Tag Archives: sean croxton


Posted by in podcast, wellness

The Podcast About What to Do When a Vegan Diet Stops Working…

by Sean Croxton

There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind.

My gosh, if it weren’t okay to flip-flop in the event of new information, I would still be pushing the Food Guide Pyramid and watching my personal training clients get fatter!

In his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie writes, “…ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.”

In other words, human beings LOVE being right — the overwhelming majority of us will stick to our guns regardless of how conclusive the evidence to the contrary may be.

But not Susan Schenck.

Susan had fallen madly in love with her raw food vegan diet. So much so that she wrote a 700-page book about it!

Going vegan made Susan feel amazing. Her book, The Live Food Factor, even became a bestseller, making her a hero amongst the vegan community. She was on top of the world. That is, until…

Her diet stopped working for her.

Ouch!


Posted by in mind

The Blog about Fear of Success and Stuff…

by Sean Croxton

Mediocrity is an interesting place to live.

It’s safe yet frustrating. Cozy yet disempowering.

It’s like a default setting for human beings who wish to do more with their lives but just can’t get — or keep — going.

There have been days when I longed for mediocrity and normalcy. You may even remember the time when I shut down my YouTube channel and social media accounts. My goodness, you have no idea how awesome that felt. No longer would I have to deal with 8 billion emails every morning. Never again would I have to wake up to find another smear video by the fruitarian dude posted on my Facebook wall. And I wouldn’t have to worry about getting caught in line at Whole Foods with a slice of chocolate cake in my basket.

I just wanted to make edu-taining health videos. I didn’t sign up for all of this other stuff!

Leading up to my meltdown, I had convinced myself that I couldn’t deal with you guys — the readers, listeners, and viewers who followed me online. But the truth of the matter is that the fear of success had taken over both my subconscious and conscious minds and had its way with me.

But as I like to say, every breakdown is followed by a breakthrough. And here we are, almost two years later, still cranking away at it. And having a ton of fun doing it.

It’s interesting that we are so very familiar with the fear of failure, but seldom do we ever consider how we fear success at the same time.


Posted by in mind

Fear First: How Your Brain Can Be Your Biggest Hater

by Sean Croxton

Haters gonna hate.

Another of one of life’s certainties is that there will always be people — sometimes even those who are supposed to support you the most — who will do all they can to keep you down. They go out of their way to sabotage your diet and exercise program. They do all they can to tear you away from your significant other. For some reason, they can’t seem to be happy for you no matter what awesomeness may be occurring in your life.

That’s a hater.

Yet, little do we know that our biggest hater may be, in fact, that three-pound noodle between our ears.

Last night, I decided to pluck one of my favorite books, Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear, off the shelf. In it, author Dr. Srini Pillay breaks down the science of fear and why even though we know what we want, we just can’t seem to act on it. We get stuck.

This reminds me of a Facebook status update I posted a couple of months ago, in which I asked my peeps what they would do if they were guaranteed to succeed. The responses were some of the most amazing aspirations I had ever read. Yet, when I later inquired about why they were not pursuing these inspiring endeavors, the almost-unanimous response was fear.

But where does this fear come from?

The human brain is quite the survivalist. Although we have developed higher order functions like speaking, thinking, and, of course, blogging, our brains still possess primitive forces remaining ever-vigilant for signs of danger or threat. It is these latter forces that may lie at the root of what I call the game of start-stop-start-stop-only-to-start-again-and-stop-again when it comes to moving toward our goals.


Posted by in mind

Are You a Professional Human Being?

by Sean Croxton

If there is one thing guaranteed about life, it is that we all evolve.

I can recall my early days as a personal trainer, when I considered exercise to be the solution for everything under the sun. I immersed myself in books, videos, and courses on fitness, strength, periodization, and anything else that could help me build the ultimate physical human machine.

Then I stumbled upon the work of Weston A. Price, Francis Marion Pottenger, and many other nutrition legends who convinced me that diet was a critical element of building not only a well-tuned physical body but one that enjoyed internal health as well.

As I learned more about nutrition, I became less enthusiastic about my personal training career. Since it was so different from anything else they had ever heard before, most clients seemed to be disinterested in my nutritional advice. They just wanted to work out. And since you can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet, I eventually hung up my stopwatch to become a nutrition consultant.

Working as a Metabolic Typing Advisor, I quickly learned that many of my clients had health challenges that went far beyond diet and exercise. Despite their much improved eating habits, things like insomnia, low libido, and digestive problems continued to persist. That is when I stumbled upon Reed Davis and the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN) course.

FDN blew my mind. I learned all about steroidal hormone imbalances, detoxification pathways, intestinal pathogens and dysbiosis (bacterial overgrowth), and a bunch of other cool stuff. The best part is that I could run lab tests on my clients to see where the hidden internal dysfunctions resided. Once we found those dysfunctions, I had the pleasure of helping my clients correct them through natural protocols.

Once again, I immersed myself in information, reading everything I could within the realm of functional medicine and the endless connections amongst the body’s many systems. You have no idea how much fun this was (and still is)!

As my FDN practice grew, another missing piece of the puzzle became apparent — mindset. Some clients just seemed to think differently than others. After a while, I could almost sense who would follow the program and eventually resolve their health complaints, and who would not. It all revolved around mindset.


Posted by in mind, wellness

Compulsive Overeating: Is It All in Your Head?

by Sean Croxton

My exploration into the human brain continues.

Last night I was hanging out in my bathtub (yeah, I do that once in a while) reading a book called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. You can imagine how geeked out I was to learn that humans are only species with the ability to prospect. In other words, we can look forward in time and consider the future. Which means that we do whatever the heck we can do to control the future. We believe that this sense of control makes us happy. And when we lose this control, we freak out. I’m sure you can relate.

Why is prospection exclusive to humans. Well, it’s because we have ginormous frontal lobes in our brains. In fact, a frontal lobotomy — or chemical/mechanical destruction of the frontal lobe — would not affect you much. The only major side effect of such a procedure would be the inability to think into the future. The ability to prospect is gone.

I found this interesting because a lobotomy was, at one time, a common and effective treatment for anxiety. What do people typically feel anxious about? The future!

No frontal lobe, no future. Anxiety gone!

Trippy, huh?

Anyway, our last video was about impulsive overeating and its connection to decreased activity of the prefrontal cortex, the front one-third of the brain responsible for planning.

Today, we’re discussing another type of overeater called the compulsive overeater. This individual may have increased activity in a part of the brain located deep within the frontal lobe called the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG). Increased activity in the ACG may be due to low levels of brain serotonin.

Dr. Daniel Amen and I discussed this type of overeating in THIS PODCAST a couple weeks ago.

Proven and natural ways of increasing brain serotonin are supplementing with 5-HTP, l-tryptophan, or St. John’s Wort, as well as using the brain-boosting spice saffron.

But before you head out to the local supplement store to grab some 5-HTP, be sure to check out THIS PODCAST with Dr. Daniel Kalish.

According to Dr. Kalish, serotonin and dopamine are antagonistic — when one goes up, the other goes down. This can cause a problem down the road.

Load up on information, and then decide what is best for you!

And enjoy today’s video.

I’m out!

Sean Croxton
Author, The Dark Side of Fat Loss
Host, The Paleo Summit