dr. Scott Sher, who I know through the hyperbaric conference I went to, he's very good friends with Dom D'Agostino, you know, he's very big proponent of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Wade Lightheart: Dom's doing some testing on some blood sugar formulations for us. He's been a fantastic researcher, just had interviewed him last week. Again came back on the podcast and what I love about Dom is he's as high up the research ladder as you can do, dealing with the military, space agencies, highly secretive programs and you know, very accomplished from a doctorate perspective. But yeah, he's a hacker like everybody else and he's running these experiments on us. He's trying to optimize everything in his life too. You know, prick his finger doing blood tests, he's running continuous glucose monitors, he's doing training. So he's a very unique individual. You've had so many great guests and so many,I would say, powerful people who have really cracked the code on various areas that you bring to your conference every year. What are some other things that stand out to you that you went: aha, these are things that I've chosen to integrate in my life on a longterm basis, as far as health optimization?

Tim Gray: Another bloody good question actually, said like a true British person. I like Dr. Satchin Panda's work around circadian rhythm. I think that's probably the most exciting and obvious, hidden in plain sight, stuff out there. Obviously optimizing, like I talked about sleep optimization is my first fundamental for a very long time, but then it occurred to me after reading "The Circadian Code", his book, and various other resources, actually I went to town on it, once I realized how important it was. I then changed it from sleep optimization to optimizing your day or the timing of everything for your life. I think that's one thing that I will never change. It's understanding that we should wake with sunrise and we should sleep after sunset, and block blue light so that we produce melatonin, it's so that we eat at the right time of day and actually let food ferment a little bit like would do in the cave that men should faster a little bit longer, cause' they would be out chasing an animal or collecting food or doing whatever they would be doing, while the wife would be in the cave feeding the children with a little bit of a store, so therefore, they wouldn't fast quite so long, which is why their hormones go all over the place. And then knowing that you would exercise in a certain timeframe, so that you didn't increase your cortisol too much and it didn't mess up your sleep. So I think understanding the timing of everything is relevant, especially with certain genes turning on and off at different times a day, especially around obviously food and one thing that struck me, which is something I say so frequently it's insane that so few people seem to know, is that the gene for insulin turns on and off different times a day and we can produce up to 50 times less insulin after sunset.

Tim Gray: And as a result, if you eat far after sunset, your body is processing that food, your blood glucose stays high through the night and doesn't drop until four or five in the morning, which means you don't get your best deepest REM sleep or deep sleep as a result of your blood glucose being so high. One thing that I tied up with that and I wanted to check it when I read it, cause' it was so fundamentally huge for me, whereas my constant glucose monitor and my Oura ring. So I had both obviously tracking in real time. And…

Wade Lightheart: What a call ring. You see someone with a ring, you know, are you one of us?

Tim Gray: Yeah. A hundred percent. It's funny if I ate at 9:00 PM, my resting heart rate and heart rate variability wouldn't be better until three or four in the morning, which is like three or four hours after when it should be at its best really. And then when I looked at my deep sleep and compared it to my blood glucose, where my blood glucose was a good low, but not too low, my deep sleep was best. So it's just like, hang on a minute, the timing for the day is so important for me specifically. And obviously dr. Satchin Panda talks about that with the studies and the rats as well about feeding them the same diet, but one was within a restricted window of eight hours and one was all day every day. The ones that ate within the same amount of food in the eight hours actually lost weight, because they weren't storing everything as fat through the night, because of those genes. So I think that's along with grounding and sunlight, timing is the biggest thing. And if people nailed those three things then you know, health would be significantly better for everyone.

Wade Lightheart: Talk about a little bit about grounding and sunlight. I live here you know, I lived in Vancouver, Canada, which is very much like I would say London. It rains a lot during the winter time and very dark and cloudy and one of the things that I absolutely had to do is I started using a high pressure, full spectrum sunbed a few times a week. And I had noticed a significant improvement in my mood and my function when I did that, and real drop off when I didn't. But there's another piece that you bring up here, which, which is grounding and there's a lot of, what I would call, conjecture and mysticism, and misunderstanding around grounding and yet it's so profound, like so many people go on vacation and they go. No one imagines going to a vacation in, you know, they don't put postcards of like frigid waters and Northern climates.

Wade Lightheart: It's Palm trees, a sunny beach and the ocean and I find it interesting that the ocean creates ions and the beach, most people are walking around with their feet on the sand and sunlight is shining at some exorbitant levels, like it's a recharging and many Northern climates, like if you go throughout Soviet Union and things like that, they would take holidays during the darkest parts of the year, to the sunny parts to recharge the health of the population and this is common practice in many, many cultures. What have you learned, I would say pass the critical British eye about grounding and how a person goes about it should they find themselves in a city?

Tim Gray: I generally talk about the things that are quantifiable, openly anyway, and I test other things on. Obviously it's a very critical world often and if you're talking about stuff that can be considered woo-woo, that can discredit you in many ways. So I had heard about grounding a few years ago and how good it was. I watched the documentary by Clint Ober a few years ago as well and it seemed amazing, but I didn't really understand the importance of it until whole body operating correctly. It wasn't until I heard that you can actually measure your body voltage and the efficacy of grounding on your body and that there have been live blood analysis showing blood before and after grounding and also for mammography as well. And I was just like, Hmm.

Tim Gray: So in my usual style, like I did about digestion once upon a time and it's how I know about you guys. I literally tore apart every single podcast, every single resource or everything I could on grounding and actually drew down diagram so I could understand the whole process of it so I could internalize it. The basis of it is, when we're connected to the earth, feet on the ground, grass, soil, sand or in the sea or a body of water, that's natural, where it's connected to the earth we are getting free electrons from the earth and those free electrons go and find those free radicals and pair, and make it stable which is obviously reduces inflammation and promotes healing. Is actually kind of like the ying to the yang for our bodies in terms of electric. So when we're getting sunlight and it doesn't matter if it's direct sunlight or if it's just natural light through clouds, because light is energy essentially, and it's photon positive of photon energy is what we're getting from the sun.

Tim Gray: Now, when we're connected to the ground, we're getting the positive photons and we're getting the free electrons. We're a bio circuit board in between the two. And that's actually something I heard, dr. Mercola mentioned it in similar, very similar way to that, which really resonated with me, because calling us a bio circuit board… Well, if we're not getting the sunlight and we got rubber soles on them, we're not connected to the earth, two fundamental parts for our energy isn't working properly. It's just not connecting. Which is, my hypothesis is, when you're in a warmer country and you're getting more energy from the sun and you're grounding more, you don't get so hungry, because you're getting your energy direct from source, as opposed to from things that collected it from the sun, which is one step removed.

Tim Gray: Sure, you need your nutrients and your minerals and the food. You need your food, but you need a lot less when you're actually getting energy direct from source. So that's how the sunlight and grounding pair together. But again, we're so far removed from the planet. I mean I spent 10 weeks traveling until last month, and I pretty much was barefoot the whole time and then when I jumped on a train to head to Germany from Croatia, I looked around and I was just like, I'm on plastic flooring on a metal tube going along the railway lines. I've got no sunlight on me. And I felt like I've been, it's just such a downgrade. Yet I'm in a modern world, on an amazing train going 80 mile an hour or whatever across Europe. And it's just like, I feel like I'm being hard done by here. I felt like I should be back, you know, in nature. It's interesting because my stats in terms of resting heart rate came down 18 to 20 beats a minute. My heart rate variability was up a hundred, up a hundred average. And then within 40 hours of being back in London and bearing in mind my house is optimized for EMF, I've had biological builder and I've got various devices and whatnot, and the EMS in my room almost zero, my stats went back to where they were.

Wade Lightheart: Isn't that incredible? Isn't it? I mean that is… What I first love, I want to commend you that you've actually documented and recorded and was able to demonstrate that. So you're doing one of the things that I think is essential in optimizing one's biology and that is correlating one's subjective experience and observation with external quantifiable data. And to me that's where we begin to cultivate and understand what we are feeling so that you would get so good at it you can almost tell where you're at at the scale based on what circumstances that you're in. Unfortunately, most people don't have any baseline. We have a policy of, you know, you assess where you're at, you test something, and then you optimize that process. What are some other things that you have learned to kind of optimize your life to enhance your health even though that you live in a city like London?

Tim Gray: The tracking with Oura ring. Obviously, I felt like we're part of a big boys club wearing one. We are I think for the city, the hustle bustle, it never sleeps as they say making sure that the sleep is optimized is super important, because we reverse the damage that we've done during the day to our body when we sleep and if we don't sleep properly, we don't reverse the damage properly and we age quicker. So I think that respecting sleep and making sure that it is your number one priority for your health is important. Obviously, within sleep that comes into circadian rhythm, obviously, for what you're doing throughout the day to help that sleep become better. But I think most people in the city, they don't think they need to sleep much.

Tim Gray: They work super late. They get up super early. Like if you watch an episode of Suits, for instance, they seem to work until 10 o'clock every night and they're back in the office at 6 in the morning. I mean this is city life. And if you're not… Gamifying, it would be giving you a sleep score every day. Knowing that you're in bed five minutes before where it says your optimal bedtime is knowing that your score is going to be higher, you're gamifying the life. You're gamifying your sleep, you're gamifying your health and that's gonna pay dividends. So I think in the city, making sure that you are optimizing your sleep and that comes with things like blue blockers making sure that if you're out entertaining, for instance, for me, I used to entertain a lot of clients, if you are out and you do eat something that you wouldn't normally eat, having like Gluten Guardian, and not to throw a product out there, but I do.

Tim Gray: I love that. And it's like having the right things in place. There's a whole host of things. And I think again, another one is, hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a good one. If you haven't got good air filtering system at home, which is very unusual to have in London, even though the air is very, very toxic and there's so many deaths from the bad ai. It's reported in the press frequently. The other thing is also if you can't get on some grass, if you haven't got a garden in London, for instance, you can get a grounding bedsheet or a grounding pillowcase, or a grounding house mat or a grounding floor mat that goes under your desk, so when you're standing at your desk or sitting at your desk, if you're not as optimized, then you're earth down and you can again measure your body voltage.

Tim Gray: As you put your hand near a wall socket, you can see your body voltage go up when you're measuring it with a multimeter. And then as soon as you put your foot on an earthing mat, you'll see your body voltage come down to zero. When you can see it like that, it's more than just a thought of this might be bad for me. You can actually quantify it. I remember when I got my first EMF meter and I was going around the house, checking it for all the different places around the house and you can, it's going off the charts at certain points. When I then put the reader down, I would then hear that buzzing in my head whenever I walked past that point in the house, just thinking: this is toxic right here.

Tim Gray: I have quantified that this is bad. Like get away from here. I actually moved house within two weeks as a result of it being so bad in some of the areas. But until you actually have the data to go, this is bad and this is how bad it is, you're not gonna be as motivated to do it. So I think that, you know, checking EMS is a good city one. Getting grounding sheets is a good city biohack. Making sure that you have the right for instance, Gluten Guardian is a big one for me, cause' I don't really eat bread, but when I do entertain, for instance, I might occasionally have it. And if they know you're a biohacker, they might be a bit judgy about it, but if you've got Gluten Guardian and well, that's what biohacking, that's the definition of biohacking. It's using technology to reverse technological issues in modern time. That's the type of really the basic stuff.

Wade Lightheart: It's kinda, I just thought of this, like technology reversing technology.

Tim Gray: Yeah, exactly. That is exactly it. I mean the Gluten Guardian is an absolute perfect example of that. My team is funny. We sat down, one of them had a chocolate ghetto or something or other, and it had gluten in it and there's like, that's it. All I do is I bought a few of these Gluten Guardians. It's just quite funny how they're so on brand, like on point with it as a result. It is using, that is the mindset of it, a poster saying I'm just going to avoid this completely altogether for the rest of my life and not get to enjoy something as a result of being too stubborn, the poster going, actually, I'm going to take this with it and I'm going to be fine. And that's really biohacking. Cause' someone said to me a few months ago: well, why you live in London then, like if you're a biohacker? I was: okay, what's the alternative, a wooden cabin on the side of a Lake with no phone lines or electricity? Come on, like be realistic. What can I do to hack my way out of this?

Wade Lightheart: One of the things that we started here is, BiOptimizers had just moved into a place I called the bio home and we're in the process of both enhancing the technology from an audio production and adding in all this biohacking stuff, but actually creating a biologically optimized home in the middle of the city, in the middle of massive VMs, in the environment, because I do love technology. I love the best of both worlds. I love being able to fly in planes. I love being able to connect on a computer. I love being able to eat things that maybe aren't the best for me, cause' they taste good and it's nice socially, but I also like to have an optimal level of health performance and to look at it at the same time.

Wade Lightheart: I want to, I know you've been very generous at the time, I wanna talk a little bit… Can you speak about your conference? I know there's been a lot of changes that are happening and stuff, but I really would like for you to take the floor, talk about the Health Optimization Summit, what it's all about the conference that you hold every year, what's the plans, how is it changing and where can people connect with you as well to kind of stay on abreast to everything that you're doing and the kind of information that you're putting out there, cause' you're putting out such amazing stuff and you have such a great event? And I know there's so many people that are just itching to go. When is it back? Where do we go to get to go? I know I'm one of those people, so please tell us.

Tim Gray: Thanks. I appreciate it. Yeah, so the Health Optimization Summit as you know, was born with those guys on board and my thing is the absolute best speakers, bar none, like with the best research, not just the biggest names, but the ones that really are game changers with no exceptions. So the quality is assured and I think that was the biggest draw. My belief was if you have the biggest speakers and the best brands, and everyone has been assigned often, approved or used in my life, or my team's lives that will bring the attendees. And that's really what worked. So, we have 40 speakers, 50 exhibitors over two days with workshops and like movement classes, but really it's about the content and the brands, and getting to meet all of these cool people. I remember when I first heard you on Dave's podcast actually a while back, and I was just like, I can't wait to meet these guys.

Tim Gray: And it was actually the thing is the first time I met the team fror BiOptimizers in Beverly Hilton actually last year. And then again at Paleo (f)x, I was so excited, cause' it's like, you hear these brands, you get to see speakers such as yourself and I guess the faces of these brands and it's so good to connect. That's one of the things I really love about these conferences. And as I said to you, before we started recording you know, digital dating, for instance, will get you buying for a certain while, but you're gonna have to meet them at some point, especially if you want to make babies and I think it's the same with conferences in terms of connecting with the brands, connecting with the tribe, really having the experience, because we didn't evolve with digital screens blocking us from everything.

Tim Gray: It's really an immersive experience of bringing everyone together and Health Optimization Summit is different, because I brought biohacking, health, fitness, medical, wellness, nutrition, biohacking, paleo, keto, everything with the viewpoint of optimizing health. And so that's all the cool futuristic stuff and it's all the natural things brought together, but quantified, natural, saying it's not just, you know, something that can't be proven that people roll their eyes out and call it woowoo. It's really the best of the best brought together and the best speakers for it and you get to meet your favorite authors. Last year we had obviously John Gray, who wrote "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus" and as Dave Asprey calls him one of the original biohackers cause' he's been into this whole hormone optimization for a very, very long time. He had a lot of fans that came along that really wanted to meet him and get to see all of these guys.

Tim Gray: It's just awesome to have it in London, because it's obviously Europe. We don't often get all the luxuries that you American guys the American guys get all these events, all the time, and we're very new to it in England. So it's a big experience. And when we got 1200 people in year one we knew it was pretty cool. So that's happening at the moment at 30th and 31st of January in Central London, but with our prime minister, Boris Johnson saying that there might be issues for up to six months, we're just putting a contingency plan in place for later on in the year just to make sure that we can have a big proper event where we can actually all meet without any restrictions. So we're just working on that at the moment.

Wade Lightheart: One of the things that you do and I think is really important is that you provide a lot of information to your community ongoing, so can you share where people can reach out to you, connect with you and tap into the information that you provide? Because I think, one of the great values are you're very curative and how you screen people that present information. So you're getting really, it's not filler. If you could kind of give everybody all your connections and social links, and where they can get ahold of you, and how do they find out about the conference, and to get tickets so that they can go and get on that list, because it is a very, you know, there's only so many people these events can hold and so it's something that people want to attend.

Tim Gray: Of course. Well, first of all, the website is healthoptimisation.com. That's with an S not a Z, because we're British and we're awkward like that. So it's the healthoptimisation.com, sorry. I'm on Instagram @timbiohacker and also healthoptimisationsummit is the summits social media. In terms of the speakers we really are very specific about who we invite and it's by invite only. We have 300 applications each year and I don't really take any of the applications. It's only by invite as you know for yourself actually. So, I really, really, really, really wanted you to speak. I rate the whole experience from a high level of what are all the areas of health that we should be covering and visualize it, so that I know that we've got all of the topics covered so that even beginners can come in and get a really good rounded view on health with the best content.

Tim Gray: And then it's the same with the exhibitors as well. I make sure that there's not overlap in the brands. I make sure that every one of the products I've tested or I already use in my life or my team do. And there's no exceptions to that at all. Like literally every single product has been used, tested and torn apart by me. And I talk about that on my Instagram very openly. I'm very, very open about everything I use and how I share it. So if you want to check out on Instagram, any of these brands or these speakers, then, you know, that's the best place to do it.

Wade Lightheart: Tim Gray, you're a wealth of information, you're doing great work in the world and more importantly, you're building a community that allows people to connect in the real world about this incredible health optimization technology. I encourage all our listeners to follow Tim, he's got so much great information. Especially our folks in Europe, because it's a great event that he holds, it's a great place to connect. And like you said, meet, greet, and perhaps even flesh out some of the ideas that you have or share some technology that you might have crafted, created, or learned about with other people and enthusiasts to find out: Hey, here's your tribe. So Tim, thanks so much for joining us today. And for all our listeners at BiOptimizers, I want to thank you for joining us for another health episode at the Awesome Health Podcast from BiOptimizers. Of course, check out Tim's stuff and we'll see you on the next episode.

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