Welcome to episode 47 of The Rich Roll Podcast, with Joe Cross.

Hey everybody, welcome to the show. Welcome to The Rich Roll Podcast. I am your host.

I am Rich Roll. Thanks for stopping by.

What do we do here? Well, I, every week, try to bring you the best and the brightest, most forward-thinking, paradigm-busting minds in fitness, health, wellness, wellness warriors across the board.

Everybody from doctors, nutritionists, world-class athletes, and other people like myself who are out there trying to spread the message, trying to get people to take responsibility and control of their lives.

I've been having a lot of fun doing it and today we have a very excellent guest, very highly anticipated well-known guy, Joe Cross.

I stopped by to talk to him. He was in town for a couple of days and I want to thank Dean Menta, my producer, for wrangling Joe and arranging a time to get Joe to sit down with me and have a chat about all the things that he's doing.

If you don't know who Joe Cross is, then you've probably been living under a rock. He is the filmmaker behind the very successful documentary Fat Sick and Nearly Dead.

You may have heard me talk about it on the podcast before. This is a documentary that sort of started as a little bit of an underground thing and really caught some viral momentum and has become quite, quite the hit, quite the sensation.

Particularly online where it does very, very well on Netflix and iTunes and all the other places where you can find and watch documentaries online.

I believe almost 8 million people, according to Joe, have seen this movie since it came out a couple of years ago and it's an interesting movie.

It's essentially Chronicles Joe's personal story which quite ironically happens to coincide with my personal journey where almost exactly the same age and right around the time that I was fiddling around trying to repair my health and searching for a solution he was doing the same thing.

He just happened to Chronicle his own film and I ended up writing a book about it later. But we figured out that we were basically doing kind of the same thing around the same time which is pretty amazing.

We've taken different paths but we're both kind of have similar messages and trying to find the best way to put it out there and help as many people as possible.

But essentially in a nutshell what Joe did, he was extremely overweight. I believe he was like 310 pounds at his height suffering from an autoimmune disease.

He was on a whole number of pharmaceutical drugs including the steroid prednisone and he just had enough.

It was time to change the way that he was living. He didn't like being on all these drugs. He couldn't figure out how to get control of this disease and he was headed towards essentially an early grave extremely overweight.

And what he did was quite extreme. He decided to go on a 60 day juice fast in other words all he did for 60 days straight was drink fruit and vegetable juice followed by 90 days of eating only fruit and vegetables.

And ultimately ended up losing 100 pounds, changed his life. He documented it in the film and the film kind of chronicles the people that he meets along his journey because he essentially drives cross country, encountering people and talking to them about health and there's a particularly notable event that occurs in the film.

If you haven't seen it, I won't spoil it, but he ends up meeting a trucker and affecting this guy's life in a very profound way.

And there's an emotional journey that takes place with this guy fill the trucker.

So if you haven't seen the movie, please check it out. If nothing else, it will broaden your horizons and make you think about juicing fruits and vegetables in a little bit of a different light.

...