Let's Say Hello

[00:03:21.590] – Coach Allan

Hey, Ras, how are you doing?

[00:03:23.580] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:25.420] – Coach Allan

I'm doing all right.

[00:03:26.680] – Rachel

Good.

[00:03:27.180] – Coach Allan

Tammy's back from her trip to the United States she brought our granddaughter with us. So she's here experience. She's been here before, but she's going to be here for practically, I guess a whole month with us over the summer, her summer break. And we'll spend some time with her. When I talk about being fit for task, it's like, okay, now it's got to be the active grandfather that can keep up with the 6th grader. So we'll see what she's up to. But to make sure she's having some fun, we got to get out and be active with her and get some things done. So that'll be fun.

[00:04:03.030] – Rachel

Awesome. That sounds great.

[00:04:04.900] – Coach Allan

How are things up there?

[00:04:06.390] – Rachel

Great. Mike and I just celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary.

[00:04:11.290] – Coach Allan

Congratulations.

[00:04:12.500] – Rachel

Thank you. And we did that doing things we love. We went camping over the weekend and we had a five K run where we were camping. So we had a really fun weekend.

[00:04:22.670] – Coach Allan

I am so proud of Mike for championing through this with what's going on in his life and the treatments and all that because a lot of people, they would use that as an excuse. And so I just tell Mike I said I'm just really proud that he's still out there doing things he loves and he's not letting this break him. I really have something special.

[00:04:46.560] – Rachel

Thank you. Just a quick reminder. Mike has kidney cancer and his chemo is kind of taking a toll on him. We were both signed up for the half marathon, so we technically downgraded to just the five K, but that's what we were doing. And we love being out there, we love being active and he is doing so good for the circumstances. So thank you. I will let him know.

[00:05:09.070] – Coach Allan

Okay. Well, he's a good example for what we're talking about here today. Mindset. So are you ready to have that conversation?

[00:05:15.960] – Rachel

Absolutely. Thanks.

Episode

Are your words sabotaging your health and fitness efforts?

I want to start today's conversation with a little story. This story happens to be about me. I was in my late thirty s and I was sitting on a beach in Puerto Vallarta. And the day before I had tried to play volleyball in the sand and failed miserably. I was so tired and so beat up from just one game that I had to sub out. And that was just not my story. It was not who I really thought I was. And at that point the thought came across to me that I was a fat bastard. Excuse the language, but it really was that I was doing great in my career, but I was hating life, I was hating myself. I was unfit, I was overweight, I was in a toxic relationship and I just really had no joy in my life. And I was losing my family. It was one of the low points of my life. And so I made this decision that I was going to change. And I even started a blog called fatbastard. And if you actually go search and you look up fatbaster.org, it'll actually take you to my current website for this podcast.

Cool. Interesting little fact. Yeah, it's a redirect, but I was sitting on the beach, and I kind of made the decision to do some things. And like most of us, I started on fire. And then I fizzled out. And maybe you can relate to that many times that maybe you've worked really hard and then ran out of energy, ran out of motivation, ran out of everything and eventually went right back to where you started. And what I want to try to go over is why that happens. And it all reflects around mindset and the words that we use and the way that we talk to ourselves, the thoughts that we have. All of these things are important. The mindset is really the driver of all of this. And by the end of this episode, I'm going to give you some tools to help you make sure that you don't fizzle out again. Because I know how that feels. I went through nearly a decade of starting and stopping, starting and stopping, getting further and further down that hole where I thought I was a fat bastard. It only got worse until I was able to turn it around.

And I want to help you turn it around, too. So the first kind of words that I want to talk about here are called absolutes. Okay? That includes words like never, always, can't, I'll never lose the weight. I'll never be able to do this thing. It always happens to me. Something always happens. The gym closes. Something like that always happens. And then examples of the can't is I can't do a squat. I can't use my legs properly to exercise, so I can't lose the weight. I can't exercise. I can't use my upper body. Now, some of these are injuries, and sometimes there's things we got to work through. But what I can tell you is absolutes are almost never true. They just aren't. Almost nothing in the world is absolute if you have the willpower and the staying power to do that. So the solution, what are the solutions that I came up with for absolutely. Well, the first one is whenever you catch yourself using or thinking the word never, always, or can't question it, question it big time. Like I said, those words are almost never true. So you do need to question yourself if you catch yourself using or thinking those words.

And then the next stage of this would be to introduce the term yet I will. So I have never been successful at surfing, yet I will be if I choose to surf. And so you can do that for just about any time you find yourself using one of these absolutes, put it in your head that there is a way, and you have to work your way to make it happen. So it hasn't happened yet, but it will. Okay, the next type of words that I want to talk about are called controlling words. And these are the words we use when we're trying to do something and we get into a situation where we're faced with an obstacle. So you're in the restaurant or you're out, and the guys say, Hey, let's go have a beer. And you're like, I can't, or I'm not allowed to. You've set these absolute rules for yourselves and for yourself, and then now you feel like you're being held back. You feel like it's unfair your friend can go have a beer and he's not worried about it. But if you go try to have a beer, you know you're going to break your code, you're going to break your diet, and then you'll be starting all over.

It's kind of the mindset of it. So you set these absolute controlling words, and for a lot of us, we rebel against those types of things. If I can't have something, I'm going to think about it all the time. So if I can't have the cake, I'm going to want the cake even more. So the solution for controlling words is to own it. Okay? You're in your health and fitness journey, and you have a mission, you have a goal, you have a target, you have a vision, a place you're going. And if these things that are there aren't going to get you there. Now, you made the choice. You made the choice to not drink the beer. You made the choice to not eat the cake. So instead of saying, I can't have cake or I'm not allowed to have cake on my diet, the simple word change is I choose not to, or you can say, It doesn't serve me. So no, in that way, you've now taken control of those controlling words. You're not letting the rules dictate your life. You put emphasis and intent behind your words. I choose not to. I choose not to have the cake.

I choose not to have the beer. And that can be a really empowering opportunity, and it's a very good indication that you own what you're trying to do, and you're much more likely to complete it. So if I said, hey, do you want to kiss that girl when you're married to somebody else? You wouldn't say, I can't, or I'm not allowed to. You would say, no, that's not me. That doesn't serve me. I'm in a relationship. I'm in this thing. So no, I don't want to do that. I choose not to do that. So there's a big difference there on how you use those controlling words and how either you're in control or the rule is the control. The next type of words I want to talk about are called enemy words. And these are where you use words like failed or you call yourself a failure. Words like stupid or idiot or you call yourself weak or you say something like I just really have bad willpower, I have weak willpower. You make those statements that are basically deriving yourself. And the solution to that? Well the funny solution to it is there's an episode of Bob Newhart, there was a show in the it's called Stop It and basically a woman comes in and has some phobias and fears and activities that she does and his answer is just stop it.

It's just hilarious. I don't know that it would be as funny for someone today because it seems a little insensitive to someone but if you're interested you can find that on YouTube. You can go to fortyplusfitnesspodcast. Comstop and that'll take you to a link to that YouTube video. It's about six minutes long and it's hilarious. It's one of my favorite clips from Bob Newhart and I think it's a favorite for a lot of people because it gets a lot of plays. So that is one solution. Obviously if you catch yourself using these words to talk about yourself just stop it. But there are other ways. One is I talked about the Slip to Success process last week. This is a way to do that. You forgive yourself, you recognize we're human. If we made a mistake we didn't fail. We got to learn from this and make it better. And so you can get that Slip to Success model is a little PDF guide that I did. You can go to 40 plusfitnesspodcast.com slip and that'll take you to that guide and it's a really interesting way to sit down and reframe the things that we do that are off plan.

But really the crux of all of this and particularly with the enemy words is you would never use these words to your best friend. If your best friend made a mistake you wouldn't be yelling at them idiot, you failed. You would never say that to them. You would never say that to another human being. Yet here we are saying it to ourselves or thinking it to ourselves. Now I'll admit that this is probably the one that gets me the most. I will do something silly and use something with forgetting or losing something and just be really upset that I misplaced something and I fall back into this little trap and I catch myself saying you idiot. And when it happens, it happens but I have to recover from it and then I have to remind myself I am my best friend, I have self love and that means I don't use those words communicating to myself. And so then that goes through the whole slip to Success process of forgiving myself, learning from my issue and planning for something different the next time and then putting into action. And the final bit of words that I want to talk about that can often fail us or make us mess up are these weak words.

We use these weak words to basically mark our mission, but I'll explain why they're weak words in a minute. They're words like resolution. In the new year, we make that resolution, we're going to lose that £30 this year, starting on January 1. We talk about motivation. Right now, we're motivated. We feel really good. Like I said, we start out on fire, and we fizzle out. We start talking about willpower. I got to work on my willpower. I only have so many decisions in me before decision fatigue causes me a problem. And then what happens is we fail. And when we do, we go back on the tried and true. Well, 90 some odd percent of people don't complete 30 years resolutions. So we're just normal. We can say, yeah, sometimes I lack the motivation to keep going. And we can just accept that people will understand that it's really hard to get motivated to stay on this keto diet, because it's really hard. So, yeah, I had a little bit of sugar, but I didn't really intend to have, and I fell out of ketosis. And then willpower everybody understands willpower is finite. And so our willpower doesn't hold up.

We just accept that. We accept these words. They're very weak words for doing what we want to do. So we counter strong, weak words with strong words. And the first strong word that I want to put out there is accountability. A lot of us will go into this journey not accountable to anybody. And so when I finally did decide I wanted to turn myself around, my accountability was to my daughter. I told her I wanted to do a tough mudder with her, and I didn't want to let her down. So that was a big driving factor to showing up, a big driving factor to changing my food, a big driving factor to everything that I was doing at that point in my life to get myself turned around. I had accountability. And then the other one, probably the strongest of words that I know is called commitment, okay? And when you are committed to something, change happens. Now, I want to finish that story of me, the fat bastard, and how I tried and I failed and I tried and I failed in almost eight years of stop and go and backtrack, stop, go backtrack, and just over and over, and I couldn't get it worked out.

So one morning I woke up. I was in a Malaysian hotel. I'm traveling a lot for work, and I was hungover. And I'm laying there, and I'm thinking, why am I right back here again? Why am I right back to being the fat bastard? And it occurred to me that every other thing that I did in my life that I'm really, really proud of everything that was really hard that I did, I was committed. I was committed to doing well in college. I was committed to doing well on the CPA exam. I was committed to my career when I did things, I didn't do anything halfway, particularly as it related to my career. And so I said, Well, I'm always committed to those things and I get them done. I don't fail and I very seldom even backtrack. So why was this different? And it wasn't. So it was no different for me to look at my life and say, if I want something bad enough, I will get it. And I hadn't committed yet. So that was the beginning of committing. And with the commitment I put in the effort, I made the changes.

And I can tell you, if you are committed and you have some accountability, all the weak words don't matter anymore. You're less likely to use the enemy words. The controlling words go away and the absolutes go away because you're committed to a task. You haven't done something, but you will. It's not that you can't do something, you choose not to. And the enemy words don't happen as often, particularly as you're going through that because you're being more successful, you're sticking with it. And then you don't have to worry about the weak words. You left those behind and you suck yourself to a strong word. And that's going to help drive you through this process of change. Change is hard and it requires commitment and it often requires accountability. So in summary, and the core thing I want you to take away from this episode is that words reflect your mindset, but they can also drive it. So it's really important for you to do the mindset stuff, get yourself settled in your head, because where your head goes, everything goes. So if you have a bad mindset, you're not going to complete the task, you're not going to make it where you want to be.

You've got to deal with mindset. And that's going to come from sometimes reversing it and making sure that the words you're using are the right words. And then they will drive your mindset, and then your mindset is reflected in your words. So you'll see this return on investment. You'll get better and easier at how you do things and things will just become a part of your lifestyle. And then there's no more can't, there's no more lacking motivation. They all just become natural to you. So the words that you want to avoid and deal with absolutes, because they're almost never true controlling words. And I'll tell you straight up, you are not weak. You're listening to this episode and you're still listening to this episode. You care about this. And I can tell you those words don't control you if you control them. Enemy words. Now, if you wouldn't talk to other people that way, stop talking to yourself that way. And then the weak words, don't let your words give you an excuse. Oh, well, it's resolution. I almost never do this resolution. This is the fifth year row that I've started on January 1 with a resolution and it always fails.

So don't allow weak words to be a part of who you are. So you want to start with commitment. You want to have self love. You want to be your own best friend. You want to forgive yourself when things don't go your way or you make a mistake. And you want to own your choices, they don't own you. And finally, find accountability that will help you keep this stuff on track and make sure that if you do slip up, it's much easier to get back up because there's someone there in your corner keeping you on task and watching out for you. So I hope you found this a good episode. I'm going to get on with Rachel here in a minute and we'll talk about this a little bit more. But thank you so much.

Post Show/Recap

[00:22:32.230] – Coach Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:22:33.620] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. This is my favorite topic. You're going to have to keep me under control today. I love talking about mindset.

[00:22:41.020] – Coach Allan

I have a hard stop in 20 minutes and, yes, we can talk for a lot longer than 20 more minutes, but what are some of your thoughts?

[00:22:51.190] – Rachel

Oh, my gosh. So many of these things I see every day. And I guess I'm going to skip right down to the enemy words and I see a lot of people that just don't say the kindest things to themselves. And I hear a lot of people say I'm fat and I can't and I'm lazy. And these are just kind of like waving the white flag of defeat before you even get started. And we are where we are today and we just need to figure out how to talk nicely and a little bit more motivated to ourselves to get going.

[00:23:29.530] – Coach Allan

Yeah. You know, you would never talk to your friends or family that way.

[00:23:37.810] – Rachel

Never!

[00:23:37.810] – Coach Allan

Your friend walks up to you and you say, oh, my God, you're fat. You look fat today. No, we would never say that. But we look at ourselves and we use that word talking to ourselves and that's where you have to stop it. I don't know if you watch that Bob Newhart, oh, gosh clip, I could watch it a thousand times. It's just hilarious. And, yes, maybe it would come off as a little mean, but if you need tough love to get you past what you're doing against yourself, then that's the way to do it. I prefer to do it in the self-love model. Be your own best friend and think of it in terms of the words used. When you find yourself doing that, you've got to stop and you've got to think. And then you've got to say, is this something coming out of love or is this something coming from a darker place?

[00:24:34.430] – Rachel

Right. Like what you said earlier, too, is you need to change the narrative. If you keep repeating these words, these hateful words to yourself, then they tend to get stuck. So what I like to do is I like to call my clients, athletes. You're my athlete. This is your training log for your activities. And I refer to them as athletes because I want them to think like an athlete.

[00:24:57.150] – Rachel

So they're going to think, well, what would an athlete eat? What would an athlete do for recovery? What should an athlete do about sleeping? And if you start to think forward in that way a little bit more positively, then you're giving yourself a little bit more self-love and a lot of grace, too.

[00:25:15.850] – Rachel

Just a few minutes ago, I said, Mike and I only did a 5K when we were supposed to do the half marathon. And that wasn't a very kind thing to say to myself. But a 5K is still a great thing to do, and we were trained and in good shape for a 5K. That's a very positive thing. So we just need to think and just a little bit.

[00:25:38.120] – Rachel

Changing that narrative, I think is a really important thing. Place to start.

[00:25:41.830] – Coach Allan

Yeah. What you're talking about? And I actually kind of picked this up from a business podcast I was listening to and I actually did an episode on it. It's called The Be Do Have Model. And so the Have is that you're an athlete. The Have is that you're a half marathoner or that you're fit for task. You're who you want to be.

[00:26:01.610] – Coach Allan

So you start with, Be that person.

[00:26:05.910] – Rachel

Right.

[00:26:06.510] – Coach Allan

So now it's like, okay, what does that person do? They get up and they run and they eat right. And they want to keep their body weight within a certain range because that's going to make it easier on their joints. And so the Do then is doing those things. So the Be Do Have is how you become the athlete that you want to be, the person you want to be.

[00:26:27.310] – Coach Allan

And so following that model of just saying, I have to think like them, then I have to act like them, and then I will be them.

[00:26:34.710] – Rachel

Yeah. You know, one of the other favorite words that I heard you speak was committed. The word committed, motivation is lacking. And right now we're in the middle of the summer. It's chaos. Our schedules are all out of focus with kids at home and vacation planning and all these things going on. It's just chaos.

[00:26:52.150] – Rachel

But when you're committed to your goals, you're going to get up in the morning and do your workout or your run or whatever your activity is, because you're committed to doing that. That's another good word to focus on.

[00:27:03.490] – Coach Allan

Yeah, that's the primary word. That's my favorite word when it comes to change, because change is hard. You're trying to rewire if you're working on mindset, you're trying to rewire 40, 50, 60 years of messaging. And sometimes that messaging was your messaging. But a lot of times, whether they meant it or not. People close to us said things that got stuck in our head.

[00:27:35.090] – Coach Allan

You're not good enough. You're looking a little out of shape. You hear these things and you internalize them. Now, I was a weirdo. Like you didn't know that.

[00:27:53.370] – Coach Allan

I grew up in an environment where saying bad things about someone became motivating to me. When someone told me I couldn't do something, I was ten times more likely to get it done. Not the first time, but the first time I was in football where there was actual tryouts, where you had to go in and earn your way on the team. I was cut. Okay. And you flash forward just three years later, and I'm one of the best athletes on the football field.

[00:28:28.660] – Rachel

Wow.

[00:28:29.530] – Coach Allan

And it was because that one coach said, we just don't think he can do it. Now, I had a lot of disadvantages at that time because of my age and my weight. I was underweight, so I weighed maybe 90 pounds, and I had to be on the 110 pound team. So every kid on that team outweighed me by about 20 pounds. And that's significant 20 pounds relative to 90 pounds. I was way underweight, I was way small, and I wasn't fit.

[00:29:00.690] – Coach Allan

And so I started getting more fit. I started working on being able to go longer and work harder and get stronger and was back on the football field. So for me, a lot of times, the words that would stop somebody are the exact words that would get me going. Then I responded that when I was in the army, when I was playing football, if someone told me I was not doing well enough, I just started doing better. But that came from being obstinate and stubborn and saying, “No, I'm not going to let you stop me.”

[00:29:31.980] – Coach Allan

But I find myself doing the same thing, and I don't find it motivating when the words are coming from me it doesn't work that way. I have to go at it for myself with self-love. But if someone tells me I'm letting the team down, I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, I'm going to work harder. But it doesn't work the same way for me. But these are things that were put in your head potentially decades ago.

[00:29:56.140] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:29:56.620] – Coach Allan

And so the rewiring on it is not a one and done thing. The self awareness journey of going through all this process and paying attention to it, the Slip-to-Success stuff that Be-Do-Have, all those things, those are tools to help us do the rewiring. But the rewiring is going to take some time and patience and effort. But it's so worth it, because when you get to that point where you don't refer to yourself as the Fat Bastard, everything kind of changes, because you know that you have the power to do this, and you start doing it. You start seeing it and living it and experiencing it.

[00:30:35.000] – Coach Allan

And I can tell you, crossing that finish line with my daughter at that first Tough Mudder was one of the best experiences of my entire life. And there's nothing that's ever going to take that memory away from me, that work that I did to get to that place, to be able to do that thing, and that experience.

[00:30:56.070] – Coach Allan

And so I think everybody deserves to have those moments, to have that joy in their life, for sure. And that's why I do what I do. I know that's why you do what you do.

[00:31:06.410] – Rachel

Exactly.

[00:31:07.070] – Coach Allan

And it's just this whole idea of if you're defeating yourself, you're depriving yourself of some of the most joyous moments of your entire life. And that's a shame, and it shouldn't be that way.

[00:31:22.570] – Coach Allan

So get a coach. If you need the accountability, get someone that's going to help you work through this mindset stuff. My programs, we spend so much time talking about mindset, they're like, well, what about the coaching? Other stuff I'm like, sure, send me a video of your movements. You want a new workout? Give you a new workout. That stuff is just easy. It just happens. If you do the work, you see the results.

[00:31:45.000] – Coach Allan

But to keep you from quitting, keep you on task, keep you doing the things that you need to do, you got to get your mindset right.

[00:31:54.390] – Rachel

Yep.

[00:31:54.390] – Coach Allan

It's all of it. It's 100%. I mean, people like to say 90% nutrition, start with mindset. The rest of it will just fall in place.

[00:32:04.740] – Rachel

It really does. Absolutely does. Yeah. Listen to how you talk to yourself. Change that narrative and take that challenge. Do something big. You got this. We can do it.

[00:32:14.730] – Coach Allan

All right, well, I think that's a good note to end on.

[00:32:17.510] – Rachel

Perfect.

[00:32:17.980] – Coach Allan

Rachel, all right, I'll see you next week. Okay?

[00:32:20.390] – Rachel

Take care.

[00:32:21.230] – Coach Allan

You too. Bye.

[00:32:22.260] – Rachel

Thanks.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
– Deb Scarlett	– Ken McQuade	– Margaret Bakalian
– Debbie Ralston	– John Dachauer	– Melissa Ball
– Eliza Lamb	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

How to shift into a higher gear with Delatorro McNeal

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:48.430] – Allan

Hey, Ras, how are things?

[00:02:50.330] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:52.050] – Allan

I'm doing all right. Just staying busy.

[00:02:56.230] – Rachel

That's good. Busy is good.

[00:02:58.070] – Allan

Yeah. A lot of moving parts, working with clients. I'd stopped for a little while, taking on new clients and had taken a break from that. I kept my old clients, I kept clients that have been around for a while, but I wasn't adding new clients. And so over the course of the last month, I've been adding new clients. And it's interesting because I was admittedly a little burned out when I took my break last time, but I'm finding this time that I'm much more energetic about it. And so I'm really excited to be bringing new clients on to the new program that I'm doing.

[00:03:33.170] – Allan

And six weeks actually feels right. I was doing twelve weeks and it was intense, and it was an intense twelve weeks. And then at one point I think I had eleven clients going through a twelve-week program all at the same time, and so it was just a little too much. So I think six weeks I can handle twelve and then take a break and see how things go.

[00:03:59.590] – Allan

This is working out really good and I'm loving the reactions and what's happening with the clients that are going through the program because they're seeing success and you think of six weeks, no, they're not seeing this crazy success from a standpoint. We're going to talk a little bit about measurement and how things look.

[00:04:20.970] – Allan

So no, they're not saying the scales like just falling off a cliff, but it's trending, it's going down, and that's important, and they say so. But what is more specific with this group as I'm going through at this time is their mindset shift. They're coming at this now with a can't lose attitude.

[00:04:43.600] – Rachel

Wow, that's great.

[00:04:45.210] – Allan

And you go through six weeks and have the confidence that what you're doing is working and that you can get this done, you'll get it done.

[00:04:52.730] – Rachel

Yeah. Well, they'll probably learn so much that they can carry forward, but that's great. Things are trending in the right direction.

[00:04:59.140] – Allan

Absolutely.

[00:05:00.250] – Rachel

That's fantastic.

[00:05:01.150] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:05:02.420] – Rachel

Oh, really wonderful. Mike and I just went on a backpacking trip over the weekend. We are testing our gear for our upcoming trip to Isle Royal, and it was a beautiful weekend. We did really well. Definitely hard backpacking with a lot of weight, something I haven't done in a while, but it was a great trip and just gorgeous. Michigan is beautiful right now in the summer.

[00:05:25.730] – Allan

Did you load your packs in such a way that they'll be about the same weight that they would be when you were going to do the longer.

[00:05:31.360] – Rachel

One or no, not yet. I feel like starting out we wanted to have a little bit lighter of a pack because once we're on Isle Royal, I imagine my pack will be in the 30ish pound range. And so I wore about 18 pounds, just enough for an overnight. But we still had the tent, the sleeping bag, the water purifier, the gear that we will take with us.

[00:05:54.820] – Rachel

So really what we would be adding to our pack later will be a couple of extra clothing items and a lot more food. We'll be on the island, I think five or six days, I really can't remember. And so we only did an overnight, so we only had two days worth of food, but everything worked spendedly. It was a great first outing, so we got a lot to look forward to.

[00:06:16.140] – Allan

Good. Yes. And last week we had Katie Gerber on, and she was talking. So it's kind of that thing get yourself ready for your pack, understand what your needs are, and then train physically and mentally. Train for it.

[00:06:29.900] – Rachel

Train, train, train. A great time.

[00:06:31.050] – Allan

Awesome. You ready to get into this week's episode?

[00:06:35.180] – Rachel

Sure.

Episode

So today I wanted to talk to you about a way of checking in with yourself, seeing how well you're doing and doing it in a way that's fun and gives you a big benefit. A lot of times when I've done ratings and things with my clients in the past, it was really hard to get to a point where they felt successful in their journey, and that typically was because we were measuring the wrong things. So today I want to talk about a new process that I've implemented with my clients called the MNS Temperature Check. And it's a culmination of several different things, several different people I've talked to over the years, and there's a little bit of behavior science built into this whole thing.

So hear me out. Here's how it goes. So typically when we're trying to determine how well we're doing on our health and fitness journey, we focus on results. Did the scale go down? Did my strength improve from workout to work out? But one of the problems with measuring results is we don't always have control over those results. You might be doing everything right. All your activities, all your efforts are exactly what you should be doing, but the scale doesn't move.

Or you go into the gym and your energy is just a little off. And so you're not quite as strong this workout as you were the last time. And it's nothing that you did wrong. It's just sometimes the results don't fully align with the effort and activity, and it's never a straight line. So that's often why we're seeing this. And then when we have objective measures, so we say, okay, did we do our workout today? It often gets to feeling like it's just a checkbox.

So my clients are like, did you do your workout today? Yes. No. It becomes very checkbox for some people. It doesn't really rate how well that workout went, how they felt about that workout. It's objective, did you do it or not? Yes or no? And this process can also lead to a very perfectionist role. Meaning if I wanted to work out four days per week and something came up this week and I didn't get that fourth workout in, did I fail? A lot of people will feel like they had not counting the fact that they had three great workouts, they look at that fourth and they think that they didn't get and they think they failed.

And many people will use this as an opportunity to fall off. They're looking for perfection. When we should be looking for is progress. So a few weeks ago, it's been a while, I had an interview with Alan Aragon, and he introduced a rating system in his book that was very subjective, and I really liked that and that's why I pulled it out in that interview. It's episode 541. You can hear a little bit about that there. Alan is fascinating.

And it's a really great book on eating for performance that I highly recommend. Probably the best book I've read this year so far. And with his subjective rating, one of the other key points he brought up was that you want to just make sure that you're in the high range, are pushing up into the high ranges most of the time. That's how we would measure success. So it's going to be much more subjective about how you feel about the things that you've done.

Now, I've done something like this in the past, and I used a traffic light, and I've seen that used in different masterminds and groups that I've been a part of over the years, and that can be pretty good. The problem I have with the traffic light, though, is what happens if you're not quite yellow and you're not quite green, and what happens if you're not quite read but you're not quite yellow. So you can see that that doesn't really give you much of a range to really project where you stand. And so it becomes this kind of, well, is it more red than yellow? Is it more green than yellow? You start having those kind of dialogues between the person coaching and the individual being coached.

So I came up with the idea of using temperatures, and the reason I like temperatures is a few different reasons, but it's a very broad range. And so if you're thinking in terms of the temperature from freezing all the way to boiling, it gives you a pretty good range, and it gives you an opportunity to just pick something that feels more like what you're feeling with regards to how you're doing. So how do we do this? What are we going to measure? Okay, well, what we want to measure with the MNS is movement, nutrition and self-care. Now, I believe if you're doing these three things well, then you're improving your health.

You just are. So obviously we know what movement is. That means that you're moving throughout the day, you're getting your exercises. And your training in nutrition means that overall, you're eating well, good quality food. It means that you're not eating too much, and it means that you're getting the nutrition that your body needs. Self-care includes a lot of different things. It includes your sleep, your stress management, social connections. Are you avoiding toxins and are you doing things that bring you joy? So there's a lot wrapped up in that word, self-care. But I didn't want this to be eight different things we're trying to measure. I broke it into the three core foundational things movement, nutrition, and self-care.

Let's take just a moment to go through how this MNS Temperature Check works. And I might change the name of that in the future, but this is just descriptive. So of course, M equals movement, N equals nutrition, and S equals self-care. Okay? These are going to be our foundations for wellness and longevity. So what we want to do is we want to periodically, typically, maybe like once a week, check-in with ourselves, how are we doing?

How do we feel? Okay? And I would encourage you to do this on paper rather than on a computer, maybe even a calendar. On episode 446, I had Tony Horton on and he recommended using a paper calendar, writing a red X each time you did your workout. And if you're seeing more X's on that sheet than you are blanks, then you're doing the right thing. And then what I would say is, if you're doing that, then at the end of the week, sit down and record your temperatures.

Now, one of the reasons I really like this process is because it really fits well with my Slip to Success model, where you're forgiving yourself, you're learning and planning and you're acting. And I'll get into the full process of all this in just a minute. But if you're interested in learning more about that Slip to Success process, I do have a guide that's free. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip and there you'll find a copy of that guy. It walks you through the thought process of Slip to Success. And it's part of the backbone of how this process that I put together works with my clients and now with myself.

It is a two-part process. The first part is measurement. The second part is to look forward next week or next period, however you're doing this.

So the first thing you do is you ask yourself how you feel about your week for each of the three foundations movement, nutrition, and self care. And then I want you to use the words that you use to describe temperature. So you could say freezing, you could say boiling, you could say cooking, you could say lukewarm, you could say chilly. Just the words that you like to use that aptly describe what that temperature is for you. If you're doing great, everything's wonderful, and you really feel happy about your success and how you're doing with this one thing, say nutrition, you had a great week. You might say boiling. If you're having a bad week, you missed a couple of workouts or your energy level and the way you approach the workouts just weren't really motivated to work hard. And, you know, you didn't really push yourself as hard as you should have. You might want to say that you're lukewarm or cold. And so you can use the words that you like to use that are going to give you a good feel for where you are.

Okay. And after you do that, try to provide a little bit of color of why you feel that way. Maybe I don't feel good about my workouts because I had a couple of obstacles, and instead of being able to go into the gym for an hour and a half, I really could only get in there for half an hour. So I did get a workout in, but it wasn't as good a workout as it would have been if I'd been able to stay in the gym a little bit longer. So I have obstacles. I have roadblocks, maybe Saboteur, my wife is in the United States right now, wedding planning. And so I have a little bit of double duty trying to run the gym, run this, run Lulu. And that kind of puts a lot of stress on when and what I can do. And then there's just the emotions. Sometimes you just go into the gym, and you're just not emotionally ready to do what you need to do. And so there are different things that can be going on, so you can kind of write those things down. So you have a little bit of color to why you said cold for your workouts, and you can have some color, why you feel really good about your nutrition, whole food, plant meals, and at least at that point, you know, okay, when I do these things, I get boiling.

When I don't, what do I get? And this is going to give you a lot of information that's going to help you moving forward. So at the end of each week or each period, however you want to break it up, you do a measurement, and you do it on a temperature scale, and then you kind of put a little bit of color to why was it the way it was. Then we get to part two of this process. Now, part two is where we ask ourselves, okay, based on what I know, what I see, what is one area of these three, that if I put a little bit more energy and effort, I could move the needle and move the needle a good bit. And so I would say, if you're already boiling on your fitness, keep doing what you're doing. And if you need to improve your nutrition, then that's the one. Maybe you had a lot of stress this week, and you need to do something about stress. That's your one thing, and I want you to limit it to one thing. And the reason is, this is going to be your big rock.

This is the one thing you know is going to move the needle the most for you. So this is where you want your intention for the week to be. You really want to apply effort to this. And if we try to do more than one thing at a time, we often dilute our effort across all those things and we're not quite as successful. So don't be trying to pick up all the big rocks. There might be a lot of them. But know which is the biggest rock. Know which one you know you can do. And that is the best one for you to do now. And then think through some actionable steps, some things that you can do, strategies and tactics that you can implement, they're going to help you do this better. So if my nutrition was off and I know because I've seen it in previous weeks, that batch cooking on Sunday makes me much more effective at maintaining and staying on plan, then I need to add batch cooking to my week. I need to make sure that I do that. If it means, okay, I need to go through the pantry and throw out some things that I really don't need and don't want in there, then I do that.

So write out some strategies and tactics, the things that are going to help you be successful as you go into this next week.

So I want to share a few key points about this. It's subjective and with it being subjective, it's going to rely on how you feel at point in time. So yes, recognize that you want to do this when you're clear headed, when you're not mad or angry or frustrated, but just sit down. And subjectively, objectively but subjectively, write down your temperatures, write down why you feel that way. And then write down what your plan is to go forward. This is going to require honesty. Now if you're checking with me as a coach, I need you to be honest. I need you to be honest with yourself and I need you to be honest with me. But if you're doing this, check-in for yourself, then you need to be honest with yourself. Because if you're lying to yourself, you're not going to get very far. And then what this does, this process builds self-awareness. Why did I have a cold week? Because this happened. Because I did that. Because I didn't do that.

This builds self-awareness for you to understand what the obstacles are, the things you may be do to sabotage your own trip. And so this self-awareness is part of a reiterate process of do, learn, improve over time. So we're going to do what we do. We're going to learn from our mistakes. We're going to learn from our successes as well. And it's all going to be recorded as you go through this process each week. And it's quick. This is not like you have to sit down and get on a scale and pull out tape measures and then go get a blood test. It's just a quick sit down. This whole exercise shouldn't take more than a few minutes. And as you get better at it, you'll sit down and just be able to say, okay, I'm cold and nutrition. I'm cooking with my movement and I'm say Lukewarm with my self-care. My plan for the next week batch cooks so I can get my nutrition back on track. Avoid going to the restaurants because I'm more likely to order a beer at a restaurant than I am if I stay home. So just recognize it's very quick.

You can get that done in just a few minutes.
So to summarize this MNS Temperature Check Process, you're looking at movement, nutrition, and self-care. These are the three foundations of wellness and longevity.

There are two parts and each is just a quick thought exercise, very quick. You take a look back and you assess your temperature on movement, nutrition and self-care using the words that you like to use that give you a good feeling that you're understanding where you are. And then you want to look forward. What do we learn from this? What can we do next week to make our intentions and make sure that we're doing something a little better?

And then we get that incremental improvement because we implement a new strategy or a new tactic and we see incremental improvement. And as you get going on this, you'll notice that if you're doing all of these things the way that it's intended, the temperatures should start to go up. Now. Can they go down? Yes. We can have a bad week. We can have a bad day. Stuff happens, life happens. And so we can't rate ourselves and think that we're always going to be cooking and always going to be boiling, but we can do the best we can do.

And so in the example where I said I only got three of the four workouts I intended to do, three out of four is actually pretty good. You could give that a good warm temperature and feel good. You've done something. You're not just saying yes or no. I failed. I passed. This is a good way to say three-quarters of the time I did. Well, that's pretty darn warm, so bordering on hot. And you can give yourself that rating and understanding what you're doing. So I did put together a little worksheet for this to walk you through it. It's the 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/mns and that'll pull up a guy. Now, I said to record this on the calendar, but I think when you first get started, it might be nice to have this worksheet so it will walk you through the process. You won't need this worksheet forever because you'll start to remember how to do it. But it's good to have it written down. And then as you go through and look at the words that are changing, again, having a record of this is going to really help you.

Also, again, if you don't remember the slip to success, you can get that guide. I'm going to have these links in the show notes for this episode, that's 40Plus FitnessPodcast.com/545.

I hope you enjoyed this. It's a new way that I'm checking in with my clients, and I'm really enjoying it because it's starting really good dialogues about why we feel the way we feel about our journey and what we can do to improve with a solid plan for the upcoming week. So I hope that works out for you. Let me know. You can comment on this, or you can join us in the Facebook group at 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/group. I'd love to see how you're using this and what results you're getting. Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:24:00.870] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:24:02.260] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. I love your new measurement about taking a temperature check and checking in with yourself. I think this is a really great tool for people to use.

[00:24:12.750] – Allan

Yeah, it's funny. Little bits and pieces of this came to me over time, like the interview with Tony and having something visual in front of you all the time so you can kind of see the things that you're doing. Right.

[00:24:26.670] – Allan

And then talking to Alan Aragon and getting into the way he was going about this, people checking in and doing it, and I was thinking, okay, well, one, I want to cover the core things because you can overmeasure. Right. You waste a lot of time doing this and thinking through it and numbers and all that.

[00:24:48.730] – Allan

And then I also went and said, okay, well and I know that we did stoplights. I have one group. I'm still part of their mastermind, and they do stop lights every week. And I'm like, I'm puke yellow. Okay. A little bit of green in there.

[00:25:05.310] – Rachel

Oh no!

[00:25:05.310] – Allan

But no, so I want a little bit more granularity there so that someone can do that. And then the practice of the words and knowing that okay. The words we use are really important. In fact, I think the next solo episode I do, which I'm not absolutely certain, but might actually be next week, will be about that, about what are the words we're using when we're talking about ourselves.

[00:25:33.760] – Allan

We're talking about health and fitness and what you might find over time. And I'll see how this plays out, but you might actually start looking up new words to say hot. You might spell it a little differently, like H-A-W-T when you're really feeling hot.

[00:25:53.590] – Allan

So this can be fun. And the other side of it is to realize that self-reflection, self-assessment is not meant to be a punishment. It's meant to be a learning opportunity. And if you can make it fun and exciting for yourself to say, okay, I want to come up with a new word for what I'm doing here.

[00:26:11.310] – Allan

And you mentioned something earlier on the call when we're talking about this being a learning experience, is that you're not just learning from your failures.

[00:26:19.950] – Rachel

Right.

[00:26:20.570] – Allan

You're learning from your successes.

[00:26:22.460] – Rachel

Absolutely, yeah. When I work with my clients, I have a really detailed training log. I give them. And when they do a workout, hill repeats or speed drills or something, I want them to write details on there. How was that workout? Was it hard? Do your legs feel heavy? How did you feel afterwards?

[00:26:39.730] – Rachel

Because most of the time, even though hill repats are super hard, you feel really strong after that. And then after a couple of weeks of training, after doing that repeatedly, you're advancing from maybe four or five times up a hill to six or eight times up a hill, and you're still feeling really hard. And it's a challenge, but you're feeling even stronger.

[00:26:59.540] – Rachel

And as you look back over your entire training log, you can see the progress you made a lot easier. And maybe not day to day or week to week, but you do see it, and you feel so much stronger for having accomplished all these things. And then that propels you even forward. It gives you a lot of confidence to tackle the next big challenge.

[00:27:17.790] – Allan

Yeah. And I think that's really important for people to recognize that self-awareness is a key component to change. And when you start recognizing that things are working, then you can double down on those. And when things are not working, then you can drop them, and you can try something else. Come up with a different strategy. Use a different tactic.

[00:27:40.090] – Allan

If you're doing a certain exercise and I'll tell you you're doing a certain exercise and it hurts, stop. Okay. Yeah, you're supposed to feel the muscle working, but you're not supposed to injure yourself doing exercise. And so we stop. So that's feedback. Okay. When I do upright rows, my shoulder hurts. Guess what I don't do anymore.

[00:28:01.810] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:28:02.340] – Allan

And I actually cringe every time I see somebody in the gym doing it because I'm like, that's how you tear a rotator cuff. Just recognize that we have all this information from everything we do and journaling or like I said, putting it on a calendar is Tony recommended with the Xs. And I recommend doing this because you can literally look across the month and say, wow, I had an awesome June. Look at that June.

[00:28:29.366] – Rachel

Right? Yeah.

[00:28:29.870] – Allan

All those hots and warms. And I compare that to May, and May was lukewarm and cold, and now I'm getting a lot more hots, and I'm getting a lot stronger, and my body weight is going down. And then I notice if I start recording a few lower ranges, that, okay, something's changed. I've got to diagnose that, and I've got to do something different.

[00:28:56.530] – Rachel

Yeah, well, like, you even mentioned the self-care aspect of it. If you're not getting a lot of sleep or if you're on vacation and not eating your right foods, then you may not perform quite as well. But all of this works together. And if you can pay attention to all these little details together, then it would make sense. If you're not hitting the marks that used to hit anything, and you have to give yourself some grace there.

[00:29:19.070] – Rachel

If you're on vacation and you're not sleeping well and not eating well, you know what you're having vacation. That's important for self-care. That's a hot spot right there. That's hot. Even though your movement may not be.

[00:29:31.150] – Allan

Yeah. And that's kind of the key. I did put the Slip to Success as a part of this discussion because I really want to put forward that this is your opportunity to use this for learning. So you can go I did an episode. You can go to the podcast page, 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/podcast, and you can look up Slip to Success and probably find that episode. But I do have the guide, so you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip and get the Slip to Success Guide. It's not a huge thing. It's a one-page PDF to walk you through the process.

[00:30:05.060] – Allan

And then as you're working through your temperature check, I have a Worksheet 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/mns, and you can just download that worksheet and use that for your starter to understand how the process works for you, get comfortable with it, and then you probably won't need that worksheet. After that, I'd encourage you to consider doing it on a calendar. Or you can just print out a bunch of worksheets and just put them in a binder and do your weekly check-ins or however frequently makes the most sense for you. Every four days, once a week, whatever you feel is a good reminder for you to sit down and tweak things on your go forward.

[00:30:43.520] – Allan

So take the lessons learned and move forward with that is really important.

[00:30:48.640] – Rachel

Yes, download. That would be great.

[00:30:50.990] – Allan

All right. Well, Rachel, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:30:53.540] – Rachel

Awesome. Take care.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
– Deb Scarlett	– Ken McQuade	– Margaret Bakalian
– Debbie Ralston	– John Dachauer	– Melissa Ball
– Eliza Lamb	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

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Let's Say Hello

[00:03:00.010] – Allan

Hey, Ras, how are things?

[00:03:01.640] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:03.540] – Allan

I'm doing okay. Yeah? Doing all right.

[00:03:06.420] – Rachel

Good.

[00:03:08.110] – Allan

Well, that's good. Good to hear.

[00:03:10.470] – Allan

Well, we're into the low season, and so what happens is we have all this blank time at Lula's, so you're looking at just day after day after day of no people here. Now, that could sound great to somebody, but it's revenue. We got to pay the bills. We still have employees. We still have electricity. We still have things we got to do. And so there was nobody, like, no bookings at all. I was really only on one listing agent out there besides ourselves. So you can come directly to our website to book. But we're then connected into we were connected into one other, what they call Ota, which is just someone who sells your rooms for a commission, and we run one, and they dried up, so we weren't getting any up from them either. And so I've been working since we opened to try to get on these other places, and they just weren't happening. And I was like, I just don't understand. I do what I'm told to do, and then nothing happens. And so I managed over the course of the last three weeks to get on two of the other ones.

[00:04:22.150] – Rachel

Good.

[00:04:23.410] – Allan

And that's helped. A lot of bookings are coming in through those two other sources, one in particular, and then there's one other source that I wanted to be on. And when I first tried to start doing this, like I said, this was back November. I'm trying to get on this one, and we had already had it was already an account, and so I was just trying to access the account, and things were a little backwards for them because to ask for help, you have to log in. Well, I didn't have the login criteria.

[00:04:52.350] – Rachel

Oh, no.

[00:04:53.200] – Allan

I couldn't log in. Okay. And because I couldn't log in, I couldn't get to their extranet to ask for help, and there's no external email or anything to contact them at all. There's no way to reset the password. There's no way to do anything else on that site, and so you're just completely locked out. So I created a new site. I'm like, I created a new website, another one, like a whole new start all over. So there won't be any reviews on that and all that. And that's fine. We'll work that out. But I go to set it up, and they're like, we want to confirm your address.

[00:05:27.920] – Allan

So they want to mail me something. Well, we don't get mail here. You can't physically mail something to me. You can mail it to a US. Address, but that's not going to confirm that I'm at a physical address. So then they want to do it online, and I've been going back and forth. They're like, Are you on airbnb? Send your listing stuff, and we'll confirm you. I sent it, and I got nothing. And then they sent again, and they say, Okay, well, we can get on a zoom call with you. I'm like, Cool. So I go to book the zoom call, and then it comes back with this, okay, your appointment is set. It's going to be on Google Meet, but there's no link to the Google Meet. I email the woman, I'm like, I didn't get a link. I didn't get a code or nothing. And we're supposed to be on the call. It didn't happen. And so I booked another one right after it on the same thing. And again, it never sends me a link to the meeting, and she's not responding to emails. So I've been working on this for months, months and months and months, seven months going on now.

[00:06:27.560] – Allan

And just this one place I can't I'm not going to say their name out loud, but one of them that I was trying to get on because it's one of the bigger ones, they're not equipped to help.

[00:06:39.490] – Rachel

That is so bizarre. Crazy thing.

[00:06:43.550] – Allan

So that's my morning frustration supposing to have someone get on a Google call with me so I can confirm that we are who we say we are, where we are. And yes, that fell through. And still she's not responding to my emails. And I'm like, I don't understand.

[00:07:01.810] – Rachel

No. Terrible customer service.

[00:07:04.380] – Allan

It is, but we are on those other bookings, and so if you're looking for a vacation spot, come on down to Bocas Del Toro. We've got rooms.

[00:07:14.590] – Rachel

Awesome. Yeah, that sounds great.

[00:07:18.100] – Allan

So how are things up there?

[00:07:21.190] – Rachel

100% things are great. I've had a really rough spring with allergies just to pick up mano, and I haven't been running for about a month because of the mano and the fatigue, but now I feel I'm back to normal out there walking the trails and enjoying some time outside. So I'm feeling really good outside doesn't want to kill me right now.

[00:07:41.290] – Allan

Outside, doesn't want to kill me right now.

[00:07:43.780] – Rachel

Not now, anyway.

[00:07:45.910] – Allan

All right.

[00:07:46.660] – Rachel

Feeling great.

[00:07:47.890] – Allan

I guess that's just one of the odd things I really have never suffered with allergies. And I lived in Austin, and I'll tell you, you moved to Austin, and you may not have these problems before you moved to Austin, but almost everybody who lives in Austin develops allergies.

[00:08:05.860] – Rachel

Wow.

[00:08:06.380] – Allan

Fortunate. I never did, but I was only there for about three years, so maybe I just missed it, but yeah, unfortunate. And then here in the jungle, nothing.

[00:08:17.500] – Rachel

That's awesome. That's really good. I didn't have these problems in Florida. When I lived in Florida, it was not nearly this bad, but the trees on my property here, I'm pretty much allergic to most of them. It's just my poor planning on taking notice of the wildlife in my area.

[00:08:36.670] – Allan

Okay, well, I hope that things are good and that things are not trying to kill you and you can get back out to your running.

[00:08:42.920] – Rachel

Thank you.

[00:08:44.770] – Allan

All right, are you ready to talk to Katie?

[00:08:47.300] – Rachel

Yes.

[00:08:48.210] – Allan

All right.

Interview

[00:09:30.910] – Allan

Katie, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:09:33.850] – Katie

Hi, thanks for having me.

[00:09:35.630] – Allan

Now, your book is called Adventure Ready: A Hiker's Guide to Planning, Training, and Resiliency. And I have clients that hike and love hiking. I actually have one. He does a lot of day hiking, and then I just got a client and his aspiration is to do Appalachian Trail. He'll be 65, so he said he's going to break that into sections. And so I think when people think of hiking, because I know, like, here on the island or on the different islands they'll put together hikes, there's a hiking group. I'm a member, although they tend to plan a hike, like, they'll email today for a hike they're going to do tomorrow. And I'm like, I didn't have time to plan. I didn't have time to schedule. And no, I can't make that one. So a lot of them work that way. But these are hikes through the jungle, and they're usually a few hours, like half day things. But hiking is really kind of this diverse sport, if you will. I mean, similar to running where you could just do a 5K or you can do a marathon or you can do an ultra marathon or even take it further, some 100 miles multiple days in a row.

[00:10:50.410] – Allan

Can you talk about hiking and kind of some of those variables that maybe we haven't heard about so we can get an idea of where we're going with this?

[00:10:59.290] – Katie

Sure, yeah, that was a great analogy with running. Like, there are many ways to engage with hiking and backpacking and this whole world of through hiking, which is something that my book speaks to. And so with day hiking, that's what you're talking about. Like, you have that local group that does a lot of day hikes. So that's essentially just anytime you're getting out for the day, not sleeping out overnight, it could be a couple of miles, or for some people, it could be like a 30 miles day. It could be a day hike. It's a big day hike, but it could be a day hike. And then there are these long trails that usually referring to there's a debate about what a long trail is, but it was like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail, anything that's usually like 100 or so miles or more, anywhere up to a couple of thousand. The Continental Divide Trail is 2800 miles, and there are different ways to hike that type of trail, to backpack that trail. Essentially, you could do it in sections. So some people will hike like a couple of sections each year and eventually what we call a thru-hike, which is to hike the entire trail.

[00:12:05.900] – Katie

They will thru-hike it over maybe a decade or something by adding up sections. Or there's some people who like to go out and to hike the entire thing in one season. So maybe they start like the Appalachian Trail, for instance, that you're talking about your client. Maybe they'll start in late April in Georgia, one of the terminus, the southern terminus, the Appalachian Trail, and hike all the way north up to Maine, the northern terminus, in one season. So that's 2200 miles. So yeah, there's a lot of different ways to engage in hiking and backpacking kind of depending on your life and how deep you want to go.

[00:12:39.880] – Allan

Yeah. And if you're doing over 2000 miles and you go the wrong direction, even a step, that's no problem,

[00:12:47.090] – Katie

you don't want to do it.

[00:12:51.650] – Allan

You had some great stories in the book about exactly that, especially when you're talking about the Orientating and back before GPS were really popular and you're looking at a map and you say, well, that's that ridge and you start walking that direction only to find that no, the next ridge that you were looking for isn't there. So you got to turn around and go back to where you were.

[00:13:10.390] – Katie

Yeah, it's the worst. It's the worst feeling. Exactly. Especially when you're on like a 2000 miles hike, even missing a trail junction by a mile and having to backtrack you're just like, no. Yeah, that's why learning the navigational skill set can be really helpful.

[00:13:25.220] – Allan

And you do really good job. I was in the military and had do a good bit of that myself before the days of GPS, the compass and the map of your friends if you learn and practice and I think that was one of the key things you talk about in the book is this is a skill that requires practice. You help us with that. Now, one of the things you put in there and I love it because I live on an island in the Caribbean and so people bring things here and they leave them. The locals are kind of the worst, but people will go out and they will make a trail less likable, less fun. And we actually, because some of the stuff is private property, we've had owners just say, no, you can't come on my property anymore because of this. But you talk about the seven principles of Leave no trace. Can you go through those? Because I think it's really important when we're doing these things to make sure that we're doing them responsibly. So just to give people food for thought, if they're going to get out of nature, which is what you need to do, you should be out in nature. What's the protocols or etiquette we need to follow?

[00:14:30.030] – Katie

Absolutely. Yeah. And I appreciate that you're bringing this up? Because I think any of us who are going to spend time in the outdoors should be aware of these principles because we just want to leave as little impact as possible out there so everyone can continue to enjoy it. Essentially, there are these seven leave no trace principles that we talk about in the book, and obviously we didn't develop these, where there's a center called leave no trace center for outdoor ethics. Essentially, these principles are designed to minimize our impact on the outdoors, help us be good stewards of the land that we're walking through. And so these principles are designed mostly for backcountry use, but they can be used anywhere, like you said, in a local park or on your trails, out behind your house or anything like that. Sure, I'll briefly go through them, and we can talk a little bit about each of them. So the first one is to plan ahead and prepare. So by planning ahead, essentially, like individuals who are going out or groups that are going out can be better set up to stay safe and then to practice these leaving a trace principles.

[00:15:28.950] – Katie

So, for example, if an inexperienced user goes out into that country, maybe in the sierras, and they don't know that there's a fire ban there, because in the southwest, where I live in Colorado and then west of me, we have very severe wildfire problems in the summer. So if someone doesn't know there's a fire ban and they only brought food that can be cooked over a campfire, then they're almost like forced to start a campfire where they shouldn't be starting one. Or maybe if someone doesn't plan a trip properly and they don't know what the trail is going to be like, and it's more rigorous than they expect, and they have to camp in a place that's ideal, then they could be damaging some of the fragile surfaces, for example. So that's why planning ahead and preparing as the first step is so that you can be a better practitioner of these leaf and trace principles. So travel and camp on durable surfaces is the second one. So durable surfaces would be anything like sand, rock, ice, snow, anything that can withstand impact. Some vegetation can, some can't. And examples of nondurable surfaces would be like cryptobiotic soil, which is a type of living soil in the desert that prevents erosion.

[00:16:39.110] – Katie

Delicate alpine tundra would be another one, like wet meadows where you trample the grass and it doesn't bounce back easily. So just knowing, like, what are durable surfaces, what aren't durable surfaces, traveling on trail where you can and if you're traveling in a group, knowing how to minimize your impact on those non durable surfaces, essentially knowing where you can camp where you're not going to cause further impact and just how to go about that. And then the third one is disposable waste properly. That refers to, of course, packing out your trash. A lot of people may have heard the phrase pack it in, pack it out but it also refers to human waste which in many cases like in a river quarter should also be packed out or if you're like in a fragile alpine environment it should also be packed out or if you're going to barrier waste like which digging a cathole is sort of the way that the accepted practice to go about that to know that you have to take it deep enough 200ft from water, away from high use areas, away from game trails and places that animals are going to use regularly and then packing out your teepee in some places where it's like moist and hot and it's going to break down, that's fine, it'll probably degrade but in a lot of places especially again where I live where it's dry or if you're in the alpine and it's just not going to break down because there's not enough heat and there's not enough moisture, just pack it out and knowing the best practices around that and one other part of that whole topic of it's not really disposing of waste but it kind of goes under.

[00:18:10.720] – Katie

This is like not putting soap into the waterways. A lot of people like oh well it's a biodegradable soap, I can use it in the waterway but we don't want to do that as well. So it's part of that leave no trace ethic. The fourth one is leave what you find which is pretty straightforward. It's like any we go out there because we all want to see these beautiful flowers or beautiful we find beautiful rocks or like when I was in Utah guiding last month we were finding artifacts like old arrowheads and things like that and it's so tempting for people like oh I want to take this home and I want to show it to people, it's so cool. But part of leave no choice ethics is just leave what you find. Other people want to enjoy it as well. And then another part of that is to avoid landscaping an area with like fire rings or log chairs or things like that avoiding like moving things around too much in an area or if you do naturalizing it again before you leave the area. Minimizing campfire impacts is principle number five. Again I mentioned fire ban so knowing when and where fire bands are in effect if you are allowed to build a fire in an area knowing whether it's going to cause potential damage to that country there looking around knowing is there sufficient firewood that I'm not going to further impact the area.

[00:19:26.600] – Katie

Like will removal of this firewood be noticed? I mean understanding how to minimize the impact if you do build a fire, like if you build a fire ring you should build it in a ring if the one exists you should dismantle the ring if it doesn't exist and there are other methods to building campfires that you can minimize your impact. Respecting wildlife is principle number six. So that's just like keeping your distance, not being too intrusive. I think we've all seen those national park photos where people are having their cameras and they're right up in the moose's face or, like, way too close to the bison or the bears, and it's obviously stressing the animal out. And so it's like, we want to avoid that. We don't even want them to know of our presence unless we're trying to just sort of gently spook them away so that we can pass through a trail. But it also means not camping too close to a water source where we might be scaring the animal away from coming to the water source, not camping right on top of a game trail where we might interrupt their travel to and from where they're trying to go.

[00:20:28.920] – Katie

So, yeah, just generally being respectful of the wildlife. We're in their home, so we want to be respectful. We would being a house guest in someone else's home, and then the 7th one is being considered by other visitors. We're all trying to be out there enjoying nature. And so I think just being cognizant of what you're doing, like using your headphones instead of playing music loudly through a speaker, which might disrupt other people or disrupt the wildlife or keeping your dog leashed or just sharing the trail with other users, whether those are pedestrians or equestrians or bicyclists or whatever it is, just being thoughtful of other people so we can all enjoy the outdoors. And if you want to learn more, is this lnt.org is the place to go to really get all the details on that.

[00:21:16.890] – Allan

LNT for leavenotrace.org? Okay, cool. All right. Now it's the end of June, and so for most of the places that people would be either hiking or training, because that's the other side of it, is if you're going to start your hike next April to do the Appalachian Trail, for example, you're training now, so you're getting out and training. And one of the things that happens for a lot of us is we're trying to push ourselves because, again, we're carrying a pack. That pack could be over 40 lbs, maybe 50 lbs sometimes when you first start with the food and you're in the heat. So you've got to train your body to do that. We're going to talk about conditioning in a minute, but one of the things that hits a lot of us is just the heat and all those things that can happen with regards to illnesses, heat illnesses. So we're talking about heat exhaustion, heat stroke. Can you kind of talk us through what we should be looking for as far as symptoms, that the heat starting to really be a problem for us and what we should do about it?

[00:22:16.410] – Katie

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely something valuable to be aware of. So, yeah, as you were just saying, these heat illnesses can occur essentially like on a spectrum, there's a progression. So there's heat rash and heat cramping which most of us are familiar with, like from exercising outdoors and heat, those are pretty common and can be prevented and treated by consuming adequate water and salt and cooling off and resting in the shade. And then as you mentioned, there's more serious forms of that. If those aren't treated, that would progress to heat exhaustion and then to heat stroke. These also result from exercising in the heat and the humidity, not consuming enough water, salt and they can essentially cause the body temperature to rise above critical levels. So prevention is best. So if we can stay hydrated, consume electrolytes, pay attention to when we're starting to overheat and we can rest and not try to, we are pushing ourselves, but maybe try to not push ourselves beyond what is comfortable in the heat or at least just paying attention to our own body and what's going on in there. So you're asking about symptoms. So heavy sweating, muscle cramping when you start to get a headache.

[00:23:34.830] – Katie

Nausea is a big one that I've seen before. If you're starting to get nauseous, dizzy, of course fainting is a pretty obvious symptom. Pulse can change, either become really rapid or really weak. So when you're starting to see any of those changes, there should be like red flags. Like hey, it's time to slow down, find some shade, cool off immediately, whether by putting cold water on the skin, any way that you can cool down, replace some of those fluids in the body, take some electrolytes if you haven't been taking in any salt or anything like that. And then if you don't treat that, that can progress to that heat stroke which is a medical emergency. So if it progresses to that point and that's a temperature greater than 103. And some of the symptoms would be that you stop sweating, actually you start to get slurred speech and essentially there's any changes in consciousness, that's when you need medical help. And so hopefully you're carrying some sort of either a cell phone or an inreach device which is like a satellite communication device that you can get yourself help.

[00:24:36.590] – Allan

Or you're traveling with a hiking buddy. And so this is something also if you notice that your hiking buddy is getting confused, they've stopped sweating, start asking them a couple of questions that they should be able to answer and if they really start struggling with those types of things, it's time to call it quits and get that person some help. okay. So yes, we need to condition ourselves for this stuff. And you start thinking, how does one go about training for a 2000 miles plus hike? And it kind of brings me back to my marathon days and the way we would say it was you either feel the pain before you do the run or you're going to feel it after you do the run, but this you're going to feel it during because this is not just a one day thing. And the phrase you use in the book, which I like, is to hike yourself into shape. And some people can and do that, but it's going to make for a very unpleasant first few weeks. Can you talk about how someone could go about planning and conditioning program? You have some in the book.

[00:25:41.090] – Allan

I don't have to give all the way the stretching and all of this stuff. We're going to talk about that's in the book, but it just gives us an overview of how someone can look at planning their conditioning so they're ready. Like my client that wants to be able to do this in a few years, he wants to start conditioning himself for it. What should he be considering and how should he be going about this?

[00:26:02.090] – Katie

Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, it's a great idea. So you can hike yourself into shape. So some people, they're kind of different schools of thought. Some people are like, oh, you don't have to do any training ahead of time. You'll hit the trail and just walking every day, you're going to hike into shape. And it's like, yeah, that's true in some cases, but you're going to be a lot more prone to overuse injuries and just to not completing the goal that you set out to do. So of course, I and my co-author Heather, are big proponents of physically training yourself to be ready for that hike. And I think the longer out you can start, the better because that way you're not going to be tempted to ramp up too quickly. So that's one of the principles that we talk about with training, is building a training plan for yourself where you're balancing cardiovascular training, strength and mobility exercises and rest, of course, because that's an important part of a training plan, as well as giving yourself your body enough time to adapt to the stressors from exercise that you're actually strengthening building muscle and not like just wearing yourself down.

[00:27:04.100] – Katie

So, yeah, the training plans, we essentially talk about how to build your own individual training plan. And we go through some exercises in there where you can test yourself for muscle weaknesses. So that's one aspect of it is doing different tests on your own body so you can determine if you have places where you used to get injured a lot. We're going to invite you to focus extra strengthening effort in that area, whether through different exercises, whether that's through doing lunges or toe raises or calf raises or things like that. So figuring out where your personal weaknesses are and then building a plan that builds your endurance by slowly building up the miles, gradually including enough rest days in there. And we talk about a protocol for how to figure out where to start because it depends. Are you starting from the couch are you starting from someone who is already relatively in shape. So we kind of talk about how to build those miles gradually and what to start with and how to build up. And then including those strengthening exercises and those mobility exercises like I was talking about, whether that's strengthening your inner thighs or strengthening your hip muscles or things like that.

[00:28:18.040] – Katie

Any of those muscles you're going to use with backpacking. Essentially, we're just trying to get the body adapted to carrying a weight on the back over uneven surfaces, because that's different than what a lot of us are used to and what a lot of our bodies are used to. We talk about how to build those, balance out those aspects in a training plan so that your body hit the trail with your body being ready, and you're not going to have to go home early from overuse injuries. And it's so much more enjoyable when you show up in shape. I've seen both sides of it. Some people go off the couch and they just struggle a lot. And then other people focus a lot of time into that training ahead of time. And you can hit the trail doing more miles and it hurts so much less. And you can keep up with your friends if you're going in a group. So I'm definitely an advocate of training your body.

[00:29:08.800] – Allan

Yeah. One of the things I kind of liked about what you had in the book was it was also know yourself. So it's like put on a 40 pound pack and walk kind of the same grade of hills and things that you're going to be doing on there. And if you notice, okay, your core is not really stabilized well enough that you can handle a pack. You need to maybe bolster your core work. Maybe you're arching your lower back and over time that's going to fatigue. You can do some cobras and some things like that to just make sure that you're in a better condition to handle how your body is going to respond. Because I saw something and there was where I got to find this because it was so cool. It was the trail pronation, which I guess as you're carrying weight and you're moving up a trail, the way you walk, the way you move, it changes it changes the whole dynamic of your kinetic chain. And as a result, you have to look at the shoes you're wearing and be ready to change those out regularly. You also need to just train yourself to be in that different position for hours at a time.

[00:30:17.090] – Katie

Yes, absolutely. It's such a good point as a lot of people, especially sometimes, like, if people just do walking as their training or they're transitioning from running or something like that, they kind of forget about how putting a pack that's anywhere from 20 to 40 lbs on the back really changes, like your center of gravity and how you carry your body. And exactly like you're just saying, how does that affect how you move and how do you train for that?

[00:30:43.070] – Allan

And then how much you've conditioned yourself, then blends into the plan for the trail. It's like if you know you're not going to be able to do 20 miles a day for five consecutive days, then you've got to come up with a plan for one, okay, maybe it's going to take you a little longer. You probably have to carry more food so your pack might even be heavier and you're going to move slower. Yeah, but that's your plan and you have to kind of balance that out. And so knowing your conditioning and then that helps drive your plan. Knowing your plan helps drive your conditioning and it's kind of a back and forth thing.

[00:31:13.370] – Katie

Absolutely. Yeah, exactly like you said, knowing the daily mileage that you're capable of, what's comfortable for you, taking into consideration that weather might get in your way or heavier pack might slow you down, all that stuff really ties into exactly how much food you're going to need to carry when you're expected to get to point B and then point C and D resupply places along the trail. And you're also thinking about, okay, am I going to finish in time to fit inside this weather window is what we say. Because you don't want to be out there on a 2000 miles trail. It's a little different than planning for a three night or even a five night trip because you're like, oh, I'm going to go out and it's June 1 through six, no problem. I know the weather is going to stay nice, but when you're out there for months at a time, you have to be kind of thinking about, okay, am I going to be able to finish in time? Am I going at a pace that's adequate to get me to Canada before the snow starts flying and all of that. So it's another reason why being trained and like you're saying, just knowing your body and what you're capable of is very valuable.

[00:32:19.270] – Allan

Yeah, well, Heather did a fastest known time on the Appalachian Trail. I think if I did it, it would be the slowest time and I would have to go through a lot of snow, probably two years of it, to get that baby done because that's something else. Now we can talk about the physical preparation, but I know from experience that you can get yourself as physically prepared as you ever want to. You can have all your planning, you have everything mapped out, but stuff happens. This is hard stuff. You're not talking about walking an hour or 2 hours and then calling it a day. You guys are doing upwards to twelve, maybe even more hours to get the distances that you want to get so that you can keep this sustainable for you. How do you mentally prepare for something like that?

[00:33:14.750] – Katie

yes, such a great topic and one that I really love talking about with people because it's something that a lot of aspiring through hikers or long distance hikers don't think as much about. They think a lot about I've got to get the right gear and I have to practice my navigational skills and I've got to get my food ready and all that. And all those things are super important and we cover them in the book. But that mental preparation aspect, that's something I wasn't ready for on my first hike. I mean, I kind of had an idea from having read blogs and things like that, but there are some tough conditions out there. Like you said, you're not just out for an hour over the course of multiple weeks and months, you're going to encounter crappy conditions, you're going to miss your loved ones, you're going to be hungry, your body is going to hurt no matter how well trained you are. There's going to be a lot of aspects to it that you can't really prepare yourself from a fiscal perspective, but you can't prepare your mind for it. So, I mean, I share the statistic in the book, but it's estimated that 75% to 85% of aspiring through hikers on what we call the Triple Crown trails, which is the at, the Pct and the CDT actually quit before reaching their goal.

[00:34:31.770] – Katie

And when you think about that, it's interesting because backpacking is a skill set that you need to learn, but it's not particularly technical. Someone who does, who studies and goes out in practice, you can become proficient at it relatively quickly. And yeah, it's a great physical feat to accomplish, but you can adjust your pace, you can slow down and all of that. So why is it that so many people are failing to reach their goal when they're out there? And I think it's a lack of mental preparation, failing to prepare your mind for the fact that it is going to be hard because I think when a lot of people are thinking about going out on these trails, they're thinking about all of those really desirable things like the beautiful scenery and being away from their laptop or their work schedule, kind of being on their own time, the simplicity of being out there, all those things that draw us out there. But they're not necessarily thinking about the fact that they're going to have blisters on their heels that are the size of a quarter and that they're going to run through their food too quickly and be hungry or they're going to be scared at times, whether it's of animal or weather or anything like that.

[00:35:39.150] – Katie

So yeah, there's a saying that through hiking, success is 90% mental and it's mental preparation. That's why we kind of go through some different strategies in the book of how to prepare yourself mentally for a long hike. And I'm happy to dig into those if you want to get into those specific?

[00:35:53.840] – Allan

Yeah, absolutely. Now, I know I've written a book, too. Congratulations on the effort. But you also said you like to journal. You are already sitting around with a notebook every day after you finished your hike or maybe even the morning before you started your hike. So I imagine that discipline of journaling helps you with writing this book as well. So I know that was one of the big ones that was but the one that was most interesting to me was the practice voluntary hardship.

[00:36:24.050] – Katie

Yeah, it's an interesting one, I think, that you don't necessarily think of right away. But for me, that came about really when I started running when I was younger. I did cross country in junior high and high school, and I noticed that when I would so it's become skilled at anything. It's practice and it's putting in the hours. And I would notice that when I made myself go out on the rainy days or go do twice a day in the afternoon. So I grew up in Ohio, and it was hot and humid, and I would make myself go in the morning and then go again in the afternoon no matter how much I didn't want to. And it was amazing because I would get out there and I would be like, oh, this isn't like that bad. I survived this. Like, oh, I went out in the rain and I survived it. And so I think that principle of practicing voluntary hardship is like building your inner resiliency, like letting yourself, your body and your mind know, I can do this hard thing. I'm capable of it. And this hard thing isn't going to it might not be even as hard as your mind is telling you it's going to be.

[00:37:27.760] – Katie

Like with those runs, I was saying, Oh, I got out there and I was like, Oh, I got wet. Okay, that's not a big deal, I'm fine. Or just putting yourself in those situations, anything that's sort of a little bit on your edge of discomfort to just train your body and your mind into that belief and knowingness that you're capable, you can do those challenging things.

[00:37:51.230] – Allan

Yes, I had an author on it. I know his first name was Michael, but his book was called The Comfort Crisis. It was a great book on this topic. He got himself in a situation where he just got dropped off with these guys out in the tundra about as far north as you could ever go, and he spent 30 days out there. And it's kind of one of those things it taught him that in these hard things do they'll teach you this, that you guys said words like embrace the suck, or those types of things. And it's funny to say, it's not funny when you're doing it, but then after it's over and you survive, it's kind of like, well, good. I feel like I've accomplished more because I went through this hard thing and I think that's where the kind of build up of all of this is going is okay, yes, you can journal, you can meditate, you can breathe, and those are all important things just for life, everything in life. But if you make things hard on yourself here and there, it just gives you this resilience from a mental perspective that you wouldn't have otherwise.

[00:39:00.010] – Katie

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And there's like a big trend in wellness and such a trend, but science and research behind it is like cold baths and cold exposure and part of it is like yes, it does have absolutely benefits for your mitochondria inflammation, all of that. But I think part of it too is like the mental benefits. Exactly. It's like showing yourself that you can do hard things and you can get through it and that makes you more capable for other hard things in life.

[00:39:28.450] – Allan

Yeah, because I prefer the heat shock proteins of going out when it's in the high eighty s and putting up with that versus the cold any day. Maybe I need to do that. But I don't actually have anywhere I can take a bath here, so I'll have to figure out and the ocean is 70 deg, so it's not going to do it. But I agree with you there.

[00:39:51.120] – Allan

Katie. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:40:00.750] – Katie

Yes, that's a great question. So of course I'm going to say daily time outside. For me, that is probably one of the biggest, most valuable wellness practices in my own life. Even if it's just you only have time for ten minutes, 15 minutes, getting outside, ideally as close to sunrise as possible, getting that natural light into your eyes, setting your hormones, optimizing those for the day, your circadian rhythm, all of that and just the stress relief benefits of being outside. I think it's so valuable, I think having something planned each day that you look forward to or that you're excited about, whether it's a walk outside or for me, like journaling time over my coffee or my tea, whatever it is. Time with a loved one snuggling, a pet, whatever it is. Maybe it's part of a morning ritual, anything that I think feeds and nourishes you. It's such a great antidote for the busy and often like stressful lives. Many of us live in the modern life or find ourselves in, whether it's a stressful day or a season of life. Just having those things each day that we can look forward to. It's just really important having that reason to get out of bed.

[00:41:10.130] – Katie

And then that kind of leads into my third one, which is something similar we talk about in the book. It's like knowing your why, having that strong sense of purpose or vision for what you are, putting your energy towards each day, what you're putting your time towards in this season of life. Something that just keeps you going through the inevitable challenges that you're going to face in day to day life. Just having that strong sense of why and purpose.

[00:41:35.970] – Allan

Thank you for that. So the book is called Adventure Ready: A Hiker's Guide to Planning, Training and Resiliency. If someone wanted to learn more about that book or learn more about you, Katie, or your co author Heather, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:41:50.290] – Katie

Sure. The best place to go would be katiegerber.com, which is my website, and then my co author and I, Heather, are both active on Instagram, and so mine is @katiegerber and she's @wordsofthewild. So you can find either of us there. And I have more information about those online courses that are the companion to the book there. There's also a free backpacker nutrition course on there. So lots of backpacking resources on the website for anyone who is interested in doing more long distance hiking, backpacking, day hiking, any of that. So I just want to help people get started and get out there safely and confidently.

[00:42:25.680] – Allan

Great. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/544, and I'll be sure to have the links out there. Katie, thank you so much for being a part of 40 Plus Fitness.

[00:42:36.270] – Katie

Thanks so much for having me. It's a lot of fun talking to you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:42:46.330] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:42:47.890] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. What a great interview and listening to Katie talk, really just invigorated my excitement about hiking. And I've got a big hike plan this fall. We're supposed to be hiking across Isle Royal up in Lake Superior, Northern Michigan, and all the tips that she had to share with you were just fantastic. It was a great interview.

[00:43:09.260] – Allan

Yeah, it's a really good book. She and Katie and Heather, they're pros, they do this regularly, they've done it for a while and they know their things. They know their stuff. Heather having the record fastest known time for the trail, that's not something you just get showing up. You got to keep moving. You got to keep doing it. And so that's why I thought it was really important to have them on to talk about this book because a lot of people, this is an accessible thing for a lot of people now maybe not 2000, 2200 miles hike throughs, but that said, you break it into segments, you break it into pieces. Most of us are going to live within daily reaching distance to do a day trip, to go out and just do a day hike. And it's a great way to reconnect with nature. It's a great way to just get away from all the digital toxins and stuff in our lives. And don't take your phone except to have it in your pocket as a GPS if you get lost or to call for help. But this is a great opportunity for you to get out, see things that most people don't see because they don't bother to venture out.

[00:44:34.140] – Rachel

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So many things to chat about. She had mentioned showing up in shape and being prepared, and I just wanted to highlight that going on a hike is a little different than just walking to your mailbox or walking through the grocery store or something. Sometimes these trails, like my little trail downtown that I use a lot, is asphalt paved. I can't get lost, so it's a perfect trail for me. But there's a lot of dirt trails and there's a lot of things to see out there, and it's a little bit of different type of hiking, and you need to be prepared for that. Different type of walking.

[00:45:06.590] – Allan

Yeah. And the weather and everything else. That's what in this book. That was one of the other things. They do a really good job of walking you through the planning. There's worksheets. There's all kinds of things in there for you to literally plan your hike and then go do your hike. I wanted to discuss that with her, the preparation, at least from a physical perspective and then from a mental perspective, because, yes, you can plan to use the hike as part of your training because if you do fewer miles, the beginning, and then you can build up your endurance and you can do more. And maybe if you're working really hard I know if I tried to take three months off to go do something like that, then I'm going to be working my butt off those last days, and they're going to be long days, and I'm not going to have training time during the week and maybe not even on the weekends as I'm trying to get myself ready to take that kind of time off to go do it. So, yeah, you train how you can with what you have to get yourself in the right kind of shape, because the worst thing you want to get into is that you throw that 40 pound pack on your back and you can't really even do it.

[00:46:21.230] – Allan

Your three month hike just became a three year hike because you can't do it. So you're going to want to be at some level of condition to be able to hit some mile markers. You're going to want to be able to put some miles in. So the training is important, but you will be able to somewhat train yourself to be better as you go. So you can even factor that a little bit into the plan of a gradual, I like to say gentle nudges of additional mileage as you go as long as again, and she even said this in the book, is you got to factor in your rest days. Probably Heather didn't take too many rest days when she was breaking the record, but when you're going at it, you might plan okay, we're going to be near this city there's town and I'm going to go act like a townie for a little while to eat restaurant food and sleep in a hotel bed and take showers, lots of showers. And then you can go for another sprint, but you have to factor in who you are, where you are and then do that and then the mental side of it, I was telling you before we got on the call I was going to do 9 miles Sunday and I kind of didn't feel really good about my digestive system when I have messy pants.

[00:47:38.640] – Allan

And so I thought so I stayed around town. So I was like, okay, I'm going to stay between my house and the gym. They're about a little over half a mile away. So I'm just walking down towards the gym and sort of walking right back towards the house and I do a couple of loops and I'm like, okay, I feel pretty good. And then I got about a mile out of town on an outback and so I'm somewhere around 5 miles and I noticed that my arm is chasing and it's very uncomfortable. And so now I have this do I quit or do I not scenario. And I was like, well, I have a mile to walk back and then I could put something on it. But then am I going to really want to get out and continue to do this or would I just quit? And so I was like, no, I'm just going to finish it. And this is uncomfortable, but I'm going to embrace the suck, if you will, and just keep going. And today I'm wearing a tank top. That was a tank top too, but I'm wearing a tank top with a much bigger drop in the sleeve so I'm not re scuffing it as I go.

[00:48:41.810] – Rachel

That's good. Yeah. We're preparing this trip for Isle Royal and we've been planning it for over a year. We're going to walk about 50 miles across from island end to end. And there are no showers, there's no gas stations to pick up food. So we're practicing everything that we need to have on this island right now. Actually, over the weekend, Mike and I were taste testing some different freeze dried foods, really lightweight camping foods that we'll be packing in. We're testing our equipment. We're making sure our tent can withheld some leaks if it rains. You know, there's a lot of planning that goes into that. But also while you can do some conditioning on a hike like that, it is good that you arrive at having practiced your equipment and know what it feels to wear a 30, 40, 50 pound backpack. I mean, there are certain things you can't just show up as a newbie. The first time Mike and I hiked Isle Royal with our family, gosh, I think it's going on 30 years ago. It was really neat to see this wonderful newly wed couple they had chosen Isle royal as their honeymoon vacation.

[00:49:51.320] – Rachel

And the woman had never hiked before in her life. And when we did find them at the end of the island, her feet were just blistered because she didn't practice her boots, she wasn't prepared for the backpack. I mean, they're just a myriad of problems that she had. But she gutted it out, she made it to the end, which is amazing. But my best advice, if you want a successful and happy and fun trip, is to show up fit and practice to the best of your ability.

[00:50:19.850] – Allan

And that's what the preparation is key. And that's one of the things that this book is really good about, because it asks you all the questions, like something you're going to say, like, you were just talking about food. How many calories will you be burning every day? So how many do you need to consume to maintain? And so it's not the normal, what you eat. You can say, Well, I only eat 1600 calories a day. That's when you're sitting at the computer doing your job, driving around, you're not walking 12,15, 20 miles a day or more. Because some of these hikes, they're doing eight to 10 hours of movement per day, easily. And so they're looking at their calorie requirements and say, Okay, that's easily 3000 calories. And this is for woman, it's a lot, but they need to have that amount of calories. And how much do all those calories weigh? Because if you're carrying a casserole dish, yes, it's heavy. So, yeah, the freeze dried stuff, the granola stuff like that, and then get knowing that it's something you can tolerate. Because the worst case thing is that you get out there and you eat something that doesn't agree with you, and you're not making your miles those days because you're in a bush in a squat position.

[00:51:50.000] – Rachel

Yeah, that's a problem. We have very precise transportation on both sides of the island. We get dropped off at a certain time and then we get picked up on the other side of the island in, I think, seven or eight days. So we need to be there no matter what, otherwise we're getting off the island. It's very important that you know how to practice all these things. And like she said, the mental aspect of it, if you've got blisters, you've got an upset stomach, you've got shaping, these things are very common and you need to be mentally prepared to push through it. Like in our case, when we have a very specific time, we need to meet our planes. There's a lot to it, but it's so fun.

[00:52:33.010] – Allan

Well, you do need to check out this book. I think this will help you a lot.

[00:52:36.560] – Rachel

I think it will. Thank you so much.

[00:52:38.680] – Allan

Right, well, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:52:41.470] – Rachel

Take care.

[00:52:42.450] – Allan

You too.

[00:52:43.170] – Rachel

Thanks.

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Let's Say Hello

[00:01:18.550] – Allan

Hey, Ras. How are things?

[00:01:20.460] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:01:22.810] – Allan

Well, we are now out of the closet, out of the bedroom, into the house. My wife Tammy got covid, so we've had her quarantined for this week. And I've been living upstairs in one of our rooms, which is not bad. It's a really nice place, but just having to take care of her, having to take care of everything else. And it's been a lot. But it's a good week.

[00:01:52.840] – Rachel

Yeah. She's feeling better?

[00:01:54.650] – Allan

She is now symptom free, so she's gotten over it.

[00:01:58.420] – Rachel

Good.

[00:01:59.320] – Allan

She had tested positive on Monday and she tested herself and then she tested positive again. She went to the hospital and tested and got a positive. So this at home test, you can get false positives sometimes she got a positive, I got a negative. And then we quarantined her. She went to the hospital the next morning and it was positive. So she finished up her fifth day yesterday, the day before yesterday, and then just out of precaution stayed another day and a half, two days. So she's just now coming out of the apartment today.

[00:02:36.110] – Rachel

Cool. That's good news. Very exciting.

[00:02:40.030] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:02:41.570] – Rachel

Oh, great. Mike and I went camping this weekend and had a great weekend out. Our first weekend of camping. And it was a beautiful time. Nice, peaceful, relaxing. It was a good time. Nice to be out.

[00:02:55.330] – Allan

All right. Well, are you ready to have this conversation with Superager Jim?

[00:02:59.090] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:03:35.350] – Allan

Hey, Jim, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:03:37.820] – Jim

Thank you, Allan. I'm delighted to be here.

[00:03:40.640] – Allan

You know, you're in your 70s, mid-70s now, I guess, right? 76, maybe.

[00:03:46.380] – Jim

Allan, I will be 82.

[00:03:50.290] – Allan

Okay, we're going to play some of the video. We're going to save some little clips here and there. And so I want people to look at this because you don't look like a normal 82-year-old. Not by normal, I mean an American 82-year-old man. You look very different than most of us think we're going to look or would look when we're 82. And a lot of it is the stuff that you shared in this book.

[00:04:15.600] – Jim

And that's kind of the real story, because I'm nobody special, believe me, if I can do this, because when I was 70, very different story. That's what we're talking about, my story.

[00:04:28.710] – Allan

Okay, well, the book is called Just Move: A New Approach to Fitness after 50. And I started when I was in my mid-40s, realized that my job was killing me. My life was killing me. I was unfit, unhealthy, and just going downhill and fairly miserable. So I started making some changes. And those changes reflected who I changed into. And in many ways, it's the same for you. You came upon it, said, hey, I got to do something, and you started making some changes. Can you talk a little bit about your story?

[00:05:02.770] – Jim

Well, Allan, when I turned 70, I was in terrible shape. My back was killing me. I'm not talking about a little back pain. I'm talking about excruciating back pain. Both knees were shot and my right rotator cuff was frozen. If that weren't enough, I was probably 20 to 25 pounds overweight. But when I think about it, and I'm sure that many of your listeners had the same thing, the worst of it all was low energy. I just didn't have the energy I had when I was younger. And I said, boy, I said to my wife, I look in the mirror. I don't forget as long as I live on my 70th birthday. And Allan and I said, My God, I'm an old man. And I said to my wife, I'm an old man. She said, Sweetie, don't worry, you've still got game. She paused and then she said, unfortunately, that game is being gone. That's a true story. So that got me thinking, okay, I got to do something. Today, I'll be 82 in October. And now I'm in the best shape of my life. I couldn't do one push up on day one on my 70th birthday, I could not do one push up.

[00:06:40.490] – Jim

I can bang out 50. I don't do it every day because it's not good for your shoulder. But I can bang out 50, and I weigh less than I did today than I did in high school. And I look back and say, yeah, it's transformation. But, Allan, I think the takeaway for your audience is I'm just an average guy. So if I can do this, go from being weak and overweight and so on, anybody can do it. I'm nobody special. I'm not a Superman or any of that stuff. I think the basic message to your audience is, if you want to get more fit like you did, you want to get healthier, you can. It's never too late. Doesn't matter. Obviously, if I'd done this earlier in my life like you did, I wouldn't have had to have worked as hard. Let's be honest about it, okay. But if you're 75 years old, you still get more fit. And still now 82, and all I can say is I'm in the best shape of my life. I feel lucky. But it wasn't a gift. I had to show up and do the work. And that's the basic message to your audience.

[00:08:06.800] – Jim

You have to show up and do the work, and you have to have kind of a long term view. And maybe you can help me out. If there's a secret, if there's a pill I could have taken, there's a shortcut. I never found it, frankly. I just showed up, did the work. But anybody can do this. You don't have to kill yourself. You don't have to have a gym membership. You don't have to have a personal trainer. Not really. So that's my story.

[00:08:39.280] – Allan

Well, if there is a magic to it, and I think this is where most people struggle is, and you would have struggled with this a lot as well. You hurt, you're in pain, but you're in a bad place. And you know that there are two directions. You're kind of at a fork in the road. And as you said, it's your stark reality.

[00:08:59.140] – Jim

Absolutely. Fork in the road is a great way to look at this.

[00:09:04.510] – Allan

And now for you, it seems, because I was looking at it kind of the same way of saying I'm either going to keep dying or I'm going to start living. And that's the way I kind of looked at it. But being inactive was really, I think, one of the big problems both of us kind of faced at that point in our lives. We weren't active. What are some of the risks that we were facing when we're not moving our bodies and not doing the things we're supposed to?

[00:09:30.370] – Jim

Well, this is one of this book I wrote. I wrote this book, I guess five years ago, published by National Geographic. They've never done a book like this, but they were sort of fascinated by this whole concept. Let me just say this, Allan. I came across one statistic that I want to share with you and your audience, and this is really what got me motivated. If you make it to 70. Statistically, out of a very large sample of people, I'm not talking about ten people from Denmark. I'm talking about 100,000 people. Statistically, you will live another 15 years on average. And I said to myself, If I feel this bad now, can you imagine? In 15 years, I'll be in a wheelchair, I'll have a cane, I'll be slumped over, whatever. That was my motivation, to be honest about it. What happens if I do make this? So the reason that you and I are on this health kick I think, it has nothing to do with I need to lose 10lbs or I need this or that. It's not about living longer. Maybe this to you. It's not to me. Okay. But I want to live as happy and as full of life as I can.

[00:11:05.010] – Jim

The killer. And that's why this book is called Just J-U-S-T I'm a Southern accent. Just move. Is that one of the problems is that all of us today, or most of us sit too much. The average adult. This is not my opinion. This is, I think, Harvard or somebody, or maybe I think it's Harvard Medical School says the average American adult sits between 8 and 11 hours a day. That's between the computer, hunched over a computer, watching TV, kind of relaxing, whatever you want to call it. That's part of the problem. That's why my basic thing is just move. It doesn't matter what you do, as important as you've got to do something as opposed to sitting. The reason that sitting is bad. I know it's a cliche, Allan, but sitting is kind of the new smoking. If you sit, you will have aches and pains. There's no doubt every doctor will tell you that. And the doctors themselves probably sick too much. Okay, we all do. That's just part of our culture. I've worked hard my whole life. I deserve some relaxation, that's all true. But you will have aches and pains. You will have tight hips.

[00:12:35.250] – Jim

Absolutely true. The tight hips are often what leads to this back pain. I didn't know that. Again, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a kinesiologist. I don't have an advanced degree in Gerontology. I'm just an ordinary guy. That said, if I feel this bad now, how am I going to feel in 10 years or 15 years? And that was the motivation for me.

[00:13:04.890] – Allan

Yeah. I was looking at my life with my daughter going on and doing things like CrossFit and obstacle course races. And I was thinking to myself, she wants me to come and be there with her. But she was thinking of it in terms of me being a spectator.

[00:13:24.330] – Allan

Sit. And watch her do her event. And when she started talking about those things, I was like, Well, I don't want to spectate. I want to participate and I can't. I'm not there.

[00:13:36.630] – Jim

That sums up. And I did.

[00:13:38.710] – Allan

And then as I really got into thinking, about this long term what this means as far as my path, my aging curve. I noticed my grandfather, he was in his ninety s and he could not take care of himself. And so then it became this mantra of I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 105. So it's kind of funny, kind of silly, but it's kind of those concepts of I want to be able to do the things I enjoy doing with my family. We didn't have mud runs when I was younger, so now we have mud runs. And when I have grandkids, I don't know what they're going to be doing. But I also don't likely want to be a spectator for much of it if I can participate in any way. And the only way I'm going to do that is to keep myself healthy and strong. The only way I'm going to live to see 105 and still be healthy and strong is if I'm doing the right things day in and day out. And the next thing is avoiding mistakes, because I can tell you over the course of the eight years I was trying to figure all this stuff out because we don't come with an operating manual, although now your book gives us a lot of that.

[00:14:41.730] – Jim

Right.

[00:14:42.280] – Allan

Your book does give us a lot. What are some common mistakes that we make as older individuals trying to start an exercise program?

[00:14:50.970] – Jim

I would say the first thing is that most people and I live in a senior community, as we call it. Okay. And I see people I'm probably a young person, to be honest about it. My wife and I, we've been married 52 years.

[00:15:08.860] – Allan

Congratulations.

[00:15:10.240] – Jim

I think the biggest mistake is that people don't have a goal, which I don't ask you where it came from just out of my head. But when I started this program, I had one goal, and it was I want to be 80 years young. And at the time, I was 70 years old. So I wrote this down. I'm 80 years old. I want to be 80 years young. What do I have to do? And Allan, again, I'm not an exercise nut or some freak or gym rat. I didn't know what to do to be honest about it. And observing people was part of this, Allan. And what I noticed was that there were people who were 60 who looked and moved like they were 80. There were people who were 80 who looked to move like they were 60. And I said, what do these folks know who are 80? I said, I want to be one of those. And I call these super-agers. That's my term for it. I don't know if that's not a medical term. I call them super agers. Now let me be clear. I didn't say super men and I didn't say super women or Wonder Woman.

[00:16:47.710] – Jim

These are ordinary people who made a decision Allan, just like you did. What do I have to do? Okay. To lead a happier, more full life, not to be 100 years old or whatever. I'm not saying you can exercise every day, but one big lesson out of all this is that DNA is not your destiny. And what I did, I talked to people who were what I call Supe-Agers, people who are 80 years old, 85 years old, what the heck do they do? And there were some very common traits of these people, and that's how I developed a plan. The other mistake people make is they say, okay, I want to get fit. Okay. Do you have a plan for getting fit? No, I do the treadmill. I go walking. Well, I'm going to tell you, walking alone is not enough. People in your audience you're going to go, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Well, I love to walk. Okay, so let's make it real clear. Walking alone is not enough. So whether you have a gym membership or work out at home or whatever it may be, there are other activities you have to do if you want to get more fit.

[00:18:28.050] – Jim

And I talked to the experts, for what that's worth, there are lots of conflicts of interest. There's a lot of showman in the fitness industry. I'm a little bit cynical, as I suspect you are about the industry itself. Everybody's promoting something, but it doesn't matter when I talk to the experts, plus people who are actually what I call Super-Agers. And that's where I developed a program and I want to show you my T shirt. I call this, Geezer fitness is what I call this. So the best advice I got ever, I want to share with you and your audience and I can get a kick out of this. The best advice I ever had, somebody who was probably 85 years old, I was never quite sure how he was, but he looked like a million dollars. And he said, Jim, if you want to get motivated and stay motivated, I'm going to give you a secret. I said, Gosh, we love secrets. What's the secret? He said, Buy a couple of compression shirts. I said, what is a compression shirt? And he showed me, he says, what the athletes wear. So on day one, I show up and I had a double, the highest thing you could have, okay, whatever it was.

[00:20:02.610] – Jim

And people looked at me on day one and said, this guy has no pride at all. And the fact you try wearing a compression shirt if you're 5lbs overweight the fat hangs out. And people would look away and say, this guy has no pride at all. And to be honest about it, that's what kept me motivated. Pretend I've worn one every day since, and I love putting stuff on here. I've got one called Spartacus. So if I'm really at my best shape, I say Spartacus. If I'm not such good shape, and now I'm wearing a medium. So that's kind of what kept me motivated. People just couldn't believe it. Does this guy know how awful he looks? So try a compression shirt. And if you're 10lbs overweight, it's really embarrassing. So anyway, that's what I did and it kind of worked. It just kept me motivated day after day. And all of a sudden I started wearing a large and now wear a medium T shirt. And for a guy, one problem that men have is that they develop that punch okay and very difficult to get this off. So one mistake that people make, Allan, which I didn't know about, I didn't know what core meant.

[00:21:29.610] – Jim

I thought core referred to a six pack. Now, core is a band that goes around your upper extremity. It starts about here and goes down to your thighs. And if your core is weak and mine was incredibly weak, you will have back pain, I guarantee you. So one mistake that I would guess that 80% of people make in your audience, they don't do enough core. Again, I didn't know this. I'm not a medical doctor, I don't have a PhD. But what I found out the hard way was one reason for my lower back pain was a weak core. So for the first, probably two or three years, I would guess at least a third of my workouts exercising was on the core. Here's the good news, Allan. I'll be 82. I have zero back pain. None. Nada. So I look back and say, whatever I did seem to have worked. But a big part of this was the core. So it's not about being in a dynasty, it's not about Allan how many pull ups can you do? I can do. It has nothing to do with the ego. It has to do with, quote, functional fitness.

[00:22:58.030] – Jim

So I'm going back to what I said earlier about mixing it up. There are basically five dimensions of functional fitness. Now, when you're young, you're motivated. I want to look good in a bathing suit. Nothing wrong with that, okay. Or I'm getting married in four months. I need to lose 15lbs. So it's very vanity driven when you're older, older, being 50, 60, 70, 80, whatever. Presumably you're less vanity driven and more driven, as you said you were, by the desire to be functional, to be able to go through a day without aches and pains, without being slumped over like this, being able to stand up straight, not having a Walker, not having complaining all day about, oh, God, my back hurts this and that and so on. And so that's what it's done for me. When I say I'm in the best shape of my life, well, I have no aches and pains. What is that worth any amount of money? I can tell you that had a good career in the investment world. All I can say is the hour a day that I spend on exercising working out is the best investment I ever made.

[00:24:21.580] – Jim

How do you put a price on this? I don't know how to do it. I can say all the money in the world if you're 80 years old and let's say you're a rich person, whatever that means, and you end up in a doctor's office three or four times a week, what have you achieved? So, Allan, I call all this stuff winning at life. That's how I frame what I do. My goal, I want to win at life. How do you look back on your last days and aches and pains and the doctor you know your doctor better than you do your kids and your loved one? I don't think that's winning at life, personally. I don't think being dependent upon your kids to take care of you when you're older. I don't think that's winning at life.

[00:25:13.150] – Allan

Let's take a quick step back, because before we get too far away from the functional fitness, I think this is important for someone, particularly someone that's just starting out to understand. So the gym culture. I've been in the gym a lot over the course of my life. There's this thing, and you'll notice all the cardiovascular machines are really close to the door. And that's where 90% of the people that come in, they stop right there at the treadmill because it's easy. They understand it. You turn it on, you walk, you turn it off, you go home. And kind of the funny thing is you might live a mile away from the gym, but you're going to walk 3 miles on the treadmill and not walk to the gym. But a lot of people stop there and they look to the rest of the gym, either by not knowing what to do or even having, like you said, a plan. And for the plan to be successful, as you mentioned, it has to address functional fitness. And you mentioned Core. And we were going to say, yeah, the walking and cardiovascular endurance is important. Those are two facets of functional fitness.

[00:26:13.420] – Allan

But what are the other three that we should be looking toward to be a super ager?

[00:26:18.850] – Jim

Well, a clear one is strength. And when you say that, wait a minute, I'm not a muscle head. I'm not trying to be Mr. or Ms. Adonis. I'm not talking about that. Here are the statistics. When I did this book just move the National Geographic, it took me about two years to do the book. And when I got through and turned in the manuscript and they said, this is great. Oh, by the way, we need to have an expert read every page and evaluate it. I said, what?

[00:26:55.690] – Jim

Oh, yeah. Well, I said, I don't think anybody can do that or would do it. They found somebody out of Duke University who was, I guess, a gerontologist, and she read every paragraph. And so we agreed upon that. And then they said, Jim, oh, by the way, one more step. You have to source everything you said. What does that mean? Well, we don't want your opinion. You have to say, where did your opinion come from? I said, why don't you tell me about that? Because you would never have signed the contract. So I had to source it. And I said, because there's so much BS in the fitness world. So when I threw out these statistics, it's not my opinion. It could be Mayo Clinic, it could be whomever. But the book was not my opinion says this or that. Okay. But what I learned was from the experts is that how important strength training is. And that does not mean lifting heavy. That's what people get in trouble. You can do a lot of stuff with very light dumbbells. So my advice to your audience is maybe you're using 15 or 10 pound dumbbells. That's okay.

[00:28:22.450] – Jim

I can show you some exercises that you're going to say, I suspect you're in good shape, that you're going to say, Gosh, this is hard, Allan. 15 lbs can be hard depending on what you do. Okay. But here's the reason why in a nutshell, is because you lose strength as you get older, that unless you do something to offset that, here are the statistics. You're going to lose about 40% of your muscle mass by the time you're 70 or 75. And this often leads to the problems. So you have weak bones and so on. And so, again, I'm not a medical expert, but that's what the experts says, not an expert alive they wouldn't agree with that. That strength training and it's not being a muscle head and it's not lifting heavy at all. It has nothing to do with that. You don't need a gym membership. You can do it at home. I can show you exercises to do, just push ups, that kind of stuff that anybody can do them. You don't need a trainer, although a trainer is very helpful in sort of laying this out. But the first one is strength training that you have to do as an adult.

[00:29:46.790] – Jim

And the second, the other one is balance. So here are the statistics. One in three, there could be one in four adults, 65 and over fall every year. Now think about that again. I'm living in a senior community. Allan, if I told you how many friends we have or acquaintances where you want to call them fall, you would not believe it. And typically it's at night and for some reason it's in the bathroom. I don't know why, but we'll see somebody said, Where's Joe? Where's Nancy? Oh, man, she fell last night, banged her head. Then you're talking about something that's pretty awful.

[00:30:36.090] – Allan

Yeah. One of the statistics you had in the book that I'd like to share is that a quarter of a million people fall and go to the hospital with a hip fracture every single year. That's insane.

[00:30:53.370] – Jim

It's stunning. And these are people who are not in such bad shape. Something happens. Now let me explain to you. I fell myself and broke my wrist three months ago. Say what? Yeah. I got through working out, had a cup of coffee in my right hand, tripped. We have Oriental rugs, for better or for worse. We have Oriental rugs, tripped on the rug and said, If I spill this coffee, my wife is going to really kill me.

[00:31:31.230] – Allan

That thought would be it, but that was the thought in my head.

[00:31:34.830] – Jim

I think I did.

[00:31:38.190] – Allan

You flung the cup across the room.

[00:31:40.280] – Jim

No, I didn't spill the coffee. I fought with one hand. If I fell with two hands, guess what? I'd catch myself. Broke my wrist. I was in the cast for it's been four months now, and it's still not quite okay, but I'm a lot better. And so this goes to show you and my wife said, what happened? I said, well, I didn't spill the coffee, but I broke my wrist. It was a clean break, thank goodness. But even so, it could happen to anybody. In my case, I tripped on a rug after working out. It could happen to anybody. So you could fall this afternoon because you're walking along with a friend or your daughter and you're talking and you're not looking down. And there's whatever reason, the concrete, there's a bump in the road, whatever it may be, in the trail, for example. You'd be surprised how many people are trail walkers and they trip because of, who knows, a branch comes in, they're talking, not looking down. And so you have to do something about some kind of balance training. Now, we're not talking about this takes 2 hours. One thing that's very important. There's a big difference between training and exercising.

[00:33:12.890] – Jim

I didn't learn this in year one or year two, but training is what I've been doing. Training means you're working toward a goal. Exercising, Allan, is what most people do. They go to the gym, they do a slow slog on the treadmill while they're watching the news. That's most people who are older.  I don't think that works. So when you're working toward a goal, you tend to be more efficient. So when I see an hour a day, in order to do that, you've got to be efficient. I think the magic number for me, at least is 30 minutes of walking. I do walk and think everybody needs to walk some kind of cardio endurance. I think the magic number personally is 30 minutes. I think it's diminishing returns. If that's the only message I'll leave you with today, there's diminishing returns in all of this stuff, whether it's walking or push ups or sit ups or whatever it may be. And you have to sort of understand and you learn this the hard way because the goal is to be efficient. What can I do? How can I use this hour efficiently? And what you learned, what I learned is that people who are in shape learn how to be efficient, how to squeeze stuff that's essential into 1 hour.

[00:34:56.860] – Jim

It could be 45 minutes. And nobody says that you can't exercise for 20 minutes three times a day. No big deal, 45 minutes a day. But I find out that works for me is an hour a day. And I do balance. I do my cardio on the days I do strength training. What I should have told you was, here's my program. I do strength training three times a week. Okay. I do cardio three times a week. So I walk pretty actively. But I don't run. I don't jog because my knees, I walk. Stretching is critical. If you don't stretch, it's a big mistake when you're older. You will have aches and pains. There's no way around that. Now you can say, Jim, I do yoga. Great. Pilates. Terrific. Okay. But these are the main things that someone has to do, and every older person is I don't know what to do. I don't have a plan. Well, there's some trial and error, and you sort of have to learn what works for you. The best motivation on is getting results. Here's some good news for you. If you're in bad shape like I was, the results come very quickly.

[00:36:23.770] – Jim

That's what people don't realize if all you do is walk. When I started out, I literally out on day one, could not walk more than probably four blocks. And I was huffing and puffing. That's how bad the shape I was in. But I said, you know, I'm going to do a 30 day deal now. Why 30 days? I have no idea. I just said 30 days. It could have been 45 days or 20 days. I was amazed by simply every day trying to do a little bit more. I wasn't running or jogging or any of that stuff, just walking. At the end of 30 days, I felt so much better. You have no idea. My wife's friend said, what is Jim doing? What do you mean? He looks so much more energetic. When you're older, that's what happens when you walk. Okay. And so what I found for me was the sweet spot was about 30 minutes, and I do it three times a week. Beyond 30 minutes, it's kind of missing returns. I'd rather use those other 30 minutes to do strength training and other activities. That's all it is.

[00:37:40.960] – Allan

right. Well, in your book, Just Move, there's a ton of these types of tips. You talk about how much time you dedicate from each workout, the different things you have images of some of these exercises. So there's a lot in this book. But if you wanted to just say, what are a couple of your favorite takeaways from the book that if someone were thinking about buying your book that you want them to know, want them to look for, what would that be?

[00:38:05.240] – Jim

Well, that's a great question. And I think what I would say is you have to find your why. What is your why? Why are you even thinking about taking up some kind of a program? Okay, now your why might be, I don't want to be a burden to my kids. I don't want to say, well, I'm sorry I can't go with you on this trip. I've got to take care of my dad. Man, I don't want that. I want to be able to play with my grandkids. Everybody has their own try, but that's sort of the motivation. My motivation again, was I want to be 80 years young. That may not be your goal. It was my goal. Okay? You have to find that. And the other important takeaway is you have to have a plan. Without a plan, a goal is just a dream, in my opinion. So a goal and a plan. And then you have to actually show up and do the work so you can talk about this stuff all day long. I think the only mistake the other takeaway is the goal is not perfection. So I know you like to exercise and it's really improved your life and that kind of stuff, but perfection is not the goal.

[00:39:31.830] – Jim

The exercises that I do, I don't do very well. I try, but we all have our issues. So the other thing I want to make sure that everybody understands is you can work out every day, okay. And it's true that your DNA is not your destiny. That's an important concept to me. That means you can do activities that will help lower the risk of a serious disease. Heart attack, stroke, okay? Certain cancers, all that's true. But I have to tell your audience this. When you get 80 years old, you will have issues and no amount of exercise, no amount of eating right. No amount of managing stress, none of that good sleep habits. You will still have stress. I don't know anybody who's 80. It's like having a car. Okay? You have a great car, but there's a certain mileage. I don't know. It's 150,000 miles. Your car is going to break down. Well, guess what? Your body breaks down, but it's okay because you're in shape. And I've had some issues. I don't want to go into them myself other than a broken wrist. But the big pay off from all this stuff, Allan, the big pay off is what you have to think about,

[00:41:03.900] – Jim

What's Jim want to payoff from all of your exercises, all of your hard work? You know what it is? It's the confidence that whatever life throws at me, I can deal with it. And what I'm suggesting is the real benefit of all this stuff is mental as much as physical. So given where I came from, getting where I am now doesn't mean I'm not going to have issues. That's just BS. I do have issues. I will have issues. But it's the confidence I can deal with whatever life throws at me. I don't care what it is. If I get hit by a truck, if I get cancer, if I get all the bad things that happen because of the confidence that comes from hard work and getting results, you can deal with it. The other thing out of the book that I want everybody to really kind of think about, these are all just insights. There are no rules that I know of, but they're insights. The other big insight that I think is important is that attitude is so critical. Okay, so all we're talking about here is looking forward and not back. Allan, I cannot tell you how many people I know who live in the past and every single one of them is in bad shape.

[00:42:43.270] – Jim

I'm looking forward. Now, I'm going to say this to your audience, and I believe it. I honestly believe my best days still lie ahead. Is that positivity? That's a critical element. If somebody says I don't need exercise, I don't need to eat healthy or eat clean, I don't need any of that stuff. Okay, that's fine. That's your choice. Ok. The problem is you're going to end up at some point, you might lose your loved one, then you're going to be by yourself. Okay, maybe you have a caretaker, but your world is going to shrink. It's the opposite out of what you said. Your world is going to shrink. You spend your day in a small apartment when you're 80 or 85 years old. Loneliness. And all of this is what tends to lead to depression, but even worse, Alzheimer's and dementia. Now, I may end up with dementia or Alzheimer's, but I'm doing everything I can. Okay. Staying active. And also, I want to share with you one last thought is that we talk about physical fitness, and that's very important because fitness is the foundation of healthy aging. That's the other message. But there's more to healthy aging than that.

[00:44:18.830] – Jim

There's also mental fitness, and there's emotional fitness, and they're equally important. So in my case, the reason I'm doing this interview is not to sell books. If my story can inspire somebody to get off the couch and just move, as opposed to just sitting, that's my legacy. To be honest about it, I wrote a best selling book called Cowboy Ethics. 160,000 copies. Best selling book. This book maybe 25,000 Max. You don't sell excise. Books like this don't sell unless it's written by George Clooney or Brad Pitt. That's the truth. So the money I make off this book is not worth even talking about. To be honest about it, it doesn't matter. This is for me, is a legacy. If my story of going from incredibly bad shape and back pain and terrible feeling and so on to where I am right now in the best shape of my life, I weigh less I did in high school, and I'm just an average guy. I'm not anything special, okay? If that can inspire somebody that's more important to me, that's my legacy. I want to look back on my life and say, and this is the whole idea of purpose.

[00:45:50.270] – Jim

Now, you're too young. I suspect even think about this.

[00:45:55.340] – Allan

I'm 56 years old.

[00:45:57.590] – Jim

That's young. You're a kid.

[00:45:59.990] – Allan

I am a kid. I agree.

[00:46:04.070] – Jim

But what keeps you going, what keeps you alive is that having the passion or the purpose. I look back on it and say, I will look back on my life on the last day of my life and say, Did I leave things better than I found it? If it's true that I did it's because of my writing and my speaking, I made my money, so to speak, in my career. Not that I'm a rich, rich guy, but I have enough money. Okay? So I'm lucky on that score. But the legacy is what's important to me. It's not the books I think sells on Amazon for $15 or whatever. Okay. And if you think somebody is going to make a living off of writing a book, well, I guess Michelle Obama can do it, but most of us can't do it. I sure couldn't do it. But it's the legacy factor that is so critical to me. And that's why I do all this stuff. You have no idea. I get emails from so many people, and I'm not big computer guys. I told you to be honest about it. That's just not me.

[00:47:21.520] – Jim

I don't like emailing, any of that stuff. But if my story can make a difference and that's why I do all this stuff, that gives me more satisfaction. I also did a film. I produced a film called The Art of Aging Well, and it took two years. Now, when I say produce, what does that mean? Well, producer of a film hires the people. I'm not behind the camera, hires the people, oversees the quality, and basically does the marketing. Okay. Jim Havey, who's out of Denver. I've known Jim for 30 years. Jim has won three or four Emmys. I've not won an Emmy, but we did a film together again. He's the film guy. The Art of Aging well, and just when we got it finished, this pandemic hit, I can't go on the road and speak about this. I'm basically a communicator. That's kind of what I do. I get in front of an audience, it could be 20 people, it could be 1000. I don't get rattled with an audience. And I said what I'm going to do, I've got two years invested. I can't go on a plane and go any place anymore.

[00:48:42.640] – Jim

So I said, maybe, just maybe a PBS would carry this thing. Well, we got on PBS, and I'm very proud to say 124 PBS stations carried this. And your audience, there's no charge for it. I raised the money from I had sponsors. That's what I was. But your audience can look at it's called theartofagingwell.com. It's free.

[00:49:13.830] – Allan

Okay, cool.

[00:49:14.980] – Jim

I'm very big on what you're doing. For example, I really think it's the emotional connection that you make with it's, not the information. If information was the answer, everybody would be working out, eating clean, managing stress, getting a good night's sleep, that kind of stuff. Information doesn't do it. I can give you a 700 page thesis. You're not going to read it, much less take action. But what you're doing with your communication skills, I hope what I'm doing with my writing and creative process inspires people to make these changes. And all I can say is small steps add up over time. So don't think about, that's why I had a ten year goal. My ten year goal was to go from being 70 years old to 80 years young. I never found it. If it was a pill, believe me, I'd be taking it right now. I don't know where the pill? There may be a pill that I do.

[00:50:29.870] – Allan

There's a pill. It's called exercise. And you're doing it six days a week.

[00:50:35.230] – Jim

To me, I would rather spend. So I look back on that and say, Jim, what have you learned from all this stuff? Well, me, I'd rather spend an hour a day doing what I'm doing right now. Okay. As opposed to an hour a day in the doctor's office. And that's what it's going to be like. I don't want to be in a wheelchair. I don't want to have a Walker. I don't want to be bent over like this. I want to be as healthy and as alive and have the energy as long as I can. Having said that, there will be a time. It could be tomorrow. But, Allan, it ain't going to be today. Okay, that's all you can do.

[00:51:22.370] – Allan

Jim, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:51:30.520] – Jim

that's beautiful. I think you've done probably a better job of this stuff than I did. Again, I'm just an ordinary guy. But one of the messages is one, it's never too late to get started. Don't think for a second when I'm 75, there's no point now. I might as well have that three dips of chocolate ice cream or something like that. It doesn't matter with your the sooner you start, the better. There's no question. Now, does Jim Owen wish he had started this program when he was your age? Absolutely. Okay. There's no question about that. But I didn't. I started at 70. You can start at 75. And it's not about getting fit. It's about getting more fit than you are. Now, I had took a long view. Ten years. Okay. I guess you could say I'm fit. I don't know what else I can do, but your DNA does play a part in these underlying conditions. But I like to think that 75% of your health and wellness is lifestyle driven, and we can argue all day long about this. Well, maybe it's more like 60%. I believe it's about 75% lifestyle. Now what does lifestyle means?

[00:53:04.990] – Jim

Exercising, eating clean, okay, managing stress, which is critical. Okay. Getting sufficient sleep, it's that kind of thing. But also and this is what the exercise people don't talk about all that's great. But that's physical health, physical wellness. There's also that mental wellness and emotional wellness, and that's what I'm into now. I want to be a better husband, a better father, a better friend. And that to me today, means more than saying, Gosh, I just had a personal best with pushups. I suspect that I'll be in no better shape in two or three years. I am right now. I don't know what I could do because you can get injured when you're older. So if you do too much with your shoulders or whatever, maybe legs, whatever, you can have a problem. So do I work out as hard as I did before? No. The reason is we all have low energy days. That's another message I want to give to your audience. At my age, you have to recognize the recovery days are critical. So today I'll be working out this afternoon. Do I work out as hard? No, but I work out pretty hard for me.

[00:54:49.550] – Jim

But do I work as hard as I did five years ago? No, I don't think anybody does, but I do cover the bases. I do push myself, but it's incremental. It's not major changes. I don't know how to do that. Can I get more lean? I could probably lose a pound or two. That's about it. Can I lift more weight? Maybe, but do I want to take the risk of hurting my shoulder? Not really. And the recovery days become much more important. So the other message take away from all that we've talked about is when you're older, you have to listen to your body, not to Jim Owen, listen to your body. And I think that's the best guide that I can give you. Listen to your body, particularly when you're older, but you've got to have goals. You've got to have a plan on how you're going to get from here to here. And if you don't just kind of, you have to cover the basis. And you do have to continually improve. And that's sort of the hard thing to understand about this. Let's take a push up, okay. If all you do is plane pushups after you can do about 25, I think you're better off progressing.

[00:56:19.510] – Jim

So I keep progressing. I do more difficult exercises than I did before. That's how I progress. So I do stuff that I probably couldn't have done five years ago, but I don't do squats with barbells on my neck and stuff like that. Or let's just take push ups, okay. A diamond push up, push ups like this. So in every exercise. This is what makes ourselves so fascinating. You think about push up as a pushup. No, it's not. You're going to put your hands like this, like this. You're working your body different ways. The core is the critical part. You've got to have a strong core to do what I do. I guarantee you that. And that's why when you say, Jim, every once in a while I'll take part in the competition with my peers. They want to hear where I live. I live in La Jolla, okay. And I won against all other people my age. Okay. And why? Well, I work out. That's why. A lot of people could do one thing, but they couldn't do the whole thing. This is a test, if you will, but it's great fun. And I want to say one more thing on this.

[00:57:44.900] – Jim

Is that the one regret I have in life? This may surprise you. I want to get your take on this than anything to have been a great athlete. Anything. My brother, who's older than me by two years, was a star athlete and scholar, baseball, basketball, football, and track. The best athlete in a pretty damn good high school. We're from Kentucky and great high school. He was number one. I never scored a touchdown. I never hit the winning home run. I'd have given anything to have been that gifted athlete, which I wasn't I had learned in football. What's interesting about this is I found my inner athlete and I have an athlete's attitude about what I do. And that's why it's fun for me. The exercise part is challenging and fun. And guess what? No surprise to you. A lot of terrific athletes in high school and College, when they get my age, they don't do anything. They got burned out. I can't tell you how many people I know who were good athletes. And so finding your inner athlete to me has made a tremendous difference in terms of confidence and attitude. And the attitude is what kind of keeps you going again to repeat it, I look forward.

[00:59:14.860] – Jim

I don't look back. So many people my age continue to talk about the past. I can't tell you I get so sick of this. Well, when I was in high school, when I was in prep school, how about looking forward? What are you doing now? What's your challenge now?

[00:59:33.470] – Allan

And that's the big thing with me. I was the athlete in high school. I was a very good athlete and then fell out of it in my 30s. But I was an excellent athlete. I was in the US imagery, military. I was super fit all the way up until my thirty's. And then I let it go. And it took me a long time to get it back. But I can tell you all the things I ever did, all the winds, all the shots, everything that I did do all of that, none of those compared to the feeling I got running across the finish line with my daughter at a tough Mudder and knowing that I could keep up with her. She didn't have to wait on me. I was as good an athlete as I'd ever been, and I was able to do that. And you talk about the looking forward. I've got another tough Mudder scheduled in three months, so I'm going to be back up in the States. I'm going to be doing another tough Mudder because I can, because I want to, and I train for it. As you said, train, not exercise.

[01:00:34.880] – Allan

I have a goal. I have a mission. I have a plan. All of those things that you brought up here

[01:00:41.630] – Jim

I'm so impressed. You have no idea. My daughter, we have two children. They're both adopted at birth. We couldn't have kids and married 52 years. Our daughter's name is Allegra, and she's 38 and she's an athlete, and that's her. And she does this tough mudder. I've never done one. She says, dad, when are you going to do a father daughter thing?

[01:01:06.830] – Allan

Yeah, do one of the smaller ones. The tough Mudders are now broken up. So the original one was like 12, 13 miles. So it's pretty tough. Now, that's what they call the 15K, which is, I guess, closer to 9.5 miles, but they have a 5K version. And so the obstacles are going to require upper body strength, grip strength, that type of thing. You're not really running a whole lot because the obstacles are probably no more than a mile away from each other anyway. So you pretty much jog to the next obstacle, and then you wait your turn to get on that obstacle. But they are a ton of fun. And based on looking at you right now, I don't see any get your wrist completely fixed, but I don't see any reason why anybody that doesn't set their mind to do something like that couldn't do it. And if there's an obstacle you can't do, there's no shame in that. You give it a shot, you do your best, and then you move on to the next obstacle. It's a lot of fun. And yes, if you're doing it with your daughter, that's going to be a special day, I promise you.

[01:02:11.320] – Jim

Well, I cannot believe this. I cannot believe this. And I have never talked about this with anyone except my wife. But when I hear your story, are you ready for this? I want to be in the senior Olympics in my age category again. So I'm not competing against somebody who's 75 it's every five years. And I would be in the 80-85.

[01:02:38.520] – Allan

Just started creating those age groups because they figured I got these people in the 80s that are now having to compete with people in the 60s that wasn't right. So they've corrected that. And because they've got Centurions doing it now, they have an over 100 category, and I have no doubt. Yeah, I have no doubt. Within ten years. They're going to have to start breaking that up because it's not fair for 115 year old to run against 100 year old. So good. Congratulations on that. 

[01:03:09.850] – Jim

Well, you may not be aware of this. I live in San Diego, in La Jolla. San Diego. San Diego started this instead of in addition to track and field, they also have and now for the first time in the season, and they have an exercise thing. So I'm not going to run 100 yards because of my knees. Okay. I can't do a lot of stuff that you can do, but I have a feeling I can compete in the 80 to 85 senior Olympics in the exercise part, and I can train for that. And I've never talked about with anybody. But hearing your story, It'd be a blast to do it.

[01:03:58.470] – Allan

Let's stay in touch and talk about that.

[01:04:00.390] – Jim

It's about doing your best. I did my best. And guess what, pal? You beat me this year. Next year. That's part of the motivation stuff. Yeah, that's great.

[01:04:13.450] – Allan

So, Jim, if someone wanted to learn more about you, more about the book, Just Move. Where would you like for me to send them?

[01:04:21.630] – Jim

Well, what I would do, frankly, is go to Amazon. This book is going to cost you, I think, $15 and change. Two years of work. And this is like a cup of coffee. So it's not like Jim is getting rich off a book. I think the book is really well done, if I may say this. Okay. And it covers the gamut. And I can tell you there's nothing in this that you don't know. So the book is not really not written for you. You're an athlete, okay. It's the person who, in fact, is a couch potato. I'm not sure where to start or how to do this stuff. I believe in the basic core exercises that everybody needs to do, and you can make all this stuff complicated. And I want to leave you with this one idea. If you want to make what we talked about today complicated, be my guest. I don't think it has to be at all. It's pretty simple stuff. You got to mix it up. You got to keep progressing. You've got to do more than just walk. But you don't have to have a gym membership if you don't want to.

[01:05:40.800] – Jim

You don't have to have a personal trainer if you don't want to. Okay. But you have to move. And you say, I love to move. We have a friend in Santa Barbara who's 92 years old, who is a competitive ballroom dancer. I'm talking about competitive, like on the national stage. That's pretty damn. You can do kayaking, you can do bicycling. There's all kinds of ways to move. If you say, Jim, I'm just not the gym rant type, okay. I've told you what I do. It's worked for me. But if you want to do kayaking, bicycling, Pilates it's all good stuff as long as you are moving and not sitting. But I've built the case here that the cardio endurance is not enough. You should do the other stuff. But I'm not here to pound the table and change somebody's life unless they want to. This book was written for somebody who essentially is skeptical like this. Tell me why I need to do this. Okay. Here are the reasons, but it's not my job to try to. I'm not a personal trainer. I'm not selling protein powder. I have no wax to grind. It's not going to change my life.

[01:07:09.920] – Jim

If somebody says I'm a couch potato, I'm not going to change your call. Good luck, because I can tell you what your life is going to be like when you get my age. You're going to have aches and pains, spend half day in the damn doctor's office. If that's what you want, it's fine. Me, I'd rather not do that. So that's kind of the takeaway. But the book, I need a wonderful book for somebody who is a couch potato, who says, I don't need to know more about this. I want to know more. But I'm not a personal trainer. I'm not a life coach. No, I'm just a guy who said, here's my story. If my story can inspire somebody, then that's my legacy, and that's why I do it.

[01:07:57.380] – Allan

Thank you, Jim. And thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[01:08:00.800] – Jim

Well, listen, I have to tell you, you inspired me, and it's not used to inspire me, but your story, you have a terrific story. You're a terrific communicator. Okay. And I think you've got a terrific life ahead of you. It's all I can say.

[01:08:21.040] – Allan

Thank you, Jim.

Post Show/Recap

[01:08:29.130] – Allan

Hey, Ras.

[01:08:30.460] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. That was so fun listening to a successful story like his at 85, he sounds like he's the fittest he's ever been. Oh, 82.

[01:08:39.690] – Allan

He's 82. Yeah, he's 82 now. He started his journey when he was in his 70 years, when he was turning 70, because he just had that moment. And most of us that go through some form of transformation like this, we come up to this moment and it's like, oh, I have to do something. And what he was is he just 70, and he felt old and he didn't like the energy level. He didn't like anything about it. And he determined that he was going to change that and committed to changing it. And his overall vision was that by the time he turned 80, he wanted to feel younger than he did when he was 70. And he has and he did, but he did some important things. And normally I try to drive these conversations. Jim is a Rambler. So he went on and on and on, but there's a lot of gold in there. Don't poopoo that like he did. I think it's worth our time to listen to people who've done what you want to do. Listen to people who've struggled through this and learn everything you can from them. So I was more than happy to just sort of hand the mic over to Jim and say, okay, run with it, because it's a good conversation.

[01:09:55.590] – Allan

But one of my key takeaways here is that he didn't play around with this. This wasn't that he dabbled at getting more fit, and it took him all these years. He went straight in and said, I'm hiring a trainer, and I'm going to make this change. And he got a good trainer, and a trainer made him younger, helped him exercise, get stronger, add muscle. And so now he is effectively from a biological age, probably younger than he was twelve years ago.

[01:10:28.980] – Rachel

My gosh, that's just incredible. And I love that he does all the things that we all should be doing Besides cardio. He does strength work. He does balance, which is really important. Even I need to work on that as a runner. And then he does the stretching. The other thing I need to do more of as a runner. But it's awesome that he dedicates his time to doing all of these different modalities each week.

[01:10:52.920] – Allan

Yeah. And so his schedule has him doing exercise for 1 hour, six days a week. That sounds like a lot of people say, oh, my God, I couldn't give an hour and go to the gym every day. You probably spend that much time watching Netflix in a week, 6 hours. And if you really look at it, 6 hours is a fraction of available time you have in a day. So I know we all feel like we're busy, but if you don't make this a priority, it's never going to happen. This is not something you phone in. He had to go to the gym and go through those workouts, and he's working on the other modalities and getting better there, too. And that's one of the cool things about this is when you really dedicate yourself and you put the time in, particularly at the beginning. We call it newbie gains, but you're going to see change really quickly. And that can be very motivating. But you got to start.

[01:11:55.740] – Rachel

Right. I love how he also said that he would rather spend an hour working out than an hour in the doctor's office. And I have to agree with that wholeheartedly. I would rather be exercising once a day or several times a week and just feel healthier and stronger for it. There's a lot of his lessons that I've learned at a much younger age. But again, going back to his age of 82, I'm just flabbergasted that he has put so much time and dedication into his own routine, and he's sharing it in his book. I just love to see people in this age bracket working out like he does.

[01:12:34.370] – Allan

Yeah. Now, a lot of books, when I'm talking to the author and I've read the book, it's like the same style the same thing. So I almost feel like as I've read the book I've already had a previous conversation with this individual. But I will say this Jim's book is much better organized than this podcast episode was. Jim knows his stuff and he put a lot of effort into writing the book. It's very well organized. There are workouts, there are stretches with pictures, all how to do this stuff. He does tell his story in there, which is very uplifting to know for sure. There's always a chance, but you got to get started and then it's a very well organized book for you to have a full program to get yourself started. But I'd still encourage you to look at getting a trainer and I know that's an investment the time is an investment and actually doing the work is an investment, but those investments pay off huge dividends, particularly in our current era where we need to keep our bodies as healthy, as strong as they can to just deal with everyday crap.

[01:13:43.710] – Rachel

For sure. Yes, for sure.

[01:13:47.830] – Allan

Because if you're starting from a better base, you're better off in the end. Regardless.

[01:13:54.570] – Rachel

Going back to his story, he started off with back pain and knee pain and all these things and now he doesn't feel that anymore. He's changed his lifestyle so much that he's healthier and more fit now than he was at age 70. It's just incredible.

[01:14:10.140] – Allan

Yeah, it's a good story and there's a lot of gold Nuggets in this episode. Even more in the book, so it's a good one.

[01:14:19.460] – Rachel

Yes, I love that. Great interview.

[01:14:21.580] – Allan

All right. Well, Rachel, I will talk to you next week.

[01:14:24.880] – Rachel

All right. Take care.

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Let's Say Hello

[00:02:38.830] – Allan

hey, Ras, how are things?

[00:02:41.040] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:42.900] – Allan

I'm doing all right. I just got back from a fairly long walk, and I'm trying something different. I've actually given myself a challenge this month, and it's a good one. I think it's sustainable. It's something I can do. A lot of people will think I'm insane. You're a distance runner, so you look at it and say, oh, well, I do that in a weekend, but I'm challenging myself to do 500,000 steps in 30 days.

[00:03:16.510] – Rachel

And what would that equate to in miles?

[00:03:18.700] – Allan

It will equate. Well, right now I'm thinking, that okay. I didn't break it down. The whole I'll look at that. I actually don't know that number. But to kind of give it to you in context is, okay, 10,000 steps for most of us works out to just under 5 miles.

[00:03:36.570] – Rachel

Okay.

[00:03:37.690] – Allan

So what I'm going to have to do to hit my number is about just under 17,000 steps per day. So you're talking about steps and you should get at least ten. So this is really I'm not saying steps above that. It just means that consistently I have to be well above the 10,000 if I have a slow day. And so it's got me thinking, okay, so how do I structure this and make sure in the past I've had moderate days and long days. It's just now that I'm getting myself ready for the Tough Mudder because that's really only numbers we're recording this. It's less than three months away. So as this goes live, we're really looking about two and a half months. So as I go into this challenge, like, okay, I've got to get myself into the basic condition of just being able to go and go consistently. And so I figured, yes, the whole trip thing I'm doing for the Tough Mudder shouldn't be more than nine and a half, maybe 10 miles. And it's going to have obstacles. So there's additional physical stuff. It's not a lot of running because if there's 25 obstacles within that 10 miles, I'm stopping quite frequently, almost never running much more than a mile.

[00:04:54.110] – Allan

And one of the obstacles they have is called the mud mile. So you're really just walking through a muddy trench for a mile. Not fun, but it is what it is. But it's just kind of one of those things. So I don't expect I don't need to worry about so much about the distance of any or being able to run any kind of speed or anything. But it was just okay, I want to keep consistent. I want to have a goal, and then I'm thinking about and I'm in the process. So Cisco's Live, you may have heard that maybe you heard an ad right before this episode went live. We'll see if I get everything planned out and it works. I actually want to run a challenge like this for everybody that's listening. So probably, yeah, for the month of July, we'll run a 30 day challenge where it'll be maybe, I think, pick 5000 steps per day, 10,000 steps per day, or let's bump it up to 16,667 steps per day on average. And then that way again, just on average over the course of a month to try to either get what would be, I guess at that point, not quite 500,000, but 300,000.

[00:06:05.630] – Allan

And I think that one works out to 150,000 steps. I didn't keep up with the miles because I'm like, okay, I'm not going to count the miles because it's a step challenge. So right now I have this step challenge, and I'm playing with this app and I may use an app or I may use a Google sheet, I'm not sure, but I'm considering putting that out there as a kind of a month long challenge starting in July. So you may have heard an ad before this show, and if you did, yeah, this is me kind of going through the planning stages of that. So you'll hear more next week. But yeah, I've been looking at that, getting into my training, just doing my thing.

[00:06:46.520] – Rachel

That's awesome. You know, I love your challenges. I enjoyed the squat challenge. And what else did you have? Another one?

[00:06:53.440] – Allan

Yeah, I've done the squat challenge. I've done a burpee challenge. I know, alcohol challenge. I've done a functional fitness challenge. And I think there might have been a couple more out there that I did. So yeah, the challenges were great. Very time intensive. I'm doing every single day. I'm there, I'm answering emails, I'm in that. And so it just got to be a point where it's like, okay, if I'm going to do a challenge, I have to use it to pay bills because I'm spending all my time doing this and I'm not doing the things that pay the bills. It got to be a problem. I couldn't I was doing it every month. I was doing a challenge and I was like, okay, I actually have to do work. I can't keep doing all my time and working this hard for on a challenge. So I did have to stop doing them only because I couldn't pay the bill. So if I do a challenge, they're probably a little price tag to it, but it's not going to be this crazy thing and you break it down for the number of days and the interaction and other things that are in there.

[00:08:03.460] – Allan

The value, it's nothing really. And particularly if we did the sugar challenge, if you just stop spending your money on sugar, you pay for the challenge. 1000 sold. So there's been a lot of challenges out there, and I'll probably rerun those at some point, but it probably will have a small price tag to it.

[00:08:24.100] – Rachel

That's great. The great thing about being in a group, like you have a little community on your Facebook group that do these challenges and it's fun. It's great to have the accountability. It kind of makes you stick with it. If you pay a few Bucks, then you've got skin in the game. So there's a lot of benefits to that. I think that's fantastic.

[00:08:43.160] – Allan

Yeah. And the step challenge, there's actually cost on my side. So this is not free to me that I'm just saying, okay, I'm just here's emails and my time. Actually, if I do this step challenge, the way I'm thinking about doing it, it's a substantial investment for me. So I would need people doing it and paying a little bit just to make it happen.

[00:09:02.630] – Rachel

Sure. That sounds awesome. Really great.

[00:09:05.140] – Allan

How are things up there.

[00:09:06.540] – Rachel

Good. It's beautiful weather. We're enjoying the time we can outside.

[00:09:11.530] – Allan

She's wearing a tank top. She's wearing a tank top.

[00:09:14.080] – Rachel

I am finally.

[00:09:15.390] – Allan

I wear a tank top. Every time we interview. I'm wearing a tank top and she's wearing a tank top.

[00:09:22.090] – Rachel

I'm Michigan pale. That's the pale white skin because I haven't been outside too much. But yeah, it's great. Great weather. And I mentioned my son graduated. We'll be moving him out. We're planning and buying furniture and doing all that to get him out. So very exciting times here. Very busy.

[00:09:40.700] – Allan

Okay. Are you ready to have a conversation with Emily?

[00:09:44.060] – Rachel

Yes.

Interview

[00:10:25.510] – Allan

Emily, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:10:28.290] – Emily

Thank you, Allan. Thank you for having me.

[00:10:30.510] – Allan

Now your book is called Optimizing Your Health: An Approachable Guide to Reducing Your Risk of Chronic Disease. And as I got into the forward and forgive me, I forget who wrote your forward, but he was really impressed with your diligence and your investigative and your curiosity and thoroughness. And I have to say, every single bit of that came out in this book. He nailed you with that. This could have been 18 books. It's not that long. So it's approachable. Approachable is in there for a reason. It's not 18 books long. You've literally taken 18 different books that I may have read over the last six years. And you put everything into a concise, beautiful chapter. And all the chapters interrelate because our life is a system. We're holistic. We're not just one system, but you've put it together in a way that you could read one chapter. So if you're like, look, I want to know more about supplements or I want to know more about this cold thermogenesis. There's a chapter there that you can go there and really, it gets deep, but you just make it easy to swim.

[00:11:44.360] – Emily

Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, my objective was to do exactly how you described. I happen to love research and love reading. And I've read several books on almost all of the topics that I hit. But what I tried to do was to take the salient aspects of each of those individual topics, break it down so that it was digestible and accessible to the everyday health consumer. So they may not be as inclined to read five books on sleep or four books on nutrition. I thought, all right, I'm going to take the most important aspects and break them down.

[00:12:22.170] – Allan

And you did a beautiful job.

[00:12:23.730] – Emily

Thank you.

[00:12:24.680] – Allan

Now, the first thing I want to talk about, if this isn't top of mind, after the last two and a half years of every single person out there, then I don't know where you've been, but it's about the immune system. This is such an important system that gets ignored a lot, and there's a lot out there. And I think from my perspective, we always talked about germ theory, and if we can kill the germ, we can save the person. But in the book, you introduced a thing called terrain theory, which was somewhat new to me. I think I've probably read about it somewhere sometime. Can we talk a little bit about what is our immune system? What is it doing for us? And then how does germ theory versus terrain theory really kind of blend into that conversation?

[00:13:13.510] – Emily

Sure. So our immune system is really quite remarkable, as is all of the other systems in our body. It's really brilliantly designed. And the immune system is broken into two different factors. There's the innate system, which is what produces the killer cells or the T cells, and that fends off pathogenic attackers. Usually that moves in when it senses something is wrong and it does its job. If it can't effectively do its job on its own, then the adaptive immune system steps in. That's part two, and that works on memory or what we've all heard antibodies, and those are B cells. And the key to all of this is that first the innate system works, and if it can't complete the job, then the adaptive comes in, and the key is to turn it off when they're done fending off the attacker because the problems result when it doesn't get turned off. And that's when the cytokine storms occur, which we've all heard about.

[00:14:15.070] – Allan

So what exactly is terrain theory versus germ theory? Because when thinking of just killing the germ and solving the problem. But this might be a little bit more complex than that.

[00:14:25.370] – Emily

So germ theory is attributable to Louis Pasteur long time ago, and it is the most widely accepted theory all the conventional doctors rely upon germ theory, and basically it says germs invade the body and cause disease. And the focus of this theory kill all the germs, which in my opinion may be an overzealous approach because we're made up of germs, and you have to be very selective in which Germs you kill because you don't want to kill the good ones along with the bad ones. And terrain theory also a very old theory, but not as widely accepted, despite I think it's logic base. And that's attributable to a man named Antoine Bashamp. It's also referred to as cellular theory, and it is focused on the concept that our internal health is responsible for how we react to invaders whether or not we will get sick. And the theory goes on to state that disease is the result of a weakened immune system, and therefore, the approach should be to optimize your immune system to create really good resilience so that you can fend off as many invaders as possible.

[00:15:45.070] – Allan

And then the final topic I kind of wanted to get into with regards to the immune system, because, again, it's just all these things, you turn it on. If you have a good, strong immune system, you're in good shape. I did get covid, and I got over it, but I got covid before I could get the vaccine based on where I live and my age. But I have a strong immune system and it got me through it, and I'm good. Same with my wife. Obviously, when these things are happening, there's an inflammation response, and we want that to be acute and done, solve the problem and move on. If we don't, we end up with something that you document in the book. I've read it before a few times called inflammaging. So can we talk about what inflammation is doing if it sticks around and becomes chronic and what is inflammaging?

[00:16:34.340] – Emily

Okay, so inflammation is an immune response, and we all have it, and we would actually die if we didn't have acute inflammation. By way of example, if you cut your arm, the result is inflammation. Your body wants to cure that cut. And so it rushes to the site of the injury and creates inflammation as a healing process. And ideally, it then turns off. So we need acute inflammation. The problems begin when the acute inflammation is not turned off and turns into chronic inflammation. And chronic inflammation is the precursor of all chronic disease and truly all bad things. So inflammation is a term. I love the term. I'm not sure who coined it, but it's a great term, and it really relates to age related inflammation, and it's a low grade, constant inflammation. As we age, our immune cells become less effective, and we have a harder time fighting off pathogens. Both our T cells and our mitochondria begin to lose function.

[00:17:42.070] – Allan

Right. Some of the other chapters you get into leaky gut and how that's going to cause some inflammation. We talk about toxins and how that's going to cost them. So it's not hard to imagine that inflammation is going to be a regular part of our lives if we have these exposures and these things we're doing. And so as we mentioned earlier, one of the reasons I kind of like almost taking these two theories of the Germ theory and the terrain theory together is to think in terms of, yes, sometimes we have to fight the bug, and our immune system has to do that. But if we're doing the right things to have the right body and the right strong immune system, we're in a better position to do that in a good way versus setting ourselves up for a problem.

[00:18:27.310] – Emily

Exactly. I mean, we'll never be able to resist everything because that's just unrealistic. So of course we will be invaded by certain germs, and ideally, we want to be able to fight them off as best as we can. And I believe that's done by achieving resilience.

[00:18:46.150] – Allan

I like that word.

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[00:20:49.770] – Allan

So the next one I want to get into, and I know it seems like I'm jumping around a bit, and I am, but it's because with 18 chapters, there's a lot to get into here. So I did pick and choose and I picked and choose some things that I thought right now might be really important for someone that's looking at improving it and then really kind of almost interested in these newer things because I think we all know if you eat well, if you sleep well, if you exercise, if you manage stress, and all those are in your book, if you're doing those things, then now you're saying, okay, what's next? What am I going to do next? And one of the interesting ones is talking about breathing.

[00:21:31.830] – Allan

Why is breathing so important?

[00:21:34.350] – Emily

Well, how we breathe directly impacts our overall health, everything. Our stress, our cardiovascular system, our neurological system, our hormones. It affects our sleep, our endurance, our immune system. If they're all impacted by either proper or improper breathing. And many of us don't breathe properly. We breathe through our mouth as opposed to through our nose, and we breathe shallowly through our chest as opposed to deeper in our belly. And it makes a giant difference. How to breathe.

[00:22:09.330] – Allan

Now in the book, you went through several different methods of breathing. I was familiar with box breathing and of course, Wim HOF and some of the others, but there's a lot in there. Can we talk about these techniques for breathing and why they can be valuable for us?

[00:22:28.020] – Emily

So as we age, we lose lung capacity and lung function. And as we go on about our daily business, we don't focus on breathing. And so it has to become a priority and a habit to do so properly. And there are a lot of different methods. And by the way, breathing has been a focus of yoga and Chinese medicine for centuries. They realized quite a long time ago how very important that it is. Box breathing, I go into because in my opinion, that's the easiest to adopt. You'd breathe in for a count of four or five and you hold for a count of four or five, you exhale for a count of four or five, and you hold the exhale. And if you're particularly anxious or something has happened, it stressed you out. If you lengthen your exhale, they have shown that that will calm your nervous system and that's kind of an easy, harmless way to calm yourself down.

[00:23:29.310] – Allan

I used box breathing when I was working in corporate. My boss called me up to his office. It was never a good thing. There was never a good okay, come to my office. I'm like, oh, this is good. I was in the elevator. It was the only time I ever took the elevator was when he called me up there. I would walk the stairs. Otherwise I would get in the elevator. Just so I had more time to do some box breathing before I walked into his office. So I can definitely tell you that the breathing techniques that you have in the book, maybe not Wim HOF, because that's kind of a specialized type thing, but they will help you with anxiety. They will lower your stress level, and they'll teach you a little bit more about the difference of how breath feels when it gets deep and when it goes out. And also that you don't necessarily have to be afraid of not breathing. Your body is going to do it automatically. But I can tell someone that wants to try box breathing, for example, you might want to start with 3 seconds because that hold when you've breathed out.

[00:24:31.520] – Allan

Sometimes it's a little uncomfortable if you're not used to it. But again, all these breathing methods that you have in the book are really great for someone to practice. There was one thing you had in there that I appreciate that I had never seen before. And first I was like, I don't know if I want to do that, but it's called a tape called Sauna Fix, and it's basically where if you realize you're sleeping and maybe breathing through your mouth or snoring and you don't have an obstruction, you can tape your mouth shut to teach you to breathe more through your nose.

[00:25:04.290] – Emily

Yeah, it does sound barbaric. And I think I had to discuss this at length with my Editors at the publishing company because they were concerned about me, including this, which, by the way, I have a Disclaimer. I am not a doctor, and everyone should consult their healthcare practitioner before trying anything. You need to be in a certain state of health before you try some of these lifestyle adjustments. But I tried the tape method on my son. He snores and is a mouth breather. And the result of that is that he wasn't getting effective sleep. He would wake up tired and groggy. And it turns out that a lot of people either have obstructive sleep apnea or they snore, and that prevents oxygen from getting to your brain. So you don't have as restful of a night's sleep. So what this does is tape, and you can use any tape. I just included that in the resources because I wanted to include it.

[00:26:00.160] – Allan

But you could literally say duct tape. Don't use duct tape. Right.

[00:26:04.630] – Emily

That seems a little extreme. It's true. And my suggestion I can't remember if they made me take it out or not. It's possible that they did was to start slow, which I think one should do with everything. And that is around the house during the day, not while you're going to sleep, but you practice. You put either the sound effects, it's the shape of your mouth or a little piece of tape. And you get used to breathing through your nose because it's a really important habit to establish. And it's probably best to start during the day. And if it works and you're not too uncomfortable with it, you can do it in the night time until you've established a habit where you automatically will breathe through your nose and not through your mouth.

[00:26:44.400] – Allan

Yeah. I had a dentist on Dr. Haas not long ago, and he talked about mouth breathing in his book and how it's bad for the PH and the microbiome in your mouth, which you got into microbiome in the mouth. Like I said, this is a very complete and comprehensive book that I could tie back to just about every interview I've ever done. But yeah, you mentioned that. You did say and you also mentioned don't try these breathing techniques while you're driving. Don't try them while you're in water, because that's important. Breathing is important to keep us alive, and we could pass out. But at the same time, teaching yourself to breathe through your nose rather than your mouth is really important. And I've seen it over and over again so again, that's why I wanted to get into this is just as people are looking at the next level, so you're doing the right things with your food, with your sleep, with your movement, with your stress management, and you're saying, okay, what's the next thing? What's the next thing for me? It could very well be a breathing practice. It will help you sleep better, and particularly if you are snoring or things like that, if you can learn to breathe through your nose, avoid that, you're going to sleep better and everything's going to work better.

[00:27:58.830] – Allan

So the next topic I want,

[00:27:59.960] – Emily

I include Wim HOF.

[00:28:01.660] – Allan

Yeah, you do. Go ahead.

[00:28:03.880] – Emily

And the only reason I did, because that's on the extreme spectrum of breathing. But he's such a fascinating individual. He really is. His story, his background, what he does. I've seen him speak in person a couple of times, and I just thought I couldn't do a chapter on breathing without him, including him. But having said that, people need to do that with care and caution, despite his objective that respiratory control will improve your resilience.

[00:28:34.590] – Allan

From experience of what he's gone through and some other people I know that have worked with his methods, then the answer is absolutely yes. But he's, in effect, level nine, and most of us are starting at level four. So breathing is a technique, the box breathing, and that works for you. Some of these other breathing strategies, they work for you. After you've done this for a while, you can consider a Wim HOF kind of thing. And then when you're looking into Wim HOF, another thing that's going to come up to is getting cold, because he's invariably famous for climbing a mountain in just shorts and boots, running a marathon. I guess he was in the snow barefooted. He does some pretty crazy things that could be great for you if you're at the right place. But for a lot of people and for a long time now, there's been this kind of move on the edge. I want to call it biohacking edge because for most of us, we're in this mainstream and then these bio hacking things are going on that people are trying. This seems to be one of those things that's going stepping towards the front, it's starting to hit mainstream.

[00:29:44.390] – Allan

You can go to a gym now and find a dip pool to do cold thermogenesis. What is cold thermogenesis? And why is this something we should consider for our health?

[00:29:57.330] – Emily

Well, this is a great way to reduce your inflammation when your body is exposed to extremes in temperature. There's a concept that I find fascinating called corniesus. And what that means is if you are exposed to extremes really of anything cold, hot exercise, your body adapts. Now, it has to be a short period of time. It can't be an extended time because you can do harm if you do any of these things for an extended period of time, but short burst of cold. There are people who get into a cold plunge or they swim in cold oceans. But a very easy starter method is when you take a shower, you turn the water from a tolerable temperature to an intolerable temperature, a cold temperature for the last 30 seconds of your shower, and then you can build upon that. Now I do that, though I continue to find it highly unpleasant. It does give you a burst of energy, and the studies state that it does reduce your inflammation.

[00:31:02.010] – Allan

Now another thing that it does is it has the potential to create a thing called Brown fat. Now, babies are born with Brown fat. That's how they manage to stay warm as babies, because they don't carry as much general fat overall, at least for the most part, because they need to be a certain size to make this all work. But most of us are with the white fat. We're trying to actually get rid of this white fat because it's unsightly and it's heavy and it's not serving us. There's no energy usage. It's just this thing hanging on me that I want to get rid of. What is the difference between Brown fat and white fat?

[00:31:39.550] – Emily

Well, quite simplistically. Brown fat is more metabolically active, which is why you want Brown fat, not white fat. It increases your metabolism and is a better type of fat.

[00:31:53.500] – Allan

Okay. Basically, we talk about cold thermogenesis some of the basic benefits that we're taking away from this conversation is that it's going to lower inflammation and it's going to potentially increase your metabolism. And so those two things mean if you're trying to lose weight, it's going to help. And if you're trying to get healthy, lowering the inflammation is going to help.

[00:32:14.320] – Emily

Yes, I think it's supposed to help you sleep better, too. And who couldn't benefit from some additional methods to improve their sleep?

[00:32:23.490] – Allan

Cool. Now the next one I want to get into because it's a question I get all the time. What supplements should I be taking? And I like that in your book, you were pretty clear that we should be trying to get our nutrition from food. I appreciate that. But then there is a time and a place for supplementation. So why and when should we be looking to supplements?

[00:32:49.770] – Emily

So this is a favorite topic of mine because most doctors will tell you just get your minerals and vitamins, central fatty acids and amino acids from food. And at one point in history, we probably could have done that effectively, but we can no longer do that. Our soil is so depleted of minerals and our food supply is so very tainted that we have to look to supplements in order to compensate. But I've learned the hard way, which is kind of how I learned everything, doing everything wrong and then learning, which allows for the lesson to remain. But the supplement situation I used to read articles that would talk about they would recommend a supplement, and they would say, take this supplement and it will improve your mitochondrial biogenesis. And I would think, well, I'd like to get some more mitochondria. I better take that supplement. And I was so susceptible to everything that I read that before I knew it, I was up to about 50 or 60 supplements a day. And I thought, all right, wait a minute. I need to do further research and get a clear understanding of how all this works.

[00:33:59.140] – Emily

And I learned along the way that everything is synergistic. The old adage that the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone is really true. Everything that we do, everything that we eat, everything that we take, we may take it for a particular purpose, but oftentimes we're unaware of how it's affecting the rest of our biology. So, for example, during COVID, everybody was recommending zinc. Take zinc because it's antiviral. And yes, zinc is antiviral and that it's an important supplement to take. But one shouldn't take anything without first testing, because if you take too much zinc, zinc is synergistic with copper. And when your zinc levels rise too high, it can throw your copper out of balance. This is something that I had to search for, and it wasn't readily available information. And that's true for everything. D and K should be taken together. A lot of these vitamins and supplements, they work synergistically together. Some of them work opposite. But above all, my kind of rule of thumb that I learned the hard way is it's not a good idea to take any recommended supplement until you test yourself. It is worthwhile to get blood tests to test your mineral status, your vitamin status, pretty much everything, because at worst, you'll be supplementing with something that you already have a sufficient amount of.

[00:35:32.700] – Emily

But you also may be doing some harm. You don't want to overdo these things. So it's good to find out what your baseline is before you add anything.

[00:35:43.170] – Allan

Yeah, every day I think if you walk into a Walmart or you walk into a GNC or you look online, these supplements, there are hundreds of thousands of brands, and this and it's like, okay, so you literally walk there's just a wall, a wall of supplements. What's wrong with that? If someone started saying, okay, well, I know I need a vitamin A. Not getting enough vitamin A. My eyes are not what I want them to be. Someone said, take some vitamin A. And I walked into the Walmart. Am I getting good vitamin A? How would I know? Synthetic versus natural, where it came from, how it was made, what are some tips of us trying to figure out these supplements and which ones we should be taking and shouldn't.

[00:36:29.870] – Emily

So chances are you're not getting good vitamin A. And the reason for that is there appears to be many different brands, but the reality is I think there are five big corporations that own all of the supplement brands, which people don't know about that. And there are synthetic brands or vitamins which are made from things like coal and tar and formaldehyde and many other chemicals that you really do not want to be ingesting. And that is in addition to the exceptions and the fillers and all these other added binders and things that you don't need. And they do that to compensate because you're often not getting the dose that reads on the label. It's not in the capsule or the pill, and they fill them up with these other things that at best are not doing you any favors, but at worst could be harmful. So people think that natural is a better approach. But unfortunately, while it should mean that there are no added synthetics, it doesn't mean that the law that governs a label with the word natural only requires that 10% of the supplement contains plant derived ingredients, allowing the other 90% to be synthetic.

[00:37:49.950] – Emily

So what I advise is there's a couple of different things. One, there are some doctor only brands that only doctors are allowed. You can only get them through your doctors. I think pure encapsulations may be one designs for health is another. I list a lot of them in the research chapter, Chapter 19. But there are definite brands that you can rely on with a little bit more confidence. But then there are labels. There's the GMP certification, which stands for good marketing practice, QAI Quality Assurance International. There's USDA organic, which is a great label, and fish oil, which a lot of us are told to take. Pretty much all of us are, and it is important to take. But the problem is a large amount of fish oil supplements are ranced. And so you can go online. There's a website called the International Fish Oil Standards, and you can search for the brand that you bought or you were told to buy and determine its toxicity level. So there are ways to combat the nefarious consumers practices.

[00:39:02.310] – Allan

But I want to go back and say what you said at the beginning is we should be trying to get our nutrients from food. And if we do think that there's an issue that we would need to supplement with something or we're interested in supplementation for one reason or another. Like you said, zinc vitamin D was another very popular thing for people to consider back when code was the strongest. And maybe now as we start going into apparently another season of it, you might want to look at vitamin D, but get yourself tested, find out what your vitamin D level is. I will say that from what I've read, most people are deficient from vitamin D because we just don't get outside with enough sun exposure and we're not getting enough from our food. But that said, you don't know till you test.

[00:39:51.720] – Emily

Exactly. And then, of course, there's absorption issues. You can take high quantities of all of these, and if your gut isn't optimized, you won't be absorbing them.

[00:40:02.310] – Allan

So again, going back to take care of what you eat, take care of your movement, take care of your stress. It's a system. It's a big system. And you give us a lot of opportunities here to understand why things are the way they are. And then some things particularly I love at the end, you give those just the high level actions do these five to seven things. And if you really want to optimize your health for this particular area. So I love those quick actionable tips, which is why I ask my next question.

[00:40:33.030] – Allan

I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:40:41.160] – Emily

So as I just briefly mentioned, and this has taken a while for me to come to this, I think the number one thing that everyone should focus on is to fix their gut. When one has gut dysfunction and most of us do have gut dysfunction, it affects every other system in our body. And it's hard to optimize the other systems when your gut is not tip top. So first and foremost, get your gut as optimized as possible and other things will fall into place. But probably the other two things that I focus on are effective sleep habits. And it sounds a lot easier than it is. And as I mentioned in the book, there are a lot of different things that you can do to improve your sleep habits, but it makes a difference. I think we all know that if you wake up and you haven't had a good night's sleep, you're less productive and you're not quite as cheery. So I think it's really important to get good sleep. And then the third one, there's so many, it's hard for me to limit it to just three. But the third one would be nutrition.

[00:41:48.630] – Emily

And nutrition is tricky. It really is, because there is no greater conflict in any area of science than there is in the nutrition space. But if you can eliminate processed foods and try and eat as clean up a diet as possible, organic where necessary, which is not all foods, you can go to the EWG website to find out which foods you really need to get. Eat organic because they're spray with so many pesticides, and that will make an enormous impact on your happiness and your well being. We are what we eat. And sadly, it took me most of my life to appreciate that I never did before. And when I changed my eating habits dramatically, it had such a positive impact on every aspect of my life that I would definitely have that my top three.

[00:42:43.710] – Allan

Thank you, Emily. I appreciate that. If someone wanted to learn more about you and learn more about your book, Optimizing Your Health, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:42:54.990] – Emily

Well, my book is sold wherever books are sold online. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart, and I have a website, emilygoldmears.com, and I have an Instagram, and I have Facebook all the same name, making it easy, at least for me, so that I don't forget.

[00:43:12.510] – Allan

You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/542 and I'll be sure to have a link there. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:43:22.770] – Emily

Thank you, Allan. It was a thrill to speak with you.

Post Show/Recap

00:43:32.170] – Allan

All right, Rachel, how did you like that conversation?

[00:43:35.120] – Rachel

Oh, that was really awesome. Any time I get the chance to hear how I can optimize my overall health, I'd like to try any tip I can get. And this is an interesting discussion.

[00:43:46.710] – Allan

And it is Emily is a very interesting individual because, well, she's an attorney. She's not a doctor. And she didn't approach this from the perspective of trying to be a better doctor or figure out a way to have conversations with people. As a personal trainer, this was something that was really important to her. Her health was really important to her. And the answers that she was getting weren't adding up. And as someone who's kind of wired like that, my father is an attorney and my stepmother's an attorney. I was an accountant. We want to see everything lined up. Everything needs to kind of function and make sense. And it was I guess the same thing with me is like, okay, I'm over 40, and I used to be able to do these things that would get me healthy and fit. And now I go in and I buy a magazine like I did 25 years ago. And the stuff that's in that magazine is not even close to what was in the magazine. And then I'm getting through and I'm like, I just paid $4 for this magazine, and 75%, 80% of it is just ads for supplements and this and that.

[00:45:04.690] – Allan

And there were eight articles and five of them were also ads for something. And I'm like, so I read this whole magazine cover to cover, and I learned nothing. And I was buying books, and it was kind of the same thing. I just bought this book. And all it really is is an ad for this guy and his service for me to go over to wherever spend thousands of dollars at his little fat for him. And I'm like, okay, there's got to be more of this. So that's why I went through my journey. That's why I'm selective about the guests I bring on the show. So Emily, even though, again, not a doctor wired very much like that, this has to make sense. And so within her book, what she's basically done is gone through each of the systems of our body. And she's talked about, okay, what's there? And what is the thing that I'm reading? What are the studies that are out there. And it's exhaustive the amount of time and effort. She probably spent years and years self-educating and collecting all these resources to then be able to put this out there.

[00:46:15.460] – Allan

And it's a reference book. I mean, it was a full at this point in time reference book of what we know about our bodies and how to optimize our health.

[00:46:25.800] – Rachel

That's pretty amazing. Is there any big key takeaway that really jumped out at you?

[00:46:32.120] – Allan

Well, there's the germ theory versus terrain theory, and I think I'm not going to say versus. I said versus in my notes when I was writing about this and talking to her. But reality is, I think they're both overlying theories that say the same thing. Germ theory basically says if you can avoid a germ or at least maybe even immunize yourself from a germ, then you won't get sick or you won't get as sick of finding out. And so the CDC says, okay, wash your hands. Best advice they did give, wash your hands. Why? Because that keeps the germs off of your hands. And if you touch your face, which there's a second thing they said, don't touch your face. But if you do, if you wash your hands, then you're not exposing your face. Now if you touch your face again, wash your hands again. But those things, the germ theory tells you those things. And that's what they followed. It was like, okay, here's how you avoid this. Then once they had the vaccines like, okay, now you could get the vaccine, and that should reduce the likelihood you're going to get it or reduce the severity Stuff's coming out.

[00:47:39.740] – Allan

I'm not going to talk about other than to say, maybe not, but it is what it is. It's all following germ theory, and it was what we were taught in school, and it all made sense at the time. But terrain theory is where we're talking about the capacity of your body to fight this thing off. So if you're thinking in terms of, okay, I have a strong body, and here comes this bully that I'm now going to have to get into a fight with. If you're strong and your immune system is strong, you win that fight. It might take you a while. You might get a little beat up. You might be sick for a while, but you beat it. I had covid I had a good, strong immune system. I beat it. Okay? My wife did it. And so if you have a strong body, that now what happens, though, is if you're fighting another bully, so that bully could be cancer, it could be diabetes, it could be heart disease or any other type of chronic disease. And then the second bully steps in, well, now you got two. And I don't know about you.

[00:48:48.120] – Allan

If you've ever been in a fight with two people, chances are you're not going to win that fight. Okay. And so that's where terrain theory kind of comes in and says, okay, the stronger you make your body holistically, your whole body, everything about you. So this is your health, this is your fitness, this is your happiness. This is the whole bundle of wellness. The better you are, the more well you are, the better your immune system is going to function. And so you don't have other bullies. It's like, okay, we've gotten rid of them. We've gotten rid of the diabetes, we've gotten rid of the heart disease. We don't have these things now we're in a better position to fight the bully, the single bully, when they show up. So that's where the terrain theory kind of comes in. And I think it's really important. So the reality of it is it should probably be a little bit of both, but the one you have the most control over day in and day out is your body.

[00:49:47.690] – Rachel

For sure. Yeah. I've known several people to have had a hip replacement, knee replacement. And every time that they've shared their journey with me that all of these friends have said that their doctors told them that they were strong and athletic before the surgery and they were more likely to recover better after the surgery. And in every case of my friends, that was held true. So the stronger you are before something happens, the more likely your ability to get through it faster without side problems or other complications.

[00:50:26.830] – Allan

When I walked into therapy for physical therapy after my shoulder surgery because I kept training, I didn't take months off and keep myself in a sling or worry about, well, if I move my arm that way, it's going to hurt. It just hurt. And I was like, okay, I'm going to move and I'm going to do my things. Now I couldn't do any pushing movements, so no overhead presses, no side laterals, no bench presses, no push ups, none of that. Almost none of that. When I went in, I had nearly full range of motion under control, which I think I'll talk about with another person, but another interview I've done recently. And if you're moving and you have full range of motion with your body, you're moving your body through full range of motion, then you've got a good base. And so when I went into therapy, my therapist was like, wow, we don't usually see someone your age that's capable of moving like this after an injury and surgery you just had. So we're much further along. Now, what did that mean? In the grand scheme of things? It meant that my therapy progressed very quickly.

[00:51:40.640] – Allan

I was into strength training a lot faster. I was back in the gym sooner. And at $375 a pop for each of those therapy sessions, which I was on the hook for 20% off, I cut a lot of those out. So the projection for my therapy was that I would be going three days a week for six weeks, and I only needed four weeks of therapy.

[00:52:05.750] – Rachel

That's awesome. It's fantastic.

[00:52:08.080] – Allan

So that's money in my pocket, it paid for more than my gym membership and my personal trainer combined. Just by being in a better position coming out of that surgery and going into physical therapy, my medical bills were lower. I was kind of shocked on a solid 375 an hour because I didn't know that's what it was going to be. But it came out through my insurance and they're like, okay, you've got to make your deductible, which is more than I more than did that. And with the surgery. But then so we come into this, I'm thinking, okay, I just got to pay 20% of this and 20% of 375 three days a week. It starts adding up pretty quick. But those are the things, the better your body's condition, the better you're ready to deal with issues stronger you are. If you fall, the less likely you are to break.

[00:53:02.600] – Rachel

True.

[00:53:03.120] – Allan

Yeah. That's just how it is.

[00:53:07.450] – Rachel

That was awesome. That was interesting. And she also mentioned breathing. Are you guys both discussed breathing and box breathing and how used it to go speak with your people at work?

[00:53:22.030] – Allan

Yes. I breathe a lot different here because I don't have the stress I had there. So I haven't found myself in a situation where I've had to do that type of breathing. The breathing I do now is like I said, I go for these walks and it's sunny as I'm walking. My mouth is closed. I'm not breathing through my mouth as I'm doing my walks. I'm just going at a pace where I'm comfortable. I'm breathing through my nose. I'm watching the beautiful surf. I've got a good bit of sun hitting my skin. Also got eaten up by chitras today. Yeah. So I'm not going back on Public Beach. Sorry. This is the third time in a row that the Chitras have just eaten me alive. So anyway, if you come here, we'll tell you where the Chitras are so you can stay away from them.

[00:54:15.550] – Rachel

Good idea.

[00:54:16.930] – Allan

But yeah, breathing is really important. And there's a lot of advice in there. And there are ways that when you find something like this, a book like this is good because the breathe of not breath of the topic, there's bits and pieces of everything in there. So cold thermogenesis, supplements, she gets into a lot of things in there. And so to be able to go through and say, okay, I want to learn a little bit about this, a good bit about this. She's got a good paragraph on it being a good chapter on it. And she's telling you, okay, I read this book, I read that book there's reference this study. So she's kind of giving you the platform for saying, okay, I think this cold thermogenesis is important for me. It's one of the next things I want to not me personally because no, I get cold. But if you just say that to yourself this is interesting to me. It's a good platform to get the basics down, to understand what the current science says and then from there you can expand your knowledge and practice.

[00:55:25.440] – Rachel

I love it. Sounds like a great book to help have on the shelf.

[00:55:28.700] – Allan

It is a really good book. I think we had Alan Aragon on last week and that was probably one of the best training for performance eating for performance books. Eating for performance books I've ever read. This is a good companion even though the two of them go together and say you write that you write that just looking for books. I would say if you want a library that really helps you dive in deep to these two different areas. So physical training and what you eat for physical training and then the other things you do to just optimize your overall health again, optimizing your performance, optimizing your body fat composition and here you come over here optimizing your health. They fit together very well.

[00:56:16.950] – Rachel

Perfect. That's great.

[00:56:19.360] – Allan

All right. Well, Rachel, I guess I'll talk to you next week.

[00:56:22.440] – Rachel

Sounds great. Take care.

[00:56:23.960] – Allan

Okay. You too.

[00:56:25.030] – Rachel

Thank you.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
– Deb Scarlett	– Ken McQuade	– Margaret Bakalian
– Debbie Ralston	– John Dachauer	– Melissa Ball
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Thank you!

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Let's Say Hello

[00:03:03.680] – Allan

Hey, Ras.

[00:03:04.890] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:06.630] – Allan

I'm doing all right.

[00:03:07.920] – Rachel

Good.

[00:03:09.310] – Allan

Been a busy week. We had that flood here in the gym, and so we've been trying to work on the roof and keep that going. So that's been pretty massive. And then, of course, they took the holiday break, took a couple of days off, and it rained for two solid days. Which was great. No, it actually ended up being great. We were like in a rainforest and a tree, like almost like a Treehouse thing. And it wasn't really technically a tree house, but it felt like it based on where it was on the Hill and then just sit there. I read two fiction book novels.

[00:03:42.650] – Rachel

How nice. What a nice change.

[00:03:46.140] – Allan

Yeah. I mean, I don't hardly ever read fiction anymore because I'm constantly reading nonfiction. In fact, I think I've got a book I've got to read today. But, yeah, it's kind of crazy. I sat down, I brought two books with me because I just wasn't sure how far I would get into the first book, and I ended up finishing both of them.

[00:04:05.070] – Rachel

That's awesome. Would you recommend either of what you read?

[00:04:09.160] – Allan

Well, one of them, yes. I suppose. I don't know if you get on Amazon and prime and the Netflix kind of stuff, but on Amazon Prime, there's a show called The Man from High Castle.

[00:04:22.730] – Rachel

Oh, I've heard of that.

[00:04:24.050] – Allan

Okay. And it was a really good series. And so this was the book that basically was the basis for that television show. And obviously when you have a television show with all the episodes and all that, there was a lot more into the plot of the show than there was in the book. But it was really interesting because particularly since I knew the characters from the show to get into their head, because now this was told from basically the Omnipotent perspective where you're in his head, each of these characters head. So that was good. But it's a good book. It's interesting. And then the other one was called Bocas del toro. But oddly enough, none of the action in the book actually happened in Bocas del toro.

[00:05:15.050] – Rachel

So I wonder what the inspiration was for that name.

[00:05:18.660] – Allan

Well, that's where the guy ended up. The main protagonist, I guess, of the book. He ended up in Bocas del toro at the end of the book, but it was kind of he said it was based on some actual facts and things that had happened to people. So you have to assume that this was a person that actually dealt with this.

[00:05:38.330] – Rachel

Cool. Very cool.

[00:05:40.260] – Allan

So how are things with you?

[00:05:41.800] – Rachel

Good. I actually just finished a book myself. I read this book probably once a year or so. I just finished reading The Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway.

[00:05:51.730] – Allan

Yeah.

[00:05:52.340] – Rachel

It's a classic tale. It's a quick read. And I've been thinking about why I was so drawn to it. And it's about endurance. It's about a man holding onto this fish for as long as he could and after several days of holding the line. But one of the things in the very beginning of the book that amuses me so much is that the old man is in Havana in the, gosh, when was that? Prior to the 1950s, I think. And he liked baseball like a lot of Cubans did. And probably still do. But his favorite player was DiMaggio and he was talking with one of his friends about baseball, and he said he needs to watch the Tigers of Detroit as well as the Indians of Cleveland, who have changed their name recently to Guardians. But it was just interesting to hear him talk about the Detroit Tigers, which is our team. So it was just really a fun little twist at the very beginning of the book, but great book. I would always recommend it.

[00:07:01.930] – Allan

Cool. Well, you ready to have a conversation with Alan Aragon?

[00:07:05.820] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:07:53.730] – Allan

Alan, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:56.610] – Alan Aragon

Hey, Allan, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

[00:08:00.210] – Allan

Now your book is called Flexible Dieting: The Science-based, Reality-tested Method for Achieving and Maintaining your Optimal Physique Performance and Health. I've read a lot of books. You're probably my I want to say close to 330th interview over the time I've been doing this podcast and I read every single book and there's at least I would say 100 citations that I earmarked or just made notes of that I want to go back and read because this was so well researched, so well organized and put together in a way that when you get through it and you would kind of admit this yourself, there's points where it feels a little trudgy because there's science and it's hard not to. But when you get done, you're like, this is what science is supposed to be, not some of the stuff we've been doing for the last few years, not what nutrition science has been doing for the last several decades. This is how you do science. And I really appreciate the way you put this book together.

[00:09:16.990] – Alan Aragon

Oh, cool. Yeah. Well, thank you. The book's title is kind of misleading. I was asked to do the book and then I said to myself, you know, this is my opportunity to leverage the powers of a large publishing house to write the ultimate evidence-based nutrition book that covers how to optimize body composition and athletic performance and just go fully science-based with that and try to make it readable for the mass audience. And so calling the book Flexible Dieting, it sounds like some almost like a pop diet book that has some sort of a hook. But then when you go through it, it's like gosh, if I wanted to learn about all the macronutrients, if I wanted to learn about different ways to enhance various sports, and if I also wanted to kind of learn what flexible dieting is that's in there, too, among a million other things? It's an interesting book, man. I commend you for getting through it. It's like an encyclopedia.

[00:10:38.330] – Allan

Well, it is and it isn't. Yes, it is. It is. From the perspective of when I have a question about when is the best time for me to take my protein? I have a chapter on that. I've took a couple of chapters. Whether I'm dealing with performance, whether I'm dealing with strength, whether I'm dealing with fat loss, whatever my goals are, I literally now have a reference book to go back and say, okay, at least from a baseline of what science was in 2022. So this is one of those books where I'm sorry, but in about five to ten years, you're going to have to I think you've tied yourself into a second and third edition or something like that. I think there's a rule. Yes, but at least what we know today. Yes. We're going to start with because it is important flexible dieting, because that's the hook, if you will. But that is a part of the fact that there is so much information out there, and there are what a lot of people call the hard and fast rules, the rigid. You must do this. You must do that. And a lot of us really struggle with that.

[00:11:51.820] – Alan Aragon

Yes.

[00:11:52.720] – Allan

And what we're talking about is the continuum of dietary control. Could you kind of go over what that is and why that's really important for us to understand because particularly weight loss or muscle gain and they're kind of on other sides of each other. But if we're really looking at changing ourselves and we want to eat the right way, common sense would say, well, find a rigid plan and just do it, grind it out, even if you don't like it. And that's going to get you the best results. But for a lot of people, that's not true.

[00:12:26.650] – Alan Aragon

Yes. Diets are all effective as long as you stick to them. And the $64 million question, well, in Elon's case, the $44 billion question would be how do you stick to a diet? And so what I feel is the magic answer to that is you have to find an approach that works for you. You have to find methods that work for you as an individual. And this is going to be different from everybody. It just varies from person to person. And there are certain immutables. Like, for example, if you wanted to lose weight, you have to impose a net caloric deficit by the end of the week, technically, not necessarily by the end of the day. If you want to gain weight, you have to sustain the opposite hyper caloric conditions or caloric surplus conditions. And as is the major public health issue of obesity, there is a problem with the general public eating too much by the end of the day, the week, the month, and you can take anybody on the planet and give them a script and say, hey, follow this 100% and they are going to lose weight as long as that script imposes a caloric deficit.

[00:14:09.650] – Alan Aragon

Now, the minute that deficit gets swallowed up or just gradually stamped out over time, then the diet will stop working. And so flexible versus rigid dietary control, that concept attempts to capture the difference between on one far end, handing somebody a specific menu with very specific foods and the timing of the foods and the exact grams and gosh, even whether the foods are organic or not, you hand them that script and you say, okay, just follow this. And on the very far end of flexible control would be telling somebody, Eat less of this stuff and maybe more of that stuff and you'll be fine. So somewhere along that continuum is the proper approach for the individual. This is the most non hookish hook ever. But flexible dieting is really the flexibility of the approach that you take to accomplishing the goals. Because honestly, some people do really well with rigid dietary restraint. You tell them, okay, this is what you need to eat. And then they're just most comfortable doing it. And they're comfortable and they actually have fun plugging numbers into a God forsaken app. You know what? That is that particular individuals psychographic, if you will, and that's perfectly fine for them.

[00:15:59.590] – Alan Aragon

Whereas if you take somebody who hates that idea and you tell them, okay, you're going to need 100 grams of protein, 200 grams of carbs, and 60 grams of fat a day. Here's your app, plug it in. Here are the allowable foods. And then just make sure you accomplish this every day. If they don't like to do that, they'll honestly, they'll last like two weeks doing that, and then they'll just throw their phone out the window and say, screw this, I'm going to try Keto or Paleo, see how that works. Flexible dieting. The approach as sort of an overarching principle is that everybody needs to establish their own personal approach to dieting. And the concept of rigid dietary control versus flexible dietary control is sort of a sub concept where rigid control involves dichotomous concepts like good and bad foods. And you have to either be precise or it's all or nothing. And flexible dietary control is the idea where it's not black and white, there's not absolute good and absolute bad foods, particularly when you think of how they fit into a diet. You can create a good or a bad diet, but the good diets can still contain a margin of in quotes, naughty foods, bad foods.

[00:17:34.630] – Alan Aragon

So, yeah, it can get a little bit intricate when I attempt to explain flexible dieting. But yeah, that's it one thing flexible dieting is not. And this is what everybody kind of gets wrong because of how the diet culture ten years ago propagated this idea. But flexible dieting, and if it fits your macros, those are not the same thing. People just kind of conflate those terms, which is false, because if it fits your macros, A IIFYM is not a diet to begin with, and B IIFYM is not what people have been led to believe it is, which it was propagated as a junk food diet or eat whatever you want as long as you hit your macronutrient target. So that's not flexible dieting. Counting macros is not necessarily flexible dieting, but everybody calls it that because a rumor got started and then it just spread across the Internet. And then that was the end of that. And I watched it happen. And I knew with the flexible dieting research and the literature what that attempted to get across. And it has nothing to do with counting macronutrients. It has everything to do with not seeing dietary approaches as an all or nothing thing with good or bad foods and flexible dieting as a protocol.

[00:19:11.170] – Alan Aragon

It really just says, look, if you're one of these people who likes to be more rigid with the type of restraint they apply to the diet, then good that's you if you're somebody who likes a more qualitative or habit based approach and you don't want to crunch numbers and you don't want to weigh stuff and measure stuff all day long, great. And that's the approach that you take. Keeping in mind, regardless of your approach, if you want to lose weight or body fat, the approach you take has to default you to eating less calories, or somebody will correct me fewer calories by the end of the week, month, year, et cetera, in order to lose weight.

[00:20:01.690] – Allan

One of the reasons why the IIFYM kind of concept really took off, I think, is one you're on a message board. So anything on the message board or Twitter, the fewer characters you use, the better. So it's quick and it answers a question like, well, here, but it doesn't answer it exactly. There's another concept that you've got into in the book that I really do. I think this will take a lot of people further down into understanding this concept of flexible dieting because I think at times we might sit there and say, I really kind of want to have a beer with my dinner or I'm going out with friends on Saturday and I know we're going to go to my favorite Italian place. And so you start looking at what your food plan is and how you're planning on going about your day. It's the concept of discretionary calorie allowance, and I like that because it keeps you aware of the goal line. It just doesn't tell you what every step you have to take is.

[00:21:09.070] – Alan Aragon

Yeah, that's true. And the concept of discretionary calories is basically it's organized moderation, I guess you call it. It's moderation with a plan. So how do we execute moderation? This is an observation. It's not, amazingly, there hasn't been any controlled research comparisons of one approach to moderation versus another approach to moderation, but it's been a long standing observation over the decades that up to about 20% of total calories can come from basically whatever you want. And as long as the other minimum 80% of the diet is from wholesome stuff, whole foods, minimally refined foods, the inquote good stuff, clean stuff, I guess you could call it. Then you will be perfectly fine, and you will get as good results as somebody who attempts to be 100% perfect with their diet all the time. And it may even be more sustainable to keep a diet going in the long term if you allow this 10-20% margin of Yolo foods or foods like desserts, alcoholic beverages, deep fried stuff, and things that would normally be taboo on a stereotypical clean diet. So as long as 80% to 90% of the diet is wholesome, then you're doing great.

[00:22:59.770] – Alan Aragon

And then that 10 to 20% discretionary calorie allotment will provide you a respite or a margin of sanity. If you want to let your hair down once in a while and eat some fun stuff or some naughty stuff, and then you can sustain the program a lot better than thinking you have to just kind of grit your teeth through the whole thing for weeks and months until you reach your goal. And it just doesn't work like that. I want to throw in a little wrinkle here for folks kind of confused about the idea that we need to add naughty foods into the diet. If you're the type of person who doesn't like those kinds of foods, if you're the type of person who just hates the idea of eating cakes, candy, cookies, ice cream, alcoholic beverages, fried foods, et cetera, then you don't have to. Eat 100% Spartan if that's what makes you happy. And that's what you want to ride into the sunset with. But we have to be aware that the vast majority of us are going to be able to sustain the diet for a lifetime more successfully if we allot discretionary calories.

[00:24:28.010] – Allan

Yeah. And the cool thing is you are paying attention to your nutrition, so you're getting the nutrition your body needs, and you're keeping your calories in line with what you need to hit your goal, whether that's to lose weight, gain weight, all of that's in line because you know what you're supposed to be doing and you're staying within kind of this flexible, okay, pivot here. I need to be a little bit more rigid. I can be more rigid because my wife's not here for the next two weeks. So I can be really rigid if I want to. Where she's going to come back and want to socialize and go out to dinner and do things. So there I know for the next two weeks I'm probably going to have a lot more of those discretionary calories hitting my palate. And as long as that doesn't trigger me and cause me to kind of say, okay, one beer becomes two and then two becomes four. As long as I'm not triggered by what's going on, then that can be a really good way to sustain this. Now I'm looking at my notes, and this is sad because this is more about me.

[00:25:28.720] – Allan

It says a lot about your book, but it just looks like a hodgepodge of things. I was having so much time reading the I'm like, I want to talk about everything. But the core of it is there were a couple of concepts that were in the book that I've never talked about here. We've talked about the importance of eating protein and getting enough protein, but I've never talked about the reason why we need enough protein. And that relates to protein turnover, muscle protein turnover, and the fact that being over 40, our ability to maintain and retain our muscle and maybe even gain muscle is that formula is changing for us as we age. And so the importance to me, the importance of protein goes up substantially over the age of 40. I think that's what was one of the thoughts that was in my head. And then in the book, you talk about the protein intake hierarchy of importance. Can you talk about those and again, one, why is protein what is this turnover thing that's happening? Why do we need protein? And then how do we get our protein? What's the hierarchy of intake? Okay, a lot of ideas.

[00:26:47.030] – Allan

I know, but it was like as I was reading, I was like, this is so good. And I kept doing it. So pardon the question not being a question, but I'm asking for an essay.

[00:26:59.390] – Alan Aragon

That's cool. It's funny, because when I answer these questions, it hits a point in my answer where I'm somewhat self aware that, oh, gosh, I've been rambling for about five minutes now for one question.

[00:27:11.210] – Allan

I'm totally cool with that. You guys need to take a potty break and come back in the middle. That's also good. It's here at the podcast. You can hit pause.

[00:27:19.910] – Alan Aragon

Great. Yes. Dear audience, you may take a break. Yeah. The concept of muscle protein turnover. You have two sides of this cycle. One side is muscle protein synthesis or the build up side, and then muscle protein breakdown, which is the catabolic side. So this cycle is a perpetual thing that goes on in the body on a 24 hours basis. And so when muscle protein synthesis is equal to muscle protein breakdown, then you're basically just maintaining your muscle, which is a good thing. And then you've got muscle protein synthesis exceeding muscle protein breakdown, and then you've got muscle growth. And then you have the loss of muscle when the breakdown side of the cycle exceeds the synthesis side. So that's kind of the idea of muscle protein, what we call turnover. And so for the older population, there is a phenomenon called sarcopenia, and there's even a related phenomenon called sarcopenic obesity, which is sort of a combination of pathology. So sarcopenia is an age related loss of lean body mass. And sarcopenia is underneath the umbrella of a larger phenomenon called frailty, which happens with advanced age, with just a general loss of function that's related to undue weight loss, specifically the loss of lean tissue mass throughout the body.

[00:29:11.450] – Alan Aragon

And under frailty, we've got the loss of muscle tissue, which is sarcopenia. And this is a major problem in the aging population. And a lot of people don't realize that getting enough protein is crucial to successful aging. And that's because as people age, there's not only a tendency to not move around as much, but there's also a tendency to not push and pull and squat as much. So non-exercise activity goes down. Exercise activity goes down as well. And this can be a gradual sort of insidious thing that sneaks up on people where they're just sitting a lot more, lying around a lot more and just not moving as much and certainly not making formal visits to the gym or the track or the field or the pickup basketball game. And what happens is a phenomenon called disuse of the muscle tissue. And there's an interesting thing that can happen where you can take young people and put them on bedrest, and their muscle structure and function will just start to resemble somebody who has aged muscle or almost sarcopenic muscle because you can create muscle that resembles muscle, that is of somebody of an advanced age if you just impose disuse on the muscle.

[00:30:57.990] – Alan Aragon

And so this can happen at the macro level where you're just looking at muscle mass. And it can also happen at the micro level where you impair the so called muscle protein synthetic response, the MPS response to feeding. So in bedridden muscle muscle protein synthesis in response to protein feeding is actually lowered after a relatively short period of disuse. And in older people, this just happens more gradually. And it happens over time because of a gradual progression of disuse. And there are other factors too involved with aging muscle and the deterioration of its structure and function. So protein's role is to make sure that you minimize these age related muscle losses. But just as importantly, protein intake synergizes with resistance training to create an environment that prevents a physiological environment that is not the interior decoration of your home office, but it creates this physiological environment, the combination of protein intake or enough protein intake and resistance training. That combination will prevent muscle loss and can even oftentimes cause muscle gain in folks who really need it. The good news about preventing sarcopenia is that it is possible and it is even possible to reverse the earmarks of Sarcopenia.

[00:32:55.730] – Alan Aragon

And anybody at any age can just start performing resistance training, as long as you do it safely and gradually enough. And then you can get muscle structure and function back. And protein plus resistance training is the recipe for that. And there are other factors, too. You can't just do it on no calories. You have to be eating enough calories, because the recipe for muscle growth really is enough protein, enough calories, and then make sure your resistance training. So that is the role of protein and the importance of it. When we're talking about muscle protein turnover and how it relates to aging and with the older population, their dietary habits are really kind of crappy in terms of achieving enough total daily protein. So it usually begins at the first meal of the day where a significant amount of protein or any real amount of protein at all is basically neglected. And then lunch has a moderate ish amount of protein, and then dinner will contain a substantial hit of protein. But by the end of the day, you're really looking at sort of like one and a half meals that have enough protein to total by the end of the day in order to make sure that this particular population is getting enough protein, let alone are they resistance training.

[00:34:32.770] – Alan Aragon

So let's imagine they are resistance training. There are still challenges to getting enough protein in the older population because the total amount that you need to consume is usually about 50% to 100% more than what's typically ingested. And it's not the easiest thing to tell somebody who's in his fiftys. Sixty s, seventy s. Hey, bro, you need to double your protein intake and you need to start weight training.

[00:35:03.090] – Allan

I have that conversation all the time. So yeah, okay. That's why we're having this conversation. Now, your publisher, because you brought it up. I'm familiar with your publisher because I've had lots of their authors on they tend to be in the Keto space. They tend to be in the low carb space, from my experience. And you did start talking about Keto. So I was actually when I got this book, I was like, oh, flexible dieting. And then this being a predominantly Keto publisher, maybe they're branching out and that's good. But I was almost expecting a Keto book, to be honest with you. So I was kind of surprised we didn't get into Keto. But then you did. And then I was not surprised why we didn't get into Keto, particularly if you start looking at what the goals are here, which is to gain muscle, to increase strength, to improve endurance. As you said in the subtitle, was it optimal physique performance and health? And you pretty much did in the book talk about how Keto works within all of those realms. Could you kind of go through that with us?

[00:36:13.920] – Alan Aragon

Yeah, sure. And before I go into that, I just realized I needed to quickly answer the hierarchy of importance with protein. So with respect to protein intake, there is a hierarchy of importance that's worth touching upon. And of most importance with protein intake is total daily amount. That's tier number one. And then the next tier down is the distribution or the pattern of protein doses throughout the day. That's of secondary importance to the total amount that you have by the end of day. And of least importance, there is the timing of protein relative to the training bound. And so, Interestingly, we could go into an hour on each one of those tiers.

[00:37:07.140] – Allan

Yeah. And you do. And that's the cool thing in the book is you literally do talk about the science behind, because I get the question, should I be doing a protein shake after my workout? Do I have that 1 hour window? All those questions are actually answered in your book with citations, lots of citations, lots of evidence, lots of science. Again, you've answered the question and you answered over and over, depending on what the goals of the person training are. So the hierarchy is important, but the core of it is get enough, get enough throughout the day, and then the rest of it will take care of itself, particularly for those of us over 40, if our training volume is not professional caliber, those other two tiers actually mean a little bit less than they would otherwise, in my opinion. But the sign says get enough. That's the first tier. Get that done. And for a lot of us, that's a struggle because it's in our food. But many of people are trying to do multiple things at once, trying to lose weight, trying to eat a certain way, trying to live our lives, and having ready protein when packaged snacks are a little bit easier.

[00:38:24.030] – Allan

Sometimes not so easy. But you do dive into this deep. That's why we're scratching the surface here and get into the book, because the science is there. The advice is there. The actual grams are there. It's all in there.

[00:38:40.720] – Alan Aragon

Yes. If anybody listening to this episode wanting to know, well, then how much protein do I take? I can give you a gram number, but do you know how to translate those grams into chunks of food? Well, some of you do. And for those who do the gram amount, that kind of encompasses what most people require to optimize their total daily protein intake is somewhere between .7 to 1.0 gram/lb in quotes, ideal body weight or target body weight. And I say that because if somebody is obese and they base their protein intake on their total body weight, they will be consuming an unnecessarily high amount of protein in a lot of instances. So protein targeting would be based on target body weight or goal body weight. So that's zero, .7 grams to 1.0 target body weight. So for those of you listening who are dying to know what's the sweet spot? Total daily protein. Well, that's it.

[00:39:52.660] – Allan

Yeah.

[00:39:54.410] – Alan Aragon

Okay. So on the keto.

[00:39:55.710] – Allan

Yeah. Let's jump into keto.

[00:39:57.200] – Alan Aragon

With keto. Keto is an interesting thing because it works very well for weight loss. And the caveat to that statement is it works very well for a temporary period for most people who try it. And that's because there appears to be a general inability to sustain strict keto, which by most definitions is 50 grams or less a day of carbs. Most people cannot sustain that for the long term. And the people who try to, their carb intake ends up roughly tripling over the course of a year of attempting keto. So it ends up tripling from the original assignment of eating less than 50 grams a day. And so that is the main issue with keto is that it works really well for fat loss and weight loss. And the way that it works for those things is that it removes a lot of options, a lot of food options. And the options it removes usually are foods that are hyperpalatable carbon fat combination foods that are very easy to over consume. And so when you remove those options, you simply are defaulted to eating less total calories by the end of the day, end of the weekend of the month.

[00:41:35.570] – Alan Aragon

And so there's a lot less variety in the diet. There's a lot less opportunity to overeat in the diet. There's a lot less motivation to sit there and overeat your fatty piece of meat. So that's how keto works. Of course, the problem is most of the majority and I can't put an exact number on what that exactly means. But more than half of the subjects who get on keto end up reaching the upper limits of keto by six months, certainly by twelve months. So for those of you who are on keto and have been on it for a few years and love it, and that's the way you do it. I don't care, man. That's great. You found what works for you. That's wonderful. But my issue with keto is when people go around saying that keto is the best keto superior, keto does special things, and it's actually a double edged sword to keto. When you look at long term health and when you look at the optimization or the protection of cardiovascular health, because with keto being a high fat diet, you're looking at 65% to 85% of the diet coming from fat, then you better be pretty Dang careful about the type of fat that you're eating because that's the predominant source of calories in your diet.

[00:43:04.050] – Alan Aragon

And if all you're eating is land animal fats all day mixed with there are other crappy kind of vegetable based fats as well, then you're setting yourself up for dyslipidemia and then the development of cardiovascular disease and then potentially cardiovascular events. So it can be a double edged sword but the thing about keto and the good thing about keto is while you're on it, you're probably going to be losing weight.

[00:43:36.170] – Allan

And I kind of put this in that continuum of dietary control as keto fits in the kind of the rigid range. And it is something that you do have to manage because from a nutritional perspective, if you're not eating certain vegetables, as you mentioned, if you're eating certain foods and excess to try to make that happen because keto didn't get the nickname of being the bacon diet for no reason, people were like, oh, sure, you can eat all the bacon you want. And that's not really the right way to do keto. And keto is a way of eating. I use it. I use it as a tool. It's a temporary tool. Like I said, for a period of time I can get over into the rigid mind frame and mindset, and it works fine for me. But when it comes to wanting to put on muscle to get stronger, keto might not be the best approach for us. And surprise, endurance athletes might not do well on keto either.

[00:44:32.690] – Alan Aragon

Yeah, that's definitely true. And that definitely is what the research evidence shows. So the collective literature on keto and performance is that it's a bad bet for that. But that's not too far fetched when you consider that athletic performance is really a carbohydrate based thing. It's based on the availability either from what you ingest around training or from what you store in your muscles. So glycogen being the stored form of carbohydrate, if you are under fueled from a carbohydrate perspective, that will always compromise the potential for maximally performing. Now there are alter endurance athletes who try to lowball their carbs, and that's fine. But they are more the exception than the rule in terms of the elite in that area and even the ultra endurance athletes who have done really well and claim to be low carbing when you look at their actual programs, they're consuming carbs throughout the race, so they just happen to be consuming less than what's normally recommended by the major organizations. So keto is something that if you have a lot at stake in terms of trophies or medals or endorsements and stuff, then you're not going to be a keto athlete who is compromising or jeopardizing his or her potential for maintaining that elite status.

[00:46:22.910] – Alan Aragon

It just doesn't happen. Now, if you're a weekend warrior or a regular guy just trying to look good at the pool or the beach or at the high school reunion, then under carving is not an issue. If you want to do good at the weekend soccer game, you might be compromised a little bit by being on keto, and you might not make the score the most amount of points out of the rest of your buddies. But it's not that big of an issue. Where keto becomes an issue with athletics is at the elite level and the professional level, you're not going to see many pro athletes at all even going near Keto because it's a liability.

[00:47:07.430] – Allan

Yeah, I think where you kind of hit the road, the rubber hit the road for me when we were talking about endurance was I think a lot of us look at endurance and think of it as a, oh, I'm going to start with this pace and I'm going to run that pace for the entire part of the race. But for most people that have done any competing at all, they know there are periods of time when you're going to try to go a little bit harder, a little bit faster. For a lot of us that are just recreational athletes, that's once you see the finish line and it's right there, you're going to try to sprint to the end. And the reality of it is you may not have the kind of gas you wanted to have during some of those sprints or faster bits of work because you don't have the muscle likage and necessary to make it happen.

[00:47:52.130] – Alan Aragon

Yes, that's correct. And it's those moments that separate the top finishers from those who don't place. It's the so called race winning moves being climbing uphills either running or cycling, passing that ending sprint towards the finish line is going to be a high intensity effort. And so those who are under carb simply do not have the biochemical reserves required to power those race winning moves. And, yeah, it can make the difference between winning and losing.

[00:48:32.870] – Allan

Now, there was one other thing that you had in the book that I could not leave without talking about because to me, this solved kind of a question I had because you're trying to work with a client or someone's trying to work with themselves. And they're like, well, I'm trying to chart my calories and my macros and my food. And like you said, they've got that app. And they're like every day, every day they're in the app. And then in the end you're like, okay, well, How'd you do today, How'd you do today, How'd you do today and one bad day, then kind of can become this bad cycle, particularly for individuals who've struggled in the past. So if you've gone through something and you struggle and fail, you work and fail, and now you're trying this again. But this quick single digit adherence rating system, I think this could be the key for a lot of people that have struggled with that start and fail cycle that they go through every time. So if you get nothing else from this flexible dieting book, I think this system is key. Could you tell us about this system?

[00:49:44.290] – Alan Aragon

Sure.

[00:49:44.700] – Allan

How it works?

[00:49:46.190] – Alan Aragon

Yeah. This is something that I put together and started implementing back in 2005, 2006. And it first appeared in the self published book I did in 2007. And I used to call it the calendar method, where you just write a number down from one to ten where you're basically rating your performance or your adherence or compliance to the program, with ten being perfect. And so when the calendar is up on your wall and you're seeing a bunch of eights and nines and tens, and inevitably you see progress at the end of the month. So you are marching towards your goals. Whereas if you see just a bunch of five, six, and seven s littering up the month, then you have a sense of self accountability and a sense of awareness of why your progress is not happening. And so this real quick self grading system on a scale of one to ten, how good did you do? The fact that it takes like 1 minute to think about and write down the number was kind of a big win because people, well, clients who hated taking detailed records, they loved this method as long as they could be honest with me and honest with themselves about their performance.

[00:51:12.120] – Alan Aragon

On a scale of one to ten, it just took them 1 minute or less. It took them 10 seconds to think about how they did and write down the number and send it over. And nobody's going to be sending over nines and tens and then at the end of the month wondering what the hell happened. It just doesn't work like that. When you can establish a certain level of trust with yourself or with your clients, then they really can't. Once they're familiar with the program, they know whether they're following it or not. A lot of times with people that they're very honest about why they're failing at programs, they're like, I know what to do, I just don't do it. And you know what? That's true. So let's see if we can establish some accountability here that you can either have with yourself or with your coach or your practitioner, your dietician, your trainer, and let's just do a self grading system. I call it the accountability rubric, where it's one to ten. And over the years towards the 2010, I developed a way to make that rubric, that one to ten scale a little bit more concrete.

[00:52:36.840] – Alan Aragon

So it's more of a checklist. It evolved into being a checklist where there's ten specific points or tasks that you need to have completed throughout the day in order to grant yourself that number. And if you hit all ten of those things, which could be drink enough water, get enough sleep, get enough protein, eat two to four fruits a day, two to four servings of vegetables a day down the line, ten things, ten healthy things, then give yourself the ten if you got all ten and so on and so forth. And so that made the accountability rubric a little bit more real and a little more concrete for people to kind of think about. But at the same time, it still took about 25 seconds to look down the list and see whether you hit all those checkpoints, and then you can take a look at the month. If it's littered with eight, nines, and ten s, you're going to be reaching your goal. I'm glad that you found that system helpful, and there's a bunch of different things like that in the book that I hope that the readers will resonate with at least one of them.

[00:53:51.510] – Alan Aragon

But yeah, this is something that I've used pretty extensively in my practice.

[00:53:58.810] – Allan

Cool. Even doing it for yourself. It's just to say if I want to start implementing a new habit, a new action, I want to get better sleep, more sleep. It's a one to ten. It's a simple thing. You wake up in the morning, how is my sleep? And guess what? They still sell paper calendars. You can still buy them. You can still have one of them, and you can still sit there and look and say, okay, if I'm not doing better than a six or seven, what's going on? You can catch yourself pretty early in the month. As you start seeing that slide, it's like, okay, what am I doing here? That's not helping me do this, because I know this action gives me the result that I want. Like I said, I really appreciate that tool. And there's like you said, a lot of that just good stuff in there. I told you before the call, I could spend two, three days talking to you about this.

[00:54:55.420] – Allan

Thank you

[00:54:57.490] – Allan

Now, Alan, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:55:08.330] – Alan Aragon

The first one, this might be really cliche Allan, but get enough sleep, get enough good quality sleep. And per the scientific literature, it is a low probability that you're going to be optimizing your health if you consistently dip far below 7 hours. And I know a lot of healthy people and people who are just very vigorous getting five, 6 hours a day. But that's them. And that's how they're wired. And that's how they're built. And per the scientific evidence, they're not in the majority. So statistically, at the population level, you would want to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night or at least try to. And if you're not one of these people who can and you feel amazing with that 6 hours a day, great, fine. But just know that statistically people sleep is optimized at seven and up. And so that would be the first. The second thing would be, for God's sake, lift stuff if you can. And it doesn't have to be Olympic lifting and powerlifting and bodybuilding and flexing in the mirror between sets like you and me, people can do activities that do involve resisted joint movements that aren't necessarily at the gym.

[00:56:42.770] – Alan Aragon

They're not necessarily in the weight room where you're fighting for spots with the gym Bros. A lot of people are intimidated by the word resistance training. They're just picturing barbells and dumbbells flying around. But any kind of movement that you can just involve your joints with resisted movement. There's a million resources and ways to do it. You can go outside and do it. You can go to a park and do various things. It doesn't have to be at the gym. Get resistance training in your life. Get enough sleep. Make sure you get resistance training as a foundation, as a non negotiable part of your training. Some people think that all you need to do is go for a bunch of walks throughout the week and you're good. Well, okay, as good as walking is, that's not going to save you from sarcopenia. That's not going to save you from the ravages of aging. That's not going to allow you to age, amazingly like Allan Misner. So what people need to realize they have to do a certain amount of pushing and pulling and maybe some squatting or some at least leg extension and hip extension and things to stimulate the lower body on a resist basis, whether it's more primal and organic type of movement outside or whether it's in the gym.

[00:58:08.330] – Alan Aragon

So I'll be number two. The third one, eat the foods that you personally like most. Forget about whatever diet book is telling you are the super foods that everybody needs to eat. That's just a load of baloney, really. If you take a survey of all the centenarians in the world and super centenarians, they all eat different foods. They all have a different list of favorite foods, and almost all of them list a bunch of crap they include in their diet every day too. But yes, stick with the foods that you enjoy personally, because there's psychological and physiological signature reasons why you gravitate towards those foods. And we as humans are not completely devoid of any instinct. We have a feel for what we like, and there's good reasons for that. So you will be able to stick to your diet long term if you stick to the foods that you like within a healthy eating pattern. Right? I'm talking about foods within the food groups and you should be getting the food groups. So those would be my three if I could boil it down to three. And I guess maybe if I may add a little sub thing under the eat the foods that you like.

[00:59:35.220] – Alan Aragon

Eat them in the pattern that fits your personal preference and schedule. There's a lot of color blue going around about when you should eat your foods. How much should time restrict the eating window? Can we only eat from 08:00 a.m. to 04:00 p.m. in order to maximize? That's all majoring in the minors. That's not going to make somebody freaking awesome at 70 compared to maintaining their exercise program and a decent overall food selection of the foods that they love. When you eat your foods in the day, that should be determined by how you prefer it. Do you like to eat dinner at 08:00 P.m. Instead of 06:00 P.m.? Cool. Eat it now. Do you like to have a pre bed snack? Great. Have that. Do you like to skip breakfast? Is that how you function best?

[01:00:31.400] – Alan Aragon

Cool. Skip the hell out of breakfast. It's not going to make or break you. There are very silly books going around saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and you have to stop eating, x foods or stop eating carbs that you have to make sure you don't eat like 3 hours before bed. That's a load of crap, Allan. And I can't emphasize that enough how trivial that advice is in the big picture.

[01:00:59.390] – Allan

Thank you.

[01:01:00.100] – Alan Aragon

My advice is do what you can stick to within the context of an overall healthy selection of foods.

[01:01:09.800] – Allan

Great. Thank you for that. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book Flexible Dieting, where would you like for me to send them?

[01:01:18.410] – Alan Aragon

AlanAragon.com. And then we've got the various links to my stuff. So I have a research review as well, a monthly research review for the nerdy types who like to really dig into the details. And then I've got my book Flexible Dieting, that's going to come out on June 7, but it's available for preorder, as you and I are speaking.

[01:01:46.430] – Allan

But this episode is going to drop on June 7th. So, yeah, the book is available now wherever you want to get books. You can also go to his website alanaragon.com, if you go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/541 I'll be sure to have links there. So, Alan, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[01:02:05.030] – Alan Aragon

You got it, Allan. And you as well. Thank you so much.

Post Show/Recap

[01:02:15.930] – Allan

Hi, Rachel. How was that interview?

[01:02:18.070] – Rachel

Oh, my gosh, it was great. It was really interesting because right at the very beginning you drew me in with the title of the book Being Flexible Dieting. But the $64,000 question, how do you stick to a diet? Isn't that the question of the year?

[01:02:34.560] – Allan

Yeah. Well, he went to a publisher and sometimes publishers want to change the name of a book. You might think this is the name of the book. So there was discussion about flexible dieting in the book. In all fairness, it was a part of it part of the conversation, which is an important part of, like you said, sticking to a diet. But really, what this book is about is about nutrition for performance or physique.

[01:02:59.760] – Rachel

Okay.

[01:03:00.760] – Allan

And health. So it was science based, meaning he went to the science, the studies that were out there. He didn't pick a side of a conversation and say this is what it is based on his beliefs. He literally went through and said, okay, what is out there? Everything that's out there. And then based on what's there, can we draw a conclusion? And in some cases, he didn't really feel like we could. But for a lot of it, he literally would go through and say, okay, based on all these studies, this is what it says. And this is the bet if you want to perform well at strength training, this is what you eat, literally giving you the calories, giving you the macro breakdowns, all of it. The flexible dieting comes around and, okay, that's all good and fine if I know what I'm supposed to eat, but can I stick to it long enough to see that performance improvement? And that's where the flexible dieting comes in of saying, okay, if you're getting the nutrition you need and you've got a little bit of buffer calories in there that you have maybe 90, ten, you say, so 10% of my calories.

[01:04:13.530] – Allan

So I'm going to eat 2000 calories as I'm trying to cut weight of that. Or 200 calories can be, for lack of a better word, crap. It could be chips. It can be a candy bar or maybe half a candy bar, depending on how many calories are in it. But you see where you can go and say, okay, I don't have to eat perfect all the time to see these things. If I go in and I at least know that I'm getting the nutrition that I need, that's the first one. And then second, I'm not just overeating because of these lack of a better word, empty calories. And then the way I would say it is, enjoy the heck out of it. So don't make it just any old candy bar. Make it your favorite candy bar, or make it something higher class, higher end stuff. Don't just drink just any beer. Make it a beer that you're really going to enjoy. That kind of mindset makes it a lot more sustainable.

[01:05:15.120] – Rachel

Well, the other thing that really attracted me was that he said that your calorie deficit doesn't have to be a daily thing as long as you have a calorie deficit over the week or the month or the year that it takes for you to get to your goal weight, if that was the main goal. But yeah, you don't have to be really rigid with your eating rules day by day. So I like that approach.

[01:05:39.610] – Allan

Yeah. Even though there's a lot of things about the human body that are built into the rhythms of a day or a month or a year, the reality of it is there's nothing magic from the calories in a day. You can gain weight in a day. You can lose weight in a day, but you're not going to lose a whole lot, and you're not going to gain a whole lot. If you do notice the scale move any at all really much on a day to day basis, that's mostly just water shifting around. You went pee one more time than you did the day before, you weigh less simple. And so I think the key of what he's talking about there is just know that there's sort of a target of what you're burning doing the work that you're doing. And you don't have to create an accounting system like it's General Electric. You can go through and say, I know these foods. I know this is how my body reacts to it. I know what a serving size looks like. I know about how much. And for many of us, we do eat the same foods as staples on a fairly regular basis.

[01:06:53.050] – Allan

So if you know, okay, this is my dinner. I have it probably once a week. You don't have to look it up every time. You don't have to say, okay, what are my macros? What are my calories? You just know. I'm getting a third of my protein in this meal. I'm getting half of my carbs in this meal, and I'm getting 35% of my calories in this meal. And if you just know those kinds of things, it's just plug and play and enjoy your food and then occasionally flexible. If something happens and you need to be flexible, then just let it go. You're not destroying yourself in a day.

[01:07:27.830] – Rachel

Yeah, right.

[01:07:29.160] – Rachel

The other thing I really enjoyed was the part about protein and how usually people 40 and over or maybe even 50 and over or even 60 and over have a strange relationship with protein in their diet. It seems like they skip it for the morning and maybe have a tiny bit at lunch and then throw it all at dinner hour when it seems more appropriate to spread it throughout the day.

[01:07:51.510] – Allan

It's easier to get if you spread it. That's absolute truth and unfortunate. Food guidelines, foods that's available, they're highly dense in carbs and not the nutritionally dense carbs, but bread. So there's pizza, there's hamburgers, all those foods. And you say, okay, what's the protein? And they have some protein. But you look at the protein in the cheese and the pepperoni, assuming you even got that on there. How much protein is in a pizza? And I'd say, probably not a lot. I haven't looked it up, but I would say less than 20% of the total calories is coming from protein breakfast cereal. Maybe there's some in your milk if you're even drinking regular milk, because maybe you're doing the soy milk or maybe you're doing the oat milk and you start looking at the protein of that and the protein that was in the cereal. And you're kind of like, okay, 75% of my calories are coming from carbs, 20% from fat, and now 5% protein. So it's almost devoid of protein.

[01:09:06.690] – Rachel

Right.

[01:09:07.490] – Allan

And most of us should be eating more protein than we are. It's hard to shift over until you actually make a concerted effort to get protein into every meal.

[01:09:20.170] – Rachel

Well, yeah, exactly. I don't think we don't pay that close attention to how we eat, our habits of our eating. And if you're in a habit of having cereal for breakfast or a sandwich or something at lunch, you just don't notice that you're not getting the adequate amount of protein probably. The other thing he mentioned, too, was the ratio for how many grams of protein per body weight. He mentioned that it's not the body weight that you're at, it's at your goal body weight for the purpose of weight loss, which that is something I don't know that I paid attention to. I don't know that I've heard it like that before.

[01:09:59.850] – Allan

Well, yeah, because what they would typically base it on is they would say your lean mass. So what you're thinking in terms of this, let's say you're at 30% body fat and you want to get down closer to say 20 or 15. Okay. Then you're going to want to lose the body fat. And if you were to do that, you lose that amount of body fat to get down to, you're going to be closer to your lean body mass weight. So realizing now you're carrying less fat. So the way you are is closer to lean body mass weight, particularly if you're like a bodybuilder and you're trying to get down into the single digits, you're carrying very little fat and most of the mass that you have is your lean body. So that's where that number comes from is really just a function of saying rather than think about it from lean body mass. Because for a lot of us, that's hard. Unless you go get a DEXA scan and they tell you your body mass is this amount of fat, you don't know. So it's easier to just base it on where your goal weight would be and just use that.

[01:11:08.140] – Allan

Now that's going to overstate it a little bit from the numbers, but it's not significant. Again, if you're just thinking unless you're trying to go from 50% body fat to 40%, then if 40% is your target, you're going to probably be overeating some protein because that's not really a lean body mass. But you see, for most of us, it's like we want to get down to that 20 to 15 range. So that's where that number is coming in.

[01:11:35.080] – Rachel

Yeah, that was great. It was a great discussion. Really interesting.

[01:11:37.930] – Allan

Yeah. This goes down is so far my favorite book in 2022.

[01:11:43.270] – Rachel

Wow.

[01:11:44.020] – Allan

If anyone is really looking at improving their performance, I would strongly encourage them to read this book because it's going to give you a formula for how you can eat to optimize your performance. And whatever you're trying to do, get stronger, run further, faster and just look better.

[01:12:02.260] – Rachel

Awesome. Great discussion.

[01:12:04.400] – Allan

All right. Well, I'll talk to you next week.

[01:12:06.330] – Rachel

Great. Take care.

[01:12:07.510] – Allan

You too.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

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Let's Say Hello

[00:02:31.450] – Allan

Hey, Ras. How are you?

[00:02:33.360] – Rachel

Good. How are you today, Allan?

[00:02:35.000] – Allan

I'm doing all right. I'm pretty excited. As we record this, I'm about to go on a two day staycation. My wife and I are going to go to this resort here. It's in Bocas del Toro, it's on a different island. No WiFi, no cell signal, no phones. Two days of being completely off the grid. And even though we take an annual trip and we did take a week off last year. Really? Since early September, I haven't had a break.

[00:03:07.550] – Rachel

Oh, gosh.

[00:03:09.610] – Allan

Almost seven days a week every week since then. And so this is just kind of time for me to take a couple days, just a quick little mini vacation. It's on our anniversary, so that's a good thing to (worked out). So we're going to do that. And I'm pretty excited. We're packed up, ready to go, and later today, I get on a boat, and I'll come back 48 hours later, having been off the grid and unplugged for a full 48 hours.

[00:03:35.570] – Rachel

That sounds so wonderful. Well, happy anniversary. Early anniversary. But also, how wonderful to be off the grid for a little while. It sounds great.

[00:03:42.960] – Allan

Yeah. And so next week, I'll talk about what that feels like and what that's all about.

[00:03:47.400] – Rachel

Cool. Yeah.

[00:03:48.500] – Allan

No Twitter, no Facebook, no drama, no anything. So guys, don't blow up the world while I'm gone?

[00:03:56.410] – Rachel

We'll do our best

[00:03:57.650] – Allan

I'm sitting there looking on the horizon? All these mushroom clouds. I guess I missed it.

[00:04:01.420] – Rachel

Yeah, you missed something. Must have missed the headline. Well, I'm sure it sounds like a wonderful vacation. It's nice that you can finally get away after such a long time. My goodness.

[00:04:11.020] – Allan

All right. How are things up there?

[00:04:12.820] – Rachel

Good. We are also planning some vacations for the summer, but we've been a little bit sidelined. I told you earlier, but we haven't shared with listeners that my husband was recently diagnosed with kidney cancer. And I wanted to share that for a couple of different reasons.

[00:04:29.830] – Rachel

The first reason I want to share it is that it was an incidental finding, and it was a strange finding at that. We're both 50, so I feel like it's still a little young, although not unheard of to have cancer at this age. But he noticed some blood in his urine right before our marathon weekend back in April. And I mentioned that because it is unusual. I mean, you should definitely go to the doctor anytime you have blood in places that doesn't belong, even in your urine. And so when we got home from our marathon, he did go in and urine test blood work, and a CT scan revealed that he had a pretty significant size tumor in his right kidney.

[00:05:14.170] – Rachel

So the good news is that it seems to be contained. It hasn't metastasized, which is great. The type of cancer is the most common type of kidney cancer. Almost 50% of the people that get kidney cancer get this particular variation, and it does respond very well to treatment.

[00:05:31.370] – Rachel

He started chemo, and he's doing okay with the chemo right now. He's not having any ill effects so far. And then after a couple of weeks on this, he'll be starting an immunotherapy, which sounds super cool, but that will help to keep it from spreading. And he might be on this for a year after he has his kidney removed in order to teach the body to fight it should it come back. So it's definitely boosting his immune system. That's the whole purpose of it.

[00:06:00.630] – Rachel

So a couple of months, chemo, hopefully the tumor will shrink enough so that it's able to be removed through surgery. He'll lose his kidney, but that's okay. His other kidney is untouched and just as healthy and he will be just fine. So hopefully by the end of the year he'll be one kidney down and cancer down.

[00:06:20.100] – Allan

Yes, absolutely. You know, we're there, we're thinking and praying for him. So thank you.

[00:06:24.030] – Rachel

Yes, thank you. Thank you so much.

[00:06:26.510] – Allan

All right. Are you ready to get into weight loss?

[00:06:30.630] – Rachel

Yes, definitely.

Episode

How to lose your spare tire with three simple Tactics I wanted to talk about this topic in particular, because a lot of times I will have people come to me and say, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, and I just can't lose this last 10 lbs or I've plateaued and I really don't know what else to do to get my fat loss going. So if you have just a little bit to lose and or you're kind of plateaued and looking for some things that will kind of boost your weight loss, this is the episode for you. I'm going to talk about three basic tactics that you can incorporate into your day to day that are going to help you be more successful at weight loss.

High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

The first one is high-intensity interval training, and I know that scares a lot of people, but this is really a simple and effective way to get a really good workout in in a short period of time and really boost your metabolism to make some things happen faster. Okay. Now, for a lot of people, they believe a HIIT training is 45 minutes to an hour and you'll have people bragging about their 45 minutes HIIT training.

And I'm here to tell you that, isn't it? It's a very specific thing, a certain thing that you need to do if you actually want to get the benefits of it. What most people are talking about, if they're going for more than 20 minutes, is called interval training and it is effective. It's not as effective as high-intensity interval training, so let's talk about the difference. Interval training is something that you can just keep doing. So there is a work phase and a rest phase, but you just keep going. You're not pushing at 100% during your work phase, so you have more juice in the can, if you will. You can keep going for longer and longer. And there's nothing wrong with interval training. It is quite effective. But HIIT training is very different in that with HIIT training, you're running really hard, you're moving really hard. So whatever movement patterns you're doing with HIIT training, they need to be really intense. That high intensity is the key, because if you're doing the high-intensity intervals, you're going to experience what's called excess post exercise consumption. EPOC and EPOC is the key for why this is effective for weight loss.

It raises your metabolism for a period of probably up to 12 hours after you do the work. And so it's basically requirement that you work as hard as you possibly can for a period of time usually no more than 30 seconds, and then you can have a rest phase, which can be anywhere up to four times the work phase. So usually when I'm programming for someone new and we're going to do some basic HIIT training, it's 20 seconds on and then 60 seconds off. That's a three times rest to work phase. So going through several rounds of that, the person is working really hard. The way I like to emphasize the work is I want you to think about carrying your baby through the forest and you see a bear and you have to run as hard as you can to get away from that bear or else you and the baby are done. If you're a little older, maybe it's your grandbaby, but you're moving as hard as you possibly can for that period of time, so be it. 20 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever your work phase is. And then you allow yourself to rest.

You've gotten away from the bear and you're able to recover. You won't recover all the way. So you go through your rest work, and if you find that you're not recovering enough to do another work, that program is over. That workout is over. When you first start this, you might only be able to do four or five rounds, and that's fine. That's a good workout. If you've gotten yourself up to a point where you're fatigued and exhausted and you're not recovering, you need to go ahead and stop. You've done enough. In no cases should you be doing more than ten rounds. If you're doing more than ten rounds or you're able to do a work phase that's longer than 30 seconds, you're not working at 100%. You're not pushing yourself hard enough for it to be HIIT training. It's all right. It's interval training. It's still something to do. But just realize that almost no one except potentially an elite athlete is going to be able to do true HIIT training for more than eight to ten rounds. It's just not going to happen. So for us, we want to basically try to target doing eight rounds, but we're not looking at the number of rounds as a measure of how good this workout is.

We're looking at how hard we can push ourselves and then recover as much as we can. The better performance you're going to see typically with his training is that you're recovering better as you go along. So if you're doing the work now and then you look at yourself six months later, you might find that your heart rate, if that's how you're going to measure your recovery, is dropping back down into a good zone for you to get started again quicker. And so you're seeing better recovery. You can do more work. And that's really where the benefit of it is. It affects you. It improves your cardiovascular fitness, your Vo two Max, as they say. And with that epoch, it's helping you burn calories. Well, after your workout now I'd be remiss to talk about high-intensity interval training without talking about Tabata. Tabata was developed by a doctor. Izumi Tabata. He's a scientist, and he was studying how high-intensity interval training can be used to improve cardiovascular fitness and particularly improved metabolism. And so he did some experiments, and he has come up with a process. It's a 20 seconds of work, ten-second rest. So again, this is not a multiple one.

This is the 50%. So 20 seconds as hard as you possibly can, 10 seconds rest. And for eight rounds, that's his structure. Now, in his structure in his workout, he has eight specific exercises, and these exercises are put together. All eight of them make a very robust, very hard full body workout. You have to be pretty athletic to be able to do most of these movements, and they're very metabolically challenging each and every one of them. So if you see someone who says they have a Tabata workout and it's not pulling those other exercises various extras or you're doing the same exercise over and over, what you have is an adaptation. When I'm programming for my clients, I'm very clear it's a Tabata style workout, which just means we're going with his formula of 20 seconds of work and then 10 seconds of rest for eight rounds. The last thing I want to say as far as HIIT training, because it is so intense, start out with just once per week. And I know it's inviting to try to do this every day or do this all the time. And that's too much. That's too much volume for most people.

At some point, you might be able to put in a second. And if your fitness level gets up to a point, you may actually be able to do high intensity interval training for three times a week. But if you're doing it right, which I mean 100% all you got, like there's no other rounds to do. Each one is your last one. You're working that hard. If you're working that hard to get away from the bear, then your recovery is going to be slow. It's going to take a little while. And that epoch that's happening. Your body's not recovering while that epoch is going on. It's still in a work phase well after your workout. So don't try to put too many of these in there. A little bit goes a long way. So make sure you do one. You get good at it. You keep doing maybe once a week. And again, if you look at it about it, it's four minutes. I mean, you got to warm up, and then you got four minutes of hard work. So these are easy to fit in, but it's not something you want to do every day.

So time it out. Pay attention to your recovery. See how much these high-intensity interval training affect your other workouts. You might notice your cardiovascular strength gets better, but it might also adversely affect the workout that you are planning to do the next day if you haven't fully recovered. So pay attention to your recovery. But this is a really good way to get your metabolism up and keep it up for an extended period of time. And if you're doing it regularly, once a week, you will see an increase in your overall calorie burn. And that's going to help you cut some of that fat.

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)

The next topic I want to talk about is called NEAT. It's Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Now, NEAT is a term that is kind of neat because it's not exercise. It's just a way for you to help your body burn a little bit more and stop being as sedentary. Now, if you've ever sat down on the floor, you may notice that it's difficult to just sit in one place unless you're on a pad. You just sit on the hard floor. You start squirming and moving around.

So if you can imagine, our ancestors, they didn't have comfy couches in their living room. They didn't sit in front of the computer all day. So there was constant some form of movement most of their day where there was just moving around, walking, doing things, tapping your feet. Any movement that your body is doing is going to require some energy. Now is it a lot of energy? No. But put together, if you work to do some things that increase your needs, you will actually start burning some calories. And a little difference of even 20 calories a day over a period of time can be quite significant. So what are some things Besides tapping your feet and dancing that we can do that are non exercise activities that would get us there? The first thing I would say is recognize how our lifestyles have become easy and convenient. We get in the car, we drive to the grocery store, we try to find the closest spot to the door. We may even wait for a car to pull out. To get to that closest space, we go to work in our car, we sit at our office, things are brought to us, delivered to us.

We live a very convenient life for the most part. So try to avoid easy. Try to avoid convenient. Park a little bit further away at the grocery store. Park a little bit further away in the employee parking lot. Don't ask for someone to bring something to you. Get up and go get it. Avoid convenient. Make life less convenient. So you're moving around a little bit more. Instead of someone saying, I'm going to the break room to get a coffee, do you want one? It's like, sure, I'll walk with you and you walk that type of thing. So avoid the easy, convenient stuff that's keeping you sedentary and make sure you're adding a little bit more movement. And then the final bit I'll say on this is create opportunities for me, like I said, sitting on the floor instead of sitting in a chair. By the nature of that, you can still watch your program or do what you were doing, but you're going to move around more because it requires it for comfort sake. It's really hard to sit on a hard floor for any period of time. And it's more work getting up than it would be from a chair or a couch.

So look for opportunities to make your life a little bit more uncomfortable and you'll be moving more. You'll be less sedentary. And that little bit over time is going to be significant. So that's the second one Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis look for opportunities to move.

Don't Drink Your Calories

The final one, and this is probably going to be the hardest one for most people is to not drink calories. When we drink our calories, they go into our system almost immediately. Most of the digestive process has already occurred, and as a result, they don't really fill us up. And there's a lot of calories. Eating an orange is better than drinking orange juice. For example, the orange is already processed and chewed and ready to go, and you're absorbing it, and you're losing a lot of the fiber from that orange. So eating the orange is better than drinking the juice. And that goes for everything. So try to avoid drinking your food, even if it's protein, even if it's something else. Even if you're putting whole fruits and vegetables in there, yes, there's some fiber. Yes, you're getting some of the nutrients, most of the nutrients in a smoothie.

But the reality of it is it's going to go through really quick. It's not going to keep you full, and as a result, you're going to get hungrier sooner. So eating whole food, it's better to eat a chicken breast than it is to do a protein shake. It's better to eat a fruit than it is to drink the juice. So milk, juice, and then the final one, alcohol. Alcohol contains calories. Even if you're going with the low sugar, drink the vodka with the club soda and a little bit of lime, which is not a bad choice for alcohol consumption. A little bit a good wine, a dry wine, not a bad choice. But you're drinking calories, and they're not nutrient-dense calories. So as a result, it's just additional calories. And if you're working really hard with HIIT training and you're doing the NEAT and you're working out and you're doing your thing, you're putting calories in that aren't adding value to you unless it is having a drink is not a problem. But if you're trying to cut that last bit and you found yourself plateauing, this is something to consider. Should you abstain or significantly reduce the amount of alcohol that you're drinking?

And then the final bit I'll talk about is shakes and smoothies. Anyone that trains with me knows that protein, protein, protein. We've got to make sure we're getting our protein. And if you're training hard, which you're doing the training, you're probably training pretty hard. Then you're going to need enough protein. And sometimes it's just really hard to get that from whole foods unless you have specific strategies to make that happen. For a lot of people, those strategies involve drinking protein shakes. Some people are in the habit in the mornings of having a smoothie so that they're getting their Greens and a lot of the nutrients that they need. It's quick and easy, that type of thing. We talked about convenience earlier. This is another situation where we might want to look to strategies that are a little less convenient. So I might have to say my snack is not going to be the. Nuts and seeds and things that I would normally eat.

I'm going to eat chicken breast for snack just to get the protein. I'm not going to drink a protein shake after my workout. I'm going to eat my protein. By doing that, you're causing your body to have to do the work. And here's one of the interesting things. Digestion uses energy. So if we are eating chicken breasts, there's a thermogenic effect to food that is going to happen. And as a result, that protein grams or the grams of protein that I'm eating aren't going to give me the full calorie load that they would if I drank, say, whey protein. So I'm getting the same nutrition, so to speak, at a fewer calories. So it's less calorie-dense. It's more nutrient-dense food. So all the way across the board, if you know you're drinking calories, look for ways to reduce that. So if you have cream in your coffee, try to reduce it, try to use less or try to avoid it if you can. Again, drinking calories, it's a zero sum game. You're not digesting that. So all those calories are just pure calories into your system. And even if there's some nutrition involved in them, they might be slowing down your weight loss.

Summary

So to kind of recap these, these are three of my favorite tactics and strategies for how I go about. If I want to cut or help someone cut some body fat or if they've plateaued, we're going to do high-intensity interval training that is as hard as you can go for the work period. Get your rest. Stop when you can't recover. Or if you're doing a Tabata, push yourself. Grind through those eight rounds. It's four minutes so you can do this. Make sure you're recovering. Make sure you're not trying to do this too often, and do exercises that you're comfortable you can do and go full speed. So work hard, rest, and then give yourself adequate recovery, knowing that you're going to have EPOC. And that's going to help you burn more calories than you would have otherwise. Next is NEAT. The near Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis and this is just basically where we look for opportunities to be a little more active, to move our bodies a little bit more. We're not scheduling exercise, we're just saying I can move my arms more. I can tap my feet. I can dance while I'm brushing my teeth rather than just stand there.

I can park further away. I can make my life a little less convenient and burn more calories as a result. And then the final bit is don't drink your calories. If you want to lose weight and you want to really lean out, you want to avoid drinking calories because those calories are not being digested. You're losing the thermic effect of food if you were getting those nutrients from whole food. So try to avoid drinking calories. So those are my three top tips. If you have any questions, you should join us on our group. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and we have a Facebook group there. I post challenges and other things over the course of the week and we can have discussions there. If I see something cool, I tend to put it out there. So I'd love for you to come join our group. 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group. I'll see you there.

Post Show/Recap

[00:24:12.710] – Allan

Hey, Rachel, how's it going?

[00:24:14.170] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. Good. I love having these extra tips. We all get through our weight loss journey in different ways, but I'm sure everybody has had a plateau or has stagnated in some form and just needs some boost to get through it. And these are all great tips.

[00:24:32.350] – Allan

Yeah. A lot of people will set a weight loss goal and, you know, it's not a linear journey. It's never a linear journey. And particularly when you're at that last stages, most of us are going to plateau. We're going to have this set point. We're going to be like, I'm at this weight and I really want to be maybe 10 pounds lighter. And it doesn't seem like the things we're doing are working and it can get kind of frustrating. So I wanted to put out a few tips for folks that are in that position of things that they can do or not do that would help them kind of push that journey going, whether it's a plateau or just kind of that last five or ten pounds you're trying to cut.

[00:25:12.860] – Rachel

Yeah, right. All of them are great tips, but I've never tried HIIT training. And I suppose maybe it's because I'm a little bit intimidated about how intense that it could be. But after listening to you talk about it, I feel a little less intimidated.

[00:25:27.300] – Allan

Now, probably as a part of your running training, you've done a fartlek before.

[00:25:31.060] – Rachel

Yeah. Lots of speed drills.

[00:25:33.270] – Allan

Okay. So far is basically a speed drill where you run a little faster and then you run a little slower. It's an interval, interval training and it's good because it actually builds VO2 Max and allows you to run a little faster. This is a similar thing. Although the difference between standard interval training and HIIT training is that in a fire like you don't want to get gas. You want to run right at your threshold and hold at that threshold and slow down when you need to. Whereas with high-intensity interval training all the ropes are off, all the bets are off. We really want to push ourselves past that point. We want to actually gas ourselves in a sense and run as many as we can and still recover. And if you do that, you're boosting your metabolism like nothing else you could do. No long, slow anything is going to compare to what you can do with a HIIT session.

[00:26:27.170] – Rachel

Well when you mentioned that you're on for 20 seconds and off for 60 seconds, I didn't put two and two together until you just mentioned the fartlek training. Because one of the first things that I did in my marathon training and that I have my runners do as well is some 20 second strides. So it's kind of funny. It's the exact same thing. You go out full force for 20 seconds and take a minute or so to recover and then do it again. So that's funny that we do those things.

[00:26:56.520] – Allan

Yeah, there's some science behind it because we have different energy sources. Our body uses different energy sources. So when you first start movement you're on one energy source. Okay. It's basically the ATP that exists in your muscle at that point in time that's going to last you maybe 20 seconds. Okay. And then you start getting into anaerobic and you're using oxygen past that which is shortly after like 30 seconds. Then you're at this point where now you're going to have to slow down.

[00:27:30.210] – Allan

You're going to have to start being able to pull on the blood sugar and other things because you've burned all that ATP, you burned all that energy and you'll just feel yourself naturally just not be able to keep sprinting. That's why they tell you if you're going to get into a race, pace yourself. But in training it's the exact opposite. We want to actually reach that threshold. We want to get to a point and so we do multiple rounds of this and we have to then yes, allow enough time for recovery which for most people is going to be three times. Sometimes you want to go four times.

[00:28:02.840] – Allan

It seems like a long time. But I promise you if you go out there and push as hard as you can for 20 seconds, a minute does not feel like a minute.

[00:28:11.580] – Rachel

No.

[00:28:11.960] – Allan

Any other time you experienced a minute. This is not an experienced minute. This is really quickly. And then particularly as you start getting towards the end of what you can do, when you're not recovering all the way, you'll want to sit longer, you won't want to do another round and that's your body talking to you and that's maybe a good time to quit. But really the easiest way to know whether you're recovering or not is to actually look at your heart rate and find out what that base level is for you.

[00:28:38.220] – Allan

The 220 formula can work for some people. It doesn't work for me because my heart rate will naturally go higher when I'm pushing and I can handle that. And when it comes down, it's going to stay at a higher base. So I'm not going to get down to like for a lot of people, you might get down to 120. I'm not going to get down to 120, but I'm also not going to stop at 175, which is what my age formula would say. It's probably stopped somewhere in the 170s.

[00:29:04.630] – Allan

My heart rate can get up to 190 on a good push. I can't stay there again because I'm out of ATP and everything else. So I HIIT that and then I watch my recovery. If I get down below 145, then I know I have it in me to do one more round. But it's a mental game and it's a push game and it does wonders.

[00:29:26.610] – Rachel

It does, I think in running, I think that was a big crux of how successful I was at my marathon, because I just felt really cardiovascularly strong for that. And I'm sure it was because of some of those speed drill type of activities. Yeah, HIIT training sounds like a great thing.

[00:29:44.000] – Allan

It can be. You can do it very easily. It's a body weight movement for the most part. Sprinting or something like body weight squats with jumps maybe, burpees. Just anything that's really going to get your body moving and moving most of your body, particularly your legs, which are some of the bigger muscles. But the more you're moving, the more energy you're expending. Sprinting is good.

[00:30:09.220] – Allan

I would encourage you not to do it on a treadmill, even though I said running is good only because treadmills have the safety devices in them to slow down slowly and speed up slowly. So it's not going to work for the change that you're going to want to have a full out and then fall off, or at least very slow to allow recovery. Treadmills don't work very well for that, but elliptical machines, stationary bicycles, versa climbers, those things can be very effective for HIIT training.

[00:30:39.070] – Rachel

Awesome.

[00:30:39.600] – Allan

You're pushing yourself. Now with the treadmill, you can do more, just basic interval, slow it down, speed it up, change the angle, but at the same time, it's not going to be HIIT and it's very hard to do it safely on the treadmill.

[00:30:54.670] – Rachel

Sure, that makes sense. And then the Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT). As we're talking right now, I'm standing and I'm kind of rocking back and forth because I can't stand still very much. I don't sit down very much either, but I do love all those tips about parking farther away and taking the stairs all the things that we hear all the time. Just introducing a few more of those types of energy uses throughout the day could add up over time.

[00:31:24.020] – Allan

It does. You could sit down and do the math and just say, what if I burned an extra ten calories each day?

[00:31:32.530] – Rachel

Sure doesn't sound like a lot, but.

[00:31:34.660] – Allan

It does not sound like a lot. But that's a whole pound in a year.

[00:31:38.810] – Rachel

Wow.

[00:31:40.910] – Allan

And I can tell you, like, when I was doing the rower, I could burn an entire calorie in one pull if I pulled really hard. So it's not hard to burn an extra ten calories with a short walk, doing things that are a little bit more work than they have to be. And just even things like yard work, things that would make your job easier, like a wheelbarrow, you load it all in a wheelbarrow and go, well, no, just grab a clump and walk and then go back and get another clump. There's that extra walking around while you're doing yard work. Those things, they can add up. And like I said, just an additional ten calories that you're burning each day, it adds up to at least a whole pound of body fat in a year.

[00:32:29.910] – Rachel

That's fantastic. But there are three tips I have to say that number three is my favorite. And to not drink your calories. My goodness.

[00:32:38.610] – Allan

Yeah. A lot of people, they don't want to give up alcohol.

[00:32:42.190] – Rachel

Right.

[00:32:42.720] – Allan

They're looking for convenience. Again, convenience. So if I can get a protein shake, is that the easiest way for me to get my protein in? Absolutely. Get through workout, go over, put some whey protein or vegan protein or even beef or egg based protein into a shaker, shake it up and drink it. And you're getting your protein quickly. But the problem is it's just not going to help you if your goal is weight loss because you've thrown calories at yourself, that your body is going to digest really quickly because you've done most of the work for it and doesn't have to do the work. So we talk about NEAT. Chewing food is NEAT is the digestive process.

[00:33:27.580] – Allan

There's a thermal effect of food that's going through digestion. So eating a chicken breast is going to be so much better for you than taking a protein powder because your body has to digest that and pull it in and use it. It just takes time. So you stay full longer and your body is burning more energy to obtain that protein from what you just ate.

[00:33:50.360] – Rachel

Yeah. The other day I fixed myself a nice bowl of a keto friendly yogurt, and then I put on there some blueberries and raspberries. And then just because I like the taste of coconut, I put shredded coconut on top of it. And it was a delicious dessert for me the other night, especially now that we've got almost 80 degrees here in Michigan. But a lot of people would throw that in a smoothie and drink it down, which I'm sure would taste just as good in smoothie form. But I just got a lot more out of it. And it's full food, proper form, taking my time eating it, taking my time, chewing it. And the blender would have done all that work for me. Yeah, eating your food is a lot more enjoyable than drinking it.

[00:34:35.820] – Allan

And had I done a fourth tip, the slowing down would have been my fourth tip. So I'm glad you brought that up. Being more mindful of the food that you're eating and the nutrition that you're getting. Slowing down so you can feel the sensations of getting full. So you stop eating.

[00:34:58.970] – Allan

An experiment, that someone's doubting this. Try this. Make a smoothie in the morning. Go ahead and make a smoothie and get a bag of the spinach. You can put half of that bag in your smoothie, about two and a half ounces of spinach. It's good nutrition. You get it in there. You drink that 32 ounce smoothie really quickly, and then you're still going to be hungry an hour or two later. Sit down and try to eat a salad that has two and a half ounces of spinach. You put a nice dressing on it. You put other stuff in there.

[00:35:33.250] – Rachel

That's a lot

[00:35:34.730] – Allan

that's a lot. Big honking bowl of salad. And it's going to take you a long time to chew and eat that salad. And that's where this all comes from is the speed with which you put it in, the speed with which it leaves your stomach and the signals that your body is going to give you that it's no longer full.

[00:35:51.370] – Rachel

Yeah,

[00:35:52.610] – Allan

You still put in the same amount of calories, but because it didn't take as long to digest it, you're going to feel full sooner. So slowing down absolutely is how you feel when you're starting to get there and over and over. The advice, blue zones, everything else all the way through is if you feel you're starting to get full, stop, because you'll end up overeating, past almost every time.

[00:36:18.370] – Allan

So 80% is where a lot of people like to target it. If you feel like where you are eating is about 80%, give it a break. Don't throw your plate outright yet, but just give it a break. Slow down and just feel how you feel. And then if you start feeling full, then if you've gotten the nutrition your body needs, full stop. No reason to eat the rest of it.

[00:36:39.220] – Rachel

So funny, Allan, you and I both I'm sure we're raised as kids where you need to finish everything on your plate.

[00:36:44.640] – Allan

Everything on that plate, everything brought out to the table… leftovers? Who has leftovers?

[00:36:53.530] – Rachel

I know

[00:36:55.410] – Allan

Now I'm famous here in our house for we'll fix dinner and I'll be halfway through with dinner. And then I'm like, okay, done. And I'll set my plate down. I'll go get up, get some foil or a bowl or something. And I'll put my food in the bowl.

[00:37:11.010] – Rachel

There you go.

[00:37:11.690] – Allan

And that's my lunch tomorrow and probably about a third of what my dinner would have been like ten years ago.

[00:37:19.420] – Rachel

Sure, it's funny. It's a hard habit to break, but it's definitely a good one. Save it for later.

[00:37:25.260] – Allan

Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to go get on a boat and take my holiday here. Give Mike my best and I'll see you guys next week.

[00:37:35.700] – Rachel

Thanks. Take care, Allan. Have fun.

[00:37:37.670] – Rachel

You too.

[00:37:38.300] – Rachel

Bye bye.

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