Cofounders Phil Mickelson and his long time friend Dave Phillips sat down to talk about coffee and wellness. Heres a peek into their conversation.
Dave: Welcome! This is a little coffee break with Phil and Dave, co-founders of For Wellness. We don't have a script but we're going to talk about health and wellness, because it's important to you. And of course, we're going to talk about some coffee.
Phil: Its a lot easier when your job requires your body to perform, to be motivated, to keep your health and wellness in check. And it really wasn't until about 10 years ago that I became accountable for my own health. When I got diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis and I needed to make life changes and the way I was going about eating and so forth, I started to become educated on some of these areas. And the first health practitioner that I saw said that my TH-1 cells were low. My TH-2 was too high to lift up my TH-1 immune cells and get it in check. He said I needed to drink coffee all day long, which I had never drunk before. Now I do it every day. And I have not been sick a day in 10 years.
So its been a life-changing experience and I look at coffee as being the foundation of my overall wealth and health and wellness. But whats interesting is that as you and I have worked on this concoction, lets say over the last 5, 6, or 7 years, theres a physical element to why this has helped me become better, but theres also a huge psychological element. And the psychological element is that when Im putting the healthiest thing in my body, first thing in the morning, I am much more committed throughout the day to make better decisions. So if I haven't eaten till 11 o'clock and I say, gosh, Ive had my coffee, I feel great. Im going to eat. Im more inclined to have a salad or vegetables or fruit or something, or a healthy bar than I am to order the cheeseburger. And then once Ive made it until five or six at night, Im like, you know? Ive had a great day eating. Lets not mess this up now.
And so I end up making good choices for dinner, and then I actually use another coffee and wellness concoction at night to help me go to sleep and get rid of that sugar craving.
Coffee... for bedtime?
Dave: You bring up an important point because people think that coffee is going to keep us awake, but if you actually put the right blend of ingredients in there, we can use coffee as that recovery thing that actually helps us sleep, which most people don't realize.
Phil: Right! I take our normal concoction and I add tart cherry, Maka root, and cocoa. The magnesium from the cocoa and the melatonin from the tart cherry helps me get to sleep, but the tart cherry also gets rid of that sugar craving. And so its helped me maintain my weight and eat less. I only eat one or two meals a day, and it gets me through that last few hours where Im awake to get my body to sleep and in recovery. So the physical elements of our ingredients, the collagen and protein power, helps muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints, repair. The MCT powder helps cognitive function. And the cinnamon helps with inflammation. Sea salt, with hydration, helps with your pain loss. But the biggest thing that you really turned me onto was L-Theanine.
What about the jitters?
Dave: Which is an amino acid that's derived from green tea. You probably got some of that by drinking some of the other ingredients that you used to take, but what L-Theanine does is it interacts beautifully with caffeine - actually smooths it out. So it doesn't give you jitters.
Phil: You showed me so many studies where caffeine has improved every single athletic performance across the board. But I always wondered or questioned if it would work for golf, because you really have to have calm nerves. And as much coffee as I drink, because of that L-Theanine, I never have any jitters. It allows me to play and perform my best.
I used to take a huge breakfast, thinking that if I eat a big breakfast I have all day to work it out, work it off. I have all the energy I need. What would happen instead, is I would get tired and lethargic and sluggish. I'd have brain fog. I wouldn't perform well and I wouldn't feel great. And so now, rather than breaking my fast early in the morning, I try not to eat until later in the day. And if I have our coffee with maybe a handful of nuts, I'm full until one, two, or three o'clock. I feel like I have much better focus, much better energy. I perform better on the golf course, as well as maintain a better overall health and wellness.
Where to begin?
Dave: Yeah, so you know there's a lot of things out there today on intermittent fasting, right? And why it's good for you and giving your body a break from digesting. Again, anytime you're going to do something like this, you want to talk to an expert, a nutritionist, a physician, and get yourself on the right program, because everybody's a little bit different. But to your point, I mean, coffee is that vehicle for health and wellness. We talk about health and wellness today and why it's so pertinent. People are putting bad things in their body. It hurts their immune system. With COVID we need our immune system to be fired, right? And coffee's a vehicle that gets good stuff in your body that helps you with that.
Phil: Well, it's the first thing you put in your body. When you put sugar and cream in it, you're causing an insulin spike and inflammation. When you have a doughnut in the morning, you're just not committed throughout the day. You get to lunch and you say: Well, I've already had a doughnut. I've had coffee. That's not healthy. And I'm going to have the burger. Then at night...
I've been there and it's not just one donut - it's usually more. I've been there for many years and eventually I've had to become accountable for my own health. And coffee is a great place to start. In the past, I didn't know where to start. Like, well, what do I do? Coffee and wellness is the foundation. And then I have made smarter choices throughout the day because of it.
