The Optimal Diet for Entrepreneurs: How To Live Past 100 and Have Abs The Whole Way #TheOnePercent

You know, I think we can, certainly with the biohacking kind of movement, we can get very deep into the data, which is good, but at the expense where the data distracts us from, you know, just doing the foundational things that have created healthy humans for, you know, 20,000 years or so. Like, you know, let's start there.

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Welcome to the 1%. A pursuit to be the best in all areas of life, including money, including relationships, and including health, which is today's topic. Today we're talking about optimizing health for longevity, for physique, for performance. And we're going to cover it all with my personal advisor, Dr. Anthony Balduzzi, and we have had him on the podcast. Previously, when we were going through my blood markers, through my biomarkers, and actually deconstructing them here on the podcast, I didn't like what I found, and so I implemented some of the things that he told me about last year. And we have him back on the podcast to talk about what do we need to be thinking about to living a long time, what do we need to be eating in order to optimize cognitive and physical performance? Especially if you're a high achiever, if you're a hard charger like me, like you, if you're a 1%er, we tend to be drivers. So what do we need to be thinking about, eating, doing in order to make sure we are on this planet and have abs and biceps the entire time we're alive, as Anthony would say. So if you Google Anthony's name, you'll find, well, you'll find perfected physique and you'll find somebody who is advising people like you and me. And he's specifically focused on fathers because he lost his when he was young. And so he focuses on something he calls the Fit Father Project. So I'm obviously his target market. And today we're going through my personal goals and deconstructing what we need to be doing in order to what I need to be doing in order to reverse engineer those goals. Now, a little bit of context for this. I had Anthony on the show last year right after I had sold a company, and I was. I was wrecked. I mean, my body was just toast. I was tired. I was burnt out. I was going through a separation. I was just wrecked. And because of all of that, Anthony's recommendation to me was that cortisol stress was this thing that was driving my poor biomarkers. Everything was really solid except this one thing, which was cortisol. And so I made it a priority in order to get that in check. But as a result, you know, I'm not doing cardio every day. I'm not killing it at work as much as I would like to be doing. I feel like I just don't have the energy to be killing it as much as I would like to be. I've just kind of come back to baseline, but now I'm not optimized the way that I want. So I asked Anthony to come on and be like, hey, look, you work with all these hard chargers in order to get them really dialed in. What am I missing? What do I need to be doing? So we talk about the tests we need to run, the bio tests that need to be in place in order to figure out where you are. And so I have my homework cut out for me of what blood tests I need to get done. We talk about the ideal diet, and we talk about other things that we need to work in. And we also talk about some, well, chemicals that some people are using, and we get his opinion on whether they should be used or not. So we're gonna go into all of this and more with this chat with Dr. Anthony Balduzzi.

Doctor Anthony, thanks for coming back on the show. Appreciate you, buddy.

I'm so happy to be here, Ryan.

Well, I have a fistful of questions for you, because the last time we saw spoke, we were looking at my blood panels, and, you know, I was telling you I was feeling out of balance in a lot of things, and now I'm feeling out of balance in kind of some other ways, and I.

Would really like your help.

But when we spoke last time, we kind of weaved together a story about basically, my blood markers had pointed to cortisol being really out of whack, and it was throwing off my sex hormones. It was throwing on my testosterone, it was throwing off a lot of other areas. And so I made it the priority to get that under control. And I have done that, but I've done that at the expense of, you know, I'm certainly not working out two times a day like I was a year ago. I've put on a little bit extra weight that I don't want. I'm not overweight, but I didn't want to be at, you know, 15, 16% body fat. I might be even over that at this point. So I guess my first question is, I feel like I've addressed the first domino, doctor, but now I feel like I have other things I need to address. I'm sure I'm not the first person who has run into this issue of balance before. So how do you consult someone who is kind of dealing with that? Or can you kind of have it all at the same time like you have, it seems?

Yes. So the ask here is really, how do we get you from this, at this point right now into what you would say a state of higher performance with your boss body? Physically, aesthetically, you want to be hard charging, or at least harder charging than you are right now without sacrificing your health and going down the rabbit hole of the cortisol issues you had before? That's correct, yeah. So it's doable. It's technical, but it's doable. And it comes down to the rituals and the habits that we set up in your life on a daily basis. So where do you want to start? Because it's a big conversation. Do you want to start on the what can we do to change the body aesthetic in a way that doesn't require two a day's kind of stuff? Or do we want to talk more mental, psychological, cognitive, focus based? Because I want to unpack this, but I want to figure out where we should start, because I want to make it directly relatable to you.

So let's set some context here. You share a goal of mine of living well past 100, and so I believe yours is like 500, mine's 138. I feel like such a chump when I talk to you about it. So I want to set the context. We're talking about not just looking great for a bodybuilding show. We're talking about living to be, you know, old and healthy and productive, you know, for a very, very long time. And context number two, if I were to be really honest, Anthony, one of the reasons I want to have you on is I want to look like you, you have the physique. If I could look like anyone that I know, I would probably pick you, which sounds like I'm asking you on a date. You look like I want to look. And yet you're a hard charging entrepreneur. So that's context number two. The third piece to kind of set the frame here is I don't have my baseline numbers at this point. I just know how I feel. So I'm curious to get your perspective on. For both myself and for those who will listen to this, what tests should I get done in order to set a baseline of where we are? And then the next question I'm going to have is you have looked at every diet under the sun and you've kind of weaved together what I think is a sensible plan. So I want to give you free reign to give me a diet within the parameters that we set in terms of longevity, aesthetics, performance.

Love it.

Okay, Perfect.

Perfect. Based on those, the context you just provided, we have to start with longevity. And the reason is there are so many things you can do to make your body look a certain way that are not compatible with living a long time. Right. You know, I don't necessarily need to go into those things, but, you know, if you look at the competitive professional bodybuilding world, they do a lot of things to look a certain way and they're dying in their 50s and 60s. So to approach this conversation, we have to start with the habits that are going to help us live a long time and then modify that approach so it can also give us an aesthetic and a peak performance in the short run that we also want. So let's start talking longevity. First off, when it comes to longevity, the kicker is that it has a big genetic component. And what I mean by that is there are some people that have genes positively associated with longevity who will live long in spite of themselves. These are those 110-year-old smokers and drinkers and whatnot. Right. I mean, they exist and they'll just live long. They will not die no matter what they do. And so first thing we need to look at when it comes to longevity question and setting reasonable parameters is what does our general family history look like? So for you, Ryan, do you have, do have people in your family living well above, you know, 90, 95? Do you have any of that genetics in your family?

I've got so on one side, yes. On another side, no. So on my maternal side, I have grandparents who are still, they're in their upper 80s, in great health with, you know, they're slowing down, but they're in great mental health. They golf, they vacation, they're in their great health. And then. And then on my paternal side, I had a both passive cancer at 85 or younger. Okay, on one side I've got great genes and like no disease, everything's great. And then on the other side, not so much perfect.

And I think for everyone listening too, this is the first question that I want you to start reflecting on and thinking is what does the family tree generally look like? Because it's almost an opportunity for us, although they live different lives than we're living right now, to kind of look into the future, the crystal ball, on what kind of things we may be predisposed to. And this is just a rough way to look at it. So let's say, for example, that you have in your family history some cancer and some heart disease and maybe some like pre diabetes kind of things we can know, knowing these things are predispositions in the family, or at least are there in the family history, that these are the things we need to hedge against in the short term to make sure that we're going to help you live a long time. Because ultimately living a long time means not dying. And if we can know the things that cause your family in particular to die early, then we can actually develop tailored, specific strategies. So, for example, if we have picture of someone, family history that has a lot of Alzheimer's, dementia kind of stuff, a lot of pre diabetes diabetes, we know there's some issue with sugar regulation. So in the short term, we can get you on a diet that is really going to help control your blood sugar, your insulin levels, keep you very insulin sensitive. And hey, that might be a lower carb approach than I might recommend for a different person who doesn't have those kind of issues. So this is something that I don't think enough people talk about is look in the crystal ball at the family tree. What kind of things are we predisposed to and what can we do in the short term to create a strategy? Now, I wanted to bring up the genetics component because a lot of the things we're going to talk about in this podcast today are going to be environment and habits based. But genetics do play a big role and some people do have better genetics for longevity than others. But again, we're going to tailor to the things that we're predisposed to. The next thing is that our bodies essentially, as we're going throughout life, it's like a process of rusting, like, almost like A car rusts. If you sit a car outside for a long time, it rusts. Just oxidative stress, weather, you know, scratches, nicks and dings. That's essentially what our body is. It's a vehicle that we get to carry with throughout our lives, and we get injuries. You know, we get those dings and scratches, and we rust from stress, from poor diet and poor fuel selection. We're putting the wrong things in the tank and, you know, all sorts of different variables. So if we want to get a car looking like a, you know, let's say some kind of classic 1930s car that still looks amazing today, why does it look amazing? Well, we've maximized the repair mechanisms on that vehicle. We've refurbished it, we've changed things out. It got regular maintenance and maybe even got an upgrade of components. So I give this analogy because essentially, when we want to look at the picture of living a long time, we want to do two things. One, we want to maximize the amount of ongoing repair that we're doing on a regular basis. And this will come into the kind of habits that we can implement into your life. We want to maximize the repair, and we want to minimize the damage. So the things that damage us are the things that we probably know are not good for us. The smoking, the drinking, the not sleeping, way too many stimulants as entrepreneurs. So that's the damage side. And I think all of us have a fair internal sense on how hard we're pushing the gas pedal and how much damage we're kind of accruing. And this is you. If you feel like you have trouble getting out of bed, you're experiencing brain fog, you feel like you need coffee to stay focused, you're having irregular sleep patterns. This is a good indication that your body's accumulating damage. And then on the repair side of things, it's like our body has this own internal mechanism for healing and compensating and creating this homeostasis effect that we need to give it everything it needs in terms of tools with the nutrition, with sleep and the recovery, and with some regular habits like extended fasts to essentially allow our bodies to heal and upregulate those repair mechanisms in the short term. You okay if I continue to unpack this?

Yeah. I mean, I got a couple questions about this, about where you're heading, but I'm starting to put some pieces together, so keep going and then bring back some questions.

Okay.

Yeah. So one of the best things that I think entrepreneurs can do, because I want to bring this Totally practical, because I know we have a lot to cover in a short amount of time, is to create habits that increase repair mechanisms on a daily and weekly basis. And so I think the two best things, based on the research that you can possibly do to live longer, is one, do some regular intermittent fasting. And what fasting is, is essentially a structured, scheduled break from eating. And these fasts are wildly effective. I mean, we have from the research now that shows that a three day water fast, which is pretty intense if you've never done one before, but just hear me out here, can completely reset the immune system. You get a replacement of pretty much every immune cell in your body over a three day fast. They're now using this in research studies to treat cancer, you know, which is a lot of like IMM system based disorders. And now they know you can fast people with cancer. And the body increases its natural killer cell activity and clears out old damaged proteins. And it essentially gives your vehicle a chance to catch up with the damage it's accrued and clean it all out. So regular fasting, and the second thing is actually sauna is another huge thing that a lot of entrepreneurs and hard charging people need to do on a regular basis to promote longevity. So, so our body is always adapting to the stress that's put upon us. And just like sauna is a great example of heat stress, when we stress our bodies with this heat in a way that's more radical than we normally are exposed to, our body produces these things called heat shock proteins. And these heat shock proteins go in and they actually repair damaged DNA damaged proteins. And so ultimately a lot of these disease processes happen because we get DNA damage that then just replicates and causes things like cancer and whatnot. So if we can repair damaged proteins before they become problematic with things like sauna for heat shock proteins, exercise also increases heat shock proteins. And then things like fasting where we can actually clear out the cellular junk. Now we have at least a practical, simple short term strategy that we can implement today that will help us live longer into the future. So I'll pause here because I know you do have some questions on this and then we can keep on unraveling.

Yeah, that was beautiful. I remember one of the things you said when we first met was that you can get the same benefit from a daily intermittent fast or a once a week 24 hour fast. And if that's the case, if you still stand by that, I for whatever reason just have never been able to follow that eight hour eating window in terms of intermittent Fasting, I just don't feel like it gels well with me. But I can do a 24 hour fast once a week without much trouble at all. So I guess first question is, do you stand by that thesis completely?

For the purposes, the longer the fast goes, the deeper you get into this intentionally catabolic state where you're breaking down some of these bad proteins for so for longevity, these 24 hour fasts once a week is a phenomenal habit. I mean, it's kind of like just doing a little bit of spring cleaning every single week. Now, from a body composition standpoint, there is benefit to controlling your calories by having a short structured eating window every single day. But the problem with the whole intermittent fasting conversation right now is that people are making it out to be the panacea. It's the diet that everyone has to follow. And it's just not true. If you are a breakfast person or you work out in the mornings, or you have xyz, or you just don't like compressing your eating window because you can't eat that much damn food in eight hours, then there's so many reasons why you shouldn't necessarily do that. But I think everyone can do a dinner to dinner green tea fast. And no, this will not chew through your muscle. No, you will not be starving and exhausted all the time. You know, you get some green tea, which has a light amount of caffeine with a lot of other great plant compounds, and you fast dinner to dinner is one of the, probably the best things that you could possibly do from a longevity perspective. Like starting today. And for entrepreneurs, this is something you can do on your busiest days when you're just cranking and you don't need, you don't want to necessarily think about food. You'll find that you're very focused, especially with the green tea. So that's definitely a habit that I love.

Yeah, I tend to have no problem with it. And sometimes I'll even go 36 hours. I'll just skip the second dinner just to kind of extend it. But a question about fasting versus ketosis. I know that a lot of the intermittent fasting crowd is also really bullish on ketosis. I've experimented with, you know, a ketogenic diet. I mean, I've tried all diets, I think at this point. And I'm just curious, is there a. I know ketosis can be kind of a fasting mimicking diet. So do you get the same benefits or would you still recommend if somebody is eating a ketogenic diet that they still work in regular fasts.

Yeah. So there's lots of signals besides just ketone production that would benefit somebody to do fasting, even if they eat an incredibly low carb ketogenic diet, because ultimately it's not just the fact that there's carbohydrates are not in the diet that triggers these benefits of fasting. It has to do with some ATP signaling and just energy in general. So you're getting plenty of ATP and energy from a ketogenic diet. You're just getting it exclusively from fats. And a lot of these great triggers in fasting happen because your body is in an energy deprived state. So if you have 100 grams of fat throughout the day eating a ketogenic diet, that's still a good amount of energy. Your body has learned and adapted to use all that energy in the form of converting it to ketone bodies and using that to fuel the brain. Let me talk about the keto diet because I think it's important and it's definitely a huge topic right now. So ketosis in itself is a survival adaptation that our bodies developed because our ancient ancestors didn't always have access to tubers and berries and carbohydrates. Our brain does enjoy running off carbohydrates and we don't have carbs. Our liver compensates by creating these things called ketone bodies from fat. And that can fuel the brain, it can fuel activity and some people feel really good on it. Ketogenic diets in themselves can be very healing for people who have messed up digestive tracts and are feeling like they're totally out of balance, because it can be a great reset. You get rid of a lot of the carb containing foods that, that cause a lot of problems for people and then you can reset the system. The problem is that ketogenic diets, one, are very hard to stick to long term, two, they can negatively impact high intensity exercise performance. So the kind of exercise I would recommend for you, Ryan, you know, kind of like strength training, doesn't work quite as well on a ketogenic diet as it would including some carbohydrates in your diet. And number three, I would say is we don't even know the long term effects of ketogenic diets on our health health yet. There are certain people that should be on them long term. Some of the early research with people with epilepsy and seizure disorders, ketogenic diets help a ton. But we also are seeing some new research that having a ketogenic diet does negatively impact the gut microbiome and could cause some changes to the probiotics in the digestive tract, which could have problems down the road. So for me, the reason I like something like intermittent fasting or even just cycling your carbohydrates throughout the week week is that we are producing ketone bodies all the time. We're not in full blown ketosis and we have what I call metabolic flexibility. So what I want for you Ryan, is your body to have the ability to burn all sorts of different fuel sources, ketones for sure, while you're fasting, carbohydrates while you're exercising, burning fat at rest. And I'd like to create a system that has that kind of flexibility versus like I'm artificially going to give my body one fuel source, primarily fat, and just see how it does. And so it ends up being something that, that can work for some people in the short term, not a long term play in my opinion.

Okay, so my plan at this point that I wanted to run by you was to maintain a lower carb diet under 100 grams a day, coming from mostly vegetables and then working in higher carb days on a really heavy leg day or a deadlift day to refeed glycogen stores and to burn multiple fuel sources. So that's what I had planned to do. So you sign off on that?

I sign off on that completely. And I would intentionally time those carbohydrates on a daily and weekly basis around your workouts exactly as you just said. So what time do you typically exercise? Because this will be useful for people who are thinking about their schedules as listening. What time do you exercise?

If I'm doing one a days, then I'm either working out in the morning at 8am or I'm working out after work at like 4:30pm If I'm doing 2 a days, then I'll usually do cardio in the morning and weights at like 430 mm.

So let's just look at that two a day scenario or at least that evening kind of workout model. I would probably backload a good percentage of your carbs throughout the day into that last meal, you know, that post exercise dinner meal that comes sometime around 6:30 for you or whatever time that is. You know, if you're getting around, let's just say 100 grams of carbs a day, I would allocate at least 50 of those, you know, throughout for the dinner time and I would spread the other 50 if you will, just nickeling and diming your way through like a breakfast, a lunch and a snack. So that might be, you know, just basically trace carbohydrates in those meals and then you can backload the carbs there and vice versa. You know, you also, as entrepreneurs, we want to set up these schedules so they're behaviorally sound around the kind of times where we might have events or parties or gatherings or people over. So for example, it could be a great day for you if, you know, on Fridays and Saturdays you typically have a bigger meal with your family or your friends, or you're speaking at an event and there's a dinner afterward to do some kind of heavy training earlier in that day, like legs to really deplete the glycogen source and then have those carbs be loaded heavier on the Friday, Saturday kind of thing that seems to work best for most people from a behavioral perspective is to have those higher carb days around the weekends when there typically is more food around. Right. So it might seem like a small point, but it's important to know because then at this point when you can understand which days are going to be high carb, why they're going to be higher carb, then you have a proactive schedule instead of one that's reactive. Right. And I think that's a big thing when it comes to this health stuff.

So to summarize what you're saying, our foundation is going to be longevity. And in order to do that, the things that need to be in place are our regular cleanup. And cleanup is going to come in the form of extended fasts when we get more autophagy and we are able to clean up damaged proteins. It's going to come from sauna and exercise, which allow us to do the same, and from just a functional way of eating long term, at least for me, I'm going to go mostly low carb with some rotating higher carb days, specifically around schedule and around the heavier lift days when I'm doing legs or deadlift or something like that.

Perfectly summarized. And I would say too is, you know, with this kind of big picture model of maximizing repair and minimizing damage. A lot of the damage that people do to their bodies comes from the food itself. Right. So we talked about carbohydrate amounts a little bit, but this is also assuming that we're eating a non processed whole foods based lower on the food chain type diet that just has great foods that are not inflaming us, that aren't high in sugar, et cetera. And so any good diet if it's on the spectrum of like a vegan, you know, super high carb, low fat diet or a paleo keto kind of like lower carb diet is still the, if the diet works, it's going to have these high quality foods in it. So assuming that we all know the good foods and maybe that isn't an assumption, maybe we should explore that some more. It's up to you. But yes, this is a great summary. Up to this point.

I get a lot of questions about what I think of some of Tony Robbins investment strategies, especially the ones where he talks about assets that can go up in value over time, but don't participate in any downside. I don't agree with all of Tony's investment recommendations, but I do participate in investing in insurance, which is one of the things that he's describing in that strategy. Now, I want to give you a warning. When I went into that investment strategy, I got schmoozed over by a slick salesman.

And I wish that I had used.

A sophisticated firm that was actually dedicated to that. That's why I had wealthpoint on the podcast recently. And I'd encourage you to go listen to that episode about infinite banking. Now, infinite banking isn't the proper term to describe what they do. They actually use a modified version, which is called capital warehousing. But what it basically allows you to do is park cash like you would put it into a bank, participate in the growth of the market without participating in any downside, and you still get access to that capital so that you can put it into other investments. So, so if you've got money sitting on the sidelines, you might want to use capital warehousing as part of your strategy. So you can go over to gowealthpoint.com freedom to learn how the strategy works, or you can just listen to the episode that we had with Sam Prentice from wealthpoint. Here on the podcast. It's called how the Rich Use Infinite Banking for Tax Free Wealth.

At the top of the call, we're talking about family history. And I mentioned that on one side of my family I had really great genes, and on the other side, not so much. And what's interesting now, even on my not so good genes side, is my father is in, he's in his mid-60s and he's in phenomenal shape. I mean, just phenomenal shape. I hope I age like my father did. But his parents ate actually, you know, bacon and eggs for breakfast, a lower carb approach. And both of them died on the younger side, whereas on My mom's side to this day. They eat chocolate and they eat cupcakes and they eat all kinds of sugar. And they're 90 and happy and married for 70 years. And they're just amazing people. So I guess what I'm asking is, are there tests that I can have done? Is there something that I'm missing? Is there a way that we can establish baseline on genetics to find out what's really good for me, to make sure this approach that we're setting out together is the right one? Yeah.

Well, I think certainly we can start to go down the rabbit hole if we want of some of the Nutrigenomics kind of testing, like getting your 23andMe and then getting that data processed. And we can start to look at these things called SNPs, which we talked about a little bit before, I believe, in our previous conversation, which are these single nucleotide polymorphisms, these little flavors of different genes that make them behave in certain ways. So a good example of understanding SNPs is a SNP for one of our stress hormones that is called comt. So I don't know if you've ever heard of the concept that there are people who are more warriors, who thrive in high stress battle conditions versus warriors, people who are generally, they can't handle as much stress and they're a little more reserved. And so people who are warriors, they tend to get into athletics, they join the military, and they have a gene, a COM T gene, that clears out some of these neurotransmitters, dopamine in particular, very quickly. And worriers have a slower gene. And they essentially aren't as stimulated by dopamine. And they have enough going around the synapse that they don't go and stimulate themselves with crazy activities. I imagine a lot of entrepreneurs probably sit a little more on the hybrid, if not warrior side of things, because it's a high stress, high pressure environment a lot of the time. My point of bringing that up is these SNPs are things that we can test with a 23andMe genetic tests. And there are certain SNPs that relate to diseases like heart disease. There are certain SNPs that relate to how well your body can process fats and how that might impact something like your colon cancer risk. So you can certainly go down nutrigenomic testing. Another thing that I think would be useful to do would be to do one of these more advanced gut microbiome tests. A cool one out there right now is called Viome which essentially. Have you done biome?

I haven't.

I've been kind of skeptical of it to be honest with you, just because I find the founders to be kind of hype men more than they are helpful. But that's just been my own personal bias. So that's the only reason why I haven't taken it.

So for those who don't know, viome is a gut microbiome test where they essentially sample your probiotics and the strain diversity, the different kinds of gut bacteria and fungi that are living in your digestive tract. And we know how important those are for our health and we're learning more, I should say. And viome basically tells you what's your breakdown? What kind of bacteria do you have? How does that compare to healthy people and how we might modify your diet it so that you can have a healthy gut flora. But quite frankly I believe, and I'm much more of a fan of just the baseline foundational habits over saying that we need to get you this super advanced testing and it's really going to move the needle for you. What I would say is that the regular blood work that you're doing for you, your complete blood count, your cbc, your cmp, your hormone panels, and I would probably also get some more advanced, advanced lipid panel to look at heart disease because if we want to live for a long time, we know that that kills like over 50% of people die from heart disease. Right. So want to keep your heart healthy with some of these more advanced markers. And so that's things looking like fractionated LDL and vldl, like particle size. Did you get that done last time I looked at your blood work?

Yeah, I did. And that was the one part on the test that you were like smashed it doing great. That was the one part that I had really dialed in. My most recent panel was a basic lipid panel and it wasn't as great. So it's something that I need to go revisit. But overall that it's probably for me personally the thing that I have the easiest time maintaining. When you say a complete blood count, hormone panel, advanced lipid panel. Are these all separate tests or is there.

Yeah, they are. Like you'll, you'll see in your doctor say a CBC and what that's going to do is look at your red blood cells, your white blood cells and some other fractions of those. And so that's really going to look at. Okay, how much oxygen is your blood carrying, what's your hematocrit, how many Blood cells, red blood cells, do you have, do you have anemia, any kind of bleeding disorder or low red blood cell counts, or is your white blood cells, are they super high from an infection? So this is a very simple test that any doctor can run that essentially says, what's your blood looking like? What are those kind of cells? A CMP is a comprehensive metabolic panel. And that's going to look at a lot of your functioning tests for your liver, liver for your kidneys, for your electrolyte balance. And these are just like the baseline tests that when you get standard blood work, you're getting a CBC and a cmp. And then we have the add on widgets, the things that you might want to check out, which might be a very comprehensive thyroid panel. And this is, we looked at yours and you even had some tests that I would have liked to have seen, you know, looking at your total thyroid, your free thyroid, then you have probably your male or female hormone panels that you can tack on things looking at like testosterone, free testosterone, estrogen in. So it's interesting because we're kind of in a divide right now in the medical community because right now standard of care doesn't necessarily order all these tests as baseline, but there are so many people that want deeper dive into the info. So we have this whole naturopathic or functional medicine movement now. That's where people are getting a lot more advanced testing and they're paying out of pocket for it, which is assuming what you did. Is that correct?

I don't remember. I think I got it. Just, I. I don't remember what the full spectrum was, but I think it had some missing pieces that we wanted to find.

To get back to what I think is a little more of the useful stuff for most people. Good idea to get your hormone panel tested, to get one of those, the lipid panel, the advanced lipid panel once per year and get a CBC and a cmp. And then from there, this is just like a guard post to check on a yearly basis. You know, it comes down to just doing the basic foundational habits and living and walking the walk. You know, I think we can, certainly with the biohacking kind of movement, we can get very deep into the data, which is good, but at the expense where the data distracts us from just doing the foundational things that have created healthy humans for 20,000 years or so. Like, let's start there. In my opinion.

Okay, so you mentioned 23 and me and Viome as optional tests. They're not really necessary if we want to Go down those rabbit holes. We could, but really what's important is that we do the baseline sleep diet. Eating whole foods, that's going to be much more important. As far as baselines, you mentioned complete blood count, cbc, complete hormone panel, an advanced lipid panel, a comprehensive metabolic panel, and a comprehensive thyroid panel. I'm assuming I can get these from any functional doctor, correct?

Any functional doctor, 100%. Yeah. I mean, that'd be a very strong place to start.

Okay, great. I will go ahead and have those done. Next question from me. I'm just gonna read what I wrote down. Specifically a doctor, I want to look like you. What should I focus on?

So, funny question. Okay, so here's the deal. To achieve the look, which we'll define as, you know, having an appreciable but maintainable amount of muscle while also having a lean body and one that doesn't, like, drive me crazy with being on a regimen. What you're ultimately going to have to focus on is lifting heavy weights. And we can define heavy in a little bit, probably four times per week, knowing your exact macronutrient breakdown as target numbers throughout the week. And, and 90% of it ultimately is diet after you've gotten the strength training. So what I would do for you is specifically set you up on some kind of lifting plan where you're probably doing full body lifting or upper lower training. Split four times per week in the gym. Those sessions take around 60 to 90 minutes with warmups, kind of like out the door. And you have a structured training plan where you're not just going in and making stuff up, where you have have progression and you're getting the right amount of volume. I mean, there's certainly a science to building muscle. And then outside that, we know what your general macronutrient targets are. So for you, if you're right now at, let's just say 15% body fat, we're going to probably want to get you closer to 10 as quickly as we can. So I would have you be training probably now that I'm kind of talking through it a little more, three times per week, full body, with two times per week of some metabolic conditioning, like high intensity interval training kind of stuff. And we would pin down your exact protein, carb and fat numbers and distribute those throughout three to four meals per day, whatever your meal timing schedule is. So for you, you said you were roughly around 100 grams of carbohydrates. I'd imagine we'd probably have you around 90 to 100 grams of fat and probably around 150 to 170 grams of protein.

Yeah, just about nailed it.

Yeah, I guessed and made that up. Right, okay.

Yeah, correct.

Yeah, those are roughly your numbers. And the macronutrients are super important. And I think for anyone out there who does not at this point have an idea of how much fuel their vehicle needs, like, we gotta start there and we gotta basically figure out we don't have to track this to the gram every day, but we have to have a target that we can aim at. And so once we know these numbers for you, it's like, okay, well, you typically get up at this time, you enjoy breakfast at, let's say, eight. You have lunch at noon, you like a little snack at three before you go work out, then you have dinner with the family at 6. So when we have those kind of times, those signposts of when we typically eat, then we distribute those calories, those protein, carbs and fats throughout those meals in a way that's simple. So as it breaks down for most entrepreneurs, what I typically recommend, you know, regardless if you're doing intermittent fasting or not, is that first meal of the day ends up being a liquid meal, some kind of shake that has a recipe that's dialed in to hit your specific numbers. So, Ryan, for you, your morning shake would probably be around 30 grams of fat, fat probably 35 to 40 grams of protein and around 15 grams of carbs. And so we got to develop a shake that is super easy for you to do. It's turnkey, doesn't require decision or much time, and it makes you feel great. So I would do that, and quite frankly, I would probably make that first meal of the day a plant based meal, use a plant based protein powder for that particular thing and just do a full plant based meal. And there are some reasons for that. I think it's a good solid habit for lunch for you. It ends up being something like greens. Plus protein is probably what you're looking at based on your numbers. And so we need to think about what's a way for you to conveniently do that every single day. And the answer ultimately comes down to you've probably done some kind of meal prep or you use some kind of meal service and you have green vegetables prepped in bulk or salad mix kind of lying around. So it's really simple and turnkey. I'd like you to develop a snack that you know, you absolutely love, that is non perishable and you can take with you while you travel because I imagine, you know, you Travel a lot for your own events, speaking at other other people's events, doing business deals. You need something that is an anchor between your routine at home and your routine when you're away. And the snack should ideally be the same in both instances because it creates a consistency with your routine no matter what your location. And then your dinner could be a little more variable. And that's where I want to backload a little more of your carbs and your calories because it gives you more wiggle room to eat a wider variety of foods. You can go out to dinner and you know, you have a budget of let's say 7, 800 calories, you can definitely have a nice meal there. You don't have to be worrying about like having a carrot and like a piece of grilled calamari. So that's like the. I think some of the key principles that I want people to tease out is one, we got to know your numbers. You know your numbers, which is good. I mean your macronutrients. Two, we got to decide on meal timing. And you want to decide on that in a way that fits and integrates with your work schedule in a very seamless way. Typically on times you want to be productive, liquid meals are better. They're easier to digest. Rest require far less blood flow so your brain can feel a little more alert. And three, we want to distribute those calories across those meals. We want to backload calories whenever possible after exercise. With the exception of if you are a morning workout person, I still recommend you do a shake and you don't have a huge meal in the morning that will slow you down. And then you need to be strength training for you probably three times a week, full body and two times a week of this more metabolic conditioning kind of work. And the nice thing about ultimately is at that point with that in place, it ends up becoming math, tweaking numbers, you know, making sure you're performing on your workouts. And it's pretty much inevitable that you get to around a 10% figure. And then the nice thing is once you get there, nutrition keeps you there for the most part. You know, it's like you can get to a point where for most guys, they can maintain in the 10 to like 13% body fat range. When they have the dialed in plan, they can maintain that with pretty good effort. When you get below 10%, you want to get quote, unquote, very, very ripped. That's when it requires a lot more finagling with the plan. And you have to make some sacrifices.

Yeah, so I'm going to ask you about that in a second. But just to recap, you mentioned a plant based breakfast first thing in the morning. Plant based breakfast, which kind of threw me because I think that basically leads me down. The option of maybe a bulletproof coffee with a plant based protein or kind of an avocado based smoothie with some plant based protein.

Did I hear you?

Both are great options. Yes, you did. Both are great options. And I'm not against throwing a whole egg or a whole pasture raised egg for some, a good source of choline in a little cholesterol in that morning shake as well. But for most people I want to have a low carb plant based breakfast. So we're not doing too, too, too many eggs, like five, six eggs. We're not necessarily doing a bunch of bacon or animal meats or stuff like that. It's just a good habit because most of the animal products that people do have for breakfast are highly processed. People aren't like getting a grilled salmon fillet out there for breakfast typically. Right. It's processed typically nitrite heavy meats and stuff like that. So it's best to just avoid that. The bulletproof coffee, avocado based smoothie with a super greens powder or some plant based protein powder. I would add some chia seeds or some hemp seeds in there, some cacao. These are just some good plant based sources of fiber and protein and they're easy to digest. That's one of my big key points here is we don't want hard to digest foods. There's a lot of arguments to be made that a super healthy grass fed steak can be beneficial for your health. Certainly the paleo and maybe some keto people might make that argument, but I would say say definitely not first thing in the morning when we have to, we're basically challenging the body to break down some tough proteins that we didn't chew well enough and then it creates a cascade of low energy later in the day. Got it.

Okay. So my typical smoothie would be like an avocado, like half an avocado with some cacao hemp seed. I would usually use whey, but I could switch like a vanilla protein powder, maybe some super greens and then like a macadamia nut milk or a flavor flax milk.

Absolutely beautiful. One reason against the whey in this particular instance, and I love whey, it's a great protein source, is whey is super, super high in leucine, which is the specific amino acid that triggers muscle protein synthesis. So It's a great amino acid and we definitely want to have plenty of leucine in our diet throughout the day for the purposes of muscle building and after exercise. But whey also does stimulate your insulin levels quite high, high relative to other proteins. And it's because it has leucine in it, it can spike your insulin levels pretty well. And that's why a plant based protein powder that's lower in leucine might be a better choice for keeping your blood sugar stable. I mean, can we really validate that claim? Like, absolutely not. Because the whey is in there in concert with the avocado, the macadamia nut oil, the chia seeds. So what's the net effect? Is it going to be really that much different not having the whey? I don't know, I can't tell you. But from an on paper standpoint, a plant based protein powder might be a better choice in the morning. Whey is definitely something I love post exercise.

Okay, great. So I feel like I've got a good starter plan here, at least in terms of structuring my macronutrients, structuring the meal timing, structuring my workouts. The one thing I have no problem doing is getting to the gym. Like, if I don't go to the gym in a day, it's a weird day. So if I'm not there six days a week, it's a weird week. So I have that dialed in. It's all the other pieces that I need to have optimizing. There's one question I wanted to go to next and I feel weird talking about it publicly, but like, in terms of things like, well, chemicals and biohacks we might call them, there's so much noise about like, well, everything from intermittent fasting to taking exogenous testosterone to SARMs, something I've experimented with, to prescription drugs. I guess what I'm asking is like, A, are any of them particularly helpful? And B, are any of them as harmful as some people say? And three, are they necessary for us to talk about until everything else is dialed in? I know that's a meaty question.

It is. So let's dive into two of those things. We're kind of talking about your goals of having a particular body aesthetic. So we'll talk about exogenous hormones, hormones and SARMs first. Is that cool?

Sure.

Exogenous hormones, we're going to call them what they are, like steroids, anabolic steroids, which essentially would be taking testosterone or a derivative type compound like testosterone, typically in injection form. But sometimes in pills and creams. And is it effective for muscle building and fat loss? Absolutely. I mean, you raise your testosterone levels to super physiologic levels, your body will start to build muscle. And that's why steroids are effective. The problem is that a lot of people do know and are aware of, there's many, but I think the main one is the fact that steroids are very effective while you're on steroids and when you come off them, your body has no, little to none internal testosterone production. A lot of the muscle that you may have gained when you're on cycle, you will lose after the fact because you have to re kickstart your body's testosterone levels and your body doesn't want to hold on to muscle past a certain genetic limit.

It.

And so ultimately guys look great when they do take these things. We're now seeing a lot of the golden era bodybuilders now dying in their 60s and 70s from heart attacks. So we know these things are not great for your heart. And we also know that our bodies, to live a long time, need this balance between anabolism building up protein synthesis and catabolism breaking down. And in the bodybuilding circle, people are so afraid of that word catabolic. It's like, like the second you get out of the gym, oh, bro, you're going catabolic. Hit that protein shake, right? It's kind of like the thing. But we need catabolism and that's why we have fasting. Because ultimately a lot of these diseases that kill us are anabolic. Diseases like cancer responds incredibly well to growth hormones and it has some of the highest rate of protein synthesis around. And so there are a lot of dangers to creating a hormonal environment in the body body where you basically turned on the anabolic switch, you're keeping it on when your body likes to be able to move that lever up and down throughout the day. Now, sarms, for those who are not familiar, are selective androgen receptor modulators. So these are compounds that bind to the same receptors inside the nucleus of the cell that testosterone would bind to, except they're not hormonal. And a lot of these things, there's so many of them that are being developed in the lab right now. Now, and in theory they should have a lot of the benefits of testosterone in terms of they bind to those same nuclear receptors, cause the downstream muscle building, but they're not hormonal, so they shouldn't cause this negative feedback shutdown. And I guess we just don't have enough data about them. There are certain people that see great results with sarms. I've seen some blood work as well that hormone levels do change negatively after coming off a SARM cycle. So it's like this weird gray area where it's not quite steroids, but it's definitely a lot more hardcore than your protein powder and your creatine. And we don't fully understand what the long term effects are. What I can tell you is just understanding the body in general physiology is we want this balance, this yin and this yang between anabolism and catabolism. And anytime we're artificially stimulating one side of the equation for too long, it's going to throw the system out of balance. So I'm not a big fan. I'm not a big fan. You know, I've never used SARMs. And so I would recommend that most people can probably get phenomenal results from doing these baseline stuff, cleaning up their training. Most people are probably under eating in terms of as it comes to muscle building, it's just kind of like the shortcut stuff that I'm not saying can't work, but for me, for the goal of trying to get to 138 to 500, you know, it's not worth the short term risks. And also understanding that I always want to have muscle that I've earned and it's not from a badge of honor standpoint, it's just because that's muscle that I know that I can maintain using the conditions that I use to create it. So it sucks. You know, I have a lot of friends that are still doing competitive bodybuilding and they look great a couple months out of the year and they look like shit the rest of the time. That's not ultimately my aim.

Got it. Great. So, Doctor, where I want to go on our next discussion is the idea of living to be 500 years old, which that's your goal, right? 500. And is that a legit goal?

It's a funny goal. I certainly know that I have a lot of trust in the routines that I do to promote longevity. I have a lot of family members over 100. And I also do believe that we understand what aging is, the factors that contribute to aging, the genetic damage, the repair mechanisms. And we have science now that is very promising that I'll be able to fix some of these problems and basically prolong lifespan. So who knows? I think it's certainly above 150 for me.

Okay, great. So that's where I want to go in Our next discussion. But for now, I have my homework cut out for me, which is the labs that I'm going to get done, the routines of regular fasting and sauna and really just tracking my diet to ensure that I'm hitting these benchmarks that we've set in combination with the goals that I have. So the next time we check in, I want to go through what came back on the labs and talk about what it's going to take to live to be 150 or older.

Yeah. With abs and biceps.

Yeah, that's right. Dr. Anthony, where can people follow you? I mean, I get the privilege of chatting with you one on one and going through this stuff. If people wanted to learn from you directly, how would they do this?

That I think they should Check out our Fitfather Project resource. And that's probably what I'm publishing most. That's what I'm working on in business right now. So for those who don't know, I do this peak performance consulting work. But I run a company called the Fitfather Project, which specifically helps busy dads and guys in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s get in amazing shape. So we have a ton of content on the Fitfather Project blog and we have a fast growing YouTube channel too, which is great. I think I have like 100 videos. If you like hearing me ramble about XYZ topic, then the YouTube channel will be a nice place to start too.

All right, good. Doctor, thanks so much for hanging out with us for inspiring entrepreneurs, for keeping fathers fit. I know this is a passion of yours and is near and dear to my heart. So thanks for hanging out with us and keep on changing the world, buddy.

Today I got to be the student, which is really exciting for me and I hope you found benefits out of hearing what I'm focusing on in terms of my homework, which is getting the blood test we talked about, which is following the diet that we outlined, which is doing the regular fasting and the ability for the body to repair damage as we outlined in this podcast. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this because it's a little bit of a different format for me to be the student, but allow you to listen in on me being the student so that you can test the same strategies for you if you shoot me a message or shoot me a comment on Instagram. I'm RyanDaniel Moran, would love to hear your thoughts on today's episode. I think the number one source of ROI that we have is our health because our return on investment when we're dead is really low and when we're sick it's really low, it's even worse cause we have to spend money to fix our problems. So I have the goal of living to be 138 and I want to be healthy the entire way there and I want to be fit the entire way there and I want to be in better shape 10 years from now than I am today. And I want to be a higher performer 10 years from now than I am today. And right now where I am is I'm doing great, but I've been a better performer in my past. And so I am working actively to get back on track in my health because I think that's the number one domino that will lead to an even higher level of performance. And so if you want to follow along on this journey, I would love to be running alongside you. And the best way to do that is on Instagram and on Facebook. I'm RyanDaniel Moran on both. So shoot me your thoughts on today's episode. Would love to hear it. And if you know an entrepreneur who is a hard charger that needs to be surrounded by the same type of focused entrepreneurs who are balanced and focusing on health, send them this episode. It might just add 10 years to their life.

Thanks for listening to the show and.

I'll chat with you soon.

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