Fat Loss Scientist: It’s Easy To Lose Weight, But Here’s Why You WON’T Do It! | Dr Andy Galpin

26:54To distract me. Great. If we took that away from you, you might sleep worse because you're going to sit there and struggle through that moment. If you wanted to go from upgrade, we would say, okay, let's figure out what is actually a way for you to downregulate cognitively. Give you that same thing that won't then disrupt your sleep throughout the night. Have you dealt with people in that situation before? Super common. Podcasts are an incredibly common one with that. TV, books. My philosophy is let's step back and solve causes. Let's solve constraints rather than mask them. You've got a host of different supplements over here.

27:32Everything you see on this table has moderate to strong scientific evidence that it will help us sleep. What are those things? So lovely, delicious looking tart cherry juice. And I'll go through why that is there. You've got some chamomile tea. You would see this in the supplement form of apigenin. It's a really common way of that. It's kind of like distilled chamomile. Look at these lovely kiwis. What's funny here is this is actually what happens in research. They will give people two to three kiwis. It will eat them right before bed. And you will very routinely see people sleeping better after ingestion of kiwis.

28:07other things that are high on the evidence-based list are of course magnesium and various forms more of the research now on magnesium for sleep is turning to a particular form called magnesium bisglycinate rather than threenate that's up there as well you will also see things like omega-3 this is your common fish oil oh this is actually interesting because this popped up on your labs as something we have to work on. Oh, my test. Yeah. We'll come back to that in a second. Okay. And then, of course, you've got melatonin, right? The issue with all these is the same that you have with your podcast.

28:45These are doing the exact same thing. So one thing we could do is say, ditch the podcast and let's go with one or multiple of these options because they're doing the same thing. They're cognitive turnoff. Apigen and our chamomile specifically will play that role. It is a reasonable switch that says frontal cortex turnoff. And so you're getting there through the podcast where you could get through those through food or supplements if you'd like as well. Kiwis. Yeah. Kiwis have scientific evidence that they improve sleep for some people. It's really common. There's like levels to this. You'd probably like level one, two, and three.

29:19Level one being things like, actually surprising enough, magnesium, chamomile, melatonin, of course. Lots of randomized control trials. level one being the best the best of the best the best highest quality and you'd say what magnesium kiwis yeah kiwis would probably be like a level two or level three okay so there's been good studies on them enough to put them on this table enough to say there's data there so you're getting some product below it in this case abigenin in this case other phytochemicals that either reduce a little bit of cognitive function they reduce arousal they put you in some sort of checkout state.

29:55And then there's this one over here, melatonin, that a lot of people are aware of. Strong. What level is melatonin? So melatonin probably has more evidence than the rest of these things combined because it's a medicine. It's a drug. There's a ton of research on it from children to aging to bone health and tons of other stuff, right? It's a hormone. You're going to be able to move some units with this one. Nobody is going to be super concerned about risk factor profiles with eating two kiwis. You start getting to the level of something like a melatonin and now you have to have real conversations about risk versus benefits.

30:30We typically don't use melatonin at the dosage that's normal. So a common dosage for melatonin is like five milligrams, sometimes even up to 10. We will typically use like 0.3, maybe 0.5, so about a 10th that dose. A lot of times we're trying to find like one milligrams, cut them in half, kind of things like that. The only real reason we use melatonin outside of some fringe cases is when we actually legitimately need to reset circadian rhythm. Travel. Jet lag. Things like that. And it is effective and it is useful there. It is safe in small doses where people mistake melatonin is I use it every night to go to sleep and or I wake up in the middle of the night can't go back to sleep I go grab a melatonin.

31:13Why is that bad? It doesn't work. It doesn't work? No. Because the thing that melatonin is supposed to do is realign circadian rhythm. If you're in the middle of the night, you're already in that rhythm. It's not going to do anything. You would, in fact, not to, I don't want people to do this, but you would actually be better reaching for something like a chamomile perhaps, because if you're having a hard time getting back to sleep cognitively, this is not going to do it. The other issue is we've done a lot of morning urine testing. There's enough studies that look at the dosage that's actually in the pill versus those on the label, and they can be up to a hundred X higher.

31:48A hundred X. and we see this in morning urine. We have seen people who are consistently tired. Their sleep doesn't look horrible. They're doing all the right things. It's cold. It's dark. They're meditating. They're doing all this stuff. They're popping in even a moderate dose of melatonin. And the amount of melatonin the next day in their urine is 100x the upper end of the reference range, which means they're spending the rest of their next day in a hyper-dosed melatonin state. so they have to live then on stimulants to get how they feel and horrible they would feel sluggish and you wake up the next day and you're like man it's what we call sleep inertia you're wildly groggy you can't get out of bed or you're just getting throughout the day this is a like don't talk to me until i've had my coffee kind of response right this is not a normal waking physiology that you should be going through presumably that's just melatonin from sort of cheap sources that haven't been tested that's going to knock off a huge part of your problem right only this is why we'll always say you don't no one needs supplements like no essential person needs to have any supplement to live a great happy healthy life if you choose to use supplements though just buy them from third-party tested transparent companies that place their testing on their websites that give you open access to it for for these exact reasons vitamin MDs has a similar profile of inaccuracy.

33:14The other issue with that then simply, let's say you're buying it from a high quality source, you're dosing it too much and you're taking it too late. So take it earlier than you think before bed so that your body has a chance to break it down before the next morning. What kind of time and how quickly acting is it? It's person to person dependent, but a lot of times you'll see things like an hour before. Some people will feel a response in 10 to 15 minutes. Some people will feel it closer to an hour, but that's a pretty good window. Hang on, if it's 2 a.m. in the morning and you're getting in bed, don't take it?

33:43Don't take it at all. Okay. We're going to use this in very specific situations, and then we're coming off of it. This should not be a part of your nightly routine most of the time. What exactly is going on in my brain when I take melatonin? Because a lot of people take it, and we know that it makes us feel tired. But understanding the mechanism, I think, will help us understand the application. So it actually doesn't really make you feel tired. That's part of the issue. Oh. The mechanism is a circadian shift. So it's telling your endogenous system that this is nighttime. so it doesn't hit you with like a all my eyes are there this hits you with a shift in cortisol this hits you with the shift and a whole cascade of epinephrine norepinephrine serotonin that are moving around and saying this is the milieu that you need to be in that is consistent with a sleep pattern okay so i take it and then it regulates my other hormones which would be getting in the way of me feeling tired theoretically that's probably more appropriate to what it does okay because yeah i've taken it a couple of times again always for jet lag issues and within about 30 45 minutes i feel a bit drowsy and then i find my eyes going shutting and i'm off great and then you get out of those that two or three day window put it back away and you're off and going yeah that's a good use case for the mistake is when this is like i can't go to bed without i'm generally scared of all these things because um honestly anything that's effective i'm more scared of and so sure it's really effective which makes me hesitant to use it frequently yeah it's a good default position to be in it's a good strategy yeah because i one of the things you learn from doing a podcast like this is you just learn that everything has a trade-off always and i and again this might not be logically sound but i assume that the bigger the upside the bigger the trip like the trade i'm making on the other side as a general rule so do you know the only thing that i've still not been able to i guess understand the full trade-off of is coffee because the upside is so significant.

35:29No one can articulate to me the downside other than they say, if you have it after midday, it's going to impact your sleep. But I'm like, come on, there's got to be. The phrase that I'll say in my class all the time is there's no free passes in physiology. With coffee specifically, that actually, we have a meta-analysis led by my colleague, Dr. Ben House, puts it together. But if you look at the research on caffeine and sleep, it's very interesting because if you go through sleep deprivation your physical and cognitive performance goes down. No surprise there. Coffee can offset that. Caffeine specifically is the thing.

36:05But what it doesn't do, at least the data and the meta-analysis suggests, is it doesn't actually put you back into the augmented spot. Meaning, if you, did you sleep great last night? I think so, yeah. Full night, okay. Let's just say you're there. If we took you out and we had you throw that medicine ball and we did a grip strength tester and we did some sprints up and down, whatever you want to do, you would perform well. And then if we gave you caffeine, you'd perform better. It's why we call it ergogenic aid. It's a performance enhancer. Caffeine is really effective primarily at endurance-based events, but it is a stimulatory thing that people will use.

36:40So let's just say you have normal baseline performance and then caffeine augments that performance. If you go into sleep debt, the sleep itself will reduce your performance. And the coffee can bring you back to normal, but it won't bring you back to that augmented state that you had when you were rested and caffeinated. This is important because a lot of people will be like, ah, I'll throw away the sleep or I won't worry about it as much because I'll just take more stimulus tomorrow. And I feel great. You will feel as good, but you will not perform as well. So what you need to perform at your best, if you're a caffeine user, is to be both well-rested and then caffeinated.

37:17Another thing you want to pay attention to in your sleep environment, labeled ergonomics here is your pillow, your bed, your mattress. This is mostly based on feel. Is there any no-go's in this regard? Not really. Not really? No, unless, let's say you have a sleeping partner and you're sleeping in a bed that is too small and that results in you hitting each other or touching each other and you don't like that. So other than those, the framework themselves, there's really nothing to be concerned with. What about these like eight sleep beds. Eight sleep is fantastic. So eight sleep is not a bed.

37:48It's a cover, which regulates temperature. If you are in a bedding situation where you're getting hot, then that's a problem. So if then an eight sleep will help you regulate that temperature, it's a great solution. If you're not in that situation, then you're going to be just fine. So temperature regulation is a really big deal. And you'll quite often see people that do that, whether that's getting a product like that, or it's getting a sheet that's cooler or a mattress that is better with ventilation, then you'll oftentimes see them sleep a little bit better. Next on our list is screen usage.

38:22Everyone has been told, and you know, perhaps nothing's more destructive if you're sleeping on a screen. What's more interesting here is the stuff that people generally don't talk about. It's not the fact that necessarily screen usage is shooting your face with a bunch of blue light. What's more dangerous about your screen is the arousal associated with the search for novelty. The search for novelty, what does that mean? you're engaging in a podcast social media a game is puzzle driven it is solution is interest it is engagement it is search for the next that's the stuff that more likely than not cause sleep disturbance disturbances in the studies that i've looked at things like tv time versus tablet versus phone versus reading, those all can be equally dangerous to sleep.

39:14Here is the example. I am a TV before bed guy, a giant TV with a blast of blue light. I sleep great with that. My wife is really struggles with light before bed. She will read. And yet she chooses to read things that I don't think she should be reading before night. And then she'll wake up because of the topics that she's reading where I'm watching things on TV that are, you know, documentaries on Ulysses Grant or something. And you're just like, that is the least engaging thing ever. So it's not the fact that the light is there. I use that stuff much like you use your podcasts, which is my entire day is so driven by somebody wanting my attention and time.

39:53I have to have something that gives me a cognitive switch that says you get to turn off. I wanted to add something to this, which I've been thinking about this week. So in Meta, Meta owned Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, etc. In Meta's earnings call this week, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how they changed the recommendation algorithm on social media apps using AI. And this was something that we've always forecasted would happen. And we've been thinking about the creator economy and how it impacted. But specifically for people listening, what essentially he said is every time you post something on Instagram, whether it's a real or a normal post, they now feed it to a large language model in AI.

40:28and the AI effectively, and again, I'm summarizing here, watches it and it can now understand the full context of what it's watching. So if it's watching a clip of you and me right now, it'll understand that that is Andy Galpin. He's holding a card. He's wearing a black t-shirt. He'll look at the transcript. He'll know what you said. And this is all pertinent because it then can, without in the past needing to look at the caption and the hashtags, it can then decide with way more context than ever before who exactly would want to see that and the net impact of that for the user of instagram or these other social media apps or tiktok whatever it is is you're going to be more retained now than ever before and as you were talking about that i thought i wonder if they think about timing of day like i wonder if they think at 11 p.m there's a certain thing that's going to keep andy scrolling versus something at 9 a.m when you're off to work and of course they do because that and you know they were talking about on the earnings call mark was saying how it's increased retention by i think 15 basis points and there's this quote where he said there are already two large sets of content to draw from first from your friends and people you follow and second from creators that you don't follow but now there's going to be a whole new and nearly infinite universe of personalized content which from the iron felt they're saying is with their new large language model called muse is we're actually going to make new content to show Andy Galpin that no one made, no humans made.

42:00We're going to make stuff that we know Andy will like. And so I say all this to say that in this sleep conversation, we've been talking about it as creators. We've been saying basically it's going to get really difficult if you're a creator because now if you have a million followers, it doesn't matter. If Jenny has zero followers, but she makes something that is contextually more interesting than the million follower guy, Jenny's thing is going to be seen to everyone. But actually now you're going to be competing with an AI that's going to be churning out super personalized Andy open content like that just andy would just love at 11 p.m i said to my team this week i was like just take care of yourself do you know what i mean like just be aware you know when you open your phone that the ai is doing everything it can to retain you yeah i mean just don't be on your phone we've been making this argument for years but geez um you got every disadvantage possible coming in your way.

42:49And look, we're all human. I think I remember last time I was here, you were talking about how you wake up and your phone's right there, but your fiance doesn't touch your phone for the first hour of the day or something. It's just like on the charger until noon or something. You're just like, what? I'm more like you, right? I'm like, my phone is in my room. It's not three rooms. I'm just not doing any of that stuff, right? And we started this entire piece by saying the environment you're in is just different than it's ever been before. And it's not getting any better. And at some point you have to make that decision of, do you care about your own health?

43:25Do you care about the thing the next day that you didn't do well? And do you care more about that than you cared about that next reel? What is it that's causing us to understand everything you just said, but to ignore it and to pick up our phone anyway? You are hard driven, the entire biology of our species, to search for novelty. In fact, I look at this from the lens of sports. Why do you care about high achievement? Why do I care about performance? There has direct translation. When someone breaks a barrier, we all benefit from that. And I could give you direct examples of this. but we have every story you want to go to joseph campbell hero's journey right you want to go back to hercules the story of the marathon like you pull any story from history out and what are you actually looking at you're looking at somebody did something that no one has ever done before you care more about records than you do regular wins and losses why because they're novel why Why are you more interested in watching Messi break that record than you are the other team winning in the exact same shot?

44:40It's because you saw something. You got to be there when someone did something for the first time in human history. I get more of a dopamine hit from the novelty, from the new thing. It's more than the dopamine hit, though. It's a sense of purpose. Your life mattered because you got to be involved in something no one else has ever seen. and even as that bystander on tv 30 000 kilometers away you got to be a part of that and that all comes down to we are so wired to reward novelty so then now that comes back to your life and you have to be thinking how do you walk away from that core drive thinking about a study i read about in psychology class in school with pigeons getting variable rewards.

45:25I'm going to butcher this, but bear with me. They took a pigeon and they got a little lever for it to press. And every time it would press the lever, and sometimes it would get a reward. And they found from the study that if they made the rewards variable, i.e. it couldn't predict when it was coming, the pigeon was more likely to keep pressing the lever. It was more addicted to the behavior if it didn't know when the dopamine hit was coming, or the treat in that case. Scrolling on social media is kind of like the slot machine of variable rewards. I just don't know what i'm gonna get but every fourth you know scroll i get something that or every 40th yeah better right because the more unpredictable it is the more likely you already be like one more one more one more one more right like if it actually comes too quickly you care less so you're gonna scroll through all the boring stuff boring stuff boring stuff boring stuff for the one in every 40 that gets you that's what you're actually there for i mean if i gave most people and i said like you can have$10 ,000 or you can have$10 ,000 in equity in a startup.

46:25Look at your face. Like I know what you're doing. You want to like people are, it depends on where you're at. Right. But it's just like, okay. And if I said right now, the most likely scenario is that$10 ,000 gets zero. Yeah. Which is what happens. Right. You're like, kind of hedge. Can I go five and five? Like you're going to, you're going to go, you don't, unless you need the 10 grand, which a lot of people do, but you get the point because you're like, man, walking away from belief, walking away from hope, walking away from what if is insanely hard to do. I deleted one of these social media apps just completely from my phone.

46:59And honestly, you always think that you're going to have like FOMO, you're not going to know what's going on, or there's going to be some huge loss to your life if you don't have an app on your phone. And it's just remarkable when you delete some of these social media apps, how positive of a net impact it has on your life. I have a friend of mine named Sean O'Malley, a famous UFC fighter. He was sitting at his pool and his daughter was like one or two years old and he was like scrolling Twitter and was like, what am I doing? Like my daughter's over here in front of me. She's two years old and like I'm on scrolling, like not doing work or not making a post, not, I'm just scrolling.

47:35Dumped it and was just like, team, you guys handle it. Not on any social media anymore. So that screens. That screens, my friend. Another one I think about, which we've sort of touched on is called the presence of other beings. this is our classic sleep divorce i assume you uh as i do share your sleeping environment with your partner yes tough to make the argument of like get a sleep divorce right yeah i'm not telling you can tell her it's funny if it was up to my wife we would have a sleep divorce you're joking no she's like get away from me don't touch me she wants to like if we could have separate beds in separate rooms she i don't know her anything but she just like my fiance is the opposite it's not super realistic but it is true there are data behind it people generally don't sleep as well when you're in the same bed as others the realistic solution try to get sheets or a sleeping situation in which when one partner moves it doesn't rule the other person oh like separate sheets separate sheets or simply the type of sheets um my wife loves to be really constricted.

48:39So she likes the sheets tucked in tight. She likes to bed and I hate it. Like, I feel like I'm in Shawshank. I'm like, break me out, like rip it all out of there. So there's little things like that that don't require you to buy anything. We just change kind of the setup and the scenario to where their movement doesn't impact you as much. Noise would be the same one. If you are sleeping with somebody who makes a lot of noise, tosses and turns a bunch, you could put a pillow in between. So when they roll over and move, They don't hit you earplugs, things like that. So that one's a pretty straightforward one, but that said, it's pretty impactful.

49:12It can really make a big difference. And if you're really struggling, maybe do a partial sleep divorce. Okay. Next sleeping in new environment. This would oftentimes be called first night effect. So your first night, whether it's back home, whether it's in a hotel or somewhere else, you don't feel as comfortable and as safe and your circadian rhythms, the things that set your timing aren't there. This is sound. This is light. This is feel. This is temperature. This is smell. What you can do if you travel a lot, our athletes travel every three to five days, right? This is what they do. You can try to mimic your sleep environment at home on the road.

49:48Some people will take their pillows. Other things that are on the similar list are smells like lavender. Lavender is moderately associated with helping people fall asleep. None of those is going to like knock you out. What you're looking to do is stack wins. next is temperature you want to be cool generally you're looking at 64 to 68 degrees this is personally dependent some people actually like to be a little bit colder so that they can have a heavier blanket because they like that feeling when this idea got popular about a few years ago people just started raking the acs right you're just like get this room as cold as you possibly can that can become a problem because we're seeing this somewhat consistency where when people's air conditioners kick on, it actually wakes them up.

50:35And as we talked about earlier, with noise, it's not necessarily always about the volume, but it's the change in sound. And so you have something kicking on, kicking off, kicking on, kicking off. The other thing we see is because of air quality situations, we've seen quite often when we have environmental sensors and stuff that if your air conditioner is not clean and the fan is out in the air, you can actually kick a bunch of dander and particulates and other things into the air. and then you start breathing those things in it overnight and your nose starts to get a little bit stuffed up. You can't breathe through your nose and then boom, you have this hypopneic or apneic event.

51:09The last component that comes up pretty often at absolute rest is fans. This can make your mouth dry. So if you're waking up with that and you're like, ah, I got to get a drink of water or something, then maybe consider not having the fan blow directly out your face. An interesting thing I was thinking about there, which is there was the viral experiment done in 2009 by MindLab Sleep Study, where they conducted the sleep experiment at the University of Sussex. Researchers hooked men and women up to an ECG machine to measure their brainwaves and played a variety of ambient sounds while they slept to see which noises triggered an immediate wake response.

51:48And the top wake responses from men and women was completely different. Men's top trigger was a car alarm. Women's top trigger was a baby crying. Men's top trigger was wind howling outside. uh women's second top trigger i should say is a dripping tap men's third top is buzzing or flying of a mosquito uh women's was um shouting outside and both of their fourth top trigger was snoring but it was interesting that the thing that woke most men at their top trigger in that study was an alarm outside but women's was a baby's crying yeah every mother out there is gone yep But it's, in fact, one of the largest causes of sleep disorders in women is having children.

52:30What happens after childbirth, and it's a whole interesting field here of postpartum care, is really poor in women. Like, if we just sort of, like, start paying attention to baby, stop paying attention to mom as soon as baby comes out. Well, I'm saying that because it is obvious and clear that the last trimester can present a lot of sleep challenges for women. And then especially as soon as the baby's there, like, you're just going to have some known period of sleep deprivation. whether it's delivery or having a newborn, all that stuff. And that can actually cause patterns. This can cause insomnia.

53:00This can cause irregular sleep schedules, circadian disorders, natural thing. Totally fine. In some percentage of women, those patterns will persist. And so you'll see women who have sleep disorders, even with adult children, that started because of the childbirth. We were advocating at all times like, yeah, get through it. I got two kids, you know, I've been there. But then just make sure you're providing care and going back to try to fix those things. And why that is difficult is because the study was mentioned. It's worth saying, there is an evolutionary theory behind this that says men and women are attuned to different things.

53:35But there's also a counter-argument that says the difference in who actually wakes up and who gets out of bed is often heavily driven by social roles, parenting expectations, and individual sleep depth rather than a biological inability for men to hear the baby. So how do we close off on the subject of sleep? Is there anything that we haven't touched on that we should have touched on as it pertains to how to have incredible sleep? One thing that I think will help everyone, whether you're at any of those stages, free a little bit of money or you got to go the full end of the spectrum and use a hospital or a service like ours, is everyone has the ability to run self-experiments.

54:09We have a free guide that anyone can go use. And it's just a quick tutorial about how to run your own self-experiment for sleep specifically. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So this is up and available for free on our website. Anyone can check it out. There's a lot of stuff in here we've covered. You can get more into it. But the short answer of it is we don't want to make people think sleep has to be the center of their life. I oftentimes when sleep comes up people start thinking I'd love to sleep more but I'm too busy hey I'm the same boat like I can't afford to have a 12-hour sleep routine where we should be paying attention to is sleep resilience Steve I want you to be as resilient to bad sleep as possible I don't want you optimizing your sleep because optimization turns into that giant routine before bed i gotta take 12 different supplements and four different cocktails and again if i have to do that along the way great the end game though should be resilient meaning you had a bad night of sleep cool and you still performed we had this challenge flight got delayed great we still executed i want you to know how to get a good night of sleep so you can feel as refreshed as possible, execute the next day, and then get right back onto it.

55:30The way you get there is, and that's the way our company works, like we're just going to run a series of experiments and everyone can do that. Start by changing one thing. Your trackers, your data are going to tell you how you're sleeping, but they're not telling you why you're sleeping that way. So that's your quest. Go figure out why you're sleeping that way. Is it your bedroom temperature? Is it your partner? Is it the fact that you're sensitive to light? Is it the fact you're exercising too late? Are you eating too late? Like all these things are possible. One at a time. Just like John Jones, where marginal improvements in your cognitive performance can have a massive impact.

56:10Sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in filming for a TV show and I have like one or two days off to get all of my work done, which means there's lots of cognitive load. And so I turned to ketones because I find myself more articulate, able to think more clearly, able to work out better when I'm fueled by ketones. And so the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because I remember one of my team members called Christiana, she tried it once and came up to my desk and she goes, this is the best product ever made.

56:38And I think in part that's because she really cares about those cognitive benefits as I do, as John Jones does. And as I think most of my listeners probably will. So if you haven't tried these yet, all you have to do is go to ketone.com slash Stephen and you'll also get 30 % off your first subscription order. You'll get exclusive Ketone IQ merch and of course, cognitive benefits that might just change your life. If you're thinking about starting a business, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is actually one of the most important, which is where do you build that business? Our product team, who manages everything we do from our conversation cards to our diaries, has always used our sponsor, Shopify.

57:16There are a few reasons for this, But one of the big ones is that when you're running a business, you really need your own store and your own customer data. And Shopify gives you exactly that. You aren't renting space from someone else's platform, hoping the rules don't suddenly change. And you avoid the classic founder challenges that inevitably come, like sorting out payments and logistics and storefronts, because it's already built into Shopify. Those early days are messy enough without the infrastructure challenge to create extra problems for you. And Shopify's distribution piece is underrated too, because your products automatically get in front of people on Google, TikTok, YouTube, ChatGPT, which again, isn't something you have to figure out yourself.

57:52It's just already built into their platform. If you are serious about starting your own thing, start your free trial at shopify.com slash Bartlett. I guess one could argue that the antithesis of sleep is being awake. And when we're awake, the thing we care about is energy. now i had a really great conversation on this podcast with um several people that talk about mitochondria and energy and those kinds of things and some of those conversations have really really changed me if you hadn't haven't listened to the more recent conversation we had on um mitochondria in the channel please do go listen to it martin picard martin picard it was a really honestly it's one of my favorite conversations i've had this year just because i've i knew about the mitochondria Like I conceptually knew what it was, but I hadn't thought about it as being so central to everything in my life.

58:42Because energy is essential to everything in my life. Like my relationships, my ability to do this, my joy, my everything. If someone is trying to improve their energy levels, and that's what they come to you with in terms of a symptom that they self-describe, where do you aim? Okay, so we've talked about sleep, but where else do you aim? Energy is... probably the number one thing on our list of reasons people come to us. What do they say? I'm tired all day, can't figure it out, or I don't have the energy I used to have, or I can't sustain output like I used to, whether this is physical, my recovery is longer than it used to be, or I just can't hang working as many hours as I used to do.

59:22I get fatigued at the end of the day cognitively. I'm not of the camp that this is entirely mitochondria, but I certainly will agree that energy would be the number one effect. probably the most common question I've ever got in my career is, what separates these world performers from the rest of us? And people want me to say things like, they work harder. They don't. They are categorically better at energy management. That is the one thing that seems to be most consistent, again, with the world's highest performers, athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, executives, you name it, however you're defining success when you get better at managing energy.

1:00:01You're more effective. This is everything from cellular energy to understanding things like your own interpersonal communication. What type of relationships give you energy? What type of relationships take energy from you? What type of activities give you energy? What types give you back? When can you be more efficient? When are you running for the sake of running and not actually running in a direction? And I mean this figuratively, not literally. this is all energy management and what you see is these people are world-class performers get incredibly good at going 80 of my energy suck comes out of here for 20 roi i'm going to switch that out they're better at choosing what matters and what doesn't matter okay and this is everything from what supplement is working to what type of person that they work with where people struggle is in the like what if i could also be doing this what if i could also be doing this what if i add this on top what do i add this on top okay so i thought you were talking about um i guess if i try and put this into some sort of analogy or metaphor the high performers wake up with a hundred energy chips let's say and they're really really good at allocating them against the most important thing yes whereas maybe jenny and dave listening kind of let it seep out they put 20 on instagram 20 over here on this and they spin their wheels they spin their wheels they go okay great I listen to this podcast and I get super excited about zone two.

1:01:21I'm going to go hop into a bunch of zone two. And then I listen to this other podcast and I get super excited about journaling. Let me go add journaling to my mix. And then what ends up happening is you see their daily routine and you're like, okay, your daily routine is 20 hours. And then at some point, like you didn't actually do anything that mattered. What is the one thing that can get you to that goal in the most effective way possible? and then everything else has to actively be stripped away. So the traditional thing we like to do is we give one to two what we call active movements per week, which is, this is something, Stephen, you have to actively remember to do.

1:02:00You don't actively remember to brush your teeth. You don't have to actively remember to shower, blah, blah, blah. You might at this point not have to actively think about your gratitude practice or your meditation time. Like you probably have these things you've been doing for years, great. I don't actually call those additive because you do those, you're going to get those in. But I might ask you to do one thing different. I don't know what that would be, but I would look at this and say, here's your constraint. I'm not going to ask you to do five things new. It's too difficult. Maybe this is a change in what time you eat.

1:02:29Your training style. Find what's constraining you from your energy. What things could it be? It could be sleep. It could be mismanagement of relationships. It could be you're working too much. It could be you're under fueling. You're not eating enough. It could be that you're overusing stimulants, sleeping poor, and you're in that cycle. It could be you're not seeing sunlight. So what you need to do is run a quick analysis and think, what is the single biggest thing in your way? Is it the fact that you're in pain? Great. Maybe the only one thing I want you to go after then is, let's go figure out why that knee hurts.

1:03:05Okay, so for me, you've seen my blood results. Yeah. So what things might improve my energy from the blood results that you saw? What are you, mid-30s, early 30s? I'm 33. 33. All right. You're lean, you're active. The first thing that jumps out on your report. Yeah, can we skip that page, please? And think, skip the page. You're going to see quickly the difference between medicine and performance. Okay. This is medical. So we're looking at cholesterol and cholesterol-related markers. You've got, I don't know, a dozen of them or so there. Not one's good. this is incredibly actionable can i ask a question about this what does it mean and then i was going to ask a secondary question which is i was going to try and self-diagnose why i think this is the case but i would love that second question that'll actually tell us where to go so when you look at things like blood work these are secondary measures of physiology they're trying to predict what we call an outcome meaning in this case we are looking at your heart health okay there is an association and i choose that word carefully between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease okay high cholesterol low cholesterol good cholesterol all the above very traditionally excessively high cholesterol is going to be associated with earlier heart disease heart attack could even manifest itself into strokes and things like that right so if we were to just like zoom all the way out and we say all right your cholesterol is extremely high i'm concerned about your heart health.

1:04:33There's way more to the story, but at the top of it, that's where we're at. So the second question I was going to ask is, at the time that I did these blood test results, I was frequently in a ketogenic diet? I know. There's a lot to unpack here, and a lot of people are going to get mad online. Cholesterol has lifestyle, dietary, and familial causes. Oftentimes, you might have high cholesterol and all these various markers, simply because that's a familial genetic inheritance and there's not a lot of action behind it. When you see these things independent of obesity, now we have a different connotation.

1:05:08If I were to look at all this stuff and go, oh yeah, sure, you're 35 % body fat. I know you drink alcohol. Then I'm like, okay, this is true, but let's tackle those things first because those have so many robust implications on your health. That's the starting place. You don't drink alcohol excessively. I don't even know if you drink alcohol at all and have it in years, I assume, right you don't smoke you don't like i know so all those things are checked off the list this means this is actionable i should give you some context here my uncle died of a heart attack and my dad had a heart operation last week oh so do you remember what kind of heart operation he had a pacemaker put in um but he's been on statins i think for a long time i think he's been on stands for about 15 years if i was to guess about 15 20 years yeah so when i look at this independent of your obesity with your familial history.

1:05:59Do you remember what advice you got when you got these results of what to do? Do you know, I did two tests. I did this one with Function Health, who I believe are a sponsor, so I should say that. And I did the second one with Nico Health, where I'm a big investor in the company. They both said to me, like, Steve, stop eating steak all the time. Bacon, stop eating bacon all the time. The way that I heard it was, damn, this ketogenic diet you've been on, Steve, you need to just take it easy. and have you done blood work since then no all right first thing that would pop up and this is the order i would do this in when you get something like blood work the value is not in the data the value is in the interpretation what they're talking about why you heard that as steak butter bacon is because those are food items high in saturated fat saturated fat is not evil there are no evil foods it's only evil context right so in your particular case if we saw those and we don't have this but if we had your baseline before that test and then we had this and we went okay when you change your diet and increase your saturated fat intake and then we saw these numbers increase most ethical people in this space would look at that and say, that's not a positive thing.

1:07:12That does not mean ketogenic diets are bad or unsafe. Not at all. It only means if we had those theoretical data for you, it's probably not healthy. You stack that on top of the fact that you have your uncle and your dad in there. Then I would triple down and go, talk to your doctor. I'm not your medical doctor, but I'd be really concerned about that. Then what I would do would be go to the next step. Let's run the experiment and see. This is an indirect marker. And remember, what is it trying to predict? Your heart health. Have you had your heart scanned? Yes, I have. And? They said that I had like, I had a thick wall.

1:07:50Okay. Exercise-induced cardiac remodeling. Especially if it's left ventricular. It's a good thing, right? So your heart has four chambers, two on top, two on bottom. The two on the top are called atria, ventricles on the bottom. Oh, you've got a great image there as well. Yeah. So you can look at this as a maze. Okay, so we'll use double modeling here. Can you see how the left ventricle is much larger than the right ventricle? There's a reason. The right ventricle only has to kick blood to your lungs, which are physically a few inches away. The left ventricle has to kick it up, out, through your entire body, down to the tip of your toes, all the way back up against gravity, and then back up into your heart.

1:08:37And so what you're seeing here is strength training. This is resistance exercise. Your left ventricle is lifting weights. It has to be bigger. It has to be stronger so that it can contract really hard and shoot all that blood up and down and up and out. If you said you had a thicker wall, either naturally or exercise induced, just like when you lift with your biceps more, it's larger. The same thing is happening in left ventricle. incredibly common and healthy adaptation. Okay. What we would be concerned about is if there was any type of blockage or any type of plaque buildup. One of the things that I remember them saying is they, again, I'm going to butcher this, but they told me there's kind of like two types of plaque buildup in my veins or my arteries, whatever.

1:09:23And they said, the bad type you haven't got. And they said, but the other type you have got. and they i think they were referring to like the bad type as being like more sticky yeah and it like doesn't go it'll dislodge oh okay and that can cause a risk yeah they said i didn't have the bad type but i had this other type that can cut is like temporary but could turn into the bad type or something yeah one thing you want to be really careful of and this happened to a dear friend of mine joel jameson young super fit all the things no stress doesn't smoke doesn't drink much like you all this stuff family history didn't think about it blood work came back totally fine still asked to get a CT angiogram scan of his heart.

1:10:05His cardiologist said, no, you don't need it. You're young. You're all the thing. Got it anyways. And he had, I think he had a 50 % blockage of his, what's called a widow maker. You're flipping the dice whether you're going to die here, right? So this is a classic case to me where he's doing all the right things, but imaging saved his life. Let's not live in fear. Let's go look. You went and had it looked. I'll just trust your physicians. Great. Then I'm less worried about this because this could be a direct response to your ketogenic diet, which it almost certainly was. And if it's presenting no risk to the place we actually care about, then I'm less concerned about your cholesterol.

1:10:39But if it carries on like this, could it create a risk? Absolutely could. Okay, because they all did tell me to fix this. Yeah, just keep getting a scan every few years. And if you see any buildup at all, then I wouldn't manage it. Okay. Now, what you're seeing over here is that client of ours. And so as an example, I'll give you a specific number. His total cholesterol was 347. We got him down to 223. What did you do? Fiber. Why fiber? Stress reduction. Fiber, depending on the type of cholesterol, will actually bind to the cholesterol and clear it from the system. You will physically reduce it.

1:11:12That's why one of the supplements I was told to take is a fiber supplement. It's not always going to something, and I want to be really clear. If you have numbers like you had, you need to work with a doctor. And you need to get screened. don't just be like, I took fiber, I'm fine. This guy said it on a podcast. That's not what I'm saying. But it is, it can be effective. The other thing we did was massive stress reduction. I was a very hard charging CEO for a large company. How is stress reduction going to impact my cholesterol? Things like cholesterol can be what are called acute phase reactants, some parts of them, not all of them.

1:11:43Meaning it responds to acute stress and stimuli. When you look at things like blood work, they aren't static. They're responding to the entire system. And so if you were to be stressed, and we'll not to blame our name, cortisol, but cortisol is elevated. You are in a heightened alert state. This causes short-term inflammation. In fact, if you look at, I think your inflammation was a little bit nuts over there. This guy as well. Probably like your most classic inflammation marker is called CRP. His was at two, which is really high. We got him from two to 0.2. So 10X reduction. That then allowed cholesterol to normalize.

1:12:21The easiest, most technical way to get to say it is it's an acute phase reactant, meaning it will change in response acutely to inflammation. Some markers will go up and some will go down in response to that, like vitamin D goes down. If what? If you? In a stressed environment. Some go up, some go down. Blood glucose goes up. So you've got your stress down, you've got his fiber up. And that took him from 347 to 223, which is still high. Went from 223 to 163. Now that took a statin. Oh, so you did give him a statin. We didn't, but his medical team did. Okay. And so this, why I want to draw this point out is we were able to go a long ways with lifestyle.

1:13:02But he wanted to go more. He wanted to be green, green, green, green, green. So that's when medicine came in. And to me, this represents a great marriage of the two. Some people are very anti-medicine. Some people are, that's not my decision. That's up to you and your medical provider. but I think it's unfair to tell people things like all of it can be done with lifestyle and there's no need for medicines ever or the opposite I'm just like oh just take the drug don't worry about it he needed all of it he needed stress reduction he needed some changes in his diet and that made a huge change in his biological health so if you were to be like look this is so complicated this guy like how can I make actionable advice of all this stuff this guy's saying I don't have a private doctor cool just run the experiment Try more fiber, try to regulate your stress.

1:13:49If you want to go the opposite route and jump right onto the medical side, that's fine too. But it doesn't need to be super scary or super daunting because these are not like, especially if your heart has been scanned, I'm not concerned about an acute emergency. The two things on here that I thought were shocking to me are my vitamin D levels and my omega levels, which I was told were deficient. I thought I was smashing it with those two because I think I was living in LA at the time Yeah, so your vitamin D was borderline low. Fairly traditionally, people of African heritage are going to be lower in that marker.

1:14:26You're at 37. Kind of lower end of that number is 40. That might actually be fine. I think I heard you say something about vitamin D. Again, I don't want to butcher your words if this was what you said, but you kind of make the assumption that most people are deficient. Yeah, it is true. Why does it matter? So vitamin D is a nice microcosm of raw health. So what I mean by that is you will tend to see people low in vitamin D who are also tending to make poor health choices. So it's a little bit like grip strength and all that where it's kind of a one snap shot at saying, are you generally healthy or not?

1:14:59Why is it needed specifically? It is involved in every reaction from your brain to your gut, to your hormones, your immune system, metabolism, and everything in between. It's critical to maintaining bone health. It's critical to being able to grow skeletal muscle. It's also clinically low in a high percentage of the population and even subclinically low in a vast majority of the population. So should we be supplementing if we are low? The real world will always win. Whole foods, sunlight, positive social environments, that's always the place to start. So do you want to supplement with it? That's up to you.

1:15:35I would much rather you get sunlight if possible. Now, enter everyone in the chat going, I live in the UK, there's no sun, sort of up here. Fine. If you want to choose a supplement because you live in those situations, then that's absolutely fine. Or I work in an office for 12 hours a day. It's interesting because there is a bit of a paradox here in we're all in search of very natural solutions in a very unnatural way of living. I had this conversation with my fiance a couple of weeks back about a few things where in one area of our life, we're trying to be really, really natural. yep um but i'm like babe look at the rest of our lives it's so unnatural we get on planes and have these smartphones and and so almost forcing this one part to be natural is yeah arguably going to cause a bit of a problem i mean it happens to me right like i'll put in the entire hours of the day and not even realize i didn't step outside yeah it absolutely happens so what i think you have to do is number one give yourself grace right like you're not going to be perfect i'm especially thinking about like single parents it's just like you're not gonna go out spend 30 minutes in the sun night shift workers totally boy that's a really hard thing um we've dealt with a lot of nurses and surgeons and things like that where you're on call you're out and that's when we can lean towards modern medicine modern supplementation it's why those things are not trash they're not garbage they're not fake our strategy typically is that's can we find one actionable thing one thing that you're doing as a focus that is something you got to go out of your way and do and that might be you have to go outside today you have that might be your one thing to pay attention to when you start asking for more than one to two active things per week you start end up failing okay fine so with your omegas so your mega score at five is low you want that to be eight but you probably didn't notice your mercury was right on the line of high as well those things will typically track the more omega-3s you consume the more mercury goes up oh really because most omega-3 sources are going to be filled with mercury but i was low omega and high mercury so what that tells us is if you were to jack your omega-3s up your mercury is going to get into the line that we don't want it to be in so solution you need to alter the source of your omega-3s get it from a higher quality place so i'm not sure where you were getting them from there all over the place yeah but you would want to to either choose your supplement more carefully or choose better quality foods.

1:18:02What actually moves the needle on this subject of energy, which is what we're talking about here? Is there anything that is more consequential as it relates to these people that are trying to get more energy in their life? They feel lethargic. We talked about sleep as being a real foundation here. If you're looking for more energy, I would divide everything into two buckets, hidden stressors and visible stressors. Visible stressors are things like you're not exercising. We know from excellent databases physical exercise enhances energy. Why and how? Mitochondrial health is one of the many aspects of it.

1:18:35You'll have more mitochondria if you exercise more. Generally. Not only will you have more, they'll be larger and they'll be healthier. And mitochondria basically process your energy. So you get a bit more efficient energy production. They're one of the ways you can make it. You can make energy a lot of different ways. It is the end path of all aerobic exercise. So in other words, anytime you're using oxygen as a byproduct to make fuel, mitochondria have to be there. So it is central and core to that. But it is more than mitochondria. You'll have more total blood. If you exercise? Yes. It's one of the primary adaptations to endurance, is you'll physically have more blood in your body.

1:19:10And that will mean? You carry more oxygen. Oh, okay. You have more red blood cells. So you're able to carry more oxygen to fuel those mitochondria. Is that a certain type of exercise that gives you more blood? Generally, anything that demands blood flow will increase blood supply. Cardiovascular exercise. Can be. Can be anything. Okay. Stress equals adaptation. Meaning if you put a demand on your heart to pump more blood, it'll get better at pumping more blood. If you put a demand on bone to resist tension, it'll get better at resisting tension. You run the whole cascade of connective tissue to cellular health.

1:19:47It is simply, it's called the SED principle, S-A-I-D. specific adaptation to imposed demand. And also, is it fair to say then, if we take the word exercise out of the traditional definition, which is like in a gym doing a thing, and we broaden it to work or just, you know, cognitive performance? Remember, exercise is a novel made up term. This is a new thing to us. Historically, humans have carried, have sprinted, have jumped, have climbed, have grappled, have done all those things. Putting that into a structured non-daily activity is a last 75-year phenomenon, right? It wasn't actually until we started to realize that stress reduction to the end of the limit is a bad thing.

1:20:30And then we had to recreate stress into our lives. One form of that was we call that exercise. So yes, if you think about exercise as either running, cycling, swimming, or lifting weights, you have left a bunch on the table. I don't care how you're challenging yourself. Even if that structured exercise in your example is more vocationally based. It's the stress being provided to the system. And so when you start to look at things like what's the best exercise protocol for A, B, and C, one of the things you start to realize is all of them can have equal responses given a few constraints. And if they hit that constraint, they work.

1:21:07So if you have a movement practice, you skateboard, you play pickle, you walk, you garden, fine. All those can have equal clinical outcomes. mortality, joint pain, body composition, because they're getting to the same spot. Does this make sense then? So if I'm, say I'm a podcaster and I want to have more energy to podcast, I should podcast more. Yeah, you'll be more resilient to it, right? Okay, so you could apply that to sort of any vocation or activity. If I want to have more energy to lift my kids up and run with them in the garden, then I should lift things and run with them. Stress inoculation.

1:21:44And then in the future, my body will adapt and it'll give me more energy for that particular activity. So sometimes when people say they don't have energy for a thing, it's because they haven't challenged themselves in that particular activity enough to expand and adapt. It's really difficult, right? So if walking up the stairs is a VO2 max test for you, how likely are you to walk upstairs? Okay, so it's like a downward spiral. Too difficult, right so then what happens you don't do it and you get yeah let's get it able to do it right yeah so when we started thinking about energy and i started talking about like hidden visible stress right i'm looking for constraints do you have an undiagnosed pathogen in your body we have a major league baseball player felt horrific i'm talking like can't make it through a baseball game legs are shot no energy whatsoever in his particular case we were able to confirm in his blood in his physical bedroom and with a bunch of other tests for actually you test his eyes and you test a bunch of other stuff he had a very gnarly exposure to mold oh yeah all we had to do in large part was get that cleared and his energy came back that's an example of a hidden stressor but one of the things we're always looking for is are you an energy toxicity meaning are you eating too many calories which is not the same as being obese or you and low energy availability you're sleeping being fine, but you're of low energy.

1:23:10Are you eating enough calories? Oh, you're not. Like, we have to go no further on this train. You are under fueled for what you're asking. So there's things that are hidden stressors like that. There are visible stressors, which we just talked about, like you're not actually doing the thing. Another easy way to explain this is cognitively. If you want to write a book and you don't currently write and you sit down to write, it's going to be exhausting and then you talk to a writer and there's like oh yeah like i need 45 minutes so i can crank out a thousand words it's like not exhausting at all right stress inoculation is exactly what you said before you can build up endurance in those things by them this is one of the things i've learned from this podcast and meeting all these exceptional people is um this like use it or lose it principle oh yeah you know because i'm getting older and you start to feel the odd pain you know and so you start to like not use that part you know your back for example or bending down.

1:24:03And so you find ways to not bend down properly so you can avoid the pain. And what's happening there is because something is difficult, you do it less, which then means it becomes more difficult. So you do it less. And there's this downward feedback loop to decline. Atrophy leads to atrophy. Yeah. And like, you know, I think the critical idea that got in my head a couple of years ago from someone I was interviewing on the podcast was that aging isn't always the excuse. And I think we assume it's just aging so we accept it and we don't fight back when i sat here with one of the exceptional phds that i interviewed she showed me i think it was a dexa scan of a 70 year old he was like a pentathlete and then a dexa scan of someone that was like 30 years old and this 70 year old was just phenomenal yeah that their sort of bone their muscle etc and she basically proved to me i'll put up the scan on the screen it really is a mind-blowing scan i've actually send it to my best friends because it really did.

1:24:57I couldn't get this idea out of my head that I actually don't accept everything as an aging problem because the minute you do, you go on this downward cycle. And it blew my mind. And that was such an important idea to get in my head at my age at 30 years old. So when I feel like a pain in my back, my solution isn't, okay, Stephen, you're getting older. Stop bending down and protect the pain. It is go to the gym and start squatting and bending, et cetera. There are some things that will go down with age. sleep is actually one of them we typically just see you will sleep a little bit less as you age fine there are some aspects of that but i think you can resist and fight as much of that as possible this is actually you're seeing a turning of the tide right now that's just starting to emerge with longevity longevity is currently being positioned as this anti-aging phenomenon and people are already bored like is your goal to just not age or is your goal to dunk a basketball at 70?

1:25:52Do you want to have the four by four truck that has the best off-road package ever and it stays in your garage? Probably not, right? Like you want to be able to be like, no, you want to live because you want to experience life. And so then you want to be able to take advantage of those capacities and functionality. Yeah, someone said to me, you want to extend your health span, not necessarily your lifespan. It's not the health span though. Oh, really? No, that's what I'm pushing back on. Healthspan, cool. I mean, lifespan, fine. Great, we're all past that. Healthspan, though, is still like, I don't want to be in pain.

1:26:26I don't want to be. I'm saying performance span. I'm saying I want you to be focused on having the most skill. I want you to just be crushing cognitively. I want you to be able to do anything you want physically for as long as we possibly can. And not just being like, well, that's going to go away. Let's just stay alive and be out of pain. I want you to be thinking about, no, like I'm going to be doing awesome stuff in whatever venue you like to do it in for as long as you possibly can. I think people want both. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But let's not, let's just not leave that end of the table off and assume the performance has to go away.

1:27:04So on this point of energy then, I think we've covered a lot of it and given me some sort of like really actionable principles there for how to have more energy. I do notice I have to say because I travel quite a lot and so on occasion my gym routine will be impacted and there's quite a clear correlation for me between the amount of times I've gone to the gym in previous weeks yeah and how I feel in terms of energy today I was thinking about this this morning we're in New York here and over the last couple of weeks I've probably been going to the gym like three or four like three times a week if I'm being honest whereas usually I'd go almost every day and I have felt a difference in my energy and I wasn't sure if that was just like psychological or if that was supported by science both if you go and do a a moderate to to light lower intensity exercise session those are generally going to provide energy if you're like no i did a like to the death training i pegged it i went all the way whatever that is with your lifting weights intensity whether you're getting your heart rate all the way up then you might walk out of those and be like whoa i'm exhausted but on aggregate those will provide more daily energy.

1:28:06If you're traveling, sick, super busy, do the former. Like just get in some motion. You'll feel better. You'll get a sweat in. You'll be there. If you're healthy and looking for long-term adaptation, then that's when you can start to push the pace on the training. I want to speak to the business owners listening and watching right now. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at 21 years old, and honestly, the pressure can be immense. It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface. I recently did some tests through our sponsor, Function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact.

1:28:41I found that I had low levels of omega-3s. I had deficient levels of vitamin D, probably because I sit inside this dark room all day. And that has totally changed how I construct my day going forward. I get up in the morning and the first thing I now do is I go for a walk outside in the sunshine, in part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm. With Function, you can check your brain health, your aging, your stress, and so much more. They provide over 160 lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Head to functionhealth.com slash DOAC to join and use code DOAC25 for a$25 credit.

1:29:23Speaking of training, you know what this is, don't you? Sure. This is a grip strength machine. Yeah. A lot of people told me that grip strength is the single biggest predictor of, I think they said like longevity and stuff like that. I wouldn't call it the number one predictor of mortality. It is a really nice scientific test. Late 1980s, Stephen Blair and his team started looking at giant databases and started to realize that cardiovascular fitness, VO2 max, VO2 peak, things like this, were predicting how long people are going to live. And in fact, they started to realize it was out predicting what we call traditional clinical markers, blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, things like that.

1:30:04And this launched an entire 45-year field that we're in now, which is like, wait a minute, these performance-based markers are actually predicting health more than these indirect markers. The unfortunate problem is that got like taken too far. And so when you hear things like people, and my colleagues have been on your show and said things like, oh, grip strength is an important predictor of mortality. It's good. It's great. It's an important message, but we have to be careful in being lost and what that means. Getting a grip strength device like that, which is probably under$40 is amazing. And what you will see consistently is those people that are really, really, really weak are in worse health on average.

1:30:47Where we become false is saying, okay, therefore you need to alter your lifestyle to maximize grip strength. I did do my grip strength results actually. Do you remember how they were? It was good. It was high. You know what that tells me about your health? Well. Nothing. Okay. Why wouldn't it be high? You're young, you're fit. I have all those other markers. It's not going to tell us anything. You know when these things are really powerful? Somebody who doesn't have blood work or doesn't have a body composition test or doesn't have anything else. It can give us a crude strength or a crude metric and say this person's probably at a health risk.

1:31:22So I've always been quite confused by this because is grip strength a proxy for my overall strength of my entire body? And therefore it's just indicating that my overall strength is low or is it actually like my arm? It's both. Oh, okay. It's both. Here's why. You know what you're really testing right there? What's that? Your nervous system. Oh, really? You're testing your brain. So you're not testing your strength as much? You are. But it's both. There's an overlap. That's why your grip strength, does it indicate general poor health? Yes. That's the value. Does it tell you anything directly about your, it can.

1:31:57And so this is when you see two camps here. So camp one is like, great, I'm going to open up a gym down the street and it's going to test your grip strength. And then we're going to focus all of your training on grip strength training. That is, we've exaggerated the point. The other camp is it doesn't matter. It's all indirect. That's not true either. It is an actionable, useful thing. What you don't need to worry about is optimizing it, maximizing it. Like if you're in the 80th percentile, going to the 90th percentile probably doesn't make you live a day longer. Over the last probably three years, I would imagine there's over 20 to 25 studies that have been published on a very specific type of grip strength, and that's grip strength asymmetry.

1:32:34Do you know why that matters? I don't, but I know that I'm stronger on my left side than my right. It's not uncommon. Typically, your force-dependent limb is not your neural control limb. So you write right-handed because you have to have fine motor control. Okay. Gross strength can be in the opposite side. I'll go like this. you know keep it in here don't touch your arm to the table at all keep it yeah 90 degrees like that yep and then you're just going to squeeze you know one good effort as hard as you can all right don't blow out now all right let's see oh gosh my head nearly exploded 130 so you're you're above average so not can i try this side yeah yeah this is my so this is my weaker all right here we go a weaker hand all right you gotta beat it though now oh gosh it's a bit slippery i think you did did i beat it oh my god wow 160 you're joking 160 what the

1:33:35130 okay on that side and your left side let's see

1:33:45110 crushing man that's really good but what it taught me is that it's not it doesn't correlate to overall strength because jeff is definitely stronger than me for sure for sure yeah i mean it's a very specific type of strength right so the asymmetry actually matters because most of the work in that area is in groups with neurological disease so you're trying to look at early predictions of alzheimer's parkinson's and things like that which ties into my earlier point is it is not simply an overall proxy of your health it can tell us direct things like nerve denervation and overall neurological health so it to me is a it's a great tool but what we don't want to do then is optimize for that what is a better marker of my overall health there's not a single marker that will tell you everything what about muscle power muscle power is great as well what is that Power is defined as force multiplied by velocity.

1:34:34So if I throw this, do you want to throw it? Go ahead. I can put your hand up then. You can do it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, great. Is that muscle power? That wasn't much power because you did it slow. Okay. So think about it this way. This is 12 kilos, right? 12 kilos, I don't know, pounds, kilos. That is mass. Kilos, pounds is a unit of mass. Force, that's what you think when you think of strength. That's force. Force is defined as F equals MA. It's mass times acceleration. It's force. Okay. So it's the mass multiplied by how well you can accelerate it. Power is your force multiplied by your velocity.

1:35:16So here's the difference. If I were to take this 12 pounds of mass or 12 kilos and hand it to you slowly. Okay. That is an expression of 12 pounds of force. That's how I think about it. Now, if you handed back to me the exact same speed, that is the same amount of newtons of force. How I create power is now I do that same thing with speed. Ready? So the two ways you can get more powerful, more force, more velocity. You would use an implement like that because you're trying to say, give me a little bit of mass, but you can obviously lift more than 12 kilos. But now I'm going to emphasize the velocity and the spectrum.

1:35:53where people make the mistake in training for power is if you go slow, the mass is too light to do anything. So you don't get stronger and you don't get faster. Why this matters in the current conversation is you see power and what some people will call, call things like power penia. So that the term that we've been using for a long time is sarcopenia. And this is the, the accelerated loss of muscle and probably muscle strength with aging. You're going to drop some, but sarcopenia is are you dropping faster than you should and now there's a turn of scientific attention to power penia which is are you losing the power faster than you should be losing power that matters because it is everything from prevention of fall catching yourself when you slip to be able to move and accelerate quickly and you see that thing that stuff highly associated with breaking of bones, fractures, dislocations, which are incredibly impactful to health, especially post age 60 or 65.

1:36:56I think a lot of people listening, and me too, so I guess one of the questions we have as it relates to the gym and working out is we often think that in order to get better results in the gym, and you can define that however you want to, fat loss, muscle gain, whatever, strength, we need to go more often. And I was curious, someone who spends so long with athletes, is that a bit of a myth? Because even me, I'm thinking, well, if I want better results in the gym, I probably just need to, I'm currently going three or four days a week. I need to go back to going six or seven days a week to get better results.

1:37:30You could go either way. It is generally true that if you train more, you give yourself more opportunity to create stress which is more opportunity to create adaptation but that said depending on the marker the answer here could range from yes to no let's use muscle growth as an example as long as you hit the same volume throughout the week the amount of times you go to the gym doesn't matter that much in theory volume how much load did you lift how many times does time period matter i.e if i lifted four weights in one hour versus lifting four weights in 20 minutes nope because now all you've changed is really the rest in between yeah does that matter it does in the sense that if you take a short rest interval and that leads to excessive fatigue accumulation and then that compromises how heavy you can lift or how many reps you can do or how many sets you can do that will have compromised your volume wait so because everyone talks about taking shorter rests in the gym to build more muscles not consistent with the evidence really yep but this is this is the game you're playing at all times right who has the time to wait two and a half minutes between every set you're going to be in the gym for an hour and a half a lot of people are on their phones totally and then because of that they're like i gotta get out of here so they do half the amount of stuff they leave because they're out of time so the battle is Because in an isolated world, if you were to probably spend 60 to 90 seconds or maybe up to two minutes resting in between each set, generally you recover enough to have a higher quality set the next one.

1:39:11So is that the most important thing to be optimizing for is making sure the next rep you do is high quality? In my world, quality is always number one. So you're saying take a bigger break as long as you can recover and are more strong for the next rep? as long as it doesn't put you in a position where you're in the gym so long that you won't do all the stuff you needed to do but in a world where you had unlimited time really generally depends on what adaptation we're working for if we're working on endurance then we don't necessarily have to do that okay but if we're working on speed or skill or flexibility or balance or muscle growth or fat loss now we have options so depending on the outcome you're looking for you have tools.

1:39:51I think the biggest point we want to make here is where the field struggles right now is making a little bit of information get in the way of motivation. If you're going to the gym three days a week, I'm clapping. Done. Like we're winning. I don't want you to hear messages and go, oh, I'm doing it all wrong. I'm not going to get any results. I'm tanking my metabolism. I'm breaking my hormones. That's the shit that drives us nuts. You're motivated. It's hard enough to get to the gym. And when you get there to try really hard, we've gotten over the hill. Now, if you're past that point, we could start tinkering with some things, but I hate it when people leave conversations like this and go, oh, did you know that if you don't rest more than 60 seconds that you're not getting anything?

1:40:40That's not true. So we can get like upgrades, but in general, I think most people quality, should be the biggest thing you pay attention to because this is going to reduce your likelihood of injury and there's even evidence that whether you're trying to get stronger or grow muscle the quality of the repetition as defined by your technique as defined by your range of motion as defined by your intent as defined by what we call your mind muscle connection so like if you're trying to contract your shoulder are you really contracting like all these things start to matter And so what you'll see happen is you can get more results with less work and shorter time because each individual repetition is of a higher quality and a more focused intent.

1:41:29I mean, this might be a good time to just quickly take a, I mean, everyone's talking about creatine at the bloody moment. Do you have your athletes taking it? Yeah, of course. You do? Yeah, everybody. Do you take it? Yeah. What do you take? What's in your supplement stack? My personal supplement stack, same with all of our clients and athletes. There's two things. Correct physiology, performance enhancement. Totally separate categories. Correct physiological deficiencies are, in your case, your vitamin D. What is low, what is high, what is off track based on blood work, right? We try to solve this through food.

1:42:03But what this oftentimes looks like is a high-quality multivitamin, oftentimes fish oil. Now you have performance accelerators. On the other side of that equation. This is when creatine can come in. If I'm traveling, I'm going to take things like fiber, right? Because it's harder to get vegetables when you travel. You probably know this, but airplanes, airports, restaurants, like vegetables are nowhere to be found. And so I know those are going to be a struggle. I'm going to take fiber there. Or I'm generally not taking it as much when I'm home because I can control my diet. Performance enhancers are things like creatine, are things like beta alanine, sodium bicarbonate.

1:42:41So depending on what fitness training goal I have, at the moment, I'm going to alter those based on if I'm looking for muscle growth or endurance or… What are you taking right now? Zero. Zero. Vitamin D, like this week? No. No. Summertime. I live in the forest. Omega-3? Nope. Why? I got full control of my diet, and we get a lot of fish right now. So we are good there. I also have… I'm fortunate. I get to harvest my own meat. and one of the things you'll see pretty consistently is even in red meat sources they're higher in a lot of nutrients wild caught versus animal caught so we're in a pretty good plus i have my blood work i know where my omega-3 numbers are so i'm gonna get there if i don't have to take those things i don't a lot of people imagine come to you for with weight loss goals whether they're trying to cut weight for a fight or if it's just mom and pop looking to lose a few pounds what are the big misconceptions about weight loss yeah it's the magic of it right it's the there's one specific element you can't eat or one way you have to train or can't train that is the the biggest misconception around fat loss the specificity it is categorically quite simple to lose fat it's practically hard it's difficult human endeavor but categorically it's incredibly simple.

1:44:02We only have a few things we have to do. And now you have a billion choices of how to get there. So if you are the type of person who struggles with moderation, then I'm not going to give you moderation. Moderation of calories? Could be. Or exercise. Or environment. Do you know the difference between baking and cooking? Yeah, I guess so, conceptually. Baking is chemistry. okay you mix something together and put in the oven you can't just fake the amounts because it won't rise it won't set it won't do the things right if you're cooking on a stove and you could just be like okay what's in the fridge you can't do that in baking right depending on what you're baking we will address this fat loss problem with trying to identify are you a cook or are you a baker personality type here's what i mean if you came to me and we were going to help you lose some fat.

1:44:55You're already pretty lean, but let's say you wanted to just get super leaned. All right, great. First question I would ask you is, how do you want this to operate? You get one of two ways. One way is I tell you exactly what to eat. You weigh and measure every single thing. You do not deviate. You check your weight every single day and you follow exactly what I tell you. The other option is I give you concepts. We have one to three rules. You're going to check weight maybe daily, maybe once a week. And I want you to stay airtight to those concepts. I prefer the concepts. Concepts. Great. Concepts are cooking.

1:45:35Okay. Baking. Weigh and measure everything, right? Here's why this matters. You're a concept kind of guy. Why? You do not want to be thinking about all that little stuff because you have other stuff you'd rather be thinking about, right? It's great because it's freeing. You know the downside is? if you don't know exactly what's in your food and you don't have a really good eye and calibration someone like you might have a hard time losing fat because you're already at the end we need to be weighing that olive oil we need to be measuring that rice cup we can't just be like a little bit of rice over there right if you're trying to lose a hundred pounds we can probably eyeball a lot of things and get really really far yeah but personality type is what i'm really getting to some people listening.

1:46:22Some people would be going, like, how many meals am I eating? Like, they want the detail, right? What's the concept? The concept could be something like, I want you eating fresh vegetables at every meal and I want you to have a dedicated protein source every time you eat. That might be the only rule I give you. Could it be an eating window? Could be, sure. I could say, eat whatever you want, but you're only going to eat between these hours. Okay. I could do whatever kind of one to three rules I want. I could say none of those things and I'll just say, all right, just cut out all your junk food.

1:46:59Okay. I'm not going to tell you what to eat. I'm just going to give you a list of things not to eat. I could only give you, I prefer to do the opposite, defer to give you things rather than take things away because you're going to take those things away, right? So I could play with your meal timing. I could play with your meal frequency. I could play with your meal composition. So what types of food you're eating, the combinations of them. I can do anything there. And why all those work? Because those are simply different strategies to likely reduce food intake. That's all we're really doing. But some people hate that because it's not enough detail.

1:47:34There's no specificity. There's no precision. They get anxiety from guessing. I've had plenty of athletes before just be like, okay, but like six ounces of chicken or seven? And I'm like, 6.3. Like, okay. Like, who cares? Like, it doesn't matter. But they're just like, they want, they don't want to make any decisions. you have to make decisions about what you're going to eat because you got only had concepts the nice part about the way you measure is you have no choices i think the the average people listening would rather have the concepts like it's much easier for me they they're busy lives they don't want to be weighing 6.3 grams of so you'd be stunned most people want that most people want me they want the detail because they don't have to think they don't have to guess they don't have to worry they don't have to go god like maybe i ate too much today maybe i didn't or whatever.

1:48:17But that's like hard to measure. Super hard. So here's the recommendation. Do the baking approach first for two weeks. And by that, you mean measure everything, understand what's in it? A hundred percent. Then you can back off and start to go, okay, I have a better sense of what a tablespoon of peanut butter looks like. I have a better sense of what a cup of rice is. I'm getting a better sense of what three ounces of this is, whatever. Now I can start toning things back. I think this is really great advice because I think the big shifts that I've seen in my own diet have been in that exact order where for one particular week I did, it might be calorie counting, or it might have been some of these apps where you can scan the food by using the barcode, and it tells you what's inside there.

1:49:02And through that, it only took me a week or two to discover that the things I ate frequently weren't what I thought, both in quantity but also in nutritional profile. I think it's super important for as many people as possible to spend at least a week doing that. And then I could make informed decisions about what I wanted to keep and what I actually didn't really like that much anyway. You know, I used to run this experiment in class every year. These are graduate students getting master's degrees in this particular field. And we would have them do a seven-day diet recall. Just measure, weigh, everything you eat for seven days.

1:49:37Consistent themes that popped up. Almost everyone ate way more fat than they think. Is that a bad thing? If you're eating more calories than you need. Oh, so it's the calories is the problem versus the... That's not bad for you. Okay, there's no evil foods. People ate way more carbohydrates than they realize. Same answer. People ate way less protein than they think. What about sugar? Everyone knows they're eating sugar. What they're always stunned is they're like, whoa, I thought I was eating a small percentage, you know, 20 % of my calories from fat. They didn't realize they're at 40%. This is why the keto diet actually did help me.

1:50:14because it forced me to check everything for a while. So this is great. It was really learning. It was learning what was in all these things that I loved. And keto forced me, you know, the principle of a concept that I had when I was on keto was that I could have about 50 grams of carbs a day, roughly. And stay in ketogenic. Yeah. Ketosis, rather. So I would think about it like a budget. I'd be like, oh, I'd spend 23 grams of carbs on this particular thing. But to do that, I had to look at everything, research everything. Yeah. And now I have an intuitive idea. Exactly. The point is simply your awareness and consciousness of what is actually in the elements that you want.

1:50:48And then if you want to change and tweak, you can do that because you know. But if you don't have the knowledge, you can't even play the game. What are the big misconceptions about exercise's role in weight loss? It is valuable. Forever we've been telling people, burn more calories than you ingest, right? And it's still true. And then we had a bunch of research pop out that was sort of like, hey, exercise is not playing the role we think it is in fat loss. And those data still hold true in the sense that you don't burn as many calories in your workouts as you think. Most of the time, if you hop on a piece of exercise equipment and it tells you you burned X amount of calories, you burned most likely significantly less than that.

1:51:25It's also true that there is places where you can get to with adaptive thermogenesis. Meaning, if you burn, say, 500 calories with exercise. if you are lean enough or non-lean enough or fit enough or not fit enough your body will change how many calories it burns throughout the day in response to that 500 calories from exercise meaning you could be in a situation theoretically where you burn 500 calories in your workout but then your body down regulated your energy expenditure by three or four or even up to 500 our calories to make up for it. So it was neutral. When you're lean, like that, that can happen quite often.

1:52:10Right. And so then what do you do? You pull more calories, you train harder, you get a more of a response. This is a like, oh, okay. Calorie counting doesn't matter. Like it absolutely matters. It may not be the strategy you want, but it matters there. So then there was a big push of like exercise is playing no role in fat loss, which was fundamentally also not true because now we have meta-analyses in the recent years, as well as more studies showing probably the fairest way to say it is exercise is a fantastic way to burn some calories. It is not the only thing that you can do though to lose weight.

1:52:48You can handle weight loss entirely through nutrition if you want. That said, people who exercise during their weight loss journey consistently are better at keeping that fat off over the weeks to years at the end of the diet. You have a 5-4-3-2-1 method. Oh, sure. 5-4-3-2-1 was just a little thing I came up with that says, all right, can we help people with fat loss rules? Five days a week, be active. Now, this can be exercise. It can be walking. It can be your vocation. I don't really care. But what has to happen with fat loss is you have to be able to produce caloric expenditure. and you got to do a lot of it.

1:53:29This is my way of saying be active. And also I'm saying, it's cool to take a rest day too. Like it's totally fine to just veg. You can do that, but be as active as you possibly can. Then from there, I want four days a week of structured exercise. One of these days can be a super hard day. It can be light. One of those days could be a yoga day. Like not all four days have to be head to the gym, volume 11, like train as hard as you can. But four days a week where I want you doing structured exercise, at least three days a week, I want you training hard enough to sweat. If you're doing all that, you're active five days a week, you're doing structured exercise four days a week, three of those sessions, you're doing it hard enough where you're getting a really good solid sweat, you're probably doing enough to burn enough calories to give yourself a chance from the exercise perspective to losing weight.

1:54:24If you've done those first three, we could even just call it the 5-4-3. You're in a pretty good spot. If you may work granular, I would love a couple of days a week of strength training. And I would love at least one day where your heart rate's getting really, really, really high. So a lot of people, including myself, often think, you know, I'm going to the gym three, four days a week, but nothing's changing. I feel like I've stagnated. What is going on there typically typical solutions for this are lack of focus and i don't mean in your training i mean in your programming so if you are looking at your program saying i'm going to the gym three or four days a week my first question would be okay what type of training program are you on i'm kind of just winging it that's why okay if i said the same thing to you and gave you any business analogy here you would look at me in the face and smile you have a plan why would you expect without a plan to get to any particular direction.

1:55:15That's a good point. 80 % of the time, that's the answer. Now, here's the thing. And we have literature on this. There's good evidence. The plan itself isn't the biggest factor. It's actually just having a plan. Interesting. Because you have the ability to progressively overload. What does that mean? Meaning you were able to increase your number of repetitions than you did last week. You can do a few more sets than you did. You can increase the load. You can increase the range of motion. There's all kinds of ways that we can overload the system progressively. You can't do all that. This is, you know, I think this is really the heart of it, which is most of us go to the gym and we do the same thing.

1:55:53Totally. We do the same thing we did last week. We put the Stairmaster machine on level eight and we do 10 minutes. Yeah. And we did that for the last seven months. Whereas we should really just put it up one. But in order to do that, we kind of need a plan, as you say. Because you can't just go up one every time. Yeah. Like how many weeks in a row can you add five pounds? three four like it's not going to be very long this is the entire reason exercise is a scientific field right we have that so my strong recommendation would be if you're an absolute beginner and you're not going to the gym at all you're not doing anything you can probably use ai tools and give you some basic starting program in fact i people send these things all the time to me like hey i prompted my thing with like all of your content and i have a complete personalized training program from andy galpin i'm like great and i look at him i'm like pretty good like all right that's pretty reasonable and it's good enough to get you started they're going to get you the basics are going to get you going and then you have something to follow for six eight ten weeks whatever let me ask ai for andy galpins put in your constraints tell it how many days a week okay let's do it like so everyone can hear hi um i want to go to the gym four days a week and I want Andy Galpin's formula for me to gain muscle.

1:57:12But what are the principles that I need to apply based on Andy Galpin's work over the next four months in order to gain this muscle? To gain muscle and strength over the next four months, you'll want to focus on a few key principles from Dr. Galpin's work. First, prioritize progressive overload by gradually increasing the weight, reps or sets over time. Second, use a variety of repetition ranges incorporating both heavy low rep work for strength and moderate to high rep work for muscle growth. Finally, ensure you're taking adequate rest between sets, usually two to five minutes for heavy compound movements to allow for full recovery and maintain high quality effort.

1:57:52Pretty good. That's not, there's a little bit of hallucination in there, which is AI, but that's pretty close. A lot of people aren't doing this now, aren't they? They're using AI as like there we've sought a huge pendulum in the last five years 2020 almost ended health and fitness gyms went out of business everyone went home everyone bought their exercise equipment and as soon as ai came online online coaching tanked and online companies got crippled because everyone is like why am i going to pay you 100 bucks a month 200 bucks a month 300 bucks a month for that and they were right it's going the exact opposite now it's already swung back in-person training is way more in demand i'm not surprised because everyone's tired of that it's also personal trainers don't just tell you what to do no they make sure you do it you know so how do i do it it's the emotion it's the connection it's the emotion it's the connection it's the like holding me accountable so what you're seeing is people going it was never about the information yeah we always had the information who's had it nothing in that yeah i made up yeah that stuff's been around for like it's funny every time i talk about like exercise prescription somebody will hit the comments and be like why don't you give credit to blah blah blah they're the one that invented that and i'm like none of us invented this stuff dumbbells barbells like rep ranges it's not the information it's never been so what is it then like why do people keep listening to these conversations when they kind of a lot of them kind of know the stuff i don't know what's happening on your platform.

1:59:20But a lot of people are not listening to podcasts anymore because you're going to see this probably in the comment section. Hey, Grok, tell me the 10 actionable things from this three-hour conversation because they just try and extract the data, right? And then they don't do anything. You know who's going to take action from this? The people who listened. True. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's not - It's not the information. Yeah. In part, it is the story. And I say the story in particular because one of the most compelling things that we see on these podcasts is when you tell me real case studies of real people you talk about what jenny did and you were training jenny and she had this thing and she was perimenopause and she did this thing with this thing and uh and people go ah okay those stay with me you know what i'm willing to pay for you know what the world is willing to pay for have you done it before oh yeah yeah true human experience like lived experience so when you see a story you're able to go okay i believe that person's done it and now i trust that opinion because I could just go grab the program, right?

2:00:18The other thing is it's saving me time. Like you could sit there and go, okay, here's all the prompts or whatever, throw it in there and get your own training program. Or you could be like, yo, I'm just going to go pay Andy. I know he's done it before. I trust him. And now I'm going to go spend my time on this other thing that I care about learning about and spending my time on. Are there any commonalities in the catalyst moment that causes behavior change in people who are otherwise stubborn? So I think everyone that I sit with, than just even myself. There was a moment in my life where I heard something or something happened where I go, fuck, yeah.

2:00:52And that was the day, it was like a before and after moment, I call them. That was the day that I decided to take this shit seriously. Yeah. And do you see any commonalities in what that is for different people? It's such a fabulous question and I don't have a good answer for you. Because it's always so different. It's so hard. I would love to say it was the rock bottom moment. I mean, it can be true. It's not always true. Can I suggest another? Please. Maybe like big life changes like kids. Death, friend, family, life becomes real. I've heard that a few times on this show, actually. You'll see that.

2:01:23My dad had a heart attack and blah, blah, blah. That's crazy. The threat of death doesn't motivate anybody. Right. If it would have, we wouldn't have a 40 % obesity rate. Yeah. Who doesn't know obesity tanks? Everybody knows. It's not an information issue. You know the risks associated with alcohol, smoking, social media. That does not change behavior. You get closer though when it's at home, right? Somebody died in a car accident. Fuck, I'm going to stop looking at my phone when I drive. Because my neighbor just died. That's the thing that makes you go too close to home. That's so true. I was saying to my fiance when I was driving the other day in the car, because I'm notorious for asking everybody to put their seatbelts on.

2:02:06If we get in a car, I'm the guy in a black cab or a tech. I'm like, everyone, can you put your seatbelts on, please? My team know this as well. If we're going anywhere, I look around at every single person and make sure they have their seatbelts on. When did this begin? When I was 10 years old. And they came to my school. I remember being sat in the front row. I almost remember my seat number. It was that vivid for me. Two things I remember from 10 years old. They brought a mother who had lost her child in a car accident. And then they brought a police person. And he described going to the scene of the accident, looking down at the person who had just been in a car accident's phone, realizing that they were deceased.

2:02:38and then looking down and seeing their phone ringing and it said, mum. And I just, I've never forgotten it. It was somewhat traumatic, but it's meant that for the rest of my life, I've policed seatbelts. And that's what I mean by these catalyst moments where an idea gets in your head and it just completely changes. And so I'm wondering what those ideas are for people as it relates to like weight loss and health. And so we ticked off some of them. Someone gets a linear family, maybe a diagnosis. In the performance perspective, this is when we would argue for data. because we've had this happen earlier in my career with a professional athlete who was not fast enough and was convinced he was fast.

2:03:17And then we put him on a force plate and we started collecting objective data. And at the same time, I had some of my students around and I had them do it. Kind of like what you did with your grip strength with Jeff. And it was like, you see how they're as fast as you are? And he was like, oh. Everything changed. Like he was totally bought in, made every training change that we asked. He had to see it in front of his face. Like he had to see his data. So my other answer to that to you would be, now that we've democratized health in this sense, the ability to see your own data, I would be willing to bet.

2:03:52Had I pulled up a blood panel that had the cholesterol levels that you saw and I said, oh, this is a client of mine. You would be like, oh, okay, great. Uh-huh, uh-huh. but then when i pull up yours and say this is you're like i start shitting myself like we're done with that right like there's no question i was looking for some research and there's some evidence here backed by some research that goes to answer the question and i think we actually answered we hit most of them which is an acute health shock or diagnosis which is the primary catalyst um vicarious health events which become wake-up calls which you talked about as well which is someone else appear a friend or sibling number three you touched on as well which is this quantitative biometric feedback so data yep yep um it says major light this one we didn't touch on major life transitions i.e yeah um such as becoming a parent turning a landmark age like 30 40 or 50 or reaching retirement you see that a lot yeah you know what actually that may think here's one we've seen the most sold my company oh that one changes everyone's life it's similar to post-cold depression oh you've lost purpose oh fuck what do i do oh i need to do something i got now i got money now i have time interesting i'm investing in my health now like i didn't i sacrificed my health the last 20 years ding ding ding ding now i gotta turn around and i'm like okay but is it also just like i need a new purpose and my body then becomes the the project that's exactly what it is where in the past i had the excuse of sacrificing for the company and i i couldn't focus on myself it was selfish it wasn't fiduciarily responsible to do that and i have no more excuse well looking at this list then listen we can't we're going to pray no one in your family sure no one you know gets sick so let's stay away from that one um the the two of them there that can be quite motivating and again we don't want to motivate you if you're completely fine but this actually answers the question is to go and get your health checked yeah that's like a simple solution because maybe you're fine and that's great maybe you're doing everything right but also So just saying, oh, I want to lose a bit of weight or I want to do this isn't as solid enough as going and finding out how you're doing.

2:06:01One thing also I think is important because I will default to performance and optimization and getting the best and excellence. Like that's just the language and stuff I do. But that's not the opposite of what you just said. To be really clear on that point, not everyone gravitates to the idea of being the best possible ever. Yeah. Totally fine. but that still doesn't mean it's okay to just check out on your health. You can have it both ways. You can be like, look, I'm not an optimizer. I'm not a maximizer. I'm not, that doesn't live with my ethos and cool. We can still though say you still want to live that life for as long as possible, right?

2:06:43All right, let's just make sure we're paying enough attention to where nothing catches up and we're not waking up one day and be like, oh my gosh, now i've got to go invest all these time and resource energy and all those things to go backwards in that so pay attention enough how important is it to get clear on your why you're not gonna love the answer because traditionally when people approach me they already have that figured out they're getting to me they figured out why they're here or they're if they haven't figured out they at least have had the motivation to seek outside counsel like that.

2:07:17So now they're getting to the what and how part. What about bad goals? I look back at my life and I had some bad goals that set me up for failure. That's more realistic to what we all do. And this is a, you're aiming at the wrong target. I was aiming at my goal when I was 20, I think it was 27, was to go to the gym every day and I failed. Oh yeah, yeah. I failed six months later, but then once I'd failed, it was catastrophic. And how are you not going to fail? Yeah, yeah. Were you going to go every day the rest of your life? It was a terrible goal because the day that I missed one day because some flight, it was like my entire motivation was over.

2:07:51Yeah, yeah, sure. And then I was like, how do I get back on the horse now? Here's an example. You want to lose fat. Your goal is fat loss. Cool. Why aren't you leaner right now? And you automatically think I have to exercise more and diet. And I'm like, great. That's the tactic. I want to know why you're not there right now. Like, what is the thing that's actually getting in the way? Because like calorie fight, like, yeah, yeah. like you know that though but it's not working what is really in the way do we actually have some hidden stressor a lot of times people will say things like i i gotta lose fat so i can get healthy and we will generally say you need to get healthy first and then the fat loss would be a whole lot easier that's the bad goal and so we'll ask this question like what would success look like what would failure look like and when we hear things like oh success is i lose these 25 pounds all right great let me ask you this if we lost 12 pounds and then your shoulder pain went away you have normal bowel movements now for the first time in 10 years your energy is way up is that all a failure no that's success so then we didn't just find success properly so it's a huge focus of of how we help people actually make progress in those areas that they've struggled with dr andy galpin we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you is if you were sure to fail what would still be worth doing a great question yeah fantastic question i am ultra competitive but I really don't mind losing so my answer to that question was it sounds like a cop out but it's all of it because I actually don't care about failing that much it just doesn't bother me I just like the competing thing I like the doing thing so my initial reaction to that was like God being around my kids you fail anything you want there and I'm like we're winning right and then I went to business things and I'm like I don't even really care about losing those I was like, because you get to do it.

2:10:03You get to be active and whatever. So kind of a cop out, but my answer would be all of them, man. Like the process is dope. The podium is the process. Yeah, man. The process over the podium. Dr. Andy Galpin, thank you so much. Thank you. You're held in such high regard by everybody. I think there's two reasons. I think it's so you're so deeply obsessed with this subject matter for reasons that we talked a lot about last time. But also, I think the essence of your motivations is so unbelievably pure. before we started recording you were saying to me how like you're really not that concerned with the business side of things because what you'd love to do is just be focusing on the research the education and the coaching and i think that says a lot about you and it comes through people understand that you're just deeply obsessed about this stuff in a way which allows us to benefit tremendously from all the work that you have done and you're a wonderful synthesizer of very very complex things so please carry on doing what you're doing if people want to go and listen to your show or if they want to go consume more of your stuff if they want to continue this journey with you where do they go?

2:11:00Where's the best place to send them? Well, first of all, thank you for those kind words and to be invited back. It's a huge opportunity and I will never be ungrateful for it. My podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, available everywhere. And then andygalpin.com and social media, Instagram and all that stuff is probably the easiest way to follow along. I highly recommend you go and subscribe to Andy's channel. We're going to link it down below now, but you're incredibly rigorous with all the work that you do. having spoken to Andrew Andrew Huberman who's a good friend of both of ours he's also told me just how utterly obsessed you are with truth and also your mission of helping people become who they could be and that shines through in all of your work so please go and subscribe to Andy's podcast as well Perform and I shall link all of his other resources below including some of them that we've mentioned today including the tests and questionnaires that we talked about Andy thank you

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