My Diet & Lifestyle Routine For Burning Fat, Building Muscle & Staying Young | Dr. Mark Hyman

Now, if exercise were a drug, it would be the most powerful drug on the planet. Why is it so important for longevity? Well, essentially it has the ability to regulate almost every physiological function that your body has in a beneficial way and to lower your risk for chronic disease for every single disease, from heart disease to diabetes to cancer to dementia and lots more. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy and to another episode of Health Bites, where we take a deeper bite into juicy topics. And today, my friends, the juicy topic is me. What I do to stay healthy and increase both my health span and my lifespan. And I think it's working because I just did my lab test again through Function Health, the company I co-founded that allows you to get a panel of over 110 biomarkers for less than $500 and track them over time. And in the last five months since I did my test and I just repeated it, I have reversed my biological age by one year in just five months. So I'm going to tell you what I do and why so maybe you can learn what may also work for you. Now I'm turning 65 this year and I feel healthier than I have in decades. My friends and my colleagues often ask me what I do to look even in better shape than I did 20 years ago. And seriously, I didn't know it was possible to build muscle and get abs in your 60s. And now I know what it is. That's what today's Health Bite is all about. I'm giving you the inside scoop on what my longevity routine looks like and what I do on a daily basis to age in reverse. From my morning routine to what I eat in the day to how I de-stress and the supplements I take all the way up to my evening routine. This episode has everything you need to burn fat, build muscle and stay young forever. So let's jump right into my daily routine for longevity from start to finish. How do I start my day? Well, I wake up around 6 30 or 7 o'clock in the morning, and first thing I do is hydrate. Now, we all wake up a little dehydrated in the day, so I drink 32 ounces of water with electrolytes. My favorite is light show. I have no connection with them, but I love their clean products. You can get the ones that just taste like chicken soup without the chicken. It's salty. I don't mind it. Or you can get the little lemon flavored one with little Stevia. That's fine. Then I'll do a short 10-20 minute meditation. There's lots of apps out there and programs you can use, like Ziva meditation, Sam Harris's apps or headspace. And then I'll have a coffee and I'll journal to gather my thoughts and ground myself for the day. And then I don't have too much. I just maybe one or two cups and none after the first cup in the morning. Next, I'll do my morning workout. Now, why is exercise important for longevity? Well, essentially it's the most powerful drug other than food to regulate every aspect of your biology that improves your health and extends your life. It has the ability to regulate almost every physiological function and lower your risk of every single chronic disease from heart disease to diabetes to cancer to dementia. It's also essential for our mental health, for our mood, for our microbiome. to keep those gut bugs happy for your immune system and for longevity. Now, I used to think that yoga was enough to stay strong and fit along with running or cardio that I did or biking, but my body started to change after I did strength training in my late 50s and it really revolutionized my idea of what is possible. And I look back at pictures of me without a shirt when I'm 40 and now it's totally different. It looks like it should be reversed, right? 40 should be 60 and 60 should be 40. Now, there are four elements of fitness that are really important. The first is cardiovascular fitness. We call that cardio or aerobics. The second is strength or resistance training. Third is flexibility. And the last one often people forget is stability, which means preventing yourself from falling and having a good core. My favorite tool is resistance bands. I can travel with them. I take them everywhere. I don't need any equipment other than a little bag of bands that I take with me and can use in any place. So whether I'm in a hotel room or a house, I just hook it on a doorknob or a railing. I need a floor and a door, basically, to exercise. Now, it's possible to use these to put on a lot of muscle, and you can do it in your 50s, you can do it in your 60s, you can do it any age, 70s. I started my dad's strength training when he was 88 years old, and it totally changed his life. Now, muscle is important because it's the currency of longevity. And without muscle, you're going to decline, your metabolism is going to slow down, you're going to become more inflamed, your hormones are going to screw up, you're going to high cortisol, low growth hormone, your testosterone is dropping if you're a guy. It's bad news. So my morning routine doesn't take long. It's 20 to 30 minutes of full out exercise with the bands three to four times a week. If I do five, I'll do five, but mostly three to four times a week. Now, I love the bands because like I said, I can take them anywhere. And the program I use is from Tom Brady's system, which is called TB12. they have the bands, they have the workout app. It's pretty easy to do at home. You just follow the program and you can do it at any age, anywhere. And you don't get injured like with weight sometimes. So I like it for that. Now cardio is also important. I love cardio. I love biking, I love road biking, mountain biking. If it's bad weather, I'll use my Peloton. I love tennis 'cause I don't feel like I'm exercising. I love hiking. And I do something four or five times a week. And I also do stretching every day, a little bit, but I do hot yoga two or three times a week. So that's my routine, my bands, some cardio, stretching yoga. And I don't spend that much time on it, But the dividends are enormous. After I do my band training in the morning and pretty much every morning, I have my healthy aging shake for breakfast. And this is something I concocted for me, but I think it's good for everybody and it's got a lot of benefits. And I'll tell you what's in in a sec, but this shake is really important because it supports muscle protein synthesis. This is what you want to do to build and maintain and repair muscle. It's super healthy for you because it upregulates the pathways that build muscle. And if you have it within an hour of exercise, or maybe two, you actually will accelerate muscle build. and I notice when I don't have my routine, when I'm on the road, I end up having a change in my body that I notice. The next thing it does, and this shake does, which is really important, is it supports my mitochondrial health and repair and renewal of my mitochondria, which are the energy factories of your cells that are necessary for healthy aging. And as we age, our mitochondria decline in number and function. So keeping your mitochondria healthy is really important. I just did a test. It's a cheek swab for my mitochondrial function. And I just got it back, actually, yesterday. And it was amazing. The guy says, you look like an athlete. It looks great. And again, you know, I'm 64, gonna be 65, but I have really healthy, strong mitochondria. The next thing I do, use stuff in there that's gonna support my microbiome. So the healthy aging shake has things to support my gut health, which is really important, 'cause if you wanna age well, you wanna be healthy, you wanna reduce inflammation, you have to have a lot of healthy, happy gut bugs and not the bad bugs. And we now know that the disturbances in our microbiome are one of the hallmarks of aging. The other thing I think is really important is to support my detox pathways, to support my hormones and adrenal. So all that is done through putting stuff in my shake. I put in the blender, it takes me about three minutes to make in the morning, it keeps me balanced and energetic throughout the day. And it's really important to start the day with protein. Most people start the day with sugar. Sugar, sweet coffees, teas, muffins, bagels, pancakes, waffles, French toast, cereal, which is the worst thing they ever invented. This is what's killing us. It's driving our biology to become insulin resistant, put on weight, store belly fat, and drive inflammation. And that leads to every single problem that we see as we age. So how do you avert that? Well, you start the day with protein and fat. And the first thing you do is get 30 to 50 grams, depending on your size or how much work out from high quality protein. Now, what I use is regeneratively raised goat whey. And why I use goat whey is because it has A2 casein. It's not like regular cow whey because a regular cow has A1 casein, which is more inflammatory and more likely to cause gut issues and other problems. So I use goat whey. I tolerate it very well and it's really easy to digest and it's the most easily absorbed, bioavailable, clean and best muscle building protein available. It also boosts glutathione, which is an important detoxifying compound. It reduces inflammation and oxidative stress, and it's really important for longevity. So these are the things that you need to do as you age to get your glutathione up and having whey is really good. So I'll take 30 to 50 grams of regeneratively raised goat whey. I use Mt. Capra or Naked Goat. Again, I have no relationship with them, but I like their products. And that jump starts muscle protein synthesis right after exercise. Now, there are vegan options. Garden of Life Sport Organic Plant-Based Protein is okay, but they basically have to jack up the plant protein because the amino acids in plants are not the right amino acids to build muscle. You need high amounts of leucine, which is an amino acid that is mostly found in animal protein, some in plant protein, but not in a high amount. And you need about two and a half grams per serving of protein in order to activate the switch to turn on muscle building. So with this Bored protein, they basically add the amino acids. It's not naturally found in there. Next thing I do is I put in a packet or two of something called Mitopure. This is what we call a postbiotic. Now, what is this? It sounds fancy, but essentially your gut bacteria, when they consume certain foods like polyphenols from pomegranate or berries, for example, will create a compound. that has beneficial effects on your biology. And this particular compound that's been very well studied is called Urolithin A. It's found in a product called Mitopure, and it induces something called mitophagy. This basically is the process of cleaning up old mitochondria. Essentially, it's, think of it like a recycling system. So it gets rid of the old mitochondria, it increases new mitochondria, it increases muscle protein synthesis, it increases fitness without even exercising, so it increases your VO2 max and fitness, and it helps clean up old cells, reduces inflammation, and lots of other things. So really an amazing product. I use that every day. I take about five grams of creatine for muscle protein synthesis, just a powder. It's very inexpensive. I use a scoop of my gut food powder, which I developed as a multivitamin for the gut. Essentially it's got prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols, all which help support a healthy gut microbiome. So like a multivitamin for your gut, and you can find that at gutfood.com and I take about a tablespoon of MCT oil to help my brain function and energy and mitochondria, which essentially medium chain triglycerides, really powerful for optimizing mitochondrial health and for giving you a little fat in the morning. And I also use an adaptogenic mushroom powder with reishi, shagga, lion's mane, cordyceps, and other things. It helps energy, immunity, stress resilience. That's called Stamits seven mushroom powder. I love that. And then I put in about 8 to 12 ounces or sometimes more of unsweetened macadamia milk. I use a handful of frozen blueberries or other berries and that's it. I just hit the blender, turn on and I drink it with my morning supplements and that's it. It doesn't take a long time. So my morning routine, basically I could do the whole thing in an hour or two. Sometimes if I want to do longer cardio, it'll take longer, but it's really a huge investment that sets my day. Yeah, for success. In the best case scenario, I do all these things before starting my day. Sometimes I can't, right? If I'm busy, I have certain non-negotiables, right? I might be in a rush or I have less time. I do something, even if I have 10 minutes. For example, I was busy this morning. I just did a 20 minute workout instead of a 30 minute workout. I had my protein shake, was heading to a meeting. So I basically didn't have the full time, but I still got my workout in and my shake in. It's great. And so those are non-negotiables for me. A 20, 30 minute workout, protein for breakfast, and I take my handful of supplements and I'm good to go. So that's sort of my morning routine. And I think having a morning routine Vegan is really important because it's just a habit. You build the habit, you build the muscle, you build the practice, and you end up having these practices that work over time to up level your health over and over again. What do I eat? What do I eat for health? What do we eat for longevity? Well, that was my breakfast. And for lunch and dinner, I basically follow what I jokingly call a Pegan diet. I wrote a book called the Pegan Diet as a spoof, making fun of all the diet wars, paleo, vegan, and so forth. And I focus essentially on nutritional principles everybody agrees on that are common sense and that there's a lot of science behind, which is focus on quality, because that matters actually more than quantity. You eat 35 cups of broccoli, right? You mean you could, but good luck with that. If you did, it wouldn't matter because there's not that many calories in it. So you can focus on quality. You don't have to worry about quantity. If you focus on what you eat, you don't have to worry about how much because the body will naturally take care of that. Also focus on nutrient density. So I eat a very nutrient dense diet. And what does that look like? It's a low glycemic, meaning low sugar and starch diet. It's high in phytochemicals, all those colorful plant compounds that have medicinal value. It's high in fiber to feed my microbiome. I have good fats and also the right amount of high quality protein. So what look like? Well, I eat lots of plants. I eat a plant rich diet, not a plant based diet. Plant based means 100% vegan. I'm not vegan. You can be, but it's problematic if you don't do it carefully and you don't supplement. I just had, you know, Brian Johnson on the podcast who's trying to live to be forever. He's trying not to die, which I think maybe has a chance at, I don't know. But, you know, he has to supplement with processed pea protein because he can't get enough protein from food that's Whole Foods if he wants to be a vegan. So that's just a note. Not that you can't be, but you have to be be very smart about it. So I eat lots of plants, a plant rich diet with plenty of fiber to feed my gut bugs, plenty of polyphenols, all the colorful phytochemicals. About 75% of my plate is non-starchy veggies. So colorful veggies from a lot of variety of plants, phytochemicals that are in food like purple foods, right? Purple cabbage and black raspberries and cherries that have anthocyanins in them, or resveratrol in berries, or ECGC in green tea, which is really powerful compound for longevity, or flavonols in onions, spinach, arugula, watercress, lycopene, which is in tomatoes, curcumin, which is in turmeric. Broccoli has all these great compounds, sulforaphane and isothionates, which are incredibly powerful for longevity. So there's a lot of compounds in these plant foods that are super medicinal and have longevity benefits. And you don't have to worry about it. You just have to eat a lot of colorful variety of foods and you'll get them. I also eat foods that are low glycemic, so low glycemic fruits, so berries, kiwis and so forth. Try to stay away from pineapple and melons and like really sugary fruits that like a lot of bananas, for example. But it's not that you can't have them. It's just they're more likely to spike your sugar. I also include lots of herbs and spices because they're really important. herbs and spices have a lot of phytochemicals in them. Like we mentioned curcumin, pepper, all sorts of wonderful compounds. I also eat lots of healthy fats. So extra virgin olive oil, you know, use that as much as you want. I go through a bottle a week, probably nuts and seeds, avocados, grass fed meats, omega three rich foods, all really good for you and essential. You need the right fats. Fat used to be the bad guy. Turns out it's not the bad guy. It's not fat that's making you gain weight. It's the sugar and starch. And I wrote a book about fat called Eat Fat, Get Thin. Pretty powerful. One guy wrote to me and didn't know him, but he wrote, found my email, he wrote to me. He said he lost 200 pounds. to see his before and after pictures. So the body really has an amazing ability to get repaired and to heal and do all the things it has to do if you just feed it right. I also eat the right kind of protein. We talked about this a little bit in terms of the regeneratively raised goat way. I eat about a gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So I'm about 175 pounds. I eat about 160, 170 grams of protein a day. Now that may seem like a lot. It is if you're just a sedentary person, but I'm very active. And if you want to build muscle, and especially as you age, you need more protein. Now there's a whole anabolic resistance. Anabolic resistance is a phenomena that happens as you get older where you need more protein and more exercise to build muscle than you did when you were younger because most of the younger gains are based on high levels of certain hormones that decline as you get older. So you really need to make sure you're getting adequate protein. It's about a palm sized piece of protein with every meal or so, not that much. And it's important to eat enough because one of the things that happens as we get age is you get something called sarcopenia. Now, sarcopenia is the this condition, which means less muscle. Sarco means muscle. PNA means less like osteopenia or osteoporosis. This is a disaster because when you lose muscle and you could be the same weight that you were at 65 than you were at 25, but be twice as fat. In other words, your muscle becomes replaced with fat. And when that happens, you get abnormal blood sugar, abnormal insulin, your cortisol goes up, you get abnormal cholesterol, your hormones get screwy, you get high cortisol, like I said, and low growth hormone, which is needed for tissue repair. You end up with more inflammation, more oxidative stress and more aging. Plus, you can't function as well because you can't get up out of a chair. You can't do what you like to do. You can't feel Nimble and athletic and. And fit and do whatever you want. That's the goal here, is not to just look good in a bathing suit. It's to actually be highly functional as you get older. My friend Peter Ortea talks about the Centenarian Olympics or the Centenarian decathlon. Basically, one of the things you need to do is you know, you need to get up on the floor, get up out of a chair, you know, tie your own shoes, like basic stuff. It puts people in nursing home if they can't do it. So you need to build muscle to do that, and you need more protein, as I mentioned, to overcome this anabolic Now, there was a huge study on this called the Protage study. We'll link to it in the show notes. But essentially all the world's experts on protein got together looking at how much protein needs we have, what happens as we get older, what kind of protein we need, and it basically says what I just said. So have a look at that if you're interested. I also focus on high quality protein because not all protein is the same. I don't eat factory farmed animals. I make sure I have regeneratively raised meats when I can, grass fed and finished meats. If I can't get a regeneratively raised meat, pasture raised eggs, wild caught fish that sustainably harvested or regeneratively raised. It's low in mercury. I like sardines, mackerel, anchovies, salmon, and herring. And my go-to sources for healthy protein are various companies that allow you to get direct access to this food, like Force of Nature, which has regeneratively raised meats, Cetopia.fish, which is great for regeneratively raised fish, and also Thrive Market, which is a great company that sells affordable meats and also other products that are really good for you, like snacks and so forth. So I would check out thrivemarket.com. Now, plant proteins, as I said, are fine, but you want to focus on minimally processed processed plant proteins, not all this fake meats and plant-based meats. Those are just science projects. They're made in a factory. They're not good for you. Tofu, edamame, lentils are fine. Dairy is okay, but I would be careful with conventionally raised dairy. I would use sheep or goat dairy if you can, or sometimes you can get grass-fed, regeneratively raised dairy that's milk that's hard to find, that has A2 casein. So that's kind of hard to find, but goat and sheep you can get, which are pretty easy. And I would stick with those. Get away from all the refined oils. They're made in ways that are highly damaging to your body. They have oxidized fats in them. They're made with various chemicals. They're probably full of things like glyphosate because they spray all the soybean oil and canola oil with that. So I think I would just stay away from those refined grains. Obviously you can have some, but also stay away from starch and sugar, as we've talked about so much on the podcast. These drive this phenomena of insulin resistance, which is at the root of all age-related diseases and aging itself. So what would that look like? What would I eat in a day? Well, after my protein shake in the morning, I probably have a big salad with avocado, arugula. I get the kind of washed kind because I'm lazy and I don't want to wash the salad, but toasted pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, maybe a tin of fish like wild salmon or mackerel or sardines, tomatoes, olives, cucumbers, extra virgin olive oil. So, I call my fat salad, right? It has fat from avocados, fat from pumpkin seeds, fat from pine nuts or fat from salmon or mackerel, fat from olives, fat from virgin olive oil. So, it's a lot of veggies but also a lot of good fat keeps me satisfied and has good quality protein. And then dinner, what do I eat for dinner? Well, I have regeneratively raised steak. I'll have beef, bison, venison, elk if I can get it. It's hard to get. I'll have pasture raised chicken or sometimes small cold water fish that are low in mercury. I do like Japanese sweet potatoes. Those purple kinds, those are the ones that are eaten by the Okinawans who live a long time. And I need a little bit of extra carbs because otherwise I lose too much weight. I shouldn't probably say that in public, but I do. So I need a little extra carbs because I'm very active. Some of us have roasted shiitake mushrooms. I make this delicious dish. You just take the shiitakes, cut the stems off, put them on on a tray in the oven with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, roast them for half hour, 45 minutes at like 350, 400, and they're just crispy delicious. I always have two to four veggies as sides. So stir fried broccolini, steamed broccoli, asparagus, and a salad. So I have a lot of extra veggies and I think you need to have veggies as your main dish and meat and fish as a side dish. Once you figure out the meals that are work for you, you can just kind of mix and match and switch up protein sources and veggies so you cover all the bases. So I basically have a formula. that's just really quick. I don't spend a lot of time cooking. I can take a piece of fish, chicken, meat, cook it in the pan, cooks very quick, throw it in the oven for a few minutes. I'll chop up some veggies, stir fry them, put a sweet potato in the oven. It's really maybe 15-20 minutes to make dinner by the time I start till I sit down. I have to put the potato in early, but other than that, it doesn't take me much time. So my main course is veggies, protein side dish, very low starch and sugar, except the sweet potato, as I mentioned. And sometimes I eat dessert or chocolate, but I usually eat at the end of a meal. And when you do that, the sugar gets absorbed more slowly. It doesn't spike your blood sugar or insulin. So It's really important to eat the right food, but also be clear about when you're eating. So what you eat matters, but the timing also matters. Also, I stopped eating about three hours before bed. So that's kind of my food routine. And you can, you know, create any kind of meals with this basic framework. And my Pegan Diet book is a great framework for this. I obviously wrote a book called Young Forever on longevity. I talk a lot about longevity and diet and how to use food to activate your biology for longevity. So you can refer to that. We'll put a link in the show notes to that as well. Now, the other thing I do is based on all the research I've done, and all the research that's out there on longevity. We have embedded within us what I call longevity switches. These are built-in pathways that we all have that are designed to regenerate, renew and repair our biology. And we just have to learn what they are and how to turn the switch on. Just like a light switch in your house, you have to find the switch to turn on. And I'm going to tell you exactly what you can do besides the food that I just talked about, which is also a way to do it. But how do you activate these longevity switches? Well, one of the best ways is through something called Hormesis is essentially a stress that doesn't kill you, that makes you stronger. So exercise is a form of hormesis. You run or you lift weights and you're pushing your body. It's a stress. In fact, your cortisol will go up, but it ends up making you stronger. You make more mitochondria, you make more muscle, you get fitter. That's essentially a hormetic thing. There's others like saunas and cold plunges. We'll get into them. So basically I make sure every day I practice some form of to activate these ancient embedded longevity genes and reverse what I call inflamaging. These switches are built in to help us deal with an adverse environment. Because we didn't live where there was grocery store in every corner and we had cars we could drive everywhere and we didn't have to do much. We had to work hard to live and we had to deal with cold and heat extremes. We had to deal with starvation and hunger. We had to deal with all kinds of stuff that we don't have to deal with anymore. And because we did that, our bodies actually learned how to adapt to these stresses and conserve our biology in ways that make us survive. And so this is the phenomena of hermesis and why it's so important. So these practices we should really incorporate into our lives. I will do at least one, probably two or more of these a week, depending on my travel. But I like to do it every day if I actually can. So let's, let's talk about the kinds of things you can do that are hermesis. The first is something you might have heard about. It's called time restricted eating. Basically, it means giving yourself a 12 to 16 hour window, maybe three or four times a week where you're not eating. It sounds hard, but it's not really hard. If you eat dinner at six at night, if you eat breakfast at eight in the morning, that's a 14 hour fast. If you wait till 10 in the morning, that's a 16 hour fast. It's not so hard. The next thing I recommend is what we call phytohormesis. And I talked a little bit about it earlier with all these phytochemicals, but there are bioactive compounds in our food. We call them phytochemicals that I consume regularly that activate Pathways that we have that are designed to reduce inflammation, improve blood sugar, activate our stem cells, reduce oxidative stress, increase mitochondrial function to do all these wonderful things that these plant compounds do to activate our longevity switches. So I want to make sure I eat a lot of these colorful plant foods, all the flavonoid rich berries, leafy greens, all the family of cruciferous vegetables, right? Cauliflower, kale, collard greens, all which are super powerful. Plant compounds are really nice because they're in our food. We can eat them. They're like the plants defense systems. So when your plants are trying to survive, they're not making these chemicals for you. They're making them for themselves. They're their immune system, their defense system, a repellant system for predators to deal with drought and, and extremes of cold and all these things that they have to deal with. They make these medicinal compounds. And so when you eat them, they create a little stress in your body because they're designed to be a little bit poisonous, but they're actually good for you because they basically turn on the right thing. So, like exercise, for example, if you over exercise, it's bad for you, but if you do the right amount, it's good for you. The next thing I recommend is hot and cold therapy. Now, saunas and cold plunges sound like a lot, but even if you don't have a sauna or a cold plunge, if you have a bathtub, you can take a really hot bath or you can fill your bathtub tub up with cold water. That's what I do. Now, ideally, you could do 30 minutes in a sauna three or four times a week. In fact, in a finished study, they looked at thousands of people who did saunas. They do saunas a lot there. And they found that if you did 30 minutes of a hot sauna four times a week or more, you had a 47 reduction in your risk of having a heart attack or dying, which is not so bad for a sauna. Plus, it increases something called heat shock proteins, which repair all damaged proteins in your body. It activates your innate immune system. it improves your heart rate variability, reduces stress, helps with weight loss, detoxification. There's so many benefits. So and the cold therapy does a lot of benefits, too. It activates dopamine and mitochondrial function through brown fat. So there's a lot of benefits that are scientifically proven. I've had podcasts on these. I'd encourage you to check them out. We'll link to them in show notes. The other thing you might want to think about is red light therapy. Now, red light therapy sounds weird, but there's actually a fair bit of data on it. You all you need about 10 minutes a day and it activates all these protective mechanisms in your cells. It stimulates the body to make more energy. It helps reduce inflammation. It helps stimulate your antioxidant system. It speeds up healing. There's been data that shows it helps improve eyesight, cognitive ability, physical mobility, even skin aging. And there's a term for this, actually called photobiomodulation, which is super cool. One of the things I do, it's a little hard to get, but I think I really think is a powerful therapy is ozone therapy. I use it as a tune up or when I have access to it. Ozone is a highly reactive molecule. It acts as a pro-oxidant, so it's kind of a stress. It's a hermetic stress. But then it triggers the body to make all these beneficial things. So it increases your body's antioxidant reserves. is anti-inflammatory. It boosts your mitochondrial function, your stem cell function. It prevents blood clotting. It really helps your body can repair. And it's a powerful hormetic therapy that activates all these anti-aging defense mechanisms. It's very safe. It's, it's generally cost effective, and it has the potential to really optimize our health. I'll do it maybe once a month if I can. The other thing I like to try to do, which is a little hard to get, is hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Now there's some interesting data out of Israel and other studies that show that it kills all these zombie cells, which are one of the hallmarks of aging, better than anything. And it also increases telomere length, another hallmark of better than anything. And they use about 60 sessions over 90 days. They put people in the chamber and they found that it really helped rejuvenate people, repair their brain, improve their biology. It helps actually do all these incredible things like boost new blood vessel growth, mitochondrial function, stem cell activity, activates one of the longevity switches called sirtuins. So really, really powerful therapy. I think we're gonna learn more about it. But you want to obviously do this with your doctor and it's not something you just do on your own, although they are home chambers, but you want to make sure make sure you're, you're really looking at the risks and the benefits. The next thing I want to mention is really stress. Now, stress is not good. We all have it. We all get it. We all have to deal with it. But if it's not mitigated by some type of practice to reset your nervous system, it'll wreak havoc on every single one of our core biological systems. It damages our gut microbiome. It suppresses our immune system. It drives inflammation. It'll shorten your telomeres. It causes DNA damage and it screws up our hormones. So it's one of the most potent drivers of aging, besides probably lack of sleep and poor diet. I make sure that I live a very kind of active life, a lot going on, but I make sure I give my nervous system a reset on a regular basis daily. I do meditation, breath work, guided imagery, spending time in nature, spending time with friends. I use binaural beats. I love that. It's sort of like an app I use to kind of synchronize my brain waves and to help me go into a deep theta state and get really relaxed very quickly. So you can put your headphones on and do that. There's an app called NuCalm. It's kind of fun and we'll link to it in the show notes. Of course, getting a massage is always good. Can't always do that, but I like to get a massage once in a while, maybe once a month. And there are other practices that you can use as well for, for stress reduction. But I've written a lot about this, but it's, it's really important to, to practice active relaxation. It's not something that just happens passively. The next thing is sleep. How do I optimize my sleep for longevity? Well, it's one of the most important cornerstones of health. Cause you don't have that right. Everything else goes south. You eat worse, you don't exercise, you're more stressed, you're more reactive. Everything kind of gets messed up. And not to mention all the benefits that happen when you're sleeping, right? When you're sleeping, your body cleans up all the garbage from the day, especially your brain. There's a brain system called the glymphatic system. It's the brain immune system and it cleans up all the metabolic waste. And when you don't do that, you end up with brain issues, brain fog, memory issues, maybe dementia even. And when you don't sleep well, it disrupts your circadian rhythm, which is really important in regulating all the pathways of healthy aging. And when your circadian rhythm screwed up, your hallmarks of aging get worse. For example, more inflammation, inflammation, more mitochondrial damage, altered hormones and nutrient signaling pathways. So all the stuff that you don't want to happen happens if you don't sleep enough. So my goal is seven to eight hours a night of good quality sleep. I'm generally asleep between 10, 11 at night and up by six or seven. I try to follow the same sleep schedule every day because the body basically is a biological organism. So you need to make sure you keep it in rhythm. If I don't have a blackout shades in a room, I use my eye masks, especially when I travel. I use earplugs to block out any noises. I turn off the Wi-Fi keep my cell phone out of the bedroom. No screens in the bed. Your bed is for sleep and romance, that's it. You can read a little bit if you want at night, that's fine, but basically don't work in bed. Blue blocker glasses at night can be helpful. They can eliminate blue light and I try to use those for two or three hours before bed. I don't have alcohol or caffeine. Obviously don't caffeine after the morning and I try not to drink at all, but if I do, I try not to have anything before two or three hours before bed. Sometimes need help to wind down. If I got a very active day, I'll do an Epsom salt bath with a few drops of lavender oil. I'll take a supplement maybe with some herbs in it like passionflower, valerian root. I'll use magnesium. I'll use a little melatonin. Sometimes other things can be helpful like theanine, GABA, 5-HTP, sometimes guided relaxation, meditations can also be helpful. So sleep, really important, don't shortcut sleep. The next thing I do is take the right supplements and they're designed for me, but there's some general principles here. There's trillions of chemical reactions that occur in your body every second and every single reaction requires an enzyme and every enzyme requires vitamins and minerals to run smoothly. So they're the grease that lubricates your biochemical wheels. And if you don't have those, your biochemistry won't work right. Now, since the nutrient density of our diet has declined over time, we all need supplements. I mean, unless you're hunting and gathering and foraging all your own wild food, unless you're drinking pure clean water, you have no exposure to environmental toxins, you have no chronic stress, you go to bed with the sun, wake up with the sun, sleep nine hours a night, if that's you, you don't need supplements. But everybody somebody else needs supplements, right? Because our bodies need the extra help because of all the stresses of our modern society. Now, they help fill a lot of nutrient gaps, and about 90% of us are deficient in one or more nutrient at the minimum level that the RDA says. So not the optimal amount you need for health, but the minimum amount you need not to get a deficiency disease like scurvy or rickets. Now, these nutrients help prevent age-related diseases. They help support optimal functioning of all their biological and basically help our bodies run as smoothly as possible. And the key is you need to kind of test. I don't guess I test. I'm a big fan of testing your biology to know what's going on. You have to know what's happening. It's like you check your blood sugar to know if you're needing diabetes medication or your blood pressure, if you need blood pressure medication, you got to test what's going on. So I'm a big fan of testing so that you can personalize your supplement plan according to your body's own unique needs and your own biology. Now, how do you do that? Well, you can go to your doctor. But I co-founded a company called Function Health in order to allow people easy access to over 110 plus biomarkers. markers, including vitamin D, magnesium, Omega-3 fats, iron studies, ferritin, zinc, selenium, many things, CRP, that you're not going to get tested at your regular checkup, right? They're included in the basic function testing and you don't have to worry about it. It's just there. It tells you the interpretation, it tells you if you're high, low or borderline, and then what to do about it. Let me just share with you the basics I recommend for everyone and my basic routine and then we can go on to what the kind of extra plan is if you want to really go extra. And I do because I like to. you don't have to. So the supplement plan I think everybody should be on is vitamin D. Vitamin D is super important. My favorite vitamin D is something called vitamin D Supreme. It has vitamin K2 as well, including the MK7 form, which is important for your heart. I take Omega-3 rejuvenate from Big Bold Health, which has EPA, DHA, a couple of grams a day. I take a multivitamin. My pure encapsulation is called multi TD. And I take something called homocysteine Supreme, which has extra folate B6 and B12 because I have some genetics that make me need a little bit of extra help with something called methylation. And I also take magnesium. magnesium at night help with sleep and relaxation. Just magnesium glycinate, super simple. And then I take probiotics to keep my gut healthy. I take my own product, gut food every day. Sometimes I take extra probiotics, but that's kind of what I take on a daily basis. And I think that's the basic for everybody. A multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, maybe some extra B vitamin support and probiotics. That usually covers the bases. I have a longevity stack that I like to take, but again, this is optional. You don't have to do this. I take NMN, form of younger NMN, about a thousand milligrams a day to support NAD production. Again, this is really critical for activating longevity. switches. I take a senolytic product to help kill the zombie cells with fisetin, green tea and curcumin. Basically kills all the old damaged cells and helps activate sirtuins and AMBK. Some of these pathways that I talk about that are longevity switches in my book. I take quercetin, which is really important. This is a very powerful longevity compound. It's an anti-inflammatory. And the form I use is something called HTB Rejuvenate by Big Bold Health. It's from Himalayan, Tarre Buckwheat. Really a lot of research on this. cumin. And the one I like is Tervia, but there's many out there by Orthomolecular. I take green tea extract. It's called ecgc 500 milligrams a day by designs for health. And I take a broccoli extract that's called onco Plex from zymogen that has the ability to improve detoxification and is anti-cancer a lot of data on that. And as I mentioned, I also take my MitoPure packets, which are really helpful for preventing sarcopenia. And I take a little creatine as Dimension in my shake. So that's my kind of longevity stacked a lot. But I like to take as much as I can just to stay healthy. And it seems to be working. And I reverse my biological age by years, so I'm going to with a plan and I'm measuring and I'm tracking and I'm looking all the time. So I'm not just doing this kind of willy-nilly I'm tracking my results and I use my function health panels twice a year or more often to see where I'm at, adjust things and see what's happening. And you can learn about that if you want. You can go to functionhealth.com/mark to learn more. That's functionhealth.com/mark and we'll put it in the show notes. All right, so what are other things that are out there? These are really on the edge. They're often very expensive. I've had the privilege of trying many of these things as a guinea pig. I find them very helpful for my health and well-being and I've also had a lot of issues. So I've had a lot of health challenges. I've had autoimmune diseases. I've had mold toxicity, mercury poisoning, chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, back injuries. I mean, I've had a lot and still going pretty strong. I use a lot of these therapies to kind of help fix a lot of these things. So one of those things that I use and, and that may not be ready for prime time that we need more research on, I do a lot of things. So I'm going to sort of share some of the menu. But again, realize this is really just for your information purposes. If you really want to explore, I write about them in the book. It depends on your budget and capacity to do it, but I think these are going to be coming down in price. They're going to be more accessible. There's more research on this all the time. So peptide therapy is something that people are using a lot. Ozempic is a peptide. You might have heard about that. But there's a lot of peptides out there that help with immune function, that help with muscle repair and healing, that help with hormone support. A lot of them out there. Exosomes and stem cells are basically regenerative therapies. A lot of regenerative therapies out there that help repair, renew systems, and you can use them locally. You can use them just intravenously. And I've done that as well. Natural killer cells, which are things that your body makes to kill cancer and infections. You can actually take your own, grow them in the lab and then put them back in. I've done that. And there's also another therapy I think it's really exciting that I believe will become more widespread. It's called transfer plasma exchange or plasma pheresis. And essentially it's a technique of taking out your blood, filtering out the cells, keeping them and throwing out all the soup that the cells float around and call your plasma. It's kind of like an oil and filter change, but it can be remarkably effective. And the data on longevity for this is really impressive, even on reversing a lot of Alzheimer's symptoms. So these are therapies that I don't think are ready for prime time. I'm just giving you a sense of what's out there. I've written a lot about them in my book, Young Forever. You can read all the things I'm talking about. in the book. It's a great resource that guides you in exactly how to customize this for yourself. So that's it. That's my daily longevity routine. That's how I age in reverse. That's how I, in the last five months, I got a year younger biologically, which I'm very happy about. But it's important to note that you don't have to do everything, right? You don't have to. I'm a crazy man. I like to do everything. You don't have to do anything and you get 80% of the benefit or more just by focusing on the basics. Just a few basic principles. Focusing on what you're eating. exercising, sleep, managing your stress, some basic supplements, some simple hormetic stressors, things like hot and cold therapy, cold shower in the morning, or cold plunge in your bathtub, or a hot bath or a sauna or steam if you can get it. All these will make a real difference. And you don't really need to do all these things. Just focus on the basics. Now, the older I get chronologically, the more I actually see what's possible. The more I test myself, and I'm using myself as a guinea pig. I'm not quite spending two million dollars a year like Brian Johnson, but I'm learning a lot and I'm actually finding out what works and what doesn't. And I'm doing this with my patients, with myself, I'm tracking the data. So it's really important to focus on your biology because if you want to live a good life, if you want to feel good, have energy, have healthy relationships, do the work you dream of in the life, be there with your family, be there with your friends and actually feel good, you've got to take care of the machine. We don't do that and we just kind of degrade and get dilapidated, but we don't have to. This is the promise here that we now have the science to unpack what's going on under the hood and to customize personalize a routine that works for you, basically solves a lot of the things that we're trying to fight in this society, which is all this chronic disease that everybody's suffering from. Six in 10 Americans have a chronic disease. So when we take care of our bodies, when we put energy and doing things right for ourselves most of the time, you don't have to be perfect. We'll get our energy back, we'll get our drive back, our zest for life, and we'll get stronger and we'll do great. I'm really excited about this space of longevity. It's teaching us not necessarily that we're gonna live forever or to strive for living longer and longer. It's helping us understand the basic mechanisms of disease and how to address these so that we can optimize our health and feel good now. I'm gonna keep you up to date. I'm gonna let you know how this progresses. I'm gonna tell you what happens over time with myself, and I'm gonna share what I learned with you. And I hope you've learned a few things that are gonna help you live a long and healthy life. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.