+1: The 80/20 180° - First Steps in Moving from Theory to Therapy

Hey, hero, if you're enjoying these daily plus ones, make sure you head to Heroic us to access a ton more resources to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and express the best, most heroic version of yourself today. And now, here's Brian with today's plus one.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. Technically, I should start this plus one by saying this is closer to a plus eleven. We're going to go a little on the longer side. I hope you find it impactful and helpful. So as we discussed in conquering cancer 101 in our prior plus 1s on cancer, one of the first things I did after my brother's diagnosis was reach out to my dear friend Pilar Gerasimo. Among many other things, she told me to read a book called Anti Cancer by a guy named David Sirvon Schreiber. Of course, I immediately got it, read it, and started sharing everything I was learning with my brother. And in what we've come to call his 80 20, 180 phase, in which we super quickly turned rick's life around 180 degrees. I haven't mentioned it yet, but up until his diagnosis, Rick was kind of the poster child for the modern western diet and lifestyle. He had smoked for a couple of decades, he'd quit for a while, but he had smoked for a couple decades, drank a bit too much and definitely ate too much. For example, he just got back from a cruise on which he deliberately feast on three desserts a night. So our first step in optimizing was to stop doing a bunch of little yet high leverage things. No more sugar, flour, grains, et cetera. Then we got more and more precise as we optimized one day at a time to the point where he's now a precision machine. So here's a quick look at the 80 20, 180 approach we took that might be helpful for you. First, for those who may not know, the 8020 principle basically says that 80% of the benefits from any given activity often come from 20% of your efforts. Basic idea. There are almost always a few key things you can do to get big results fast. And that's what we focused on with my brother, who again, like most people in the world, was starting from a near perfectly suboptimal standard western lifestyle. Love you, bro. So first we discussed and we focused on getting his mind right and seeing how we could cut off cancer supply lines. Check out those plus ones. Then, as per Tony Robbins, Dr. Dr. Gundry, author of the Plant Paradox, we followed rule number one of nutrition and life, really, which is to stop eating or doing the stuff that that's slowly killing you. In this case, we can be even more specific. Stop feeding the cancer that's killing you. Step one. We immediately eliminated added sugar. All of it, as in completely eliminated. No further discussion about the subject. 100% gone. Parenthetical aside, of course, this was after the IV drip of pure sugar in and the first couple hospital meals that were essentially as bad post surgery. And as my brother puts it, get rid of sugar, period. He says, get used to eating leaves and vegetables with some super tasty, healthy, calorically and nutritionally dense and satiating salad dressing that's so good you want to drink it, by the way. So we also completely eliminated all flour. The type of flour we consume in such excess didn't exist pre industrial revolution and it's just not meant to be in our bodies, period. Note, getting rid of sugar and flour means you just got rid of almost all packaged foods, which is fantastic. We also completely eliminated all grains and legumes, including but not limited to rice, wheat, corn, barley, oats, beans, all varieties, et cetera. Now this is for some, slightly more debatable, especially for hardcore whole food, typically low fat vegans. God bless them and their approach. And we'll save the debate on the pros and cons of all the various dietary approaches in the prevention of cancer. But the approach to nutrition for active cancers is a completely separate discussion. So in addition to the sugar, flour, grains and legumes, there were a few other important facets of our 80, 20, 180, including vegetable oils, factory farmed animals and fish, protein, water, both drinking and showering, household products, sleep, movement and meditation. We talked about some of this in a prior plus one on pulling levers, but it's worth a quick review. First, vegetable oils. Think soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil. Vegetable oils sound like they're good for you. They're vegetable oils. They have to be good for you, right? No, I know. Vegetable oils sound so nutritious, but they're not. They simply didn't exist before the turn of the 20th century. And anything that recently added to our food supply should be limited. Yet get this, Americans consume 18 billion pounds of soybean oil per year. An astonishing 20% of our total calories come from soybean oil alone. 20%. Pick up a bottle of salad dressing, even at a place like Whole Foods, and look at the first ingredient, then put it back on the shelf and walk away again. We never had the edible food like substance known as vegetable oils before the 20th century. Now just one type of it constitutes 20% of our diet. Yeah, that makes sense. And you can do the same calculations with sugar trace amounts until recently and now 150 pounds per person per year. That's crazy. And that is not helping the conquer cancer cause. So again, number two, you don't want to be a statistic. Stop following those statistically normative behaviors. And one more little quick note on why vegetable oils are so bad. One of the big things we want to do is reduce the chronic inflammation within our bodies. One of the ways we can do that is to optimize our omega 3 to omega 6 ratio. Here's the very short story there. Omega 3s are anti inflammatory, omega 6s are inflammatory. Now we need both. But the ratio back in the hunter gatherer days used to be 1:1. Now it's something like 16 to 1 in favor of Omega 6s. As Christopher McDougall puts it in Natural Born Heroes, our bodies need a modest inflammatory response. Think of a fire in the fireplace. But with the modern western diet we have a raging inferno of inflammation that's burning down the house, which is not good, especially for cancer. So vegetable oils jack up the Omega 3 Omega 6 imbalance. So walk on over to your pantry right now and throw away everything that has a vegetable oil in it. By the way, fascinating Wikipedia fact regarding veggie oils, specifically the rebranding of rapeseed oil into canola oil in Wikipedia we can learn. By the 1950s and 1960s they say soybean oil had become the most popular vegetable oil in the US in the mid-1970s, Canadian researchers developed a low certain type of acid rapeseed cultivar. Because the word rape was not considered optimal for marketing, they coined the name canola from Canada Oil low acid. Have that in mind when you throw out your canola oil and refuse to buy any more of the lab made toxic edible food like substance. By the way, number two, fat is awesome and will provide the bulk of our calories as we move toward the the ketogenic therapeutic diet which we'll be talking about in a future plus one. We just don't want veggie oils. The good oils coconut oil, olive oil, algae oil, perilla oil, avocado oil, et cetera. Now moving on, we have factory farmed animals, vegetable oils and factory farmed animals is our next little subsection here. And factory farmed fish vegetable oils are gone. That will help with inflammation. Next up on the anti inflammatory push, never eating a piece of meat or fish from an animal or fish that was factory farmed, in addition to getting sick from eating grains they didn't evolve to eat, and then being jacked up with antibiotics that you then consume all that grain those animals eat leads those factory farmed animals to to have a disrupted omega 3 to omega 6 ratio which then negatively impacts your ratios. And that's one of the reasons you should only eat grass fed beef. And while we're at it, skip the underwater factory farms as well. Stick to wild caught fish. Next little subsection here is protein and mtor. The factory farmed animals are gone. Now we need to dial in our overall protein intake. The quick story here is there's something called MTOR activation that's associated with nearly every cancer out there. Here's how Dr. Mercola puts it in fat for fuel. He says of all the nutrients that stimulate mtor, amino acids which are derived from protein are the most potent. Stimulating MTOR by eating large amounts of protein is also one of the quickest ways to suppress cellular and mitochondrial autophagy, which prevents your body from effectively cleaning out debris and damaged cells. Even if you are optimizing everything you can to keep glucose and insulin levels low, eating excessive protein will still activate the MTOR pathway. He continues by saying, if your goal is to treat disease and live long, doing this chronically is something you want to avoid. So our target is adequate protein, not high or even moderate protein, but adequate enough to do the repair work that's vital to our well being, but no more. Now, in our 8020 phase, I had my brother limit his total animal protein from chicken, fish, beef, but not including eggs, to to 4 ounces per day. And we napkin numbered a target of 0.5 grams of protein per lean body mass. So for example, with my brother weighing in at 155 pounds at around 20% body fat, he has 31 pounds of fat and 124 pounds of lean body mass. 0.5 times 124 is 62 grams of protein. That ballpark wound up being pretty close to what we're now doing in our precision nutrition phase, which, which we entered when we started working with our rock star nutritionist, Miriam Kalamnian, who's the author of Keto for Cancer, who has helped us fine tune everything down to the lettuce leaf via her wisdom in an app called Cronometer, which she my brother now loves. For now, remember, adequate protein, not too much, not too little, Goldilocks style. Then we have our next little subsection here, Toxic Household Products. Next up, removing all the toxic stuff in our houses, from the cleaning supplies to the cosmetics, soaps, shampoos, etc. Any one dose of one item by itself might not be toxic, which is why it isn't regulated. But when you aggregate and compound all those little toxins into a non stop toxic cocktail, the effects can be disastrous. So eliminate that stuff and replace basic idea here. Your immune system is in a fight for your life. Literally. So let's not give it extra work. Think of all these little things we're optimizing as little paper cuts. Any one may not be a big deal, but all day, every day, from every angle. Ouch. And finally, in the 8020180 we also dialed in sleep and optimized the drinking water, replaced the water filtration system and had fun rocking 10,000 plus steps per day again. I know that was a lot. We can talk about a lot more. But that's a quick look at the 802100 80.

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