A MASTERCLASS On Weight Loss, Stress Management, Building Muscle & Reversing Your Age w/Andy Galpin EP 1247

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It's my position that the entire existence is a human race. We have strived for two primary goals and that's it. Reproduce, right? The second one is reduction of stress. Mmm.

We're now realizing though, Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Why do you feel like people in general are weak in the forms of their body structure, their muscle structure, and their mindset? And obviously, I don't want to generalize this because there are a lot of mentally tough and strong humans, but it just feels like it's getting weaker and weaker with technology, with the the access to comforts, everything is so quick and easy, why do you feel like this is happening? And what is the downside to a weaker society?

I think about this on a continuum of what we call resilience to sensitivity. And every action you're doing, you're moving towards one direction or the other. Now, depending on what insult you're looking at, Some things you wanna be highly sensitive to. Some things you wanna be very resilient. So not one of these is better than the other. It's a paradigm, easy example. It's probably good for you to be very sensitive to alcohol. Yeah, yeah. Right? Like, I don't want you to be so sensitive to where if you have a drink of alcohol, you have a mental breakdown for seven months. That's way too sensitive. But I want you so resilient to it that you could drink excessively and have no physical consequence, right? Because you're gonna pay for that eventually. So that's something we probably want to be generally sensitive to. Generally resilient is probably something to like even carbon dioxide build up. So what you don't realize, and we could go into metabolism a little bit if you want, but every time you take a breath in, you're breathing in oxygen, O2. When you exhale, you're breathing out CO2. So the difference is you've added a carbon. Where does that carbon come from? Your fat and your carbohydrates are stored in your body, which are your two primary ways in which you derive cellular energy. are just big long chains of carbon. In fact, that's why we call it a carbohydrate. So when you breathe, you're breathing out fat. Or carbon, or carbohydrate. It's just a carbon. It doesn't matter. So whether you're getting your fuel from this carbon that's been hydrated, which is, that's all carbohydrates are, one molecule of carbon plus one molecule of water. Well, fat is typically in this what we call triglyceride form. So it has these three carbon backbones and it has tri, 1, 2, 3, long chains of carbons. So either way, you're talking about a 40 carbon molecule or a six carbon molecule. It's being metabolized in the cell in either direction. One's going to go through the mitochondria initially. One's going to go in the cytoplasm and then through the mitochondria, but either way they're going to end in the mitochondria. They're going to come out as carbon.

That carbon's going to be attached to oxygen. Mitochondria is in the entire body or is it mostly in the brain? Mostly muscle.

Mostly in the muscle.

Not in the brain.

It's gonna be a lot up there because you have more muscle than you have brain. Gotcha. So total volume wise, it's gonna be a lot. Yeah. So you're going to, however you're metabolizing energy from any of your system, it's gonna be accessing and kicking out carbon dioxide. When that level rises in your system, that's going to cross up in your brain. You have various receptors throughout your body that are going to tell you we've got a rise in carbon dioxide. The thing that drives your ventilation, the sensation to breathe, it's not actually running low on oxygen. It's running high in CO2. So this is why carbon monoxide kills you. Because carbon monoxide will competitively bind to oxygen. So oxygen levels get low, but you don't sense that your oxygen is low.

So you don't have any idea and then you just fall dead. You pass out or you- oh, wow.

Because there's no elevation in CO2. Interesting. So this is why we have to put smells and things like that in various gases so that you can have some signal.

You know, hey, this isn't good, I gotta get out.

Or you have to have a carbon monoxide monitor in your house. Wow. Right? So point is, CO2 has a direct physical psychological connection. This is a two-way street. It's what we call bidirectional. So an elevation or change in, say, state or trade anxiety. So the amount like you get something happened right now and you freaked out, bad text, real actual, it doesn't matter. You will see an acute change in CO2 levels.

So if I think a thought, experience something that frightens me or gives me stress or anxiety, watch a scary movie, whatever it might be, your girlfriend reaches out to you about something and you feel stressed, what happens to the body when you feel that? in a moment.

You're gonna get an immediate change in catecholamine status. What is that? So you're gonna see adrenaline, you're gonna see epinephrine, which is same word. You're gonna see norepinephrine, cortisol, all these things, this stress response is gonna happen instantaneously. From that, you're gonna see a physiological response. So you're gonna see a change in heart rate, you're gonna see a change in ventilation, you'll see a change in dilation of your eyes and focus. You'll tend to see actually a change in vision because you're gonna wanna narrow in what's the danger, what's the threat. So you have a whole host of physiological responses that are coming from a psychological stress, and it goes both ways. So a physical stress can also then cause a state of psychological awareness. So you can give yourself psychological anxiety from a change in physiology, exercise. CO2 starts to rise, oh my gosh, you can't focus, you're not making good decisions, your vision changes, everything happens in this bi-directional Interesting. So with CO2, and we've seen this in our lab, if someone is very tolerant and resistant, which is where we started this question at, to elevations in CO2.

Meaning that they can push themselves longer distances from training, they can have high heart rate.

It's simpler than that.

What is it?

Yeah, it's simply say that bad thing happened psychologically. You get this rise in CO2. If you're tolerant to that CO2, you can go, okay, I'm good here. Heart rate came up a little bit, not much.

You can assess the situation, you can be more neutral as opposed to up and down.

And that would be a psychological or cognitive thing, but there's also just physiological. Your heart rate won't go up as much. And you're, okay, we're good here. We're fine, right? You're not gonna make any emotional decisions, you're not gonna make any physical actions, you're not gonna change- Change your act. Yeah. your ventilation strategy. you're resilient to it, right? Someone who is sensitive to it has the smallest little thing come in and they're gone. Right.

The wreck.

I, these are the people who are, oh, if I don't have my coffee in the morning, like don't talk to me. Horribleness, right? Like we call these people precious. You should be more resilient to daily stressors.

Yeah.

But you should be fairly sensitive to things like, I feel like I'm not drinking enough water today. I want a lot of sensitivity there because now you can quickly recognize change in behavior and pattern. But some stressors we want you to be resilient towards. I want you to be resilient towards running 20 miles.

Yeah.

Right?

26.2, but yeah, it's counted.

But I want you to be sensitive to going, hey, my heart rate's a little bit higher last time that I ran this pace because now I don't need as much tech. to give me feedback because that's one of the problems with the tech, especially training and physiology-based technologies. Is they're outsourcing your own endogenous awareness?

The heart rate monitor or something else?

Totally, right? And this is what our entire Unplugged book was about. It's not that training tech is bad. Obviously, I use it with every professional athlete I work with. But you don't want to outsource your physiology to a clumsy tech. It can be good for calibration. It can be good for establishing, I.

Don'T know what a heart rate of 150 is. Right, right. It's an assessment tool. It's more of like, where am I at?

Totally.

Not a continuum tool necessarily.

100%.

An assessment every now and then. Okay, let me recheck later. But using your brain or your body or own senses to assess on a.

Consistent basis is what I'm hearing is probably more in alignment to a healthier long-term constructive life. Absolutely, because then what happens when you're Michael Phelps and you're in the pool in the Olympics, I need my money. Well, your goggles broke. Oh, yeah. And he still broke world record. Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with this story, but what happened is goggles break in the middle of the race, right? And you can't see. Now, you know how important it is to be able to see when you're swimming, especially when you're trying to break a world record, because you can't Veer. Right. You finish it. And the story goes, his coach had actually made him practice without his goggles in case something happened. To prepare for it. Yeah. So he learned how many strokes it takes.

He learned how far he's traveling, and.

He could just count. and they knew when to reach.

That's amazing, isn't it?

So if we kind of wrap that part up is if you think about the entire optimization, if you want to call it that, for human physiology, you have to think it's my position that the entire existence as a human race, we have strived for two primary goals and that's it. Reproduce, right? The second one is reduction of stress. We're now realizing though It worked.

We have all these comforts, right?

We went too far, right? We developed culture for safety in numbers, right? We developed agriculture for safety of food. We developed indoors for safety of thermal stress. And we've even strove for one central goal. Every technological advancement we've ever done is to mitigate stress. Now what happens when you go into space and we have completely reduced all stress? your physiology tanks in a matter of days. So getting to Mars is not gonna be a rocket problem, it's gonna be a physiology problem.

Interesting.

We can't replace enough stress with our current lifestyles. Your question initially, and I'm whatever, 10 minutes into finally answering your question, why are we at these problems? It's simply because we have not realized what stressors we wanna place on ourself and which ones were acceptable removing. We've just removed all. as fast as we can. So if you want to take this from a lifestyle, if you want to take this from a happiness, if you want to take this from a movement or nutrition, any of these ones, it's gonna work. We have to have a better understanding of what are we trying to go after. So we have to come back and now artificially engage in weird stress, like exercise.

Yeah. Because it feels like, I think I can speak for most of the human race. And correct me if I'm wrong here. It feels like most of the human race wants to be happy, wants to be healthy, wants to have quality relationships and feel loved, wants to live a longer life. They want to be around longer. Maybe I'm off, tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like most humanity wants those things.

I think you're probably pretty close.

And maybe they want to have status or something else or have fulfillment in their work or something, but those are things. They want to be happy, healthy, quality relationships, extend their life as long as they can in a healthy way. Is it better to do that, to live in complete comfort, or what types of stresses do we need to be putting ourselves to also have all those things and extend our life as long as we can? Or if we're living in complete comfort, will we die earlier?

Yeah, clearly. There's no doubt, right? So you're gonna... And when it's too.

Much stress, like you're actually gonna die earlier because you're stressing yourself too much.

This is what we do. This is the entire point of everything I do with the professional athlete. We're trying to assess what we'll call hidden stressors, visible stressors. We're going to match that with a recovery capacity. If you outkick your coverage, in other words, your hidden or visible stressors are higher than your recovery capacity, you're going to block adaptation. Now if I can move the lever on an increasing recovery capacity or I can reduce a stress Total stress load, fine. Well, the backside of that coin is the only way we get adaptation is through stress. So reduction of stress is not adaptation.

What's adaptation?

Any change.

Okay.

Any change.

The only way we grow is through stress.

Or shrink.

Interesting, okay.

Either way, right? It's gonna have to be some stressor. It's inertia. If I put up, if I throw a ball in space, It will continue at the same speed for forever because there's no external stress. We have external stress here. Physiology is optimized with stress. Right. Not without.

The body is optimized with stress.

It functions its best with stress because it needs to continually provide maintenance. Imagine if in this building you just fired every maintenance person. It's not going to work its best. Right. you want to have some small changes there. Let's get the carpet out. Let's do this. Let's change out.

You're gonna see improvements, right?

Take the trash out, everything, yeah. Totally, yeah. That's like a figurative and a quite literal example. So another paradigm that's important to think about is what we'll call optimization versus adaptation. Okay. So just like I had my, and you're gonna see this a lot, by the way. Like I love to have kind of numbers and systems. Every choice you're making in your day, is moving you more towards optimization or adaptation. Now what the key is, is understanding when we want to hedge for one versus the other. And I can give you some examples. If you had like, say you spent some time and you figured out what your optimal morning routine is. Yeah. Awesome. I want people to do that. That's fantastic. Huge believer in understanding what makes you feel incredible. However, that's pushing towards optimization, right? So you're gonna not do work, you're gonna lose time in your day, you're gonna do all these things that are gonna come at an expense and you're gonna feel great that day. The downside of that optimization is you're blocking adaptation, right? Because you're no longer getting better at dealing with a suboptimal day. Fine, so when you say, okay, look, I've got a very important meeting, I've got a game today, I've got something to do, I want you to know exactly what it takes for you to feel fantastic, starting 24 hours or more out. Let's get on this thing, let's get in the sleep, let's get everything dialed. I'm gonna feel great tomorrow. Yes. If you try to practice that every single day, you're going to become incredibly sensitive, which means- if something's off.

Anything is off, you just tank. Oh, interesting. So you have the optimal routine, but if your alarm clock goes off too soon, or you get a phone call, or something happens and you wake up.

Dog wakes you up in the middle of the night. The whole day is off, is what you're saying.

The whole thing is screwed. Interesting.

Because you became way too sensitive. So I want you to- you- became.

Too reliant on it to being perfect in a certain way.

And we've seen this a lot with breathwork stuff where people are just like, if I don't get my whole breathwork in, like I can't focus. If I don't have my Nootropic and I don't have my full, like that's not, if you can't function without coffee. That's not good. And caffeine's fantastic. Yeah. Like, that's a really bad position to be in because you're back to being precious now. If anything happens.

We're not resilient.

I can't take you in the woods. We can't go hunting for five days because you're not gonna be able to function. Plug in your head. No. We need to be able to survive in difficult situations. Obviously our lives, what we consider to be a difficult situation now is far less than what it on average used to be. Certainly some people are dealing with really difficult things. But for the most part as a global average in this country, The bar has gone up. Life is pretty good.

Yeah, we're not in the woods all day.

So how do we figure this out? We need to think through from an athletic perspective. It's very easy, right? In the off season, for example, we're not driving optimization. I'm not peaking you for tomorrow when I'm six months out from a game. I'm driving adaptation. Here's what that means. You're not going to feel great today. Things aren't going to be perfect. Our HRV numbers are going to be down. I'm not gonna give you an optimal pre and post workout. And we're not gonna dial these things in. We're going to put the body under higher stress in the areas we want. We're gonna remove them in the areas we don't want, but general stress load's gonna go up. And I may cut out a little.

Bit of your recovery capacity.

Make it uncomfortable for you. I want you to become more resilient. I want the physiological requirements for recovery to have to go, We don't have enough here. Upregulate. Build more mitochondria. Be more tolerant to the connective tissue be more tolerant to the stress load.

Whatever thing we're trying to push. You're gonna feel more soreness today, you.

Have to push through the soreness, whatever, yeah. All these things, right? Now we're gonna roll into season in this example and say let's now push towards optimization. And I could give you some examples of this, but we've done work with things like taper. And you know what taper is, but.

I'll explain for non-sport folks.

Like tapering off? Yeah. So you've trained the entire season, for example, and then the last couple of weeks you say, back down practices.

Yeah, so we can get ready for the playoffs.

The whole idea is you've actually overloaded your system the entire season, and now when you back off that volume, intracellularly you recover. So now performance jumps up. And we've seen this actually, we've taken biopsies of folks pre and post like a three-week taper, and we've seen improvements of like 10 to 15% in fast-twitch muscle size.

Wow.

Through the taper.

Wow. And how long does the taper, like?

Three weeks.

A couple weeks, yeah.

And we've seen this with as little as two. And this is not like generally a 50% reduction in volume. So if you're running 30 miles a week and you go down to 15 for a week, you could quite literally see a giant increase in fast twitch muscle fiber size by simply doing less. Wow. That only works though, because you worked really hard.

Yes.

Before that.

For like three months, yeah.

Yeah. So you just have to have a bit of a strategy and for non-athletes, the same thing happens for this longevity scheme, right? So what you're trying to run the equations on all the time are, okay, what have I become really sensitive to? What have I become really resilient against? And am I driving too much optimization? Because if you are, you're probably shortcutting your long-term. This is what we call the short game versus the long game. Sometimes I want you to play the short game. I don't want you to spend too much time pushing for another way to think about this adaptation versus optimization is immediate versus delayed gratification. If you always choose immediate gratification, I don't need to explain to you why that's a problem. However, if you always choose delayed gratification, you're now asking a recipe for mental health issues.

Give me an example why.

You're not present. You have this big thing and congratulations, like you made the big sale. Okay, yeah, but now we gotta, you're always kicking the, you're never having that piece of cake, you're never taking that day off. You're never present. And you've probably had a million people on the show before talk about the importance of presence, right? If you're worried about the past, you know what that is. If you're worried about the future, that's a different thing. So having some semblance of presence, is critical. So you want to pay attention to, hey, you haven't been happy. I've had this happen with athletes winning Olympic gold medals.

Yeah, and then depression right after.

Immediate depression, right?

I can't tell you. Have you seen that movie, the Weight of Gold?

No.

It's a documentary called the Weight of Gold. Yep, I can see that. You should watch it. It's powerful. And it's about kind of like the depression cycle that these elite athletes have after the Olympics, specifically with the Olympics because-- It's very real. because it's like you train for eight or 16 years for one moment and then there's no more vision, there's no more goal once you retire, I guess.

It's even more acute than that. I have seen this before, like you walk off and you have these NBA world championships, UFC belts, and it's like, I'm not even happy right now. Yeah, or like, I'm so happy.

It's not even like I'm so happy.

It's the next day, it's like, you,'re not even happy right then. And that's because it's too much of.

Like, okay, yeah, we had a great day, but like, Or you focus on the mistakes you made, or I could have done this, or I missed the shot of the goal or whatever.

Yeah. That's workaholics. You're gonna have all these problems.

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If you're too focused on acute happiness.

Though, yeah, you're eating sugar all day long, you're having, you know, you're not sleeping, you're just partying all day.

I'll probably, four or five hours work today is probably good. Yeah. Now you're there. So all these things are a calculation you're running and I think you can challenge these with every aspect of your whether that's your work, it's your food, it's your relationships. All of these things you need to think carefully and go, you know what? Maybe I should, I'm gonna invest in more sleep right now, right? And I'm just gonna eat it with my job right now. We have what we call a snapshot or a quadrant. So you get 10 points.

Give me an example.

I give you 10 points. I'm gonna make you do this right now.

Okay.

You ready for this? You have four categories. Mm-. Category one is relationships.

Okay. So this is like a four quadrant?

BINGO.

Okay. Relationships.

Category two is physical. Category three is recovery.

Okay.

And category four is, we have relationships, physical, recovery, and business. Of course, business, like business life. like job, all that stuff. So now each one of these categories is changing based on you. So what's relationship means to you? Like that's not the same for me or whatever. What's business means, that's just so whatever these things need to make sense for you, makes sense for you. And you get 10 points. Okay. So the question, and this is part of the questions.

One through 10.

One through 10 total. So you've got to tell me how many points you want to put in every category.

You only have 10 total points. 10 total points. In each category or all total.

Okay, so what's the points mean? Like, How much of your energy are you going to put into each one of these for the next, let's say, eight weeks? And I like to do these in short seasons, right? So it could be a month, but I like eight weeks better. So right now for the next eight weeks, Louis, how many points are you going to put in your relationships?

I feel like I put a lot of my relationships. I feel like I put a lot in all these.

You put, you put, you put, you put, you put.

You only get 10, so if I.

Give nine here, then I only get, your 10 may be higher than my 10. Right, but your 10 is still your max capacity.

Sure, sure. So I can only use 10 points in all total. So we do 3-3-3-4.

And now what's that number?

Oh, so 3-3-3-1, right? It's like- Bingo.

Here's the problem. So put them down. Let's start with recovery.

I mean, it's hard.

I really- so how much are you doing for physical and mental recovery? every single day relative to, let's start with business.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is-- How much of.

Your day is focused around business related things?

You're saying like there's 24 hours in a day.

How much of your energy, your overall-- It's not like time per se. It's like, how much does it take from your soul?

I feel like this is probably a four.

Four, great. So now we got six points left across the next three categories. How much is your physical training, your exercise, your breath work and motivation?

This is probably a 2.1.5. Can I do that? Okay, I'll do it too.

All right, so now you got, how much are you putting into your relationships? This could be family, this could be even your people you work with and buildings.

This is probably a 3 and then a 1, right?

All right, cool. Fine. So here's what I'd say, there's nothing wrong. Your split is your split. Here's what I'd say is, is that.

Split matching your current goals?

Well, I mean... And here's the thing. Physical to recovery can never be higher than a two to one ratio. So you can't have a four in physical training and a one recovery.

So this is perfect then. This is perfect.

Two to one. If you don't want to make much progress in your physical training. You're right, but if you're 20%.

Right. Well, I'm thinking about the time. Like, I spend an hour, two hours a day of my time towards physical training, nutrition, I guess.

Yeah. But like, so that's up to you, right? Right, right. What we're going to do then is we're gonna take that and we're gonna put that in front out here with the rest of your team. And you're gonna put that on your cell phone, right? And every couple of whiles we're gonna check in and say, Louis, did you, you haven't done, did you skip your mobility again today? Mm-. Are we really getting two here? Are we getting half as much time in your physical training as we are in your business? And the answer is no, you're not holding consistently against what you said. And this was our agreement. You made this agreement to your boyfriend, your mom, whoever your coach is, right? So we're helping understand and then we're gonna do this again. And you may say, Hey, look, right now, we got this stuff moving business-wise. Yeah, right.

So put more energy here as opposed to, yeah.

It's just acknowledging it and it's hugely helpful for the high performers because we want your family to see this too. That's when you go, Hey, look, we're in the playoffs right now.

I'm not gonna have time for you.

Dad's going six in physical, four in recovery.

Yeah, not the zero.

Athletes that do this, it's like they're 10 weeks out and they hug their family and okay, like dad is gonna see you in 10 weeks. They're not moving out, but like they're focused. They know emotionally I'm gonna try to be here, but it's just not gonna be there. And if there's a question of like can you go to Tommy's practice versus go see your, like you're on them. That choice is made. And we're just gonna hold you consistent to that choice. And it's very helpful for understanding where we're gonna go however the final key here is once you've hit that mark, we have to reassess and we have to go, look, you can't just have a permanent six on business. No. Well, this is why I love looking.

At life in seasons, just from like sports. You know, as an athlete, it's like you can never have a season nonstop forever. There's always an end to a season and then there's the postseason or the off season, whatever you want to call it. And then there's a preseason and then there's a season and then there's the playoffs. So it's like that end of the season, you gotta give yourself a date when the end will be. 100%. So you can reassess and say, is this working for me? Do I still wanna be doing this? Do I wanna try something new in my life? And create a new vision for the next season of your life, which I think is valuable.

I couldn't agree more, because if not, you end up getting this, and this, like by the way, this is the most common split. Yeah. Like 80% of people are gonna put this on their first try. Yeah. Exactly that. I could actually, I probably should have done like a magic trick before.

So I guess he's gonna go 4-3-2-1.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's everyone, right? If you run that the rest of your life, you're just going to continue to move at a very slow rate. You have to come and go, okay, you know what? Look, we did spend the next six months. We built this company. We got this project.

Yeah, because it takes momentum to build something and launch something. It's going to take more effort and time on one thing, but then you got to focus back on your body. The goal would be hopefully to have things kind of balanced after you launch things, right?

Or no? Not really.

Huh?

I don't think, because if you end up having an equal balance of everything, you get very little done. I actually like sprints. Totally. I haven't slept and we went nuts for two months, whatever the thing is. I'm gonna go full recovery. We're gonna go to business, and maybe we're gonna do it for two weeks. Fine.

Take a month off or a year.

Not even, it could just be like, look, I'm gonna work from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00. I'll work three hours a day, whatever the case is, and it's just not gonna get done. We're gonna lose that sale. Money's gonna come down 20%, fine. But I have to repay back this physical debt. I have to pay this emotional debt back.

I gotta spend time with my relationship dad.

I haven't called my mom yet back. Like, I'm gonna hate myself. All these things you know are true. You just have to now invest and go. Because, like, I know, like, I know you have to just do the 100-hour work week sometimes.

Yeah, if you're launching something, if you want it to be successful.

You have to.

You can't just show up two hours a day on a business that no one knows about.

When we're preparing for a world title fights or four years into an Olympic career, why? There are plenty of times when it is just like nothing else is going on.

Yeah, you don't get to call your mom, no. She gets one minute a day. Born in the cabin.

No mom, no kids.

Here's the thing. Here's one thing I wanna ask you about is sleep. One of the things that I've heard from a lot of the sleep scientists and doctors out there, from Dr. Matthew Walker to Huberman, to Shawn Stevenson who studied a lot about this as well, is that you can't pay off sleep debt is what I've heard. Like if you're, you know, two hours behind on sleep, what you should be getting, the brain just functions slower from what I've been told by scientists. And if you keep doing two hours less every day or you only get four hours or five hours of sleep, like the body is not gonna be able to recover. You're gonna be slower thinking based on the studies that they've done. So what have you seen where people are lacking sleep? are you able to still be focused and recover? And can you pay off that debt if you miss a few hours every week for years? Can your body actually recover? It's a bit of a pedantic argument.

Okay. My general response is I like the message of, no, I'll just like sleep when I'm like, I hate that idea. No, sleeping I'm dead. Yeah.

No, no, no.

Like, you're going to be dead. You're gonna die sooner. It's no good, right? So I. As a general thing, I think it's a good message to put like, hey, you need to invest in your physical health and sleep is a huge cornerstone to that. Having said that, I think people, and these are not Matthew Walker's words, by the way. It's just people have interpreted, as Sim was saying, there is some confusion on what sleep debt is and is not. So if you missed two hours of sleep last night, that's not two hours, well, you can't travel back in time. So yes, technically you'll never recover those two hours. Literally not gonna happen. Totally get it. But don't think because you've not slept two hours tonight that you'll never recover some physical state ever possible again. That's not sleep debt. What he's saying is you can't sleep three hours a night during the week and then sleep 15 on the weekends and think that that's equal. That's a bad idea. So I would absolutely agree with the idea of sleep debt like that is something you want to avoid. I would also agree that if you want to perform cognitively and physically at your highest level, sleep should be a major core. I would probably argue the top. That's why I've spent so much time in that area. So I'm a huge proponent of that. I'm a big believer in it. Now, having said that, I deal with athletes that are, take a major league baseball player. We're going to go into different time zones. Right. Every three or four days.

Yeah, it's tough.

We have to deal with this problem. And so we have to come up with solutions for that. And we do. You can recover. There's no question. You can come back to baseline. It's a question of this. Think about your body tends to like spikes versus slow ramps. So what I mean by that is a huge insult physiologically matched with an equal amount of recovery. tends to lead to positive adaptations. A tiny bit of stress.

When you mean an insult, a huge insult, meaning like, okay, I'm going to the gym, I'm hitting it hard for a couple hours, I'm gonna tear the.

Muscles to a certain point.

Yeah, there's actually not much muscle tearing there, but you get the idea. Be sore. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna be sore, I'm gonna be in pain, right? Okay. And then I'm gonna go to fatigue, whatever it is.

So you're saying a big insult in the body. Yeah.

Stress.

A totally important point that you don't care about, I promise I won't lose the message. Yes. You do not need to get sore.

For a quality workout at all.

For a quality workout. For have a productive exercise session, soreness is a terrible metric for activity. We can come back to that if you want, but I don't want to lose what you're really trying to get at, because that was just a kind of example you're saying. So I understand. So we can flag that and come back if you want. But yes, in theory, whether this is a food insult, whether this is a sleep insult, whether this is a hormonal, is a thermal stress. This is why things like cold.

Cold, hot, yep.

They are big whole cow. We're gonna see a change in ventilation. We're gonna see an endocrine response, which is hormone release, right? We're gonna see all these physiological changes. This is what we're after.

We want that.

You match it with an equal amount of rigor recovery.

Sleep, rest.

Done, right? You get in a cold bath, 30 degree water, you're gonna see immediate, boom, everything is gonna shoot up. You're gonna get out what you're gonna see. In fact, if you look at like HRV. So HRV is a measure of autonomic nervous system. So think of this as like a global measure of your stress load. Okay? Now there's the parasympathetic side of the equation, which is kind of like, chill and sympathetic, which is like fight or flight. So you want this high HRV score because this is generally saying you are in a nicely parasympathetic mode when you're supposed to be. If you get in the ice, and we've done this with a lot of professional athletes, not like one setting, we talk about like weeks and weeks of daily and metrics and months of metrics. Your HRV score when you get in the ice is going to plummet. You're going to flip into sympathetic nervous system, and remember low HRV is bad.

Okay.

You get out of the ice, within 30 minutes your HRV score will be higher than it was when you started. 60, 90, 180 up to 270 minutes post that, it'll still be higher than it was at the beginning. So a three minute jump in cold water can provide a pretty lasting positive physiological response. And that's exactly what I mean by short term shock. Matched by get out, okay. Breathe.

Relax for 20 minutes, yeah.

Totally. You're going to see a higher basal state, if you want to think about it, than what you did before. That's a really easy example of a quick.

Higher base state of what?

In this particular case, HRV, which is again like a rough global metric of what's your physiological state.

And you want that. You want it to be higher. You're higher.

Performing better.

You're more under control.

Interesting.

So less. Is that good to do on a daily basis, these short shocks, whether it be extreme hot, extreme cold, extreme whatever, extreme sprinting really quick, something like that.

On a daily or. Yeah, I think so. But they don't have to be the same thing. So you don't have to ice every day. You don't have to do max heart rate intervals every day. But you could do something that requires tremendous concentration.

Focus.

You can make a get like, yeah, I'm gonna do 90 minutes of just completely involved work. I'm gonna do a meditation session. I'm gonna have breath work. I'm gonna be totally engaged with my partner and just really have a 45 minute conversation where we're just locked in like physical touch. All of these things can represent these short intense bursts, right? So if you're an exerciser like us, like that's gonna come a lot of.

Times in the form of working out, yeah.

Food-Related things. There's, of course, supplementation and other areas to get to it. What you don't want is just a wandering baseline where you're slightly underslept, you're slightly overfed, you have a little bit of stress, but it's not the kind of stress you want.

That's not good stress.

You're not totally focused and then work builds up and then you're kind of a jerk to your Kit, that's a recipe for all things bad, right? Loss of productivity, loss of relationships, all these things got worse and we didn't drive adaptation. So we didn't get better.

Interesting.

Because of it. So those are the areas we want to stay away from. I could give you physiological examples, but you're getting the point. Yeah. And so that's where we want to be mindful of. With sleep, For example, chronic slight under sleep is going to lead to that area of, okay, now all of a sudden, I don't feel great and I feel like my energy's down and we just have these continual degradation of physiological state. So then we have to come in and spend way too much time running diagnosis and figure out, okay, it's one of four, bad sleep is one of four areas. It's psychology. it is physiology, it is environment, or it is your pathology.

What is pathology?

So you could have something going on, like if we ran, you could have, there's a particular issue where your legs twitched all night, right? You have things like that where your tongue is falling in the back of your neck and you can't breathe and your being shot awake. So some sort of negative actual state, you could have some sort of physical induced sleep apnea. Right.

So the four parts of bad sleep is psychology, which is essentially like the way you're, maybe you're thinking or ruminating.

All day, you're worrying about something and you're not able to calm your thoughts. Yes, essentially.

This comes into a variety of areas.

Either I can't turn my brain off at night. Yeah.

This used to be me for most of my life. Totally. Super easy fixes for that, by the way, for the most part. I wish I had that. I feel like I had that in the environment. We didn't have air conditioning when I was a kid growing up. Yeah, me too. So I was just sweating in the middle of summer just like, I can't sleep. And then you're just like ruminating on why he can't sleep. No sheets, no blankets, just like, and my dad didn't let me have a fan on me 'cause he's like, it's gonna make you sick.

Oh no way.

So I couldn't have a fan on. And he was like, this is gonna make you sick. So I just had to sit there for two hours every night hoping for sleep. Well, you became very resilient to that. I know, right? Oh my gosh, man. So, I feel like the psychology, the environment is one thing. And you hear people talking about having a sleep sanctuary and really like the different things you can do with dark out, the snake plants to create more oxygen, the sheets, the temperature, everything for the optimized sleep is the ghee, right?

So, with the environment, you want to pay attention to a handful of other things. Most people are hip to light.

Yeah, the light is sound.

There's other things that we can measure, like I was talking before the show. We have a box that we can just sit at the end of your desk.

I like that.

And it's gonna run full environmental diagnostics.

I wanna try that.

So this is gonna measure everything from your CO2 cloud, which is again going back to our beginning of our conversation. You're gonna take a breath in and you're gonna breathe out CO2. Well, when you're sleeping, because you're not going, you're just barely moving. CO2 basically seeps out. Wow. Well, if that CO2 hovers around your face and you're re-inhaling CO2, what's happening?

It's not good.

It's going right back up again. It's shooting awake. Or even if you're not physically shooting awake, you're gonna be shot out of sleep stages. Right, which is what we're trying to get into, right? And you can go back to, I'm sure, listen to your episodes with Walker and Andrew, and they've talked about the various sleep stages. So, if we can figure out, hey, you know what? Like, actually it's not You don't need to wear the blue blockers. Not that you don't, but you don't have all these things that people are thinking. You've tried all these supplementation, you've tried changing your diet, you've changing all these things, you're done and you're still not sleeping.

Well, maybe it's as simple as the fact that the air ventilation in your.

Room isn't moving the air off your face.

So having some circulation.

Totally. It has to be the right type.

Of circulation because if the air condition goes off, you're going to be like, now we've fallen, sorry if that was really loud.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's falling now back into there.

Yeah, I actually like the some sound, like not sound but more like.

Air.

Flow, air flow, like hearing the air flowing makes me sleep easier than silence. Like I get like worried when it's just silent.

I don't know. You're very normal. Yeah. Most people are gonna say put a big, this is why white noise machines.

Like a little fan or something. Yeah, just to hear it.

It also drowns out the bottom level of noise. noise.

That's true. Any other little sounds that you might hear from outside?

Yeah, that's interesting. Can't hear it, right?

Huh. So we're gonna look at that. We're gonna look at any. You said pathology.

What's the third one?

Psychology, environment, something else in pathology. Physiology.

Physiology. This is like. So this is where the body is twitching or you're sore, you're in pain? No, no. This is going to be quite literally your melatonin levels throughout the night before. Gotcha. Throughout the day, it's cortisol levels, it's DHEA levels. It's everything that goes the serotonin, dopamine, all these things that you can do supplementation wise or food wise are affecting the physiology.

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Fidelity Brokerage Services member NYSC SIPC. So what we're going to try to do is run through if you do the very standard sleep hygiene stuff, and that's not working. Now we've got to go down one of these areas and figure out maybe there's simply a pollen or some environmental thing going on in the air that's blocking up your nose and all of a sudden you can't breathe through your nose. Now you've gone to mouth breathing at night and you've probably talked about that.

Of course. Yeah, yeah.

That's bad.

James Nestor. Yeah.

Yeah, you can look at the nitric oxide issues, so endothelial function is down. So if you're a little bit older and you've lost nitric oxide function and/or you're not getting high nitric oxide concentrations out of your food, and now if you've got the double whammy, which tends to happen, poor food and age, boom. Now we have physiological problems. So it may not be any of the environment or psychology, but you're kicking awake, and then when you kick awake, you start thinking. and now you think it's a psychology problem, but really your physiology was just too close to high alert and any little thing shot you off. And so you weren't resilient at all because you're right on that threshold of not being able to do things. And then you can try, you know, I'm sure Andrew's talked about HSDD stuff and just like nuts, right? Another trick I love for the brain thing, actually, we use this a lot with high performers. And by that I mean not just athletes, but high performers, right?

Executives and yeah.

The brain does not do well for these people that are high drive when you tell it to calm down. Now, if you can't do that, you need to develop that skill.

The ability to calm down.

For sure.

At any moment.

Yeah. And meditation, breath work, all this stuff is really effective. However, it tends to do very well when you simply give it a very specific task, which sounds counterintuitive. So you shoot awake and you can't go back to sleep because you're thinking about whatever the thing is. Two ways to solve this. Number one, if it's like, I gotta do this tomorrow and this, this, this, a very easy solution is to just keep this right by your bed. Wake up and write, okay, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and you'll be like, all right, good. Get it out, yeah. Or the other way is I try to solve my hardest problems in bed when I can't sleep. I specifically, not my emotionally difficult ones, but my hardest, what I call wonders. thought like, you know, I haven't really thought through this concept of optimization. How would this, and I'm just, I'm thinking really hard on something. How am I gonna write, like, you know, like, what do those data mean? Like, huh? Gone. Because you've just, you've state changed. You've given the brain a task, and then it goes, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not what we're doing right now. Really?

Interesting.

And you just go out. Oh. So mindfulness is my number one. try to just zen back out. If that doesn't work, though, focus on a task that's not emotionally charging for you. Oh, yeah. But you really like, what's the thing where you're just like, man, sometimes, like, sometimes i'll think about. I'm a sports fan. I played college football like you. Sometimes I think about, like, god, can I name the entire 1995 mariners roster? Like, I think I can. Who the hell plays second base? Like, I want to. Yeah. You just go through that stuff. So you give it something to do. Yeah. It's the same thing with, like, a parenting. or work with employees rather than just telling them what not to do. You're more effective generally telling it what to do and making it do something and giving it options. And you can think about this, this, or this. I'm not just gonna run around and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, 'cause that's really hard for you to just like stop thinking about this damn meeting. Like that's really difficult.

Right, right.

It doesn't work. So you know what? Okay, you can have these three options. Think about this, this, or this and.

You just go and in worst case, you lay there in bed happy. Yes, thinking about something, yeah.

Worst case.

Something I've heard recently from different longevity experts is that building muscle mass is one of the key indicators to living a longer life. I don't know if that's accurate in your studies.

Yeah.

So having, you know, for a number of reasons, if you fall and, like, just to be able to get yourself off the ground so you don't die as one, one thing, having the strength also just like. being healthier and living longer and more flexible and stuff like that.

But there's physiology too. Remember, skeletal muscle is your biggest organ. Which means it's your center house for most of your hormone response. It's going to control and regulate a lot of physiology. It's the place where insulin is going to have the most effect. Your cytokines and myokines, most of this is coming in or out of muscle. It's an amino acid reserve slightly. Which you need amino acids to then build immune cells and and brain cells, everything else requires an amino acid. So it's a storage depot. It has tremendous physiological benefit outside of jumping and looking good.

Is this the same for men and women?

Yes.

So should women be thinking about building muscle?

100%. If you look very clearly at the longevity data, you're gonna see a handful of things jump out. If you look at studies, and this is Stephen Blair's stuff from 1990, Way back, we've known that things like your VO2 max. This is something that again has been in every exercise physiology textbook for 35 years. It's nothing new. It's not like a controversial hot new thing. It's very well established. VO2 max is a huge predictor of longevity, lifespan and health span. More recently, but even the last 20 years, muscle function, so muscle size and muscle quality. In fact, a really nice review paper came out just this week. neurophysiology, showing that skeletal muscle cells. So remember, your muscle, any one of your muscles, is made up of millions of individual muscle cells. So think about a ponytail. So a ponytail is one, but it's just a composite of tons of hairs. Tons of hair. Skeletal muscle is long and thin and tubular. In fact, it's one of the biggest cells in all of biology by volume. So human skeletal muscle is massive. It's multinucleated. which is also very unique, which means all your DNA is held in the nucleus.

Of the muscle.

Of the cells, of every cell. That's just how cells work. Most cells have one nucleus per cell. Skeletal muscle has thousands. And now you imagine having a muscle cell this long, right? And you can see them with your naked eye. I've got stuff where I can pull it up with a tweezer and hold it up in air and you can see a muscle cell with your naked eye. We've done that before. In that thing, it could be a few inches long. It's going to have thousands of nuclei spread throughout it. And what this does is allow you tremendous adaptability. So imagine you're running a company all over the nation. If you had one manager and there's a branch in Wisconsin, there's a branch in Florida, and a printer breaks in Wisconsin, and they got to call you. Or you could have a general manager in every single location. repair happens much faster, which means we can have more turnover, we can accept more jobs, we can do more stress, we can handle more stress. In fact, we've seen this in some of our athletes, that the ones who recover faster and handle more volume have more of these mitochondria, or sorry, have more of these myonuclei. So, the nucleation is what allows you to handle and recover from stress because it's controlling your DNA and it's coming in and saying, we've had an insult here, reproduce, the genes necessary to build the protein, in this case myosin are actin, the proteins that make muscles contract or whatever the case is, it's going to build. So you have these greater amount of control there. So having more and higher quality muscle function just simply allows you to go through more physical stress. More physical stress then has tangential benefits to the cardiovascular system, bone system, brain, like everything else is going to then benefit from your ability to continue to put yourself through physical stress. You're going to feel better. One of the key associates of muscle strength and size through time is general physical activity. So imagine standing up out of this chair is an 85% one rep max. You're not going to do it very often. No. So by having strong legs in particular for men and women means you're much more likely to get up and go check the male, get up and go for the walk, which means general physical activity goes up and we have all those secondary benefits associated. So it is hugely important. And the last thing I'll say here is not only is it important for general muscle, but it is incredibly important to preserve your fast twitch muscle fibers.

How do you do that?

You need to expose them to stress, which means you need to make them move forcefully. That's the central place. So think about it this way. You've got these millions of muscle fibers inside a muscle. Some of them are what we call fast twitch, which means they contract with a lot of velocity, but they tend to be fatigable. So they use primarily or mostly carbohydrates for fuel and less fat and less mitochondria. Great. Their purpose is explosion, force production. Then you have a bunch of slow twitch fibers and they're the opposite. So they don't contract with much velocity. They tend to be smaller. but not always, but they tend to have a lot more mitochondria. So these are your anti-gravity muscles. So your spinal erectors are mostly slow twitch because they're supposed to be on lightly contracted and just keeping you erect. Your hamstrings are fast twitch muscles. You don't need your hamstrings very often, but you need them to explode. So each person has a different amount of fast twitch and slow twitch muscles and they differ from muscle to muscle based on functionality. Even within the calf, there's two primary muscles. There's a soleus and a gastroc. Soleus is keeping you vertical and a gastroc is the one that if you flex your toe towards your face, it's the one that pops out in the inside. That's explosion. So what happens is general activities of daily living are always going to activate soleus fibers. So when I take a drink of.

This cup, you're not sprinting.

I'm actually not activating any fast-twitch muscle fibers. because if I did, I wouldn't be able to down regulate force production. So I want to start with what's the least amount of force needed, which we call the size principle. So Eldred W. Henneman, famous neuroscientist, 1950s, he said there's this idea that you're going to activate the low threshold neurons first. So you're scratching your arm and doing this. I'm going to activate the smallest, weakest nerve set. And if you realize I need more force here, you'll activate a little bit bigger. And you need more force, we'll go a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger until that's enough. Right. Well, these fast twitch fibers at the higher threshold, imagine going years and now decades of never turning them on, because you never did anything that required high force production. Well, eventually those- They turn off. They die. They die.

You don't have fast twitch anymore. You can't sprint, you can't jump, you.

Can'T lift heavy things. It's the nerve that stops sending signals. The muscle fiber can die away and go, or it can stay there. But the nerve then says, you know what? We're gonna reinnervate and grab some of these fast twitch fibers and convert them into slow twitch fibers. And so you have these huge swaths of slow twitch fibers. You can't produce force.

And so once those are dead, it's gone, though, right?

Regrowing a nerve is out of there.

What's the best ways to...

Anything that requires high force.

High force meaning...

Anything that feels heavy. Lifting heavy. Can be jumping, can be plyometrics. It can be... Start where you're at. So don't go to the gym if.

You haven't lifted in 10 years.

Squat 300 pounds. Start with simple movements. Start with single joint machines if you have to. I don't care. And then what's heavy? Well, what feels heavy? Okay, great. Next time, a little more, a little more, and stay in movement patterns that are efficient and get a little bit sore is okay, but pushing more soreness is not equivalent for better.

Really? Not always. Why is, could you improve without getting sore?

Yeah, it's like my whole job.

Really? Yeah. So when does soreness happen? When it's like, okay, if you do this much, you won't feel sore, but if you go one rep more, you're gonna feel sore.

Yeah, a couple of things to note there. explain soreness as micro tears in muscle fibers. That can happen, but that's not the primary reason. Most likely you're disturbing, this is probably way outside of your audience interest level. You're disturbing calcium concentrations from the sarcoplasmic reticulum to the muscle fibers. So it's not a muscle damage, although that can occur. The things that tend to make you more sore are the eccentric portion. So this is the lowering of stuff. So imagine if you were to do a bench press, and you lowered it to your chest, that's eccentric. That's gonna cause more damage than the part where you lift it. Pushing it. Off your chest. So if you're doing a lot of eccentric related movements.

You're gonna get more sore. More sore. Interesting. But you're gonna get stronger too. So if you're doing a pull up when you go down and slowly, that's.

When you're gonna feel sore. But it's gonna make you stronger.

Yes.

So how do you get stronger without soreness? Control volume. So how many reps you do? It totally depends on the person. So you gotta figure this out, right? What's the reps I can do? What's the load I can do? And what's the movement pattern? And then how frequently can I do this? Where here's my rule of thumb.

If you grade soreness on a scale.

Of one to 10. Like I can't walk as a 10. Totally. If you go to zero, you're probably in a place where you didn't cause enough stress. No stress, no adaptation. If you go 10.

You can't move.

You've gone so far in that direction. You hurt yourself.

Yeah. Most definitely.

But also think about it.

You're not gonna be able to train again make sense. For four or five days, you're not gonna function. Worse.

Yeah. Right? And you're gonna stop moving, you're gonna do all these things. So you actually have killed your own productivity. Three.

That's where you wanna be. And when does soreness usually occur? The next day or two days later?

It depends on the person. It's gonna be anywhere in that, what we call DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness.

It's anywhere in that 48 to 72 hour, 24 hour, we can say.

So what are you usually at then in soreness level? Are you a three, a six, seven.

What are you?

I will spend most of my time three to one.

Okay.

And you're seeing sometimes I'm going to four to five to six, depending on the phase I'm in.

Yeah.

If I'm trying to really push it, but then I'm gonna do that for four or five weeks.

Yeah. But you see that you're getting stronger at a three. You see that, like, you're becoming.

You get stronger to zero. No question.

Right.

So if you go heavy enough under controlled range of motion with a low enough volume. So imagine this. I'll give you what I call my three to five principle. So for development of strength and power, now these are not the same thing, but they're close. Three to five is a very simple rule. If you're an advanced coach, you can go past this, but for the average person, it's a good starting place. So I want you to choose three to five exercises. So if you're feeling better that day, maybe it's closer to four or five. If you're feeling Worse or just starting? Closer to three. Three to five exercises. I want you to do three to five reps per set. I want you to do three to five total sets. So imagine you're gonna go in and you're gonna do goblet squat, you're gonna do a bench press, and you're gonna do some pull-ups. Three exercises. You'll do one, two, three reps. Take a break. and you do that three times. There's your three sets, you know. And maybe you do your pull-ups for three, you could do your bench for three, and you go to your squats for three, and you do that three times. And that's it. You're done, right?

Three to five minutes rest. Three to five exercises, three to five.

Reps per set, three to five sets. And three to five minutes rest between sets, you know, for the working muscle. So you do your pull-up, you can do other stuff, but by the time you do your pull-ups again, it should be around three to five minutes. Three to five times per week. So again, that's a very general rule, but if you do that, if you want power, stay pretty light and move fast. If you want strength, do longer. Just go heavier. Heavier, right? Now the three to five minutes of rest is like, it's quite exaggerated.

It's a long time of rest, yeah. For three reps, you're like, okay, I don't need to sit here for three minutes.

Well, if you're doing a 95% deadlift, Yeah. You're gonna take 35 minutes. Sure. If you're doing a 95% bicep curl.

You probably need 20 seconds.

Yeah, exactly. Let's be real. So it's just a rough idea. Again, for heavy or for strength, it's heavy. Right? Because you need to activate those fast with neurons. Hypertrophy is a totally different story, but for strength and power, it's a very good starting place. Days you feel better, do more. You're not gonna get tremendously sore from that stuff because the volume's not really high. So the total amount of work is, it's not a lot. It can be pretty short. You're gonna get minimal things there. So if people had 15 minutes a.

Day, that's all they had to give to their physical workout. This would be the strategy I'm hearing.

You could if you want to do a little bit of power and you're like, Hey, I don't know what I'm doing here at all. Let's go. Okay, let's do some, if you know how to do some kettlebell swings. All right, we're gonna do some of those. We'll maybe do some split squats. So, or lunge variation, something like that. And maybe we'll do some push-ups. There you go.

Boom, boom, boom.

And you're gonna go push-up, split squat, kettlebell swing, and you're gonna pop, pop, pop on those kettlebell swings, and you're gonna push up as fast as you can. You're gonna run through that thing four times. And done. It's a minimal viable.

Effective. Not best, but effective.

Right. What's best? 45 minutes? No, time domain is relevant. Yeah. In fact, typically the longer the workout is longer is required for more pure strength and power to be developed. Because you need rest. You want to go for hypertrophy or conditioning or something like that? Those can be 20 minutes. No question. And so it really depends if you're trying to develop skill, then you need more rest. And that's going to be longer. I have actually a whole series of videos on YouTube where I just, I walk down all these things. if you want to know exactly how to do hypertrophy, if you want to know exactly how to do endurance or speed or skill in like five minute chunks of just like hear all the numbers, that's a really easy place to go.

That three or five rules pretty good rule. Yeah. I'm curious about nutrition. Say we're, we're training at a high level physically. How important is the quality of nutrition, the right type of foods we're eating in order to optimize our bodies as well? Or can we train super hard and get away with it if we're having the sugar and alcohol and breads and processed foods as well.

It depends on your definition to get away with it. I don't work with people who are interested in getting away with it. Right.

They're going to optimize.

Yeah. So the answer is when we program nutrition, we don't do it. Calories are considered, of course. It's a standard place. Macronutrients, but most people stop there. Our stuff is you're going to get a nutrition plan that is micronutrient developed. So it's not just this is much protein, this is much carbohydrates they want. That's going to be there. But it's going to be this is I want this food choice, this food choice, this food choice because we need to get this much vitamin A, I want this much zinc based on your labs what we figured out. So that's the level of precision we get with these high performers. It is micronutrient developed. Supplementation will then fill in any gaps, especially if we have a time constraint or a calorie constraint. For example, I've got a fighter and they've got to do all this, but then they've also have to lose £35. I can't just give them more food.

That's crazy, yeah.

So we have to play with some stuff. But the base of it is this, right? So yeah, we're going to get there. Can you get away with it? Yeah, like if you saw what most professional athletes eat.

Right, they completely nuts.

So yeah, you can, but you're not gonna get in the best spot. No way. We're gonna figure out what their body can handle and what they can utilize the most. And for a high performer, especially someone who's burning a lot of energy, we have to really be really careful about generally scaring them away from foods.

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It's when you're eating it though, right?

Well, it's everything. What are you eating it with? What type? Are you drinking a Capri Sun? Well, there's some times when that's not a terrible choice. Right. Sometimes not at all for what we do, right? If the average everyday person is just walking around drinking, like, of course, I'm never going to advocate for that. That's never going to be the message. Most people are burning very little energy. We probably don't need much. pure sugar. Most people don't really know what sugar means. They think sugar and they think Capri Suns. They don't really understand what carbohydrates are. So there's a lot of misinformation around those topics. In general, carbohydrates themselves, nor sugar, are not inherently dangerous. Everything has a hormetic curve, right? So everything has a toxicity curve. Water has a toxicity curve, right? If you don't have enough of it, you're going to die of dehydration. Too much, you drowned. Everything has a toxicity profile. So it's about understanding the context and where that person is at. and what they're doing. So there are plenty of times where we're going to avoid certain nutrients situations, but then there's others where we're going to use it to the advantage. So I am very fundamentally against the demonization of any strategy. I am very much pro understanding what's the pro and what's the con and then deploying the right tool to get the quickest result in the situation.

Yeah, I think people hear carbs and sugar and they're thinking, well, that's gonna they're gonna gain a lot of fat, right? It's gonna be a lot of fat if you're having too much sugar, too many carbs, if you're not training and that's what you're doing is eating that. I think a lot of people are worried about the obesity that's happening.

You know, was it a third now or more than a third of the US is obese? It's an extraordinary number. And now it's going-- Depending on how.

You want to classify it, it's either 100 million or 200 million. Either way, it's a lot of people. It's outrageous. How scary of a-- you know, factor is obesity for us. How worried should we be about gaining too much excess fat?

Yeah.

Towards our mental states, our moods, our emotions, our thoughts, our longevity, all these things. And so that's part one. And then what would be the main factors that you could say if people don't have all day to obsess over this, but the main factors that this, like, I've got few things I can do every day to try to burn that fat. What would you say would be those things?

Yeah, let's do the first one. Keep in mind a couple of things. My scientific practice, so what we do in our lab, and when I work with athletes, general health is just not an area of my expertise.

Right. You're looking to optimize freaks of nature.

So it's not the fact that I, like, am disregarding the obesity. It's just not my area of scientific expertise.

You see human specimens that are Elite.

Performers and the occasional executives and stuff like that. Okay, great. So we've done plenty of that. We have a whole program for just that stuff where we can come in and you get basically the pro athlete treatment and then you get on a health plan that gets you there. So when I typically respond to questions and interviews, my brain is coming from my default setting is, is this something I would do with my athlete? yes or no, right? Other folks, their default setting is public health. So then they say things, I roll my eyes. I'm like, that's totally irrelevant for them. They're rolling their eyes to me when I'm like, you can't do that. So I just want folks at home to understand, it's where we're coming from, perspective-wise, what we're finding interesting. Having said all that, I think you would be very difficult to make a cogent argument that obesity is not a big deal. you're gonna have a very difficult time scientifically arguing, Obese Sue is okay. Right. Like, this is, this is not a place, I don't want my professional athletes being obese. I don't care if it's the offensive lineman, like, it's not adding, it's not helping.

You can be big and strong, but not obese.

Now, sometimes it's like, hey, it's just not worth, the juice is not worth the squeeze. So we just, we just do what it is. I've got athletes right now competing in in season that I'm like, yeah, God, I think it'd be great if we lost 10. But it's so far down their list of hidden stressors.

They're trying to optimize these other areas, yeah.

And we have found other things that are massive performance anchors that were like, you know what? You're in season right now. There's only so much bandwidth you have. Let's pull these ones out of the ground. Yes. And we'll lose some weight in the off season. Okay, fine. So having said that, it doesn't take long perusing the research from every perspective, realize, okay, this is a problem. The second question, okay, what do we do about it? I think it's also difficult to make a cogent argument that anyone has an answer because nothing's worked. Show me how it's worked.

Well, it worked for some people, but it's not working for the global population because people aren't taking action consistently probably, right? Yep.

So you can make the argument that, okay, pick whatever eating style you want, fine. Like, well, it's not working. Oh, it'll work for you, okay, sure, but it's not like, what argument do you want to make? Okay, do you want to make the argument of what's going to be the singular solution for mankind? Well, that's, I'm going to walk out of that conversation. That's not an answer. Or do you want to talk about like what's generally going to be helpful for most people? So I tend to defer to that, because you're like, well, let's give people possible solutions. I have seen general population folks, thrive on a number of different eating strategies. You can fast, you can not fast. You can eat a lot of carbohydrates and be fantastically healthy. You could eat very limited and be fantastically healthy. Protein seems to be the linchpin that is most effective for most people. So in general, again, having more protein or less protein? More. If you make sure you hit enough protein, the carbohydrate to fat ratio for the general population seems to be not irrelevant, but it gives you context options. I feel like I do better on high fat. Okay, great. I feel like I do better on high fat. Okay, like great. Most people are going to do most better if they lock around protein for a number of physiological reasons. So we don't have the answers to all this stuff though. So we do have to acknowledge there's a little bit of There's not one magic food that's causing these problems. It is clearly an issue of hyperpalatability. I think you're gonna have a hard time arguing that that's not a big contributor. What is that? The fact that food is so available and so good.

Oh yeah, yeah. You can eat some abundance of it constantly.

Completely, right?

Like that... You have too many calories, a lot of sugar, too much of all of it.

Well, too much fat too. It's both, right? There's way too much of all of it floating around. you match that with our lifestyle changes. Okay, great.

That we're not physically exercising as much, we're not stressing the body the way we should be.

But that's not really helping people because everyone says like eat less and move more. Well, that didn't work either. So what are the solutions? Well, a lot of people are going to come in and say we need.

To develop drug stuff because people aren't.

Going to just do this. Okay, like I'm not on that train, but I get what you're saying because nothing's work. We can't educate. That's not working. It doesn't matter, oh, this was wrong. It doesn't matter because there's so many people, it would have worked in 100 million with all seven billion. It didn't. So landing on a solution here is going to be the only way out of this is going, we have these three or four things and this one worked for these people and this one worked for these people. It's never going to be the demonization of a food item. Mm-. That's never going to be the answer. It's never going to be a single pharmaceutical. I will argue very hardly against that one. It's never going to be a single mental health treatment. It's never going to be a-- Right. It's probably, unfortunately, the long game of like, well, let's understand that food matters. And here are a bunch of ways. You want to go paleo, you want to go Mediterranean, you want to go.

Vegan, you want to go start testing stuff.

These are all options. Some of those things were less scientifically valid years ago and now actually it's like, well, okay, that actually looks like that works. And, well, you can make a lot of complaining about a lot of them, but- yeah, yeah.

There's some results here.

Yeah, on all sides of those, positive and negative, right? Like you've seen the keto thing run up and then run back down and realize like- Right, right.

The Paleo thing and just be called different names over the years and all those things.

Yeah.

Atkins to Paleo to You don't have.

To, yeah, it's like what's the next variable? I think the core to it is there has got to be some sort of caloric regulation. There has to be. I'm not saying calories in calories out, that's all you have to do, track your calorie.

There needs to be some of it. There has to be calories.

Calories are energy, so if you're adding more, yeah. There has to be some regulation, and there's a lot of ways to do it, but that has to be there.

More evidence recently is showing that ultra-processed foods are inherently worse, even metabolic calories. That seems to be true. Processed food is not as good for you as.

Totally, right?

Organic, unprocessed, yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of little problems within all those categories, but as a global message.

Now, here's the thing. You work with a lot of elite athletes and executives, and there's so many different documentaries and people on both sides of the spectrum saying, meat is the way and another saying plant-based is the way. And they both have cases that show different sides that seem pretty compelling. And so what have you seen? And there's elite athletes that eat meat that seem to be crushing it. And there's elite athletes that eat plants that seem to be crushing it as well. So where is, with the athletes you're working with, what are they mostly eating? And who are the ones that you're seeing have stronger recovery, faster growth.

Less.

Injuries, all these different higher performance? What are their nutrition levels typically like?

I'm just going to intentionally ignore the first half of your question. My PSA is stay as far away from those documentaries as possible.

All documentaries.

All of them.

Plant-based, the meat-based, all of them.

Because they're all skewing towards one reason. Of course. Yeah, yeah. You know what's sort of funny? This is totally unrelated, but it's kind of not. Folks in the journalism space, whether they're making a documentary or selling a book, they love to point out the conflict of interest and bad science. If you think you're getting unbiased like clear, I've yet to see one where it's like, hey, here's a fair, because it wouldn't be interesting. It wouldn't be like, Right? It wouldn't be, well, like have a drink of water and that's equivalent to 28 cigarettes or whatever, like off immediately, right? That's not true. It's not a genuine conversation, right? So all those things are the lowest level of information, which is sad because it's a fun way to learn, right?

Absolutely.

Number one there. Number two, the real part of your conversation is what do our athletes typically eat? Number one, the entire field is moving towards precision.

Precision.

Absolutely. And this is being able to say, okay, what is right for my body? Now we have typically said, we've always said that message, but what's that mean? Well, try this, try that. Okay, no. It's not going to work. Go do this diet for six months. I need an answer faster. Can I run analytics on myself right now and get better precision instantaneously? That's where this whole thing is going. That's our answer. Those stuff, Some of those things are available now, some are better than others, some are, I'd say, hot garbage. I'm not gonna name any of them for those reasons. But the ones I don't like now, I still like the concept. They're moving the needle. They're trying to move in this direction. Now, some of them are just trying to take money from you and sell false promises. But in general, the place the field is acknowledging we need to be able to let people know what's most likely to work for them quickly versus let them run a six month. People aren't going to do that. There's just no way. So with our folks, everything is that, right? It's a combination of three main areas. We're gonna run labs in a lot of areas. We're gonna do Generally think of these as surveys. So we're going to questionnaires. And there's a lot of evidence-based questionnaires for think about even things that are controversial scientifically. There are evidence-based questionnaires for toxicity exposure. There's evidence-based questionnaires for gut health. There's a lot of nonsense around dysbiosis and leaky gut, but there's also science there. So being able to figure out what is the garbage and the guy trying to sell you the next book and convince you that carrots or grapes or I don't know, I'm making things up. I don't think I've ever heard because I don't want to call anybody out. But there's science there too, right? So let's not throw the whole thing out. There are evidence-based questionnaires that can help you get guided there. So we're gonna look at labs, we're gonna look at questionnaires, and then we're gonna look at symptomology, right? How do you feel? Are you noticing this? And there are there's science that would be able to say, hey, this is correlated, this symptom is correlated with this. okay, fine. Correlation is limited to what correlation is. But when you see things land in the middle of that triangle, imagine a Venn diagram, your symptomology matches your screening. Your screening matches some indicators of labs. Are the labs perfect? No. Are the screens perfect? No. Are these perfect?

No.

But when something lands in the middle, you've got pretty good indication that to me, I'm taking action. I don't know 100% because we don't have a great diagnostic for gut health, but we have some. and we don't have a perfect diagnosis. You see what I'm saying here? Yes. When something lands in the middle of that target, to me that starts to become actionable. So that's what we're doing. And we're going to put them on whatever programs they need, whether this is, let's say that they are not, they don't respond well to carbohydrates. Are they in a position to where they need to? If they're not, then we're just gonna say, okay. But if you start pulling, for example, carbohydrates out of a diet, you become very sensitive to carbohydrates. So when you reintroduce, you blow up and you think, oh my god, I'm terrible. Well, no, you're not bad with carbs. You have down-regulated your ability to handle it because it hasn't seen it in a long time. That's a trainable thing. If the athlete, I feel like, is in a sport or position where they need to train that, then we're gonna actually train it. If not, like we're gonna say, hey, your body does not handle this, it's not worth the thing. Are we in season, we're pulling it most likely. If we're out of season and we need to get there, we're going to build it. Cause some discomfort, cause some performance drop, you get the idea. In general, our athletes are eating mostly whole food. They're typically going to eat five or so meals a day. Roughly?

Because they're performing so high, they're training so hard.

A lot of times you're training twice a day.

Yeah, they need it.

They don't do as well on two meals a day or one. They tend to perform form much worse because we need that recovery to happen within hours because we're doing it again.

Wow, that's crazy. So you need the nutrients to come.

In to be able to train again. Totally. Like, like we don't have 48 hours to recover muscle glycogen. I have four hours. Right.

Because we're going to train again that day.

Hard.

It's amazing.

So what's a. So Whole Foods.

Whole Foods is.

Needs plants, fruits, nuts, seeds, 100. Yeah. All of it. We're gonna go for everything. Is anyone just plant-based or just meat-based? I have worked with plant-based athletes before. We have had success. I firmly believe, I think the science will show you this, you can perform very well physically even as an athlete on a plant-based diet.

Is this what sports are we talking? Is this MMA?

We've worked with for sure. Only plant-based.

100%. And they performed well. Yeah.

They recovered well. They got- I'm a professional MMA fighter for a number of years. Never won a world championship, but that's-.

Right, right, that's hard. Yeah, yeah.

I would say, yeah, multiple times. We've done it in multiple sports, actually.

You've also trained-- It's harder. It's harder. Tell me why.

Yeah, it's harder. We have to change things more often. We have to be very careful and pay attention to protein intake. It's more difficult to get because think about this. Plant-based foods, you can run these crazy, schemes where you're like, well, look, the same amount of protein in four ounces of sirloin is the same in this amount of broccoli or peanut butter. Great. But the peanut butter has four times the calorie intake. When I have a fighter in camp, we are cutting weight. He can't eat that.

I cannot do that. He's gonna have like pea protein powder or something or whatever.

Yeah. And then we're starting to lose effectiveness in mobility. Interesting. So in someone who again, not like when you don't have these targets and you want to say can I live a lifestyle? Yeah, sure and you can do but calories do start to matter and this is one of the reasons why we generally call animal source of protein generally higher sources because it means they have more bioavailable, more complete proteins at a lower calorie intake.

And there's no plant-based protein that has a lower calorie intake right now or there's.

To the amount of relative Amino acids.

It'S difficult to get. It's tough, gotcha. So it's possible, it's harder, is what you're saying. It is generally harder. For an elite level athlete is what I'm hearing you say.

For the general population, I'll put it this way. It's just trying to live a good life. I can't think of a situation in which an athlete would come to me who's not currently plant-based and I would go, I think you do better on plant-based. I don't think, I've never had that conversation in over a decade of professional athletes.

I've had many come to me.

And I've said, okay, if you want.

To be plant-based, this is what it's gonna take.

It might be harder.

Totally.

And again, some of them have, it's not actually been that difficult. Like a baseball player, it's not really, the physical demands are not incredible.

Right, and if you've already been training and you have a baseline, you don't have to be building mass muscle.

For an NBA player, it's been more of a struggle.

Yeah, 'cause you're burning a lot of.

Calories all day long, running up and down. But it can, So if those things are there, it's not inherently better for you. So show me the data that it's better. Plant-based? Yeah. You're not gonna be able to show me it's better. We have no indication at any scientific level that a plant-based diet would be advantageous for an athlete. For an athlete, gotcha.

What about for a human?

I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that it's advantageous for a human either.

So don't look at these documentaries, obviously.

No, don't watch them. Again, they're not genuine.

That's the biggest issue. Right, right.

They're the one-sided to what you're saying.

To be honest, I've watched a few.

Of them and I've got the Game Changers obviously. You saw that one?

I couldn't do it.

You couldn't watch? I knew, I knew. It's so one-sided.

I'm in the community. I knew this thing was coming. I had actually, It's because they don't.

Also interview the elite on the other side and say, There's a host of problems. Let's just say I knew about that documentary a long time before it ever came out. I get interview requests and stuff a lot, and it's just like, I don't want to support.

I knew-- On either side, you're not watching documentaries.

I knew where it was coming, and I knew it wasn't gonna be fair. Right. I'm not gonna waste my time, I'm not gonna support these things. Which sucks, because again, people eating vegetables is great. Yeah.

And that's why you don't eat lots.

Of plants and vegetables. Well, I feel like the whole cool community got stained a little bit because of a bad actor. A disingenuous person, it's like, I don't want that message. I just want people to know, hey, if you're gonna do it, and there's people who are actually really good in that community who, this is, and it's, hey, it's not panacea, it's also not, show me evidence that in a reasonable diet, that addition of meat is worse, you're not gonna see that either. So they make these false, they do a lot of logical fallacies. Burden of proof, they're really good at flipping. and a whole bunch of things. So I find those things generally very uninteresting to talk about. Yeah. 'Cause you're just like, we're never gonna go here. But if an athlete came to me or a general person and said, Hey, this is what I wanna do, I would say, okay, if you're willing to run analytics and we can make sure that your micronutrients are on point, then we can do this. Having said that too, most people who are eating even meat-based are not doing it well either. So it's not like, well, okay, you're.

Getting, What are they doing wrong?

Just like the same thing, right? Not regulating nutrient intake. Totally disregarding micronutrients because of lack of understanding. Not regulating food intake. Consistency seems to be a very big deal. So if you look across more recent literature, you're going to see that the simple act of eating at a consistent frame allows you to, we'll say, burn more calories. So you can adjust more calories to say the same way by eating consistently compared against an inconsistent eating pattern. So just basic principles like that, we've talked about having some caloric regulation. I don't care how you do it. Having a mostly whole food nutrient based thing. Regulation of, this is what I call my 90%, by the way. It's like 90% of quality diets are gonna do 90% of the same thing. It's these standard principles. It's regulation of variety. of colors. So for polyphenol and a whole host of other important intake, you probably want a decently wide spread of colors. You want dark rich colors. You need to understand fiber intake one way or the other. These are the principles that are going to work mostly for most people.

Do you want more fiber or less fiber?

Well, so that's another example of, I go back to the water.

Right, right. You want the right amount.

Yeah.

You don't want to flood yourself with too much fiber.

You're going to know You're gonna know really quickly. Exactly. Yeah, so in that example, the typical number we're gonna throw around is like 10 grams of soap per thousand calories. So if you're eating 2,000 calories a day, you're aiming for 20 to 30 grams of fiber.

What does that look like in terms of, say, broccoli?

Is that like a cup of broccoli? That would be a lot of broccoli.

That's a lot of broccoli.

That would be more broccoli than you wanna eat.

You want 10% fiber.

10 grams. 10 grams of fiber. Per thousand calories. Per thousand calories. I'll give you a day. I just did this yesterday. So let's say I've got a NBA player, just did these labs yesterday. I'll use a different example. Let's go with something that's more, I'll do a baseball player because a lifestyle is more akin to a person, right? You're gonna wake up and maybe you're gonna have something like three or four eggs, maybe a little bit of diced up vegetables in there, maybe some aromatics, onion, garlic, or whatever, or eggs. If you're just like, that's too much. Maybe you're gonna have a little bit of blueberries, you're gonna have some raspberries, and then maybe even a little bit of avocado. If we want to go heavier on carbohydrates, we're gonna kick out the avocado and maybe go sourdough, piece of sourdough bread, something like this. If we have a specific micronutrient issue, then we're gonna choose the fruit intentionally. So I want you with the pear this morning, not blueberries. I want you with whatever the case may be. You're going to go there and then you're probably going to have some sort of nutrients three or so hours later, which are going to be mostly, say, a protein source. So say this is a yogurt with maybe plain yogurt. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's a little bit of granola if you're going to go train right after it. Sure. You know, something like that. No problem. Lunch, it's going to look very Mediterranean and paleo-ish, right? So it's going to be a lot of greens and a lot of vegetable and then it's depending on the person, maybe salmon, maybe not, maybe we need to go way away from fish for a while, maybe beef, whatever these things. So it's going to be some sort of animal protein for the most part with a big plate of vegetables. Then they're going to go for another meal after that if they're on four meals a day or they're going to go into dinner. And I typically like to give them more carbohydrates at night. Really? Yeah, so same thing but then they would get maybe rice, or quinoa or sweet potatoes or a whole host of things, depending on like their structure of their day. That's like a pretty standard template, if you will. I like doing a lot of carbohydrates at night. It really helps recovery.

For athletes.

Yeah, and it really helps sleep.

Interesting.

You give 50 to 75 grams of carbohydrate a handful of hours before sleep.

Knock out. That doesn't help burn fat necessarily, right? If you do that.

You're not gonna gain fat either.

Oh, interesting.

No, not at all. But you're not gonna burn it. Yeah. If you have carbs at night necessarily, right? It's the whole idea that if you eat carbs at night, you're gonna store them and therefore gain more fat has been widely scientifically refuted. Interesting. In fact, if you look at like Mike Ornstein's stuff out of Florida State, like very clearly shown that nutrients at night tend to add in fat loss.

And preservation of muscle. Specifically protein and even some carbs at night.

And that's been shown. So a little bit of rice at night is okay or sweet potatoes? Yeah.

Interesting.

You need to balance this with your personal physiology, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, some athletes I have eat right before bed. They feel great. Some people, boy, that's a recipe for not sleeping. Yeah. High fat meals before bed tends to be a real big problem. Mm. Right, you're gonna have, but not everyone. So we're gonna figure this out. This is a part of our day that we're gonna construct that says, do you need to stop eating three hours before? No. Four hours before? 90 minutes, what's the number? Do we do a bigger meal? and then a snack. Do we do a snack and then a big, like, what do we need to do? I've had a lot of athletes that do very well with a really big chunk of carbohydrates, like almost immediately before bed. And then they just pass out and they're recovering. They wake out, then the recovery is-- you- got energy. Shoots up. Exactly.

Now, you're not gonna wanna do Capri.

Sun and some healthy carbs. Yeah.

Yeah, you're gonna do starch, right?

Like, this is a really good thing to do. Sweet potatoes, potatoes. All those things.

You're gonna feel really, really good.

Calories matter, right? So as long as you're in a rough understanding of where your total carbohydrates are and your rough fat and everything like that, you're gonna be fine mixing and matching. But do keep in mind, physiology is unique, right? If you're like, man, if I have.

Carbs at night, I blow up.

I believe you. Then don't do it.

I totally believe you.

I don't think you're a liar. But if you're just like, oh no, I heard it on a podcast. No, we've got enough science to suggest that you're gonna be just fine, especially as a moderate performer to recover.

If you could, I mean, this is a hypothetical question, but if you could only choose, let's say for three months, you can only choose five foods a day that you could eat to help you optimize your life. This is not gonna be peak performance and training and this and that, but it's just gonna be one of the best lifestyle I can live.

Yeah, okay. I'm going to give you an Andy Galpin answer. Okay. So as you've probably seen, I'm generally one to be like, wow, it depends, bro. I hate giving you these things, right? I'm going to give you stuff. Yes. You, as I mentioned a little bit ago, you will do better when you establish consistency. Yes, interesting. I'm not against people doing, I feel like you just outlined, basically eating the same thing every day. You're not against it, yeah? Not against it at all. I am against it as a long-term strategy because of the need for micronutrient variation. Micronutrients though on like a daily basis don't matter, right? So if you got a lot of vitamin C today, but you didn't get a lot tomorrow, it's okay. Micronutrients are fine. Macronutrients matter today.

Micronutrients tend to take weeks to months.

What's the difference between micro and macronutrients? Macronutrients are carbohydrates, protein and fat. Energy or structure. Fats and carbohydrates provide you with cellular energy. Protein provides structure. Some energy, but very little. Macronutrients tend to be measured in big units like grams. Micronutrients typically split into a handful of categories: minerals, vitamins, and then things like polyphenols. Any of those nutraceuticals that are lower there, those tend to be measured in very small units. So micrograms or milligrams or very small things. Got it. Vitamins, Technically, the definition is vital amine. That's where the word vitamin comes from. So it's vital to survive an amine being like a small part of an amino acid. So these are structures that have been identified throughout history that play a role in health. So for example, you can live without carbohydrates. You cannot live without vitamins. And if you have a clinical deficiency in a vitamin, you're going to get a disease immediately. You're not going to get a disease from having low carbs.

Right, right.

That's the structural difference. Now, vitamins tend to be broken up into a couple of categories. You have fat soluble, so these are ones that they're absorbed best when you eat them with fat, and they're gonna be stored in your own fat. Then you have water soluble ones like vitamin C. So vitamin C is gonna come in, go into your bloodstream, any excess for the most part you're just gonna urinate out. Fat soluble ones like vitamin D are gonna stay around for a long time. time. And so because fat soluble vitamins stay around, you don't have to have them necessarily every day. Because they're around and if your body needs it, it'll pull some out of tissue. Minerals, zinc, magnesium, rocks basically are quite different. You can play with vitamins. Like if you took a multivitamin every day, fine. You don't want to play with minerals. They have a much bigger physiological consequence. Magnesium is pretty okay, like if you're just, not a bad strategy, right? But if you are just taking iron or you're taking zinc, you could cause a whole lot of important physiological problems. So you want to be very careful about dosing things. You want to go even further, now you talk hormones. You play with hormones, you're in a whole new ball game. Don't play with minerals, multivitamin, you're fine. That's not one where I'm like, oh, don't take a multivitamin until you've had blood worked out. That's fine. You're probably fine. But I wouldn't go crush, especially for men, I wouldn't go crush iron as a supplement unless you've had blood work done. You can get into danger real fast. Interesting. Women, probably fine. So there's different things to pay attention to. So the micronutrients tend to be stable. When we change someone's diet and we're running their panels, I don't really run blood again for typically another 90 to 120 days because it takes that long for nutrient status to really change that much. If you're low on vitamin D and we give it to you, it's going to be a while before we see a change.

Sure.

Macronutrients, it's instantaneous. Yes. You ate more carbs today, how did you feel? I felt better, I felt worse. Okay, great. I gave you multivitamin today, how do you feel?

You can't feel it.

You don't feel anything for a very long time.

That's the general Okay.

To answer your actual question.

So the five foods you'd eat on a daily basis. You give me five foods and three supplements.

Okay, yeah, that's easy. Supplement number one, multivitamin. Supplement number two, creatine. Creatine.

For everyone.

Yeah, no question.

All ages. Yeah, no doubt. I mean over 18 or something or.

You could even go younger than that. Creatine, you think we should have every day. It is the most efficacious single supplement you'll ever find. Really? Tell me why. Boy, we should probably have done this the very first time.

Creatine, what does it do for you?

It is probably the number one to three most studied supplement.

And this is like bringing me back to like 16 year olds back in high school, like creatine getting that pump.

Yeah, yeah, right? You remember getting mad when you hear about your, like a guy you're playing, he's like, oh, he's all hopped up on creatine. Guys cheating, he's taking whey protein and creatine.

He's so much stronger.

It works.

So tell me why it's creatine.

So in the 1990s, I haven't heard.

Creatine in years probably.

Really?

I haven't heard anyone talk about creatine in, maybe ever on the show.

No way.

I don't think anyone has told me any nutritionist, scientist, doctor, you know, you're.

Missing the biggest role.

I don't think anyone has told me creatine in the last nine years.

It's number one.

That I can remember. Tell me why creatine is the number one thing we should be taking on a daily basis.

Tremendous amount of science, right? Which is a means it's very robust. It works under a lot of different situations and are a lot of it's not only gonna work for old people or it's only gonna work like other supplements where, for example, if you're, everything has a curve, right? Yes. So if you are at the top of that curve and you're in the optimal range, Whatever that means, right? Of vitamin C, for example. And I give you more vitamin C. Nothing happens. If I continue to give you more and continue to give you more and continue to give you more, you actually start to get worse, right? Because now you're overcrowding. Too much vitamin C. Well, too much anything, right? Now vitamin C is like, again, pretty safe.

Yeah, yeah.

And that curve is long with vitamin C. But other things, that curve is short, right? We could go with any toxin, same thing, right? Sure. They just have a really tight curve and it's like, hey, milligram and two milligrams death. Okay. Vitamin C is more like, okay, three grams, five grams, 10 grams, like you're still fine. Vitamin D, same thing. Like you could do a lot of vitamin D. Tons of vitamin D. Now there's some, like we're actually, like I can't tell you how many times we have improved people's physiology right now by pulling them off vitamin D. Ooh. We just got some labs back about two weeks ago and doubled testosterone from simply removing vitamin D. Wow. You play with things that have hormone-like effects.

Yeah, interesting. Okay.

But creatine, now, like, without generally vitamin D is super safe. Yes.

Generally a beta supporter.

Yes. You should be paying attention to vitamin D. I like precision. Right. Having said that, everything has this curve, right? So if you are here with vitamin C and I give you too much, actually things get worse. If you're clinically deficient and I give you that same amount, then things got better. So you have to understand where on the curve you are with some of these things. Testosterone is another easy example. If you're at a normal range, going normal to a little bit higher has very nil functional effects. But if you're a little bit low to going to normal has huge. positive beneficial effects. Okay. Creatine doesn't have a curve like that necessarily. So there's no clinical deficiencies of creatine unless you have some of these really weird conditions. But having said that, you can really kind of take it a lot and it doesn't kick back. There's no feedback loops.

So I just keep powder, straight powder to the water, drink creatine all day.

Yeah, it's not gonna go cause your bones to start excreting excess calcium or anything like. like other vitamins and particularly minerals will do. It's not a hormone, so it's not going to change your regulation and production of growth hormone or anything like that, like other stuff. So number one, ton of science. It works in a lot of populations, meaning if you're a little bit low on your creatine or you're already good, you're still going to have an effect. It's okay. It's very cheap. It's very accessible. Creatine monohydrate is all you need to really get to. It's been the safety profile is outstanding. So we have very little evidence to suggest it's going to be detrimental to anybody.

Long term.

Long term or short term? All that on one side and say, okay, so what's the risk of taking it? Well, basically nothing, right? Because of all this, which is different from any, not any, but a lot of other supplements.

So you take creatine every day?

Positive effects. Let's get here.

Yes.

You can take it every day.

Do you take it every day?

Yeah, I try to.

You try to.

For the most part, yeah. I'll go through phases internally where I do different things diet-wise and stuff-wise, but like, yeah, so to not get off topic here, we associate it with stronger, bigger. And through the 18-1980s, 1990s, that was became pretty clear. And then I sort of left the field because I was just like, we know the answer. super safe and it works for athletes. And then other people started picking it up and going, well, what about for things like brain function? What about recovery from traumatic brain injury? What about cognitive decline? What about neurological health? There is actually strong data suggesting a relationship between creatine and depression. There is a, and to be very clear there, creatine is not solving depression. That's not how depression works, right? Has there some data to suggest it may be helpful? Yes. There's a lot of other health benefits associated with it because think about it this way. The way you make energy biologically is it's going to come from a number of sources. Creatine is actually the very first one. People think carbs and fat and those are the predominant sources but the very first place is actually creatine. It's a one, the stoichiometry is great. It's one to one. One thing of creatine, one molecule of ATP. So it's not a high energy producer, but it's the fastest. It's stored inside the cells themselves and they can directly create basically ATP. Kind of, there's one step in between, you get the idea. So it's very fast, but it burns very fast. The brain loves that. Astrocytes around the brain love it. And when you look at all the trials that have been done, With any of these populations, cognitive decline, injury, neurological function, there is a lot of research moving with creatine in all of those areas. Again, it's not a treatment and it's not a cure for Alzheimer's.

Sure.

Some of the data suggests it's not doing much and then some of it is like maybe there's a slowing of the reduction or slowing of the progression. Some say maybe not. But there's enough health benefits globally that we're basically saying, look, a lot of decline in cognitive, whether it's function or mental health, it's looking like an energy problem. Again, not exclusively, but it's a big deal there. This is why you see trials with lactate providing folks with lactate and seeing really good improvements in brain function. George Brooks and stuff doing that with brain injuries.

Interesting.

Well, it's because those things like energy. We know that they prefer glucose because it's a faster energy source. Well, they actually love creatine as well in some of the places. So it is creatine. It is a very, very useful supplement. Yeah, no question.

Wow. Okay.

So for your third one.

Yes.

You know, you could throw in, in general, fish oil. Again, I don't think we probably need to be smashing out as much fish oil as I would have said five or eight years ago. But safety profile is high.

Add some in there. Okay, and what about, so those are the three supplements, what about the five foods?

Okay, if you want to talk bang for your buck, it's very hard to get past eggs.

Really, man, I heard someone say the eggs is like one of the worst things.

Yeah, that's not.

Okay, this is the challenge. I bring on people from all different nutritional scientific backgrounds who will say these different things. And I think that's challenging for people is to figure out what really works for them.

Yeah.

But I could, so eggs.

Well remember, science is a verb, not a noun. It's an action. It's a moving target. Yes. You want it to be that way.

Yeah.

Right, so it's good.

I love eggs. So for me, that's a good.

Yeah. I have some folks that eggs are a death sentence for them. So yeah, I get to believe you're like, oh, I get no, my nose runs immediately. Great.

Take them out.

Don't do it. Don't do it. Most people though, it's nutrient density wise. That's a pretty good one. I'll go with the potato.

Really? Man, and talk about-- There's a lot.

Of benefits with potatoes for sure. Tons of benefits as well as functionality in terms of it works well for the whole family. You can cook it a ton of different ways. Preparation methods, they all change the nutrient profile by the way. All of it. so you can make it into a resistant starch if you want. You can make it into a faster acting carbohydrate if you want. You can make it in a mash. You can make it like you can do different things. It's cheap, high quality and a ton of nutrient variety, lots of fiber, lots of good things, energy source. Potato. Yeah. So those are a pretty good one. I would say I'm torn between blueberries. Yeah. I've heard that as a common with.

A lot of experts. Yeah, it's actually a superfood.

Top five, yeah. Like it's a fun, nutri I just don't like blueberries. Blueberries for performance, big, big help. There's been a lot of, there's been some literature showing it having a fairly robust nitrptic effect acutely. So you take it right now, before you go perform.

It's gonna help you.

It has mostly doubled the amount of carbohydrates relative to other berries. So if calories are a concern, then maybe you would want to switch it for Raspberries.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Blueberries. Okay.

That's a pretty good one. Let's see. Another one that's a pretty big staple. Meat in general is probably going to be pretty high on my list if you let me count meat as one.

Yeah, okay. What's the optimal meat? If you just like, I can only do this type of fish. I'm going to do this type of.

I'm probably gonna take, like, personally, I'm going for antelope.

Antelope.

Yeah. That's just cuz my freezer is stocked with it.

Okay.

Almost every year. Yeah. We eat pretty much exclusively game meat for our meat choices, if not fish. So fish, elk, mule deer, and antelope are like, my house lives off those things.

Okay.

Cool. I realize that's not very.

But if someone, the general population, where do you say fish then?

I'm not against fish at all. The only reason I'm hesitating is you have to be very careful of mercury toxicity. It's a real issue. We've had this problem a lot over the years. There are folks who just love professional athletes that fish in the off season and stuff like that.

Interesting.

Depending on your fish choice. Stacked against each other, heavy metals aside, fish is a very high quality meat.

Gotcha.

Very good profile.

Mm-. And the fifth thing? I don't see any vegetables in there, right? I get the potatoes in there, but.

Yeah, no leafy greens. I guess you could say, I mean, I guess the easy answer is broccoli. It's probably the most robust. It can be cooked in a lot of different ways. Nutrient profile changes based on cooking preparation, so you can get variety by just cooking it differently. Yep. It's not people's favorite. I like broccoli. Yeah, I'm okay with it.

But like put a little hot sauce, you're okay. But it's really there's a lot of.

Benefits of broccoli though, right? Tons. Yeah, tons. In a lot of ways. So, it's probably like my five where.

You'Re like, well that's the least interesting.

Five that anyone's ever asked. Oh, it's good. Yeah, it's all good. That's a pretty good. What I would really say, I guess my advice for someone is, whether you want to do the five meals a day thing or three meals a day, one meal a day for the average person, it doesn't really matter. Get a plan. get somewhat organized and try to be fairly consistent, right? And if you want to move parts out, so you go, you know what? Like, my meat option for today is I'm gonna go salmon today, and then tomorrow I'm gonna go sirloin, and then I'm gonna go lamb. Like, all these things have pros and cons, right? But you still have a structure. So you have freedom with a little bit of structure, and you're not out there going like, what am I doing today?

Pizza or burritos or like mac and cheese.

Yeah, you're totally just off the yeah, exactly. If you can kind of do that for three months, two months, whatever the case is, the one key I'll say here is you want to eat for the average person in a way that fosters abundance and not scarcity. So don't go on a diet. Don't have cheat meals. Just eat.

Just eat.

And make food good. If you don't make food good, you're now thinking about cheating.

You're like, what's all these bad foods I can eat?

Totally. So if you're like, hey, look, having a piece of wheat toast in the morning, like, it's just like my favorite thing.

But they have it. Yeah.

The cost to benefit ratio is pretty high. Like, if you're like, I could. I like toast, but, like, whatever. I like a hundred. Well, then, okay, maybe. Maybe you cut that out and you. What? Another. The toast is bad. But you get, like, one point here is, like, figure out what are the non-movable parts and then. Give yourself the ability to do that and then make things taste like you want. If you're just like, oh God, like, okay eggs, but like I can't, then don't eat eggs. Get them the hell out of there and find foods where you're like, dude, I could do this, I could do this or this. And then preparation styles, right? So like maybe when I use these herbs and spices and do it this way, I can handle it. You have a chance. But a crash diet, like we've just seen.

It doesn't work.

Yeah, it doesn't work. One of the most popular studies or papers I've ever published was on intermittent dieting. I can't even tell you how many downloads. It's just ridiculous. But the evidence is very clear. Yo-yo dieting is a huge problem. It's really bad for your physiology. It's not just the fact that you gain the weight back. It has detrimental. You'll be in a worse spot than when you started. We have explanations of leptin and insulin, the whole gamut. There's problems. So you really want to be cautious of hardening the paint for a month and then completely off the resveratrol.

Be more consistent.

Yeah. Sustainable.

But you're also saying having some restriction or fasting incorporation also can be helpful.

For some people. Yeah. There's no magic to fasting. There's no special benefit to it if it is a good system for you. Great.

Sure.

If it's not, then don't. There's no, like, don't make yourself, it's that immediate risk to late gratification. So, right? So if it's like, if it's just ruining your life, it's not worth it.

Don't do it.

If you're like, well, that kind of sucks, but like, it's the only way I can control myself, then it's probably worth the exchange. I mean, I have a friend who's like this with even carbohydrates. and we've gone through this so many times and he knows, he's like, I know carbohydrates are not bad. I can't control myself with them though. That's easy for me.

I have to just go.

I can't eat them. And he goes to these wildly, like he's in the space so he goes to these wild changes in diets like all the time. He's like, that's the only way I can keep my brain from just going completely bonkers. So I'm like, okay, it's not necessary, but if you have to live really hard rules, And he's like, that's the only way I can do it. Right, right. So some people do really well with a band-aid pulled off and just-- Sure, sure. You eat this same lunch every single day. One of the reasons why I love working with bodybuilders is they're kind of like that.

If I told them to eat that.

They'D be like, dope, let's go. Okay, let's go. Yeah, let's go. Let's go broccoli chicken. Cool.

I got it. And then people are like, oh my God, I made it a day and a half and I quit. This is terrible. Yeah. So make sure it matches.

Well, I have heard from a lot of different of the longevity, I guess.

Scientists There are benefits to fasting for longevity.

I don't know if that's- I would say that's extremely contentious.

Okay. I would say intermittent fasting or even-.

I am not convinced at all that that adds a special benefit to aging at all.

Okay. What about for burning fat or helping?

No.

Fasting doesn't help burn fat?

No, that data is clear.

Really?

No, not at all. No, in terms of like if you look at the literature on fat loss over the course of pick your number, 16 weeks, six months, six years, you're going to see no inherent benefit of fat loss with fasting.

So what is the benefit of fasting then?

When protein is accounted for.

Okay.

So if you're matched for protein, if it's a strategy to help you eat less food, then it will definitely work. Right. And there appears to be very little physiological harm to fasting. Right. No downside, especially for non-athlete. I'm not against it at all. So I want to make it clear, I'm not at all against it. I use it personally.

Not all the time.

I'll use intermittent fasting, I'll use prolonged fasting as for other reasons. We don't typically use it with an athlete in season, though we will use it off-season occasionally. So I'm not against any of these things, but I don't think it's fair to think it is a, if you don't do this, you won't live as.

Long as you could have.

I think that is extremely scientifically debatable, which is I think the most fair way to say it. So I could be wrong. I'm open to that. I could be right though. If you look at fat loss, I think that's much clearer that there is no special benefit for fat loss. Really? No.

By fasting, you won't burn fat.

When calories and protein are equated, absolutely not.

Interesting.

And those trials have been done. You have intervention trials, you have observational stuff, and it all is landing in pretty much the same spot that that's not a huge.

Interesting.

For the group.

Yeah, yeah.

For the individual, maybe. If it is better for you, better for you. Sure, sure. Always the case. But as a net positive, do you really need to go out of your way to fast to lose weight? No. Oh, no, not at all. It's a great strategy.

Right, right. It works.

Yeah, but we have a lot of people who've lost a lot of weight.

Without fasting.

Totally.

Well, there you go.

So this is a difference of, I would say, it's not that folks that are in a different position I am are liars. That's not how science works. I mean, of course, you can't. They can't fake data. I choose to assume that they're all.

Doing their best, yeah.

Yeah, of course. It's a difference of opinion of what is an actionable piece of evidence versus not. So some people think they'll see evidence in, say, an animal study, and that is actionable. Well, in this particular case, we can't say differently. I can't tell you it's going to worsen aging. I don't have any evidence to suggest it makes it worse. I don't have any, it's very hard to do a human longevity study. So they say, hey look, there's no downside, there's a plausible upside, it's worth the risk. I say, well, you have a plausible upside, you have no risk, but your plausibility is questionable. The things that are working in the animal don't carry over to the human, which we've seen in other things. I don't think it does anything. So it's simply a matter of what you choose to be actionable or not. You move that up to the human trials. I think where it differs is this. Let's say, I'm making this up, but let's say there was a study on fasting in animals and it showed it worked. And then someone were able to do a magical 60-year trial in humans and it showed it didn't. Well, if the people then continue to push the animal stuff saying it worked, then that's malpractice. That's misinformation. Because you have evidence in human that challenged that thesis and it showed it clearly didn't work. That's not the case. Right. Right now it is, this is the only level of evidence we have.

We're seeing that it's working here with these animals and so it could work.

I think the rest of the evidence stacked on top of that and my thought is this is not going to carry over to humans. Interesting. I don't think it is. Well. They think it does and that's the differentiation.

Yeah, interesting.

We see this with, in the case of the fat loss, we have carried these, we, but scientists, have collected, have run these trials on humans, and it did not work. And so that's why I'm very firm in that one, because we've run those experiments in the humans, and it didn't work. Interesting. And to me, then, to use mechanism study, or animal or cell culture models, or yeast models, or anything like that, in the face of human evidence that's not just observational, to me now it's like, what are you doing here? We have good evidence in humans. These studies could be wrong and other stuff, so you don't need to change your career or anything, but to me, the message I will send then is, hey, this is not a necessary thing. It's not particularly special or advantageous. But this is a moving field. No question about it. So we don't know per se what matters for fat loss consistency, number one, right? Not within your timing, but if you don't stick to some principles, whatever those principles are, It's not going to matter, right? So we always say the number one thing for fat loss is adherence. Whatever your plan is, if you don't do it, you're out the gates. The vast majority of people simply don't adhere. So conversation over. Just like, can we work on that side of the equation? Then that really matters. There's a lot of reasons I love fasting for really fun stuff, but we have done this.

So you like it, you do it, you recommend it for certain things.

I think the message though that you have to do it to improve your longevity, I think it's wrong. Right, right.

I don't think it's have to, to do that, but I've seen there's benefits to it.

I don't think it will. I'll even say further, I don't think it will aid in your longevity at all. I don't think that there is, as a general rule, a positive needed effect of fasting.

Interesting.

I think there's a positive needed effect of caloric control. Like that seems to be pretty clear.

So less calories.

Controlled calories.

Controlled calories can help you live longer.

You don't see people at 105 at 400 pounds. You're just not going to see that stuff. If fasting is your method of that, fantastic.

I see what you're saying.

Great. I've done studies. In 2010, I worked with a guy named Per Tesch, very famous muscle physiologist in Stockholm. We studied athletes that were 80 years old or more. So 89-year-old athletes. These were people that were Olympic and world champions in the 1940s and 50s. They have not stopped competing.

Wow.

Skiers. So they have skiers. Yep. They have a race over there, which is like their equivalent of the Boston Marathon, but it's the ski version. So thousands of entrants a year.

You're talking about not downhill skiing, but cross country skiing.

Yeah.

And I'm breaking legs over here. Breaking hips when you fall.

The best in the world are doing two hours. Yes. You know, the average person, four to five. So it's like a rough cultural equivalent. So these folks have done that race for 40 to 50 consecutive years. They've not stopped competing, right? They're entering these things. And we've gone over there. We've taken blood, we've taken muscle samples, we've run VO2 maxes on them, the whole shebang. So these are the most successful folks. In fact, we broke an unofficial official record. We had a 92-year-old with a VO2 max close to 40 milliliters per kilogram.

Per minute, which is what an average college kid would Wow. That's pretty cool.

These folks are not fasting.

Well, they can't when they're competing at that high level also.

Maybe, maybe not, right?

If you're not training like that, you want to be able to, but I think for the average... So to me, I'm like... who's sitting around all day and not moving their body.

I guess my point here is, I don't think you're gonna get to 90 super well. if that training part is not a piece of the equation. You need the training part.

You gotta have the training part, right? And so with your training, you're gonna.

Be eating a little more.

You can't be, yeah. Totally.

So those folks-- so it depends where you're at and that's your son. Yeah. So all of these, again, need to be moved forward as viable options. Now, I'll even say this. If you would have asked me this question eight years ago, I would have, I would have probably tried to convince you that there are negative effects of fasting. I was wrong. I think it's very clear. We have some athletes that'll even do it. Yeah. And be fine. You can clearly do it. So I've changed my position on that piece a lot, but just to think that it is requirement for fat loss. No, because when we have tested any number of athletes and looked at things like metabolic efficiency or metabolic flexibility, these are grossly misconstrued. in the pop culture. Metabolic flexibility is not what most people think it is to be. It is very trainable. It can be moved. It is very, very important. And you do not at all have to go on a low carbohydrate diet or fast at all to become really effective at burning fat. Burning fat is also not the greatest proxy for fat loss.

What is the best thing to do to burn fat and for fat loss then?

So there's no single best thing, right? It's going to depend on you. So I'll give you some things. Okay, I have a lot of videos you can go if you want to see this entire breakdown of metabolism, but think about it very quickly this way. Carbohydrates and fat are the primary places you're going to get energy from, right? And think about this as in general, carbohydrate is there for faster time. less energy per molecule, per weight. However, it's less. This is important. Carbohydrate is more oxygen efficient than fat. But the total amount of energy per gram of fat is far higher, like tenfold. If you're concerned with fat loss, it's not about burning fat, because if you burn a ton of carbohydrate, you have to restore the carbohydrate some way. And you can't, it's difficult to convert fat into carbohydrate, but here's what happens. If you burn more fat, if you eat more fat, if you eat more fat, you're going to burn more fat because you've given your body more fat. But you're also going to store more fat. Right. Because you're giving yourself. More fat. Right? If you eat more carbohydrates, you're going to burn more carbohydrates, but you're going to? Burn more.

Store more carbohydrates.

Store.

So how do we burn it then?

Cool. All you have to do is make sure the total balance of two of them is lower than what you're burning. It doesn't matter. If you want to keep the carbohydrates up and the fat low, fine. You want to keep the fat high and the carbs low, fine. You want to keep them both like kind of low, it doesn't matter. In terms of actual fat loss, six months or six weeks or whatever down the run, it doesn't matter. We can play games by giving you food before your workout and bias is what we call bias the energetics. So if I want you to burn more fat, I'm gonna give you more fat before you work out. But you know what's gonna happen? You're gonna store more fat. Yeah. I'm gonna give you carbohydrates in the direction. If I need the energy faster, like in a sport like 100-meter dash track and field, we're gonna hedge towards carbohydrate. If we want to do a long, prolonged exercise, that time doesn't matter like your marathon. Mm-. We're gonna go more towards now fast marathon is still gonna be carbohydrates. A fast marathon, even a two-hour marathon.

Is still 85% carbohydrate. If we're doing a six-hour marathon, what.

Should I be eating before?

You could do, you have the bandwidth to do whatever you want.

There's a lot of-- I'm not trying to get through it. So what happens is because it's regulating these places, your body's gonna say, if we have excess fat come in, we're gonna burn some of it as fuel as we can, but we're also going to store more because we have excess. So this de novo lipogenesis, the ability to take extra carbohydrates and then the leftover ones get stored as fat is very difficult to do. What happens is you just store them as carbohydrates. So imagine this, you had too many carbs. This is how carbs make you fat, by the way. It's not that those things get converted into fat. That's a very difficult process. You're going to take a bunch of those carbohydrates and you're going to store, you're going to max out muscle. They're gonna max out blood glucose. They're gonna max out the liver. And then what happens to the rest? Well, it says, hey, any little bit of fat that we're burning right now, turn it off. Because we have so much extra carbohydrate, we're only going, and so you become very carbohydrate burning, doing things like this, what we're doing, which should be a very fat dominant thing, because we don't need energy quickly right now. So the excess carbohydrate ingestion is not Converting into fat, it's simply lowering the rate of fat burning. Gotcha. Ingestion of over fat does the same thing in the opposite direction.

Right, right.

So this is how it's gonna lead to excess storage of actual fat. It's not that you're converting one, you know, from the other. It's the fact that it's regulating or what we call partitioning total utilization. So you have the bandwidth for fat loss to do whatever you want. So the idea of metabolic flexibility is when you need energy quickly, you're gonna move towards the carbohydrate side. But when you don't, you're gonna be able to be really good at the other side of the equation. You do not need to fast. You do not need to have lower carbohydrates to get good at fat burning. That's complete garbage.

What do you need to do?

You need to be able to be good at fat burning. If you want to get better at it, can you, here's a quick test. If you can wake up in the morning and go for a 30-minute jog without food and you feel fine, maybe you're hungry but you feel fine, then you're probably decent at fat burning. If you are a complete wreck and you can't get 15 feet, then you're probably very poor at using fat as a fuel source. So if we have you do a time trial on whatever thing you do and you just, you tank, you should have more than enough energy .. you might be hungry because you're used to eating breakfast, but you don't have, your blood sugar is not going to be low. You have way more than enough blood sugar to do what you're going to do. So that's a very easy litmus test. If you want to push that ability, you can practice fasting. It will work. You don't have to. You can get simply better at doing things like nasal only breathing, endurance stuff, right? So do whatever it takes, breathe through your nose only. You can train, you can do a little bit of fasting, training, you don't have to. You could work on simply eating fat before your workouts.

Not carbs.

Push that system.

Yes.

Yeah, right? Like all of these things are very easy to work and we've had athletes that have problems at this site too. They're so good at fat burning that they're slow starters. So we have to work on their ability to use carbohydrates. So we push that into the spectrum. So it's very easy to do to move, well, Conceptually it's easy to do. It doesn't mean it's gonna work. And it's gonna be a little bit of a struggle for those folks. So that's generally how you can get fat burning done. Movement can work, but you don't have to. Diet is your biggest player there, no question. The last thing I'll say about that is energy control is real. If you are crushing your energy control with stimulants, you can just guarantee a loss of physiological function. So if you're in this situation, okay, I'm doing 10 milligrams or 5 milligrams of melatonin at night. Okay, great, fine, because I can't sleep. Wake up the next morning and I'm doing stimulants, however you want to adjust them all day. And I ask, how's your sleep? You're like, pretty good. And I ask, how's your energy? Pretty good. And we look at physiology, I'm like, well, your physiology is not very great. I feel fine. Well, you don't really actually feel fine. You're just cycling drug to drug to drug to drug to drug to drug. And I'm not against either one of those things, right? But you're sort of blinding yourself a little bit because if I take either.

One away... How are you gonna feel? You feel awful.

You can't, no energy. Okay, great. So you're actually not very good at producing energy. You're very good at giving something else to produce energy for you. That's not an optimal optimal physiological state is you can't sleep fine without anything. You can perform fine. Maybe we're a little bit better when we use them. And now these things give us like a little bit of an extra juice. But that's a difference between taking us from really good, needing extra juice to like, I can't function. And I can't tell you how many labs we've had come back recently where people have next morning melatonin concentrations that are 10 or 100x upper range limits. They're walking around sedated, even though melatonin is supposed to have like a 60 or 90 minute half-life, right? It should be gone fairly quickly. They're taking so much of it. In fact, a study came out very recently showing the actual amount of melatonin in your supplements can range up to 100,000x what you think you're taking. So you think you're taking three milligrams?

Mm, but it's more.

Way more. Wow. And so people are walking around on sedated and that's where they're going to nootropics. and more coffee and more nicotine, which again, I'm not against any of those things, but we have to have a little bit more control. The easiest way around all this stuff is eat a simple diet, drink water, regulate stress, sleep. Okay, let's come back to the baseline. What do I feel like when I'm not taking micro-dosing LSD? What do I take when I'm not- Right, right.

Like when I'm not- Eat every day. Yeah, having gummies and this and that.

Totally, right. And then you can go, okay, actually, like I was just regulating everything coming in. And now we can start playing here and here. But we have been generally pulled people off of things more than we put people on things.

Yeah, exactly.

Because you just lose any sense of normalcy. Which is a challenge.

Lots of information here, Andy. You've got a YouTube channel with a lot of this stuff that people want to nerd out and go into the data. They can see all your YouTube videos there. Your Instagram is really fun to check out. A lot of good tips there. You got a book as well, which is about getting unplugged. It's evolving from technology to upgrade your fitness performance and consciousness. I wanted to go more into consciousness and exercise and things like that, but I think maybe we'll have to have you come back on next time to give people some time to digest this. You also have your lab. I don't know if people are able to go to the lab if they're in LA or if it's more for just high performance athletes, but you've got a whole center there where you're sharing the research online from the lab, which is really cool. People can go to andygallpin.com, your YouTube as well as that's just Andy, Dr. Andy Gallpin. I think it's just Andy Gallpin. Andy Gallpin was there. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, we'll have it all linked up as well. How else can we be supportive to you today? What can we do to support you besides checking out your site and all the information you have?

Yeah, I think a couple of things. So my YouTube page, a little bit more context there. I built that a number of years ago simply because I thought it's kind of weird how people want and need general exercise and nutrition information. and I can only do this 35 students at a time and I've been waiting. Like this is just not a thing. So I just thought like, can I just start taking all of my university lectures? All the seminars I give, all the private speaking engagements, and can I just put them up on YouTube for free?

Turns out you can.

So that's all it is. So you can take any of my graduate level courses in strength and conditioning, nutrition, all these things, or some of the more advanced talks I give. I could just put them up there in 5, 25, 55 minute physiology ones. That's just all I just pay out of that. I don't have like a, I don't have a company or anything that does that. So that is a Patreon model.

Cool.

So if anyone wants to support that, I take that money and I'm an intern actually, a student, and he's like, I know how to produce videos and I know how to post to YouTube.

There you go.

And we're actually trying to up the ante on that quite a bit to make them way more user friendly and stuff and provide notes and all that stuff. So that's probably the easiest way. If you're more of the high ticket person and you're interested in supporting research, our lab is a nonprofit, so we can get a nice kickback on lab donations.

That's great, man. That's always something you need, more resources.

Yeah, we don't fund, this type of research is not fundable. We're not making drugs and we're not doing that.

Yeah, exactly. They can go to your website and learn more about that, right? Or they can donate?

Yes. I don't have any of that stuff up there.

You'll put it up there after this talk.

And then that'll have links to our other programs. So the Absolute Rest program, the Sleep Tech. I'll make sure that gets up on the website.

Absolute Rest, yeah.

Our Rapid Health Optimization program, which is our executive program. So if you want kind of the athlete thing and then you want someone to take you through the training, stress reduction or breathing, whatever it is we find. So, rapid health optimization program. And then if you are more the athlete type that we have our biomolecular athlete, that's that side of the equation.

Interesting.

We can run all those labs and everything and get you your complete biomolecular blueprint and then provide solutions.

Oh, that's cool. So, you can run labs for people.

We can.

That's cool. I love it.

It's not a high throughput thing.

Yeah, yeah. There's a waiting list. Sure, sure, sure. All right.

Sign up for that waiting list.

Depends on how are you? Are you up sometimes?

Yeah, I can skip that line. Yeah. We had a couple just jump in. I'm like, well, you're the, we are.

The number one player in the world in multiple major American sports. Nice.

Yeah. They got to jump the line.

They'll get it there tomorrow. No offense, I'll take offense of you. But they got to jump. I love this, Andy. A couple of final questions for you. We'll wrap things up. This is called the Three Truths. Imagine it's your last on earth many years away. You get to live as long as you want to live and you accomplish all your dreams but for whatever reason you got to take all of your information with you or it's no longer around. All your content, your work, your books, your videos, this, it's gone for whatever reason. But you have three lessons you get to share with the world. Three truths that you would leave behind from all of your life experience, knowledge, research, whatever it might be as profound or simple as as the truths might be, what would you say are those three truths for you?

Wow, that's an interesting one. Number one would be I'm just gonna steal this. I just think I'm gonna say ownership. I'm a huge, huge proponent of that. I don't think I need to explain that more. You know what I mean. You listeners have probably heard people talk about that. Number two, I'll say, I'll just give you one word perspective. And what I mean by that is truth is not as common as you think. We live in gradients. And what seems to be completely true for you may not be completely true for somebody else because their perspective. Right. And we need to understand that science is not a thing that produces proof. It's very difficult, borderline impossible to prove. Right. All we do is play on levels of certainty. If you go back to any parts of our conversation, there are some of those things where I'd say, I have tremendous certainty on, you need water to perform very well, right? X amount of water. I'm pretty certain about that. Other things we've talked about, I start to lose... I may still be like, yeah, this is true, but I have less certainty and I'm willing to entertain ideas that are moving. I'm probably not willing to entertain an idea that you don't need water. There would have to be tremendous evidence for me to even not swipe right by your post. I'm not listening. I'm not listening or reading a post about how all you need to eat is liver. The burden of proof there is so extraordinary. Maybe I'm wrong about that in 10 years, I'll see, but most likely I'm not. Because so many of those things come and you're most likely to be right most times up here. But then there's some things where I'm.

Like, yeah, so perspective is key.

You have to understand where you're at on that spectrum. The last one would be, I'll call it intentionality.

Okay.

And what I mean by that is, and this is part of the stuff we got to at the end of my book that we talked about, are you pushing towards adaptability, which is pushing towards optimization. Most people don't even realize that every action you're doing is moving you in one of these directions. So if you can just zoom back a little bit and start to think through, I'm gonna change this one. Okay, I'm gonna explain this better. I'm gonna call this first principles. First principles? First principles. Are you familiar with first principles thinking? No. Okay, I'm surprised. It's a very common thing in the business leader space. So first principles is a line of thinking that suggests go back to the very foundational beginning, go all the way to the bottom to where there is no more assumptions. And you just simply work your way up. anytime you see an assumption, you stop and you confirm your case is in fact true there. And this works so well for managing relationships. You can already see the application there, right? Where are we gonna go down to? Fundamental truth do we agree upon? Let's go back. Wherever that is, if that's a very bottom level, we're gonna agree upon that truth. And we're just gonna go to the next level. Do we agree here? Yes. And you're just gonna walk up until you find a place of like, and you'll just, you'll be so shocked with how many assumptions are baked in to things that you're just assuming. So questioning those assumptions and going back and it works for relationship stuff, it works for nutrition, it works for should I be doing this today, it works for do I really have to go see this person, do I really have to just come back to first principles, where's the fundamental thing that we agree upon? and then where is the assumption breaking down? And you'll just be shocked. Like, I didn't realize. I assumed.

Right, right, right.

You were willing to put your career in front of your wife.

Right, right, right.

You weren't. Okay, like, this is. Now I see why you're mad that I gave you this recommendation. Because I thought here, you didn't. We missed. So go back to the very first principles. And when you're solving problems, whether it's with your company or it's physiology or new tech or whatever it is, just start there and walk up. This is Elon Musk, right? Everyone said you can't make batteries, blah, blah, blah. He's going back to me. Okay, what do we assume? You're assuming we can't make batteries cheap. Why?

Well, you can't. Why?

You can't. Why? Right. Oh, we got an opportunity. That's all. If you could, how would you do it? Totally, right? This is, I could give you examples of scientists in our field who you think things are just like, they're in our textbooks and I've taught. I give you so many examples of things I've taught over the years and I'm like, oh, I just assumed that was, it's an interesting thing. Right, right.

And then somebody came along and said.

Well, where's that paper? Question or assumption? Where's the paper? Where's the first paper? You go back and you're like, actually this was shown one time 1970 in six people and then it's just like, yeah, that was, that totally changed the way we train muscle hypertrophy. Brad Schoenfeld just did that, right? And it's like, we have so many people you're like, I never thought to assume.

I just, yeah.

So just really go back to first principles thinking and, I love it.

My man, I love this. I want to acknowledge you, Andy, for the constant search of moving the human body forward. You know, the constant research that you're diving into, the constant testing and tweaking, the optimizing of humans. I think it's really cool that you have a lab that you get to work with great athletes all the time, college athletes, pro athletes, and see what's working for the rest of us. So thank you for doing all the work and the research and diving in and publishing this information and making it available for us as well for free on YouTube and everywhere else. So really appreciate it, Andy. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

Exceeding your own expectations. Whatever your coverage is, when you outkick it for yourself, I think you've done great.

There you go.

That's all I'm gonna say. My man.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Andy.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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