GA 089 | How to Improve Your Health with Lean with Paul Akers

You're listening to episode 89 with Paul Akers.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over@gembaacademy.com now then, today's episode is very different than any of our previous 88 episodes since we're going to be sharing an entire three hour audiobook. Now, this audiobook is called Lean Health and was written and is narrated by my good friend, Paul Akers. Now, as you'll hear, Paul has made some radical improvements to his health over the past few years. And throughout the book, Paul shares exactly what he's done and how we can do the same thing. And as it turns out, Paul's book was exactly what I needed for my own personal journey, since heart disease, cancer and other serious issues like strokes run in my family. So I'm happy to say that I've taken Paul's challenge seriously and have decided and committed to change the way I eat, sleep and exercise. So perhaps I'll share more about my personal journey to better health later. But for now, I want to keep the focus on Paul's excellent work. Now, obviously you may not be able to listen to the entire audiobook in one sitting. Most podcast apps out there will remember where you left off, making it easy to jump back in. Now, we're also going to link to a YouTube version and PDF version of this book over on the Show Notes page. So just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 89. Now, the YouTube version is especially nice since Paul has links to the various chapters, making it easy to navigate around. Again, just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 89. If you'd like to check out the YouTube version or the PDF version. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

You're listening to Lean Health. For all the videos in the always improving list of lean resources, go to 2secondlean.com that's the number two secondlean.com and now, lean Health, written and narrated by Paul A H. A word from the author. If I was to Summarize my entire book in one word. It would be Ferrari. The Secret to Excellent Health the answer is to treat your body like you would treat a Ferrari. A Ferrari is the archetype of a sports car, one of the most precise and high performance machines ever made. It is exotic, fast, agile and beautiful. If you take the same care your body as you would a Ferrari, using only the best fuels and regularly taking it to the best mechanics for maintenance, your body will give you back 10 times what you put into it for the duration of your life. So ask yourself, do you treat your body like a Ferrari or a Pinto? Another way of thinking of your body is as a magic carpet transporting you through life. It is the vehicle you use to experience everything. If your vehicle is in excellent condition, your life experiences will be more full and complete. If you choose to take average care of your magic carpet, you should only expect an average life experience. The more you respect it and care for it, the more magic you will experience. Lean Health tells the story of how I went from average health to having exceptional health. I achieved this exceptional health in just one year. These are the four things that define exceptional health for me. One most of my life I was over 210 pounds. Now I find it easy to maintain 165, which is the correct weight for my height of 5 10. Number two, when I go to the doctor for a checkup, he says, you look amazing and your health is excellent. What are you doing? 3. I have a strong muscular body with a chiseled abdomen. Something that was just a dream before. 4. Finally, and most important, it is easy to sustain exceptional health. After a full year of living healthy, I have no temptations to backslide into unhealthy habits. I just have a total love affair with serving and taking care of my greatest customer. My Body. Forward By Jeffrey K. Leiker, author of the Toyota Way When Jim Womack was working on the machine that changed the world, he was struggling to name this remarkable phenomenon that Toyota seemed to be exemplifying. Toyota was thinking long term innovation, designing and building cars at a steady pace, with high quality, with very little inventory or other waste, and claimed their purpose was to contribute to society. It sounded too good to be true. A graduate student at the time, John Krapkich, suggested he call this unusual way of thinking and behaving lean because Toyota was doing more of everything with less of everything, like a lean athlete. Now we come full circle and Paul has provided wondrous imagery of what it's like to live a lean lifestyle. And he is able to provide himself as an example. He has his lean journey at work and now is extending that to his lean personal lifestyle. This is also a lean book, written crisply and clearly in a way that engages us from the first line. I love the Ferrari metaphor. Take care of your body like you would take care of your very expensive, beautiful red Ferrari. It raises the irony that we may value things more than we do our own body. Toyota today represents their way as having two pillars, respect for people and continuous improvement. Paul's book brings to mind respect for ourselves, including the impact we have on the world and continuously improving ourselves. Continuous improvement means exactly what it says. Never stop or pause. A lean lifestyle suggests that we do not take vacations from living healthy and do not proceed in fits and starts. Most diet fads lead to unusual eating patterns to lose life lots of weight and then fight a losing battle to maintain the lower weight. In the Toyota Way. When I talk about leveling the workload, I use the analogy of the tortoise and the hare. A lean lifestyle is more like the tortoise, slow, steady and consistent. This is automatically self sustaining. I had a similar experience to what Paul describes, though at a much lower level. When I reached my mid-50s, a friend suggested I try her personal trainer. I had been creeping up in weight every year and saw a photo of myself in a T shirt and it frightened me to see my belly hanging out over my belt. I went to the gym and began working with a personal trainer, a petite woman who was much more gentle on me than Paul's trainer. I explained my weight loss goal and she made it simple. Only two things matter in weight loss. Calories you take in, minus calories you burn over time. She gave me eating tips. For the last six years I have maintained daily workouts. Personal training for one hour, two to three times a week, walking an 18 hole golf course every chance I get, and eating more healthy than I used to. I get a fair share of compliments on how I look, but I use artificial sweeteners. My workouts are still on the treadmill and I do not measure anything. I take over the counter drugs and I do not have a six pack and have not climbed to Mount Everest Base camp. As you read Paul's description of how he is leading a lean lifestyle, think of it as a source of inspiration, like Toyota is to so many organizations around the world. Toyota thinks of the Toyota way as true north, something they can Never live up to 100% but as providing a direction they aspire to. Paul is giving us a powerful true north direction. Anyone who does half of what Paul is describing will find themselves happier and healthier. At least that's what I'm telling myself. As I was writing this, my wife sent me an email with an appropriate quote that happened to be from one of the leading advocates of holistic medicine. Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. Deepak Chopra Paul is providing a sensible vision of a desirable future for all of us. It has already inspired me to make some changes in my own life. More push ups as part of my daily exercise. More vegetables and fruit. I am right now at the airport and after reading the book, I selected a chef salad instead of a barbecue sandwich. So please, please read this book. Reflect and enjoy. What do you want your life to look like down the road? What one positive step can you take to start on a new path? Paul suggests it gets easier and at some point exercise and healthy eating are a joyous experience. Jeffrey K. Leiker Author, the Toyota Way. Word on the street after my 18th birthday, a restaurant owner at the time, I started gaining weight. I gained four pounds per year to be precise. Fast forward 30 years and the math becomes obvious. Obese was an understatement at a weight of 310 pounds. Then comes his 2 second lean health process outlined by Paul's trials and tribulations. It took a little while to get it, but when I did, the rockets started firing. I have managed to lose £4 pounds a week over the past 10 weeks. Are you kidding me? I would have never in a million years have thought this was possible. When I am done, I will be back at my high school weight and having added 20 active years to my life, what a gift. This is a must do type book. After you break through the barriers that Paul describes, you will never look at your life the same way. Paul may be a Ferrari, but I am the space shuttle Discovery. George churchillis President and CEO, Lean Leadership Institute in his new book, Lean Health, Paul presents a relentlessly logical, elegant approach to improving one's own personal state of health. It's clear his book is loaded with specific examples. A favorite of mine is the Picture Diet. It's attainable. Everything he suggests is possible for all of us. Paul does a great job of challenging the excuse we make when we try to convince ourselves that in some circumstances travel, for example health practices aren't possible. He proves they are. It pays off more than it costs. By making this approach simple and fun. Paul takes the cost out of the recipe by sharing the benefits of his own journey. From being in the best shape of his life down to the exquisite taste of non processed natural foods, fruits and vegetables, we can taste the payoff for making healthy changes in our daily practices simply by reading this book. I have bought into launching my own lean health journey. Once you read it, so will you. Doug Walker, Author of the AHA Building and Managing a Self Motivated Workforce 2007 Wiley Press I love and respect Paul and I know his sincerity. He has not written this book to make money. He has written this book because the lean health process has worked so well for him and he knows it will work the same for you. Over the last number of years, Paul has become a master of lean. His company, FastCap, is probably one of the best lean companies in America. He produces products with a very high quality, at a low cost and with very fast delivery. It is the model of just in time. It follows the principles established by the Toyota Corporation. Every person at FastCap is a leader. Every person there creates an improvement idea every single day. The company is very well organized. Everything has an exact place. The floors are spotless. Even the bathroom is the cleanest I've ever seen in America. Paul has made a showcase of his company and now he has made his physical body a showcase for you to follow. Now keep it simple. In fact, Paul's major message in life is to keep it simple. His advice in this book is not complicated. No, not at all. Just look at it as a cookbook to create a new you. Norman Bodach, Author of the hurrah method 83 years old and spry as ever. Over the last several years I have invested considerable time in my mental, spiritual and physical health. I exercise almost every day and as a vegetarian I thought I ate fairly well. But as I crossed into my 50s, the extra weight still crept on. When Paul shared his physical transformation and the method he used, his concept of your body is the customer. Aligned with the customer centric thinking I've embraced for decades as a lean manufacturing proponent, Paul's pointers are easy to understand, easy to implement, and perhaps most importantly, easy to sustain. I quickly realized I was underestimating portion size and distorting the nutritional and exercise balance. By embracing Paul's lean health concepts and quite honestly, lifestyle, the positive changes have come quickly. I am adding value to my body. My customer Kevin Meyer, Co Founder and Partner, Gemba Academy, LLC if you find keeping a diet hard, this book is for you. With the plethora of dieting books in the world. It's hard to imagine how anyone could carve out a niche, but that is what Paul Akers has done. He did what is missing in every other diet book the how how to get the motivation to keep to one. Anyone eager to keep a diet who is not eager to keep a diet will find the solution to every previous diet failed them. In Paul's magnificent book, Paul not only lays out a clear recipe for healthy eating, but brilliantly explains the method to create the motivation to keep to it. Other than preparing the food for you, Paul lays it all out for us. Thank you. Rabbi Steven Behrs, Author, Executive Director of ASH Seminars. Preface who is your customer? As a business owner and entrepreneur, one of the most important ideas that I've learned is the importance of loving your customer. My company provides services and products to my customer, and without them, I'm out of business. However, in order for my business to be relevant, first the customer has to want what I have to offer. As I understood how important the customers were to my business, I came to appreciate and cherish cherish my customers. Once I learned to love them, they always reciprocated. When I say love, I mean cherish, respect and improve everything for their benefit. Because without them, I'm lost In the lean world. We live and breathe to deliver continuous streams of quality and value to our customers. The customer is not a part of our business. The customer is our business. We are obsessed with continuous improvement and the elimination of waste. We do this so we can increase quality and let continuous value flow to the customer. If we do that well, we maintain a long term, mutually prosperous relationship with our customer. I would characterize this relationship as a deep and relevant respect. As I wrote this book, I asked myself the question, who is the customer in the Lean Health scenario? It was easy for me to identify the customer because all I did was ask, who's getting the short end of the stick? Who's calling the shots? It became so clear to me that I was the business owner that was screwing my customer my body. Wow. When I put this together, I realized that I needed to make sure I reestablished a proper and respectful love for my newly discovered customer. My body is my number one customer. Without my body, I am lost, irrelevant, and out of commission. It is through my body that I experience life in all its fullness. If my time machine is in excellent condition, it goes without saying that my experiences in life will be a reflection of the quality and condition of my time machine. Given that I have this magnificent gift, you would think I would be out there polishing it every second, making sure it was in excellent condition. Unfortunately, that is not the case. In large measure, I took my number one customer for granted. Instead of considering my actions and how they would impact this loyal customer, I barely gave it a second thought. I was not a total loser. I wasn't a drug addict. I wasn't a chain smoker. However, I gave my body a whole lot of unnecessary food that was poor quality and that loaded up and burdened my customer tremendously. My customer was not in the forefront of my mind. It was actually a bit of a stepchild that didn't get much of my attention. As I began to understand the relationship between me and my newly discovered customer, everything changed the moment this concept connected with total clarity deeply inside of me, the quality of my life accelerated at a more rapid rate than I could ever imagine. All of a sudden I considered how everything I put in my mouth would affect my customer. I started asking, is this activity good for my customer? What have I done to support my customer today? Is my customer happy with my actions and how it affected my well being? I stopped being mindless and became mindful of this amazing gift and cherished customer. In the business relationship, if you treat a customer poorly, they are apt to find someone else sooner or later. In the lean, healthy relationship, the customer your body is stuck with you. You can continue to abuse your loyal customer and they will take it as long as they can. Sooner or later. Just giving up. If you choose to make an intelligent decision to nurture and care for your customer, it will reward you with a positive mindset, more energy than you could ever dream possible, a boundless mental attitude, superior physical health, a longer lifespan, and countless admirers that marvel at how someone your age can look so good. Is it worth the effort? The irony is the small amount of effort to achieve exceptional health is significantly less than dealing with the travails of poor or average health. At the end of the day, understanding that my body is the most important customer in my life has been a true awakening. So welcome to Lean Health. As you read this book, read it through the filter that every decision you make about the food you eat and the degree to which you move affects the most important customer in your life. Your body. Chapter One A Perfect Night in Germany it's eight o' clock on a pleasant August evening. I'm sitting in an outdoor cafe in Baden Baden, Germany, one of the most beautiful places in the world. Across from me sit two of the most amazing people I've ever met, Alex and Paloma from Mercedes Benz in Germany. We have just spent the last three days together touring the Stuttgart Mercedes plant and test driving a spectacular S Class Mercedes around Germany and France. We are bringing our journey to an end in this beautiful little city of Baden Baden where we sit chatting over a fantastic meal, recalling the high points of our recent adventure. As I savor my fresh tomato, tomatoes and mozzarella parmesan sprinkled broccoli, Paloma looks over at me and says, paul, when are you going to write your next book? I would really love to but I'm so busy, I replied. I asked why Paloma? Why should I write a book? She replied, I was waiting for my food and I realized you helped us change our way of thinking so fast in just three days of being with you. I thought you need to pass on your thinking to everyone so you should write a book. Come on Paul. Her beautiful Brazilian accent coaxing me along. You need to do it. You need to start now and write one chapter a night. I looked at her in disbelief. I'm in the middle of a two month trip around the world teaching and training people in eight countries on how to implement Lean. I'm capturing everything I do on video because four days earlier Mel Demski, a well known movie producer, asked me to document the entire trip for a new television program called Lean around the World. And if that weren't enough to fill my time, I also have to manage my company, FastCap, a lean manufacturing business back home in Washington State. I'm completely swamped. I pushed back. You're telling me you want me to also write a book? Are you crazy? You find a way, she replied, much more confident than I. It's hard to believe that a single person could be so influential in another person's life. I really do not want to add anything else to my plate. However, less than a minute later, a voice inside me says, hey Paul, practice what you preach. Go out and change the world. So I give in. After all, it wouldn't hurt to at least type out an outline. I pulled out my phone and over the next four to five minutes typed out the titles of 12 chapters explaining the health journey I was on. I felt empowered by typing out those chapter headings in such a short period of time. What do you think it should be called? I asked her. Healthy Lean or Lean Health? I think Lean Health sounds good, she says. Lean Health tells the story of how I went from having average health to having exceptional health in one year. I did it by applying my relentless application of making small incremental 2 second improvements. These small improvements to how I manage my health over the course of one year allowed me to develop the perfect system. For me. This is what I achieved. Most of my life, I was over 210 pounds. Now I find it easy to maintain 165, which is the correct weight for my height of 5 10. Number two, when I go to the doctor for a checkup, he says, you look amazing. Everything looks great. 3. Now I have a strong muscular body with a chiseled abdomen, something that before was just a dream and and four. Finally, and most important, it is easy to sustain exceptional health. After a full year of living healthily, I have no temptation to backslide into any unhealthy habits. I just have a total love affair with serving and caring for my greatest customer, my body. Most people want this for themselves, but do not know how to get it. This book will lay out exactly what I did and give you the processes I followed. You will see how I applied and think about lean ideas in every element of my life. Through my own personal stories and the stories of others, you will learn to implement the simple lean health program so you too can have exceptional health. This book is also the story of how truly great friends can transform your life if you're willing to listen, to collaborate and improve relentlessly. I stopped making the endless excuses of why I couldn't have excellence in every facet of my life. If we can be receptive to other people's ideas and not limit ourselves with negative self talk, we can accomplish much more than we ever thought possible. Excellent health is clearly within reach. Hey everyone, Paul here and I'm phoning in this audio message. Can you believe that I'm in Kazakhstan? But I've needed to record the one thing for every chapter. Now let me explain to you what the one thing is. I always like to distill everything down to a simple sentence or a simple concept. So when I read a book, I distill the entire book down to like one thing. When I read a chapter in a book, I love to distill just the chapter down to one thing thing. But authors seldom do that. So at the end of my books I always put a thing called the one thing to distill down the very concept of what I'm trying to convey to one thing. So you're going to hear that throughout here and I think you're really going to appreciate that because it gets it down to a very pithy concept. So in chapter one, the one thing you're capable of way more than you ever dreamed. Chapter 2 the answer there is no question that I'm an unorthodox person. So instead of making you wait till the end of the book for the keys on how to achieve excellent health, I'm going to give it to you in this chapter. I'm going to do this because I read a book recently that I really enjoyed called Overworked and Overwhelmed by Scott Eblen. In the end of his book, Eblen summarizes the entire thing by saying that it all boils down to one word, breathe. Learn to breathe, he says, and your life will improve. The one word summary makes it easy to remember Ebelin's main point and how to implement his advice in the spirit of continuous improvement. Wanting to be as clear as possible, I'm going to be straightforward and put my answer at the beginning of the book. That way, if you like what you read, you can continue to read and learn how I came to my conclusions. If you don't like it, you can put put the book aside and email me and tell me you want a refund and I'd be happy to send you one. If I were going to summarize my entire book in one word, it would be Ferrari. Ferrari is the word because the secret to excellent health. The answer is to treat your body like you would treat a Ferrari. A Ferrari is the archetype of a sports car, one of the most beautiful, precision and highest performing machines ever made. It is exotic, fast, agile and beautiful. If you take the same care of your body that you would a Ferrari, using only the best fuel and regularly taking it to the best mechanics for maintenance, your body will return to you 10 times what you put into it for the duration of your life. Follow this principle and you will make great strides in your own health. You could stop there, but if you want to learn more, keep reading. What follows is exactly what I do to maintain what I call lean health. It is a simple, straightforward method with no smoke and mirrors. I'm not a nutritionist, personal trainer or health specialist. I'm just an average guy who figured out how to make his body perform at a very high level. And this is what I have done to get there. Food and drink 80% of my diet is fruits and vegetables. 20% is fish, chicken, cheese, nuts and other types of protein. When eating meat, I always look for fish first because I like it the most and I feel the best when eating it. Next, I look for chicken, which is still healthy but perhaps not raised as naturally. Third, I eat pork and fourth beef. I'M not against beef, I just don't feel as good when I eat it. I eat nothing white, no flour, potatoes, bread or sugar. I avoid any processed foods, including breads, even if they are whole wheat. I want to eat things that come directly from the earth as much as possible, with a few exceptions, cheese, something I eat in moderation. I drink no sodas and consume no artificial sweeteners. I relentlessly avoid anything processed. All my cravings for sweets are satisfied with a delicious piece of fruit. My favorite piece of fruit is an apple, but I eat all kinds of exotic fruits from around the world and do not worry about the sugar content in them because the nutritional value of the entire fruit far outweighs any negatives from the sugar. Again, these are only my opinions. I'm not a nutritionist, just a regular guy who achieved amazing health. I log everything that goes into my mouth with my Fitness Pal app. That way I know exactly what and how much I am eating. This is critical to my success. I aim for exactly 2,400 calories each day, which is what my body needs to function at a high level. When I started logging my food, I learned I was eating way too much. To make matters worse, I was also logging lower quantities than I was actually eating. No longer Two tips to reduce your caloric intake. First, try using a smaller plate. If you have to fit your food on a small plate or bowl, you are likely to eat less than you would if you use a large American sized plate. Secondly, try using chopsticks. I have found that using chopsticks slows down my eating so I get filled up more quickly. These ideas are the result of making small 2 second improvements to the process to achieve excellent health. I'm going to go off script here real quick because another trick and another improvement is at least once or twice when I'm eating, I always pause, put down my fork, maybe answer a few emails and let let my stomach catch up with my brain. This is also highly effective and probably the most effective of any trick I've ever learned to not overeat. Regarding alcohol, I try to make every decision regarding what I put in my body based first on the health benefits and then on the taste. Fortunately, I've learned that the tastiest things are often the healthiest things. For example, the complexity of a beautiful red wine is matched with the potential health benefits, so I regularly enjoy a glass with dinner. I like beer, but I generally stay away from it because the health effects do not match the satisfaction of the taste. This does not mean you can't drink beer. It just means I personally don't drink it much. For all other alcohols, I'll let you determine which to drink and which not to whatever you choose. Remember to drink in moderation. I drink black tea, green tea and black coffee. I also love soda water. Exercise 100 push ups a day. 100 sit ups, 100 trunk twists. A minimum of 10,000 steps a day Psychology the key is to love good foods and to hate bad foods. I have fallen in love with fresh fruits and vegetables. I have a visceral disdain for anything processed in my mind. Processed food is poison. It might seem extreme, but it works perfectly and I have people all over the world following what I'm doing with the same success. I view my body as an amazing gift that I need to take care of with great care. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a Ferrari. I see a beautiful body that is giving me incredible satisfaction because I take care of it. When I'm honest with myself, I do not self deceive. When I am honest with myself about the need to monitor the quality and the quantity of what I eat, amazing things will happen. Facing this reality does not discourage me, it only sharpens my resolve and delivers better results. Supplements I take nothing. No vitamins, no aspirin, no steroids, no painkillers, no sleep aids. I used to take most of these things but I have progressively weaned myself off of them and the result is my health is exceptional. Now I'm gonna go off script here. Real that doesn't mean I would never take an Advil, but what I'm saying is I used to regularly take Advil, Melatonin and all these other things to go to sleep at night just so I could survive. But now no more. There is no regularity or pattern to me taking anything. Would I take a painkiller if I had a surgery? Absolutely. But I don't take anything on any regular basis. I completely weaned myself off. This was not easy, but I believe our bodies are pharmaceutical factories and can produce everything we need if we just take care of them properly. I used to add protein powder to my smoothie but now I just add nuts instead. You might be wondering right now what I did differently to have success where so many other people have tried and failed. My best explanation is this. I took some of the Lean principles we use at my company where we have great results and rarely produce defects, and started implementing them with my health. The fundamental idea behind Lean is continuous improvement through the elimination of waste in order to Expose Waste Lean practitioners look for it and use the following categories. I have translated the classic wastes of lean into the manufacturing world and how I see them in the health domain. Number one Overproduction. We produce and consume too much food. Our bodies only need a fraction of the food we produce around the world and much of the food we produce is poor quality. So we overproduce poor quality food that has little nutritional value and has a deleterious effect on our health. Transportation Number two We waste ridiculous amounts of energy transporting food all over the world when we end up putting a percentage of that food in the landfill because we can't even eat what we transported. The irony is that we've already eaten 50% more than we need to in the first place. Transportation waste in the food system is staggering. 3. Inventory Perhaps this is the worst waste of all. While we keep too much food inventory in our refrigerators, cupboards and storage systems, this is not the worst form of inventory waste. Form of inventory waste is the rolls of fat hanging off most of us. All this fat creates mountains of defects in our health. Four Defects. These include poor health, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, a shorter lifespan, inactivity, poor self esteem, indigestion, gas, too much bad food makes you fart, and many others. Another defect is the poor example we set for our families and others. Not the farting, but by the overall lackluster condition our General health is in.5. Over processing. Our medical system is forced to deal with mountains of defects from obesity to obesity related illnesses, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and we are applying ridiculous amounts of resources to solve problems that would be almost completely eradicated if we quit over producing excess motion. Number six we are lifting the fork to our mouths 75% more than we need to. 7. Waiting the customer Our body, our most valued customer is waiting and waiting and hoping that someday we might listen to it and feed it high quality food in the right quantity so it can perform the way it was intended to and ate. 8. Wasted human potential the potential of our human body is remarkable, yet it is largely smothered and deeply muted because we have neglected to respect our body. The amazing gift each one of us has is dying to service at a high level, but it cannot because of what we are sending down our throats every day. In the lean process, waste is defined as anything the customer does not need or is not willing to pay for. So we need to define who the customer is. In this case, it's your body and you are responsible for respecting it, nurturing it, and feeding it properly. The body needs the proper amount of healthy, nutritious food. But most people overfeed it and give it poor quality food day in and day out. This produces fat which actually decreases value and makes everything more difficult for our customers. What we need to do is give our customer our amazing body exactly what it needs and stop pushing so much poor quality products through its system. When we eat or drink poorly, we create a lot of inconsistency or variation in how we feel. The variation in our results is both discouraging and unhelpful. I'm going to go off script here. Everyone knows after they eat a bad meal what they feel like, oh, I shouldn't have eaten that. Oh, I don't feel so good.

Good.

This is variation in the health scenario and nobody likes that. I never enjoy that. But I gotta tell you, I don't even know what that feels like anymore. I never have that feeling because I'm so focused on putting the right foods in me. I've eliminated the variation because I've looked at this whole health process through my lean eyes. I've said if there's variation, there's gonna be waste and there's going to be non value added activity. So I completely eliminated that by focusing on great food to reduce variation. One of the Lean techniques we use is the standardization of processes. With Lean, you create very clearly defined processes by which you perform tasks. You perform an operation the same way every time until you create a better way of doing it or you find a way to improve, if you will. By doing this, you build repeatability and quality into the process. One clearly defined process I use with my health is to start every day by consuming lots of vegetables. Every day, before the sun ever comes up, I make a large green smoothie for myself. Starting with voluminous amounts of vegetables, I don't wait to get them in the afternoon with my salad or in the evening with my dinner plate. I'm taking them in from the second I get up. When I travel, it's not always practical to make a smoothie. So when I go looking for breakfast at the hotel or or restaurant, my main goal is to find whatever vegetables and fruit I can. I always start with those. In order to understand the effects of what we are consuming, we need to have good data. There is a famous quote about data that I love. In God we Trust Everyone else bring data. If you try to run your system without knowing what and how you are doing, it will fail. For my health, I log everything I eat with my fitness pal app and Monitor the number of steps I take with my Fitbit or my Apple Watch. Now I know for sure when I'm hitting my daily goal of 2,400 calories and 10,000 steps. When you record what you consume and how much you move, you know where you need to make improvements. You have basically a standard by which you can evaluate everything from. You will begin to understand now why variations are occurring and what adjustments you need to make to remove them. As you see your success, you will also be encouraged and want to be more disciplined in how you eat and exercise. The results speak for themselves. Someone once said to me, paul, you're a machine. I never met anyone with your level of discipline. I Paul, I thought to myself, yeah, I'm also red, have a 600 horsepower engine and every detail has been handcrafted to perfection. I'm a Ferrari in every aspect and I enjoy the fact that everybody wants what I have. I am able to maintain a high level of discipline and consistency because the results are ten times the effort that I'm putting into it. People ask me if I'm ever tempted to eat some not so good food every once in a while. The truth is, no, never. To me, the food I eat is the equivalent of driving a $200,000 Mercedes. Well, a piece of chocolate cake is a smoking Ford Pinto. There is no temptation. Lean Health works so well because it resolves the core problem. It educates and trains your brain about quality. It fundamentally changes your attitude and approach towards food. You no longer have to wrestle with your brain to make good decisions because it's now 100% aligned with your heart and your emotions. When I am honest with myself, I do not self deceive. When I am honest with myself about the need to monitor the quality and quantity of what I eat, amazing things happen. Facing this reality does not discourage me. It only sharpens my resolve and delivers better results. At 55 years old, I know I can outperform 95% of all 18 year olds because. Because I'm committed to the quality food and exercise program that guarantees my health will be remarkable. But Lean Health goes beyond just what I can achieve today. It is focused on long term thinking. For me, that means I'm going to be vital and active for the rest of my life. In fact, I visualize myself skiing down the slopes of Aspen at 100 years old. I view my body as an amazing gift that I need to take with great care. When I look at myself in the mirror now, I see a Ferrari. I see a beautiful body that is giving me incredible satisfaction because I take care of it. Chapter 2 the one thing I'm a Ferrari, not a Pinto. Chapter 3 Everest Base Camp As I begin to write this book, I have to confess that something I'm going to talk about a subject that is probably the most important thing in my life. Improving my personal health and also bettering the lives of others. Nothing I've done has had a larger impact on my psychology, my personality, my well being and my overall disposition in life than this topic. In 2014 I was climbing up to Everest Base Camp on the slopes of the world's tallest mountain. One of the largest storms in the last 100 years had closed in on the Himalayas. I was fortunate enough to make it to Base Camp at the last minute just before the blizzard became so unbearable that nobody could return. It was about 6 o' clock when I stumbled into the tea house where I would spend the night. Freezing cold, I sat around the fire with about 30 other people all trying to stay warm and thankfully we had shelter. The storm was so intense it was blowing snow through the closed windows and the wind was blowing down the stovepipe and filling the main room with smoke from the yak dung burning stoves. The next day we began to understand what had transpired. The sun was out and it was a beautiful morning, but the Himalayas were blanketed with a couple feet of new snow. Hikers who normally came to this area to enjoy the beautiful terrain were now dealing with avalanches on passes all around us. By the end of the day we would learn that nearly 50 people had died in the previous day's storms. We were fortunate just to be alive. I was exhausted and knew one thing for sure. I just spent the last eight days getting up to Base Camp and there was no way I was going to try to hike back down the mountain. It took the rest of the day to secure a helicopter to fly up the mountain and retrieve our three person group that consisted of my friend Dana, myself and our guide. I will never forget the feeling of seeing that helicopter flying up the center of that valley, knowing it was coming to rescue us. After riding the helicopter to the foot of the mountain, I turned on my phone to check my messages. I received an email from Audible, the audiobook company and opened it right away. Throughout my life, I made it my discipline to read one book a week. I was constantly learning, growing and extracting information from brilliant people around the world who shared what they had learned in their books. Audible suggested I read a book called Eat, Move, Sleep by Tom Roth. I wasn't really interested in reading another health book. I'd read many other health books in my life, trying hard to implement the things I learned in them, but it was rare that any of them brought me significant results. I much preferred history books, historical novels, biographies, books about current technology. Still, with a long trip ahead of me, I figured there was nothing to lose by giving it a try. My friend Dana and I had decided at the last minute to go to Thailand for a couple weeks to recover and get warm because we were so tired of being cold. After summoning Mount Kilimanjaro and Everest Base Camp back to back, I clicked download and shortly thereafter boarded a plane flying from Kathmandu to Phuket. I spent the trip listening to the book, and when I got to Thailand, I was riveted by what I had learned during the flight, ready to get started on improving my health and transforming my life. In this book, Roth writes that there are three things you need to do to have superior health. You need to eat quality food, you need to move at least 10,000 steps a day, and you need to sleep eight hours a night. I decided to start with his recommendation about movement. Up to this point in my life, I had never measured how much I exercise. I would go out and run on the treadmill for 20 or 30 minutes, but I never knew quantitatively what that meant in terms of movement. Now, for the first time, I would learn. I downloaded an app to my phone that told me how much I was moving every day. I made it a point to go out to the beach and walk and walk and walk until I was hitting consistently 10,000 steps a day. 10,000 steps seems like a lot, but I was doing. I always took the steps and avoided all elevators. Next, I changed my eating habits. I cut out the white flour, the sugar, the artificial sweeteners from my diet, and started focusing on eating fruits and vegetables. I only put into my body what was natural and avoided all processed foods. For breakfast, I no longer would instinctively pick up a yogurt and pull off the lid and eat it. Instead, I began to eat things like papayas, watermelons, omelets and some cheese, onions top, but nothing packaged. Finally, I focused on sleep. In the past, if I was lucky, I would sleep two or three hours a night. After reading the book, I realized I needed to focus on getting to bed at 9 o' clock or having slept for eight hours. While I didn't always make it to eight hours, I did go from getting two or three hours of sleep per night to five or six. This was a significant change for Me because now, for the first time, my body was getting the right rest it needed. The results of these small improvements were remarkable and they went way beyond just losing weight. They led me to create a system to achieve remarkable health that is simple and easy to follow. For the last 15 years, using lean principles to guide continuous improvement in manufacturing processes has been my passion. We should not confine lean to the workplace. It can also greatly improve. Improve your home and personal life, including your health. Managing your health is a process no different than any other process. If you want to improve it, you must come up with a plan, run an experiment, evaluate the results, make the adjustments, and then rerun the experiment. Doing this continuously eliminating the non value added activity, delivering more value added with each improvement cycle is the essence of continuous improvement or lean thinking. For example, I did not understand the detrimental effects that processed foods were having on my health. It did not matter how much I was exercising because as long as I was consuming so much processed food, I was not getting the results I wanted. My first process improvement was eliminating processed foods from my diet. Believing that would improve my health, I ran the experiment. Experiment and it worked. My weight came down and my overall health improved significantly. As soon as I was honest with myself about the types of foods I was eating, things began to improve. The simple system I created based on these results is what we're talking about in this book. Before moving into the next chapter. I think it's appropriate that people understand philosophically how I think about life, why I go on all these adventures, why I do the things I do. I spent most of my life working extremely hard, always putting work first and play second. But when I got to about 45 years old, I realized I'd been working so hard that I was in danger of allowing life to pass me by. I sat down, I wrote out a bucket list and set out about doing the things on it. I created my own radio show. I flew across the North Atlantic three times in a single engine aircraft. I climbed mountains on several continents. For the last 10 years of my life, these adventures have been constant and consistent. I undertake them because life is short. We never know what tomorrow is going to bring. So I treat every day as if it's an adventure, as if I were a small child who was incredibly curious about what he can learn everywhere he goes in life. Today, as I write this, this book, I have been in almost 60 countries, every state in the United States, and almost every national park. I've done so many amazing things that most people wonder how in the world I've done so many recently. I was with Bob Taylor and he reached over and pinched my leg and described me as an experienced mosquito looking for somewhere to land to extract and experience to make my life more full and rich. There is no better way to illustrate how I succeeded by being deliberate about getting things done. I didn't say I'll do that next year. Starting when I was 45, I began to take lengthy trips multiple times a year. I started with one week trips, then progressed to two weeks, then three weeks and before long the average trip for me was six weeks. The trip I'm on right now as I'm writing this book is two months long. The truth of the matter is you can do anything you want to in life if you are deliberate about it. I cannot overemphasize the importance of deliberateness. I don't just allow things to happen by themselves. I plan them and make them happen. I develop habits that create the conditions for them to happen. And with that philosophy I've been able to enjoy some of the most incredible things in life. In spite of all these successes though, there has been one thing that eluded me for years. Years having excellent health. But no longer. I'm excited to share all the things I've learned in life, whether it be my adventuresome spirit, my philosophy about running my company with lean practices, and now Lean health. My personal goal in life is to help people and encourage them to uncover their full potential. Every time I reach deep and attain a new height in my life, I am so delighted and excited about the discovery. My hope is that I can help other people feel the same things that I feel. That my potential is boundless and so is yours. Chapter 3 the One Thing Even though I thought I was in good shape, I had no clue what excellent health really looked like. Chapter 4 the results so there I was in Phuket, Thailand, A place I'd never been before, but one I will never forget. The island's white sand beaches and turquoise water makes it one of the most beautiful places on earth and one of the places I most enjoy visiting. I spent the first week there dramatically changing how I moved, ate and slept. I moved much more. 10,000 steps every day. Period. The goal was non negotiable. I had to do do it. I ate better. Only fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and chicken. Nothing packaged, no sweeteners, no sugar. If it came out of the earth it could go in my mouth, otherwise I wasn't interested. And lastly, I slept more five or six hours a day compared to the two or three that I'd always gotten in the past. I made sleep a priority. The results were surprising even to me. When I came off of Everest Base camp right before flying to Thailand, I considered myself a very physically active person. Most people would look at me and tell me I was in good shape. In fact, I was in good shape. Not great shape. But at age 54, I had just climbed Kilimanjaro 19,500ft, gone on a one week safari, and traveled to Nepal to trek up to Everest base camp. Even after all this, I could still see the impact my new lifestyle had on my health. In one week, I went from 219 pounds to 213. You might think that losing six pounds in one week is too much too fast, But I didn't do anything crazy to make it happen. I just followed a simple holistic concept that delivered fantastic results. Looking in the mirror, I immediately noticed some changes. I didn't look great yet, but I looked different, and it energized me. The results indicated I was doing the right thing and I wanted to do more. Positive results provide strong psychological reinforcement for us to continue working hard on what we're trying to accomplish. When there are no results or the results are marginal, it is difficult to stick with anything. But when you do something correctly and thoughtfully, the results will be there. After one more week in Phuket, I left another few pounds lighter. I believed I finally found a system that was going to work, something I could stick with and achieve the health goals I wanted to achieve. Others noticed a difference, too. When I got home, I walked into my company. My engineer, Dennis, said to me, oh, you got all skinny on us. I don't know that I'd ever heard anyone say those words to me. I've never been a skinny person my entire life. Life. I've always been a big bone Colorado farm boy, Someone who had a bit of meat on him, a fair amount of muscle, and a strength that said, you shouldn't mess with me. But these words shocked me. They triggered something in my brain I'd never felt before. For the first time, I believed I could attain a high level of physical fitness. I can do this, I thought. This can happen. The encouragement kept coming. Not a day went by when someone didn't say to me, you look fantastic. Wow. Wow. You're doing better and better and better. These words encouraged me to continue on my new path I had started in Phuket. It is amazing how just a few simple words can change your mindset so dramatically. I think that's an important point. Because if those words were so powerful to me, it is equally important that we are supportive of other people when they're on some kind of improvement journey. If you see somebody else embarking on a journey like mine, make sure you support them and encourage them. Their journey can be life changing as well and you have the power to help them reach their goals. Chapter 4 the one thing open your mouth and encourage someone, it could change their life. Chapter 5 How could I be so stupid? I consider myself relatively intelligent. Not a Rhodes scholar or brain surgeon, but capable of consistently delivering common sense answers to problems in the sphere of my own life. However, the ability to consistently lose weight, keep it off and be in excellent physical health had always eluded me. For years I struggled to understand why. Was it my DNA that wouldn't allow me to achieve it? Or was it my stupidity? Unfortunately, I found out on my journey to Thailand that my struggles had nothing to do with my DNA and indeed were caused by my stupidity. Thanks to Tom Ross book I learned it only took three things. Deliberately moving more, that is 10,000 steps a day, eating foods that were not packaged and processed, and sleeping eight hours a night to deliver the results I was looking for. Today I can only laugh at myself because I'm 55 years old, college educated and extremely successful. And it still took me this long to figure out the secrets to being healthy. Healthy. Looking back, I can't understand how I missed the answer for so long. It was so simple and obvious. Yet the important thing is that now I understand and I want to let as many people know that having excellent health, exceptional health rather, is completely and totally attainable. This book is called Lean Health and its purpose is to show you how applying lean principles in your life can help you reach your health goals. Goals at its most fundamental level, lean is about continuous improvement. I regularly look for ways to lose weight and improve my physical shape. A few times each year I would go on a different diet, but I was never able to lose weight consistently. I stayed about the same and kept repeating the same ineffective habits. The worst part was that I accepted the results even though I wasn't making progress. I told myself, oh well, that's just who I am. This was the biggest mistake. We can say that something is just who we are, but the acceptance of mediocrity is the main problem. Telling yourself that I could not get better is where my stupidity showed itself. The moment we accept mediocrity or accept the status quo is the moment we become stupid. How could a human being with all the capacity and sophistication we have a skeletal system, a circulatory system, a nervous system, a brain, a heart, emotions. How can an organism with so much capacity, so much marvel, so much mystery, ever accept mediocrity? The answer? Utter stupidity. We do not have to be stupid, though. The opposite of stupidity is intelligence. And the essence of intelligence is believing in excellence. The essence of intelligence is not accepting anything but excellence. The essence of intelligence is pursuing excellence, excellence in making change happen. The irony is that being healthy is easier, simpler and more enjoyable than being unhealthy. Everything about being healthy is better. We sometimes rationalize not being healthy because we think it's a lot of work, but it is actually less work. This is the staggering revelation that I've come to after 55 years on Earth. When I eat healthy, I always feel when I eat healthy, I have no ups and downs. When I eat healthy, my body loves me and rewards me with emotional energy that I've never had before. Everything about eating correctly, exercising and respecting your body is better, easier, simpler, and makes your life more full. I was so stupid to take this long to figure something out that was right in front of my face. The analogy I use to understand the importance of being healthy is, is this. People's bodies are like airplanes. They work best when they are not overweight. I'm a pilot and I know that if a plane is overweight, it doesn't fly well. It's out of balance and the controls are difficult to handle. When you take off in a plane, you have just what you need and no more. You carry a little extra fuel, but only enough to fly an additional hour in case you need to get to a nearby airport for an emergency. Our bodies are the same. They work best when they do not carry a lot of extra fuel fat. However, most people carry on their bodies not just an extra hour's worth of fuel, or a day's worth of fuel, or even a week's worth of fuel. We walk around with months of fuel weighing us down. This is craziness. Could you imagine taking off in a plane with enough fuel to fly around the world when you only need to go for an hour long trip? How much bigger would the airplane have to be to support all this extra fuel? It would have to fly more slowly, expend a lot more energy, and create more wear on the plane's engine just to carry the excess weight of the fuel. This is exactly what we do to our body when we carry around so much extra weight all the time. We move more slowly, expend more energy and add extra stress to our muscles, joints and organs. But when we're lean, when we reduce that extra weight, our body functions at optimum performance. We're faster, more agile, and we can navigate the world with less effort. We deceive ourselves into thinking that somehow it's acceptable to go around with 30 or 40 extra pounds, believing we have no power to change. This is insanity and we must not allow ourselves to believe this deception. Once I figured out I was deceiving myself, it became much easier to change. I have completely shifted the way I view life, health and food. Now. For me, an easy, quick snack is grabbing an apple and tasting every element of it, knowing the good it's doing for my body. For me, eating quickly is picking up a tomato from the countertop, putting it in my mouth and tasting things I've never tasted before. They are so much more satisfying than processed food, and there's no downside. You don't have any regret. You don't suffer the emotional drain that comes from eating junk food. Eating becomes 100% positive from start to finish. Something it doesn't take a brain surgeon to understand understand. My good friend Dana May, who is also doing Lean Health, told me this. People need to understand you're not giving up anything. It's a total net gain in every regard in your life. The interesting thing about this comment from Dana is that he is someone who used to have three or four drinks a night, eat all kinds of fried foods and sugary desserts, and would often smoke a cigar in the evening. If anyone had to give up something to practice Lean Health, Dana would be the prime candidate. However, he feels like he is giving up nothing. I feel exactly the same way. I have never felt this way about anything before. The positives are overwhelming. Chapter 5 the one thing being honest with yourself will always produce a better outcome. Chapter 6 We are all addicts When I was 16 years old, my high school wood shop teacher was John Pruitt. John was a good friend who mentored me as I became a woodworker. One day he invited me out to lunch. As we were driving down the road in his truck, he popped open a Diet Coke and said, man, do I love this stuff. I grimaced at him, questioning how anyone could like diet soda, but he assured me he was telling the truth. Everyone's got a vice, he said. I've never forgot him saying that, because at that moment I realized he was right. Everybody is some kind of an addict. I also realized that food had become my addiction, something I use for the purpose of Feeling good. And was I ever a heavy user. A person of my size, 5 foot 10, can survive pretty well on about 2,400 calories per day. But I was eating 4 to 5,000 calories a day. I could easily put away 1,000 calories in a single meal. Looking back, I realized that food had become a drug for me and that the foods I was eating were actually causing me to want to eat more food. You might be skeptical. After all, I'm no scientist. I'm not a health or nutrition expert either. I don't claim to be any of these. I'm just thinking back on what was happening in life, my own life. I was eating foods that were creating a craving, an addiction, if you will, to eat more food. They weren't satisfying, so I kept eating more and more. I would eat a bunch of refined carbohydrates, and a short time later, I was hungry again and wanted more. I was also eating a lot of artificial sweeteners, and I'm convinced they had a detrimental effect on me. The scientific literature is not 100% certain, but there does seem to be a correlation between consuming artificial sweeteners and increased cravings for sweets. At the very least, I love food to the point I was addicted to it. I always wanted it. If the story ended there, it would be a sad one. However, things have changed in my life now. I love food, but for entirely different reasons than before. I'm still an addict, but I'm addicted to healthy foods. My mind and my body think about food entirely differently. I want food because it has an amazing nourishing effect on my body. Everything about the human body is staggering. We have five finely tuned senses. We can run, walk, climb mountains. We have complex brains that allow us to create things and solve problems that no other species can. Our bodies are like Ferraris, designed for great performance and amazing abilities. No one who has a car of that caliber would put cheap gas in it or take it to an average mechanic. You would treat it very special, just like you would treat your body. This is my new perspective. I'm addicted to fantastic foods that nourish my own precision engine. The only thing I want to put in it is healthy foods, fruits, vegetables, fish. Only top quality fuel for me. Every time I eat well, I have this amazing feeling that comes over me, as if I'm taking perfect care of my inner Ferrari. Moreover, because I am taking care of my body, I never feel ups and downs. Being a lean practitioner, I know that large swings, ups and downs are not good for productivity in the Manufacturing setting. We want evenness and consistency in everything we do. This produces the least amount of waste and ultimately produces the highest quality outcome with the fewest number of defects. My new addiction provides evenness and consistency to my physiologic. Eating healthy gives me a more even, consistent appetite. I wake up in the morning and I don't have the cravings I used to have. Sure, I want to eat, but not because my body is screaming, feed me. Instead, it tells me in a calm voice, hey, let's go nurse this amazing machine. I'll give you another example. Recently, I was at a job site in Kazakhstan in the middle of nowhere. One morning I was working hard on a project and when lunchtime came around, I hadn't eaten for four hours. In the past, if I hadn't eaten for that long, I would be going crazy thinking, I'm starving, I've got to eat. When will the food come? I would plow through it, eating so fast I would barely taste it. Now because I'm addicted to healthy food. When it was time for lunch, I thought, hey, sure, let's go eat. I'm going to nourish my body. I was able to slow down and enjoy the food. In the middle of that meal, I realized my eating habits had changed because I have a fantastic new addiction. An addiction to healthy food. I never thought I would say I'm happy that I'm an addict, but I love my new addiction. I'm happy that I love food because I want it to nourish me, not because I need to gorge myself like some food maniac. If we all have an addiction to something, why shouldn't it be fantastic, nourishing food that supports a healthy physiological outcome? I'm proud to say that I'm an addict of high quality food and I'm never going back to my old vices. Falling in love with good food is probably the most important component to understanding lean health and moving to a high level of personal well being. In the past, I've always enjoyed healthy foods, but I never was in love with them. Now I'm falling in love with food on two different levels. First, with the flavors, and second, with what it actually does to my body. It's an entirely different eating experience. Experience. In the past, if I saw pastries sitting on the counter, I would grab one and eat it almost without thinking. Today, my mind has fundamentally changed from where it once was. When I walked past some pastries, I immediately think, that's the stuff that makes me fat. That's the stuff that makes Me look like a slob. Conversely, when I walk up to the counter with tomatoes, carrots or beets on it, any kind of vegetable, I think I've got to have that now. It is as if I have a love affair going on every time I see something natural that comes out of the ground. When I put a tomato in my mouth, not only does it taste wonderful, but I'm also releasing vitamins and nutrients to supercharge my body and make it strong, fit and lean. And that gets me excited. The process excites others too. When I traveled to Kazakhstan for business, a man named Mateen picked me up at the airport. When I got off the plane, he left, looked at me and said, wow, you look good. 55 year old men don't typically get compliments on how good they look, but he said, man, you're ripped. You look amazing. I know, I said. It was so easy too, and I didn't know how easy it was. I feel so stupid that it took me so long to figure it out. Mateen asked me what I was doing to get in this kind of shape, and I said, you know, it's really quite simple. I just eliminated all the bad things out of my diet and focused on all the things good. More specifically, I told him, 80% of my diet is fruit and vegetables, and the balance being protein, fish, chicken, cheese and nuts. I explained how I used to consume a lot of Splenda, buying it by the bag full and adding it to every cup of tea and coffee. I drank. The very stuff I believed was helping me stay thin, though I wasn't thin, was the exact thing making me. As soon as I mentioned Splenda, a light came on in Mateen's mind. Wow, I'm addicted to Diet Coke. He exclaimed. I've been drinking three or four of them every day for 40 years. I get out of bed and the first thing I do is drink it. I said, mateen, you will not believe what will happen to you if you wean yourself off of this stuff. Without hesitation, he said, I'll do it. Now imagine a man who's been drinking this stuff consistently for 40 years, and all of a sudden he says he's going to quit. You might be somewhat skeptical, but the next day he picked me up. He said, I did it. No more Diet Coke. For the next two weeks, I was in Kazakhstan. Mateen did not drink any more Diet Coke. As we ate together, I watched him and he began to focus on eating good foods. He began to eat fruits and vegetables, taking his first steps towards Lean health in such a short time. Had Mateen broken his 4? Had his psychology completely changed in two weeks? Probably not, but he did take a powerful first step. He told me he now looks at Diet Coke as the black poison. His words were a powerful insight into human psychology. He had created a strong negative mental image for the beverage to discourage him from drinking it. This is exactly what I do with my own. I look at starches and all the cheap substitutes for real food in the world and think of them as poison. I look at them as the things that make people fat and sloppy. But I don't stop there. I also fall in love with the good aspects of healthy food. The beautiful thing about this strategy is that it's two sided. On one side you create negative associations with the bad food that is Mateen calling Diet Coke black poison. And on the other side, you fall in love with fruits and and vegetables. With these two simple steps, you move your diet towards a healthy one that will completely change the way your body feels. I'll share one other story that demonstrates some of the benefits of falling in love with good food. After two weeks in Kazakhstan, we had an executive meeting with all the top leaders of the company I was working with. At the start of the meeting, the president of the company said something that shocked me. He said, you know, Paul is not just demonstrating lean by the way he runs his company. He's not just telling us to run our company well, but he's also in good lean physical health. And I know that because I saw him with his shirt off in the sauna. He's 55 years old and he has a six pack. Then he looked around at his leadership team of eight people and said, we haven't seen this since our mid-20s and early 30s. It's all gone. Paul sets a great example for us. Think about that for a moment. We were at a board meeting of a billion dollar organization and the president was using my health as an example to be followed. That's what happens when you fall in love with good food. In addition to eating right, exercise is extremely important to health too. And the techniques of creating mind associations to change your behavior works with it as well. For example, when I see an elevator, I think of it as a death elevator because it helps me become faster. I always used to take the elevator because it was easier, but now I want to be lean, trim and healthy and to live to 100, which is my goal. So I take the stairs instead. The formula for great health is fairly simple. Reject negative foods, fall in love with Good foods create powerful connections in your mind that support the habits you want to have in your life, and you will be successful. Chapter 6 the one thing create powerful connections in your mind. Chapter seven. Never sick. Mmm. Now that's delicious. You. You know, they say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. For me, I eat as many as four apples a day. I love them. For whatever reason, I grew up with a weak immune system. It seemed like I spent my entire life in reoccurring cycles of sickness. I would get sick for three weeks, and I'd get a little better. Then I'd get sick again. The next thing you'd know, I'd have to go back to the doctor for antibiotics. The antibiotics would heal me for a few weeks, but soon I'd return to the tiresome routine of being sick. One of the causes was the environment around me. I used to be a cabinet maker. I inhaled a lot of dust while I was working. In my mid-30s, I found out that all the dust was possibly aggravating my sinuses, making me constantly sick. One of the treatments I used to improve my condition was a saline rinse, which required me to snort warm salt water up my nose to rinse out my sinuses. It helped a lot, so I did it frequently, but I still would get sick. As my company grew, I did less woodworking and more public speaking. During the winters, particularly when the cold and flu seasons were going around, I would carry a bag of cough drops with me to all my speaking engagements. About an hour before giving a speech, I would start sucking on them to make sure my throat would be numb and I wouldn't be hacking and coughing in front of several hundred people. The drops calmed my symptoms, but they did nothing to make me healthy. It always seemed like the Middle East. Minute I got within 5ft of someone who was sick, I would get sick again. It was very frustrating because I wanted to be well, but I didn't know what to do to be well. Then something remarkable happened in Thailand. After I started this new way of eating and taking care of myself, my friend Dana got sick. I was expecting to get sick myself, but I stayed healthy for the rest of the time and throughout the journey home. When I walked into my company, where 50 employees, several of whom were sick, greeted me, I was served. My health would change for the worse. But it didn't. To my surprise, I went another three months and remained healthy, even though it was the heart of the winter when everyone around me, including my wife, got sick. Over the next three months, I traveled around the world three times and went on more airplanes than you could shake a stick at. I shook the hands of hundreds of people at conferences and consulting gigs all over the world and I still did not. Now, nearly one year has passed since the last time I was sick. This raises the question why? What is different in my life that would create such a profound change in my wellness? The only thing I can think of is my diet. I took out all the artificial sweeteners and everything that was processed and added voluminous amounts of fruits and vegetables, especially broccoli as superfood. These days I eat a ton of broccoli. I buy large bags of pre cut broccoli at Costco and put it in my smoothie every morning. I cook it for dinner at night. By the end of the day I've probably eaten 4 to 5 cups minimum of broccoli, more than most people probably eat in a month. I believe the broccoli and all the fruits and vegetables are supercharging my body so I never get sick. Now I'm sure sooner or later I'm going to catch a cold and get the flu, but so far I stayed healthy. This is perhaps the greatest benefit of this new process of maintaining my health. I no longer have to waste so much time going to the doctor or taking antibiotics so I have more time and energy to spend on being productive. I do not want to sound like I'm opposed to antibiotics or modern medicine. Not at all. I'm simply making the point that when you eat correctly, you generally don't need additional supplements to be healthy. Once again, these are my opinions as a non professional. I'm not a nutritionist or a physician. I'm just making simple observations. Why does this system work? There's a logic principle called Occam's Razor that may explain what is happening. Occam's Razor says that the solution to most things is the most obvious, that is simplest one regarding my health. The most obvious explanation that consuming large amounts of fruits and vegetables, especially broccoli, has strengthened my immediate immune system. A better diet plus a consistent exercise regime has given me exceptional health. This new lifestyle has created such a powerful change in my overall well being that I wouldn't trade where I am for anything. I am, to say the least, elated with the outcome. And remember that apple in the beginning of this chapter. This is not chatter for me. This is the way I live my life. When I walked into this studio today to record this chapter, I had a bag of four apples, an orange and a banana. I came prepared to eat healthy no matter where I am. Chapter 7 the One Thing Broccoli Rules. Chapter 8 the four things I learned from Doug when I was about two and a half months in my new health regime, I thought I was doing doing fantastic. But I would soon learn otherwise. A good friend of mine, Doug Scoggins, the general contractor who built our company's new building, said I should come work out with him. Doug is an unusual individual. He runs a large construction company with a lot of employees and he also maintains perfect physical health. Doug was a state champion in kickboxing and in addition to being a contractor, he owns and operates a gym in Fernando, Washington. When it comes to athleticism, he is at a level I've never seen anyone else reach. When you watch him work out, you were astounded at what he can do, whether he's doing pull up after pull up or effortlessly doing endless push ups. When Doug asked me to come to his gym at 5:15am to work out with him and 30 other people, I hesitated. I can barely get out of bed to work out at my house, let alone work out with you, I told him. But he persisted. So I went. I needed to get in shape anyways. I was preparing for another adventure, a month long trip to Costa Rica to learn how to surf. To get ready for the trip, I had been working out at my home gym every day for about 20 to 30 minutes. Running on the treadmill, doing the rowing machine, lifting some weights. I thought I was getting into pretty good shape. As it turned out, I had no clue whatsoever what it meant to work out. When I showed up at the gym that first morning, Doug kicked my ass. There is no other way to put it. I was ringing wet at the end of the hour. Doug pushed us through circuit after circuit, from boxing to burpees to pull ups. We did 60 second rounds of intense exercising and then short breaks of 15 to 30 seconds in between. After about a week, I was addicted to the intensity and I realized if I trained that I would easily be in the physical shape to be able to master surfing and endure the pounding of the waves. Doug also knew I would be ready to surf, but he threw in another challenge. He said, paul, let's get you below £200. At this point I was about 2:03 down from 219 when I came off of Everest Base Camp. I was doing great, but I wanted so badly to get below the 200. I told Doug I was struggling with my weight and he said to me with total clarity and surety, you're Eating more than you think you need to control your portion size. I'll never forget those words rolling out of his mouth. It was when I realized that if I continued to work out with the same intensity and controlled my portion size, that I would indeed drop below 200 pounds in just another week. I had made it. To help me get there, Doug taught me how to get more vegetables in my diet. Up to this point, I was not drinking smoothies. But Doug said something very powerful to me. He said, you can bury a lot of vegetables in a smoothie. What do you mean? I asked. Every morning I wake up and I put spinach, broccoli and all kinds of vegetables in my smoothie. He explained. Then I add blueberries, an apple, a banana or strawberries. But I always start every smoothie with lots of of vegetables. I started to do the same thing and the results were incredible. I felt better about myself. I noticed my overall health and well being improving. I lost more weight and sharpened my focus on what optimal health looked like. One of the key lessons I learned from Doug was that we are very good at deceiving ourselves. I used to think I ate well, but I had no clue what eating well well meant. I used to think I worked out hard, but I didn't know what that meant either. I convinced myself I was doing well. But looking at Doug's physique, I realized I was wrong. There was nothing in my life that suggested I was operating at a high level of fitness. I had deceived myself into believing that if I worked at things diet, exercise, etc. Moderately, I would someday get where I wanted and experience except exceptional health. What a huge deception that was. Now, instead of doing things half heartedly, I realized I needed to work out with deliberateness and intensity. And I needed to monitor both the quality and the quantity of what I was putting into my body. If I could do that, the results would be amazing. Once I learned those lessons well, Doug told me one more thing that completely blew me away. As my body changed and my physique improved, he said, said Paul, you're aging in reverse. You're actually getting younger. As I reflected on what he was telling me, I knew he was right. If you take care of yourself properly, you can age in reverse. I feel like I'm 18 years old again and there is nothing I can't do. As a matter of fact, when I'm home at my company's facility, after we finish our morning meeting and our stretching, we have a push up challenge. All of us get together and see how Many push ups we can do until we were exhausted. I have a lot of young studs that work for me, but no one can beat me. Once or twice someone did beat me, but only because they were cheating. When we had someone make sure everybody was doing the push ups the same way, they couldn't keep up. Imagine a 55 year old man who can do more push ups than an 18 year old and a 22 year old thanks to Doug. This was no accident. Ultimately, my biggest luck lesson from Doug was that there is no excuse for not working out. He sets the best example because he is a successful businessman with a large company. Yet he makes no excuses for why he cannot take incredible care of his body. He is my inspiration for bringing it to the next level and frankly, why I look the way I do today. Not a single day goes by without me thinking about Doug and what he can do. As for for the surfing, I did go to Costa Rica and learn how to surf. In fact, I was very successful at it and I credit a lot of my success to Doug and the lessons that he taught me. Chapter 8 the One Thing Listen to the voice of success. Chapter 9 convoluted chemistry 1 of the realizations of that I've come to, as I've observed people in their unhealthy state and my own unhealthy state prior to gaining clarity and understanding about my health, is the idea of convoluted chemistry. The body, in my opinion, works best when it is in a totally natural state. When it is ingesting foods that are nutritional and provide all the necessary vitamins and minerals it needs to function efficiently. This is not how most people in Western society eat. However, our culture has has introduced many new compounds into the diet via processed and packaged foods. We commonly eat processed breads, meats, and even meals that have lists of ingredients that are 10, 20, sometimes 30 items long. The body takes this stuff in and says, what do I do with this stuff? I wasn't made to work with that material. I'll just put it over here and store it in my fat cells. Next, we complicate things further by taking an endless array of over the counter and prescription drugs. You might not believe me, but I challenge you to anyone who does not take some kind of medication. When I go to the doctor and they ask me, do you have any allergies? Do you have any resistance to any drugs? Do you take anything? And I tell them I have no allergies, I take nothing. When I say this, they look at me in disbelief. What you don't take anything. This is such a foreign concept. These days everybody is taking something to regulate something, and this convolutes the chemistry occurring inside our bodies. In the lean world, we call this over processing. We have overwhelmed our body's function by adding all this unnecessary garbage to our body. The net result is our bodies are confused and our chemistry is convoluted and not functioning like it should. Again, these are just my own personal conclusions, observations made through common sense. In an earlier chapter, I talk about Occam's Razor, the idea of that the most logical answer is the one that's right in front of you. If you look at all the health problems that exist in Western society, you have to ask yourself what the most obvious common denominators are. I say diet and drugs. The DD factor. We are overdosing on the DD factor. We are convoluting our natural chemistry. The more I have weaned myself off of all these foreign substances, the better I feel. I marvel every time I go to the doctor for a checkup and they look at me and say, how could anybody at 55 years old look like you look and have the health makeup you have? We don't see this. I tell them it's very simple. I'm careful about what I eat. I exercise regularly. I treat my body like a Ferrari. It's just common sense. But I haven't always had this common sense. I only learned it over the course of the last year, and that is why I'm writing this book. I want to share as much as I can with other people in hopes that they can dramatically improve the quality of their lives through the application of simple common sense ideas and a profound process that I call lean health. You don't have to over process your life. The next time your body is reacting strangely to something or you don't feel good, ask yourself this question. Am I insistent some way convoluting the chemistry inside of me? If you are, think about how you can get back to its natural, fully functioning state by reducing your dependency on processed foods and different types of drugs. Chapter 9 the one thing don't convolute the Chemistry. Chapter 10 traveling is easy One of my favorite sayings is that if you don't ask, the answer's always no. But if you ask, you'll be surprised at how often the answer is yes. I have learned this applies to traveling as well. Sticking to a health regime or particular way of eating while traveling can be especially challenging. But it doesn't have to be. I've learned some powerful lessons about how to be more faithful to our bodies on the road, and it starts with a story in Tom Ross book Eat, Move, Sleep. Ross says that when he goes into a restaurant, the worst temptation comes at the end of the meal when the waiter asks if he wants dessert. At this point, many people lose their discipline. They indulge in a dessert that adds a few hundred unnecessary and unhealthy calories calories to the meal. Roth explains how he treats himself to a dessert, but in a healthy way. He says that most restaurants always have some kind of fresh fruit available, even if it's not on the menu. All you need to do is ask. I immediately latched onto this concept, and whenever I feel like I want something special after a meal but don't want to wreck my diet, I ask if I can have some fruit. It almost always works. Most restaurants enjoy trying to please their customers. You might be surprised to find out how accommodating people will be to dietary requests. On my recent trip to Kazakhstan, a place off the beaten path for most Westerners, I told my host when I arrived that I was very careful about what I eat. I told them that if possible, I would only like to eat fruits and vegetables, fish and chicken. Not only were they accommodating, but they seemed to go out of their way just to please me. I think they got as much pleasure out of seeing me satisfied as I got from maintaining my healthy lifestyle. It didn't matter where I went. Everyone knew it was fruits and vegetables and fish and chicken. For Paul, I didn't feel like I was putting my host out. As a matter of fact, just the opposite. They love the concept of accommodating my simple way of eating. Sometimes it takes a little extra effort to maintain the regime. Being at the airport can be bad for your health because every convenience store or fast food place is full of packaged foods. Our society is set up around packaged or processed products, but it is still possible to find the things you need if you turn your eyes on. For instance, when I was in the Bangkok airport, all the stores sold junk food. But I knew there was one thing I could eat that would maintain my health and nourish my Ferrari body nuts. So I searched from one store to another until finally I found a store that sold a bag of mixed nuts. I bought a couple and instead of blowing my diet, even though I don't consider this a diet, it's my lifestyle. I enjoyed and savored every bite, knowing I was eating real food. Later, when it was time to eat a full meal. I saw there were only fast food restaurants everywhere from Dairy Queen to Burger King to kfc. I knew it was highly unlikely any of those would have something nourishing for my body. Among all those fast food places though, I noticed one Thai restaurant that looked like it made fresh food. The menu did have a lot of fried foods, noodles and other things that I did not want. So I asked, do you have any salmon? They said yes. I asked if they had broccoli. They did. Could you make me salmon with broccoli? They said yes to that too. Eight minutes later my plate arrived with a beautiful piece of fresh sample. They only gave me one sprig of broccoli and two baby corns and a little bit of sweet potato and one carrot slice, so I asked for a little more. Four minutes later, fresh steamed broccoli came out to me on a plate from the back in the middle of the most unlikely place in the Bangkok airport. I was eating perfectly, just as I wanted it is really amazing what happens when you are determined to take care of yourself so often. It seems as though when we embark on anything of substance, it's easy to make excuses for why we won't succeed. But we have no time for excuses. They don't do anything for us except perpetuate our own self deception. Another favorite safety of mine is Life is not a rehearsal. Each day is not a practice for the real day ahead. Each one is real right now and we need to take advantage. There are no do overs. Why not start taking care of your body now? Why not receive all the benefits of taking care of your body now? It doesn't matter where you are. You can maintain a consistent and healthy diet. Even even when you're on the road. Traveling is not hard. Traveling is easy. Chapter 10 the one thing just ask. The answer is usually yes. Chapter 11 the Big Deception throughout the past chapters, you've heard me talk repeatedly about how we deceive ourselves. This concept came to me when I was about eight months into my new way of thinking about life and health. I was sitting in my kitchen and I suddenly thought, wow. I have totally deceived myself for the past 55 years. Before my revelation, I used to tell myself one lie after another when it came to my health. The biggest one was that genetically I wasn't made to be thin. I would tell myself that I was a Colorado farm boy and that my dad was a big guy and overweight and brother is overweight and I was overweight. It was just the way we rolled. This is the type of self deceptive talk I would hear consistently inside my head. If the negativity ended there, it would have been bad enough, but it did not. I would further deceive myself with thoughts like, it's so difficult to eat right. It's so tempting to eat those pastries. Gosh, why does my wife make all those good things that make me go all? If only I was in charge of the grocery shopping, I would never have these problems. My kids bring home all this junk food. Every day at work somebody is bringing donuts. I go to these conferences and they put a piece of chocolate cake in front of me. I was born with these disabilities and health problems. I have to medicate. I can't walk, my ankle hurts. I have to get up too early in the morning to exercise. Work is so stressful. I don't have an athletic body. I wasn't born like one of those skinny people who can eat anything and have no problem. My family loves to eat and I was expected to love food from the moment I came out of the womb. My dad always slapped me upside the head and told me to finish your food on the plate because people all over the world were starving. I've been overeating since I was 6 years old and there's no way I'm gonna stop now. I just love sugary things. I'm addicted to chocolate. I can't stop myself. I eat one bite of pastry and then the next thing you know, I've devoured four of them. I love my coffee with tons of sweeteners and that mocha flavoring. I drive by Starbucks and an invisible lasso ropes me around the neck and pulls me in. There are only a few people in the world who are really skinny and everybody else is just a little overweight. It's good to carry some fat on you just in case you get sick. It doesn't matter that I'm overweight. I've learned to be happy with myself. All those pictures on the front of Men's Health magazine, They're all photoshopped. Those guys are all on steroids. There's no way you can look like that. They're just lucky they have bodies like that. The rest of us don't have it that good. My wife doesn't support me. She's a junk food addict. I love potato chip. I love that salty taste. I need that Diet Coke. It gets me going that caffeine is something that I have to have. All those people who are skinny and propose all those diets, they're just lucky their Bodies metabolize things totally different than the rest of us. Jack Lane, he's a fraud. Those people who are skinny, it's all liposuction. They're all taking drugs. Thin, thin, win, win, din, din. Who the hell knows it's all drugs. That's the only way they could be so skinny. I think you get the picture. We are all pretty good at self deception, aren't we? We feed ourselves a bunch of lies and excuses. I used to be the master of it too, but now I know better. I felt like an idiot that morning when I realized I had been deceiving myself for so long. But I was also overjoyed because I had broken the cycle of self deception. I had understanding that would allow me to be successful at taking care of myself at a super high level. The first step towards taking control of your health is to stop lying to yourself. When Doug told me I needed to control my portion size, he was really saying to me, paul, you're lying to yourself about what you're eating. Stop deceiving yourself. His words set me up for the success I am now having. If you're not giving yourself truth to information, you're not gonna get the results you want. So stop lying to yourself. Stop deceiving yourself. Your self deception is holding you back. I'm gonna go off script here at the end of this chapter. My brother, who is very close to me, but yet we're brothers, we butted heads from time to time, doesn't really listen to a lot of my advice. He has begun his lean health journey. And you know, I had to speak some pretty harsh words to him. I had, you know, Nick, you've been lying to yourself. And if you don't think you've been lying to yourself, I want you to look at yourself and I want you to look at your family and I want you to look at the people you're responsible for. Every one of them are overweight. And until you come to the realization that it's you, that you have been telling yourself lies, that you eat healthy and that you're a good cook and all this other nonsense, nothing's going to change. At that moment he argued with me and he said, you know what, I'm a good cook, I, I eat really healthy. He came back to me a day later and he said, you know, Paul, you're right. It is at that very moment that when you are willing to admit that you have been self deceiving, that you will have the breakthrough to move through to excellent health. Chapter 11. The one thing self deception holds you back. Chapter 12 the Picture Diet When I learned about Lean and the idea of continuous improvement, I immediately embraced its simplicity. The goal of Lean is to improve operational efficiency by eliminating the eight wastes, overproduction, transportation, inventory defects over processing, motion, weighting and the waste of employee potential from the manufacturing manufacturing process. Lean compels you to make improvements by making things more simple. Part of why I like Lean so much is that Lean solutions to problems are often elegant solutions. Elegance appears when things come together in a process without a lot of struggle involved. Lean solutions are simple, visual and easy to execute. And most people understand the concepts immediately when you show them. That is my idea of elegance. Throughout my Lean health journey, I needed an elegant solution for how I could monitor and share what I was eating with other people. People I met would always ask me how I was getting these incredible results. When I told them it was easy, they asked if I would help them do it. I promised them that every time I ate I would take a picture of the food and send it to them if they would would reciprocate. That way they could see what good foods look like and we could hold each other accountable to eating healthier. I dubbed this new technique the Picture Diet. The Picture Diet is an elegant solution because it allows you to monitor what you eat without needing to write everything down. All you have to do is pull out your smartphone and take a picture of the food you're eating. Voila. You have a record that you can reference so you know the quality of the the quantity of the food you're eating. Every day. I do the Picture Diet with people all over the world. They send me pictures of the food they're eating because it's fun and it shows all the different kinds of healthy foods that are available. I have a plethora of pictures of all these fantastic foods that are completely healthy. I use the Picture Diet wherever I go. If you open up my picture gallery on my iPhone you will see hundreds of pictures of of all different foods that I eat and I would say wow, look at how healthy Paul is eating. When I'm traveling in Southeast Asia, the variety of different fruits that are available are staggering. I love to taste and eat every one of them and every time I do I think to myself how lucky I am that I have fallen in love with all these beautiful plant based foods and get to enjoy all their tastes and smells. One of my favorites is is the durian, a smelly fruit that is popular in Thailand. The durian is about the size of A small watermelon. It has big sharp thorns all over it, and inside are many custard pods that you pull out and eat once you get past the initial odor. The creamy custard texture inside makes it one of the most wonderful foods ever. I'm always snapping a picture and reminding myself and others that eating fruits and vegetables as the primary food will do wonders for your health. We all need an accountability model. We need a reinforcement system for guiding our behavior. The picture diet is as easy as holding your phone up above the plate of food you're about to eat, clicking a picture, and then texting it to a group of people that you're holding yourself accountable to. There are no logs to keep. There is nothing. It's just simple and fun, just like lean. Some of you may want to add another layer of accountability to the picture Diet. For example, I have a very good idea of how many calories I take in every day, but I still feel tempted to lie to myself sometimes about how much I'm eating. Rather than take a chance of compromising my health. I use my fitness pal still to log everything I eat. This simple app adds a little bit of complexity, but but not much. So keep it simple. Find a friend who wants to do the picture diet with you. Then start snapping pictures and sharing them. You're going to be shocked how effective it is. I'm going to go off script here at the end of this chapter. It is so important that you are logging your food and not just logging your food when it's convenient. You need to be logging your food the minute you eat it. Do not delay. This whole book has been about lean health, about developing processes that allow you to maintain excellent health. Well, part of the lean model is just in time. Do not allow anything to turn into a batch work. Don't say to yourself, well, I'll log that in a couple hours, because invariably you will forget what you did. A great process is one that produces a consistent result. And what you want. And what I want is excellent health. You want to watch in front of that mirror and say, amazing. Not I kind of wish I looked a little better. In order to get there, you have to have great processes. And part of having great processes is processes that adhere to the lean principles of just in time and no batch work. Log your food the minute you eat it. One humorous story I want to tell just to illustrate this is when George started this whole thing, George was doing pretty good, and then he kind of plateaued and he wasn't losing weight. And I said, george George, are you logging your food? And he says, well, you know, kind of made a few excuses. And my brother actually did the same thing. Everybody likes to make excuses about not logging their food. It's a pain in the butt. I don't think I'll like it. I don't think it's necessary. I've heard it all. And finally I just got fed up with George. And I said, George, for the love of God, would you please just log your food? And finally he started laughing so hard he said, I've never heard anybody say it like that. But from that moment on. And George started logging his food. And you know what? George started losing weight again. For the love of God, log your food. Chapter 12 the One Thing a Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words. Chapter 13 Lean PDF before we go any further, here is a quick recap recap of what has happened in my life over the last year. I went to Everest Base Camp in October and learned about the book Eat, Move, Sleep by Tom Roth. After reading Roth's book, I began approaching my health differently and started to see positive results. Shortly thereafter, I started exercising with Doug Scoggins, my trainer who taught me four things. One, I didn't know how to work out. Two. I can bury a ton of vegetables in a smoothie. 3. I can age and reverse if I take care of myself. And four, There are no excuses for not taking care of my body. Doug is a high powered executive with a large company. He finds time not only to work out himself, but to train other people and busy executives throughout our community. Needless to say, Doug taught me a lot. In January, I went surfing and did fantastic because of Doug's training. Then in March, I boarded a plane to go to Japan with Norman Bodak who taught me the the Harada Method, a methodology for establishing good habits that was developed by Takeichi Harada in Japan. We met Mr. Harada and had an all day training session with him that was fantastic. The biggest lesson from that training session was that the habits you do on a daily basis determine the outcomes in your life. One of my all time favorite concepts is that the great equalizer in life is time. Every human being gets the same 24 hours in in the course of a day. What we do with those 24 hours determines who we are and how effective our lives will be. Since all we get is 24 hours, wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to be more thoughtful, more deliberate and deliver more value during that time? The Harada Method is an effective system to do that. But it was a little bit too complicated for me. I'm dyslexic and not the best student. So I took some of Harada's ideas and simplified them down into a process of I call Lean pd, which is short for Lean Personal Development. The Lean PD app, now available on the iPhone and Android for 99 cents, asks you to create a list of tasks you want to perform every day within a group of categories such as health, spirituality, exercise, leadership, among others. If you have 50 habits you want to practice, you write them down and check off the completed ones so you can easily see the things you have done each day. Here's an example. One of my categories on my first list is food and one of the habits in that category is no white flour, no sugar, no soda, all fruits and vegetables primary protein, fish with chicken as secondary. I don't always check off every one of my habits during a day, but for this category I have not missed a day. Yet knowing I'd have to admit to cheating on my eating goals has kept me on task better than I ever imagined, even if I'm the only one who would know about the transgression beyond daily habits. Lean PD also encourages you to set what Jim Collins in his book Good to Great calls a big, hairy, audacious goal. It is a good idea to really stretch yourself to pursue a long term goal, even if it seems out of reach. My goal is to make the world a better place by teaching Lean concepts to an individual entire country. I want to work with the leader of a nation to bring Lean and all the elements of lean problem solving to the entire country in order to show what could happen to the world if we worked in a thoughtful way towards solving our problems. In a previous chapter I talk about the idea of elegance. Well, one of the things that I wanted very much to build into the Lean PD app was the idea of elegance and simplicity. The app automatically logs tasks and incomplete. All you need to do is check the ones you complete every night and at midnight the whole thing resets so you start fresh every day. It is very elegant and simple with very little management required. The Lean PD app allows you to view your daily progress, your weekly progress, your monthly progress and your yearly progress so you get the big 40,000 foot view. It graphically shows you how you're performing in every category so that you know exactly where you need to improve. Much of this book is dedicated to the idea of deliberate practices. If you want your life to be great for you, you have to be deliberate about the way you approach it the Lean PD app helps you be very deliberate about the things you eat, about the habits you're developing on a daily basis. By implementing these new habits in your life, I've improved more rapidly, more effectively than ever before. In addition to improving my health, these habits have developed my intellect and leadership too. If you're predisposed to wanting to check things off and developing some healthy habits, the Lean PD app might be a great tool for you to use. It is simple, elegant and effective. Everything you strive for when implementing Lean I'm going to go off script here. I just want to emphasize that one of the best things I've done in this last year was the development of the Lean PD app because it really helped enhance my Lean Health journey. I would encourage you strongly to get the app and begin to develop these habits on a daily basis. You don't really know how powerful this concept is until you begin to actually log and see. Because one of the big issues in life is what we think and what we actually when you have to check off, manage and actually analyze what you're doing, everything changes. We really are not as disciplined as we want to believe we are. We paint a little rosier picture of how we approach life. But then when you find out, hey, you're really not as good as you thought, it's only then that you have the ability to make the adjustments, the small incremental improvements, the two second lean improvements to adjust those habits so you become more effective. The Lean PD app is rock solid and I highly recommend it. Chapter 13 the one thing create a great process and follow it. Chapter 14 to log or not to Log I'm going to go right off script, right off the bat. You've heard of me talk about this in other chapters, but I devoted a whole chapter to this because it's really important. Keeping track of everything you eat is a critical component of Lean health. Most people don't want to do it because they think it's difficult, tedious, or just a waste of time. However, if you are serious about wanting to lose weight, you greatly increase your chances of success by writing down everything you eat. When I started on my Lean Health journey, I didn't know if logging all my meals helped that much, but I've learned that if I record things, it is much harder to lie to myself. I have a 54 year history of distorting the facts when it comes to my diet. In the past I could say I wasn't eating too much, but I had no way to know for sure. Once I started Recording everything I knew exactly whether I was sticking to my calorie intake goals or not. One of the tools I use to log my meals is my Fitness Pal, a diet tracking and calorie counting app. MyFitness Pal lets you input exactly what you eat at every meal and keep track of the calories, carbohydrates, proteins, fats and other nutritional information over time. It also keeps your health data such as weight and exercise if you want to do it. I started to use the app in 2013, though at first I didn't get the results I hoped for. When I looked at the graph of my weight over time, I was shocked to see that between 2013 and October 2014, when I went to Phuket that I had not lost much weight. The graph was basically flat. After going to Phuket and reading Tom Roth's book, I started to log my meals more regularly, but not as much as I should have. The tipping point came when my friend Doug told me I needed to control my portion size. After that, I became much more consistent in recording my meals and found it easier to lose weight. I finally admitted I was not being honest with myself when I logged my meals, and the Fitness Pal app was the tool that helped me do that. MyFitnessPal works because it helps you create something called standardized work, another lean concept. In Lean manufacturing, we set up processes so that we do them the same way every time. When we make a particular product, we follow each step in the exact sequence they were set up in. This produces consistency good outputs because the processes have been scrutinized and refined to deliver quality and consistency each and every time. In Lean Health, my standardized work is to accurately log everything I put in my mouth. I created a standardized process where I eat 2,400 calories a day, day in and day out. I have very little variations variation and the consistency has dramatically helped me. That's why I weigh 169 pounds today instead of the 220 that I basically weighed my entire life. My Fitness Pal is not the answer to all your weight problems. Recording your food intake alone does not guarantee you will lose weight. You can record everything you eat, but if you're eating the bad stuff, you're not going to lose weight. The key is being able to consistently record the great foods you're eating. Nevertheless, my Fitness Pal is very helpful. I have a couple of recommendations about how to get the most out of it. First, do not allow the app to link the number of steps you take with your calorie intake every day. You want to get 10,000 steps, which you can monitor with some type of pedometer or fitness tracking device like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch. If you let it, MyFitness Pal will take the information from your device and adjust your daily calorie limit. This includes automatically increasing the number of calories you can eat if you do extra exercise. For example, If I'm allotted 2400 calories a day, but I walk 20,000 steps, the app will tell me I can eat an extra 1500 calories a day. When I first started using MyFitnessPal, I would take this guidance and go eat another 1500 more calories. You might be able to able to guess what happened. I didn't lose much weight, so these days I don't sync my fitness Pal with my Fitbit because I do not want to be told I can eat more calories. The second helpful technique is to always log calories on the high side. I used to be really good at avoiding this. I would find a chicken stir fry meal that said it was 300 calories when I knew darn well it was probably 450 or 500 calories. I used to record the lower number, but now I do just the opposite. If I see something has 350 calories, but I think it might really be 400 or 500, I'll log the higher number because I want to remove any possibility of eating too much. 95% of the people who have tried to mimic what I'm doing are unwilling to log their food. I believe this is because they are intimidated by the process or they don't want want to be bothered. Avoid this mindset. It will sabotage you. Do not be afraid to be honest with yourself. People who log their food in conjunction with the other steps I've talked about in this book are wildly successful and you will be too. Chapter 14 the One Thing Log it and Lose It. Chapter 15 Racing in the Rain in an earlier chapter I said that if there was one word to describe Lean health, it would be Ferrari. The Ferrari is the international symbol for high performance and quality. But I have to admit, I'm a Porsche guy. I have a special affinity for Porsches because the Toyota Production System, aka Lean, was utilized in the year 2000 to turn turn the company around. By using Lean in its manufacturing processes, Porsche improved so much it became one of the best car manufacturers in the world. Another reason why I like Porsches so much is that I've spent many hours learning how to drive them. About five years ago, a German friend of Mine, who was really into racing Porsches, invited me to attend the Porsche Sport Driving School with him in Birmingham, Alabama. @ the that time I had no interest in racing cars. I wasn't a car guy, I was a plane guy, a pilot who got his kicks at 27,000ft and 300 miles an hour. But I thought, what the heck, I might as well learn something new. So I traveled to Birmingham for a three day course to learn how to race high performance cars. Porsche Sport Driving School is not just a bunch of middle aged men going out there to run cars in the ground without a clue of a what they're doing. Drivers receive intensive training on exactly what each car does and how it does it with the express goal of teaching you how to fully enjoy the machine. There is a lot to enjoy if you are like I was and have never sat behind the wheel of a true high performance car. The power, the control, the handling are hard to believe. After a few minutes behind the wheel, I went from being a guy that didn't think much about cars to someone who loved driving high performance cars. The whole time I was racing on the track I was thinking to myself, how do these engineers pull this off? I never believed you could drive a car well over 100 miles an hour, taking it into a corner and having it stick to the road like glue. I did not understand how you could rev the engine to over 6,000 rpms and the car would just keep hammering. I remember one of the instructors telling me, you don't have to worry about hurting these things. They are designed to be driven to the limit. They are so well engineered that all we do is change the oil and put tires on them. I thought to myself, he must be wrong and that we were abusing those cars by riding them so hard. Not to worry, he said, they're designed to do this. All the instructors were professional race car drivers from around the world who came to Birmingham to to teach at the school. My particular instructor was Brazilian and he looked like Fabio. He was a good looking guy, about 6 foot 4 and wow, did he know how to drive. He told us when he left Atlanta for Birmingham that morning for the two hour drive, it was raining really hard and he was driving his Porsche 911 traveling well in excess of 80 miles an hour and was obviously annoyed by how slow the drivers around him were going. I don't know why people freeze up when it starts to rain. He said, you can drive just fine, you just need to know how to do it. I thought, easy for him to say being a Professional race car driver. But I would learn later that afternoon he was right. One of the many disciplines I learned at Porsche Driving School was racing in the rain, where they flood the entire race course with an inch or two of water before you drive on it. Then the instructors pull out their stopwatch and say, go, race the course. As you can imagine, you can't race the normal way in these conditions. You have to feel the car like you've never felt the car before. You have to understand exactly when the wheels are about to lose contact with the track and how and when to ease off the gas or the brake as you go into the corner. You have to know exactly how much momentum to carry and exactly when to stop and start braking. After a couple hours, I was getting pretty good at racing in the rain and I understood why my instructor thought people didn't need to slow down so much when it rained. If you know how to drive in these conditions, you can manage very well. My training paid off in a way I never could have imagined. About six months after returning from my third trip to the driving school. Yes, I became a little addicted to it. Even though I wasn't a car guy. I was driving down the road at 8 o' clock in the morning with my son and another colleague in my Lexus LX470, a big SUV. It was winter and there was black ice on the freeway. Though I I didn't see it. I had just left Bellingham and I was going about 70 miles an hour when I came around the corner and there was quite a bit of shade. As I rounded the corner, a 14 car pile up, including a big fire engine, blocked the road in front of me. I tapped the brakes and my car went into a full 360 degree spin. The car in the fast lane next to me did the same thing. It was not a pretty picture. Two cars moving 70 miles an hour down the road, spinning side by side, approaching a 14 car pileup. It seemed like somebody was going to get killed. But then all my training kicked in. I didn't even have to think about what I was doing. I tapped my brakes again and I put in a small steering correction which stopped my spinning for just a split second. Just enough to get by. Two cars crashed into each other in the middle of the road. I was not out of the woods yet. The car next to me collided with a car in the middle of the road and I was headed right for several cars that were crashed into each other. A quick tap, tap on the brakes to reposition of my car allowed us to miss another three car pileup and the fire truck. A third tap of the brakes and we missed another car. Then another one. Finally, one last tap put me gently into the divider where we came to a rest without hitting anyone. It all happened in the blink of an eye. My friend Mark Urban sitting next to me looked at me and said, how the hell did you do that? The answer is I was fully attuned to the performance characteristics of the vehicle. I fully understood the car that I was driving and I understood how to operate it at a very high level. Having good technology helped too. Which reminds me of a good health lesson. When you have a car like a Porsche or a Lexus that is beautifully engineered and designed for high performance, you can really do some amazing things. A year after starting my new health regime, that's the way I. I look at my body. I don't carry much fat at all. Before, when I carried a lot of weight, everything was a big mosh pit. I put stuff into my mouth and I didn't know what was happening in my body. Now I'm pretty much stripped down to a lean machine. I feel everything I put into my body, every piece of food that goes into it. I literally feel and register the results of it. When I reflect on this now, I think how I wasted so many years with dulled down senses. Having a body that carries a lot of excess fat is like having a Porsche. But then strapping on saddlebags all over it, mounting a roof rack on top and bashing the front fenders in so the aerodynamics are gone. And then saying, hey, this is a wonderful sports car. A performance car is not intended to run like that. But that's exactly the way most of us run and manage our bodies. The do you think I'm wrong? Start observing people's health the next time you walk into a Starbucks, the next time you walk into a grocery store or a movie theater, look at what people are doing to themselves. The place I notice this the most is when I go to Costco. I'm standing there in the line. I'm scanning up and down the aisles, looking at all the overweight people. Then I observe what's in their cart and it all makes perfect sense. I see piles and piles of processed food. In contrast, now my cart is full of fruits and vegetables and a piece of fish. And the checkers frequently seem surprised by how healthy I eat. There are no mysteries here today. I feel like I'm in tune with my health. I'm in tune with my body. It's almost hard to comprehend how integral my health is to my psychology and everything about me. I enjoy my health completely. I enjoy my body completely. I marvel at it because I know it was fearfully and wonderfully made. No different than when I look at my Porsche and I say, wow, what a machine. Our bodies are intended for a lot more performance than most of us have ever understood. I spent a lot of years in a dulled down high performance machine, only going 30 miles an hour when I could have been pulling two GS at 100 miles an hour. I did not respect the high performance racing machine I had been given. Recently I was talking to a friend of mine, Ty Lane, about lean health and about his own journey. Ty is doing the same thing that I am and he was a little frustrated because he had plateaued and really hadn't lost the weight he wanted. I said, Ty, once you figure this out, it's going to be really simple. Here's the best analogy I can give you. Just walk into the grocery store and look around. Most everything you see is packaged. There is one section for the fruits and vegetables and a portion of the meat department where the fish and chicken are. That's the good stuff. The rest of it's all there to undermine you. If you can strip away all the other stuff and focus on where the health value is added, you're going to understand your high performance vehicle like you've never understood it before. Just like a Porsche or a Ferrari, your body was made for high performance from day one. Few people who buy Porsches modify them because they are ready when they come out of the factory. They just need the proper fuel and oil and tires to keep them running. Similarly, your body needs the right food, exercise and rest to keep it in shape. Stop tinkering with it by adding a bunch of accessories, processed food and other junk to it. Start treating it like it's a purebred. Give it what it needs and you too will be ready to race in the rain. I'm going to go off script here for a minute. What I've learned is that when you have a high performance car like I have a high performance performance car, you can feel every part of the car and how it performs. But again, when you treat your body disrespectfully and you put all this stuff into it, you really don't feel your body and the capacity that it has to perform. Now, when I eat things, I know everything that's happening. I actually enjoy the sensation of how the food is nourishing me because I'M in such close, close contact with my body because I'm not putting all the garbage in it that makes me feel terrible half the time of my life. It is really a powerful concept and I would never go back to the old way because I love the fact that I can feel the fine tunedness, the precision engineering of my amazing body. Just like when I'm driving my Porsche. Chapter 15 you don't know your body and when you do you will marvel at the high performance machine you have been given. Chapter 16 the voice of Others in the lean world we talk about Gichi Genbutsu or Go and see. The phrase means that a manager should go to the shop floor to observe and talk to the people working on the line in order to understand the process taking place there. The workers are the ones who have to do the work work and are thus the best source for information on how the process works. So far this book has talked a lot about my own lean health journey, but there are many others who have watched what I have done and are following a similar path. In this chapter we hear about them and their valuable perspective. One of them is Dana Mae, a very close friend of mine. Dana was with me when we flew out of Everest Base Camp that eventful day in October 2020 14. He is 65 years old and if you look at him today you would say he's in pretty good shape. When we were on Mount Everest, though, he weighed about 245 pounds overweight for a 6 foot 5 frame. He also has type 2 diabetes, the consequences of which are potentially very severe. It can cause blindness, limb amputation, erectile dysfunction, dementia, and a number of other serious complex consequences. Like me, he had tried many different approaches to better health and every one of them ended with no long term sustainable habits and definitely not great health. Over the course of several months, Dana watched my transformation but resisted my urgings to follow the same health regime. When we traveled to Costa Rica for surf camp, he saw how I chose not to smoke cigars with him because for the time first first time, I was not interested in doing anything to compromise my health. Dana also saw how my training with Doug had prepared me for success on the surfboard, yet he was still not ready to commit to doing what I was doing. It wasn't until we returned to Thailand in June of 2015 that Dana finally gave in. I think he got so tired of people saying I look good as I strutted around the beach with my shirt off. Then he finally said, damn, I'm gonna do what you're doing Paul. While we were there, Dana decided to change his ways and to follow exactly what I was doing, including eating a plant based diet with 80% fruits and vegetables and 20% fish and chicken. In a short time, Dana started to lose weight and feel a lot better. Today he's doing fantastic. He weighs in now at about 218 and continues continues to drop. He has the resolve to continue being healthy, whereas in the past he failed many times at many different diets. Today we might enjoy a glass of red wine as we sit around and contemplate life, but neither of us are even remotely interested in a cigar. Great health is too addicting and too satisfying. Bad food is no longer tempting. Why is it that temptation gone? The answer is simple. You learn to see waste in your life. Just like I talked about in my first book, Two Second Lean. As soon as you begin to see all the waste you produce every day, you're inspired to eliminate it and improve the quality of your life. With Lean Health, once you see all the foods that are destroying people's health, you are compelled to eliminate it. When you go to a party and you see people drinking themselves under the table and gorging themselves on desserts, or you see their guts hanging out over their belts and you know the health problem they have, you think, of course, look at what they're eating. It's nothing but waste. Once you see bad food for what it is waste, you cannot unsee it. Eliminating waste works by changing his habits. Dana has his diabetes completely under control with no medications, and he has significantly reduced his risk for the aforementioned problems. He has a new lease on life, all because of a simple lean process applied to health. He is emphatic that he feels like he has given up nothing and that his new health journey has done nothing but give back to him. It doesn't matter where you are with your health, you can always get better. Alex and Paloma, who I introduced in chapter one, have also made great strides. When I sat with them on that evening, I decided to write the book. Anyone would look at them and say, they're the picture of health. Still, they saw the benefits of trying a new way of thinking about food and taking care of their bodies. Since then, Alex has lost 14 pounds and Paloma has lost eight. They are feeling the best they've ever felt just by making a few simple changes. Paloma's mother even started the program. She has lost four pounds and has noticed a sharp reduction in the number of migraines she suffers. I was chatting with Alex about his results. And he told me something, something very compelling. In your book Two Second Lean, you wrote that money suffocates creativity. Conversely, if you do not have a lot of money, you must come up with creative solutions to the problems, he said. The constraint of the lean health environment stimulates my creativity. For example, when I walk into a roadside stop where it looks like there aren't any options for healthy eating, I could just give in and buy some junk food. However, because I want to maintain my lean health regime, I find myself being very creative. I asked the clerk behind the counter if they have some fruits or vegetables anywhere, and invariably they are willing to help me. Alex said that some viable solution almost always comes up. At one roadside stop, he recalls, the only thing that was available was lasagna. It had a lot of nice tomato sauce and some meat sauce. So I ordered it and ate all the filling in between the lid layers of the pasta. My colleagues looked at me like I was crazy, but then they realized what I was doing. Look at you, they said. You've lost so much weight. You look great. I looked at them and said, yeah, I know. I'm totally committed. Philippe is one more recent convert to lean health principles. At 35 years old, his trim stature made him look like he was in perfect health. Although in reality he had low energy levels and was in poor physical shape. Compared to how how he feels today, he looks back and realizes he was like a thin zombie. Six months ago, Philippe and his father Tino, came to my company from their native Portugal to visit us for a week of lean learning. In that time, Philippe got to see my eating habits close up. We made green smoothies, had voluminous amounts of fruits and vegetables. He watched my exercise routine. Most importantly, Philippe saw how serious I took my health, health and the health of others around me. It's worth noting that we have guests from around the world visit FastCap and instead of serving them cakes and cookies that most companies provide during coffee breaks, we only serve healthy fruits and nuts and coffees, tea and soda water to drink. At lunchtime, we take our guests to Chipotle for fresh, high quality foods and if they follow my lead, a salad. Philippe returned to Portugal with a new purpose. Six months later, he is running 20 minutes a day and eating fruits and vegetables and healthy smoothies every morning. His cholesterol, which has never been below 205, is now 168. Feeling better than ever, Philippe has more energy and is loving the idea of making small improvements every day to enhance both his company and his health. Another example of this lifestyle success comes from a lean Summit. In 2015, I invited 45 of my lean leadership friends from around the world. For three days we collaborated at my home, my business and on a hike up Winchester Mountain, elevation 6,521ft. On the final day, one of the people in the group was George Churchillis. George is a fellow Greek and a big guy himself. Weighing in at 308 pounds, he's 5 foot 10. George pushed himself to make it up the mountain with us, but it wasn't easy. As he pointed out, everyone else had one body to move up the mountain mountain, but he had the equivalent of two bodies to move. George saw the results I was having and said he wanted to make some changes in his life. I told him he could lose 30 pounds by October easily. We messaged back and forth three or four times a day, sharing pictures of a food we're eating. George ate lots of vegetables and fish and fresh food. He did not struggle with the quality of the food as much as the quantity. And as soon as he got got that under control, he rapidly lost weight. Two months later, George is down to 266 pounds. He is doing great and he's got complete resolve to bring his weight down to 200 pounds. He said to me just the other day, Paul, this gives me a new daily purpose to continuously improve my health. George even managed to put on one of his suits. He had not fit in for five years. Like I said, lean health is 80. Aging in reverse. Even our suits are a testament to that. Once you start down the road towards lean health, you gain a sense of clarity about how to best improve your body. You completely change your attitude to where eating healthy, respecting your body and cherishing your health is the only way to live. Other approaches allow for the occasional soda or a piece of cake or a cheat day. But this is dangerous. There is no no middle ground. The clarity of the lean health approach makes the difference because it gives you a clear disdain for those things that undermine your health. Furthermore, the perception that questionable foods are enjoyable is really false. They bring no lasting satisfaction. You always feel miserable after you eat them. Contrast that to eating a delicious fresh apple or fresh grapes or crisp be carrot sticks. Quality food is a quality experience from start to finish. There are no negative side effects and only a huge upside. As you learn to appreciate these foods, they will actually be much more enjoyable and satisfying than any piece of German chocolate cake or a bowl of ice cream. You want to be great, not just good. When was the last time you went to a concert because there was a good musician playing or a sporting event because you wanted to see a good, good player. We go and watch because we all love what is great, what is remarkable. I have fallen in love with remarkable health and you can too. As I said in the opening chapter, there are no smoke and mirrors here. There are no diet pills, no books to buy. I will post this information online along with my videos for free to anyone who wants it. You do not need to buy any special food. All you need is a heavy dose of common sense about how to take take care of yourself and then you can get moving on your own Lean health journey chapter 16 the one thing be all In. Chapter 17 roadblocks as I finish up this book, I was talking with a few of my friends, Glenn, Texas. We were chatting about the difficulties every one of us was having while trying to change our health patterns and adopt a lean health lifestyle. One challenge for everyone was a tendency to eat in the evening after dinner. I'm struggling with roadblocks, said Glenn. In the evening, I walk into the kitchen and I start grazing. I go into the kitchen, I eat a handful of nuts, added Ty. Next thing I know, I've eaten five handfuls and have blown my calorie intake for the day. George had a similar issue. I bake vegetables and I feel like I have to eat them all, he said. Every one of us, including me, has had roadblocks on our health journey. They are inevitable, but they do not decide our fate. We have the ability to overcome them to do so. One helpful concept from Lean manufacturing is source management, the idea that when you want to attack a problem, you need to ask why at least five times, AKA the five whys to really get to the source of the problem. Richio Shingo, the son of Shigeo Shingo, one of the inventors of Lean, taught me this concept. If you want to change the direction a river moves, you must go to the headwaters, the source, he explained. At the source, you can move a little soil with your foot and change the entire direction of the river. If you go down to the mouth of the river, where it meets the ocean, you must have huge, expensive equipment and it's still going to be very difficult. Put simply, the easiest place to fix the problem is at the source. Let me give you a demonstration of using the five whys to get to the source of a problem. Once upon a time, Bob's car had an oil plug leak that caused an ugly black spot on his driveway, making Bob's wife very unhappy Here are the five whys and the questions Bob could ask to get to the root cause of the problem. Number one why was the oil plug leaking? Because the oil gasket material had failed. Number two why did the oil gasket material fail? Because the material buyer bought cheap gasket material. Number three why did the buyer buy cheap material? Because he was trying to cut cost and save money. Number four why was he trying to cut costs and save money money? Because management told him to reduce costs and bring more profit to the company. Why was management focused on cutting costs and saving money? Because management didn't understand that building in quality is less expensive than cutting cost. Therefore, the real problem, the source if you will, was management and its incorrect focus on cost instead of of quality. Management didn't understand the true cost of a defect over the long run. Focusing on cost at the expense of quality is a short sighted strategy. When you have to fix a defect, it's like treating someone for a cold in the emergency room. The cost is 10 times the cost of doing it right the first time. If you don't believe me, just look at some of the massive recalls that major automakers have have endured in the last few years. Wouldn't it have been much cheaper and much simpler to have built the cars without the defects? This brings us back to my three friends. For them, late night snacking was the roadblock. We need to figure out what the true source of the roadblock was. Here is how I would try to get to the source. 1. Why do we have these nighttime roadblocks? Because we like to eat. 2. 1. Why do we like to eat? Because we have developed habits that support nighttime grazing. 3. Why have we developed these habits? Because eating makes us feel good and it brings us pleasure. 4. Why does eating make us feel good? Because it replaces something that was missing and because we are not satisfied. Why are we not satisfied? Number five. Because our life is not balanced and food fills the void. 6. What is not balanced in our life? Our health. 7. Why is our health not balanced? Because we have developed very strong negative habits that guarantee we will always feel unbalanced and incomplete. I'm going off script here. Like eating bad food in large quantities that will forever make us hungry and always I remember when I was working with a very fit former professional baseball player named Ron. Once when I was in a colleague's office with him, Ron noticed that the colleague had gained a lot of weight. After the meeting he pulled me aside and said something is going on in his life. I remember that comment because it was very insightful. Ron understood that when we start eating excessively, we are replacing something. We are covering up a hole. We are filling a psychological need need with food. We have placed food as a solution to fill the hole we are feeling when the food is causing the hole in the first place. In the case of my own roadblocks, I was running a medium sized company and was stressed out. So eating felt good. I think that is the root cause of why I would overeat. Some mental thing was happening in my head that triggered me to think, hey, I need a little pleasure. Let's go to the kitchen and start grazing. This habit became my mindless pleasure. Managing the source of these roadblocks requires a change in your mental status. If we understand it at that level, I think we have a much better chance of really attacking the issue. This is how I approached the roadblock. First, I understood that for 40 plus years I had developed these bad habits and it would take some time to learn learn new ones. Second, I knew that I could eat 2,400 calories a day. So I started planning dinner. As soon as I woke up, I would think to myself, okay, I'm going to have a nice piece of fish tonight. I'm going to have two or three different vegetables with a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese on top and one glass of red wine. After dinner, I'll eat a bowl of blueberries or strawberries or an apple with cinnamon. Dinner would be about 700 calories. A perfectly satisfying way to to end the evening. Planning out my evening meal was being mindful instead of being mindless. I didn't let my emotions kick in and run roughshod over all the things I was trying to accomplish. I maintained my determination to look at myself in the mirror and imagine the next 55 year old that could be on the COVID of Men's Health magazine. At this point, I would like to make a special appeal to certain people who are are reading this chapter. A lot of my friends are CEOs, presidents of organizations who run multi million dollars or billion dollar companies. And I'm going to appeal directly to you because I know many of you are on a lean health journey and are doing well. We are smart people. We have built and run organizations that are sophisticated and require a modicum of intelligence to manage. Ladies and gentlemen, don't you think it's time we apply a little bit of that intelligence to the way we eat? Don't you think it's time to get the upside benefit of a lean health experience? When I asked myself that question, the only response possible was absolutely, I'm done being stupid. At the same time, I forged an emotional connection with the benefits of being thin and physically fit. I took the emotion causing me to graze at night and I rewired that them so that instead of being connected to the pleasure associated with food, they were tied to the goal of walking in front of the mirror every morning and being happy with the image that was in it. I wanted so badly to be able to walk in front of the mirror and say, I like what I saw. For 54 years, I didn't like what I saw. But those days are over. To create this new emotional pathway, we need to use our brains. We've got to stop living emotionally in the way we eat. We've been doing that and it hasn't worked out so well. In addition, we need to preemptively begin to celebrate what it's going to be like to walk in front of the mirror and see a lean, trim, fit body where the muscle is showing. If we can visualize it in our minds, we can make it happen. One of my epiphany moments happened about six years ago. My wife Leanne had a personal trip trainer named Valerie who would come and work out with her one day. Leanne told me I should have Valerie work out with me one or two days a week. Sure, I thought, why not? The first thing I told Valerie when I met her was, I'd love to see my abs. Oh, that's really easy, she said. We've just got to get the fat off of you. The muscles are there, she said, pointing at my abdomen. The abs are there. They're just covered up by all the fat. It really was that simple. We have covered them up by grazing and overeating in the evening and other times for that matter. All we need to do is uncover them. At the end of the day, use your intelligence to overcome your emotions. Set up a plan to get around your roadblocks. Stop eating emotionally. Take those emotions we all have and connect them to something stronger, like being able to walk in front of the mirror and seeing the potential that Valerie saw. Your abs are there. You just have to uncover them so that someday when you look in the mirror, you'll be able to say, oh, baby, look at those abs. Chapter 17 the one thing use your brain and get to the root issue. Source Management. Chapter 18 lead or follow. At the end of my first book, Two Second Lean, I said that Lean is all about leadership, excellence. Lean requires leaders at the top who really understand it. Once they do, they will value people, respect people, and teach and train people to collaborate and solve problems. In many regards, I still believe that Lean is all about high level leadership. However, the idea that Lean is all about being a leader comes with a big caveat. We need Lean followers more than we need Lean leaders. Let me explain. When I was 17, I had the rare privilege of making guitars for two years with Bob Taylor, the founder of Taylor Guitars. This was in the early days of the company when it was a father fledgling startup far from the celebrated guitar manufacturer it is today. When I started working there, we were making three guitars a day and when I left the number was closer to about 15. Bob was not the world renowned luthier then that he is today, nor was he swimming in the success he has now. But he was an amazing man and I had the privilege of working with him. I paid close attention to everything he did, from tuning a guitar to carving a neck to wiring an electrical box. I watched how he thought and how he solved problems. He became my mentor. For the last 30 years Bob and I have stayed in contact. He recently told me something that changed the way I view Lean. I was in Kazakhstan and I had just finished speaking in front of a group of a thousand people. I told the audience, as I always do, that Bob Taylor was my mentor. On the way back to the hotel, one of the young men driving me asked who Bob's mentor was. When I emailed Bob to ask asked this question, his reply gave me something very profound to think about. Hi Paul, I think of a mentor as someone who is a trusted advisor. Someone you continually go back to to learn from and to problem solve with. Someone who has intimate knowledge of something you're trying to learn. I guess I have an old school mental image of what a mentor is. He said. Maybe the word has a different different meaning nowadays. Maybe we've replaced good example or inspire or most influential with the word mentor now. Maybe we need a new book called the Two Minute Mentor. It's a fast world now. To answer your question, I didn't have a mentor in the way I think of a mentor. I had plenty of two minute mentors. People who said something to me that were game changing sentences in society where always talking about how we need better leaders. I don't agree. We have plenty of good leaders. What we lack is better followers. People don't like to listen these days or they don't like to listen and obey. Bob, we need better followers. His point perfectly captured the key that allowed me to Improve my health. All I needed to do to do was become a better follower. Right now you're probably asking what being a follower has to do with lean health. Shouldn't we be leaders in everything we do? Not at all. All the information we need to have amazing health is right in front of our noses. Very wise people have studied it and put it into forms we can understand. The problem is we are lousy followers. We don't like to listen. We don't want to hear. If we would just stop having what I call genius disease, thinking we know everything and start following some of the great teachers, then we would all have amazing health. For me, following the prescriptions of Tom Roth and Doug Scoggins made all the difference in the world for my health. And it didn't take me long either. As a pilot, I need to go in for a physical every year to make sure I meet certain criteria in order to order to fly my plane. I really, really hate taking the physical. Every year, the doctor would tell me I had high blood pressure. In fact, it was always so high that the doctor would need to turn off the lights and make me lie down to relax for a while. After 15 minutes, he would sneak back into the room, hoping that my blood pressure had dropped to the level where he could pass me. Fortunately, I'd always calm down enough in those 15 minutes with the lights out that I was able to pass my exam and be cleared to fly. In the years since my last exam, everything changed. I no longer fear the physical. When the doctor did my annual checkup, this time he told me he has never seen anybody with this type of health at my age. When he asked what I was doing to maintain my body, I told him how simple it was. 10 minutes of exercise in the morning, a minimum of 10,000 steps during the day, 10 more minutes of exercise in the evening. I eat all fruits and vegetables and fish and chicken, and I don't put anything in my body that's processed. No Splenda, no sugar, no soda, nothing. He looked at me and said, wow, it's so simple, isn't it? Yes, it is simple. If you commit to following the Lean health principles, the improvements to health could include normal blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol. And the list goes on and on. You won't need to take anything, and you will look and feel great. Each one of you listening right now has an opportunity. You can turn off my voice and forget about everything I've said in this book, or you can start now and become a good follower of lean health. And apply this information and head down the path to exceptional, remarkable health. The choice is yours. Chapter 18 the One Thing We Need Good followers. Chapter 19. Discipline or intelligence Frequently throughout my life, people have said to me, paul, you're so disciplined. Every time they said that, I would think to myself, am I really that disciplined? Do I have some special corner on the market on discipline and follow through? The more I thought about it, though, I realized it wasn't discipline that I possessed, it was intelligence. I'm not saying I'm super smart, especially when it comes to academics. I was always a poor student in school, lucky if I could manage a C in any course. I couldn't take a test to save my life, and I was woefully slow in most open discussions. I remember thinking to me myself, wow, Acres, you better get your life together, man, and get with the program. You're pretty dense. I was so bad at reading that I read Dick and Chain hundreds of times so that when I read out loud in the class, I wouldn't be branded the class idiot. The only thing I ever excelled at was wood shop. Still, I was intelligent enough to learn from people with more experience than me. When I was a young man, I observed my father and my investing in real estate. Even though he didn't have a lot of money, we had a few rental properties that provided a small but consistent income stream for our family. This additional income allowed us to live comfortably beyond the salary he made working at General Dynamics. Following my father's example, when I graduated from college, I made it my goal to buy one house for every year we were married. It would have been easy for my wife and I, both college graduates, to do what our friends were doing. Go on nice vacations to Hawaii, buy nice homes, adorn themselves with nice clothes and cars. We did not have a lot of money, but we could have leveraged ourselves and used credit to live a pretty good lifestyle. But that's not the path we took. Instead, my wife and I chose to live frugally in a very rough neighborhood in La Puente, California. I knew that if we could live like that for maybe 10 or 15 years, the rest of our life would be much easier because we had spent the first part of our married life focusing on investing our resources instead of spending them. The plan worked out because we are very successful financially today. Once again, the question is, were we successful through discipline or intelligence? My friends would say it was discipline, but I say it was intelligence. I looked at the facts and I knew I didn't want to struggle when I was in my 30s and 40s and 50s, so I made the intelligent decision to invest a good portion of my income into real estate. And it paid off. Let's fast forward to the year 2000, a very important year for me and my company, FastCap. At the time, FastCap was doing very well. We had won several business awards. We were growing by leaps and bounds. We're generating excellent financial results and we're creating so much buzz around town that the president of the bank which had just given us a very large line of credit, came to visit, visit for a tour. He was blown away by what he saw and said our business was the very best he had ever seen. Shortly after that, I brought in two consultants from Japan to help me manage my inventory. They didn't agree with the President's assessment. On the first day, one of them took a look at my factory and told me bluntly, you're clueless. You don't know what you're doing. You need to learn the Toyota production system. Intrigued, I hired them to teach us the TPS system. Within a couple months, we completely transformed the entire factory, reducing inventory, dramatically shortening our production processes. The amount of waste we eliminated was staggering. After that, I had to see what Toyota was doing. So I went to Japan and visited the Lexus plant in Kishu. I could not believe what I saw. FastCap was not just behind Toyota, it wasn't even on the same planet. The trip made me want what Toyota had. A company that functioned at a high level and did not require enormous amounts of management with happy, fully engaged, long term employees. I wanted to stop struggling to run my company and move from being a babysitter to being a leader. When I got back to the U.S. i fully dedicated myself to implementing the Toyota production system or lean Manufacturing at FastCap. By doing so, we managed to make a great company even better. Today, many people look at me and say, you had so much discipline to follow through with that to bring your company to such a high level that everybody wants to emulate what you're doing. And I asked them, was it really discipline? I am convinced it was not discipline, rather it was intelligence. I knew what I had, I knew what Toyota had and I told my myself I would not settle in my life until I had what Toyota had. It took some time, but FastCap went from being a good company to a great one. And I am now able to focus on being the leader I wanted to be. My intelligence is what got me there once again. Let's fast forward this time to 2014. When I learned how to take care of my body, aka my customer for 54 years, I was incredibly ignorant about how to take care of my body. I was, as I said in an earlier chapter, incredibly stupid. I had little understanding about health and was definitely not enlightened about the relationship between my body and my well being. That changed when I had an epiphany while reading on the beach in Phuket. I realized that if I put high quality food into my body in the right proportions, my body would look fantastic and I would feel fantastic. The insight opened my eyes and allowed me to see every everything around me with much more clarity. I would stand in line at a grocery store or Costco and see obese people everywhere, their carts full of all kinds of processed foods and sugary beverages. When I was attending conferences, I would go to Starbucks and see the correlation between what people were eating and how much they weighed. Finally, I put everything together and it was not a coincidence that what people put into their mouths determined how they looked. For the first time, I understood this at an intellectual level. And my intelligence would shape how I acted. From then on, others have benefited from using their intelligence in this way. My friend Dana is currently on a three week trip in Baja California with 11 of his closest friends from high school. You would think that Dana spending three weeks in Mexico would be like stepping into the lion's den of food and alcohol. You would think he needed a special dose of discipline to stay on his lean health journey during the trip. I would think the same thing too. But you know what? We would all be wrong. Instead of being tempted, Dana told me he is expecting to weigh in at four or five pounds lighter when he gets home. After three weeks of partying with his friends, Dana didn't go on this trip with a fortified amount of discipline. He went on this trip with total enlightenment and intelligence. And I knew knew he would maintain his health regime. At one point in the conversation, he stepped away from his friends for a minute because he didn't want to offend them. And he quietly said to me, paul, I can't believe the crap these people are putting into themselves. They are destroying their lives. They're destroying themselves with what they're eating and drinking. Dana's intelligence produced his strength to resist the temptation. If you think you're going to muster up discipline to carry you to a remarkable health, I've got bad news for you. It's not going to happen. But if you open up your mind to change and trust your intelligence, everything will change permanently. For the future of your health. Chapter 19 the one thing use your intelligence to succeed. Chapter 20 building a lean Team When I get ready to speak in front of thousands of people, the first words that come out of my mouth are I have a true confession. I don't like lean. I love lean. I say that because lean delivers so much joy to people's lives. The act of deliberately and consistently and continually, continually improving every aspect of your life at home, work, and play brings joy to every person I've ever met who understands it and does it. One of the greatest things about Lean is the sense of community that accompanies the people who do it. Within the lean community, there are no excuses, no victims. There are just people who want to make life better for themselves, their community and and the world. I have friends around the world who are supportive of me in every regard and would do anything for me. And all of them are involved with lean. They are all people who love continuous improvement and the joy and collaboration that comes with it. In chapter one of this book, I told a story about Alex and Paloma, two friends and fellow lean practitioners. Now I'm going to end this book by talking about them once again. When we were together in Baden Baden, Germany, visiting the Mercedes Benz plant, the three of us had a conversation. When I revealed to them that I wanted to learn to dance, it was something I had on my bucket list. But I was unsure how to go about it because I was so awkward and clunky. Side note, one of my favorite television programs of all times is Seinfeld's episode called Elaine Dancing. It's hilarious. Elaine suffers from the same problem I had. She just cannot move when she tries to dance. She's very staccato, very undulated, and not smooth and rhythmical at all. I laughed so hard at this episode because it reminds me of me. Paloma looked at me. I'm a Zumba instructor. I think you should do the Zumba. Having seen the complicated Zumba moves before, I thought to myself, wow, that does not sound fun. I looked at Alex. Do you do Zumba? No, he replied in a stern German accent. Paloma rebuked him. Come on, Alex, you have a beautiful wife. She does Zumba. You gotta learn how to do the Zumba. Well, I never really gave it much thought, he admitted. Not wanting to make excuses, I promised I would do it the following day. So the next morning I woke up. I opened my MacBook Pro and searched YouTube for beginning Zumba lessons. It was not long before I found a video that showed me the basic moves soon, this awkward, clunky man who had never danced before in his life, was actually starting to feel the moves. The next day, when Alex and Paloma picked me up, I told them I did the Zumba. They did not believe me. I did. I insisted. I followed a video on the computer and had so much fun. Both were impressed. I had been willing to try and it encouraged me to do it again. You can understand why continuous improvement is so addictive, because when you surround yourself with people who are optimistic and are steeped in positivity and want to help and encourage one another, it's unbelievable what can happen. So much has changed in my life over the last year. I love my health, I love my body. I even feel totally comfortable dancing. I would have never said any of that before. I'm appreciative and grateful that I finally figured out how to take care of my health at a high level. I'm appreciative that this new me inspires other people to reach for excellence and to break the mold. Mold of mediocrity no one is successful on their own and we need each other alongside of us. My life is richer because I'm surrounded by an amazing team of lean people who understand the power of continuous improvement. If you have a group of friends and colleagues dedicated to the idea of improvement, it will push you to continually better yourself. I encourage you to build a lean team, embrace the idea of lean health, and get going on one of the most powerful journeys you will will ever embark on. Speaking of journeys, I was on a recent study mission to Japan when the leader of our group and my good friend Norman Bodak asked the question, what is Japan all about? He said not one of us out of 30 could answer the question correctly. Finally, Norman revealed the answer with one word, quality. He told us that the Japanese learned quality from Edward Deming, a famous American researcher, engineer, author and consultant. On the strength of this quality, Japan became a manufacturing powerhouse. Many of the best brands in the world, Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Komatsu, Kubota are all Japanese companies famous for their quality. Quality speaks volumes. At the end of the day, the goal of lean Health is to build quality into your life. The system helps you fall in love with high quality foods and rejects low quality foods. Combined with exercise, it will consistently bring you exceptional health throughout your entire life. To wrap things up, here is one of my favorite stories of all time. A good friend of mine from Germany has a manufacturing company in the United states and about 15 years ago he wanted to visit China to see the capacity of the factories there, to gauge whether his products could be manufactured, manufactured or sourced there. This was during what people referred to as the wild, wild west days of China. Today, China is one of the most technologically advanced and sophisticated places you'll ever go. But 15 years ago, it was pretty crazy. Figuratively speaking, it was like the early days of the American West. A spirit of opportunity filled the air, but the rules were fluid and always changing. So trying to do business there was survival of the fittest. If you wanted to be successful, you needed help from someone in the inside of China. So my friend set up a two week trip through a Chinese liaison. When he arrived at the airport, his Chinese guide picked him up in what my friend describes as a stolen 300 SEL Mercedes. The guide could not speak English, so for two weeks they communicated only with gestures as they drove all over China to visit different manufacturing plants. While they were traveling, the two of them ate together frequently visiting many things, types of restaurants. The entire trip, the small Chinese guy, about 100 pounds dripping wet, kept taunting my large German friend, 6, 2 and 210 pounds, goading him to eat some of the exotic foods that the Chinese people loved. Each time, my friend resisted. Towards the end of the trip, the two ended up in Beijing. They walked into a restaurant for dinner and the guide motioned towards some silkworms in one of the aquariums. Nearby restaurant entrances often have aquariums full of fish and other small animals from which you choose the specimen you want for dinner. That night he said to my friend, we get this. My friend was very hesitant, but thought, man, I can't be rude the entire trip. So he reluctantly agreed to try them. After ordering the silkworms, they went back to their private dining room. When the food came, my friend picked up his chopsticks, grabbed one of the silkworms and popped them into his mouth, swallowing hard to get it down. Later, he told me it was the most disgusting thing he'd ever tasted in his life. Then he looked over at his guide and said, okay, your turn now. His Chinese host looked back at him and in perfect English said, I don't eat that sh. That sentence pretty much sums up what this book is all about. Are you going to continue to eat the sh t that has made you fat and sloppy or are you going to choose quite quality and have remarkable health? There is really only one choice. You are the one in the driver's seat of your Ferrari. You can make the intelligent decision to cut off the old destructive ways and enjoy exceptional health. The way I did. My hope is that you will use what you have learned in this book to experience fantastic life giving health the rest of your days. Chapter 20 the One Thing Exceptional Health is all about Quality. Okay, so we're in the back of the book now and we have three parts back there a typical day for Paul, the 21 stages of lean Health, and a question and answer section. So let's get started. What exactly does a day look like for me? I wake up at least at 5 o', clock, sometimes earlier. But don't be put off by this. It's not because I'm overly disciplined about getting up very early in the morning. It's just that I'm not a big sleeper and I find myself laying in bed at 3 and 4 thinking about things. So rather than do that too long, I just get up and get going. A simple idea that I learned from the Bob Taylor is early money is better than late money. The idea here is that the earlier you get up, the higher the overall productivity for the day will be. I'm very passionate about replying to all my emails promptly and not making anyone wait to get an answer from me. The first thing I do before I get out of bed is answer all my emails for about 15 or 20 minutes. I use Siri, which types out all of them very quickly and very efficiently. If the answer requires a more detailed response, I always use the audio memo feature and record my V voice so people can hear all the nuances of my reply. My wife sleeps soundly so she can't hear anything I'm doing. She just heard me say that and she says yes, I can hear you. I just ignore you. It's 2:37am when I'm typing this chapter. Next, I get on my workout clothes and head directly to the coffee machine. I love a hot cup of coffee or tea. Next, I open up the fridge, pull out all my vegetables and then the blender and begin making my green green smoothie again. I have a great smoothie video where you can see exactly how I make them. I have four stainless steel Contigo 20 ounce containers that I pour the four smoothies into. I have a small lunch bag that I take to work so I put three of the smoothies in the bag along with some fruits and other foods that I plan on eating during the day. At this point I'm pretty much ready to start my workout and I'll go to the workout room with coffee and smoothie in hand and sip on those periodically. As I'm working out, I turn up the music really loud. I take my iPhone and tell Siri to shuffle my music. I start with some kind of a mellow song as I begin to stretch and do my trunk twist to warm up my body. I'm very reflective during this time, thinking about all the great things and about what I'm getting ready to do for my body. I refer to this as being mindful. I read a book called Mindfulness for Dummies. It is fantastic and I I highly recommend it. I'm not going through the motions. I'm fully aware that I'm doing the most important thing I could ever do for my body. I start off by making sure my form is correct, my arms are flat and level, twisting my core a full 180 degrees. I'm doing this all in front of the mirror. My exercise is for the purpose of allowing my body to operate at the highest level, ensuring a lifetime of high performance and respect expect for my time machine. At home I'm able to work out for between 20 and 30 minutes. I really enjoy this time and I always feel amazing at the end of it. I want to emphasize I am rocking and rolling with the music. I produced a really cool video on my exact workout. I think it's best to watch that. It's only about two minutes long. I sped everything up so you can see exactly what I do. There's also a video on my workout review routine. When I'm traveling I don't generally have exercise equipment in the hotels and I don't rely on the hotels to have adequate gyms. If they do, that's great, but for the most part I do everything in the hotel room. I have my Bose mini link with me and I'm rocking and rolling in the hotel room. Nobody's ever stopped me or knocked on my door and told me to turn it down. After my workout routine I do two to three dance Zumba songs that really get my heart rate up. I I love doing this. After my workout I continue to drink my coffee and smoothie and it takes me about a half an hour to get ready in the morning. Leaving for work around 6 to 6:30am Another cool thing that I've learned from a friend of mine who is a world class athlete is something called Shoga which is stretching in the shower with hot water running on you. I make sure I touch my toes for an extended period of time to make sure that I'm very well stretched out. I'm not sure how how much the hot water helps, but it sure feels good. On the drive to work. I'm generally listening to a book on tape or putting myself in the correct state by listening to some of my favorite music. I'm very fortunate that I have a high performance car and this car always reminds me of the state I want my physical body to be in. At work I'm on my feet. I have no office. I'm always walking around working with people and helping people do their job more effectively because I'm a lean maniac and we have such a deep embedded culture. I will start my day by three essing my work area, making one small improvement. At 7:30. After a half hour of three essing and helping others with their improvements, we have a morning meeting with the entire company. By 8:30am everyone is at work including me. I'm always on my phone answering emails, but throughout the course of the morning I'm always sipping on my smoothie or Coffee. Around 10am it is very common for me to be sitting at a break table eating a an apple or an orange or some other fruit. I log everything I put in my mouth with my fitness pal. I log my four smoothies as 800 calories and I put that in first thing in the morning even though I generally drink them throughout the course of the day. At noon I use my Chipotle app and order a salad and go over and pick it up and eat it at the restaurant. No waiting. It is very efficient. I often bring food to work, stir fry vegetables, fish and chicken. That way I'm eating tons of vegetables vegetables at lunchtime augmented by the protein of the fish or chicken being on my feet all day. By the end of the day I have walked somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 steps just by walking around our facility. We have a fantastic gym in our facility and I run up there throughout the day and do six pull ups. Very difficult to do, but I love the physical challenge. By 3pm I'm at the break table again eating more fruit. By 5pm it it's very common for me to be eating leftover salad or some leftover stir fry. Leanne and I generally head home between 5pm and 6pm we get home. Leanne makes an amazing meal with lots of vegetables and a piece of fish. It is also very common for me to have one glass of red wine with my evening meal. After dinner I usually have two or three handfuls of blueberries or raspberries to round out the day. I try to get in bed sometimes as early as 8pm but generally no later than 10. Leanne and I watch very little TV. It's rare that it's ever even on other than in the morning to catch the news as we get ready As I lay in bed, I always answer all my emails. I make sure that I go to bed completely caught up. I put audible on with the sleep timer for anywhere between a half hour and an hour and listen to an audiobook as I fall asleep. At this time, I always make sure to check my Lean PD app and check off everything I've accomplished that day. If I can hit at least 60 to 70% completion, I feel happy. I'm always working to improve, but that's pretty doggone good for the aggressive habits that I've laid out for myself. It's all pretty simple and straightforward, but it's a great routine that takes excellent care of my health and my mind and I love every second of it. The best part of what I do is I never have a meal or food intake that I'm regretful of and I mean never. Everything I put in my my mouth is perfect. My mind has changed fundamentally about the way I manage my health. It's easy and 100% enjoyable. 21 stages of lean Health as you work your way towards excellent health, these are some of the stages you will go through on your journey. 1. You will try the process for two weeks and it will start to make sense. 2. You'll begin to look at processed foods differently and have a small degree of disdain for them. 3. You'll start to really enjoy eating fruits and vegetables. You're not sure you can sustain a high level of intake, but you try it and you feel better. 4. You continue to lose weight at a reasonable pace of £1 or £2 a week. People begin to make comments about how good you look and start asking you what you're doing. 5. You have a growing and intensified disdain for anything processed flour, sugar, artificial sweeteners, pastries, soda, sugary drinks, or anything else that would rob you of excellent health. 6. You begin to fall in love with fruits and vegetables and chicken and everything that is nutritious and nourishes your body and improves your health. 7. You simultaneously learn the importance of exercise and movement and these two components become simple central to your thinking. 24. 7. 8. The weight comes off steadily, but you begin to hit plateaus. You resolve to understand your body at a deeper level and for the first time you realize you're eating too many calories. You recognize the importance of counting calories and controlling portion sizes. You stop lying to yourself about how much you're eating. 9. Eating smaller portion sizes becomes a habit and you drop to weights you've never, never known before. 10. You see yourself in the mirror and you ask, who the hell is that? 11. You step up your exercise program and begin to work out much more vigorously, doing sit ups and push ups to the point of failure. Your body is becoming more and more toned and you start resembling someone on the front of a health magazine instead of an overweight middle aged person. 12. Nearly every day someone asks you what you're doing to look so fantastic. You resolve to eat fruits and vegetables as your primary food, with chicken and fish as your protein, and you never put a bad thing in your body again. 13. You view your body with great respect because you realize it is vastly superior to the most expensive exotic sports car. You would not do anything to harm it, so you protect and nurture it with the best fuel and maintenance at all times. 14. You walk by fruits and vegetables and you get excited because you know they are going to help you be an exceptional physical condition. You trust they will take care of all your health conditions and rid you of the problems you've had for many years. So you eat them to satisfy your hunger instead of eating processed foods. 15. You look at people who are overweight and you ask yourself how could they do that to themselves? You also wonder how you did it to yourself while missing out on some of the finest things in life. You reflect back on all the wasted years when you abused your body and did not treat it with the proper respect and you resolve never to let that happen again. 16. You look for every opportunity to exercise. You see an elevator as a death machine that keeps you sedentary and adds to your weight problem, so you always take the stairs instead. 17. You consistently make great choices about everything regarding food and exercise. People around you see your actions and want to mimic what you are doing. 18. You stop taking all supplements, medicines, painkillers, sleep medications, because if you take care of of your body properly with both food and exercise, it makes all the necessary ingredients for you to be in exceptional health and sleep well without any additional additives. 19. Your mind is completely changed about food and health and you get great satisfaction from finally discovering what excellence in health is all about. 20. You're never hungry anymore. You eat because you know it's time to nourish your body. The hunger pains are gone forever. This is perhaps one of the craziest realities I've ever experienced. I spent my entire life being hungry and satisfying those urges by filling my mouth with junk that made me more hungry. I cannot emphasize how gratifying it is to fill my stomach with the correct amount of good quality food. 21. You start sharing your success with the world. I produced 12 videos on how I lost weight and achieved essentially exceptional health. I am in better physical shape than when I played football in high school. And of course if you go to our website, all the videos are there and they're very easy to find. Questions and Answers all the following answers are my opinion as someone who is not a medical professional. This is just what has worked for me. No more, no less. What is your feeling about how much water to drink? Hydration is extremely important. The more the better. I drink four 20 ounce smoothies a day for a total of 80 ounces of liquid. After drinking drinking my smoothies, I shake the container with cold water and drink it so I do not waste any of the nutrients packed on the walls of the thermos. This gives me an additional 4 cups of water every day and captures a bunch of nutrients I would otherwise be rinsing down the sink. Remember, I don't like waste. Additionally, I drink four teas or coffees for another 80 ounces of liquid. Beyond that I don't measure how much I drink because I always have a 20 ounce thermos in my hand and I'm hydrated all day long. Consuming fruits with high water content I.e. watermelons, oranges, cantaloupes, papayas, grapes, blueberries, raspberries and mangoes add to my fluid intake as well. My trainer Doug said that if your urine is a dark color you're not hydrating enough. It should be light in color. I use this as a rule of thumb and I find it to be very accurate. What is your opinion about organic versus Non organic? The two greatest scams perpetrated on the American public over the last last 10 years are the front loading washing machine and paying two or three times more for the products because they have the word organic on the box. I am not saying that organic is not better, but that is not the issue when it comes to our health. The real issues are we don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. Organic or not, we put a bunch of processed crap in our body. Organic or not, we put way too many drugs and over the counter medications in our our body that are absolutely not necessary. We need to get off our asses and start moving more. We need to stop blaming other people for our problems and take responsibility for the things we have control over. If we took care of these issues, we'd solve 95% of the health problems people have. Eating only organic foods will not solve your or my problems. Should I buy the Pro version of MyFitnessPal? It is not necessary, but it can be useful. For three years I've used the free version and just ignored the additional calorie allotments that show up when Fitbit sends my exercise statistics to my Fitness Pal. Nonetheless, one week ago I bit the bullet and paid $49 for a year to see how the paid version works. So far, I'm very happy with the decision. I like that I never have to be distracted by those additional calories. I also like a few other features that come with the pro version. At the end of the day, for me to spend $49 a year to have an enhanced and better experience. For me, maintaining my near perfect health is worth it for me. What if my wife doesn't support what I'm doing? You cannot use that as an excuse. Once you see bad food and excessive food for what it is, a direct path to poor health and a poor or not, you will have the resolve to make this work. What should I do if I'm always hungry? If you're always hungry, you're doing something wrong. You should never have hunger pains. Just a gentle nudging that says it's time to eat something. You might be eating foods that are making you hungry. Starches, breads, pastas, refined sugars, artificial sweeteners. You may have also stretched your stomach in the same way those people elongate their earlobes to fit those large oversized hoops in them. To get your stomach back into shape, you're going to need to stop eating four times more than you need to. I recommend using your intelligence and your reasoning to ask yourself and if you really need to eat 4 or 5,000 calories a day. I'm a big guy with a lot of muscle and I perform at the highest level on 2,400 calories a day. In the past, I would easily eat 5 to 6,000 calories a day for no reason other than sheer stupidity. There are a couple strategies that can help you manage your hunger in a better way. You should always carry an apple or a piece of fruit or small, small bag of nuts with you, so the moment you get hungry, you can eat something healthy. Also, you should always have a thermos full of liquid nearby so you can't immediately drink something if you feel hunger pains coming on between meal times. How do you exercise when you travel? Everything for me is so simple and straightforward. I make sure I move 10,000 steps a day by watching my Fitbit or my Apple Watch. I wake up every morning and rock out to Taylor Swift using my Bose Mini Link speakers while I do my 10 minute workout routine. No equipment required. This includes after my main workout, I dance Zumba for two or three songs. It's so much fun. So far I have not had a hotel manager tell me to turn down the music. I'm assuming everyone else loves the upbeat morning I'm providing for them. I do 100 trunk twists, 100 push ups to exhaustion or failure, whichever comes first, and 200 sit ups or crunches to exhaust exhaustion or failure. Are you against modern medicine or modern drugs? I am the biggest proponent of modern medicine and grateful for the amazing medical system. I am planning to live well beyond 100 years old because of the advancements in medical technology. Having said that, it does not mean we should use technology to avoid our responsibility to take care of our bodies. We must get the fundamentals right and then leverage technology and and medical advancements to support a longer and healthier life. Where does your passion come from? It probably comes from the fact that I never felt I was gifted when I discovered life in itself was a gift. I now see the world as positive and moving forward even though it has many problems. My overall view is that compared to what people had a hundred years ago, we are lucky to live in the most amazing of times. Why do you think it took so long to figure your health out? The best answer I could give you is I was uncomfortably content. I was uncomfortable with my health, but not enough to take the necessary action. I did not apply the standard of excellence to my health like I did to everything else in my life. I read many books about health, but none of them made having exceptional health simple and comprehensive. It wasn't until I read Tom Roth's book that I I put it all together. That is the only thoughtful answer I can give you to why it took me 54 years. I promise I was trying to figure it out. As I reflect back on the time I spent developing my company, my leadership and my communication skills, I know that if I would have given equal time to learning how to have exceptional health, I would have discovered this much sooner. Ironically, excellent health would have also improved those other categories significantly, but I just didn't put it all together. How do you do your smoothies when you travel? You have to be creative sometimes. When I went to Costa Rica for a month, I had access to a blender so I was able to maintain my routine. I did take my blender on a different trip, but finding and handling the ingredients was not worth the trouble. So now I load up on vegetables and fruit during the regular meals. If I have someone at a cafe or restaurant for make me a smoothie, I'm very emphatic. Do not add sugar. Many shops and restaurants put sugar and other stuff in the smoothie to make them taste better, but I watch them like a hawk to make sure they don't. If you have your own car and you're on a road trip, it is feasible to make your own smoothies. My good friend Dana, who I talk about a lot in this book, just went on a three week trip to Mexico and he took his blender in a yeti cooler. He said he found all the ingredients easily along the way and was able to maintain his smoothie routine for three weeks straight. In addition, a lot of the guys that he was traveling with enjoyed these and came to love the smoothies as well why do you think lean health works so well for you? To use lean terminology, I looked at the entire value stream of my health, tore up the whole process, threw out everything bad and only left the good stuff. The key to getting healthy has been to get all the following points correct. Maintain a focus on fruits and vegetables. Eat fish and chicken as your primary protein source to stain and remove everything processed and packaged from your diet, as well as sugar and artificial sweeteners. The only exception I can think of would be nuts, sparkling water and cheese, which I don't eat a lot of anymore, but I do enjoy. Move ten 10,000 steps a day. Include a short, intense muscle building workout every day. 100 push ups, 200 crunches, 100 trunk twists. It only takes 10 minutes to do them. Treat your body like it's your customer and treat it with respect because it is the reason you're in business. Why do you see your body as the customer? As a successful businessman and entrepreneur, one of the most important ideas I've ever internalized is the importance of loving your customer. I make things that they want and improve the quality of their lives. They do me a great favor and keep coming back over and over again to buy my products and improve the quality of my life. Your body is your number one customer of all time. Your body needs the services and goods that you provide. Food, shelter, nourishment, intellectual stimulation, spiritual mindfulness. You give it high quality inputs and it returns a high quality life to you. This is the life of compensation. Whatever you put in is exactly what you get out. How do I start? You can start by focusing on the three areas that have the greatest impact. First, increase your intake of fruits and vegetables. Second, eliminate processed foods from your diet. Third, be deliberate about walking 10,000 steps every day. Once you've mastered these three, gradually incorporate other suggestions from the book and you will reach your health goals more quickly than you ever dreamed. What are the three biggest benefits to being in excellent health? This may seem a little crazy, but never feeling bloated and always feeling like every meal is perfect is the first benefit. I never have regret anymore after I eat so much. Mindfulness goes into everything that goes into my mouth. That fueling up is a perfect excuse. Experience every day, perfect taste, perfect nutrition and perfect portions. I am crazy about the idea of getting it right every time. The second is the praise I receive from others everywhere I go. The first thing people say when they see me is wow, you look amazing. When you take someone like me who has always been average and transform them into someone who could model with a shirt off at 5055 years old, it's hard to overstate the boost this gives to my self esteem. I do not know any 50 year olds that look as good as me. Being in such an exclusive group of people makes me feel pretty special. The confidence it gives you is indescribable. The third benefit is seeing the impact my example is having on other people. The idea that my mindfulness is helping other people is deeply inspiring to me. Additional benefits are I don't wear as many clothes. I don't wear a vest or a cop coat to hide my belly. That's a big deal. And the second one is I never get sick. I can't totally explain why it works, but my consecutive days of not catching a cold or the flu is hard to comprehend. What is the Lean Health credo? I am the boss of food. It will never rule me. It will only help me. I love everything about it in its most natural, unprocessed form. I disdain things that are processed and packaged. Quality food in exactly the right amount gives me amazing health and an amazing life. Can you summarize Lean Health in one word? Easy, Ferrari. So there you have it. Lean Health. I've never enjoyed any project more than this project. Nothing has energized me me more than getting phenomenal health. I hope this book helps so many people. That is my goal. That is my heart's desire that other people can feel what I feel as being someone who is in average health and now experiences remarkable, exceptional lean health. You've been listening to Lean Health, written and narrated by Paul a.acres go to 2secondlean.com for all the free Lean resources Paul's been talking about, along with the contact info to have Paul come speak on Lean live. That's the number two secondlean.com this has been Lean Health by Paul A. Akers Copyright Fast Cap Press. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. 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