498 | The 6 Pillars of Health | Dr. Bobby Dubois

26:25Right. You can get up there real quick. Just real quick before we move on, the balance and flexibility. I'm curious, obviously you mentioned, hey, you could stand on one leg. I mean, that's something that's so actionable and really simple to do. One thing that I've found is interesting between maybe American and Western culture and potentially Asian countries is, or at least I've seen in passing studies on like the incidence of hip fractures and how much people get on and off the ground, on and off the toilet, if you will, in Asian cultures and the lower incidence of hip fracture as opposed to the United States where I talk to my parents about this all the time.

27:04I'm like, they literally cannot get on the ground and off the ground. And I'm going to be 45 this year. Like I'm spending as much time on the ground. Even just something as simple about it as like when we're watching TV at night as a family, I'm not sitting on the couch. I'm sitting on the ground in all different postures, legs crossed, things like that, because I'd ideally like to lower my likelihood that you can never lower it to zero, but lower my likelihood of breaking a hip when I'm 60, 70, 80, if I possibly can with something simple. And that's exactly how one might approach this. I mean, we sit in nice, comfortable chairs, and that's wonderful and relaxing, but it's doing nothing for our core muscles.

27:44If you look at some of these blue zone countries and localities, they don't sit in chairs. I mean, in Okinawa, they do a lot of squatting. So when they're sitting around a campfire or they're even eating or whatever it is, they're not sitting in a chair. They're either squatting or they're sitting on the ground and sitting on the ground requires your muscles to be engaged. So all those little things make a big difference. You're on a conference call, a Zoom call, stand up and do the call while you're standing. All of these are wonderful ways to do it. That's really great. And yeah, even just little fidgeting.

28:19I mean, people talk about this all the time. I think there's something called NEAT, right? It's like non-exercise activity thermogenesis, if I recollect. And it's just like a little movement during the day. Don't just sit there, ramrod straight, not moving. If you have to sit for a while, like you said, it would be wonderful to stand up for a little bit, but even just tap your feet, lift your calves up, do something minor, right? Yep, exactly. All right, let's move on to pillar number two. So sleep. I think this for many, many decades was looked at as like a weakness, like, oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or, oh, that successful person gets four hours of sleep, so blah, blah, blah, I can do that too.

29:00I think most of that stuff has been proven false seemingly. And I think a lot of modern science is coming around to just how important sleep is. I'd love to hear you talk at a high level about sleep generally. Sleep is what I call the unsung hero of health. It's remarkable how important sleep is in terms of how long you live, whether you get Alzheimer's disease, your mood, it's extraordinary. And the sad thing is that Americans, on average, Americans 30, 40 years ago got about eight hours of sleep. That's fallen to below seven. So below seven means that half the people may be getting a lot below seven, so six hours or even less.

29:44From all the studies, it appears there's a bit of a magic number around seven hours of sleep, and that above seven hours, you seem to get the benefits. And if you are below that, you have problems. And as I said, the problems are heart attacks, strokes, cognitive decline, things that we really, really, really care about. And another interesting thing is people are like, well, I don't sleep very much during the week, but on the weekends, I try to catch up. Unfortunately, each night is its own beautiful story and you can't make it up. I've had people ask me an interesting question. It's midnight.

30:23Normally I would get up at six so I could do my exercise, get to the gym. What do I do, Dr. Bobby? Should I get up early, not get as much sleep, go to the gym and the benefits of the gym, or should I get that extra hour or two of sleep? My answer is not based on absolute scientific studies, but my reading of the general literature, sleep longer, you can catch up on your exercise another day, but you can't catch up on your sleep. And when you sleep, and I'm not going to get lost in the neurobiology, if people are interested in sleep, Matthew Walker has both a lovely podcast and a great book called Why We Sleep.

31:01If people are interested, that's the best resource. You can listen to my podcast, it'll give you a summary. But when you sleep, things happen. The brain is a very active part of your body and it creates, in essence, toxins, waste products, and you got to get them out of your brain. And when you sleep, there's a massaging action that gets rid of some of that stuff. And unfortunately, if you don't get that full sleep, you don't get rid of those byproducts and that can cause problems over the long haul. Not, you know, one all-nighter is not going to do you in, but as a routine, you really, really, really want to try to get around seven hours or more.

31:40Ten hours is not good. Five hours is not good. Seven to eight, seven to eight and a half is good. And the wonderful thing about sleep is that there's, and we may not have time to go through all of them, there's 12 things that practically you can either do more of or do less of that will fundamentally help your sleep. And that's the beauty. You've got control over these things. And if you're having challenges with your sleep, very practical, tangible things you can try. All right. Well, let's dive right into that. So 12 things either to avoid or to do to help improve sleep. So yeah, I definitely would love to go through these, Bobby, if we can.

32:18Exactly. And we don't need to get through all 12 of them, but I'll just mention them. So on the things to do, let's promote the positive first, and then we'll take away things you might enjoy that also will help you sleep. So get sunlight. early in the day. Get up, get out. And that helps set your biologic clocks, your melatonin secretions. Again, I don't want to get down into the biochemistry, but it's really, really, really helpful. And if you take your dog for a walk, you get a twofer, you get your exercise, and you get your sunlight. And if you go with somebody you care about, now you got your social relationships working, and now you've got three pillars all at the same time.

32:59So that's the first thing. The second is exercise. Exercise helps people sleep. It improves the number of hours of sleep and it improves the quality of the sleep. So very, very important. And sleep is more than just, I was on the pillow. You've got your REM sleep, you've got your slow wave, deep sleep, and exercise is very, very helpful in that regard. The fourth pillar that we'll get to probably is mind-body activities. So meditation or other type of mind-body harmony activities have been shown in clinical studies of thousands of people to improve people's sleep compared to those that didn't do these kinds of things.

33:40Here's one that's critically important for many people and yours truly is the poster child. Go to bed at the same time each night. Why is that important? Well, Yours truly wakes up at five in the morning, whether I go to bed at midnight or I go to bed at nine. If I am forced to be up later, I know I'm getting less sleep. Now, not everybody is this way. Not everybody has that sort of inflexibility, but study after study, lots have been done in adolescence because we know adolescents tend to stay up crazy hours, go to bed at the same time each night. Now, you mentioned earlier, and I'll take a quick aside here, the N of one concept.

34:27So clinical trials, clinical studies of which I love to talk about, are generally looking at a group of people who did something and a group of people who didn't. It might have been a drug, it might have been surgery, and it's ideally randomly done, and then you ask who did better. And that provides an average. On average, people who take this drug, their blood pressure lowers by eight points. But that's just an average. For some people, they get a lot more benefit. Some people get a lot less benefit. So an N of one study is you become the laboratory test. And the beauty of this and sleep is you can test all the things I'm talking about with you.

35:10And within a week or two, you'll know whether it makes a difference for you. So take a baseline assessment. How many hours a night you typically get over the course of a week? If you happen to have an Apple Watch or a ring or a whoop band or any of those things, you can not only tell how many hours, but the stage is asleep. If you don't have one of those, go on the web. There's sleep questionnaires. They basically ask you questions like, how hard was it to go to sleep? Were you waking up in the middle of the night? How rested do you feel the next day? So you can do all this without a fancy watch or anything.

35:47Now, once you've got a baseline, try one of these things. Okay, I'm going to bed every night at 10 o 'clock. And you come back a week later and say, Dr. Bobby, didn't make any difference. I didn't sleep any longer and I didn't have any better quality. Or you may come back and say, oh my gosh, that made a huge difference. Here's another one. Set your bedroom temperature low, 70 degrees or maybe lower. Now, we do it, makes a huge difference for Gail and I. You can test it. You're going to be like, well, you know, it uses more energy. I don't really want to do that, et cetera, et cetera. Try it for a week.

36:25Try it for two weeks. You can come back and say, Dr. Bobby made no difference. Fine. That one doesn't work for you. Great. Or here's another one. Take a warm bath or a sauna before bed. That will actually, in spite of what sounds like hot water, it will actually help you sleep. It lowers your body temperature, helps you sleep. Again, you can test it on yourself. All of these things are so testable. Now, give yourself a chance to unwind with a dark room. Here's one that Gail and I are playing with. This is not based on a major randomized clinical trial. It was a small little study, but it got a lot of press.

37:04Wearing socks to bed will improve your sleep. Now, there's biochemical reasons why this might actually work. So Gail and I have been testing this, wearing socks to bed, and I think it actually works. But again, this isn't one of the six. This is a freebie seventh. Again, all of these, see if it makes a difference for you. And if it does continue, and if it doesn't, you haven't lost much, but now you know a little bit more about yourself. And this concept of an end-of-one study will come up over and over and over again. And if you listen to me, it'll come up with nutrition and we'll come back to this later.

37:42So those are the six things or six plus one that you can do that might help. Now, if we want to run through the other ones that you should avoid, we can do that. Cool. Well, then we will definitely get into that. And I think the most important takeaway that people are going to have from this episode is that N of one, right? It's understand that you can test this. You don't need fancy equipment. Like Bobby said, you don't need to go out and spend$300 on an aura ring. you can just kind of get a sense of, okay, how do I feel in the morning? Right? Like you could even just journal this if you wanted to, just very low tech, right?

38:15Perfect. Which is super cool. And then a lot of these things like I've noticed, and it was interesting, you talked about the cold room. This has been a massive one for me. And you also mentioned it might be more energy, but interestingly, I would actually argue that it might be net even because in the winter, we're actually letting it get down to 63 at night. So I'm using dramatically less energy in the winter. And I think 70 is exactly where we set it in the summer, the air conditioning. So we're somewhere between 63 and 70, depending on the time of year, which is wonderful. That's great. So you've done your N of 1 study and it works?

38:53Great. I have indeed. Good news. So one thing I realized we forgot to mention at the outset, this is an audience that is concerned about retiring and having financial means. I think about approaching retirement as a three-legged stool. You need to have the money and the resources to have that wonderful time of your life. Secondly, you have to have a reason to wake up in the morning. You have to have a purpose. You have to have activities you care about. But you could have your money and you could have a reason to wake up. But if you don't have the energy or health to do it, it all falls apart.

39:28The stool falls apart if you don't have that third leg. And that's why I feel so passionate about helping people. So when they get to that point, they can have the type of retirement and later years that would be very satisfying for them. Love that. Thanks for listening to ChooseFI and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support ChooseFI is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at choosefi.com slash cards. I keep this page constantly updated, so it should always be the top resource for you. Thanks for being part of our community and for your support.

40:04All right, let's go into the things to avoid because I think some of these are gonna be eye-openers for people. So caffeine. I think everybody knows that caffeine can wake them up. For some people, it doesn't really wake them up. But for me, if I have a real cup of coffee at seven in the morning, I will have difficulty sleeping at night. It's because my body is, I have a genetic kind of variant that means that the caffeine lasts in my system for just about forever. But other people can drink a Coke, drink something late at night, it doesn't bother them. How are you going to know if it matters to you?

40:37The end of one study. If you're not sleeping well, try to cut down on the caffeine or do it very early in the day and see if it works. The next one, people aren't going to like me, alcohol. But Dr. Bobby, when I drink, I fall asleep so beautifully. Yes, you do. And you wake up at two in the morning so beautifully and you can't go back to sleep. And even if you did sleep the night, often people feel groggy and not as rested. And I'm not talking about a hangover. I'm just talking about one or two glasses of alcohol in the few hours before bed. Makes a huge difference for many people. The studies are very, very clear about this.

41:23And it's something, again, to try and see if it makes a difference for you. Yeah, this one I can personally vouch for. Again, N of one, of course, everyone metabolizes differently. Just like Bobby, actually, I'm a fast metabolizer of caffeine. So I took genetic tests and had it analyzed. So I actually have the other side of that. But when we're talking about alcohol, it is shocking to me what an impact even one drink has on my resting heart rate. I think it's about a 10 % increase I've found is my resting heart rate goes up 10%. Again, just in my end of one, my wife actually has tested and she has virtually no impact with one.

42:00But when she has two drinks, her resting heart rate's up about 10 % approximately. But most people think, oh, I'm not drunk. I'm not even buzzed or anything. It couldn't have had an impact. Oh, I had that drink at 6 PM and now I'm going to sleep at 10. I mean, I've seen it as clear as day in my ordering stats. And frankly, it's shocking. And it's testable. It may be a bigger issue for some than others. So we talked about the life hack. Take your 15-minute walk in the middle of dinner. Here's another one, another freebie. Remember back in the 60s and 70s, they would talk about the three martini lunch.

42:37It was not uncommon for people back then to have alcohol at lunch. I'm bringing back the martini lunch, meaning, and jokingly, if you can have alcohol, have it in the middle of the day. Now, obviously, if it's a workday, not such a great idea, but have your beer or wine at lunch because by the time you go to sleep, could be 8, 10, 12 hours later, the alcohol is very likely to be out of your system. So something you can test and see. Okay. But here's one that I think is quite important people may not realize. Don't eat close to bedtime. Now, your mom probably told you that way back when. There's something about having a full stomach.

43:18It could be the metabolism going towards a digestion. It could be hormones that are circulating. Anyhow, people find that eating close to bedtime doesn't help. Again, there have been studies that look at this and find that people that eat late before their bedtime. It takes them longer to fall asleep. They wake up in the middle of the night. So that's another one. Here's another one to avoid, napping. Now, napping is wonderful, but napping too late in the days can interfere with your sleep. Ideally, you're going to nap if you do at 1 p.m., 2 p.m. Any later than maybe 3, it may create a problem.

43:57And basically, one of the drivers to make you want to sleep is a chemical in the brain called adenosine. And over the course of the day, it builds up. It gets up to such a high level. It's like, I got to hit the pillow. I'm so sleepy. But if you take a nap, that adenosine levels fall. And by the time it's time for bed, you may not have enough of it to tell you to go to sleep. Again, test and see, and it may make a big difference or it may not. Put away screens a couple of hours before bed or at least an hour before bed. Kindle doesn't seem to be a problem. The sort of that type of white ink or whatever it is, not a problem for most people, but watching a movie can be a problem.

44:40Some people try the blue light glasses. Again, that's something you can test. And that's pretty much it. There's one that I'll mention because my wife invented this and I think it's brilliant. One thing to avoid, don't drink too much liquids close to bed. So if you have to wake up at night to pee, often getting up to do that wakes you up and it gets harder to get back to sleep. So don't have any fluids after 6 p.m. See if it makes a difference. It may not make a difference. But my wife invented this one. So if you wake up at two in the morning and you say to yourself, oh, I got to go to the toilet and you get up, you go to the toilet, It probably wakes you up even if you keep your eyes closed.

45:22And you may find, or some people find, it's hard to go back to sleep. What she invented and I find incredibly useful is when you wake up, you're groggy. Tell yourself, nah, I don't really need to go to the toilet. And 90 % of the time, five minutes later, you're asleep. And of course, you didn't need to get up. So we can talk longer about this. But that's something just, it's a life hack. Try and see, and it might help you. And it has helped a lot of people. That's a great one. Yeah, I've heard, I think just to kind of summarize a lot of your things to avoid, like a general rule of thumb, I think maybe popularized by Andrew Huberman or put out in the ether by him at least, the 3-2-1.

46:06So it's no eating approximately three hours before bed, no liquids approximately two hours before bed, and no social media, email or screens one hour before bed. And those are all the three critical things you said to avoid in those windows. I, like you, would extend this personally. Like I try to stop eating and drinking by about 6 p.m. So for me, it's about four hours before bed, approximately three and a half, give or take. But yeah, I found that, again, in my end of one, those little tweaks have helped dramatically. All right, let's move on. So I think we've covered two absolutely critical ones.

46:41Now we get into one that is maybe in my eyes, like the toughest one is nutrition, just because there's so many contradictory headlines and it just, nutrition seems confusing to people. I'd love to hear you distill how you think about nutrition as a pillar. Nutrition is really important. And although it will sound like I don't believe in anything related to nutrition, what I do believe in is being a good weight for you is unbelievably important for risk factors related to living longer and living well. So however you get to a reasonable weight, and it's a whole nother discussion to talk about Ozempic and some of the other ones, it's really important to be at a good weight level.

47:29Now, how you get there, obviously you can't eat Twinkies all day long and that's the only thing you eat. You obviously have to have some sort of a balanced nutrition and it's best to shop around the periphery of the market, you know, the fresh fruits and vegetables and meats and such and the aisles have all the processed things. So to the extent you can do that. So there are some things I actually support and believe in. Where I don't agree is with all the people who say our way is the right way. Oh, a plant-based diet. That's the healthiest. No, no, no. Paleo. That's what we were meant evolutionarily to eat.

48:14No, no, no, no. Carbs are bad. They raise your insulin and insulin is evil. Well, how about the Mediterranean diet? How about fats are bad? Oh, and saturated fats are especially bad. And you must take probiotics. And intermittent fasting is the key to everything. So there are so many theories and so many approaches in life. I believe if you have this many people saying this many different approaches, it's because none of them really makes much difference over the others. But the headlines sound amazing. You know, apple cider vinegar will help you lose weight. And the reason why these headlines are so tantalizing is that we as Americans, a third of us are overweight, a third are obese, and a third are probably a good weight.

49:03And this is, we used to be 10 % of people that had weight issues. Now it's much, much, much higher. And these diets, one versus another, I am not a proponent of. Whatever allows you to eat the right amount of calories, again, not the Twinkie diet, is what I support. And I'm old enough to know that not too many decades ago in the nutrition space, eggs were bad. They have cholesterol in them. Don't eat cholesterol. Shrimp's bad. Lobster's especially bad. And then we learned, oops, we were wrong. They're fine. Coffee used to be bad. Well, it turned out that what they were measuring wasn't the coffee.

49:45It was that when they found people that drank coffee, they smoked a cigarette. So it was really the cigarettes, not the coffee. And so much of nutrition research is very small studies, not rigorously done. And it sends people in directions. And then people have their own diet books. So, of course, they're pushing that or their nutritional supplements. So they're pushing that. I think the key issue is eat a basic rounded diet and find a way for you to basically eat the right amount of calories. I happen to like intermittent fasting, not because it changes your biochemistry. Some people argue it does.

50:25Now, maybe if you didn't eat for four days, yes, it'll change your biochemistry. But the 12 or 18 hours that people call intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating, I don't think makes a difference there. But what it does help some people is that it reduces the number of meals or reduces the chances of eating a lot. There's no magic. So if that helps you, that's wonderful. If the get up in the middle of your meal and go for a walk helps you, that's wonderful too. So I wish there was a magic bullet, a magic approach. And we have learned a lot about what diet and appetite is from the new weight loss drugs, which has really opened people's eyes to the problem and the solutions.

51:07But if you're not going to be on those drugs, you got to find an alternative way. And basically, you do your end of one, try to figure out what works for you. Yeah, that last thing you said is really intriguing. Obviously, I would love to have you back on as many times as you're willing to come back on the show. So maybe we can talk about what we have learned from these new weight loss drugs and how that impacts. It's very powerful. And Weight Watchers has completely changed its approach. It used to be a shaming approach. They get you on the scale. I don't know much about Weight Watchers, so I don't want to malign them.

51:39But there was a period of time where they would get you on the scale in front of people. And if you didn't lose weight, then they would say, oh, you don't have enough willpower or whatever it is. Go and try harder. And what we've learned is even people who never were able to lose weight or kept losing weight and it comes back on, they do brilliantly on these drugs. There is something going on in the brain. There's something going on in your stomach that we cannot ignore any longer. Maybe someday we will have drugs that are inexpensive that you could take for the rest of your life and really solve the problem.

52:12But until that's the case, then we're back to the standard stuff that I've alluded to. Yeah. And what I've heard is there's early indications, and I think it's too early to say this definitively by any means, but that these weight loss drugs are actually showing like a decrease in a lot of addictive type behaviors. So I've heard in passing that people are seeing a lower incidence of smoking for people who are taking them, a lower gambling. Again, too early to say. I'm not saying this as definitive. I haven't read any studies. But I've heard that numerous times from numerous different places. And it's intriguing to see what the impacts are going to be of these Ozympic and such.

52:53Profound. Very profound. Yeah. And look, I don't take money from these companies. Of course. Of course. and all, but I'm just an observer of the literature. The sad truth though, is when you stop the drugs, the weight comes back on for almost everybody, even though they're like, no, I've got it solved. This won't happen to me. Invariably it does in almost everybody. So that's a sad piece of the puzzle, but they're very effective. Yeah. Two things I wanted to get your thoughts on that you said in passing in the explanation of nutrition. So, well, first, I love that there's no religious war here.

53:31I think you're very careful to say, listen, a lot of these people do get into their little camps of, oh, carnivore is the best. It's my religion in essence. I'm going to fight to the death for it. That doesn't seem to make any sense to me. And I love your thoughts on that. So you said a basic rounded diet. I want to get your thoughts on that, but also how it ties into, you said something to the effect of the right number of calories. And I think a lot of people, myself very much included until this past roughly 18 months where I started tracking my calories. And now I always thought that was frankly like kind of odd behavior, people who track their calories, because I was worried that anytime you get into deprivation type mindset, especially akin to a short-termism, I think that's something, Bobby, that we go the opposite here at Chooseify is we think long-term.

54:22So whenever I think of, hey, I'm going on a budget for a short period of time. I'm going on a diet for a short period of time. Almost akin to that shaming of like you talked about in Weight Watchers. I feel like any short-termism is doomed to fail. So in my mind, I conflated that with tracking calories. But my mind has been open to, I had no idea how much I was eating. I had no idea that, oh, one of my favorite foods, peanut butter, which sadly I have the regular Skippy or whatever, I was eating probably 800 calories a day of peanut butter, just like three spoons full, three heaping spoons, granted.

54:56But I mean, I cut that out and it was a dramatic difference, just literally cutting peanut butter. And again, I think of myself as a healthy person. I had no idea what I was eating until I actually started tracking it. It's a critical issue. And if we look back over the decades, portions in restaurants have literally doubled. And we begin to approach our meals with that mindset that this is what a full plate is. And not even talking about, yes, this is how much of your plate should be your broccoli versus your start versus your meat. But just the size of the plate has grown and the amount of food that you put on the plate.

55:35So it's huge. So counting your calories is great to give you a sense of I had no idea that the sandwich I made, which I thought was healthy, by the time you added everything up, it was 1 ,000, 1 ,200 calories. Or that Cheesecake Factory cheesecake, which I love, it could have 1 ,200 or 1 ,500 calories. It's like I had no idea. So you asked earlier about people should be at a good weight for them. So for many, many people, they can remember back to their college days or their 20s. And they were like, yeah, if I could be that weight, I would be very, very happy. Well, then you know. Now, obviously, if you were a young man, you might have had more muscles back then than you do now.

56:24But you have a rough idea of what your weight could be, should be. And then you obviously hear in the movies or whatever, I can still get into my wedding tuxedo. I mean, you have a sense of that. Now, Now, for people who have been overweight all their life, okay, that's going to be a little more difficult because they maybe don't have that mental image and what the weight associated with that. But for the vast majority of people, I think they do. Now, if you're a devotee and you really want to figure out how many calories my body burns, it's not very expensive to go to one of these places and get a basal metabolic rate.

57:03You basically lie down. You breathe into this mask. It measures CO2 and other things. And then 20 minutes later, it will give you a printout, which will say, you know, if you do nothing during the day, this is how many calories you'll burn. If you're walking around just like a normal person, you'll add another couple hundred calories and then your exercise program goes on top of that. You know, is it a perfect test? No. Will it vary from week to week, month to month? Sure, it could. But it'll give you an inkling about whether my basal rate is 1 ,200 calories a day or 2 ,000 calories a day. And then that plus counting your calories for a short period of time will give you a sense.

57:42Nice. I like that. That's a great way to start. And I guess, what would you say is most glaringly missing or not sufficient in most people's diets? Are there like simple things that people could add that you find generally people are not getting enough of? Yes. And I'm glad you asked that question because I forgot to mention it. The Twinkie diet is not a good thing for a whole host of reasons, but in part because it's missing a critical element of what you need, and that's protein. So protein, generally speaking, people don't get enough of it. And we all love carbs. We love other things. Obviously, if you're on a keto diet or something, you're probably having a fair bit of protein.

58:23But the recommended daily amount of protein is about 50 grams per person per day. That's way too low. probably needs to be 80 or 100. The numbers that people quote is 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, which is sort of 0.6 to 0.8 grams per pound of body weight. I weigh 150 pounds. So I would like to get about 100 grams a day. Now I'm a carb lover, you know, left to my own devices. I'll have oatmeal for breakfast with some butter on it, maybe some fruit. Dinner, I'll have pasta. And lunch, I might have a little bit of something that contains protein. I could easily finish the day at 30 grams and not blink.

59:11And that's why counting these types of things gives you a sense of it. The good news is that it's not that hard to get the right amount of protein. I love cottage cheese. You can easily get 20 or 30 grams of protein in your cottage cheese. Have three or four eggs. If you like eggs or egg whites, now you're at 20 or 25 grams of protein. Obviously, if you have some chicken or some fish or whatever for a meal, that'll get you 20 or 30. The key is that you need to think about it for each and every meal, or you'll be like Bobby and you'll end up with 20 at the end of the day. Why do we need our protein?

59:50Well, it goes back to our strength and our muscle loss that we talked about earlier. Not having enough protein, those are going to get worse. Yeah, it's so important. And yeah, that's the one aspect of my diet that has changed the most in the last year and change where I'm actually targeting somewhere in the vicinity of like 180 grams of protein a day. And I have to say, it's not that hard to hit when you make a concerted effort. But to your point, prior to this, like you, you could go through your life and eating full meals or so you think and get 30 to 50 grams of protein a day, which is just wholly insufficient.

1:00:25Whereas now I'm eating, for me, Bobby, the best bang for my buck are the Oikos 000 Greek yogurts. They're like 90 calories for 15 grams of protein, and they're delicious. So I'm probably eating three or four of those a day, and it's just easy. And that's a free 60 grams of protein, it feels like. Beautiful. All right, let's go to pillar number four. This is one that I think a lot of people's eyes have been open to over the last maybe decade or two is mind-body work. I'd love to hear you talk through this. Yeah, mind-body work's been around for a long time. And if you go back to the 60s and 70s in the hippie era, they were all going to these institutes and meditating and doing these other kinds of things.

1:01:06And that's great. And people feel better. Their stress level goes down, depression goes down. That's all wonderful. But what we've also learned is that these same activities, I talked earlier about how meditation helped our sleep, they also help us to live longer and live well. The body and the mind are truly connected. Obviously, the mind tells the body to do stuff. Move your legs, go for a walk, take a breath. The mind is obviously telling the body things. And the body, conversely, tells the mind things. I talked earlier about your stomach can tell your brain, I'm full. Or your muscles can say to your brain, we need more oxygen, tell the lungs to start doing more work.

1:01:49So there's absolutely a connection between them and it's a very important piece of the puzzle. What we've also learned is that stress and how you measure it and define it is always an interesting question, but baseline stress levels relate directly to the likelihood of having a heart attack or dying due to a heart-related disease. And they did this study in Britain with 7 ,000 people, and they followed them for 18 years and basically said, you know, what was their stress levels and did they die of heart-related diseases? And the answer was yes. And then this was duplicated in 52 countries around the world, similar kinds of things.

1:02:28So I don't want to get too far into this. People can ask me separately if they want to listen to the podcast on this. But what we have learned is that meditation or something as simple as breath work or qigong or yoga really makes a difference. And studies have shown it reduces depression, helps sleep, reduces your blood pressure. In a study of meditation, they found that people who meditated regularly, their blood pressure dropped almost as much as taking a drug. Now, you may need to take a drug and meditate, but it's very powerful. And if you're not a woo-woo person, I'm not in this new age stuff, I can't sit for 30 minutes and meditate, do something as simple as breath work.

1:03:17Andrew Huberman has a wonderful podcast episode on breath work. And something as simple as taking deep breath, and I'll just sort of demonstrate, it's called a sort of accelerated sigh. You take a breath before letting out, take a second breath, then let it out. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. So it sort of sounds like this.

1:03:43Now, don't hyperventilate. Take your time. Do it for three to five minutes. It will make a difference. People are like, ah, no, that's just new age stuff. When you think about people who are shooting a rifle, snipers, what do they do? They take a breath and they let it out. This is physiologic. It has nothing to do with whether you believe in Buddha or not. And that's something very, very simple. So you can incorporate this into your daily life. So when you're going out for your walk in the morning, getting your sunlight with your spouse, getting all these pillars done, do some breathing. And now you've got almost everything completed in your first 20 minutes of your day.

1:04:28Yeah, that is, damn, that is really spot on, Bobby. I love that. And you talked about that one particular breathing exercise. And you mentioned you followed that with if you're shooting a rifle, right? What's interesting is the Navy SEALs do something called box breathing. So this is something you can Google, but essentially it's just, let's say four seconds in through the nose, hold for about four seconds, four seconds out through the nose, hold at the bottom on empty for about four seconds. And just think of it as a box, four seconds on each side. And you will be shocked. You just do five or 10 rounds of that.

1:05:03It's amazing what a difference it can make. And I've found, yeah, that type of breathing helps a lot. You mentioned meditation. I know people are always looking for actionable things. I'll link these two in the show notes. And if you have any that you want to recommend, I can certainly put them in. But there's a yoga nidra. So this is not yoga like we think of yoga, movement practice, But it's basically a guided meditation. Andrew Huberman now calls this, he's coined this as non-sleep deep rest. So when I'm really tired and I don't want to take a nap or whatnot, I put on this 10 minute yoga nidra.

1:05:37I've been doing this for about six years now. And I just, Bobby, it is so relaxing. It's incredible. And that 10 minutes just kind of rejuvenates me. And I also got recently introduced to a meditation app called Insight Timer. So it's Insight Timer. and there's one particular, this is a bit longer one, it's 23 minutes, but it's called Deep Healing. And I just absolutely love this particular one. I did it for, I think, 60 days straight. And it was just like a nice, wonderful part of my day. So I'll link both of those up in the show notes for sure. But yeah, I mean, this is something that's become a big part of my life, certainly more recently.

1:06:15And if you don't believe it's helpful, do the end of one study, try it for a week, you know, have a baseline assessment of anxiety. There are questionnaires you can fill out or just, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how anxious am I typically, you know, six, eight, do this for a week, come back, test it, ask yourself that. And if it doesn't work, fine, doesn't work. But for many people, it's very helpful. And you've just mentioned how helpful it's been for you. Yeah. And it does not hurt to test, right? I mean, I can't think of anybody who's going to be worse off for having spent 10 minutes lying down or sitting quiet and just focusing on their breath, right?

1:06:55To me, it's at worst neutral and almost certainly a universal good. But like you said, N of one, you have to test. You have to test. Then you'll know. You will know. So, okay. I absolutely love this. Let's move on to number five, which is exposure to both hot and cold. Yes. And look, saunas and rolling in the snow have been around for thousands of years. Sauna was sort of originated in Finland. That was a very popular thing just 2 ,000 years ago. And rolling in the snow, people have been doing that forever back in the time of Hippocrates, thousands of years ago. Cold exposure was something they did to bring fevers down, obviously.

1:07:37And if you got injured, that they would do that. So it's been around a long time, but just because it stands the test of time doesn't mean there's actually any evidence that it works. So of course, since my middle name is evidence, I wanted to sort of dive in and really understand the evidence. And the good news is that saunas, exposure to heat and exposure to cold really, really immeasurable ways can help you live longer and definitely feel better. So here's some data. So saunas. Saunas have been shown, people that do sauna have been shown to have a lower likelihood of a heart attack, lower likelihood of a stroke, lower likelihood of cognitive decline, sort of the triple threat that we would like to find.

1:08:28Now, in a lot of studies, you would ideally like to, as I mentioned earlier, you randomize people. These people did something, these people didn't, and you now learn what happens. But for a lot of things in life, you can't randomize people for 30 years. So you kind of have to do what's called an observational study where you sort of follow people and see what happens. And for saunas, they've shown that it's very powerful. One thing that makes these observational studies more likely to be true is when you have what's called a dose-response relationship, which sounds like a big fancy term. But what it really means is if you look at people who did one sauna a week versus three saunas a week versus five saunas, the more you did, the better you did.

1:09:12That begins to help you think, huh, there may be something to this. And people who did less than 10 minutes didn't do as well people who did 10 to 20 minutes or 20 and above. So this also helps you to believe it. And we talked earlier about heat having a beneficial help before you go to sleep. So those are some of the benefits. The little bit challenging part of saunas and things like sauna, like a steam bath, is that not everybody has access to one. The beauty of some of the studies is they come out of Finland. And in Finland, basically there's one sauna for every two people, whether you're rich or poor, unemployed or employed, you have access to a sauna.

1:09:56And so it separates what people say, well, the people who do saunas, they have more free time, they're richer, and it has nothing to do with the sauna. It has to do with the fact that they have more free time. But in Finland, that sort of eliminates that problem. And so we actually do believe the results. But you can try to find a gym that has it. YMCAs may have a sauna. So not quite as easy as the next one, which is exposure to cold. Now, problem with this one is I got a lot of people say to me, well, Dr. Bobby, I can do the sauna thing that I can do, but I'm not getting in any cold water. I don't like cold water.

1:10:33And most people don't like cold water. The beauty of exposure to cold, not only does it work and it helps not only in terms of helping injuries heal. But if you measure the happy hormones in your body, they go up threefold, sixfold when you get into cold exposure, typically in a cold plunge experience. And it's only three to five minutes, but measurable differences in how people feel. Lovely studies done in, again, Finland, some people swim in the winter. And in Finland, swimming in the winter is pretty darn cold. So they took people in October and said, how happy are you? How stressed do you feel?

1:11:15Then half of the group didn't swim. The other half did this winter swimming. They measured them in February or January. And the people who did the winter swimming were way better mood, way happier, way less evidence of depressed feelings. So there's evidence that it works. Well, how can you try this without sort of doing something that's so difficult? turn the water to cold at the very end for 30 seconds. Let me tell you, it's a lot easier to do it in the summer than the winter. So start doing it now. And then when the winter comes around, you know, you'll gradually be able to do it or go to the market, buy a couple of bags of ice, throw it in your bathtub and climb in again, a minute, two minutes, three minutes.

1:12:00And if you're real devotee try to find a cold plunge tank. It's really easy to try this out. And again, do your end of one study. And if you don't feel happy, not just for the five minutes after you stopped hitting your head against the wall with the cold, but for hours, let me know. Most people feel fundamentally happy, alive, awake, alert for hours. Give it a try. Yeah. And like you said, it is hard, right? I mean, people are going to come to you and complain about it because it's not easy to get into cold water. But man, if you feel that much better afterwards and it's lasting, that seems well worth a couple minutes of potential - Give it a try.

1:12:44Just give it a try. Yeah. And I think something we talked about before reminded me of the phrase, I think it's hormesis, right? So it's like introducing a little bit of a stressor, but that's actually going to be like a net positive for you. So I think about like walking, walking outside, right? As opposed to going to a gym and walking on a treadmill, which certainly is better than sitting on a couch. Let's be clear, not even close. Treadmill is wonderful as compared to a couch. But if you can get outside and walk when it's raining, walk when it's 20 degrees, walk when it's 100 degrees, we sit in these hermetically sealed boxes at 70 to 75 degrees, 365 days a year.

1:13:25And our bodies probably could use the 100 every now and again and the 20 every now and again. And I think that might fit into that concept of hormesis, right, Bobby? It does. And if folks are sort of intrigued by this, Michael Easter wrote a book that came out probably a year ago, a New York Times bestseller called the comfort crisis. And Brad, you and I can talk about this on another podcast, but there's a lot to be said for challenging yourself and how our lives have become so comfortable with air conditioning and chairs and whatever that we've lost something both psychologically and health wise.

1:14:04So yeah, it's a good book if you're interested in the topic. Wholeheartedly agreed. We will definitely come back to that because one of the concepts in that book he talked about was Misogi. So this is basically doing an adventure that is just extraordinarily difficult. And both the lead up to it, he said, so Misogi would be, okay, I think there's a 50 % likelihood that I'm going to succeed at this. And how many things do we do in life that are actually, as adults, that are actually really difficult and that we, even as prepared as we might be, it might just not happen. Though one of his caveats was you cannot die on this, which is kind of hilarious.

1:14:41But that Misogi concept is something that I'm actively working on. So I'm glad you brought that book up. We'll definitely come back to that at some point in the future. Wonderful. All right, Bobby, before we move on to number six, I just wanted to ask real quickly about the heat, because I think this might be something that is more practical for most people. So like you said, it might be a little difficult to get to a gym or YMCA. The YMCA is a really good option for a traditional sauna. Some people might have hot tubs at home. Obviously, we have showers that we can kick up pretty hot. There are these new infrared saunas, just in real quick hit.

1:15:17How would those three compare to that traditional kind of finished sauna? Well, I'm a show me the evidence kind of guy. And the problem is there are no data to tell us whether a hot shower is enough. I live in Texas. It's pretty darn hot during the summer. Is we are walking around outdoors in the heat and the humidity enough to do that? We don't know. I have an infrared sauna, so it's a little bit of a leap of faith between the conventional and the infrared. But I think the data is enough on the conventional that I believe it. But on the things that aren't truly the saunas, 140 degrees, 160 degrees, we don't know.

1:16:01It certainly isn't going to hurt, but whether it gets you these life-changing benefits, we don't know. And until I've seen the data, I can't really say to folks, yes, this is good enough. I wish I could tell you, but the evidence isn't there. Wonderful. Well, thank you for being so forthright with that. So yeah, we'll touch base on that maybe a couple of years from now when maybe the evidence is in or either way, right? So, okay. We have the last pillar, which is really important. And it's something that we talk about here at Choose a Viola, which is maybe one of the reasons to pursue financial independence is that we can have the time and space to spend our most precious resource, which is our time, doing what we want with who we want, right?

1:16:46Our family, our friends, our community, and social relationships. I think this is something, sadly, a lot of people neglect, certainly in modern day America. and it's so important, but I fear that this is the one that's missed the most by people. It is missed by most people. And I think if you sort of phrase it in a different way, people will be like, oh yeah, you're right. This is something I've always known. So there's data on what happens when one spouse dies to the other spouse. And the risk of the second spouse dying in the next week or the next month or the next six months is doubled. Wow.

1:17:27Now you could say, oh, well, that's because one spouse smokes, so the other spouse smokes, so it's no surprise. I don't think that's the case. I think the stress and the change in that connectivity, losing that is what I believe is going on. So the data is pretty clear if you look at that, that losing a spouse is a much higher likelihood the other spouse won't survive. An interesting discussion we can have another day is whether men are better at this than women. It appears that when men lose their wife, they don't do nearly as well as when women lose their husband. And that may be because women historically in today typically do better at relationships than the average man.

1:18:11They have more of a circle of folks. One of the most important studies that has gotten popularized is the Harvard study of adult development. And this was a study that started 75 years ago at Harvard, where they basically took a bunch of Harvard men, because at the time Harvard didn't take women, and compared them to folks that lived in Boston, young men that lived in Boston that didn't have the same social and educational benefits. And they tracked them forward over decade after decade after decade. The scientists who were running the study would die and another scientist would pick up and carry the baton.

1:18:50And not long ago, they came out with some fascinating results. They asked the question, I wonder what factors in somebody's 50s, when they're in their 50s, will predict whether they'll live into their 70s and beyond and how functional they'll be. And you would think, well, did they exercise in their 50s? Did they smoke? Did they have their blood pressure under control? Those are all, of course, important. But the number one predictive factor was whether these people had satisfying social relationships. Those that did lived longer and were more functional as they got older than those that didn't.

1:19:32Now you can then drill in what does it mean to have a satisfying social relationship? And there's some wonderful articles and books that we could link to if folks are interested, but there's multiple factors. I mean, the obvious one is, do you have somebody you can call at two in the morning if you were ill or you had something difficult going on in your life? That's one aspect of having a social relationship, but there's other pieces of the puzzle. Do you have somebody in your life you can have fun with? Is there somebody in your life that you spend time with where you learn? Learn from them, learn with them.

1:20:11These are all different things. Of course, there's romantic intimacy is what people often think of. And what some of the teachings are is that you don't need to get all of that from one person. I've been blessed to be married for over 40 years. But if you go through the checklist of different aspects of the relationship, you don't have to get it from one person. So I have fun with my wife, but I have fun differently with my male friends. I learn with my wife, but I learn different things with other people. So again, we all enjoy having others in our life, or many people do, but it affects our health and well-being in ways that go beyond just anxiety and depression.

1:20:57And people are like, yeah, this all sounds a little woo-woo. How can this possibly be true? Well, imagine carrying a burden with you emotionally. Oh, I'm not getting along with this person in my life. I've lost my job. That is a very stressful experience. And if you look at the biochemistry, your cortisol goes up, your blood pressure may go up. Having somebody to share that with has been shown to reduce your stress level. So stress leads to bad things. Relationships help reduce stress. It's not rocket science to say how it's possible that one is connected. And the data, again, is pretty strong that relationships lead to positive things with health and well-being.

1:21:43Yeah, I love how you brought the evidence into that and also mentioned that the Harvard Study of Adult Development. I know pretty much any book you read on happiness is always quoting that particular longitudinal study. I mean, that's probably chapters of most books on happiness. So they have been studying this for quite literally, what, seven or eight decades now, somewhere in that vicinity. And it's remarkable. It's remarkable what a difference social relationships make. So I would love to see you do an episode, a future episode on your podcast on precisely that quote, the quote, satisfying social relationships.

1:22:17And in fact, it's the one I'm recording tomorrow that should be out in the next week. Okay, that is incredible. We did not tee that up, obviously. That was perfectly natural. So that will be out well before this podcast episode comes out. So that will exist. You can binge that to all the listeners. And like I mentioned, Bobby's podcast is phenomenal. I have spent, I mean, really the last decade of my life taking in and trying to synthesize in my kind of layman's version, all this health and wellness information. And I have not found a place and a person who has synthesized this and summarized it better than Bobby.

1:22:56So Live Long and Well with Dr. Bobby is the podcast. It's absolutely fantastic. And Bobby, I know you have a, actually a ranch. So Madrone Springs Ranch outside of Austin, Texas, where as I understand it, you're kind of living and breathing these pillars with visitors to your ranch. And I'd love for you to talk about that just for a minute or two while we close out here. Yes, we lived in LA forever. We moved to the Austin area about 10 years ago and got the crazy idea to buy some land. And we ended up finding this amazing raw land that we've basically put together exotic animals and a bed and breakfast.

1:23:35It's not your typical bed and breakfast in that it only has one group or one family at a time. So you have the privacy of 178 acres. But what's evolved over the last year or so is that these six pillars now are front and center in people's experiences. We have a yoga studio and a fitness center and you can get a massage and I'll cook meals that are hopefully healthy and yummy for you. We've got a cold plunge and a sauna. So all of these things and there's six miles of trails to hike on and there's places to swim in the creek. So we're hoping that folks will not only have a wonderful time and have lovely accommodations, but they'll learn the six pillars, they'll get to practice them and they'll go home and hopefully it will change their lives.

1:24:20And that's really what it's all about is to have a chance to help educate people and help them along this journey that I feel so passionate about. That's incredible. I would love to visit there in the future. And maybe, just maybe, we could put together, we're doing a lot more of these live FI gatherings and FI events. So I could see that being a potential future locale for a FI event. So stay tuned on that. And Bobby, I just wanted to thank you for being just so generous with your time and your knowledge. I know we're at over an hour and a half now and this has just been absolutely fantastic.

1:24:55I feel like we just barely scratched the surface. We could probably talk about this for another 50 hours. So I would love to have you back on in the future and maybe we can dive into really specific topics over the months and years. Wonderful. I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to the feedback from your listeners. Nice. All right. Thank you again. And thanks for listening, everybody. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Chooseify community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first subscribe to the podcast.

1:25:26So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand and I send it out Tuesday morning. So just head over to choosefi.com slash subscribe. And it's really, really easy to get on the newsletter list right there. And I would greatly appreciate it. It's the best way to get in touch with me. You can actually just hit reply to any of those emails and it comes directly to my inbox. So that's the way that I keep a pulse of the community and how we keep this the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show.

1:26:00And finally, if you're looking to join an in real life community, we have Chooseify local groups in 300 plus cities all around the world. So head to chooseify.com slash local and you'll find a list of all of those cities in 20 plus countries all across the world. And if you're just getting started with FI or you have a family member or a friend who you think would be interested, two easy ways. Chooseify episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the FI community. and even though it's a couple years old at this point, it still stands up and it's a really great just starting point to get an understanding of what is financial independence?

1:26:36What are we doing here? Why are we looking to live a more intentional life where we save money and use it as a springboard to live a better life? And then Choose a Vi created a Financial Independence 101 course. That's entirely free. Just head to choosefi.com slash fi101. And again, thanks for listening. Thank you.