4 Mind-Training Hacks to Achieve Any Goal EP 1458

25:42It starts much earlier. So if you eat the way that you did in your 20s, you have no chance of protecting your muscle. The changes will be subtle until one day they're not. Dr. Justin Marchegiani You just start shrinking and getting weaker. You have increase in adipose tissue. You now fall into the general category of one of the millions that are overweight, have high blood sugar, insulin resistance, you name it. And it's something that happens over time. And if we continue the conversation that is very distracted about, well, we'll take this and we'll take this and we'll do that, as opposed to do the foundational things that we have direct control over, which is train hard, optimize and prioritize for a protein-forward plan.

26:40You do those fundamental things, everything else is gravy. That's it. So if you focus on protein and you're trained consistently, you should be... Able to protect your muscle. And it sounds like eliminate a lot of the health problems or risks that could come your way. This is the ultimate in a muscle-centric approach.

27:03What was the things that you saw when you went to these blue zones that they did that maybe you weren't even thinking they would do? Like, what were the surprising things they did? What were the unsurprising things they did? Yeah, I mean, a few things I saw that were kind of striking to me that made sense. But one was that in Icaria, which was one of the Greek blue zones, they eat so much wild food. So they had wild greens, summer greens, winter greens, they had wild mushrooms, they had wild sage tea, they had wild fish, they had so much wild food in their diet. And we know that wild foods are much more nutrient dense.

27:37Why? Because they're stressed. And stressed plants make more protective compounds. Those protective compounds are called phytochemicals. They give the color and the richness and the flavor. What people don't understand is the more flavorful a food is naturally, the more phytochemicals it has. Interesting. You know, if you go to your garden at the end of August and pick a cherry tomato that's ripened in the hot sun that explodes in your mouth like the most incredible flavor. But if you go to a store-bought tomato and you cut it, it's like cardboard and tasteless. What's the difference? It's the phytochemicals.

28:11So flavor always follows the phytochemical richness of a food. So not the stuff you put on it or sauces or salt or fat or sugar to make it taste better, which the food industry does, but just the natural flavor. So the more flavorful the food is, the better it is. So they eat a lot of wild food and it's so flavorful. The other thing that was interesting was that shepherds had this culture of going and knowing exactly which plants to feed their animals at which time of year, to graze them. So it would shepherd them, they'd eat all these wild plants, but they know if this herb was coming in at this time of year, they'd go eat this herb.

28:45And if this plant was coming in this time of year, they'd go eat that thing. I'm like, why are you doing that? We know because the meat and the milk tastes better. When we, yeah. And so it kind of, you know, they were not doing it because it was better for them or because it was for longevity or because. Tastes better. Yeah, it tastes better. So it turns out that we know now that phytochemicals are not just in plants. And phyto means plant, right? They're not just in plants, they're also in animals. So the work of Fred Provenza and Steven Van Bouliet from Duke have clearly shown that when animals are eating a wide array of wild plants or a wide array of, you know, planted grasses and flowers and different things, they will seek out medicine in the food.

29:33So they will literally go and eat major, like, you know, calorie crops, let's say, but then they'll go and sample from like a hundred different plants to get their medicines. And so these wild animals, these wild plants are being eaten and the phytochemicals are accumulating in the meat and the milk of these animals. So studies have shown, for example, that you can have as high levels of the catechins in green tea in goat milk from goats eating certain wild plants. Really? Yeah. So it's my belief, and there may be ways that even these get transmuted. So eating regeneratively raised meat, I went to a restaurant here in LA last night called Matu where they have regeneratively raised meat.

30:11Was it amazing? It was amazing. Now it wasn't as like fatty and kind of like marble, like corn fed meat, but it was delicious. And it was tasty and yummy and amazing. What was this place called? Matu, M-A-T-U. Check it out. Really good, from Everly Hills. And it's, you'd love it. It's so good. And you know, you can eat that and know you're eating from an animal that's been well taken care of, that's living out in its natural habitat, that's regenerating the environment, that's restoring the ecosystems, increasing biodiversity, and conserving water in the soils, it's reducing climate change, it's producing more nutrient-dense food and rich in phytochemicals and good fats and more antioxidants and more minerals and just pretty much everything.

30:52So that was a sort of a, I think a key part of their longevity was they lived on this stuff. You know, they basically were shepherds and goats and sheep for their livelihood. What was about their relationships? How did that play in? Did they have certain types of relationships with family members? Did they have intimate relationships? Were they married for long periods of time? Did they have 10 wives? You know, what was the whole process? One couple I saw had a collective age of 210. That's crazy. So I don't know. I think, you know, being married is definitely a key to longevity for men. For women, not always.

31:31Depends on if they're happy or not. Oh, man. So I think having a happy, healthy relationship is such a key part of longevity. and they were very much in the realm of community. It wasn't just like this isolated relationship. They were embedded in a context of a community that was totally supportive, that celebrated together, that played together, that worked together, that harvested together, that shared sheep together, that made cheese together. They were just doing stuff together as part of the way of life. And they would just stop and talk and hang out and chill. and nobody was starting a company, or nobody was getting ahead in social media for likes and followers.

32:14I mean, they were just living life. They weren't striving or trying to get anywhere. They were just being. And so their culture was all about the power of these incredible moments where you share with people you love and care about and celebrate life and enjoy life and talk. We were driving out of this one town in Sardinia that had these two guys who were really great and they were local Sardinians. And this car like stops in front of us and like blocks us. And this old guy gets out, he walks over to the stone wall and he's like waves us to come over. And I'm like, what's going on here? And he just waved us over, he wanted to talk.

32:50He saw us in the car behind, he's like, he just wanted to talk. So we sat in the stone wall for like an hour or so and chit-chatted about life and about his life. And he was car money, he was 85 years old and super vibrant fit guy. and he started telling us about his life and how there was a mudslide that destroyed the village he grew up in, which they moved the town a little bit higher on the mountain. But he still had his farm on that old area, his old family land. So he took us down. He had like six sheep and he had a pig and he had some chickens and he had orchards and he had a whole garden where he grew eggplants and peppers and tomatoes and zucchini and herbs and spices.

33:24And it was amazing. He literally took care of his entire property by himself at 85 years old. I mean, I don't think I could do it. And I'm chasing this guy up this hill after his sheep and I'm like, I can't keep up with this guy. He's 85 years old. And so he was super vibrant, mentally sharp. You know, he lived with his family and they just had this incredibly deep culture. There wasn't nursing homes. I met Julia, who was 103 months. You know, like I say, I'm five and three quarters. She's like, I'm 103 months. And she was like, you know, didn't have kids and lived with her niece and nephew who loved her and took care of her.

34:02I mean, she was still working. She was still working, making all this stuff for weddings, all the little tablecloths and doilies and embroidery stuff. I don't know how to do that, but she was making all this stuff. And she was just so bright and still was walking around every day and taking her walks and hanging out with everybody and her friends. And it was really amazing to see this culture where, you know, people were not ostracized or excluded, but, you know, they were included in life. And it doesn't sound like they're hustling for something. They're working hard to maintain their life, like their home, their farm, their land, whatever they have.

34:35Maybe their small business, but they're not hustling for something greater. Is that right? Yeah. No. Why can you live long and still hustle or just want more? Want to build something greater in your life? I think you can. I think it's really about what happens on the inside. Because one of the biggest things that regulates your epigenome is your mind. So your biggest pharmacy in your body is between your years. It's the most powerful pharmacy in the world. And you can activate it for good or bad. So when we are having thoughts that are, you know, stressful thoughts, when we're in toxic relationships, when we're worried or anxious, when we aren't in harmony with ourselves, it activates all these really nasty pathways that drive inflammation and harm your mitochondria.

35:29I mean, your microbiome is listening in on your thoughts, is eavesdropping. So those bugs don't like it when you are not happy. Really? Yeah. What is the process of that from an idea, a thought into the mitochondria? How does that transfer into a healthy information, into a physical manifestation versus unhealthy information, data and a thought into physical unhealthy? So what's the biochemistry of it? Well, for example, if you're stressed, you're producing cortisol and adrenaline and all these other hormones and proteins that then will trigger a whole cascade of downstream effects that activate transcription factors, that transcription factors that turn on genes that cause inflammation and all these other problems.

36:13So you're basically creating inflammatory thoughts or creating inflammation in your body, literally. And - Isn't that crazy? And you have receptors on your, like immune cells, for example, for neurotransmitters. So if you're stressed, your immune system is eavesdropping on your thoughts. That's why if you're stressed, you are more likely to have an infection or get sick or have other bad health consequences. Why do you think it is that our body is built this way that a thought can either make us feel and physically transform into joy and health or feel sick and then become sick? Why do you think our body - Why, from an evolutionary point of view?

36:52Why do you think that is? Isn't that crazy? It's a crazy thought. You think something, it's not actually, it's in your mind. Right, where it, you know, it's like, and then it transfers into your body. Well, I think, I don't know, Lewis, but I think, you know, we have a built-in stress response system, which we needed. Like if we were getting chased by a saber tooth tiger, well, you know, we need to get on a move. And we need to like - Run. Jack up our cortisol and pump our blood sugar up and get our blood pressure up and our heart rate up and flood our body with glucose and just all this stuff that needs to...

37:23Survive, yeah. It's like the story of how someone sees their kid under a car and can lift up a car. Why can that happen, right? Because we have the system built in to deal with acute stress. That's a good thing. The problem is we have a society and a life that drives chronic, unmitigated, unrelenting stress. So unless you are very clear about how to discharge that stress, because we can't avoid it, right? but how do you discharge it? How do you not react? And how do you have a different perception of relationship and what's happening to you? It's all about perception, right? So I always say stress is the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body.

37:59So it could be a real threat to your body, like a tiger chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your wife's cheating on you, but she's not. And you get the same physiology. Or you can have the same input, let's say you're James Bond, and I put a gun to your head versus Woody Allen, it's gonna be a very different set of responses, right? Same input, very different response. So that's the beauty of our minds is we have the power over our thoughts. You remember Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, he said, between stimulus and response, there's a pause.

38:30And in that pause lies a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom. For those of you who don't know about Viktor Frankl, he was in Auschwitz, and he was a psychiatrist in Auschwitz, and he chose not to let even the most horrific thing that's almost ever happened to human beings affect his own well-being and happiness and inner life. That just blows my mind, right? So when you think, oh, my life, this and that, we always have a choice, you know? And whether you have stuff or don't have stuff, it's all about our perceptions. So mindset and your thoughts are a key part of longevity and health. And having meaning and purpose.

39:07That was the other thing in these cultures. They had so much meaning and purpose. Like Carmine had such a purpose. He had to go and take care of his sheep and he had to feed his family and he wanted to support the other members of the community by giving them food, and he fed his animals the extra. And so he had a meaningful life, and he also had a very active mind, was reading books and learning all the time. So that extends your life up to seven years. Wow. Having meaning and purpose. Because you hear the story sometimes of like, you know, someone in their older years, their husband or their wife dies, and then within six months or a year later, they die.

39:43Or a week later, yeah. Or a week later, right? You hear that story often. All the time. And is that because their meaning has lost or just more they have a broken heart and they don't know how to overcome that? Both. I mean, there actually is a phenomena of a broken heart. I had a patient with this once who had this incredible wife. They were deeply in love. They were married for decades and decades. She got breast cancer and died. And he was relatively healthy and all of a sudden he went into heart failure. Come on. Like, boom. And it's in the medical literature. It's literally a broken heart and it causes actual clinical heart failure where your heart muscle can't pump the blood around.

40:18Now, that's from, what is that from? Is that from thinking and then feeling the heart, you know, the pain in your heart? Yeah, it's the physiological phenomena that happen when you have a stress response, the flood of all these stress molecules in your body that damages the heart.

40:37Let's say that you were able to give a five-step process for someone who's 30 pounds of belly fat or around there, 20 to 30 pounds of belly fat. And they were like, you know what? For once in my life, I want to get like at least a flat stomach. Yeah. Maybe it's not going to be super defined and under 8 % body fat, but 12 % body fat, roughly 10%. And I could get close. Sure. but everything we talked about from sleep to emotional stress to nutrition to we haven't talked about calories in calories out or lifting and things like that yet but from other things we talked about if you had to give a five you know bullet point process of like this would be the foundational steps to get you started on losing that 30 pounds of belly fat what would you say yeah i'd say and i've talked about this before step one very clear and defined breaks between meals, whether you are snacking or not.

41:37What I mean by that is rather than grazing throughout the day and constantly keeping insulin levels high, I find it much, people have much more success by having very clear defined gaps. So I don't care if you're fasting or not, but eat breakfast and have a very clear and defined break until lunch. Have a very clear and defined break until dinner. Allow yourself the ability for insulin levels to come back down, glucagon levels to come up so that you're actually getting into a fat burning process between these meals. Every time you're consuming something, you're kind of stopping that process for a little bit.

42:12Right? Even if your calories are, you know, yes, that comes into equation, but you need to have these peaks and valleys a little bit. Breaks between consumption. Yes. Now, can you consume water, teas, coffees, anything else? For sure. Anything zero calorie. I mean, it's... Zero calorie. Yeah, I think once you, and that's, people will naturally eat less doing that too. But I do think that we have to take little bits from the calories equation and little bits from carb insulin model and meld them together instead of having these two camps that are largely opposed. And that's where I say, hey, this seems like an equal, delicate, thoughtful acknowledgement of both sides.

42:47You're probably going to eat less by having these clear defined meals, but you're also taking into account letting insulin levels come back down nice and low, and you're not keeping them chronically elevated, which we know is not good either. So that's usually rule number one. Okay, step one. Step number two is very similar, but I say have a minimum like 12-hour break between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the day. So 12-hour fasting minimum. It's not really a fast, right? Sleep and don't eat after eight. Exactly. I feel like there's a reason why you get your blood work done after a 12-hour fast, right?

43:21Things tend to come back down to homeostasis. Give yourself a chance to get back down to this balance. months, there's a multitude of different reasons why it's beneficial. Insulin levels getting lower, insulin sensitivity getting much better, so the food that you do eat with breakfast is going to be much more able to be taken up and utilized, which leads into step three, breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a popper. So you're kind of tapering as the day goes on. So larger meals in the morning, if you're not fasting, which we'll talk about here later, If you're not fasting, having a larger meal in the morning is generally going to be better.

43:58And if you look at the research, it's very, very clear that people that have a larger breakfast end up eating smaller lunches and smaller dinners naturally. Because they feel satiated, right? And that doesn't mean that you go eat a box of Froot Loops or Cheerios for breakfast, right? And with that, I'll kind of dovetail into a slightly different piece that kind of coincides with that. There was a BMC medical genomics study that's probably one of my favorite studies. that demonstrated that you can have higher fat content in the morning because you end up starting the day with more insulin-sensitive muscles and less insulin-sensitive fat cells.

44:33What that means is you have less likelihood of storing fat as fat in the morning, and that way you start your day with higher fat, higher calorically dense meals. So maybe steak and eggs, something like that, without a bunch of hyperpalatable carbs, right? Something that's calorically dense. And then as the day goes on, taper calories. Carbohydrates are lower calorie than fats, even though they do spike your glucose and spike your insulin. It's okay to have those at night if you're not overdoing it. So a lot of times what I will do is I will have a higher fat breakfast. I will have something like steak and eggs for breakfast or usually like steak and like ground beef.

45:11I'm a big fan of like that Joe's scramble kind of thing that you do, right? With like a little bit of goat cheese, a little bit of feta, maybe some like mox, make it very Mediterranean. and that's pretty high fat, so it's calorically dense, right? It ends up being like 800 calories, right? Then as the day goes on, like a slightly smaller lunch, and if I am having carbohydrates, they're usually allocated to the evening time. That doesn't mean I'm having cakes and pies. It means maybe I'll have some lentils. Maybe I'll have something Mediterranean, right? Then that's gonna naturally be lower calorie because there's not as many fats in it.

45:43You know, I'm largely Mediterranean. I'm mostly Italian, so it's like I look back at that And like my grandmother was always kind of saying, like, she always had these light dinners, these little teeny dinners, right? It was just like, and you look at a lot of the Mediterranean cultures and with the exception of when they're having big feasts and stuff for special events, like a lot of times they are having really small dinners, right? And they're like shutting it down right after dinner. It's like, maybe they'll have a little bit of coffee or whatever it is they're having and then, you know, go right to sleep.

46:09Yeah. Which, and then when you go into step four is, you know, your diet should optimize your sleep, right? That's something that we kind of talked about in the beginning, but the best way that you can optimize your sleep without really digging super deep into what is stressing you out and causing this sort of internal battles that might be keeping you up, cutting your food out a few hours before bed is usually very, very powerful for people. And again, it nicely coincides with everything I'm talking about. If you're having those 12-hour breaks between dinner and breakfast, well, then the earlier you eat your dinner and cut it down, shut it down, the earlier you can eat breakfast the next day, right?

46:48If you stop eating dinner at 6 p.m., you're done eating, then by 6 a.m., you're good to eat again. And chances are you're not going to roll out of bed at 5.59 and immediately go eat at 6. You're probably going to naturally end up fasting longer. And you don't have to be a, quote-unquote, intermittent faster. You're naturally kind of getting into that category, right? Okay. And number five? And number five, and this is something that you pull the throttle on or hit the throttle on occasionally, right? You want to temporarily, like when it's time to really pull that lever, temporarily reduce fats and then bring them back up, right?

47:20So that's sort of my lever, right? If I'm following all four of these lifestyle principles and things are working but not working as fast as I want, what I will temporarily do is reduce fats out of the diet, even if I'm low carb. Okay, this sounds crazy, right? But then bring them back in once weight has started to come off. People forget that even if you're doing, and I'm largely a low carb guy, so I catch heat for saying this sometimes, but fats are still calorically dense. So it's the easiest lever to pull from a food volume standpoint to dramatically reduce calories really quick and then be able to bring them back.

47:56Because what you don't want to do is you don't want to have just this point where you're chronically restricting calories forever and ever and ever. And then the moment that you do come back up, your body's like, oh shoot, put the weight back on. Yeah, it's not fun. I actually think, and there's recent research to back this up, that keeping calories moderately high and then having aggressive short-term drops, like reducing fats and bringing calories low for a couple of days and then back up can actually be very, very effective, which is probably why fasting works so well for a lot of people that just do it at random.

48:28Like they'll just be like, I'm eating six days per week normal, and then I do a 24-hour fast once per week. It's great, because you're never letting your body get accustomed to this decline in calories. You're just like, status quo, status quo, whoa, what's going on? And then back up to normal. Who do you recommend fasting for, and who do you not recommend it for? I don't think there's many people that shouldn't do fasting to a certain degree, but there's a large degree of different kinds of fasting. There's 24-hour fasting, there's 16. Exactly. And a 16-hour fast, if you want to put the label on it, You can call yourself intermittent fasting, but there's a lot of people out there that are probably intermittent fasting that don't know they're intermittent fasting, right?

49:03So 16 hours is pretty, I think the benefits start at 16 hours. So someone doing a 16-8 fasting, that usually works, but the reason that that's working is for two simple reasons, caloric restriction and insulin being lower. Nothing magical is happening with a 16-hour fast, but when you start creeping over that 16-hour mark is when the benefits start to kick in. So I personally like I fast usually three days per week with like a 20 or 21 hour fast Like so I'm still eating like two meals and I just do it three days per week. So it's kind of intermittent I can't think of a lot of people that wouldn't have success doing that Because almost everyone that even thinks they wouldn't be able to do it They might get hungry the first couple of times then after that it's a cakewalk, you know It's not now people that have serious hypoglycemia issues.

49:50They should probably be conscious of it That being said, and full disclaimer, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a dietician, but even people that are dealing with hypoglycemia, a lot of times getting their bodies adjusted to periods of time without food is actually a good thing because it teaches their body to be able to utilize alternative fuel sources so they're not reliant on this undulation in glucose. There are certain people that if you're very, very, very, very active, then yeah, it might not work for you. like someone that's working crazy manual labor construction. I'm sure there's different situations, clinical conditions that people shouldn't fast.

50:27And those, yeah, defer to your doctor. But as far as general people, I can't really think of anyone that wouldn't get some benefit out of it. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well.

51:03Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.