The above video is 1 minute 52 seconds long.
This week we welcome musician Wes Carr to the show. Wes has an amazing story to share with us as he’s been on quite a journey.
Wes openly speaks to us about his battle with depression and anxiety, and how he’s been using nutrition and meditation with great success to help combat these in his everyday life over the last few years.
If you’re not familiar with Wes Carr, yes, he’s a musician here in Australia. He’s worked alongside icons like Paul Mac, Missy Higgins, Don Walker, and Andrew Farris from INXS to name a few.
If you enjoy inspiring and transformational stories, then this podcast is for you!
You can also catch Wes live on his Australian tour: Here Comes the Sun – A journey through the songs & memoirs of George Harrison.
Full Interview with musician Wes Carr:
Rock ’n’ Roll & Depression To The Paleo Way. How I Transformed My Health
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In this episode we talk about:
From Australian Idol to the Paleo Way – What happened?
From Rock ‘n’ Roll, Vodka & Depression to Transforming my Lifestyle… The Steps I Took
Why I Meditate Daily and What Techniques I use
His Thoughts On the Paleo Diet & How He Incorporates it
And much much more…
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Wes Carr website
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Full Wes Carr Transcript
Guy Lawrence: Hey, this is Guy Lawrence from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. You know, thinking back a couple of years ago I was sitting in a friend’s car and they played me song and the song was called Blood and Bone. And little did I know that musician would end up on our podcast a couple of years later.
Yes, his name is Wes Carr and even more so little did I know that he had an amazing story to share with us and he’s been on quite a journey. If you’re not familiar with Wes Carr, he’s a musician here in Australia. He’s also worked alongside icons like Paul Mac, Missy Higgins, Don Walker, and Andrew Farris from INXS to name a few.
Pretty amazing resume. But Wes actually has openly spoke about his battle with depression and anxiety, and he comes on the show today to share with us about using nutrition and meditation to help combat those things and bring them to his everyday life.
And I have to say about Wes, he’s one very positive, happy, great guy, and it was a pleasure to have him on the show today and, yeah, you’re gonna get lots out of this.
Also, Wes is actually touring around Australia at the moment. His tour is called Here Comes the Sun: A Journey Through Songs and Memoirs of George Harrison. And I will be definitely checking it out myself. So, if you want to go and see Wes in person, after this podcast, now is the time to do it.
As always, if you’re listening to this podcast, a little bit of feedback is always great to hear from you. Simply drop us an email: 180Nutrition.com.au. And also a review is a great way through iTunes. It takes two minutes to do. Hit the Subscribe and five-star as well. Really appreciate it. Get feedback that way, but it also helps us with our rankings and we know that you’re enjoying these podcasts as well and we can reach more people.
And it’s fantastic and I feel very blessed to be doing these podcasts with such amazing people. And I have no doubt you’re going to enjoy this podcast along with many others today as well.
So, yeah, let’s go over to Wes Carr. Enjoy.
All right, let’s start, eh? Let’s rock and roll; excuse the pun, Wes.
So, hey, this is Guy Lawrence. I’m joined with Stuart Cooke, as always. Hey, Stu. And our fantastic guest today is Wes Carr. Wes, welcome to the show, mate.
Wes Carr: Thanks, guys. Thanks very much.
Guy Lawrence: Wes, I was thinking we’ve had athletes, triathlons, CrossFitters, naturopaths, doctors. And we had a chef last week; Pete Evans came on. And you’re our first musician, mate.
Wes Carr: I am?
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. And we’re very excited about that. So, every podcast, mate, what we do is get some; just tell us a little bit about your journey, what you do, before we get on to the health topic of everything, which we’re excited to talk to you about. Can you just tell us a little bit about, I guess, your music journey? You know; when did all that start?
Wes Carr: Yeah. Look, I started sort of singing and dancing and performing when I was I think about 2 years old. I put on the Michael Jackson album Thriller like every ’80s child and went nuts, basically.
And that was it, really, and then I kind of decided to start writing at about 12. I picked up the guitar and I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, basically was obsessed with music, really, all the way through my; all the way up until sort of, yeah, now, really. I mean, I’ve always been a musician and entered Australian Idol in 2008. And basically I’ve been in bands and I’ve been in the industry for 10, 12 years and I’ve been in a band Ben Gillies from Silverchair; that was probably the most profile I’ve had before Australian Idol.
And then when I entered that competition it was kind of frowned upon back then, in the industry, because it sort has this sort of stigma that anyone who goes into those shows, they don’t have much experience. Whereas I had quite a lot of experience in the lead-up to something like that.
And it was really me just kind of throwing caution at the wind and just sort of experimenting with a whole different mentality about going about doing things. And I kind of foresaw that the old mentality in the music industry that they still kind of bash these days is that, you know, you have to be laying in the gutter to sort of make it in the industry. You know? You’re gonna have to pay your dues and all that bullshit.
And I understand it in a certain respect, because you do need to have a sense of yourself and you do need to know a bit more about your craft than just wanting to be famous. But for me, I’ve never really wanted to be, kind of, you know, famous for just being famous. It was more about going onto the short and basically just releasing everything that I had under my belt for the last 15 years of my experience.
And that’s all I did. And I was fortunate enough to go on and win the show and be known for winning Australian Idol, which then I discovered that was a little bit of a struggle, because being known for winning something like Australian Idol, you become “that guy from that show” more than that guy who writes this song or that guy who… So, it’s a big leap; you sort of throw a lot of stuff out the window whilst doing it, but at the end of the day it gives you a leg up in the public arena and you get to have a stance, a voice that’s to what you love doing, I suppose.
So, you know, I’m grateful for it but it has been quite a long journey, I suppose, finding my way through it all and seeing what it means, you know? And now seven years later I’m sort of looking back at it all and really sort of saying, you know, most of it’s bullshit, really, but (really, it is) but you get to find a sense of yourself and you get to find; it’s all about you, really. I mean, at the end of the day we’re all here to sort of learn and grow and fully experience; constantly change and experience new things. And that was sort of what I did, and met a lot of cool, interesting people along the way, you know?
And I’ve done that, I’ve worked with a lot of people, I’ve been over to L.A. I’ve worked with Joe Cocker. This was all before Idol, you know. I worked with a lot of different, amazing famous, very famous, acts and people that I’ve met before and after. And they’ve all taught me many things along the way and, you know, now it’s all; now I’m sitting here talking to you guys.
Stuart Cooke: I actually watched, strangely enough, that was the only Australian Idol I’ve ever watched. And I watched it from Day 1 all the way through to the finals. So I know a little bit about your journey on there. And we were engrossed as a family sitting there, and you get so dialed in.
But I was intrigued that, so, from Australian Idol seven years ago to now the Paleo Way with Pete Evans and Nora Gedgaudas. How did that ever come about?
Wes Carr: I lived next door to a mate of mine who’s a really good friend of mine now whose name is Dino Gladstone or Dean Gladstone; they call him Dino on the show, which is Bondi Rescue, which he’s famous for. I lived next door to him in… I’m not gonna give his address out.
And this was sort of straight after the show. Or kind of two years after the show, really, and I’d been on tour for two years, basically drunk, I think, everyone in Bondi’s body weight in vodka on tour.
And I’d been pretty much partying kind of all the way through that and just playing shows. You know how it is. It’s just sort of becomes like a novelty; it just becomes a joke, really, of like how much alcohol is on the rider and everything at the end of the day, after massive shows and things. It is kind of; I don’t know. I just exhausted myself, I think. I just tried to be something that I really wasn’t, in a way. I learned a lot of that through that mentality. So, when I met Dino he kind of steered me in a different direction. I started training with him and just hanging out a bit more, talking to him.
And he introduced me to a book called Primal Body, Primal Mind. And I read a bit of that and I remember him giving it to me, actually, we were on the Cooper Park stairs, which is probably the worst, or some of the worst stairs you can run up and down in Sydney. They are like the “death stairs,” I call them.
And we were training one day and he gave me this book and I read a bit of it and it just kind of opened my eyes up. And then he really just changed my whole perception on food and what food does. It’s like, I had grew up in a household where I don’t think I ever once thought about food as being medicine or anything to do with anything other than being tasty. That was basically what my education of food was. Because growing up in Adelaide, working-class Adelaide, you just don’t think about these things. You just sort of go to school and come home and drink your Farmers Union iced coffee and…
What I used to do XXJohnny in town/talent school in ?? 0:10:00.000XX as a kid and I was XXon the team/a teen??XX in Adelaide and all that stuff. So, we set up a schedule of going from school to the city five nights a week, and every night we’d have McDonald’s for dinner. I mean, that’s kind of what you did. It was cheap, easy, no one ever really thought about it, it was just the way it was. You know?
So, getting back to Dino, like, that was just an explosion for me to finally go, “Wow, OK?” He didn’t eat grains and all this sort of stuff. What the hell is all this about? And he was making these smoothies and just really into his food and talking about food. And when he spoke about his food, he lit up and it was like; it was just this amazing kind of person; he just kind of became this other person. It was great to see. I thought, God, there’s something in this.
And that was about six years ago, I think. Five years ago.
Guy Lawrence: What made you open to that, you know?
Wes Carr: I think because I really admired Dino for his energy. He has a real just this enigmatic energy that when he talks, you know there’s something in here because he’s so, not “obsessed” is the wrong word, but so; he just loves what he does. You know? All those guys down there do, you know? That’s why they do what they do is they…
But, you know, I think for me that they’re just really good inspirations and really good role models for people, especially like me who came after having all-nighters and just boozed, basically, and destroyed, and running around the world catching flights going… And then also having a disposition to anxiety and depression, which I think I was just trying to numb myself with XXaudio glitch 0:12:04.000XX and everything else that was going on with the prescription pills and everything.
And then he just sort of; and slowly but surely I started waking up to the fact that, “Oh, wow! This does really work.” And it took a very long time because I was the only person in my camp that when we went on holidays and things I’d bring my own food in an Esky and I’d basically just copy what Dino used to do. And I bought what Dino bought and everything that Dino did, I just basically mirrored for awhile until I started getting a little bit more like, “OK, there’s something in this.” I don’t know how it’s going to be sustainable because it was really expensive back then, even four or five years ago, it was quite expensive. These days it’s becoming more mainstream and hopefully it becomes more mainstream so the price is lower and there’s markets and there’s a lot more avenues now, but it took a long time to kind of start working up to this, I think, a long time ago.
I mean, paleo wasn’t in the mainstream psyche at the time. It was just the word that I don’t really understand, you know? It was just a lifestyle choice for me that I seem to resonate with.
Guy Lawrence: Have you always suffered from anxiety and depression? You mentioned it. Or was that something that was fueled from the public eye?
Wes Carr: No. I always had a disposition to severe anxiety. It’s more like terror. I’ve never really had it diagnosed properly, I don’t think, because it sort of shifts around a bit, you know? There’s anxiety attacks, there’s the depression, and then there’s the obsessive thinking that…
I was just talking to a; I was just on the Paleo Way tour in Cairns, I was talking to a little boy, a very inspirational little boy who had changed his diet and has changed his life. But he has obsessive compulsive disorder and what he described basically, when I have my, what I sort of call “episode” where I sort of; I’ve got this one terror thought that I can’t get out of my head and it just kind of goes around and around and around and around. And it just becomes more and more and more and more, I suppose, violent, in my head.
And I basically can’t move. I just can’t get out of the house. I can’t do anything. It cripples me inside and outside.
And so I’ve always had that, and that sort of got worse and worse and worse over the years. And that’s just sort of, it comes in sort of stages maybe twice a year or once every two years. It doesn’t really matter when it comes. It just hits like a freight train when it does.
But I’ve recently realized, my wife’s done the XXINN course 0:15:07.000XX, and my little man has had trouble with sensory processing and all that when he was born. And it’s all to do with gut, really. I mean, that’s your biggest brain in your body. You know?
And so for me to constantly be aware of that and keep on the path of trying to change my gut bacteria and giving it the right foods, then I can change my brain. And then I can work on my thoughts.
But when it’s physical, I feel like you struggle with the thoughts. So you’ve got to kind of treat your physical and then treat your psychological and then it will start working all in all.
Sometimes I don’t really treat my physical well and I sort of shift backwards and forwards, because it is a big step and it’s also a very; you’ve got to be very highly committed to it in quite a strict manner to be able to repair your body and have that mentality. It’s like a mantra. You’ve got to have that mentality every day, all the time, you’ve got to wake up and…
Guy Lawrence: It takes work, doesn’t it?
Wes Carr: It just takes a lot of work. At the moment, I’m trying to get off the caffeine. You know? I’ve been an avid tea drinker for ever since I can remember. And I love my cup of tea in the morning, but then it’s got more caffeine in it than coffee, they say. And it acts differently in the body. But still, and I’ve been 10 days off the caffeine, that’s the last thing I probably need to get off of.
And, for me, I feel even better clarity of mind and able to keep up with a 2-year-old sometimes. It’s still a lot better than walking around with this kind of fake energy for awhile.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. It must have been great for you to meet Nora on the Paleo Way after reading the book as well and being able to spend some time with her.
Wes Carr: Yeah, it was a bit of trick, really. It was quite strange. You know, sometimes you sort of get exposed to these people and all of a sudden, bang, they’re in your life. It’s just bizarre. That happened with Joe Cocker and myself. My dad used to do these really bad Joe Cocker impersonations at Christmas time and then all of a sudden there I am meeting him and going over. So, yeah.
It’s happened most of my life. It’s sort of funny. It’s like whoever I think about sometimes they turn up in my life, which is, yeah…
Guy Lawrence: Oh, it’s great. But even to share your story. Because the Paleo Way was a successful tool, clearly. I mean, I went to the Sydney one and I think there was 1110 people there or something.
Wes Carr: Yeah. It’s been nuts. I mean, I think for me to watch it on the outskirts this time around; I was on the first one and then my wife’s on the second one here, and I’m playing at it and playing music. You know, I think for me, watching it all evolve into the mainstream, it’s like we’re saying the world’s flat again. Like, the media have responded in such an aggressive fashion. And it’s just so unfair because it’s just not; it’s not at all controversial when you look at what you’re saying and whatever everybody’s saying with the paleo lifestyle. It’s just pretty bloody simple really.
But then you’ve got to look at all the publications that are writing these things and what their alliances are. You know?
Guy Lawrence: But I think it’s a big shift mentally for people as well. Like, I was in the same boat as you whereas I grew up without a second thought about food. And you almost have to have a bit of a nudge, if you like, by the universe or whatever it is, pain, or whatever it may be, before you look into these kind of; look at the food that you eat and how it applies to your own health.
I think it can be quite a bit ask for people at times, even though it is actually quite simple really.
Wes Carr: Yeah, I think it is a big ask. I mean, I always look at my mum and God bless my mum. I always look at her for examples as to how I suppose 90 percent of the psyche of the public think, because mum’s from Adelaide, she’s been in suburbia all her life, and she’s read the news, watched the news on the telly, and goes to work. And that’s her sort of everything.
But that’s kind of what people do, I suppose. They get up, they read the paper, they read “fear, fear, fear, fear, fear.” They go to work. They just eat whatever they can, because it’s quick and easy and cheap. Then come home. They watch the news. “Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear.” They go to sleep. And then they get up and repeat.
And then on the weekends they have; they go away with the family or something and they recharge and then back. And it’s the same old routine. And it’s just a treadmill. And it’s a little bit insane. Well, a whole lot of insane. But, you know, I think if you can just break away from that and just be aware of one thing or change just one thing about your life that you kind of think “I could do away with that” and just slowly chip away at your so-called routine and start reading a book or just go out for a walk in the sunshine at lunch break and not sit at your desk eating.
Just something really simple that changes that routine. You start becoming a little bit; that little hole that you’re looking through starts becoming a little wider and wider and wider. And if you’re looking through a small hole, you’re gonna only see through that small hole. But if you start looking through, you start breaking that hole apart, a little bit by little bit, you start seeing a little bit more of the entirety of what’s going on around you and what’s happening, you know?
And there is a lot more happening in the world or a lot more awareness going on than there’s ever been because of such readily communication that we’re all involved in and where we are and the Internet and where we log on.
A lot of people read Facebook now as the newspaper, more so, instead of XXsubtext?? 0:22:03.000XX
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. I think the average person logs in, I think it’s five times a day, to Facebook? It’s something like that.
Wes Carr: Yeah, so, it’s in your phone. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 15 times a day, to be honest. Because you’re on your phone and you’re on the bus, you’re on Facebook. You’re waiting on the bus… Like, I mean, I look around at a café and there’s people just on their phones, you know?
It’s a little worrying, but, you know, as long as they’re kind of, I don’t know, reading something that’s sort of expanding their minds instead of “the dog did a poo on my lawn this morning” or something, you know. Some weird… If they’re reading something of worth, then I agree with the communication. But the irony is that we’ve got so much communication now that nobody; it feels like nobody’s really communicating.
And it takes people like a Pete Evans or somebody to kind of put their hand up and say, look, you know, what’s going on over here? I mean, a lot of people are calling him “evangelical” or whatever, but maybe that’s what’s needed at the moment to sort of get through, penetrate through to the mainstream. You know?
The media are only going to report and laugh about it. It’s become a bit like the court jesters back in the medieval times, the media, I think. So I think, you know, that’s the thing.
Guy Lawrence: The great thing with Pete is that he’s making people think about what they’re eating.
Wes Carr: That’s right. And I think that’s all he wants. I mean, he’s not the devil and all this other stuff; all this rubbish that’s coming out. It’s just ridiculous. If people could think about just; if people could think why; what’s the agenda with the newspaper? Why are they writing this stuff? Why are they bullying these people? They’re just basically trying to spread some love into the world. You know? That’s basically what it all is. That’s what I believe.
Stuart Cooke: It’s not as if he’s pushing a potato juice diet. You know?
Wes Carr: Yeah.
Stuart Cooke: It makes perfect sense. He’s really pushing what our grandparents used to eat before everything got screwy.
Wes Carr: Absolutely. That’s all it is, you know? That’s all it is. It’s just what our grandparents used to eat. And, you know, it’s deemed like they’re running around saying it’s gonna kill a baby, which is just absolutely ridiculous. You know? My boy grew up on the food and he’s the smartest kid I’ve ever known. I may be biased, but he really is. He’s two and a half and he’s talking whole sentences because his brain’s had the good fats, and it’s just bloody common sense, to be honest.
And, for me, getting back to my journey with it all, it’s like, you know, for me, a big thing is meditation. I mean, it’s more about, for me, it’s more about the soul and looking after your body, but also what comes; what’s around your body, you know?
And that’s who we are really, I think.
Stuart Cooke: I’ve heard the term “spiritual transformation” in some of media articles that I was reading prior to the interview. Is that something that you could explain a little for us?
Wes Carr: That’s funny because I never read anything about that.
Guy Lawrence: The media are at it again!
Stuart Cooke: They are. They are.
Wes Carr: Oh, well. As long as I’m not; you know XXa killer?? 0:25:39.000XX or something, I’m good.
Yeah, look, you know. For me, that’s another thing that came around about five years ago was transcendental meditation. I just; I had always really thought about meditation as being a bit, sort of “girly.” A little bit like, “Oh, what do you want to do that for? Sitting around and just kind of, yeah right.”
And I suppose I’ve been meditating anyway while playing music. That’s a meditation, absolutely. When you’re on stage it feels like you’ve disappeared for an hour and a half and then come back and when you get off stage you’re back there again and it takes you awhile to come down from being on stage.
But, yeah, that is a mediation as well. But for me, transcendental meditation, when I first did it, I went and saw a really amazing person called Carol Maher in Sydney and she taught; she gave me a sound, a mantra, and I just; she just sort of said, now just sit there. And she kind of integrated it into my psyche or system or whatever. You know?
And I just started kind of saying this word over and over again, and, man, it was like; I don’t know. I think David Lynch has the best analogy, which is he just sort of says it’s like standing in a lift and having the lift ropes being cut and you sort of free-fall down the shaft of the lift.
And it’s a bit like that. You just sort of, you kind of close up…
Stuart Cooke: How often do you meditate?
Wes Carr: It’s meant to be twice a day. So…
Guy Lawrence: For how long?
Wes Carr: Well, I do a thing called the Flying Sutras as well, which takes another 10 minutes on my 20 minutes. So, it’s an half an hour a day, morning and night. So, I get up early to do it. I have to get up early, really, to do it. Otherwise, I just can’t do it.
And then the night time’s a little bit harder to fit in with babies and everything else. But I still try to get into it, even if it’s just before I sleep. But it does help me a lot to balance my life, I think.
And some days, it’s funny because you start off with a mantra and you think, “I’m just going to really concentrate on a mantra.” And then boom, you’re off. And you’ve just got about 600 things that you discover that’s in your head that needs to be kind of almost like washed away.
Guy Lawrence: Like hitting the Reset button, is it, would you say?
Wes Carr: Yeah. It’s like; they say it’s like a bath-clean mind or a shower-clean mind. It’s funny, you know. As soon as you go into a meditation state, you realize how much is built up in your mind that you don’t know is there until you look within.
And once you look in, you see it all lined up all in a row and it feels like you need to deal with that stuff before you start with your everyday stuff.
And that’s what a lot of people don’t realize that there’s a lot of stuff going in your mind on a subconscious level or whatever it is under the surface that hasn’t been dealt with yet.
So, that’s why a lot of people feel stressed without knowing that they feel stressed. Or, I’m sorry, without knowing what it is that they’re stressed out about.
Guy Lawrence: Did you have coaching for a long time, Wes, or was this something you just pick up? Because I often hear people talk about meditation. But I don’t see many people that are actually habitually doing it on a regular basis.
Wes Carr: Yeah. I noticed that my life becomes a lot more powerful when I do it a lot more than if I skip a few or whatever and all of that.
I seem to go off on tangents or I start a song and don’t finish it. And I’m over here and I’m over there and I’m doing this and I’ve got 300 things going all at once. But if I just stop for that minute. And actually people say, “Oh, where do you get the time to do hours worth of meditation every day, morning and night?” And it’s like, well, I… Sometimes I don’t. But when I do do it I find that I achieve more. It’s like “do less, achieve more.” It’s that Tao Te Ching thing.
But a lot of people don’t trust that. They think that if you run around frantically and try to achieve more, you get more. And that’s not the way it is. It’s like, you know, you’ve got to give a little to get a little. You know? That’s the kind of thing; I think that’s what meditation’s all about. It makes you realize that if your mind’s right, you can sort of achieve anything, really. But you’ve got to take the time to practice it.
And it kind of makes your life feel better and then everyone else around you. You know? Because then you’re a little bit more relaxed so then it’s sort of a bit more…
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. Fascinating.
Wes Carr: I think we’re taught to sort of get up and go, like, from the word “go,” you know, from school. I remember: “Work hard. Everything’s hard. You have to work at it. Work, work, work. Hard, hard, hard.” This, that, and the other. Fourteen hours a day. Come home, collapse, get up, do it again, eat shit food.
All of this stuff is just like, from birth. So, you know, if you kind of can wake a up a little around 30 or so is a good age to do it. You kind of come in, reprogram it all and start going, “Hey, well that didn’t really work for me.” Because it doesn’t really work. This all hard work. This whole mentality of pushing shit up a hill all the time. You’ve got to just sort of, yeah, think about it a bit more, you know?
Guy Lawrence: Oh, definitely. It’s funny enough. Myself and Stu did a talk at the Mark Sisson event two weeks ago, the Primal. And one of the things then, as well, I think was a major factor that we ended up talking about was about finding your purpose and passion in life and actually… because then it doesn’t feel like hard work. If you can start to find more purpose with what you’re doing every day, I think it’s a huge thing for your own sanity and health overall. Because it’s gonna wear you down. It has to.
Wes Carr: And it gives you the ease, so therefore the hard work, yeah, like you said, it doesn’t feel like hard work. It probably is hard work to work at it but it doesn’t feel like that, you know? And it gives you the ease to then go and achieve something of a standard that you’re happy with and not just kind of stuck behind a…
Guy Lawrence: Massively.
So, with everything you’ve sort of learned on your own journey so far, Wes, what would your advice to be to anyone that could be listening to this that is suffering from anxiety and depression? Like, what have been the key points for you that you could pass on to those people?
Wes Carr: I think; I read somewhere that Maharishi, actually, the guy who made transcendental meditation famous, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was famous through; George Harrison went and got him; basically made him a world-famous guy overnight.
He said: When you experience fear and experience anxiety or anything like that, it’s actually the release of it. So, you’re releasing something within, that’s embedded within you, and if you just let it be released, you let it go, if you can let it go, it will go, it will subside, “all things must pass.” Which is a George Harrison quote.
Everything; it’s not going to be like this for the rest of your life. It feels like that way, and God, don’t I know that, where I couldn’t; I was so debilitated in my mind that that was it for me. I was fed up. The last experience or episode I had was really the one that was really the most violent one. It was something that I just could not escape.
And even if you looked at me you probably wouldn’t have known anything was going on. I had to fly to Groote Eylandt, of all places, on a tiny little plane from Sydney at the time and I was in desperate, desperate need of help somewhere. And I thought, “This is it. This is never gonna go away. And my worst terrors and fears are just going to be realized.”
And I now know that, you know, for me, I’m not anti-medication. I’m pro information. I’m not anti anything. If you need that, for the interim, do it, because it then will get your synapses working better. The Eastern and Western philosophies should mesh together. We should all have; if we have the Western philosophies of medication and all of that sort of stuff, we’ve got to have the Eastern where it’s the natural, and, I think, still, to this day, very progressive way of looking at things.
But if we have those both working together, which I’ve done, it helps you; it gives you so much more power. The Eastern philosophies give you so much more power and confidence to then go and become a natural healer or to heal naturally. It can really change your brain. It can reprogram your brain just by one happy thought in the morning.
It does work. You can get out of your funk. You can get out of your deep, darkest place. It’s a very, very easy thing to do but it doesn’t sound very easy when you’re in there. But just trust me. You can do it, just by one little thought: changing your routine, making a different; going to work a different way or go for a swim in the mornings or go to the ocean or go for a walk on the beach or something like that that changes; gets you out of your routine. Gets you out of your funk.
But, you know, in saying that, there are people out there who are chemically; there’s chemical and things out of balance or whatever, which I’ve had as well, and you probably do need some sort of help there, professional help that needs to be guided.
But be aware of the negativity, too, that comes with it. Because it’s not negative. You’re not crazy. I don’t believe anyone’s crazy. I think it’s just an issue with either their health or their backgrounds or something that you can reprogram very easily. We are all very intelligent machines and spiritual beings.
Stuart Cooke: We’re all capable of being happy and healthy. And I was interested in your comment before about the connection of the gut health to brain health. And so I was just wondering what strategies would you implement then from a nutritional perspective to nourish your gut?
Wes Carr: Well, I; this is my just repeating my wife, Pete, Nora, all the guys who are on the Paleo Way tour at the moment. Helen Padarin. It’s that, and I do struggle with this too, because my ego and my rock ’n’ roll background goes, “Bloody hell! This is all bullshit!”
But then my common sense kicks in and goes, “No, it’s not.” You know?
And it is. Fermented foods. A little bit every day, with every meal. Bone broth, which is amazing for you, for anything. Anything. Bone broths are just, like, the best. Fermented foods. You know: good fats. I don’t eat any legumes. Granted, I’m just basically rattling off the paleo diet. But really that’s all, for me, that’s what works the most. And small amount of meat and high; a lot of greens, basically, that’s all I eat, really. I go for the greens. Kale. I love kale. And just super… And green smoothies. Anything green and changing meat up every day. I’m just gonna have lamb, fish, beef, you know. Diversity. And just make it interesting.
And it’s pretty easy, really. And it’s pretty damn basic, too, I think.
Stuart Cooke: How empowering then is this, really, considering now that you can apply everything that you’ve learned to your son? Because I’ve got three daughters and they’re young and I think about what I ate when I was young. And we didn’t know. We lived in a society; we just didn’t know. It was microwaved TV dinners, fast food, sodas, McDonald’s. We were kids of the ’80s, you know.
Guy Lawrence: Exactly right.
Stuart Cooke: We can think about food as information. Food is ultimately nourishing. And we can help these guys grow in ways that we didn’t have access to years ago. So, any particulars for your child’s diet that you pull in every day as a staple?
Wes Carr: Yeah. For me, with the little man, Charlie has been; I mean, she’s got a book coming out soon. The Bubba Yum Yum book that’s the most controversial bloody book this side… in Australia, which basically just has nutrition. It’s unbelievable.
So, yeah, for me, I just think that… He just eats basically what I eat, but on a smaller scale, really. And he has a tiny bit of fermented foods, he has bone broths, he has; just meat once or twice a day. His gut is absolutely; we’re always trying to fit his gut because he just has sensory processing disorders and he was born on spectrum and he stimming and everything when he was born, which means they were showing a lot of signs of being autistic.
So, we went down this path very happily and very readily when we were advised to. I’d already known about it from my introduction from Dino anyway, so it wasn’t really hard for us to do it. But it really worked for him. He couldn’t take mum’s breast milk. So that was very traumatic for Charlie. And then we went through a whole bunch of different problems with him, formulas, and we just realized that all these formulas had, like, toxic crap in them. You know? It’s just junk. And it just makes him full. It doesn’t give him any actual nutrition at all, value at all, I don’t think. Corn syrup and all this other stuff.
So, you know, for us that’s when we found the Weston A. Price and we started making our own formula. And it really worked for him. And that’s when it started; and he loved it. And I just seems good for him. It seemed better for him than, say, your formula you get off your shelf that’s been in a tin for the last how every many years with whatever crawling all over it.
So, I mean, “breast is always best,” they say, but this was the second option that we thought would be great for him. They’re saying it’s too much vitamin A and all that, but that’s only synthetic vitamin A. It’s not natural vitamin A in all this stuff. So, there’s a lot of loopholes that the media have run with that have given it a very dark start and made it have a stigma around it because it’s new and; “new” in inverted commas, which it was only being used in the 1930s and ’40s by our grandparents as a staple diet for kids.
So, it’s funny, and it’s been published over 500,000 times, this recipe. It’s not actually a “new” recipe.
Stuart Cooke: It’s that new!
Wes Carr: It’s that new, man! It’s hilarious how; I don’t know what’s going on in Australia at the moment, but there’s a bit of a shakeup there. Don’t get me started with the indigenous communities. But, you know, I think in Australia we really have to start bloody getting up, world, and waking up a little bit and just realizing that the world is changing and it’s happening for the better.
And there is a beautiful, very non-aggressive revolution going on in the food industry and that’s our future and that’s our kids’ future.
Guy Lawrence: And ultimately what we want to do is be the best version of ourselves that we can be, and it we can do that through food, then why wouldn’t we?
Wes Carr: Absolutely. I mean, we are what we eat, isn’t it? Or we are what we absorb.
Stuart Cooke: It is completely. Where our kids are concerned, too, I mean, we’re great proponents of, regardless of who you are or what you do, we should generally eat the same things, but the volumes will change. So, you know, if you’re a super athlete then you’re gonna eat a little bit more.
Wes Carr: It’s a fine reality, isn’t it? Absolutely. It’s all about your individual needs, you know? That’s what it’s all about. I mean, what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for you.
But in saying that, the awareness, it’s all about being aware of what you’re eating and aware of who you are. You know? And why we’re here and all that.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. But I generally think, as well, the thirst for knowledge from general people is definitely there, because we’ve been at this for five years, roughly. When we started, people were: “What the hell are you two banging on about?”
And now it’s a completely different story. The podcast gets downloaded by the thousands and the content gets read all the time. There’s an awareness happening and the shift is coming, for sure.
Wes Carr: Right. And the people are just sick of the same old thing that’s making them sick. And I think it’s incredible, actually. I believe in consciousness and the collectively consciousness as a whole. And if you do really watch trends and how they evolve, it’s amazing how, when; you become a new person by just being in a different city, because of the consciousness around you. You tap into them. And if you’re more sensitive to energy or whatever it is, if you’re more sensitive to that, you become more aware more quickly.
But there’s the other people that are on to a different train of thought or a different vibration or whatever who it takes awhile. But then once the media start reporting it, it’s en masse consciousness. And then all of a sudden, that’s when everybody’s making up their own minds. And I know a lot of people that aren’t necessarily what you’d call “leading edge” or “hipster” or whatever the trendy word is.
I know a lot of people who are reading the papers these days and going; and making up their own minds for the first time. Because some of it’s absolutely ridiculous.
So, it’s great that they’re reporting all this stuff, because it’s just making all the awareness become a lot more mainstream and people are making up their own minds and thinking about it anyway, even if it is a fearful campaign or whatever that they run with just eating good food. But it makes people more aware of what they’re eating. I think that’s what I’m trying to say. And that’s great. The mainstream is starting to wake up. And that’s when you get a real revolution with everything is when Mr. Barryman, the guy who’s working on construction in Blacktown, is thinking about the healthy option for lunch. That’s when we’re really kicking goals.
Guy Lawrence: That’ll be the day. For sure, mate.
We’ve got a couple of questions we always ask at the end of our podcasts, and one of them is; the first one’s a very simple one. And it’s breakfast. What would you have eaten today, or let’s say yesterday. What did you eat yesterday, mate? Just to give people a rundown of the food.
Wes Carr: We’ve got some fermented cabbage in the fridge, so I; what did I eat for… I can’t remember. I had some sausage. I had some chili. Pork. Gluten-free sausages from our lovely butcher, GRUB.
Stuart Cooke: We know GRUB. Dominic?
Wes Carr: Dommy, yeah, he’s a good mate of mine. And I had some sausages and some fermented foods and some; I just had some kale. I just heat the kale up a little bit because raw kale sometimes…
Guy Lawrence: Yeah, yeah. I know what you’re talking about.
Wes Carr: And then I didn’t eat very much yesterday because I just; and then I had a green smoothie. I went and got a green smoothie with my little man. I don’t know why; I just had to kill some time. And we got back and I cooked up some chops for the little man. He loves his lamb chops. I think I had a chop and a bit of fermented food; a bit of fermented cabbage. Just a little bit again. And what else did I have? I didn’t really eat much yesterday, to be honest. I was so busy.
And then I had some slow-cooked bolognaise. My wife and I put a bolognaise on in the morning and we had it slow-cooking all day. And then we had that for dinner. With kale again, and some veggies. And I don’t think I had any fermented food that night, but I had some veggies and a bit of bolognaise.
And, yeah, the thing is when you’re on a high-fat diet, you don’t kind of seem to need to eat more when you’re really nailing it. It’s like when you first start going paleo, start changing your diet, you kind of feel like you need to eat a lot more than you should. Because I think, you know, I think sugar does that to you. It’s like you’re just insatiable. But once you sort of start getting used to not having too much sugar and not having too much caffeine and all this sort of stuff, you kind of don’t crave too much food. You just sort of have a big meal at the start of the day and then maybe a little bit in the afternoon and a little bit at night. You know? That’s kind of what we’re doing.
Stuart Cooke: I think so. I think you’re getting more nutrients as well out of the food that you’re eating, so you’re satisfied on a deeper level.
Wes Carr: That’s true. And I think the trick is, if you buy big bulk of mince and a chicken for your week, you put your bolognaise on the slow cooker for a day and you’ve got masses of food there left over for you, so that lasts a whole week.
And then sausages for; we’ve got a little 2-year-old so he loves his sausages and his lamb chops and things. So, put them on for lunch and then you have your bolognaise leftovers for either breakfast or for dinner. If you can stomach meat in the morning or not.
And then if you put a chicken on, you eat your chicken for dinner and then you put the bones, you make a broth out of the bones, if it’s… I’m talking organic, locally source sort of meat, not just… especially with chicken, you know. I think, anyway. Especially if you’re making bone broths out of the bones, you’ve got to have healthy chicken.
And then you’ve got your bone broth for four or five days as well, so you’ve got a broth with every meal. Like, I mean, your broth in the morning’s probably the best way to go, to wake up and to have a broth. I think that’s kind of a really good thing to do.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. I have a lot of bone broth.
Wes Carr: Yeah, it just gives you a clarity of mind. And, I don’t know, it does something to your whole system. It’s like having a coffee, I would say.
Guy Lawrence: It just comes back to educating yourself on why you’re doing these things and then learning the new habits that you can employ in replacing the old. And this stuff becomes quite simple to apply.
Wes Carr: And don’t beat yourself up if it’s taking too long to do that, too. I mean, everybody kind of says, “I don’t believe in this whole; I’d fall off the wagon.” Don’t fall off the wagon. Because as soon as you do that, you fall off the wagon.
So, it’s all about just changing one meal a day. Change one meal a day for a start. That’s what I did.
Guy Lawrence: That’s what we say. Absolutely.
Stuart Cooke: Start with breakfast because there’s normally a sugar anyway.
Wes Carr: Yeah. Yeah. It is absolutely horrible. And you wake up feeling so; you wake up feeling really tired and get more stuff that’s gonna make them feel even worse.
Stuart Cooke: You’ve been though the night, you’ve fasted, your body’s ready for nutrients, yet sometimes your Coco Pops just don’t cut it for you.
Guy Lawrence: So, Wes, we’ve got one more question for you, buddy. And it’s a simple one. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Wes Carr: Best piece of advice… OK. Best piece of advice… They’re all; they’re all some kind of XXrock dogs? Rock gods? 0:53:59.000XX; they’re all liars.
There’s one bit of advice; you know what comes to mind? I think it’s; what comes to mind is not an advice as such. It’s basically a mentality. And that’s; I really like the mentality of the Tao Te Ching. It’s a really great; I’m into Wayne Dyer and I don’t listen to music anymore. I listen to audiobooks.
And Wayne Dyer has got a great one, what is it? Oh, man. Let me have a look. It’s a Tao Te Ching translated, for anybody to understand. And, for me, that really resonated with me because of the fact of it’s a real mentality and you can apply it to your life every day.
And you actually trip yourself up every day if you get right down to it, because the ego runs rampant for everyone. You know, we’ve all got this massive ego that we need to appease on a day-to-day basis. But if you start becoming, to use that word again, aware of your ego, you start sort of stripping away that layer of your life. And you start to realize that all your needs that you think you need, you don’t need. And you don’t need anything other than a good diet, obviously. And a healthy mind.
And when you start sort of stripping away all the, I suppose, the noise in your life and all those things that you think you need, you start becoming a lot more calmer but also a lot more aware of what’s going on around you.
So, it’s Change You Thoughts and Change your Life is the book. But it’s a translation of the Tao Te Ching. It’s the Wayne Dyer translation.
Guy Lawrence: I’ve actually listened to that as well, yeah.
Wes Carr: And I was just really; it was really great. I think every kind of bit of advice for life is in it, really. It kind of does hit the nail on the head a lot, with everything. It kind of has it all in there.
And then he sort of thinks; I suppose say “thank you” a lot more. Be grateful. And be grateful for where you are in life and what you do, I suppose. And everything’s a service. As a musician, I’m just in the business of being of service, you know, as a musician. I think that gets lost a bit in the music industry. I think everybody’s out for themselves. But it is. It’s just a service. You know. You’re just a vessel that music’s coming through you. It’s nothing that, kind of, special.
You know? You’re giving something over. I think you’ve got to look at life like that. Just be grateful for who you are and where you are at the moment.
Guy Lawrence: Fantastic, mate. And if anyone wants to get more of Wes Carr, where’s the best place to go?
Wes Carr: I’ve got a mailing list on my website. And I’m putting a weekly Wes Wednesday every Wednesday. In the afternoon, I send out just a little quote with a little thing every day about my; I don’t know. An experience I’ve had that week or just a quote that I’ve seen or heard of. Or talking to a dude on the street and he said this and I found it interesting. It’s just a little one-page thing to get you through the week. And it’s on my website WesCarr.com.au. And if you sign up to the mailing list, I send one every Wednesday.
And updates about where I’ll be and my shows and everything are all intertwined on the Wes Wednesday; what is it? Weekly Wes…
Guy Lawrence: The Weekly Wes Wednesday.
Wes Carr: I might have to change that.
Guy Lawrence: www…
Stuart Cooke: But you’ll have to change it to Thursday. It’s easier to pronounce.
Guy Lawrence: That’s brilliant, Wes. We’ll put the links under the show notes and everything, anyway, for people to be able to check out when we put the podcast out.
Wes Carr: Perfect. Yeah. Also, I just, on my Facebook I put videos up and everything, too. But, yeah, it’s all happening on my mailing list at the moment.
Guy Lawrence: Wes, we really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on the podcast. That was fantastic.
Wes Carr: Thank you, guys. Thank you so much.
Guy Lawrence: And I have no doubt people are gonna get a lot out of it. Awesome.
Wes Carr: Great. Thanks, guys. Cheers.
Stuart Cooke: Good on you, Wes.
Guy Lawrence: Thanks, buddy.
Wes Carr: Thanks.