PNTV: Eat Move Sleep by Tom Rath (#279)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, Eat, Move, Sleep by Tom Rath. Eat, Move, Sleep Subtitle How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes Tom Rath. We just covered another one of his great books, Are youe Fully Charged? In that book, he talks about the three aspects of getting fully charged, meaning, interactions, and energy. This book is essentially all about that third condition, energy. And we dial that in by eating, moving and sleeping. Tom Rath's personal story is fascinating. At 16, he was diagnosed with cancer and he discovered that he basically, as he says, lost the genetic lottery. He joins 1 in 4 million people who have this genetic mutation such that he doesn't effectively fight cancer tumor growth in his body. So not only did he lose his eye at 16, he was told he was going to have to spend a week in the hospital every year to keep track of all the various cancers in his body, in his eyes, in his spine, in his kidneys, in his adrenal glands, etc. Really inspiring guy who's all about taking control of what is within his control to optimize and actualize. And of course, the key fundamentals of eating, moving, sleeping is where it's at. Philosopher's note, bunch of big ideas. And one other note, Tom also wrote a children's book called the Rechargeables, which is basically this book. And are you fully charged for kids? It's tied for first for our favorite children's book. It's awesome. Emerson loves it. We love it. Basically teaching kids, if you want to be fully charged, you've got to eat, move and sleep. Emerson, when he's running to the park or doing whatever, he'll say, I'm getting my charge up. When he eats what he calls brain food. Whole other conversation on another great book called you'd Fantastic Elastic Brain. If you are a parent or grandparent.

Of kids, get those books.

Rechargeables, your fantastic elastic brain. Anyway, when he's eating brain food, he'll say he's recharged. After a nap, I'll go hang out and say, hey, let me see your charge. Yep, looking good. So, eating, moving, sleeping, let's build this into our family's culture, our company's culture, and of course, our personal lives. Five big ideas here. The first one is 10,008 and 36 minutes. So we all know Anders Ericsson's great research on the 10,000 hour rule. But what's interesting is that when he studied elite performers, another variable that was correlated to their high performance was the amount of sleep they got. The elite performers slept significantly more than the sub elite. 8 hours and 36 minutes was their average amount of sleep. To put that in perspective, the average American sleeps less than seven hours a night.

Short story.

You want to be an elite performer, you need to get more sleep. It's not just the Anderson research on, or Ericsson's research, rather on.

All of.

This stuff, but there's countless research studies on the power of sleep. And Tom Roth tells us it all starts with sleep. All of it. If you don't get a good night of sleep, you're not going to have a good breakfast, you're going to want to eat more sugary foods, and then you're going to be tired and you're not going to want to exercise. And it spirals down. A bad night of sleep spirals down. But if you get a good night of sleep, you're going to feel a little more energized. You're going to be more likely to work out, you're going to be more likely to eat better. And when you do all these things together, which is another big point in his book and is that research shows that doing these things together works better than doing them in isolation. Nutrition, and then I'll think about exercise, then I'll think about sleep, is not as effective as doing the three together. So he actually wrote the book in a very interesting way. Each mini chapter has a theme where he talks about eating, moving, sleeping. He doesn't go eating and then moving and then sleeping. He weaves it in throughout the book where you're constantly bouncing back and forth to. To make the point that you want to do the three together and spiral up. And he says the most important thing you can do is to get a good night of sleep. So we talk about this all the time. Think about it. What can you do to get a good night of sleep? Think about it and do it. Second big idea is cancer candy. So we've talked about this before, but sugar is toxic. Purecryptonite. Unfortunately, the average American eats 150 pounds of added sugar every year. 150 pounds. And he cites numerous research studies in leading journals saying one of them says sugar is like candy for cancer cells. So unless you're looking to feed your cancer cells, you want to reduce the slash, eliminate your added sugar. And it would be easy if all we were doing was dipping into a big bowl of sugar and scooping it out spoonful after spoonful after spoonful. Obviously that would. No one would do that. That's insane, right? And if you are doing that, then that's a whole other conversation. But it's subtle and it's insidious because it's ubiquitous. Added sugar is in everything. Obviously it's in your sodas. If you're drinking your sodas, that's just liquid sugar. Imagine just scooping teaspoons of sugar in feeding your cancer cells. Not a good idea. But it's also in fruit juices. A lot of people think that fruit juice is healthy.

It's not.

If you're a parent giving your child fruit juice, know that a lot of other researchers and preeminent authors talk about that being one of the biggest mistakes well meaning parents make. It's unnecessary, added sugar that is not doing anything to help optimize your children or grandchildren's lives. So remove the added sugar. And also know that he talks about refined carbohydrates and cites more research on the fact that lessening reducing the amount of carbs you eat reduces the growth of cancer cells. And he's not a fad diet guy, but he does strongly recommend you to substitute vegetables for all the bread and the pastas and the crackers and the rice and all these different things that have those processed refined carbohydrates. Not necessary and not helpful. Remember the sugar in particular. Third big idea. If you want to improve something, measure it. He talks about some great research and the fact that in research it's well known that if you want someone to improve an aspect of their life, just have them measure it. It's one of the fastest ways to improve anything. So when you identify your life, it's and think about your ideal future or a certain aspect of your life that you want to optimize. Think about where you are right now and then think about the behaviors you need to take in order to reach that outcome. And whatever you think the most important behavior is, start measuring it. We talk about Darren Hardy and the compound effect. This is one of his big ideas. If you want to move more, measure your movement. Tom talks about a research study that had people simply have a pedometer. Simply having a pedometer, which obviously measures the number of steps they take, increased the number of steps they took by over a mile. Just having a pedometer led to people walking on average more than an hour than those who didn't have a pedometer. I'm super no tech and I carry a pedometer with me every day. I hit 10,000 steps every single day. And I measure my performance on certain things. I think I've mentioned this before, but I do one sun salutation every day. I do 10 pull ups. I'm actually doing 23 right now. I kind of add to that as I go forward, but 10 is my minimum. I do 100 burpees, I row a thousand meters, and I do 10,000 steps. And the fact that I'm measuring it as I go increases my likelihood of doing it more consistently. And I know that for a fact in this domain and everything else, because it's crazy. Every time I measure my time, I see, whoa, is it really going where I want? And we start making better choices when we bring awareness to it. So again, think about what you want to improve in your life and think about measuring it as a vehicle to quickly improving it. That's our third big idea. Fourth big idea is a fun one. He says the most important things you're going to do for your health are done at the grocery store and what you put into your shopping cart. And he says you need to buy willpower at the store. Because if you buy junk food at the store, you basically have no shot of not eating it, good or bad. If you've bought it, then your story to yourself is, well, you know, I already have it and it's right there. I don't want to throw it away and make it go to waste, right? So you eat bad food. He says you need to buy willpower, so you don't need to use it at home at the store. Don't even go down the aisles that have the food that you know you don't want to eat anymore. Don't tempt yourself. He says if I don't see whatever it is that he used to eat a lot of, then he won't put it into a shopping cart and then he won't eat it. So stay on the outside, right? You got the produce section. He talks about the seafood section. Don't go down the aisles with the junk food. Buy your willpower at the store. Willpower. Scientists describe this as pre commitment. You've made a decision in advance, right, to not buy certain things. And then you create bright lines where you say, I'm not walking down those aisles. That's my bright line. I go in the grocery store and I'm going over here and over around there, but I'm not going down those aisles. Buy your willpower at the store rather than try to use it at home. And then the fifth big idea here is exercise boosts your brain's abilities. Talks about research here. We talk about this all the Time. John Ratey, in our episodes and interviews with him, describe the fact that exercise is like taking a little bit of Ritalin and a little bit of Prozac. It focuses your mind and it boosts your mood. Those are good things. And Tom described some research that we talked about a little bit in the note of individuals who come into a lab and they're given a study, a little test where they have images of faces and names come up, right? Then they're tested on how well they do and then they moving to the next part of the study. Half of the group just sits there. The other half of the group exercises vigorously to exhaustion.

In this case, right?

Then they come back into the lab for the third part and they take the same test and they see how they do whether they just sat there or whether they exercise. Of course, the exercise group performed significantly better than the group that just sat there, knowing that we want to bake in exercise into our lives consistently. Another little side note, Tom talks about the fact that exercise gives you a 12 hour mood boost and it does all the other things on a broader perspective. But any given day you exercise, you're going to feel better for as much as 12 hours. Therefore, if you want the full benefits, exercise earlier in your day. Exercising it in the afternoon or late day, whatever is fine, get it done. But know that you're actually missing out on a ton of mood boosting goodness. So if you can move that to earlier in your day. And before I do any of these, I always work out before I teach or do an interview or whatever. Even if it's just for a few minutes, I'll bust out some burpees or do a little row or whatever just to get that goodness going. In my system, the goodness is BDNF for short, which we talk about a little bit more in the note. But remember, exercise boosts your brain performance. In the note, I share a story about a high school girl who was studying for a test and she had not done as well. She wanted to on the SAT to get into college and chatted with her about, well, look, if I was back in college and I was going to take a test that was important, I'd work out right before it. I'd schedule all my workouts before I had my exams period. Exercise increases the performance of your brain and whether it's just busting out 100 jumping jacks or 30 burpees or 50 burpees or whatever it is, get your brain going to be in a position to perform well. And if you have Test anxiety. She and I talked about the fact we want to say I'm excited. Use that energy positively. The upside of stress, Kelly McGonigal style, right? Rather than oh man, I hope I don't screw up, say I'm excited. I'm feeling these nerves. Let me channel them positively. Get a little workout in and get to work. Exercise boosts your brain. You can buy willpower at the store. That's where you want to buy it, not trying to deal with it at home. Don't buy the stuff you don't want to eat. Eat. If you want to improve something, measure it. Huge idea. Cancer candy. Quit feeding your body and your cancer cells candy in the form of sugar and in the form of excess refined carbs. And then 10,008 hours and 36 minutes. Keep that number in mind as you put in the deliberate practice and you put in the deliberate sleep to reach a higher and higher level performance. Whether you are an elite performer in a traditional sense, athletically or whatever, or as a mom or a dad or an executive, you need your sleep if you want to function at your highest level. Period. That's a quick look at Eat, Move, Sleep. This is now, I would say, my favorite health book. Actually, a lot of them kind of go on the fringes and talk about things that are a little bit out there. Tom doesn't. He's super grounded, he's super empirically based and deliberately not at the extremes. So if you're looking for a great book that's kind of your comprehensive introduction to optimizing the basic fundamentals, I highly recommend it. Basically just a bunch of big ideas. Easy, quick, practical read. And there you go. So what was the big idea that jumped out at you right now? Think about that and as always, most importantly, think about how you can apply that to your life. So starting with your next meal, with your next workout, and with tonight, having a good night of sleep, look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day.

See you.

Hi, this is Brian.

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