Sponsor

This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Organifi.

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Let's Say Hello

[00:03:37.670] – Allan
Hey, Raz, how are things going?

[00:03:40.070] – Rachel
Great, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:41.690] – Allan
I'm doing pretty good. A couple of things I'm kind of excited about one I went camping. I realized when I went camping here because place about 2 hours boat ride away from here. So we were remote. We were really remote. And I realized when I was camping, like, I haven't done this since I was in the Boy Scouts. I was in the army. Granted, we would be out and about in the Woods and whatnot? But because I was a light infantry group, we never set up tents.

[00:04:11.690] – Allan
We never started fires. We never did any of that stuff. If you were to sleep, you slept on the ground right there and you might cover up with a poncho if it's raining. But we never set up tents ever. And so just like to set up a tent, start up campfire, collect wood as got going back. And like, hey, I haven't started a fire in decades. Decades, many decades. And I was like, this is kind of crazy because I think it was probably about 15. So it's probably about 40 years ago was the last time I actually went camping.

[00:04:46.910] – Rachel
And what did you think? Did you have a good time?

[00:04:48.950] – Allan
It was good.

[00:04:49.550] – Allan
It was just 2 hours is a long time to be on a little boat. A little pangas, bang, bang, bang all the way there. And then bang, bang, bang all the way back. I was able to do a little fishing and that kind of thing. And we were camping with people that while I'm friendly with, I don't know, super well. So it wasn't like, deep friendships that you sit there and you have deep, meaningful conversations with them. It was just sort of okay. Yeah, we're hanging out.

[00:05:17.450] – Allan
This is cool. That's cool. Probably if it had been longer, it might have been more difficult because this is the point. And I'm an introvert by nature. So just being trapped on an island with a few people is kind of interesting.

[00:05:34.370] – Rachel
Sure. That sounds wonderful. I love camping. I grew up camping, not on a beach like you guys, but we love camping. We did tent camping as kids. And then when Mike and I got married and we had kids, we eventually made it up to the pop up type of camper. And now we have a trailer pulled behind kind of camper

[00:05:55.370] – Allan
that's glamping.

[00:05:56.750] – Rachel
Yeah, it is. I totally agree. I have a great mattress. I have a little bathroom in my camper. I am totally set, and I absolutely love it.

[00:06:08.450] – Allan
I had the shovel ready just in case.

[00:06:12.050] – Rachel
Yeah, it's a little different when you're roughing it like, you guys, but, yeah, it's still a fun experience to do every now and then.

[00:06:18.710] – Allan
Yeah. And then I'm pretty excited I'm going to do this new challenge. And I've started talking about it because you probably heard some of the conversations about it, but there's still time. There's still time to sign up for this because I believe this episode is going live on the 8th. Right?

[00:06:39.770] – Rachel
I think so. Yeah.

[00:06:40.610] – Allan
8Th. Okay. So there's still time for this. And so if you'll come to Crushtheholidays.com, I'm doing a little 40 plus fitness challenge this year, and it's just five weeks. And basically it's motivation. There's a pop up Facebook group for us to kind of support each other as we go through these holidays, because on the average, people are going to put on weight over the holidays. So if you're thinking, oh, I'll get started in January, we're going to talk about that a little bit later. I'll just get started in January.

[00:07:13.250] – Allan
Well, if you take two steps backwards between now and then, that's not so cool. So this challenge will start on November 20th. But don't wait. Go ahead and sign up. There is a small cost to the challenge, but there's also prizes. So I'm literally taking the money that I'm getting from the challenge and reinvesting that into the prizes that I'm giving out to make things. So there's going to be some 40 plus fitness podcast swag. There's going to be some books, some of my favorite books that I've had some of these folks on the show recently.

[00:07:44.750] – Allan
I'll be sharing their books with you. There's going to be Amazon gift cards. And for one lucky person in the challenge, I'm going to give away a six week, 40 plus fitness online training program that I'm launching in January. So I've been doing the GAS program. I've kind of revamped it a bit. And so I'm going to relaunch that in January, and it's going to be a little bit shorter, a little bit more condensed, affordable. But for the one person coming through the challenge, they're going to get it for free.

[00:08:13.730] – Rachel
Sounds awesome and like fun. Sounds like fun.

[00:08:16.490] – Allan
Yeah. So it's crushtheholidays.com.

[00:08:19.850] – Rachel
Great.

[00:08:20.870] – Allan
All right. Anything else before we get with this conversation, this really bold conversation with Deltorro?

[00:08:27.470] – Rachel
No. Yeah. I can't wait to talk.

[00:08:29.690] – Allan
All right.

Interview

[00:09:11.690] – Allan
Delatorro, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:09:14.390] – Delatorro
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Good honor to be here with you.

[00:09:17.030] – Allan
So today, we're going to talk about your book, Shift into a Higher Gear: Better your Best and Live Life to the Fullest. And I really love that title. And then also you use the motorcycle as kind of your vehicle for communication. And I just love that. I love that because you went through. And when someone does that, you know that they've spent a lot of time thinking which you probably did most of that thinking on the motorcycle, which was also probably pretty cool. And so really just kind of told a story about you that I really felt like a personal connection.

[00:09:52.190] – Allan
As I was reading through the book about who you are as a person and what you bring and the joy you bring to people's lives because you're there to help them live the better life.

[00:10:01.550] – Delatorro
Yeah. That's really what it's all about, man. I appreciate you saying that, Allan, because I really believe that when we commit to stepping into what it means to really transform people and shift people, right? I think we really have to go on this intentional journey to really let people into the parts of ourselves that sometimes we don't even feel are the most beautiful parts of ourselves. But they're the necessary parts that people need to see. And so I don't want people to just look at me and say, okay, he's super successful.

[00:10:31.610] – Delatorro
I want people to say, hey, listen, this guy's been on a journey. He's gone through some things. He's had to navigate some potholes, right? He's had to maneuver, right? He's had to deal with all these things to be able to be at a place where he can now reach back and inspire others to take it to the next level as well. So I'm excited about the book. I'm really, really grateful for it, and it's already making waves all across the planet. So we're excited.

[00:10:50.750] – Allan
Well, of course it is. Now you had this concept at the very beginning of the book, and I was like, I love this because it's kind of a mantra that I use a lot of the time is better me tomorrow. Am I doing today the things that are going to make me better tomorrow? And I think so many people think about the end game of where their finish line is, of what they want to accomplish, not thinking in terms of tomorrow. What can you do today versus thinking about this big thing later?

[00:11:19.850] – Allan
It's a snowball. Can you talk a little bit about that theme of will you be better today than you were yesterday? Because I think that's really the key.

[00:11:30.410] – Delatorro
So here's what's cool, right? It's the daily invitation. I believe that life really and truly does give us one open invitation every day, and it comes in the form of a question. Will you be better today than you were yesterday? Will you make the daily decision to better your best to top yourself just by 1% and that's the key, because a lot of people don't really can't quantify what that means. And so for me, it's how do you get better just by 1% how do you get 1% more forgiving?

[00:11:57.710] – Delatorro
1% more generous, 1% more patient, 1% more service oriented, 1% more fit, right? 1% more committed to your cardio. 1% more committed to your meal plan or meal prep. 1% more committed to your supplement intake or you're getting enough vitamin D by taking a walk in nature, right? It's about how do we every day do a little bit that's going to make the big difference.

[00:12:23.270] – Allan
And it's compounding interest.

[00:12:28.170] – Delatorro
You're exactly right, my friend.

[00:12:29.850] – Allan
Now in the book, we're talking about change. And you talked about the six phases of real change. And I thought these are really important because, again, everybody likes to skip to the end, but we really kind of have to take these steps. We have to take these little steps and go through these phases. Can you talk a little bit about the six phases of real change?

[00:12:50.370] – Delatorro
Yeah. So I want to encourage everyone who's listening right now to really think about something in your life that you want to change, like, right now we all have stuff that we want to shift.

[00:13:01.290] – Delatorro
But there are six phases to change. But just like you said, if we skip to the end and we don't do the process necessary, we might get a quick change, Allan, but it's not going to be permanent, and it's not going to be long lasting. So if we really want to create real change in our lives, we've got to go through what I like to call the six phases of change. So change phase number one is you got to say it must change. You got to identify the thing that has to change in your life because you can't conquer if you don't confront and you can't confront what you don't identify.

[00:13:32.370] – Delatorro
So you got to identify what it is that you want to change. Right?

[00:13:34.890] – Delatorro
Second thing you got to say is, I must change it. It's a simple phrase, but it's really powerful. So it must change. Lets us get clear about what needs to change. I must change it. Allows me to now be the CEO of the Correction. In other words, it's not up to the government to change it, Allan. It's not up to who's in the White House to change it. It's not up to who's, the governor or the Mayor. It's not up to society. It's not up to whatever things that we tend to externally justify and externally excuse a way or what I like to call interpersonal responsibility.

[00:14:08.370] – Delatorro
It is up to us to change it. It must change. I must change it. Number three, I can change it. You got to get excited. You got to get confident about the fact that you can get fit over 40. You can live the life of your dreams. You can take the vacations you want. You can have the kind of business that you desire, right? It must change. I must change it. Number three, I can change it. Number four, I will change it. Now, Allan, you and I both know there's a big difference between what someone can do and what they will do.

[00:14:34.530] – Allan
Yes. Absolutely.

[00:14:35.910] – Delatorro
Can is a statement of potentiality and possibility, and it evokes confidence. At the end of the day, we've got to cross the bridge from can do to will do, right. And I always say this your I will is more important than your IQ. I think it's so important that we have that determination, that fortitude, that grit, that fight, that hustle that says, I will make this change, right. And then once you get that, I will change it. The next phase, which is number five is I am changing it.

[00:15:04.050] – Delatorro
And when you're in the middle of a change process, I don't care what it is. It is uncomfortable, right?

[00:15:10.050] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:15:10.350] – Delatorro
Because you don't fit, Allan. You don't fit where you used to be. You're not there anymore or you don't quite fit where you're going because you're not quite there yet. So you're caught between who you used to be and who you're trying to be. And when you're in that conundrum, I think it's so vitally important that you celebrate. One of the things I always encourage people to do, Allan, is go to the party store, get some confetti, throw in the air and walk through their own little celebration, because at the end of the day, you're in the middle of a change process.

[00:15:35.670] – Delatorro
And it's a process. But I am changing it. I am changing my nutrition. I am changing my exercise. I am changing my podcasting process. I am changing how I people into my programs. I am changing my webinars, I am changing my parenting. I am changing my marriage and my relationship. So you're in that process of change. And final step, step number six is I have changed it. And this is where a Press release comes in, because you need to let Lotty Dotti and everybody know that you have changed something significant in your life.

[00:16:08.790] – Delatorro
And I ultimately believe that when we make it through all six phases of change, and when we really haven't changed, we've actually transformed, brother.

[00:16:16.350] – Allan
Yeah. And that's what way I kind of go about it is I called it Cargo in my book, and it was kind of like, okay, first, you've got to celebrate when you get there. Second, you've got to kind of almost re acclimate because you are different. You're a different person. Like you said, you transfer yourself, you've transformed. And then the R is reassess because there's always another journey. There's always another one.

[00:16:46.710] – Delatorro
I like that reassess. That's good, man.

[00:16:48.810] – Allan
And then go, just go do it. There's so much more that 1%, that 1%, that 1%. And then the reassess and saying, okay, what else? What keeps us motivated, keeps us moving. And then you go, like I said, you can just lay those six phases right on top of that and say that's the journey and that's the journey.

[00:17:07.830] – Delatorro
Just keep rolling.

[00:17:09.570] – Allan
Now, one of the things you brought up, I just kind of love this, too. I loved a lot of things in your book.

[00:17:14.010] – Delatorro
By the way, Shift into a Higher Gear: Better Your Best and Live Life to the Fullest. Grab it Everywhere books are sold, Amazon, Audible, Barnes and Noble.Com. Everywhere books are sold, the book is all over the planet. Pick it up in airports, you name it, it's available. Grab it.

[00:17:32.490] – Allan
Good.

[00:17:33.150] – Allan
Now, when you're riding a motorcycle, a lot of people don't know this, but if you haven't ridden a motorcycle to make a turn, you have to be very cognizant about where you're putting your weight. Your weight shift is what causes the terminal motorcycle. Now, I owned a Spider, which is the three motorcycle was the exact opposite. And if I leaned into a turn, I was going to topple. But just understanding, putting your weight into what we're trying to do and doing it long enough to wait is a big part of this.

[00:18:07.110] – Allan
Can you kind of get into that story and what that's all about? And why that's important.

[00:18:11.910] – Delatorro
Brother, I get chills, Allan. I get chills, brother. This is one of my favorite sections in the book. I love the whole book, but, man, I love shift your focus and put your weight into it, which is chapter four. And one of the things that we talk about is when you're riding a two wheeled motorcycle, right? It's important that you understand that a motorcycle takes its direction from your intention. And so a motorcycle knows your intention based upon where you place your weight right. So a motorcycle, you don't have to turn a steering wheel automobile right.

[00:18:49.650] – Delatorro
If you want to go left, you lean left. If you want to go right, you lean right. So a motorcycle takes its direction from your intention. Why is that important? I firmly believe that if we really want to live life to the fullest, there's not a single person that we admire or respect, Allan, that got to where they got to by half asking their way there. Everybody that I know put their weight into it. They went all in on something, right? Whether it's Elon Musk or whether it's Steve Jobs or whether it's Mel Robbins or Tony Robbins or whether it's Jillian Michaels, it doesn't matter.

[00:19:35.250] – Delatorro
We can do this all day. Everybody who's at the top of their game, they put their weight into their industry, whether it's Steve Harvey, right, whoever is at the top of their game, they put their weight into it, meaning they gave their best, they gave their all. They focused on leaning into excellence.

[00:19:50.010] – Delatorro
Right. But not only did they give their best effort, but they gave their best effort, watch this, long enough to get a result, which means not only do you have to put your weight into it, W-E-I-G-H-T. But you also have to put your weight into it W-A-I-T. And one of the examples I use in the book is how I've got one of the world's first inspirational business reality television shows based upon public speaking. It's called The Keynote. And from idea to television, it took me 839 days to get that book from concept to actually being able to see it on TV.

[00:20:25.890] – Delatorro
That's a little bit over two years. But I was willing to sit on that egg until it hatched. And the point is a lot of times, I believe, Allan, a lot of us don't get the results that we want in life because we're not willing to sit on things long enough until they hatch. So one of the principles that I teach in the book is you got to learn how to be like a stamp and stick to one thing long enough until it delivers. If you follow the metaphor, if you put a stamp on an envelope, let's just assume, for the sake of conversation that the stamp was animated and it could jump from envelope to envelope whenever it wanted to.

[00:20:59.070] – Delatorro
You're trying to mail something from Florida to California. And every time that envelope got to a different postal stock, it jumped from your envelope to somebody else's, the postage jumped from another. It would never arrive. Your envelope would never make it.

[00:21:11.370] – Delatorro
Why? Because the postage that was affixed to it didn't stay attached long enough to get delivery. And you're in the fitness you're into wellness. It's almost like certain supplements, right? There are certain supplements that are better for your body when you add black pepper extract to the supplement, because it gives your body the chance to absorb the supplement into your bloodstream. Same narrative, right? There's got to be certain things that allow that need to stick to us long enough to get a result. And then we can go on and take it to the next level.

[00:21:43.530] – Delatorro
So I firmly believe that if we really want success in anything, you got to learn how to be like a stamp. Stick to one thing to a delivers. You got to put your weight into it, meeting your best effort. Then you also got to understand that even in this Instagram, Instapot, Instafamous, TikTok, five G, four G LTE super quick microwave world that we live in, some things just take time.

[00:22:06.930] – Allan
Yeah, we see this a lot in my industry where someone will say, okay, well, I'm going to try this diet, or I'm going to try this program and they get into it. And maybe the first week is awesome, and then the second week is less awesome. And then there's just kind of this like this settling. And it's really hard at that point to not get frustrated. But you have to lean into this thing that you're doing and recognize that if the strategy is right, it will come and you have to lean in and keep at it and not just jump to the next thing.

[00:22:39.390] – Allan
It's like, oh, well, I was on this and all said I saw these pills at the store, and so now I'm taking these weight loss pills, and that didn't work. So now I'm back trying this other diet, and then someone else said, I need to go do this exercise, but it hurts my legs. So I quit that one. We've got to keep going if we want to get some real change. And that said at the beginning that 1% over time is going to really add up.

[00:23:02.970] – Delatorro
That's exactly right. You're exactly right, Allan. I totally agree with you, brother. We got to stick with something long enough to get the result and watch this. Part of the reason why we struggle with that is because we've got Shiny Object Syndrome, right? That looks good. That looks good. But another reason why we struggle with it. And I help high achievers. That's really my area of focus. I really love working with high achievers because this is going to sound like an oxymoron, but high achievers get ignored. And the reason why I say high achievers get ignored is because what we've been taught all our lives, the squeaky wheel gets the what?

[00:23:35.610] – Allan
The grease?

[00:23:36.690] – Delatorro
Yeah, squeaky wheel gets the grease, the grease, the oil. So in other words, if you're a problem performer, you get the most attention. But if you're a high achiever, you tend to get the least amount of attention. Right. So I really focus on helping high achievers get better, take their best and top it. Right.

[00:23:53.010] – Delatorro
And so one of the reasons why I think we struggle with this area of Shiny Object syndrome for high achievers, specifically is because we don't know how to score a touchdown. And what I mean by that is as soon as we as high achievers get close to the end zone, what do we do? We push the end zone back another 20 yards and say, yeah, but not quite right. We are never satisfied with a certain level of success. We always got to push the envelope and goal setting is huge, and it's important.

[00:24:18.330] – Delatorro
And goal achievement is big, which we talk about in the book. But as you also learn the book, I have a different take on goal achievement, but we'll get to that in a little bit. So I think it's important that at some point, we as high achievers, learn to celebrate the small wins, learn how to celebrate the process of achievement and learn how to celebrate the good things that we have in our lives and really take those things to the next level.

Sponsor

This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Organifi.

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[00:26:25.250] – Allan
There was another concept in the book that when I first got into it, I was kind of like, okay, that's not a big deal. And then as I got towards the end of it, I was like, Wait a minute. I need to go back and reread that. And as I went back and reread it, it just clicked and I was like, oh, wow.

[00:26:41.690] – Allan
This is phenomenal. And the reason I say that is in a motorcycle there's go forward or go home. I mean, you just go forward.

[00:27:22.670] – Allan
Because there's a lot more there than I'm able to articulate. But like I said, it was just a really exciting thing. As I got into it, I was like, if someone could just wrap their mind around, I only have one gear. I have one gear. I'm going forward because I can't go backwards. That's huge.

[00:26:50.990] – Allan
That's the gear. That's the gear. Now you can shift to a higher gear and go faster, but it's always a forward. There's no reverse on a motorcycle versus a car. It has park. It has reversed and it has neutral and has drive. So there's a lot of decision making there about whether you're going to be going forward backwards or whatnot. But if you're going to be successful at anything you're trying to do, you got to put it in gear and go. That's it just in the one gear. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:27:41.210] – Delatorro
Yeah, man, I appreciate you for underlining that and underscoring that for me, Allan. As a result of what you just said, brother, I'm actually going to get a T-shirt design that says, I only have one gear. That's really good, brother. I got to write it down. When the moment of inspiration hits me, I have to write it down in the moment so thank you for that.

[00:28:02.510] – Allan
You're welcome.

[00:28:04.550] – Delatorro
But seriously, so the notion is this and you kind of already spoke to it. What I love about shifting to a higher gear, and everybody, please make sure you grab a copy of the book. You can go to shifting to a highergear.Com. Grab the book, but also grab the campaign workbook that we've created, which takes the learning principles from the book so much deeper. One of the things that we do in the book is we help you understand the difference between living life, the automobile way and living life, the motorcycle way.

[00:28:29.270] – Delatorro
And I want to say this to everybody who's listening. You don't ever have to have ridden a motorcycle before. You don't even have to have an interest in riding motorcycles to be able to learn and apply the principles. Because the motorcycle metaphors are a backdrop to the deeper conversation that we're talking about, whether it's excuses or whether it's fear versus faith or emotional mastery, the motorcycle serves as a backdrop metaphor for the entire overarching concept. So automobile living allows you to have multiple gears in your life, many of which are ineffective for life and business, whereas motorcycle living only allows you to operate like Allan just said in one gear, and that's drive when you turn a motorcycle on and you put it in gear, it only knows drive, it only knows forward.

[00:29:14.570] – Delatorro
However, automobiles give you a whole bunch of other negative options. It gives you park, it gives you reverse, and it gives you neutral. Then the book, we go into great detail to explain the differences between those three different gears and how those gears, more importantly, how they show up in your life and business on a daily basis. How do you know when you're in neutral? How do you know when you're in park? How do you know when you're in reverse? And, Allan, I want to underscore something in the book that's really huge, which is I want to debunk something that most people not only believe, but they teach.

[00:29:47.450] – Delatorro
A lot of people teach that how you do anything is how you do everything. And I absolutely could not disagree more. And I'm going to use that chapter as a perfect example because I know people who are in drive in their parenting, but they're in park in their marriage, or they're in drive in their business, but they're in neutral when it comes to their financial portfolio. Let's just say their investments or they could be in drive in their hobbies, but they're in reverse in their fitness, right.

[00:30:24.290] – Delatorro
So they'll go smoke with cigars with their buddies, or they'll go to sporting events, but they don't take care of their physical body, right? They're actually going backwards. They're not even standing still. They're going backwards. Right.

[00:30:34.370] – Delatorro
So automobiles give us way too many options. That's why when you live life to bike way, you only know forward at the end of the day, because we live in time and time is going forward. We must constantly commit to moving forward each and every day in our lives. And I think that's where the real magic happens.

[00:30:51.410] – Allan
Absolutely. Like I said, that's why when I got into it, I was like, this is a lot deeper than I thought it was when I first started, because it seems simple concept. But then, as you got into explaining it, which you did so well in a book, it was just like, okay. Yeah. We all need to pick our thing and just drive. So the next thing you talked a little bit, you got into a little bit about goal setting. And this was another area where I really felt like you shine some light on it.

[00:31:19.490] – Allan
For anyone that's struggled to kind of make their goals happen. And we all struggle. But if you set up a good enough goal, you set the right goal. It's not easy. There is going to be some struggle here, but you go through the 8 hours to manifest your goals. Can you talk about those? Because again, there's so many ways people talk about smart goals, maybe even come up with a different acronym. But in this case, you're literally almost a roadmap, if you will.

[00:31:47.150] – Allan
How to Manifest Your Goals. Could you talk a little bit about that?

[00:31:52.070] – Delatorro
So first of all, I love this book. Every time I get a chance to talk about it, I get excited, Allan, because there's so much you and I both know, Allan, there's a lot of books out there that are filled with a lot of fluff. Right.

[00:32:07.010] – Delatorro
And what I love about this book is that and you can tell me your experience. And I'd love to hear it literally from start to finish. The pedal is on the metal, it's direct it's in your face. It's very Dr. Phil. The book comes right at you. Would you agree with that?

[00:32:23.390] – Allan
Yeah. The way I kind of put it together was and this fits directly with who you are. What you do is when you go into a good keynote speaker, they know they've got maybe 45 minutes to teach you something and change you to try to in 45 minutes, change you. And that means that they have to cut out every other word that doesn't suit the purpose. It doesn't get them on where they want to go. And so quite literally, yes, you open up a chapter, and the chapter might be 45 minutes.

[00:32:53.570] – Allan
It might be an hour, however long it takes you to read that chapter. But it felt like I was sitting there listening to a keynote.

[00:33:01.730] – Delatorro
Nice.

[00:33:03.650] – Delatorro
That's awesome, brother. I appreciate that. That means a lot. All right. Cool. So let's talk about this whole conversation of goals. One of the big things that we stress in the book is the fact that chapter twelve is shift, and this is another big thing people need to understand about the book, which I love is every chapter starts with the verb shift. And so, in other words, there's an action required, right. And so we did that very intentionally. And then the other piece that I think is important is that we understand this.

[00:33:32.870] – Delatorro
We got to shift from simple goal setting, which anybody could do to transformational goal getting. And I think that's the difference between the average person and, like super achievers is super achievers actually get the goals they go for it. One of the examples that I use in the book is I say, if three birds are sitting by a still pond or three birds are sitting on a branch and one bird decides to jump away or fly away, how many birds do you have left? And most people say you've got two.

[00:34:01.430] – Delatorro
And I said, no, you got three because one just decided, even though they said, I'm going to fly away. Right?

[00:34:09.050] – Delatorro
Deciding is not enough. Decision is not enough. And goal setting is a decision. It's a cognitive process. But there is a massive difference between cognition and creation, thinking and trying, dreaming and doing, wanting and walking. You know this, especially in the wellness space, how vitally important it is for people to shift from it just being something I got to do here into something I really want to manifest. So podcaster to podcaster. I have a podcast, too that I started a little bit earlier couple months ago. It's called Crushing Life with Delatorro.

[00:34:42.350] – Delatorro
And the goal of my podcast is to help people achieve one goal in four ways. I help people develop the mindset, the heart set, the skill set, and the will set to live and lead an extraordinary quality of life right now. The reason why I share that with you, Allan, is because a lot of times goal setting is done up here, but you and I both know we can intellectually know something that we don't emotionally embrace. Right?

[00:35:08.810] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:35:09.410] – Delatorro
We got to go from the emotional embracement to actually living it out, taking that tactical steps, and then they actually have the perseverance to push it through.

[00:35:16.850] – Delatorro
So goal getting, which we talk about in the book, is it involves what I like to call the eight R's. And so for the purpose of time, I'm not going to go into all eight, but I'll share two of them with you that I love. I love all eight of them, but eight is my favorite number. So you'll see a lot of eight represented throughout the book, but one of the big ones, that's a real sticker that I never hear people teach. Never hear people teach this, is the first R. In order to get to manifest a goal, the first thing you got to give your goal is Room.

[00:35:53.330] – Delatorro
Everybody wants the how to. Everybody wants the strategy. Give me the tactics. Give me the steps to do. But I believe the biggest issue that we struggle with is we don't create enough space for the thing that we want. Space in your heart, space in your mind, space in your household. When a couple is expecting a newborn baby, what's the first thing that they do? They create a space for a baby. It's got its own furniture. It's got its own clothes. It's got its own closet.

[00:36:26.870] – Delatorro
What's the first thing that the womb does when it's ready to actually, when conception happens. The womb creates space to handle this baby because it understands that the baby is going to take whatever space it needs in that mother's body and the mother has to adjust. Period. Your goal is the same way. So I firmly believe that no matter what your goal is, the first thing you got to do is you got to make room for it. So in other words, get clear about what you need to take off your plate before you put a whole bunch of other stuff on your plate.

[00:37:01.070] – Allan
Yeah. I think one of the examples you kind of gave in the book, which I liked was, you want to start working out, you got to look at your schedule and say, okay, when will I actually do this? If I'm going to train for something, when am I going to do it? And something else probably has to not be done. Like, maybe a little less Netflix.

[00:37:22.610] – Delatorro
Exactly. Right, brother.

[00:37:23.990] – Allan
And you can get the audiobook and listen to it while you're running.

[00:37:29.210] – Delatorro
You can go to audible right now and grab the audiobook and listen to the audiobook and shift into our higher gear. We didn't hire an actor. I read it in studio for five and a half hours. I did it. So you get my voice, which is awesome. I'm proud of that. But no, man, that's a big deal. And you're right. It's like no matter what it is. So one of the things that I help when I collect keynote for a lot of corporations and associations and things.

[00:37:52.070] – Delatorro
And one of the first things I talked to companies, sales teams about is I say, listen, whatever that goal is, your current schedule does not support it, or you'd already have the goal. Right?

[00:38:03.830] – Delatorro
So let's take stuff off your plate before we decide what really needs to go on it. And so it's that process of what do you need to pull back from in order for you to go forward.

[00:38:17.090] – Allan
Do you have time to go through a couple more Rs?

[00:38:19.370] – Delatorro
Yeah. I love these Rs.

[00:38:22.730] – Delatorro
So. Yeah. So the first one is room. So I love that one. Create space, another one of the Rs that I'm a big fan of, and I'm not going to go in any particular order here. But one of the other Rs that I'm a big fan of out of all of them, which I love them all is I really believe that you need a Roadmap. I think it's so important that you figure out okay, If I'm here, how do I get from here to there? You've got to have a roadmap.

[00:38:47.090] – Delatorro
And the best place to get a roadmap is from someone who's already done what you're trying to do. Because success leaves is clues. We just got to go find them. So sometimes the best way to get a roadmap is to say, okay, who do I admire and respect in my industry, who's done what it is that I'm trying to do, who is that person? And then once I get clear about who that person is, how do I begin to start to model the results that that person has gotten in order to model the results that they've gotten?

[00:39:15.110] – Delatorro
I've got to do what it is that they've done. I remember I had a chance to spend a day and a half. Dr. John Maxwell. And one of the things that Dr. Maxwell was teaching me, it was a leadership lesson. He said, Delatorro, a lot of people come up to me at events and they say, oh, Dr. Maxwell, I want to be who you are. I want the books. I want the stages, I want the lights. I want all the stuff. And he's like, great. He said, Are you willing to do what I did so that one day you can get what I want.

[00:39:42.470] – Delatorro
And I think the lesson there is we got to be willing to do the work. Once we find what the roadmap is, we got to be willing to take the steps that the roadmap provides. So you got to have a I mean, think about it as soon as you type into Google Maps or Waze. As soon as you type in where it is, you ultimately want to go. It's going to give you a roadmap on how to get there, right. But you got to be willing to follow the roadmap.

[00:40:05.390] – Delatorro
And another one of the Rs that I love to talk about is along your journey of following the roadmap. You've got to create some symbols of relief in the form of rewards. You've got to give yourself some moments of celebration. You've got to enjoy the process and enjoy yourself as you're going through. Because if all you do is work on achievement, achievement, achievement, achievement, achievement without any rewards along the way. The problem with that is you're not going to actually enjoy the process of achieving. And when achievement becomes boring, we quit.

[00:40:40.010] – Delatorro
So you got to be able to make sure that you have more fun. I teach productivity to corporations and associations. And one of the things that one of my top programs is called platinum productivity. Getting more done by having more fun. And one of the things that I teach is, according to neuroscience, your brain is more incentivized to do the things that need to be done if you attach more reward based things to it. But if your brain associates pain to productivity, you're always procrastinating. So I really believe in the importance of rewards, road maps and room.

[00:41:16.490] – Allan
Thank you for sharing that. Delatorro, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:41:30.230] – Delatorro
This is a holistic word, and I really believe that there's three things that I think we can easily do to continue to make wellness a priority. Number one, I'll go back to it. Make room for wellness in your life. That means getting an extra 45 minutes or early or staying up a few minutes later in the evening. So number one, make room for it. Make room for it in your schedule. Let it show up in your phone. Put alerts in your phone that you're going to go take a walk, you're going to go take your supplement, you're going to drink a certain amount of water.

[00:41:59.510] – Delatorro
Use the apps to help you to kind of manage certain habits, whether it's hydration habits where you're checking off, whether it's a fitness app on your phone, do something to make room for the thing that you want. Number two is do it with other people. One of the biggest concepts we teach in the Shift into a Higher Gear book is we teach the importance of doing things as a collective. So who's in your biker posse, who's in your biker community, who's in your tribe, and really getting clear about who those individuals are?

[00:42:30.470] – Delatorro
So making wellness something that you do with others, I think is an important step to keeping it a part of your top priority. And then number three is make it enjoyable. Not everybody loves going to the gym and pumping hard iron. But if your thing is racquetball, then do racquetball. If your thing is golf, do golfing. If your thing is swimming, do swimming. If your thing is, don't feel like you're not fit because you don't want to press iron six days a week. That might not be your way of doing it, and there's nothing wrong with it.

[00:43:00.410] – Delatorro
I think it's sensational, but I do think everyone is wired differently and you got to get clear about what wellness and exercise and moving your body and cardio and what that means to you and how you can find a way to make it fit you and your lifestyle. Do it with others and keep it scheduled in your life, and I think you'll be able to have fun with it.

[00:43:21.530] – Allan
If someone wanted to learn more about you, the things you're doing and your book Shift into a Higher Gear. Where would you like for me to send them?

[00:43:29.870] – Delatorro
First of all, the book is available everywhere books are sold. We're driving a lot of traffic right now to Amazon, so please go on Amazon and grab the book there. It's also available in Barnes and Noble. Our website. Our primary website for the book isshiftintoahighergear.com. So the website is the name of the book shiftintoahighergear.com. We also have a Facebook community. So please make sure that you join our Facebook community, which is Shift into a higher gear global biker posse. All you do is type in, shift into a higher gear global biker posse on Facebook.

[00:44:03.290] – Delatorro
It's a public group. It's a free group to join. You just jump right on in. And we love to have you because we're creating a global group of people who are readers of this book and who are applying the principles and things of that nature. So we do exclusive lives inside that group. It's really exciting. So that's how people can get a hold of us. And also, if you want to have us come speak to your organizations, you can search us for all social media at Dr. Delatorro, that's at D-R-D-E-L-A-T-O-R-R-O. At drdelatorro for all of our social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, everything. And then lastly, our primary website for our speaking engagements is delatorro.com. D-E-L-A-T-O-R-R-O.com.

[00:44:47.030] – Delatorro
If there's anybody that's out there that's interested in any form of speaking or using public speaking and presentation to grow your business or your brand, I've been in the speaking industry for 20 years, and I've been endorsed by some of the greatest speakers on the planet. I've been a member of the National Speakers Association for 15 years, and I actually train and mentor people who want to become professional speakers, authors, coaches, and who want to make a living, inspiring people with their messages and their story. So I have a program called Crush the stage, which is a three day live boot camp that I do that helps people to master public speaking and presentation.

[00:45:22.250] – Delatorro
And so people can go to helpmecrushthestage.com that's helpmecrushthestage.com to learn all about our three day boot camp.

[00:45:29.390] – Allan
Okay, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/511. And I'll be sure to have a link in the show notes there to all of those links because you're everywhere. So, Delatorro, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:45:44.130] – Delatorro
An honor indeed. My friend, Allan, thank you to your incredible tribe, your followers, your listeners. And I'm hoping to hear from them sometime soon.

Post Show/Recap

[00:45:54.970] – Allan
Hey, Raz, welcome back.

[00:45:56.890] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, your conversation with Delatorro is really fascinating. And I have to say, I love his analogy shift into a higher Gear, but also better your best. I think that's great.

[00:46:08.950] – Allan
He brings so much energy to what he's doing because he's also a keynote speaker. He's speaking to large, large groups. When you're on a Zoom call with him, it's actually a little intimidating. He's got so much energy. He's like, I got to try to keep up with this guy. Never going to happen, never going to happen. He just brought it. And, yeah, the analogies and the things he's doing in his book, The Higher Gear shift to Higher Gear is just really cool. He takes the Conversations motorcycle, which if you spend a lot of time riding or driving, it gives you time to think.

[00:46:40.630] – Allan
So he sat down. He thought all these things through, and he really gives you some awesome tools. We really only just scratch the surface of the things that he has in that book, and they're all really valuable. So if Mindset is something that you truly struggle with, I strongly consider you. You should strongly consider getting this book because it is a pretty powerful book.

[00:47:03.310] – Rachel
Absolutely. I particularly enjoyed his six Phases of Real Change, and I won't go into them all again. But I just like to point out the difference between I can change. I will change, and I am changing. Those are three very different mindsets. But there's also a gap in between them. And I think you had mentioned in the earlier podcast, and I'm going way back in your earlier days, but there's a big gap between saying I can or I'm going to do something and then actually doing it that follow through seems to just be a challenge sometimes.

[00:47:35.590] – Allan
Yeah. Well, I was 39, sitting on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, and I decided that I needed to do something. I was not healthy. I was not happy. I was miserable, called myself the fat bastard. But I made the decision, like, okay, I'm doing this. And then it was just fits and starts and this and that. And I never really got traction until I did that transition from not just deciding I'm going to do something but actually committing to doing it. And so that step from can to will is huge because it is.

[00:48:15.970] – Allan
I knew. Okay. I'm 39 years old. I should be able to play volleyball. I should be able to get myself fit again. And it just wasn't happening until I really bore down, really kind of pushed forward or leaned into it. As we mentioned on the podcast. And once I leaned into it, that commitment. Once I made that commitment, it started happening. And actually the reality of it was it was very slow at first. A lot of people will lose weight fast at the beginning. And then mine was almost like it was almost like I fell off a cliff.

[00:48:49.450] – Allan
I was just kind of putting along. And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, I am like that swoosh. Oh, this is happening. I'm working hard. I'm getting stronger. I'm losing the weight. Things are working. I found my buttons. I found the things that work for me that make this go. And so, yeah, that transition from Will, can and do those are important. Every one of those is important. And you're absolutely right. We have to go through each one of them to make it happen.

[00:49:20.650] – Allan
The decision isn't enough. You need the commitment, and then the commitment isn't enough. You have to do.

[00:49:27.130] – Rachel
And the excitement between I am changing. And like you mentioned, it gets exciting when you can see results, whatever the results are, better blood work at the doctor. A better number on the scale, the feeling of energy when you wake up in the morning or before you go to bed at night and the power you feel when you're lifting better at the gym or running longer distances. All of that is so exciting. And if you just take that moment to celebrate those wins, no matter how little they are, it really will help propel you forward.

[00:49:59.410] – Rachel
Back to the analogy, though, he mentioned motorcycles only go forward.

[00:50:04.750] – Allan
Yeah, you can reach them backwards with your feet, but they don't have a reverse. The standard motorcycle does not have a reverse. It only has a neutral and a go. And so you're sitting there, you start that motorcycle and you drop it down in the first gear, it goes forward. And you'll see this. If you've never seen anybody riding a motorcycle, you'll see if they pull those first into a parking space and they need to leave, they literally have to walk the bike out far enough to get their nose out so they can drive forward, because that's all the motorcycle is going to do.

[00:50:36.310] – Allan
And all the other gears do is just help you go faster. So his book Shift to a Higher Gear is really about getting more, getting faster, doing more, seeing more, all those different things that are exciting about a motorcycle traveling faster. That fun part of it that inertia the wind, in your hair. If you had hair kind of stuff, that's it. If you just stay in first gear on your motorcycle, you're putting around town at 15 miles an hour, but you get to the second gear, third gear, fourth gear.

[00:51:07.270] – Allan
And now you're flying. And so that's kind of the point of the whole thing is the motorcycle is only going to go in one direction, so you've got to drive it. But you've got to keep shifting into that higher gear to fill that inertia and get where you want to go.

[00:51:21.310] – Rachel
I love that. And then the other part that I wanted to mention that I think people probably should pick up this book would be the eight Rs that he had put together, and he only discussed a couple of them. But the first R he mentioned was room and that you need to make space by taking some things off your plate so that you can add to it. And I think that is a particularly helpful tip, because when we decide to make these types of changes, like going to the gym every day or on a run or adding this exercise to our life, it's hard to find the time for that.

[00:51:53.710] – Rachel
I mean, if we had all the time in the world, we'd already been doing that. So I like his thought about maybe taking something away or rearranging your schedule to make time for these new things that you might add to your life.

[00:52:06.970] – Allan
Yeah, I prioritize sleep. I just always have. And I always will. So I'm not a proponent of getting up half an hour earlier just for the sake of working out. But that said, I made a point of putting on my calendar every day that I was going to get this workout done at this particular time, and it became my calendar. No one else could book on that time, and it meant, okay, I have to eat a little quicker. I might have to eat at my desk, which again, not the healthiest things.

[00:52:36.430] – Allan
But it was that trade off to say, I need to be in the gym for at least an hour, and this is my trade off is eating at my desk, making sure I have something that's convenient. I don't have to go out and get. And so it's right here. It's a packed lunch and just that kind of thing. And if you're in a relationship, obviously, you may not have the support of the people around you to do what you need to do. But you've got to figure out how to make that change.

[00:53:02.710] – Allan
You've got to figure out how to get them on board, at least to the point of allowing you the room, the space to get this done. So you get the hour you need, even if it's just two or three times a week, you get the time you need. If there are certain foods that you're like. No, that's my kryptonite. Please don't leave the cookies on the counter. They may continue to do that, but you've got to give yourself the room and where possible. Engage them to help make that happen.

[00:53:28.870] – Rachel
Yes, I love that. That's a great tip for moving forward.

[00:53:32.110] – Allan
All right. Well, Rachel has been great talking to you. I will talk to you again next week.

[00:53:36.610] – Rachel
Take care.

[00:53:37.570] – Allan
You, too.

Patreons

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

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CHALLENGE

Last week, I heard someone say Halloween is the start of eating season. Is that what happens to you, too? How would you like to not be beaten by it this year? Introducing the 40+ Fitness Crush the Holidays Challenge. This five-week challenge runs from November 20th through December 24th. Stay motivated with daily videos. Surround yourself with like minded people in a private Facebook group and crush the holidays this year with me, Coach Allan

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Let's Say Hello

[00:03:46.270] – Allan
hey, Raz, how are things?

[00:03:48.430] – Rachel
Good, Allan, how are you today?

[00:03:50.530] – Allan
I'm doing all right. Kind of settling into my life back on the island. Getting things going. Lulu's is open, and I'm happy to say that Tammy got her first online reservation.

[00:04:03.310] – Rachel
How exciting.

[00:04:04.570] – Allan
So, yeah, that's looking at her. I think they're staying later, like in December, sometime around middle of December something like that. But that said everything went through. She sees the reservation. PayPal, we're using that to process right now. She figures out the whole accounting and banking and credit card acceptance, but basically ran it through PayPal. And you can also use a credit card with PayPal because the way they're all set up, but yeah, so looks good. Looks like we're on track and she's got herself a bed and breakfast.

[00:04:38.470] – Rachel
That's awesome. Congratulations. That's so exciting.

[00:04:42.850] – Allan
I'm really excited for her because she's a little nervous about all this and how things are going to happen and opening right as we go into the busy season. So it's not like we've run through with monthly renters. So as far as running the building, I think she's comfortable with that. But it's just going to be making sure that back end stuff of the booking and all that computer stuff is all working and people are finding it. So if you're interested in coming down to Panama Lula's bed and breakfast in Boca del Toro and you can go to lulabb.com.

[00:05:16.390] – Allan
And that's where you'll find her website. You'll see some pictures, see the rooms. You can book the rooms there. And if you have any questions, just email us and message me and I'll let you know what's going down.

[00:05:28.690] – Rachel
Sweet. That sounds great.

[00:05:30.910] – Allan
How are things up there?

[00:05:32.530] – Rachel
Good. It's getting cold. Saw some Frost today. Run faster. I'm in a taper right now. My last big race for the year is in a couple of weeks from now at the end of the month. And Mike and I both are actually running the Cal haven it's going to be about 33 and a half to Mike garments has said 34 miles. So it'll be my last big race of the year. I'm looking forward to it.

[00:05:59.510] – Allan
So Mike's going to do an ultra, huh?

[00:06:01.310] – Rachel
He is. He's going to be official. Officially official.

[00:06:06.350] – Allan
1% of 1% of runners out there.

[00:06:08.210] – Rachel
That's right.

[00:06:09.290] – Allan
Have done something like that. Good. I want to hear how that goes for you.

[00:06:13.130] – Rachel
Absolutely. Sure will.

[00:06:14.630] – Allan
Obviously cold, but you're not going very far south to that one.

[00:06:20.270] – Rachel
I'm pretty happy about that. I'm glad it's not going to be in the dead heat of the summer. So this will be nice, I think.

[00:06:25.370] – Allan
Yeah. Mine was in March in Mississippi, so it wasn't too bad.

[00:06:29.750] – Rachel
Yeah, it could have gone either way, though.

[00:06:31.910] – Allan
Yeah, but it was in a pine forest. Humidity and heat would have been the only problem in a situation like that, because it's not a lot of wind for the most part, but it was what it was, but good. So you got your big race coming up. Good luck with that.

[00:06:50.450] – Rachel
Thank you.

[00:06:51.350] – Allan
All right. So let's have a conversation with Sergey Young.

[00:06:54.770] – Rachel
Sure.

Interview

[00:06:56.810] – Guest Intro
Our guest today is a longevity investor in Visionary with a mission to extend healthy lifespan of at least 1 billion people. To do that, he founded Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all. He is on the board of directors of the American Federation of Aging Research and the development sponsor of Age Reversal XPRIZE Global competition designed to cure aging. He has been featured as a top longevity expert and contributor on Fox News, BBC, Sky News, Forbes, and Thrive Global with no further Ado, here is Sergey Young.

[00:07:37.430] – Allan
Sergey, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:40.490] – Sergey
Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to be here. I'm 40 plus, right. So I'm 49, and I'm turning my 50 in the next month.

[00:07:51.950] – Allan
Happy birthday. Happy birthday. There you go. And I'm 55. So we keep you in the club even after you turn 50. So you're going to stay in with us okay.

[00:08:02.090] – Sergey
Love it.

[00:08:03.170] – Allan
Now, your book, The Science and Technology of Growing Young, an Insider's guide to the breakthroughs that will dramatically extend our lifespan. And now my favorite part and what you can do about it right now. Because as I was reading through some of this and you even acknowledged that it sounds like science fiction. But if I start thinking back to the science fiction I read when I was a teenager, author C Clarke and others, some of that stuff is actually happening right now. We don't quite have flying cars like the Jetsons, but there's a lot of cool stuff that's happened just in the last ten years.

[00:08:38.990] – Allan
That is really quite striking when you start thinking about where we were and how fast things are moving. And so,

[00:08:48.230] – Allan
As I got into this, I was like, this is pretty exciting. This is pretty exciting. And to know that at 55, I'll probably see a lot of what you talked about in this book come true.

[00:09:01.790] – Sergey
I agree. Yes. We live in an exciting time like we can see in the next 5-10 years from now, we're going to see just a lot of transformational and fundamentally different things offered to us and massively available. And we're going to go today for the example, what is on the horizon and actually two Horizons, like near and far horizon of longevity innovation. But what is more exciting? There's so many things that we can do right now to stay on longevity breach while we wait for all this revolution to happen.

[00:09:37.370] – Sergey
So let's cover this today as well.

[00:09:40.610] – Allan
I think when we use the term longevity, it seems that most people will think, well, that's just living longer, which is not really all that exciting. Like the Queen song, Who Wants To Live Forever? The reality is nobody really wants to live forever if they just keep getting weaker and weaker and sicker and sicker.

[00:09:59.990] – Allan
So in the book you talked about the three dimensions of longevity, and I think all three of them are important if you're really going to have I guess what I would call good longevity the right kind of longevity, not just longer, but better. And you can talk about those three dimensions of longevity..

[00:10:18.890] – Sergey
So we actually use the term like, in addition to life span, which is basically the quantity of your years. We use the term health span, which refers to quality of your years or the years in your life when you have healthy and happy State. So that's important as well. The good news, all of the technologies that we are supporting through longevity Vision fund investments. Right,

[00:10:47.210] – Sergey
And through our proponent work, they work both on health span and life span. It's not like we're just trying to add 5, 10, 20 more painful years to your life. So I think it's important to recognize. When you talk about three dimensions of longevity, I think it's very interesting to observe how the science of longevity and the science of medicine has changed over the last few decades. What we've done so far and this is the first dimension we've been just avoiding early death. That's, like the sole focus of the medicine, the sole focus of everything which we've been offered so far.

[00:11:35.570] – Sergey
And if you look at the figures, we've been pretty successful with that. So in the last 100 years, the average life span in developed world increased from 35 to 40 years 100 years ago to 75 eight years today. So we doubled our lifespan average lifespan on Earth in the last hundred years. Well, this is a good news. Like the bad news, the maximum lifespan, which is today somewhere around 122 years, to be precise, because of this beautiful French woman who died 20 years ago was still the same.

[00:12:16.670] – Sergey
So what we're doing, we're just moving statistical average. A lot of people avoid dying at an early age. And obviously there was a huge impact of infant mortality, which was ridiculously high 100 years ago. That's why this whole notion of medicine was just like making sure you don't die early. And currently, if you look at the 50 plus, like, 90% of deaths are happening because of four diseases, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and neurogenerative disease. So that's, like, 90% of that, this is our killer monster diseases.

[00:13:01.610] – Sergey
And I think we've done a lot in this field. What we haven't done so far is two other dimensions. One is life extension, just literally adding years to our life. That's one. And the third dimension, which is even more revolutionary, is reversing aging. Right now, we already know all 3000 genes in our DNA, which are responsible for aging processes inside our body, and therefore they're responsible for longevity. So if you look at centenarians where we look at genetic research of centenarians, centenarians are people who live 100 years and beyond on this planet, these 3000 longevity genes tend to work better in their bodies.

[00:13:51.570] – Sergey
The idea is if we can influence aging on many levels, including the genetic one and make sure that all these 3000 genes work in a proper way, we can actually become younger.

[00:14:03.570] – Sergey
And that's beautiful.

[00:14:04.470] – Sergey
You can do it on genetic level. You can do it on epigenetic level, right? Like the way these genes manifest itself inside our bodies. But even today, like on the lifestyle level, I've seen some studies where in the course of eight weeks, simple changes in sleep, diet, physical exercise only list three things, eight weeks reverse biological age of people in the study by three years. So they all became, on average, three years younger.

[00:14:40.350] – Allan
That's fantastic. And I like that you put sleep first because as a personal trainer, everybody thinks that's kind of odd. But I actually think sleep is the missing link for a lot of us as far as.

[00:14:54.330] – Sergey
It was the biggest discovery. For me, sleep is like the last thing that we think about when we're trying to redefine our lifestyle. And for me, the big change was actually reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It was my book of year 2019. Before that, I was just boring hours from my sleep. I can do more sports, I can do more work, I can spend more time on traveling. And literally I was just sleeping like five, five and a half of hours during Monday to Friday.

[00:15:32.010] – Sergey
And after reading this book, my rule is 8 hours in the bath, which is at least 7 hours of sleep. And I use a lot of devices to track my sleep. So like Whoo Apple watch, et cetera. So that's important. I do remember the quote from my discussion with Dr. Jake Cradle from London. He's the founder of one of the longevity clinics in London. So when we met first time, I'm asking, Jack, Jack, what is the number one thing? If you have literally 1 minute, what would you suggest?

[00:16:09.450] – Sergey
And he's like, Sergey, every evening we have an opportunity to visit the best clinic in the world. We go to bed and we sleep. And I thought, what a beautiful way to underline importance of sleep on our coronal health. Like all other aspects of our health.

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[00:18:14.990] – Allan
Now, as we talk about longevity, and one of the things I think we look at is we'll see that picture of the 95 year old or 85 year old woman who looks fit and is athletic and she's out doing living like she's 30. And then you see the 85 year old woman that's in a wheelchair and can't really stand on her own and she's lost all of her independence. I think we look at aging as comparing those two people, but they're the same chronological age. So when we're talking about longevity, one of the concepts you brought up in the book by Carlos Lopez Otin was the nine hallmarks of longevity.

[00:18:52.490] – Allan
And I think the reason I'd like to talk about these is because if you're starting to put together a strategy for your health, for your wellness, it's really important for you to understand the underlying tenets of what's going to help you get there and why these things are so important. When we're talking like we're just talking about sleep, what does sleep allow us to do? Balance our hormones, get our energy systems working, our mitochondria resting and doing their thing. And so can we talk, just go through them pretty quickly.

[00:19:22.190] – Allan
But just overview of what they are. The Nine Hallmarks.

[00:19:25.730] – Sergey
So for many centuries and decades, we've been trying to find and develop unified theory of aging, and we fail. Like there is no unified theory of aging. You ask different people in scientific circles and they would give you, like the different answers. So there are still a lot of people are working on that. But we use in terms of scientific framework for our effort to reverse aging and fight age related diseases. The thing which was published I think it was back in 2013 and it's called Nine Hallmarks of Aging.

[00:20:09.750] – Sergey
And I do think it was pretty important work by a number of reasons. So one thing, it shows you that you need to look to basically all of them. There's no silver bullet for human health and performance and fighting age related disease or the aging process into your body. It's not going to be like in 510, 20 years from now. It's not going to be like one silver bullet and one solution to aging. You always need to appreciate the complexity of human biology and looking at the problem of aging or your health and performance through different lenses.

[00:20:45.990] – Sergey
And they all complementary and probably in your workout. You've seen it a lot. People kind of asking you like, what are the one thing that I need to do to change my life and improve the level of my health and physical health and mental health? There's no such a thing like one thing. The first important thing about nine hallmarks of aging is the fact that none of nine of them, and they mutually nonexclusive. Right.

[00:21:14.130] – Sergey
They're complementary if you can use complementary in the context of aging and age related diseases. So second thing, it gives all of us investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, an opportunity to look on a more comprehensive scale and influence different parts of it and appreciate the complexity of this call. And I want to give our audience the flavor of what are the components? What are the dimensions of aging and what levels they happen inside our body? So the first thing is, it's called genomic instability is basically mutations of our DNA, of our genetic code inside our body.

[00:22:01.770] – Sergey
And sometimes they occur when we were born. So we kind of inherited this from our parents.

[00:22:12.730] – Sergey
Sometimes, it happens because of the external, environmental or our lifestyle choices influence as well. But if you ask scientists, many of them would say that our longevity and level of health and actually happiness, like 30% to 40% predetermined by our genetic set up. And we've done a lot of progress in this field, like, 30 years ago, it took 13 years and $3 billion for US to sequence human genome. Right now, it's just a few hundred dollars and few hours. So that's really important. And as always, you've probably seen it in so many cases.

[00:23:00.550] – Sergey
Like, the first step is just literally understand that. So sequencing human genome was, like, important first step to develop gene editing and gene therapy on the later stage. So that's one thing well, second thing is, it is about telomeres. And some of you probably heard about telomeres before. So telomeres in a very simple way, it's almost like protective caps of our chromosomes.

[00:23:31.630] – Sergey
Right. So what they do, they protect chromosomes. But then when cells are going through divisions, right? They basically worn out and it's actually limit, like, a number of times our cell can divide. And with the time what is happening is attrition of telomeres protective cups. And that's why we kind of becoming older. And then finally, we die the third one. And we already touched on this a little bit in the beginning of our conversation. Is it's called epigenetic alterations? But what it really does is remember we discussed genes.

[00:24:23.990] – Sergey
Genes are expressing themselves inside our body through the very complex mechanism. I'll not go into details of that right now, but what is actually happening is you can basically influence the way certain gene or genetic combination express itself in the body. So you don't need to change your genetic setup, right? You just literally can switch on, switch off some of the genes. And with the time, specifically, in the last probably 5-10 years, we've seen a lot of positive developments in the sales. So think about, like, one thing is to change your genetic set up and a genetic code.

[00:25:07.310] – Sergey
And this is really important. This is really expensive, sometimes inefficient difficult and risky. Well, the other thing, if you can have an opportunity or ability to switch on switch off some of your genes.

[00:25:23.450] – Sergey
And that's a different level of complexity. It's still difficult, but it's much easier than just changing your DNA. So that's important as well. What else you've heard about mitochondria in our cells? So mitochondria is almost like a power plant. This is the thing which are responsible for bringing the energy within the cell. So sometimes what is happening? They become dysfunctional because of the disease or particular medical condition. And it's obviously changed the whole work of the cells. And then aging process starts inside your body. What is more interesting, like stem cells exhaustion.

[00:26:20.190] – Sergey
So sometimes the stem cells, which are responsible for immune system and overall, inside our body, we just run out of it. And I don't know if you heard about the organ called thymus. It's right here on our chest until we turn somewhere around 20, thymus are in a good healthy condition. It's actually responsible for high immune level that the younger adults and kids have, starting from age 18 or 20, time starts to shrink. So therefore, your immune system starts to degradate. If I can use this word, and therefore it produces less and less of the stem cells, and therefore it has lower ability to fight external and internal enemies inside your body and inside your mind, actually as well.

[00:27:28.330] – Sergey
And I'm just looking at hallmarks. What I find also interesting is there's a hallmark related to cellular senescence.

[00:27:40.510] – Sergey
So, it's basically when we're losing the ability to take away dead cells outside of our body, they just waste. And the volume of that cells are increasing inside our body. And therefore it negatively influenced a lot of processes inside our well, first healthy body. It's basically this number of hypothesis and number of ideas why we each and I do think it's just very interesting to look at this from a different perspective and understand there are so many things that you need actually to influence in parallel at the same time to fight aging.

[00:28:30.370] – Sergey
And we're looking at the companies and probably all nine of these hallmarks. And it's really interesting how science and technology can help us to fight aging inside our body on many levels. On, like, genetic level, epigenetic level, on cellular level, et cetera. Yeah.

[00:28:50.170] – Allan
And like you said, everybody wants a simple one, simple rule. Give me one thing. Tell me what to do. And we can see it's really not that simple, but it's not outside of our control. And particularly as technology gets better, I think we're going to see better opportunities for us to fine tune, like, all of these knobs just don't be thinking about. Okay. I got one knob that does everything the steering wheel. Now you're going to be able to turn all of them. And that's where I want to talk about this concept of precision medicine or personalized medicine.

[00:29:23.230] – Allan
You probably heard some things about, but the gist of it is this normally you go into your doctor and you tell your doctor what's going on. He does a couple things, maybe a couple of tests, and then he comes back and says, okay, we're going to try this and the this that he's giving you the pill or whatever the treatment is, it helps 80% of the people. And that means 20% of the people it doesn't help. And so you try that and it doesn't agree with you or it doesn't work.

[00:29:49.810] – Allan
And now we've got to try something else that helped 80% of the people. And it didn't help 20%. Then there's a third thing we can try and on and on and on. But with precision medicine, we're getting closer and closer to understanding why it doesn't help those 20% and why it does help those 80%. And as a result, they can go directly to maybe medicine number three and make that work. Can you talk a little bit about why we're able to do precision medicine now? And what are some of the things coming up that's going to make it even better?

[00:30:23.410] – Sergey
So we're talking about completely different approach to medicine. And this is happening already. And the whole transformation will happen in the next ten to 20 years. And it's happening. The main fundamental reason is that finally we have an ability to process data related to human health. And before that, it was all in the head of the doctor that he or she would need to quickly grasp what is the problem with you recall from his or her memory? Like, these symptoms, they usually mean that you're suffering from that.

[00:31:08.350] – Sergey
And it was just a hypothesis, right. You can go through a certain diagnostic. It was pretty generic. And then there's, like, a set of protocols, like, for this disease, you can try this, this and this. It usually works for, like, 60 or 70% of people you're right.

[00:31:25.990] – Allan
I guess I was just a little optimistic.

[00:31:28.330] – Sergey
Yeah. That's true.

[00:31:29.590] – Sergey
I mean, we've seen therapists which working, like, 40% to 50% of people sometimes. So this is what happened so far. And as you can see from my description, it was very symptomatic.

[00:31:42.010] – Sergey
So, you would need to live for the disease until disease will manifest itself. Some of the diseases, some of the indications it's solvable, but in some it's like dangerous, like cancer. Cancer just a few decades ago was kiss of death because people discovered that usually in like, stage four, when disease manifests itself, there was not a lot of diagnostic developed on that diagnostic tools developed for that. And they are all pretty expensive, invasive, like colonoscopy, gastroscopy, some of the cancer markers in a blood test. So what is happening now?

[00:32:28.210] – Sergey
Well, the beauty of this, like early detection and prevention of the diseases, give us much better chances for recovery and sustaining the quality of life. So stage four cancer survival rates are 10, 20, 30% depending on the cancer type. Right?

[00:32:48.910] – Sergey
I'm just generalizing it that's simply the figures. So this is what happens when you just wait until disease will manifest itself at the level when you just decide to see a doctor like early detection of cancer, like stage one, for example, recovery rates for some of the cancer types are 90% or even 100%. Well, that's amazing. And what is more important? It's cheaper to treat early stage cancer and it's much more effective in terms of sustaining inequality of your lifestyle. So that's beautiful. So how are we doing this day?

[00:33:30.430] – Sergey
Well, first of all, it's generating and taking a lot of data. The whole feedback loop feedback cycle and our ability to grasp this data is changing. I'm wearing like, Whoop and Apple Watch. You can wear Samsung watch or fitbit doesn't really matter. Our wearables are becoming personalized health care devices and things will change. Right now, I'm using this account, like 10,000 steps today, so you can use Apple Watch to do extra cardiogram to detect five different type of Rhythmia. Or if you fall down on the street, you can call ambulance for you.

[00:34:11.390] – Sergey
So that's just the earliest signs of this becoming diagnostic devices. So a lot of data needs to be collected and can be collected today through different diagnostic tools, including wearables, DIY boxes, et cetera. Or like full body MRI, CT, et cetera. So that's kind of one thing. This call feedback cycle as compressed, you can actually detect a problem really early. Rather than wait for your annual discussion with doctor and see if something wrong with your body. Second, we finally have artificial intelligence to process all this data.

[00:34:57.810] – Sergey
And this is extremely important. If you look at statistics, I know the figure for US. I think it was 25% to 30% of all data in US are health related. It's just massive amount of information which there's no way the human being can process that even in the context of one person. So that's the beauty. Like last two years, when I've done annual screening, my full body MRI was first scanned by artificial intelligence. And then I had a discussion on radiologist. And just to give you a little bit of flavor of that average radiologist working under time pressure, which I would assume their everyday condition can detect early stage breast cancer from MRI from the scan in 38% of cases because it's early stage.

[00:36:00.450] – Sergey
Right. You're not sure or it's not detectable with human eye. But if you empower the same person with artificial intelligence, the detection rate goes up to 98% to 99%. Can you imagine that? So that's the beauty of that. We're talking about MRI. We have a lot of diagnostic tools right now. You can look at your genomic setup, you can look at your microbiome and we just go on and on. There's so many data we can collect about our physical and even mental health, which is super helpful to define the therapy, the intervention for you personally.

[00:36:44.830] – Sergey
So it's much earlier. It's much more personalized. It's obviously data driven and technology based. So that's like a new version of medicine that we are currently creating.

[00:36:58.930] – Allan
Yeah. And it does the huge thing of eliminating human error in most of these cases because it's got a lot more capacity than any of us would have, even as a collective group, it's going to outperform us.

[00:37:13.390] – Sergey
It is. So the other important thing is actually, it's not only eliminating human error, but it leaves human, like, the most interesting and enjoyable part of work.

[00:37:24.550] – Sergey
Right? You don't need to spend, like, 13 minutes to go through the scan. I enjoy discussing with my radiologist for, like, 30 minutes. And this is amazing. More human interaction, more focus on your needs on your particular situation and more emotions. And what I also like about this whole thing is the small, convincing power that I can get from this conversation with doctor. He or she can tell me like, well, Sergey, you need to change that and that try this change. So I'm on the path for, like, improvement and optimization.

[00:38:04.450] – Sergey
And doctors can spend more time working with me, trying to convince me and support me on this path.

[00:38:12.610] – Allan
Cool. Now another topic I wanted to get into. And just to preface this, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a medical doctor. You're not a medical doctor. So we're just talking about this from the perspective of just understanding what this is. And maybe some of the issues that will come up with it is stem cells. So more and more we're hearing about these stem cell treatments. As you said in the book, only a fraction of them, a small number have been FDA approved. So there's these people popping up with stem cell therapies and they're very promising.

[00:38:46.030] – Allan
The science is extremely promising. They can show you study after study after study. That shows really great things. But it's not all upside. But in the future, it might be very important therapy. Can you talk a little bit about just generally what it is and what we should be watching out for if that comes up in a conversation with our doctor or a clinic.

[00:39:09.250] – Sergey
Okay. So stem cells, which has the potential to develop itself into any other different type of cells in our body.

[00:39:24.050] – Sergey
Right. So they pretty generic. They are responsible for our immune function, and they basically serve as repair system inside your body.

[00:39:36.170] – Sergey
so, they can become specialized, like become a blood cells or muscle cells or brain cells. And that's really important repair mechanism developed for us by modern nature.

[00:39:55.310] – Sergey
So, having said that, so that's important. And it's great that we discovered number of interventions and treatments and approaches to use stem cells in treating different conditions. So that's kind of good news. They still are really early stage of going through the trials and really early stage of regulation. So I do believe that if you have particularly difficult condition and it's a matter of life and death for you, you can take a look at stem cells treatment and interventions today. So you just need to be much more considerate with your choices of treatment. For the rest of us,

[00:40:47.630] – Sergey
I do think it's okay to wait another five to ten years until all of this will go through FDA approval cycle. And we'll give more clarity not only on potential benefits of using stem cells treatments, but on potential downside effects as well.

[00:41:05.750] – Sergey
So, as you can imagine, right. I'm part of longevity community. I'm really passionate about this whole thing. I've been offered so many times to do stem cells. What I don't like, well, Sergey, we kind of do it in US, come to Costa Rica or Panama, in Bahamas, and we're going to do it there. Why should I? So I'm 49, and I do believe that at least for another ten, probably even 20 years, combination of my lifestyle intervention, early diagnostic use, the benefit of technology, which technology can offer to us today is a great plan to stay on longevity bridge.

[00:41:57.670] – Sergey
And in 5, 10, 15 years from now, we're going to see more regulatory approvals in the field of regenerative medicine, whether it's stem cells or organ regeneration or organ replacement and a lot of different things. And not only that.

[00:42:14.830] – Sergey
Like, the major part of my book about the near horizon of longevity innovation. You've seen it, Allan. And a number of chapters then we go to DIY diagnostic, regenerative medicine, genomic medicine, which is genetic, gene therapy, etc. And this is all very promising. What I like that we're going to see almost like a mix, a combination of different breakthroughs in different areas which can use for our special specific situation. The other thing which we will see in the next ten years is longevity and build. So it's going to be new, completely different class of drugs which would address aging problem and its core.

[00:43:04.750] – Sergey
So right now, every drug should have an indication and it should fight particular disease. They disease specific but we're going to see completely different drugs which will influence aging processes inside our body and therefore will help us to fight and minimize risk of getting it related diseases. As we discussed cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurogenerative diseases as well. So I'm really excited. It can be existing drug reposition and repurposed like Metformin, the old diabetes generic drug or Rapamycin, Immunosupression, or it can be drug developed with the help of artificial intelligence.

[00:43:45.430] – Sergey
Like a Longevity Vision fund. We invest in two companies which used artificial intelligence to compress the discovery cycle. And they do the impressive things. And for the audience to know, like developing a drug is like super expensive exercise. It's like in the US, it's twelve years. It's $2.6 billion for every drug to develop. So our AI technology big data will help us to compress this process and make it cheaper or more efficient as well. But there's so many exciting things happening. Like my other favorite example is what we discussed in the field of gene editing and gene therapy, like genomic medicine.

[00:44:36.550] – Sergey
Remember the case that I brought the first human genome has been sequenced in the course of 13 years. They actually wanted to stop. I think after the first two years of the exercise because in the first two years, they managed to sequence only 1% of genome. That's it. The whole story is in the book.

[00:44:57.310] – Sergey
It's amazing. Like fast forward today we are all participating in a global experiment in the field of gene therapy because MRNA vaccines like Moderna, some other Covid vaccines are the outcome of gene therapy work. And well, for me, it's positive, not sure about the rest of the audience.

[00:45:17.950] – Sergey
And I was just looking at the article a couple of months ago and it starts with moderna vaccine has been developed in a course of two days.

[00:45:28.990] – Sergey
This is amazing.

[00:45:30.310] – Sergey
Obviously, they put a lot of work before that, right? It probably was decade plus even more. And a lot of great scientists and entrepreneurs work on that. But just an ability to develop vaccine against the new virus. I think we managed to sequence genome of the virus in just in the course of days, if not weeks after we discovered that the dangerous thing called Covid is here on the planet. So this whole Covid response, I do know this. There's just a lot of skepticism and criticism in almost every country that I went in terms of the covid response because we were fighting with a known enemy.

[00:46:12.190] – Sergey
But the rest is just amazing. See how fast we've been able to sequence genome, develop different tests to test against corona virus develop vaccines. So I'm really amazed by our ability to respond like 200 years ago, we would have Covid on Earth 25 to like, 50% of population would just die.

[00:46:37.210] – Allan
Yeah, it would have been so much different than Spanish flu. We just toughed out for the most part and did some things. But in a two year process, which I guess we're going to go through a two year process here, too. But in the realm of it, you're right. We do have to kind of open our minds to the fact that medicine will move faster, not slower. Things are going to be introduced that are brand new that we would never have conceived of even years ahead. In the book, you talked about the first Orville brothers and flight and how it was 500 years in the making, and they went against the paradigm, which was you have to flap like a bird to build an airplane.

[00:47:20.290] – Allan
And even after they flew, it took a long time for people to recognize that that's actually still possible as possible just because one person did it, they didn't feel comfortable that everybody should do it. And now almost all of us at some point in our life, anyone listening to this podcast has gotten into an airplane at one point in their life and traveled across the country. And it's opened us up to all these freedoms and opportunities to see things we would never would have seen in the past, not without huge time investment.

[00:47:49.750] – Allan
And so I think that's the concept here. That's what's so exciting about your book. You give us the near term, and we would be on this call for hours if I went into the long term because it's so exciting, I would let you off the call. I just want you to know.

[00:48:06.130] – Sergey
Look, I'm going to be living another 150 years and majority of us are going to be living longer or radically longer than we expect. So we have time, Allan.

[00:48:15.970] – Allan
Yeah, we have time. Then I'll get you on again. We'll talk about that. Sergey, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:48:36.110] – Sergey
Okay. Number one, it's importance of early diagnostics. And I always say, like, the most important day of your life every year is the day of your medical screen. I do think it's super important. We underestimate. You can even imagine. I'm an investor. I'm not MD. I saved so many lives just by pushing people doing screenings. So that's one.

[00:49:05.930] – Sergey
The second I think, is importance of the diet. And we delegated all our diet choices, like in terms of quantity and quality of our food to other parties, like big food, supermarkets, government, et cetera. So it's time to take back control and recognize the importance of the food. And this is like, the easiest way to influence our epigenome. This is the easiest way to make us healthy and body response to that is just amazing. If you switch to more plant based, I'm not saying you need to become vegetarian or vegan.

[00:49:43.850] – Sergey
You need to be religious about this whole thing, but just like decreasing your calorie and take fasting doing more plant based looking at it not only quantity but the quality of your food, avoiding growth hormones, antibiotics and equilibacterias and industrial meat and fish. It was a source of one of the most enormous change that I went through while responding to high cholesterol crisis that I had back in 2014.

[00:50:16.060] – Sergey
And the third thing is just recognizing this whole connection between mind and body. So our health and the way we age and our biological age, like how young or how old we are, is very much defined by our psychology as well.

[00:50:36.050] – Sergey
It's extremely important. So my mantra, I know it's completely responsible to dream about living 200 years today. There's no way given today's science and today's technology, I'm going to be living to 200 years. But every morning I wake up, my mantra is like, I'm going to be living 200 years in the body of 25 years old, man, and your body responds to that. Look at the book. I think this part of the book will think and grow young. And there's so many studies like, if you literally believe that your age is 5, 10 15, even 20 years below your calendar chronological age, you will become younger.

[00:51:17.990] – Sergey
That's amazing.

[00:51:19.070] – Allan
Yeah. I completely agree. I signed up for a tough Mudder in August, so I'm training for that now. But it's so funny because all of my friends that are around my age like, you're too old to do that stuff. And I'm like, but it's fun and I'm excited about it. And so, yeah, I completely agree that those are wonderful. Thank you, Sergey. If someone wanted to learn more about your book, The Science and Technology of Growing Young, or just learn more about you, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:51:49.190] – Sergey
Well, the book is available everywhere.

[00:51:51.650] – Sergey
Again, it's called The Science and Technology of Growing Young. It's an important tool for me to change the world, to change our mindset, to push more of us, to take back responsibility and control for our health, and be excited about the future and recognize, like, new developments in medicine. And it's been already on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. Usa Today bestseller. Number one on Amazon in multiple categories. I'm, like, really happy. This is the easiest way to connect with me, to understand well, my religion, my promise and exciting things, which we can do today in the next 10, 20 years.

[00:52:30.770] – Sergey
You can go to Sergeyoung.com and sign up for the mailing list. Every month we're sending out amazing newsletter, translating signs in very simple words to more exciting news. And I couldn't tell you the statistics about this, but I was just looking at statistics for newsletters all around the world. We have one of the highest open rates and click rates, and people are really excited. And I'm not selling anything. I'm an investor, right? I'm just trying to change the world to bring affordable and accessible version of longevity.

[00:53:05.390] – Sergey
So Sergeyyoung.com sign up for newsletter or SergeyYoung200 on Instagram.

[00:53:12.110] – Allan
Sergey I really appreciate your mission. Thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:53:18.110] – Sergey
Thank you, Allan. You're doing a great job. So thanks for helping all of us to spread this message across. And I just wanted to thank our audience for being with us today. Stay healthy and happy.

Post Show/Recap

[00:53:38.190] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:53:39.810] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, that was a really exciting and interesting conversation about longevity. Actually, I don't think I've ever thought about how you can define the aging process. I just never gave it a thought, actually.

[00:53:57.390] – Allan
Well, you'll see it on Facebook all the time. They'll show you these memes where there's a woman that's 85 years old and she's still a professional bodybuilder and a woman who is 85 years old and about ready to kick the bucket. You see it all the time because we're all on our own aging curve. And some of that is defined by how our genes. But they're finding more and more. It's really lifestyle choices that we've made all along the way that determine how quickly we get to go down that curve and how fast that curve crashes to our end state.

[00:54:31.710] – Allan
And if you're doing the right things for your body, you can do some things to extend it. We talked earlier and you mentioned on the podcast that just doing some exercise, eating right, sleeping, doing those basic blocking and tackling things that we talk about here every single week. Add years to your life.

[00:54:52.890] – Rachel
Well, Sergey said sleep, diet and exercise, even for as little as eight weeks, can reverse aging by three years. I've never heard that before. And that's astonishing.

[00:55:05.430] – Allan
Well, we saw it. I don't want to get too deep into this, but we saw it in covid. If you have comorbidities, then covid is a scary thing. And age is one of those comorbidities. But you see plenty of people in their 80s and 90s that lived through it.

[00:55:19.290] – Allan
Okay. They got covid, and they maybe suffered a little bit, but they came out maybe didn't even have to get hospitalized in some cases. But if you had a comorbidity, if you weren't taking care of yourself at some point in your life, and you find yourself further and down below that aging curve, then it's a killer. It's a killer straight out. And so it's just kind of one of those things of the better you take care of yourself each day, the more likely you are to have another one.

[00:55:49.770] – Rachel
That's a good point.

[00:55:53.310] – Allan
That was one of the principles of why he's believing that 150 and 200 or even permanence being effectively immortal. He believes that those are possibilities for the human race. Because if science moves fast enough to add one more year within a year, then you've effectively pushed your age your expiry date, if you will, one more day and that one more day means they get one more day to have science to solve. The next thing that would kill you. We think about in terms of okay, what's killing us?

[00:56:32.650] – Allan
Heart disease, cancer, medical malpractice, the things that are killing us, most of them are lifestyle choices. But that said, if you can have a newborn that's born and you're feeding it the exact diet that that individual baby needs throughout its entire life. It's eating exactly the nutrition that it needs. Then it's going to be a healthy baby. It's going to be a healthy teen. It's going to be a healthy young adult. It's going to be a healthy, older adult. And the other things that would kill us, we start dealing with, they have artificial hearts now, they have artificial hips, they have artificial knees.

[00:57:15.290] – Allan
And so the basic principle being, they don't know where the limit is or if there even is a limit to what the human being can live, because we haven't really pushed the envelope all the way. We've doubled our life expectancy in less than 100 years. And that's just because mostly people aren't dying as babies. But beyond that, people are living longer, and we see it. We see more Centenarians than they ever have been. And you start asking them what they're doing, and they're not necessarily doing anything special.

[00:57:53.510] – Allan
Drink a glass of whiskey and drink a smoke cigar every night.

[00:57:56.990] – Rachel
You never know.

[00:57:57.770] – Allan
Okay, well, I don't think that's great health advice, but it obviously didn't kill them.

[00:58:02.750] – Rachel
It worked for them. Yeah.

[00:58:06.290] – Allan
That kind of takes me to the next thing is, well, we don't even know right now why that is why someone can do something or why something works for someone and doesn't exactly work for someone else. And that's where the precision or personalized medicine, to me, is maybe the most exciting thing out of all of this, because with artificial intelligence and all the data and things we know, we talked about the hallmarks, and you think about all those hallmarks. And if you were capturing that data for everybody or most people, the data that you would have available and the things you would know about someone when they walk in there, it's a person comes in with a rare disease, and there's no way this particular doctor would ever have seen it because it happens to one in 100,000 people.

[00:58:55.970] – Allan
And so he hasn't had 100,000 patients in his career yet. So he probably hasn't even seen anybody with this problem. And he stopped. Because if then that symptom, try this. Symptom, try that. Symptom, try that. And so what we are going to have with precision medicine is this opportunity for someone to walk in and all that data be there. The bloodlabs, the microbiome, the genetic, all of it is all in there. And they're like, oh, you have a predisposition for this particular problem. And that's why you're having the symptom.

[00:59:37.370] – Allan
And then you can just say something simple. Stop drinking milk. And we're going to compound you something that you take for the next so many months or years, maybe. Or maybe it's something you might have to take permanently. But at least at that point, they know that it's worked for people with your situation and how often and the likelihood based on your genetics and your blood type and everything, how it's going to work for you. And then over here, they know they're not giving you too much.

[01:00:02.990] – Allan
And they know they're giving you the right doses. And they said, okay, your opportunity for side effects is much lower.

[01:00:10.670] – Rachel
Oh, gosh, that would be amazing to have all of that data aggregated into somebody's AI platform. And it would be so helpful. Just like you said, with the side effects, you go in and you've got a problem, a gallbladder problem or a heart disease or something. And if they could look at things like your blood glucose or your cholesterol levels, maybe they could fine tune the medicine that you need to help to get healthier without having all of the weird side effects that are out there.

[01:00:44.990] – Allan
It will trickle down to everything. So, like, here's an example. Maybe you just have hay fever and you get the runny eyes, the runny nose, the itchy, the sneezes and all that. And you go into your pharmacy and based on your medical stuff, all that data and you step on a scale and they say, okay, this is how much you weigh today. This is the exact dose of medication you need probably still antihistamine, but it's going to work best for you. So it's a particular one compounded a certain way at a certain dose and just enough pills to get you through what you're dealing with.

[01:01:27.110] – Allan
So you don't end up with all these expired things. The medicine cabinet goes away because you don't need it anymore to store things that, you know, I'm probably going to get it again next year, but you only need three pills and you make it through the pollen season and you're done.

[01:01:43.190] – Allan
There you go.

[01:01:43.670] – Allan
You got three pills at the perfect dose for you, specifically for you. And it helps eliminate errors. It helps eliminate overdosing. It helps eliminate a lot of this if then and that they'll probably even know things like, what's the propensity for you to be addicted to opiates? Exactly how much pain medication does someone in your situation need to get there? So it's not one of these, the doctors overshot on the opioids because it was easy. You're in pain here's an opioid, and then they overdose, or they get addicted.

[01:02:24.530] – Allan
And then the other side of it is now they're afraid to give you pain medication at all. So they're on the exact opposite swing. Whereas with AI, it's an AI driven decision. The doctor is there a judgment call to say, hey, this is the right thing. And then they can sit there and spend that three to seven minutes they have with you and just really talk about the risk of taking opioids. They say, well, AI says it's probably not a problem for you. So here's a week's supply.

[01:02:55.970] – Allan
If you don't need them all, please bring them back to the office so we can discard them properly.

[01:03:02.630] – Rachel
That'd be nice.

[01:03:03.470] – Allan
Right? And they give you just enough. The dosing is just right for you, so that you're getting the pain medication that you need without a lot of the risk side effects and all that. So the opportunity there is there. And obviously people are working towards this because there's money involved in medication, there's money involved in health care. And so people are working toward it. And one of his things was he was really wanting to see when the medical society, when they'll start actually recognizing aging as an illness as a way of dying.

[01:03:43.130] – Allan
Almost no one ages out at this point. So very few people, very little money relative is going into aging. Whereas you talk about cancer research, heart disease, so much money is pouring into those because they're seen as the killer. But at some point, hopefully with AI and everything else is going in there, they'll start solving that problem. Why does this chemo work for this one and not for that one? And what's the best chemo for you? And what's the best treatment protocols that starts working and they become less and less a factor.

[01:04:20.390] – Allan
They're still probably just going to be a point where someone just takes their last breath and that's like, okay. So he's looking at it saying, when aging is not just a comorbidity, because they will put that on your death certificate. If you just really old and have cancer, they might put that on your death certificate, but he wants it to be a medical classification. So businesses will start trying to solve aging as a problem. He invests in those types of companies, but they're little bitty companies, tech companies, typically that are coming out with these things.

[01:04:55.610] – Allan
The science is there, but there needs to be more money behind it before it really becomes the thing.

[01:05:02.270] – Rachel
Yeah. It's a big project, though, because I can just think all of my medical records, everything's electronic now. I don't know when electronic health records became mandated, and it might have been a state by state thing, but I probably have maybe 10, 15 years of electronic records, but they're spread all over the place because I've moved. But if someone could aggregate my data, even just my data from the different networks that I've had medical procedures done in, it sure would present an interesting picture for a doctor or even this AI to mash through and see what's in there and what they could pull out of that they would be fascinating.

[01:05:44.870] – Allan
And that's what it will be. They'll say, okay. Someone with this genome with this microbiome that's this age, these are the elements and things that they're most likely to see. You could know. Okay.

[01:05:58.310] – Allan
Yeah. We talked about colonoscopies and screenings and things like that. You could know. Okay, I need to go at age 45 and get screened.

[01:06:08.330] – Rachel
Sure.

[01:06:09.650] – Allan
And maybe it's even something simple. You just know. Okay. Every year, I got to get screened for something or the other because I'm at a higher risk because of all the stuff we know about it. But you're improving your diet, you're improving your exercise, you're trying to sleep better. You're doing stress management. You're doing those lifestyle blocking and tackling things and not waiting for science to catch up to. You right. There are things we can do today, and we need to be doing today, which is why I think you guys are going to really enjoy the episode next week with Delatorro.

[01:06:45.470] – Allan
He's exciting. He's fun. It's about mindset, but he talks about it. It's like you've got to lean in. You've got to put the weight on this. You got to make this happen. And he's absolutely right. So just realize, don't wait for the science to come up and save you, help you live longer, live better. The types of things we talked about, the three dimensions of aging. Don't wait for that to happen. Every action you take today is a part of making those things happen.

[01:07:16.430] – Rachel
Well, I'm really inspired by the existing genetic technology today, and I think after listening in, I'm going to talk to my doctor about having my genetic testing started. And if I can get my mom and my daughter to get their genetic testing done, it sure could paint a very interesting picture by our personal health. And who knows, between my mom's data and my data, that could help my daughter with her health and fitness in the future.

[01:07:44.630] – Allan
Absolutely. Data is going to be important. They might have some data on me. I don't know, because I've been all over like you have scattered. And in some cases, I don't think there was a computer record at all that I was ever there, especially down here.

[01:08:05.150] – Allan
but that will be important. And if you know, you have a history or something, it's worth definitely. And you do. So it's definitely worth going in and trying to get some of that data, not to panic, not to freak out, but just to say, okay, am I doing the right thing? Am I getting the right screenings and those things we should be doing? We know we should be doing that's going to be important. If you like real science, some of it is science fictiony.

[01:08:37.190] – Allan
Because we can already do some of this stuff. We just haven't heard about it. He's in the forefront of this because he's an investor in that space. So he's giving people money on the front end to do some of these things. And he does have this premise. He believes at some point we might just be immortal, that we just continue to exist. We have our normal life and we have our normal reproductive years, and then we can continue. And if you think about some of the most brilliant people or some of the most kind people or some of the most wonderful people that you've known, if they could have lived another 50 to 100 years, what would we be able to accomplish on this planet with the people?

[01:09:23.510] – Allan
Now, there's a lot of ethical things. He gets into some of that in the book, too, about living forever and what that constitutes. And is this something that just the rich people are going to be able to afford to do versus everybody else and all of those things. He has a lot of that in there, too. So if you like geeking out about almost science fictiony stuff, but it's that kind of science fiction stuff that isn't just pie in the sky. It's real stuff that could be benefiting human race.

[01:09:55.310] – Allan
It's a really interesting read. He took all that techie techie techie stuff and turned it into a readable book, which is totally cool.

[01:10:02.870] – Rachel
That sounds great because that interview was a little bit techie, but not terrible to follow.

[01:10:09.530] – Allan
And he's a businessman, his principles, he can learn the tech or at least know the tech well enough to know where he wants to invest his money and he's in that space. So it's a little easier for him. But, yeah, I'm not going to say he dumbed it down for us, but he made it readable. He made it something where you can look at it and say, oh, okay. I don't have to know how the microbiome works. I just have to know that it is one of the things that affects my health, and as a result, their ability to analyze it, to be able to maybe even make recommendations on how you can improve it based on what you eat or sleep or stress, because they all have an impact on it.

[01:10:50.390] – Allan
Then you've got practical, real advice that works specifically for you and all that's just really cool. And then, of course, replacement parts, things like that. We get into all that kind of stuff, too, and just what constitutes being a human. So it's interesting book if you like science and you like science fiction, it's just a cool read, and it's not so deep that you wouldn't understand it. He's not trying to throw words that you wouldn't know or dive down so deep into a rabbit hole that you can't get out.

[01:11:27.210] – Allan
It's just some really cool stuff.

[01:11:29.010] – Rachel
That does sound cool. The interview was great. It was really fascinating to listen to this.

[01:11:33.630] – Allan
All right. Well, Rachel, I'll talk to you next week.

[01:11:36.630] – Rachel
Great. Take care.

Patreons

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

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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

How to improve your wellness and age later – Dr. Nir Barzilai

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:44.630] – Allan
Hey, Raz, how are things going?

[00:00:46.730] – Rachel
Good, Allan, how are you today?

[00:00:48.710] – Allan
I'm doing all right. Kind of getting back into the groove of being back in Bocas and things like that and social events and things. We had a fundraiser. We had a fundraiser for the local guy that takes care of all the cats. So we have street cats and street dogs. And so this guy, he's always kind of played a part in making sure that the cats and some of the dogs get fed. And then when they have a litter, he's always trying to catch the kittens and get them spayed neutered.

[00:01:19.070] – Allan
And so he's trying to catch cats and do all that. And so everybody calls him Papa Gatto, and he was doing a fundraiser. So just kind of go there, hang out with friends and buy a T shirt. I think one guy, one of the local guys here who's really talented, he was doing the tattoos. He's a tattoo artist, amongst other things. And he was donating the proceeds from all his tattoos he did that day, and he doesn't do it, like with the little gun thing. He has a little pin thing that he does by hand.

[00:01:53.930] – Allan
So he draws things by hand on people really talented. But, yeah, so they're doing a fundraiser. So it's just kind of being back into the theme of the island. And we're getting ready to get into busy season. So we're seeing more tourists, and a lot of people are popping up and opening restaurants, some that have closed, and then some that were just never there before, because this is kind of the season to do it. And there's one thing on this island that was kind of a big thing, particularly for the young backpackers.

[00:02:28.310] – Allan
It's called Filthy Friday, and it is exactly what you think it is. Hundreds of people going to like a disco tech with a DJ. And basically it's a pub crawl, if you will. But they hop from island to island. So typically, like, three places that used to be three places I don't know how they're going to run it now, but there used to be three places, so they all get together at one place. And then there's a series of boats to take them to the second place, and then a series of boats to take them to the third place.

[00:02:57.230] – Allan
And then it's over. So it starts at 03:00 in the afternoon and runs until they drop them off around six something, and then they can just hang out and enjoy themselves. It's terrifying. I would never do it because there's just too many people in a space. Actually, I kind of get hives every time they got a Billboard at the near the airport advertising there and there's like hundreds of kids standing on this deck and there's like, no room to move. They're all just standing like face to face now, pre covid that gave me the heebie jeevies.

[00:03:31.730] – Allan
This is that packed in with that many people, not my thing. But it is sort of one of those things that when that's going on, it draws a lot of people to the island. So you see a lot more young backpackers and people on the island. So it just kind of gives it more of that touristy vibe when you have that going on. So even though it's not something I would ever want to do or care to do, it's good to see that we're getting back to kind of a normal here.

[00:03:59.270] – Rachel
That's right. It sounds wonderful that restaurants are opening and all these activities are taking place again. It's nice to hear that things are changing a little bit.

[00:04:08.510] – Allan
Yeah. Now it doesn't mean it won't go backwards at some point, but at least at this point, they didn't expect to reopen. In fact, we were doing classes in the yoga studio, and they took over the studio because the yoga teacher quit because we couldn't pay the rent while we're closed. And then when they wanted to reopen, it still wasn't tenable for us to run our classes. So we had to move out. She moved out and closed up. The people that were doing this filthy Friday, they took over that space and they turned it into a big liquor store, but something to keep him going until he was able to get it.

[00:04:43.770] – Allan
His other business is more lucrative. Business reopened. So it's just good, even though the folks that come to that don't spend a lot of money on the island. It's just good to have them here because it gives violent kind of that healthy vibe.

[00:04:56.190] – Rachel
That's awesome. Sounds like fun from a distance.

[00:05:00.390] – Allan
You guys go over there. I don't mind seeing them walk up and down the street, walk right by the gym and go party butt off. But at the same time, it'll just be good to kind of see that starting to happen here.

[00:05:13.470] – Rachel
Sure.

[00:05:14.370] – Allan
How are things up there?

[00:05:15.870] – Rachel
Oh, good. We're in the middle of October. The weather up here in Michigan is sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightening. The leaves are changing colors and dropping, which is always beautiful. And we are getting a little bit of rain today. We're going to hit 80, so that's kind of unusual. And sometimes in October we might see a few snow flurries, although that hasn't happened yet and probably won't after not for at least another week or so. But that's the fun part of October. But while I'm mentioning it, I want to remind everybody that October is also reserved for breast cancer awareness, and for all the ladies out there to make sure they schedule their mammograms as soon as they get the chance.

[00:05:59.790] – Allan
Absolutely do that. We've talked about screening, we've talked about cancer a good bit, and we'll keep talking about that. But the screening that you need to do it's critically important if you want to stay healthy. I did have one aside, though, that I want to do. This episode is going live on the 25th. And so we're less than a week away from Halloween. And so now there's going to be all this candy in your house. And if you have a sweet tooth, that's an issue. And so I did a little bit of reading on this because I did want to talk about it.

[00:06:30.810] – Allan
I thought I might end up being actually doing an episode on it, but then realize there's probably not enough content to do a whole episode, but a couple of tips that I found one of these I got from US News and Roll Reports articles five, six years old. But they made a few recommendations. So you get this candy. They recommended some things like make cookies. So you take the chocolate or cookie or whatever it is a candy bar, a piece of candy, and you make cookies and you put these in the cookies while you Cook them.

[00:07:02.010] – Allan
So they kind of make it part of the cookie. And then rather than eating them and just adding more to your candy, put those away as holiday cookies. And then you have ready made in the freezer gifts for when Christmas actually rolls around. So you get the Christmas tins, you Bake the cookies, put them in there, and you can repurpose those candies rather than eat them.

[00:07:23.730] – Rachel
Nice.

[00:07:24.390] – Allan
Another one was to basically donate them. And I had a couple here Ronald McDonald's House or even the troops, even though I know we're not as heavily involved overseas. Now, there still are troops overseas that you can actually donate your candy, too. So they'll take your candy for you and just ship it to them. You can look that stuff up online. I'll have a link to this US News and Roll Report article, and hopefully some of those links are still the same. The other is to look at opportunities for things that are coming up.

[00:07:53.370] – Allan
Like, for example, my daughter's birthday is on the 14 December, and so she was younger. I could take the candy and put it in a pinata for her birthday.

[00:08:04.170] – Allan
Okay. And the kids would have a pinata. That candy would go into the pinata. And there you go. And then the final one was bring it to work. And again, that depends on where you work and how those folks will feel about the fact that you're trying to offload your candy on them. Some people will love it. Other people won't. But, yeah, just taking it to work. Now, again, if you're going to put it on your desk, realize that that's going to be an issue. Maybe because it's sitting there and you might end up eating more of it than you'd like to.

[00:08:30.570] – Allan
So take it to the break room or something like that where this public area where they can get to it and you don't see it all the way. But one of the best tips I saw while I was doing my research was this when you're buying Halloween candy, buy something you don't like. I always made this mistake. I'd go out and buy the Snickers because the little bite sized Snickers and Milky Ways and things like that. And then the what is it? The Hershey's chocolate, the dark chocolate, because that was my favorite.

[00:09:01.830] – Allan
And then, of course, if you don't give out the candy, you're stuck with the candy. You can do one of these other things. But if you buy a candy that you don't particularly like for me, it'd be black licorice can't stand this stuff can't stand it at all. So if I had black licorice, that would be a perfect candy corns would also be one, although some people love them. I'm not one of those people that love them. So again, candy that I wouldn't use a lot of people the black and Orange peanut butter kind of candy.

[00:09:31.710] – Allan
I actually like those, which is sad because they're horrible, but I know they like them. So just kind of thinking in terms of if you're buying this candy as you're in the shopping, obviously, you don't want to be the house that gets egged because you've given out substandard candy. But just buy candy that you don't like that most people other people do like, and then you're less inclined to sit there and nibble and pick on them during Halloween and then having them in your house afterwards.

[00:09:56.790] – Allan
You're less inclined to deal with those. So have a strategy. I talk to my clients all the time when you go into a situation that you are familiar with, which this is it happens every year about this time. Have a strategy for how you get through this. If you know that you have a sweet tooth and you know that this is something that strips you up in the past, have your strategy so you can work around it.

[00:10:19.290] – Rachel
That's great. Great tips. Definitely.

[00:10:22.170] – Allan
All right. Are you ready to get into the episode on The Art of Quitting?

[00:10:27.870] – Rachel
Sure.

Episode

Today I want to talk about the art of quitting. Now, I know that sounds kind of odd to be talking about quitting when we're talking about health and fitness, because we as a people, particularly in the United States, we really appreciate perseverance. We appreciate those people, those stories where people have gone above and beyond and accomplished things way beyond the realm of what's possible or seemed possible at the beginning, like the movie Rudy or the book Rudy or the story of Rudy who tried to get on to and play for Notre Dame and actually did get on the field during a football game with the team through Perseverance.

And we love that story. There's also the children's book The Little Engine that Could by Waddy Piper. And again, it's a story about Perseverance and going at it and having the right attitude and sticking with it until you get something that seemed impossible done. We love those stories. But there are also stories that kind of push back the other way, like in Greek mythology, with Cispus pushing that rock up the Hill that's invariably going to roll down the Hill again. So no matter how much Perseverance that he puts into that effort, he's going to end up right back where he started.

Or we're watching Rocky four, and Apollo is fighting Drago in an exhibition match, and Rocky knows the next punch is going to basically kill his friend, but he doesn't throw the towel in. And a lot of people were upset about that in the movie. I was upset about it watching the movie. It was a very emotional point in that movie. And in a sense, we fought Rocky for not quitting, not throwing in the towel. And we know that that was because Apollo wanted to continue the fight all the way through to the end, and it ended up costing him his life.

And so there's these stories that we have about Perseverance and then about quitting. And they both have a place, particularly when we're talking about health and fitness. So I want to talk today about some times when quitting is actually the right answer that you're better off quitting something than sticking with it. Okay.

Sometimes when you quit, it just opens up opportunities and we're going to talk all the way through this as you look at how quitting might actually help you get to the results you want faster. So for this discussion, we're going to talk about big things. We're not going to be talking about quitting little things like quitting sugar, quitting this or quitting that. Obviously, you know, there's challenges and structure and things and strategies and tactics and things you're going to implement that will work and not work. And some of those strategies and tactics you just throw away because they're obviously not working.

But we're going to talk about some big things in the health, fitness and joy categories because in reality, this is literally life and death. Now, maybe not right now but some of the decisions you're making are going to decide which side of the aging curve you're actually on as you go forward in life. So we're going to talk about is the five key health and fitness drivers, the five key health and fitness drivers. And those are nutrition, which includes hydration, sleep, stress management, fitness and avoiding toxicity.

And that can be chemical, biological, or emotional. So we have those five key health drivers, and today we're going to go through those five key health drivers and look at some scenarios where it might make sense to not stick. It might make sense to quit. Okay, now, here's the other caveat as we get into this discussion, because I'm going to be throwing out some examples. And I want you to understand that sometimes the decision that you need to make is different than the decision I might need to make.

So as we go through this discussion, I'm going to go back and forth a little bit on that so you can kind of get a flavor for how to do this analysis, if you will.

So first, I want to talk about a few reasons why you should probably stick to what you're doing. If your strategy is sound and you just need more time. So everything's working, it's generally working, and you just need to give it more time for you to see the results that you want to see

That's probably a good reason to stick if it's working, but not as fast as you want it. Now, what there might be instead of quitting is just alternatives that you can add on to make it better. And we'll talk a little bit about that. And then another reason to stick is there really isn't another alternative. This is really the only way that's available to you based on who you are, what's going on in your life or anything else. We'll get into that as well. But what are the reasons that we should quit?

If the thing you're doing isn't serving you, you should quit and try to find another way. If you know, in your heart of hearts that there actually is a better way. You were just trying this as an opportunity and it's not working for you, and this other way would be quicker and easier. It's probably time to quit. And also we want to make sure that quitting won't hurt us, and that what we are doing is helping us. So if there's something you're doing that's not helping you, then quit and we'll talk about that as well.

So what I'm going to do for the remainder of this podcast is I'm literally going to go through each of the five drivers, and I'm going to give you a couple of examples, and then we're going to kind of talk through a little bit. Is that a good reason to quit? Is this something you should quit? And I'm going to give my opinion on it from my perspective. Realize, again, your answers could be entirely different than my answers. So your circumstances would be entirely different than mine. And you should think through these scenarios to kind of get an idea of how this process goes.

So the first key driver that I want to talk about is nutrition. So here's the scenario. You are three weeks into the carnivore way of eating. You even quit coffee and tea. And while you've lost weight, your energy level has bottomed out and you're constipated. So is this a stick, a stick and pivot or a quit? Now, obviously for some people, the carnivore diet is fairly extreme and it's very difficult to do long term for a lot of people.

Now, other people thrive on that kind of diet and that's fine. But if you're having issues with your energy level and you're just not feeling like you're losing weight the way that you should and you're dealing with other biological problems like constipation, it's time to think about that. For some people, it's obvious that you need to quit and maybe do something different. For others, it might just be a stick and pivot. So maybe you're not getting enough electrolytes. Maybe you need to implement something else like better sleep or something else to help you make sure that you're keeping your energy level up.

And then obviously with the electrolytes that I spoke to that can include magnesium that can include potassium and sodium. And in many cases the introduction of magnesium might help with that constipation. So you can kind of see as you go into this concept of I'm trying a way of eating carnivore and I intend to do it for a long time, but I'm starting to have difficulties with it. You can answer the question of OK, is this something I can just pivot, try some add ons and see what works, or do I really want to quit this?

And in many cases I would say if this was something you really wanted to do, try the stick and pivot for a little while and then if that doesn't work, quit. Here's a second scenario for nutrition. You cut your calories much lower than you used to eat. It was working for a few weeks, but you're hungry all the time and you find yourself binging at night, stick, stick and pivot or quit. Now this one is a little bit more difficult because a lot of people will want to follow the calories in calories out model.

And the reality is for a time that can definitely work. But over time your body is going to adjust to try to find Homo stasis based on the amount that you're eating today, based on the exercise you're doing today, it's going to find that balance. And so the question then is, is this low calorie going to work for you long term. For some people, just pushing through a little while can restart the weight loss. But you may need to do a couple of pivots. You may need to have a couple of days where your calories a little higher just to keep your metabolism, keep everything flowing so your body is not locked into 1200 calories a day thing.

Maybe just having a couple of days where you're up closer to 18 or maybe 2000 might be enough for your body to adapt and adjust to a point where it can continue to lose weight. That would be a stick and pivot. But for a lot of people, just cutting calories isn't enough. They need to focus on what they're eating when they're eating as well to try to figure this out. And so sometimes you just have to quit that low calorie and figure out a different way.

So I hope that made sense as I went through the nutrition piece of this, that there are different answers for each of us based on what we're dealing with, where we are in our lives and what's working and what's not. So there is stick, there is stick and pivot and there's quit, and you have to look and figure out which one makes the most sense for you. And many times, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes stick and pivot is the right answer, and then if that doesn't work, then you quit.

Let's move on to the second key driver of health and fitness and joy, sleep.

And this is one of my favorites. Okay, so here's the scenario. The first scenario. You usually go to bed at 10:30, and you've recently hired a personal trainer that can only work with you at 05:00 a.m. This only gives you 6 hours of bedtime and less than 6 hours of sleep. You know, you need more. Stick, stick and pivot or quit? Now, this is a tougher one because for a lot of people, their time is locked, and they're very deep into getting a lot done and being productive.

And the concept of sleeping more is often difficult for us. It feels like we're giving up feels almost like we're quitting something, but in a sense, getting more sleep can help you have more energy, get more done, be more productive, and definitely have fewer mistakes and issues. So the question then here is we've got two endpoints to the sleeping night. Now you could try to go to sleep earlier, but that might mean giving up family time. That might mean giving up time with your significant other time that you love to spend together.

Obviously, if you've made dinner, we've got to wash dishes, we got to get things cleaned up. So there's probably a limit to how far you can push your bedtime up and then on the other side, yes

You've hired this personal trainer that really only had that 05:00 window. Is there a way to move that training period to a later period or different part of the day, or is it better for us to go ahead and maybe find a different trainer if we really want to continue with the personal trainer that we have or that we're with a personal trainer? And those are tough decisions. I'm not going to say there's an easy answer here, but the reality of it is the bigger you make your bedtime opportunity, the more you're likely to sleep, the more you're likely to sleep, the better off your health and fitness are going to be.

So this is a tough one. It's probably a quit something, but we've got to figure out what that is for you and then you've got to decide how to make that happen. Here's a second scenario. Lately you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep. You pull out your phone to look at social media. You feel this helps you calm down. But the report on your phone shows your screen time is way up. Stick, stick and pivot, Quit?

Now, I have some pretty strong opinions about this to me. You've got to quit the Facebook, the social media stuff. You got to quit that in the middle of the night. The lights off your phone are actually keeping you up. The excitement and the dopamine stuff that's happening when you're on your phone is keeping you up. Whether you feel that way or not, it is. So the reality of it is you could do something better with that time and still be winding down. You can listen to a fiction audiobook and have the lights out.

You can actually get a hardcover printed book and turn on a candle, light a candle and read that book. You can go ahead and decide to go into the bathroom and take a warm bath with some lavender and some other scents that really help calm you down and get back to sleep a little bit faster. So I would say you quit the Facebook and then you implement something else in that place. Obviously laying in bed awake at 2:00 in the morning for hours is excruciating. But you've got to get your sleep.

You've got to figure out a way and getting on the Facebook is not going to be the answer most of the time. Now, how you do that? How you discipline, keep the discipline to do that? I can't help you there right now, but I can just say if you value sleep as much as I do, you won't turn on your phone, you won't turn on your computer, you'll figure out a way to calm yourself relax whether it's breathing, meditation, a warm bath with some oils, or reading a book, listening to an audio book.

Any of those things will be better for you than opening up your phone. So I hope that makes sense on the sleep side. You're going to have things, if you're going to try to improve your sleep, there are things you're probably going to have to quit. Screen time is a huge example. Having short sleep windows with early alarms. Another thing that you need to work around to get the sleep. You've got to be in bed and that requires you to push your windows around and have some discipline around that.

So I hope that helps you on the sleep front. If you've got some questions there, we can talk about it.

So the next key driver or key driver is stress management, and this is another big one for me, but I really only have one example. I want to walk through here. You've started setting aside 30 minutes to meditate each day, but you find you spend most of this time thinking about the things that you need to do. This leaves you even more stressed. Stick, stick and pivot or quit?

Now, this one is kind of also a little interesting to me, because a lot of people will just quit. They'll say, okay, I don't have time for this. I know meditation would be great for me. I enjoy it when it's working, but it's not working most of the time. So I want to quit. I'd like to give you an alternative. Instead of trying to meditate for 30 minutes, just try to do five, just five good minutes, clear concise minutes, letting your thoughts happen, letting things happen and relaxing and getting into it.

Now, eventually, you might be able to add a little bit of time to that. But obviously giving up five minutes is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of 24 hours, and it will feel more attainable. So you're not overwhelmed with the fact that you're losing a half hour out of each day to do this task. It won't feel as much like a task when it's only five minutes. And who knows, maybe you go a little bit longer even though you didn't plan to because you were able to relax and get into the right state of mind, helping your stress, helping you feel better.

And that's going to kind of be a positive feedback loop. So in this case, I would say stick and pivot until 30 minutes feels right, and maybe it never will. But at least you've given it a shot.

All right. Does that make sense? Okay.

The next key driver is fitness. Okay, so here's the scenario. Your fitness tracker shows that your progress is stagnating you're halfway to your set goal and hitting certain milestones. Now it looks like you won't make those milestones. So you've made progress, and you are making good progress. But now things are stagnating. You're not seeing the growth that you were seeing before, you're not seeing the strength gains or let's say we're talking about the number of steps or how fast you can go or your time or any of those things that you would want as a personal record or just some kind of measurement criteria for your fitness.

And now you're stagnating. And that goal is beginning to look unattainable at the beginning, it looked like you could get there, and now it's not. So do you stick, stick and pivot or quit? Well, I think quitting this particular time is not the right answer. You still have that goal. That's not going to go away unless you just completely changed the goal. But rather than sliding the goal post or the time to attain the goal post. This might be a good time to stick and pivot.

Maybe you just need to do something to change up your training. Maybe you need to take some rest. Maybe this is a recovery problem, and maybe this is a nutrition problem, so all of those can factor into your basic performance. So it's worth looking at. Is this a time when I change up my training? Is this a time when I change up my nutrition? Is this the time I look at other aspects that might be affecting my performance? And if I'm not approaching my goals as quickly as I wanted to just see if adding some of those differences, fixing tweaking some of those things gives you the benefits gets you removing.

I found times where someone was doing a back squat, for example, and their back squat was starting to Plateau. So they got to a certain strength, a certain capacity, and then they just seemed to slow down and they were really upset because they did have a goal of, say, being able to squat their body weight for reps. And that's admirable. That's perfect. That's a great kind of goal because it shows a level of strength relative to your weight. That's really important. So now they're not getting there.

They're looking at they're halfway to their goal, and they're just not quite getting there. So what I'll often do is I'll program other ways for them to work with the weight. That's different for some clients. I'll have them on the leg press because they're mentally challenged, not necessarily physically challenged. It can be challenging mentally to get underweight, particularly when that weight is approaching your body weight and feel like you're in control. So I'll put them on the leg press for other people. It's about their form and how they're pressing and what they're doing.

I may move them to a completely different exercise, like a front squat, which changes the angles of everything and gets them working in a different way. And then when we transition back to back squats, they find that they've either in the first scenario increased their leg strength significantly or in the second one, they now actually have better form and are able to perform the exercise better. So in both of those cases, the changes we did, those pivots are giving them the added capacity to be able to do more, and they start seeing that progression happening again.

So that's a situation where I think a stick and pivot can be really good for other people. They might just want to stick and keep grinding at it, and sometimes they're successful. Just push a little harder, do a little more, and they're there. So just recognize that there are options as you're looking at fitness. So here's the second scenario. You're doing a fitness class, and after an awkward movement, you feel a tweak in your knee. There are only ten minutes left in the class, stick, stick and pivot or quit?

Now, this is a tough one because a lot of fitness classes have you on your feet moving around both forward and backwards and side to side. And so there's a lot of opportunities there for you to injure your knees. If you're not careful with your form and how you're placing your legs and not locking out. And there's a lot of things that can go wrong. If you've already felt a tweak in your knees, then it's highly possible that you've done something to one of the tendons and leguments to flare it up.

That's what that pain is. And continuing and trying to grind out through that class is more likely to hurt you than not. It's definitely not going to help you. You're going to have to slow down. Most likely you're going to be ginger on that knee and you're not going to get the full benefit of doing the class. Now, does that mean you completely quit the class? And that might be no, it might be. Yes, it really depends on the nature of what you've done. But if you feel like all you've done is a little twist and maybe you'll be fine, just slow it down, go into just marching in place.

If you want to continue moving for the remainder of the ten minutes and not walk out in the middle of that class or actually towards the end of that class, then maybe the pivot is just you down scaling to a point where you're still moving and still getting work done and everything is great. I at one point in a CrossFit class hurt my back, I tweaked my back, and so I just quit. I tried to go a little bit further. I'm like, no, this is not working for me.

I can't do these movements as well as I want to. I can't use the form I want to and it hurts. I stopped, I quit, and that turned out to be a really good decision because I didn't do exceptional damage to myself. I had done some, but it was really just a strain instead of something that could have been much, much worse. So recognizing your body's limitations, knowing when it's time to quit, when it's time to stick, or maybe just stick and adapt a pivot. Those are good.

Now, these questions about stick, stick and pivot and quit when you start talking about fitness are really hard because we have two things happening. We have this drive for ego that a lot of us share, and then we have this drive to laziness that a lot of us have. If you feel like you're quitting just because it's getting hard or you're slowing down as a pivot just because it's getting hard, that's not necessarily a justified reason. Again, exercise is helping. You can do it. You're not harming yourself.

So in this particular case, there's not really a good reason to quit. But if you find yourself where you're pushing yourself past your boundaries, what you're capable of doing, and you risk injury. It is definitely time to quit or downsize to enough where you know you're not in harm's way. So again, that's a harder area, but it's one that if you want to stay in the game, which is key, you have to obey fitness rule number one, thy shall not hurt themselves. So managing how you do this and staying within that sweet spot of not letting ego get in the way and not letting laziness get in the way, that's going to be a key here.

So the fifth and final health driver is avoiding toxicity. So here's the first scenario. You're wearing a smartwatch and this could be Apple Fitbit, garmin, whatever. And you notice your heart rate goes up when you read posts from certain persons on social media, stick, stick and pivot or quit? Now, I know every one of us has some of these people that they turn social media into a battleground. They're always posting material that is just hard for you to stomach. They're a good friend, but some of the positions they take, some of the things they put on social media just really aggravates you.

They cause you stress, they hurt you. And maybe you've even had a few conversations with them there, and they've always ended up poorly. Is this a stick? Is this a quit or is this a stick and pivot? Now, for most of the time, because of social media, my position is just go ahead and quit. Don't respond to their posts. In fact, maybe you can even do the function that allows you to unfollow them. You're still their friend on Facebook. You just don't see their posts. And if it's more egregious and it's a problem, then you just block them on social media.

You tell them in person, I can't deal with your social media. So I'm going to block you, not the personal friend, but I don't want that on my feet. I don't want that in my life. So you quit in a sense, my social media, something that maybe I haven't talked about in here is that I break my Facebook up into two profiles. So if you actually went out and searched for me, you would see that I have two profiles on Facebook. Now, one is my business profile, and that's where I interact with you.

If you want to be my friend, you look up AllanMisner.CPT. And that's my work, my training profile. And that's where I have conversations with clients. I have great friends in the industry, and I enjoy the conversations there. And I don't worry about the political posts. I don't even pay attention to them. And then I have my personal personal, which is family and friends. I would say 99% of those folks I actually have met in person and have personal relationships with. And so yeah, some of them are going to post some things that whatever I don't agree with, but I only check that really to pay attention to friends and family and see what's going on here on the island.

I don't spend a lot of time on my personal personal Facebook because there's just not material out there that I'm all that interested in other than staying informed about what's going on with my family, some of my friends and what's going on on this island. So that's the only time I check back on that profile. And maybe once a week again, I saw that that was toxic. I saw a lot of toxicity in that, and I came up with a pivot and that pivot works very well for me.

You can also again do the other pivot where you're not actually blocking someone, but you're not following them or other settings within your Facebook, where you can control your feed and you're seeing the things that you really want to see without dealing with this much toxicity. The second scenario I want to talk about in the health driver of avoiding toxicity, you decide to read the label on your personal care products, and I'll tell you right now, the Environmental Working Group has a great app to help you do that.

It's go to www.Ewg.Org/apps and this site when you go there, you can literally scan the barcode with your phone, your smartphone, and it'll tell you whether this stuff is toxic or where it rates. So let's say now you've used that app and you've looked at your personal care products and you notice that your favorite shampoo and conditioner rank very poorly on this rating scale. And so now here you are. You love this condition of the shampoo. It works great. It makes your hair feel look good.

Everything is awesome when you feel when you're using this product, but now you find out it has some problems. It has some allergens in it, maybe some carcinogens, that type of thing. Do you stick, stick and pivot or quit? Now, the thing about toxicity is it tends to be cumulative. Rather, it's chemical, biological or social or relationship stuff. It tends to be cumulative. If you're in a toxic situation, it doesn't get better if you just reduce the amount of toxicity that you're taking in, it's still cumulative.

It's still adding in. So for many of these things, you need to get away from toxicity. And I would say the answer is going to be quit. It's very seldom that you can pivot on those types of things, but there are exceptions. So if this brand of shampoo and conditioner that you're using is a good brand and that particular type of product is the problem, maybe you move to another product that they have that's hypoallergenic or has less of these things in it, and that's a better option for you to continue to use a brand that you enjoy and works well for you.

But cut back on that toxicity. But in a general sense, I would say most of the time the answer related to toxicity if it's a product or a relationship is to quit. Now, that's easier said than done. But I have done it, and you can, too. So I hope this all made sense. I tried to come up with some examples that would show you on either side of the stick or quit model, and then some that were in that stick and pivot range. As you can tell, this isn't as simple.

And since there are thousands and thousands of things that you do every day, there's a lot going on. There's a lot for you to consider as you look at this. So for that reason, I would say, focus on the big rocks. Think about the things that you do or don't do that would move the needle. If you know there are things that you're doing now that just adversely affect you, like smoking. That's a no brainer. It's a quit. So there are things you're doing that really it's time to quit.

There are other things that you're doing that are actually for good, but they're not giving you the results. That's the time to reassess. And as you're going through this analysis, I think it's really important for you to keep your why and your vision in sight, because the things that you're doing should always align with that. If they don't, then it's a quit. So the why is the reason you're doing this? Why are you working on your health and fitness now? And when you come to that, it's this emotional, deep thing.

It becomes so important to you that there's no other option. You're not going to say no. Okay, so when you're doing these things, it's the question of am I doing it the right way? Can I pivot? And then if it's not working, find a different route.

Now, the vision is where you ultimately want to go with this activity, with what you're doing, with what you're eating, fitness, nutrition, all of it. All those things are driving you towards some vision of yourself. And so you're building these little habits, these little mile markers that are measurable as you're going through this process. And as you look at what you're doing, if you're not seeing the progress to get to that next mile marker, that's time to evaluate. And when you evaluate things, you have to get rid of things you can tweak.

And that's called the pivot. And then things you just bear down and keep doing because they are working. You just have to keep at it. So if you're interested in exploring these things a little bit more, whether you should quit, whether you should stick and pivot or quit, I'd encourage you to join us on Facebook at our Facebook group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.Com/group. And there you can go ahead and ask questions. Maybe you have something you're dealing with and you just like the sounding board of hey, what do you think?

What are some ideas here? Because maybe quoting doesn't really make sense to you, and maybe sticking to it doesn't make any sense. We've got to find that middle ground of the stick, maybe stick and pivot. So there might be these other alternatives that I can share with you in that forum. So again, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.Com/group. Go ahead and start a conversation there about your particular situation, and we can try to figure out the right alternatives for you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:42:11.650] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:42:13.390] – Rachel
Hey, Allan. You know what I love about the concept of sticking with something, sticking with it and pivoting or just quitting it altogether is that you have to make an assessment and make a decision. And while I absolutely hate the word quit, it's really hard for me to quit anything. Sometimes that is absolutely the right decision.

[00:42:35.650] – Allan
Yeah. And maybe you find another word for it. For me. It's like, okay, sometimes I just need to be upright with myself that I'm pushing myself further and harder than I should and just taking that half step back or just overall, just quitting. You're in a toxic relationship, you really have to evaluate that relationship and say, is it worth me keeping? And sometimes the answer is no. As we were going through the pandemic and being locked up, one of my friends that she was a client even here on the island was having a lot of issues and was lashing out at everybody.

[00:43:18.850] – Allan
So it's like, no, I'm going to call her on her BS, and I'm just going to say, chill out and she didn't like it. And so we're not really friends anymore, which is fine. We still sort of see each other on the island anyway, but I'm cordial I'm not going to be a problem with it, but I don't need that negativity in my life. So I quit. And it's hard and it's hard but you have to think about this holistically of your stress management and your fitness.

[00:43:48.670] – Allan
I think it's easier. We can talk about the fitness side because quitting sometimes it just makes a lot more sense when we were talking about this. And you talked about marathon training as we get into the heart of marathon season, there's a lot of legs putting on a lot of miles and going through a lot of pain.

[00:44:10.070] – Rachel
October is the best time to run a marathon. The weather is probably the best it's going to be, at least in the north here. But marathon training is no joke. And there comes a point where you might be hitting those peak weeks where your mileage is going to be the highest it's ever been. Your speed drills and tempo work will be the highest it's ever been, and you're going to be hurting. And on the one hand, that's the intention of a peak week is to put your body through the wringer.

[00:44:39.290] – Rachel
But then you come off of those weeks, and you're backing it down into the taper and relaxing and recovering until you hit the marathon until the race day. But there's also that fine line where you could be digging yourself into a hole if you're injured. And if you've got that little knee pain or maybe a little pain in the quad or the hamstring or something. Sometimes runners are egos get to us and we go out there because we have to do the training. We have to go out there and run.

[00:45:10.550] – Rachel
We have to follow the plan. Otherwise, we won't succeed on race day. And unless you're paying really close attention and stop when you're hurting yourself, then you're not going to make it to race day. And sometimes our egos just shade that we just can't see ourselves in that light. It's really hard.

[00:45:29.390] – Allan
Yeah. It's kind of the interesting thing I noticed when I was doing that type of stuff, even when I do the tough Mudders and Spartans and things like that is there's so much freaking adrenaline going through my body. Quite literally I will do a lot better on that run than I trained for if I didn't train enough. What I found was I tended to over train. I tended to spend more time running longer distances than I really absolutely needed to do. For me technically, I kind of evaluate like this.

[00:46:03.530] – Allan
If I could run 8 miles without stopping, I could do a marathon because the rest of that race is mental.

[00:46:12.230] – Allan
and so as you're going through the training and you're thinking, okay, I'm in my peak weeks and I'm hurting and I'm going to start my taper. I just recommend people take five days off. In five days, you're going to be able to and drink plenty of water, make sure you get in your electrolytes, do all the things that you need to do to allow your body to recover. And over that five days, which you'll probably find is all the muscle aches and pains go away, which kind of removes a lot of static.

[00:46:41.990] – Allan
And now you can actually feel pain in other places, like joints and things like that. And if you're feeling the pain in the joints, that's not something that's going to go away. And it's not something you can train through. Muscle pain, you can train through. You can recover a lot faster. Those joint issues, you're not going to be able to, but a lot of people because they put so much stress on their body, they have both. And therefore they can't really isolate where they're hurting because they're hurting everywhere.

[00:47:13.610] – Allan
And so just realizing that it's not a quit, it's a pivot. My plan was set and then I'm like, okay, but if I'm going to be ready for the race or at least be able to complete the race, I have to take that little step backwards. I have to take that recovery time.

[00:47:33.590] – Rachel
Yeah, absolutely. It's time to pivot the plan. It's time to stick with the plan, but make a pivot and do the recovery that needs to get done. See a doctor. If you find an injury that you just can't pinpoint or need help figuring out the difference between a strain or an injury, and then if it's time to make that decision to DNS or do not start, it's imperative that you take care of your body because our runner ego is really strong and we want to line up and gut out a race no matter what.

[00:48:09.170] – Rachel
We signed up for it. We paid for it. We told all of our friends and family about it. We're going to be there no matter what. But like you had mentioned in your discussion, go back to your goal, because if you're running a marathon, you want it to be a great day. You want it to be a celebration of all the hard work you've just put in there. You don't want to run yourself literally into the ground and making an injury far worse than it already is.

[00:48:35.930] – Rachel
There's always going to be another marathon you can pivot and sign up for on another day when you're healthier and ready. So it's time to make those really hard decisions and they're hard.

[00:48:49.610] – Allan
They are. One of the ways I like to kind of give you a visual of how this whole process works is to think about each type of training that you're doing each time in nutrition or stress management. Think about those as like channels. You got your sides. I'm running. So this is a race. I'm going to be running a race, and I need to have this amount of stamina and speed and all that to be able to complete the race. And so then somewhere in that channel is your roof.

[00:49:19.490] – Allan
And somewhere in that channel is your floor. And as long as you're between your roof and your floor, you're doing what your body needs. If you start pushing up against that roof, which a lot of your hard weeks, that's what that's about. Let's push our roof up. Let's try to get our roof higher. Let's raise the roof. I guess.

[00:49:39.950] – Allan
Anyway, you're trying to raise that roof a little bit, okay? And if you push too far past it, you have the potential to injure yourself and break. So you've got to find that line and you've got to really listen to your body when you're at that point. So find your roof. Don't let your ego push you too far past that roof too often, occasionally. Okay, you overdid it. So your recovery is much more important, but in a general sense, you didn't break. So that's good. You're right there at that point of stressing and getting outside your comfort zone with that roof, the other side is the floor.

[00:50:13.310] – Allan
And that's just where you say, okay, I hurt so bad. Now I'm just going to quit. And again, you had a goal. You had a reason why you had something you were really after. That didn't change. So if you let yourself just fall through that floor, then the term again, not a term everybody likes, but it's laziness is keeping you from accomplishing your goal. So find your floor and always stay above that. Find your roof and only push that roof when you're in a particular point of training where it makes sense.

[00:50:49.130] – Allan
And then you've got to tap that ego down so that you're not breaking yourself. So find your square and find your sweet spot. And wherever you are in your training, you're going to have times when you're down in recovery. And guess what you're not doing. If you're in recovery, you're still above your floor. That's on your training plan. Not doing anything is still in your box. Not feeling like I need to be doing something, even though the training plan says to not do something, don't do it.

[00:51:16.010] – Rachel
Yes. The question you asked earlier, too, was, is this serving me? Is what I'm doing right now helping me achieve my goal? Or could it be hurting me or keeping me from achieving my goal? And it's a good question to ask when you're trying to decide whether you should stick with something pivot or quit it altogether. I think reminding yourself, is this helping me is a good question.

[00:51:40.430] – Allan
And that's where I was when I did my alter the 50 miles way back when it was okay. I wanted to do it. It was just felt like, okay, the percentage of people on Earth that can run 50 miles at one time at that point was very low. Almost nobody did it. Marathons were seen as this crazy out of the box. How would someone do that? Why would someone want to run twice as much see if you can?

[00:52:08.570] – Allan
And then I did.

[00:52:09.890] – Allan
And I noticed that one of those things realize, okay, that served the point. But I thought maybe I was going to run 100 or do something like, no, my body was very clear with me. You are not going to run 100 miles in a day, ever. Just don't even think about it. I knew where my box was. I knew where my roof was, but at the same time, I knew that just being in that high of a box on that channel in the long term would not have suited me.

[00:52:42.770] – Allan
It was cool. It's something I can talk about and enjoy. It's actually still out on the internet's. Internet was coming around in 95. I think so they published the results on the Internet. It was the first time my name was on the Internet, and so it's just kind of one of those things of saying, okay, I did it, done it. What's next? And finding another challenge, another thing that would keep me excited. And then staying in that box. Every time I've gotten outside of that box, I've either put on a lot of weight or I've broken something, so I kind of know where my box is and it's like, okay, if I'm going to be healthy and fit, I have to stay in my box.

[00:53:22.310] – Allan
And defining that box is the real challenge of all of this. Being comfortable. Pushing the roof when you need to is also a big part of this. And it's not easy. It's honestly not easy, but you have to listen to your body or get a trainer involved and listen to your trainer because they'll be able to see what's going on and tell you, okay, what are we measuring here? What are we doing? How do you feel? Some of it can be very subjective, but a lot of it can be what's your HvR HRV how are you recovering? The shorter, faster runs?

[00:54:00.230] – Allan
How's your speed going? Are you getting the times and the splits that you need for that? And if you're not, then maybe you're not recovering enough. And maybe there's something and a good trainer will see that. Whereas if you just have a program that you purchased or got downloaded for free off the internet, you have to do that for yourself. And that's really hard when there's an ego involved. And there's an aspect of, oh, I just not do this today involved staying in the box. That training is a lot harder, but find a way to stay in the box.

[00:54:33.770] – Rachel
That sounds great. Great points. Stick with it, pivot or determine whether it's time to quit. Really good rules with them here.

[00:54:42.170] – Allan
All right.

[00:54:42.890] – Allan
Well, Rachel, that's all I have for this week. I'll talk to you next week.

[00:54:46.670] – Rachel
Take care.

[00:54:47.690] – Allan
You too.

[00:54:48.710] – Rachel
Thanks.

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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Finding your health and fitness pace

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:46.220] – Allan
hey, Raz. How are things going?

[00:00:48.630] – Rachel
Good. How are you today, Allan?

[00:00:50.960] – Allan
I'm home. We got home yesterday is a lot of travel, a lot of 4700 miles driving two different countries. We were all over the whole East Side of the country. And so it was just a lot. I'm exhausted. I'm tired, and I started my training today for my tough Mudder. So right at this point, I'm like, I need a nap and I just need a nap. And so, yeah, it's good to be home. This is home now. I really I felt that way. I was in the United States, and I was like, you know, Bocas is my home.

[00:01:30.510] – Allan
And getting back here, I was like, yeah, this is where I want to be sleeping in my own bed, that kind of thing. So it's just good to be back. And now I can get back into a rhythm, back into what I like to do, focus on me, focus on my wife and my dogs and just living our lives and doing the things we do here, back in the gym, working out, no excuses. Just go, go, go. But at the same time, just having that comfort of knowing.

[00:01:59.760] – Allan
Okay, my bed is literally just one third of a mile that way. So.

[00:02:07.000] – Rachel
That's good. Glad you had the chance to visit all your family. I'm sure it was very rewarding to be on vacation and visiting with everyone. But, yeah, there's certainly nothing like the first night back at home in your own bed.

[00:02:19.670] – Allan
So If haven't answered your email or your Facebook questions or messages. I apologize, but the traveling really made it a lot more difficult for me to keep up with things. And so I fell behind a lot of things. And it taught me a lot about how I am not the same guy I was ten years ago when I could go, go, go, go, go and then get up and go. I need more downtime. I need more recovery. So that's one of the things here that I learned on this trip.

[00:02:51.560] – Allan
So future trips won't be quite as ambitious.

[00:02:54.940] – Rachel
Oh, wow. Yeah. Good thing to learn. That's for sure.

[00:02:58.220] – Allan
Well, how are things up there in Michigan?

[00:03:00.330] – Rachel
Great. I am such a good mood today. Mike and I had a much shorter vacation over the weekend. We had another runcation. We took our camper up north, a little part of Northwestern Michigan, and we ran a half marathon in the Sleeping Bear Dunes campground area. And we just had a fun time. The weather was perfect for running. The Hills were horrible. We survived, and we just had a wonderful time over the weekend. And again, just like you, it's nice to be home.

[00:03:32.980] – Allan
Good.

[00:03:33.970] – Rachel
Yeah.

Episode

[00:03:34.750] – Allan
All right. So today we're going to talk about getting your colonoscopy. There are two things that happen. As you get close to 50. You're 50 is you get your AARP invitation in the mail. I think I was 47 when I got mine, and then you're supposed to get your colonoscopy. There's kind of write a passage to your golden years, if you will, or you're happy years or whatever we want to call it. If you got into this, you've just turned 50 and you have family history up with cancer with particularly colorectal cancer.

[00:04:17.870] – Allan
And so for you, this was a day one. Get it done. Don't worry about it. Don't even think about it. It's not like I'm gonna put this off for a little while because I think I'm low risk. You just like, Nope. 50 get it done. Almost on your birthday. And your birthday wasn't .

[00:04:34.490] – Allan
And then you actually were doing some reading and found that now they're trying to move the date. If you have history, they're trying to move that screening date to age of 45.

[00:04:44.730] – Rachel
Right. You know, it's interesting. I go in every year for an annual physical. And I have done this for many years. And on my 49th annual physical, 49th year, they said I had to wait until I was 50 to have the colonoscopy. And it used to be age 55. And so when I got my annual physical shortly after my 50th birthday, I just was past July, they said, time to sign up. And I said, sure. And they said, by the way, the age has moved down to 45.

[00:05:14.200] – Rachel
And I thought, wow, that's really interesting that they're moving the age down in these increment brackets. But once I did a little research, I figured out why and what the American Cancer Society has found that even though the number of colorectal cancer diagnosis has gone down in a certain age group, it actually has increased for the 55 and younger age group, and it's increased only by 1% year after year. But I think that's part of the reason why they moved it down to 50 go to 45 right now.

[00:05:47.000] – Rachel
But even though that's the case, I still needed to check with my insurance to make sure they would pay for it, or at least know what it would cost me if I had to pay anything extra out of pocket. So it's definitely something you need to talk to your doctor about and also your insurance company.

[00:06:01.400] – Allan
Yeah. Now we're talking about colorectal cancer. There's a reason we're doing the screening, and I think we all know the C word. We get scared of it because it happened so much. It's one of the top leading causes of death, particularly in the United States. Right behind, I think heart disease and diabetes is right in that circle of the top three that you're probably going to deal with at some point. And unlike heart disease, which a lot of people will have an episode and then it'll be treatable and they'll treat it for decades.

[00:06:37.830] – Allan
In some cases, cancer has your number shortly after you realize that you have it over almost 60,000 people per year die of colorectal cancer.

[00:06:50.810] – Rachel
Yeah. According to the American Cancer Society, again, they were estimating in 2021. There would be 104,270 new cases of colon cancer and 45,230 new cases of rectal cancer in the United States. And right now, there are more than 1.5 million survivors of Colorectal cancer in the United States. And like I mentioned, the reason why the death rate has gone down for that is because of screening because of things like the colonoscopies. But as well as the new advances and different types of stool testing that can also catch it early, so early detection.

[00:07:36.400] – Allan
And that's the point. The earlier we detect it, the easier the treatment is, the more successful the treatment is. If we're catching it late, and you mentioned earlier when we were doing our pre talk, is it's one of the kind of cancers that you might notice a little bit of issues with your bowel, you might notice a little bit of issues with the fact that you can't seem to empty your bladder. There are other reasons, guys, for that prostate, which again, another screening you might want to go take a look at.

[00:08:03.850] – Allan
But if you're noticing some changes and that's one of the things in talking to different doctors, much of self diagnosis or at least being aware of a problem is being aware of self, of being aware of how things are working now and then not just saying, oh, that's a part of getting older. It can also be a symptom of something else. So the screening, they're giving you some preset dates and that's for the insurance to pay. I did a little bit of research because I thought I'm traveling in the United States.

[00:08:31.510] – Allan
I won't have time in my schedule to stop and do the three day purge and roll, which we're going to talk about in a minute here. I didn't have time for that. I get one here, and I haven't priced one here because it actually would be relevant to you guys anyway. So I thought, what if I was going to go ahead and do the sample version? You'll see the advertisements of the little box that arrives at your house and you put a little poo in a little container and send it back to them.

[00:08:58.830] – Allan
I did some pricing on that to look it up and they go ahead and say, okay, $30. And if you file with your insurance and then we'll deal with that billing stuff later. The $30 is just an administrative charge for the company that's facilitating getting the testing. But then I said, okay, if I'm going to just pay cash, they do give $100 discount. But it's still about $700 to get this test done, which is not cheap. But again, it's cheaper than the colonoscopy. So if your insurance company isn't going to cover it or you're going to end up paying out of pocket because you have a higher deductible insurance policy.

[00:09:36.060] – Allan
I did a little bit of research in what I was seeing were numbers right about the $3100. It can be a little more than that, a little less than that. Obviously, if you've got biopsies and other things that need to happen at the end, which we'll also talk about later, I guess the cost could go up for you, because again, now you have a medical thing you're treating versus just doing a standard routine screening. So, yeah, we're looking at about $1,100 if you wanted to pay cash for this or $3100, if you have a higher deductible, that's probably about what's going to come out if you're paying like an eight or 20 kind of thing, and you're looking at the 20% of that.

[00:10:13.560] – Allan
So still some money. And you got to think about that with your health care as we get older. We got a budget for the screenings. We got a budget for those things because we've been young and foolish thinking we're going to live forever. And maybe someone who's almost never hits your deductible well, over the age of 50, you're going to find more years that you hit it. And over 60 more years that you hit it, then you don't. So just be recognizing that as you're getting older, having the finances to focus on taking care of yourself and getting these pre things down like a screening, not putting it off because $700, that's a car payment as like, just do it.

[00:10:55.560] – Allan
You pay $1200 for a phone. Just do it right.

[00:11:02.120] – Rachel
It would be a great thing to add to your monthly budget just to keep a little nest egg of money for these types of screenings, because I can guarantee you that this little cost for screening is going to be a whole lot less than what it will cost for different surgeries. Or if you get cancer than the radiation of chemotherapy that often comes with it definitely blow up and be a lot more expensive. So screening here, add that to your budget is definitely well worth the investment.

[00:11:31.980] – Allan
And this is the location where you're past the digestion of food. But at the very time, if you're having difficulties here is going to work all the way up your digestive track, and it's just going to affect other parts of your life that you don't really want to mess with. So get the screening done. So you're getting the results you need and you're getting the healthy and you're getting the treatment early, which is the key to surviving this. If you do have something, let's keep moving forward.

[00:12:01.130] – Allan
You've signed up. It's like signing up for a race, but they don't give you a number. They just show up in comfortable clothes, but there's a pre process because the proctologist doesn't want to just go in there.

[00:12:18.040] – Rachel
Yeah, yeah. The average person can have up to about 14 or 16oz of stool in the colon at any given time. And so the whole purpose of this prep is to clean it all out. And what was interesting was that my prep, which could be different than anybody else's, and it probably will be if you've had a colonoscopy. I imagine it'll be different than what you've gone through. It just varies from doctor to doctor, and it took a little bit longer to prep for this. Then I would have it expected about a week out from the surgery.

[00:12:50.110] – Rachel
The first thing I had to do was cut all my medications and vitamins, even which I was kind of surprised by that. I didn't ask any questions. I can go a week without taking vitamin E and fish oil and whatnot? It's not that big a deal, but certain vitamins, like iron keeps you constipated or can cause constipation. So those in different prescription medications had to be cut. I'm sure that there are a few medications that if you need to take them, they would let you take them.

[00:13:20.400] – Rachel
But again, that is something you need to discuss with your doctor. Seven days out, I had to quit all my vitamins. I don't take any prescriptions, and then five days out, they want you to go on a low fiber diet already, so they want you to tone down the fiber that you have in your daily diet.

[00:13:38.630] – Allan
They're talking keto.

[00:13:41.320] – Rachel
Yes. Which is easy for me because, yes, I am keto. I don't have bread, I don't have pastas or rice or a ton of fiber. I do eat vegetables, so that's definitely a good fiber and a half. But yeah, I don't have a high fiber diet to begin with. So that was an easy cut for me as well. So then where it gets really interesting is then the day before that you start the prep, you need to be on a liquid diet. So a clear liquid diet at that because you can't have anything that's blue or red or purple, because that could die some parts of your colon and make it think that there could be blood in your stool when it's not or in your colon.

[00:14:26.480] – Rachel
So I had to drink some chicken broth, some beef broth. I had a clear electrolyte drink water. I was allowed to have black coffee, no dairy, because that's also a constipating item. So a liquid diet, lots of water the day before I started the actual solution part. And that wasn't difficult either. Again, being keto, I think that gave me an advantage because I didn't really feel a lot of hunger. I'm still drinking a ton of liquids. My stomach was very full. I was getting nutrients in the broth and in the electrolyte drink.

[00:15:05.110] – Rachel
So I was totally fine with that. That wasn't a problem. So not too difficult so far.

[00:15:11.170] – Allan
Yeah. So you got to give up your red wine for a few days, you gotta give up your red wine, you got to give up your heavy foods and regular foods. And then I think for me I would probably just fast. I don't know that I would feel like I needed the broth unless it was just to have some kind of flavor. And so if I were to do it, I would say, okay, I'll do some one, maybe a little bit of bone broth here and there. But for the most part, I just say, okay, water and electrolytes and coffee, probably some coffee. For two days

[00:15:50.100] – Allan
I can fast, and I might be a little hungry, but that's fine because I would look at it because I know what the next stage of this grand journey is. And I would just say, the less that has to come out, the less trouble I've got. So it's like if you do that right, then that's going to make this next phase easier.

[00:16:11.450] – Rachel
Yeah. Now this is the hardest part of the whole procedure. That is the most uncomfortable part, but that painful. And this part can also vary from doctor to doctor. So my test was going to be at 10:30 the following morning. So that's important to note, because you have to drink the prep solution in two sections of it and two occasions before the test. So for me, this is where it got oddly specific, but remembering that my test was at 10:30 the next day. So the night before, the day before the exam was my liquid diet.

[00:16:52.400] – Rachel
And at 05:00 in the evening, I had to take a set of laxatives that was prescribed by the doctor and the laxatives just like to get everything flushing out of your intestines. There's not a whole ton of stuff in my intestine to begin with. I'm not sure how effective the laxatives were really working for me anyway, but I took the laxatives as prescribed by my doctor at 05:00. But then at 06:00 is when I had to start drinking this prescription solution. It's a gallon mix, which is sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate and potassium chloride.

[00:17:29.840] – Rachel
Now, if you think of that, basically, it's salt water.

[00:17:36.290] – Allan
It's electrolytes. It's salt water. But it's electrolytes too. So like I was saying, if you start flushing out a lot of fluids to keep your electrolytes up and literally, that's going to actually pull fluid into your muscles, into your body and into your blood. And that's why something they'll tell you if you have high blood pressure, you might not want to eat a lot of salt because that will raise your blood volume, which would raise blood pressure. So depending on your circumstances, they might give you a slightly different cocktail there, but it's generally electrolytes.

[00:18:07.570] – Allan
They're going to make sure that you don't crash from sodium or potassium deal. You're going to have enough electrolytes to be good with the flush. That's about to happen.

[00:18:19.970] – Rachel
So I needed to start drinking this at 6:00 the night before my exam, and I was only going to drink half a gallon at this time. And so at the rate you drink it, it's supposed to be 8oz every 15 minutes until that half gallon is gone. So over the course between six and eight at night, I was drinking about 8oz of this drink every 15 minutes. And really, it wasn't terrible until it was terrible. So 8oz of water every 15 minutes or a half a gallon over the course of 2 hours really doesn't sound horrible.

[00:18:57.780] – Rachel
But for me, I got a really small stomach and at the end of that half gallon, I was stuffed. I was stuffed like I just ate two Thanksgiving dinners in a row. I was so full, I didn't think there was any room for me to keep drinking it. And the other challenging part of it is that you're drinking ocean water, you're drinking salt water and it tastes terrible. And so one of the tricks, one of my friends suggested was to take a hard candy, a piece of a hard candy like a lemon drop or a Mint or Jolly Rancher or something like that.

[00:19:30.670] – Rachel
Put it under your tongue. Drink the solution with a straw. So you're not getting a whole mouth flavor of salt water and drink it as quickly as you can through the straw, which worked really well until it didn't. But for this first half gallon, I got it done. I was stuffed to the gills. And because I started at six, it took me to eight and I was full. But then at the end of the half gallon at 09:00 and then again at 10:00, I was to date two gas tablets to prevent the gas from developing in my stomach.

[00:20:05.350] – Rachel
I never felt gas. Maybe it was the gas tablet. I don't know, but that was my first day of prep up till 10:00 at night, and I was stuffed and exhausted.

[00:20:17.530] – Allan
One of the funniest things have you ever played football, particularly on the offensive line, is when the quarterback goes behind the center and the center has gas. It's hilarious for us offensive Line man, it's not so much fun for the quarterback, so I imagine it wouldn't be so much fun for the proctologist.

[00:20:34.920] – Rachel
probably not.

[00:20:35.880] – Allan
Probably the reason why you're taking the gas pill.

[00:20:38.670] – Rachel
Probably. I never felt it. But I did what the doctor said to do, and I finished it off. So sadly, this is where it gets more uncomfortable. None of this is painful, it just is getting uncomfortable. So the next day at 4:30 in the morning, I had to wake up and start drinking the second half of that half gallon of prescription solution. It was early in the morning. It tasted terrible. It was not a black cup of coffee that I had rather have had in the morning, but I started drinking it and at this point the lemon drop candies were losing their effectiveness, and the salty water was even saltier.

[00:21:18.870] – Rachel
Probably because I didn't shake it up well enough or something, and it just got to me. And sadly, I threw up the last second to last 8oz of the solution and I wasn't even able to guzzle down the last 8oz of solution. So I got a little bit down in the morning, but I couldn't finish at all. And so then you're not allowed to drink anything but 3 hours before the procedure, you can't drink anything you're done. So again, that was the uncomfortable part of it, but not painful.

[00:21:49.780] – Allan
Okay, well, I would probably take a nap because doing this thing all the way until 10:00 at night and then being up at four to start all over again, I'm like, no, no, you don't understand my sleep. My sleep is the most important thing and my health journey right now, and I won 8 hours. And so I would probably would have asked that question when I was reading it. I would have given them a call and said, Look, I don't see 8 hours of sleep in here and we're doing this for my health.

[00:22:20.340] – Allan
So how do I adjust this to get my 8 hours in? Granted, I have never tried to drink that much salt water before, but I could just tell you from a water perspective, I can easily drink a half gallon of water in 2 hours. That wouldn't have a problem with that at all.

[00:22:41.220] – Rachel
That's good.

[00:22:42.540] – Allan
So yeah, for me it'd be like, okay, I'll start at 06:00. I'll finish at eight. I'm going to go to sleep. I'll be up at four. That'll probably be up about eight times to pee anyway, then I'll wake up around four and I'll drink that a half gallon over the next 2 hours. And then, yeah, go ahead and take another nap, because what am I going to do for 3 hours? We can't drink or eat anything. I'll sleep. Okay. So now you've done all this. Probably didn't sleep very well.

[00:23:11.230] – Rachel
And here's where it gets interesting. Is that what the solution does is that it's moving through your colon. You're not really absorbing the liquid in the water that you're drinking. It's actually flushing out all of your colon. It's like you're hosing down your entire colon with this liquid solution. So after about the first half gallon or so it started to kick in and I was spending a lot of time in the bathroom partially because of the completely liquid diet. My bladder was working over time. But then when you drink this prescription solution, your colon is working overtime.

[00:23:47.130] – Rachel
So I spent a good part of my evening in the bathroom, and I did get a couple hours of sleep, but it wasn't rested sleep because I was getting up to go to the bathroom. Still, I guess looking back in hindsight, I think I might decide to pull in all nighter in this case and just sit with the book in the bathroom and just let the prescription do its job because it wasn't great sleep. And I probably got up about once every hour or so to flush out my colon.

[00:24:18.050] – Rachel
And then the next morning at 4:30, that's when it really started to kick in, and it didn't even take as long as the time period to get from my stomach to my colon and out. It was just go, go, go. And in fact, I wasn't sure how I was going to make it from my house to the hospital the next morning without needing to have a bathroom stop at the gas station or something. So that's the whole purpose of the solution is literally to hose out your colon.

[00:24:45.720] – Rachel
And I'm not kidding about the hosing out part.

[00:24:48.180] – Allan
Yeah, I can understand the all nighter thing. I'm glad you said book, because the whole taking your phone to the Ioo. Like a lot of public bathrooms when you're traveling. And so I'd walk in and people be in their stall talking on the phone. Oh, no. I hear them with a click, click, click, click. I'm like.

[00:25:09.510] – Allan
No, no.

[00:25:11.150] – Rachel
Yeah, that's a private time right there. Oh, goodness.

[00:25:16.920] – Allan
Okay. So we're on our way to the hospital. This is kind of one of those Logan's run thing because just like when you're in labor and just like, let's get to get there quickly because we don't know, I'm going to make it.

[00:25:28.200] – Rachel
That's right. Yes, I had my daughter drove me today. You have to have your driver because you're going to be sedated and you can't drive afterwards. So you need to have a driver. My daughter got me to the hospital. We got checked in. And even though I had drank all this electrolyte and as well as the prescription solution, I was very dehydrated, and they had a hard time finding a vein that would stay open for the IV. That got me it's couple of times until they got a good one.

[00:25:58.140] – Rachel
So that was kind of interesting. So I got checked in at 9:30. The procedure was at 10:30. I had my IV going. They got another bag of electrolytes to keep me going and got into the procedure room. And they said, You're about to take a nap and we'll be done in about half an hour. And I'm telling you, I had the best nap of my entire life. I was counting down to ten and I might have got to seven and I was out like a light.

[00:26:30.570] – Rachel
so I had a great nap and got back to my room and woke up and they got me a cup of coffee. And by the time I finished my coffee, I was fully awake. The sedation had worn off, and I got the good news that they did not find any polyps. And that's what they're looking for in the colonoscopy is if there's any polyps anywhere in my colon or rectum, and that's where they would take any out. If they had found any, they would take out the polyps.

[00:26:58.050] – Rachel
And they would do a biopsy to see what they were.

[00:27:01.480] – Allan
And that's where the detection goes on a standard one, which fortunately you had they didn't find anything notable. They all clean. All go. Now it's just a function of you getting yourself back in order and then getting yourself home and all that. So I think one of the things you talked about in your notes was wear comfortable clothes.

[00:27:23.370] – Rachel
Yes.

[00:27:24.800] – Allan
Throughout the whole thing. Just sweat clothes. If it's too hot, then just wear something loose and easy to wear a mumu. I don't care, but just comfortable clothes, something that makes your life easier. Rest when you can rest. But then if they were to have found something, now you're into this new stage. So they've gone in there. They pulled the polyps and they're going to do some biopsies. They'll be able to give you some information. And this is when you start triaging with your doctor, you form a medical team, if you will.

[00:27:58.040] – Allan
And you've got to take a leadership role, even though they're the expert, you have to take a leadership role in how you're going to address this from the perspective of your health.

[00:28:09.680] – Rachel
Yeah. And also, just like, what every cancer out there, what would happen to you will just depend on what they find. So a couple of polyps here and there, they could take them out. And that could be the end of it. Or if it was a tumor like my uncle had had, that might require a different type of attention. There could be surgical procedures involved if they decide they want to take out pieces of your colon. Totally possible. And then there's a cocktail of radiation and chemotherapy that could be given, and it all just depends on the exact type of cancer you have and the extent at which they find it.

[00:28:52.720] – Allan
One of the things about cancer, though, that I want to kind of put out there is that there are the different types. Some move very, very quickly. The metastasize really, really quickly, and you don't have a lot of time that you have time, others metastasize much slower or won't metastasize at all. So knowing a lot more about the type of cancer you have and what's going on gives you kind of a timeline for the decisions that you need to make. One doctor's decision or opinion won't necessarily be another doctor's opinion.

[00:29:25.650] – Allan
And you might love your doctor to death. But this is a point for you to realize you're the CEO, someone has brought you some information. But before you go in and start doing anything drastic, you might want to get another doctor's opinion in there. And we've talked about this over and over again. Some doctors are going to be a little bit more surgery prone. Some are just going to say, why don't we do a little bit of this chemo drug and see if it gets smaller?

[00:29:53.740] – Allan
Some of them may, I don't know. They may recommend some dietary changes and things like that because it's just not at that point where they feel like you need have to do something right now. They've removed the polyps. And so at that point, they're gone and the other was a problem. But it's obviously not anywhere else. So let's wait a year and do another one and see what we've got happening here to make that decision. Cancer is one of those things where it can flare up, but it's just your body hasn't had a chance to kill it yet.

[00:30:26.340] – Allan
And so there's just different things out there. I've had doctors. We've talked about prostate cancer. We've talked about other cancers, and the reality of it is the doctors over the years have learned a lot, but each doctor has their own little bias for whether they want to do a surgery where they want to do another treatment, what they've seen work. But you have an opportunity. Rather, it's something that you need to do quickly, or if it's something you have some time to do. You have time.

[00:30:52.240] – Allan
Either way, it's not an e jerk. Just let's go do what this doctor says. Do a little bit of reading, talk to us, get a second opinion, maybe even a third opinion, and just figure out what the most appropriate decision is for you. Some of these surgeries are not something that you're just going to get the surgery and you're good. There's surgery, there's chemo, there's all kinds of stuff, radiation. And you talked about your uncle. They went on for years. He went on for over a decade of different treatment protocols to try to do something.

[00:31:24.030] – Allan
And so just recognizing that this can be a long journey or it could be a short one. And some of the folks that I've talked about, particularly prostate cancer, those decisions that you're making have other adverse effects to your body. So a surgery in your colon? Well, it's not where you're getting your nutrients from. It's a part of the channel and chain that's making that all happen and things and changes you do in one part of it can adversely affect the way your whole digestive tract works.

[00:31:52.710] – Allan
And that's your second brain. So I'm not going to say this is complicated as brain surgery, but the ramifications of some problems there, it can be detrimental.

[00:32:05.610] – Rachel
Right. Definitely get second and third opinions for sure. When your car breaks down, you can take it to a mechanic. But if you have a hot Rod or Lamborghini, you go to a Lamborghini dealership to get it fixed. So similarly, you want to choose your oncologist. Don't go to any guy who is the local oncologist at the hospital. You find the person that specializes in colorectal cancel or whatever other kinds of cancers that you're going to be dealing with. You go to the specialist and you get that second opinion and you find out what is the best treatment for you based on your existing medical conditions and the exact type of cancer that you have.

[00:32:44.560] – Rachel
But the good news is that the death rate for colorectal cancer has dropped because of screening like the colonoscopy and with stool tests, and you could definitely have a good chance of survival. Your survival rates increase with early detection. So when it's your age like it is for mine at 50 or for any of those 45 year olds out there, don't be afraid of being uncomfortable by taking a stool test or being uncomfortable for the couple of days of the liquid diet that I had to do a colorectal test.

[00:33:19.740] – Rachel
Get that peace of mind by doing the screening that you should have at that age bracket and early detection 100% gives you the best survival rates.

[00:33:29.320] – Allan
And I know I would have done it. I don't know if you did it. Did you weigh yourself before you started the process and after the process?

[00:33:37.220] – Rachel
Yes, I did. And I was one tiny pound difference from day to day.

[00:33:43.870] – Allan
And then you start eating again. And you're full of it again.

[00:33:48.500] – Rachel
Exactly. Yeah. Like I said at the beginning, 12 to 16oz of stool, and it was legit, right? Yeah. So it was not a difficult test. It was not painful, a little bit uncomfortable, but right now, I don't have to go back for another colonoscopy for ten years unless something else goes sideways. So I'm very happy with the knowledge that my colon looks squeaky clean.

[00:34:14.970] – Allan
You hose it off of the fire hose.

[00:34:17.420] – Rachel
I sure did.

[00:34:18.610] – Allan
All right. Well, Rachel, anything else you want to talk about before we call it a week?

[00:34:25.060] – Speaker 2
No. Just go get screened, please.

[00:34:27.760] – Allan
Yes, please. All right. Well, we'll talk to you next week.

[00:34:30.590] – Rachel
Take care.

[00:34:31.160] – Allan
You too.

[00:34:32.000] – Rachel
Thanks.

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Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:49.580] – Allan
Hey, Raz, how are things going?

[00:00:52.190] – Rachel
Good. Allan, how are you today?

[00:00:54.220] – Allan
I'm doing well. As this goes live, I'll actually be back in Bocas. We're finishing up our trip right now as we're recording this. But by the time this goes live, in a few weeks, we'll be back in Bocas, trying to run Lula's now as a full bed breakfast. And I'm now becoming the tech guru to run the computer systems and things like that. It's not been easy. So that's been the hardest part. Just figuring out what you've got to do to run a restaurant and getting the rules for Panama

[00:01:27.400] – Allan
is one thing. But then you're like, okay, here's the booking engine. And now we have to find a credit card processor that will work out of Panama. Tammy's trying to start a bank account, but it's like, is almost impossible. The banker traveled to our island from the mainland and met with my wife, and there was all these papers that Tammy needs to fill out or needed to fill out. And so I think Tammy is going to have to take a trip to the mainland and then spend hours with them to just try to get a bank account open so we can take money in and run our credit cards.

[00:02:03.800] – Allan
So a little bit, a little missing pieces as we go about that. So it'd be really busy the first few weeks once we get back, because there's just so much to do.

[00:02:15.080] – Rachel
Yeah, sounds like a lot. It's all those little behind the scenes things that tend to eat up your time. But I hope you've had a good vacation while you've been here in the States.

[00:02:24.880] – Allan
I did. We realized because we went to Mexico first, and then we came to the States that we were just beat. And it sounds weird, but the vacation you're at different kind of tired. So it's almost like a lot of people say I need a vacation from my vacation, but, no, we put over 4000 miles on this car. And we're not even done. So it'll be abouti'm, guessing right now probably closer to 4500 miles that will put on the car total before we turn it back in.

[00:03:00.890] – Allan
And that's just a lot of time. It's a lot of driving. We broke the trips up, and we were able to see everybody we could see it was a really productive trip, but productive in vacation don't typically go together in the same Senate. So I'll probably need some time to kind of decompress when I get back. Vacation from a vacation.

[00:03:24.160] – Rachel
For sure, traveling can be very exhausting, especially all the places you've seen.

[00:03:29.980] – Allan
So how are things up there?

[00:03:32.100] – Rachel
Good. Really great. Our weather is starting to change, and here in Michigan our leaves are starting to change colors. It's just the beginning of our fall season. So it's about to be gorgeous up here. But over the weekend, Mike and I ran a half marathon, and I just want to brag on him a bit because he set a new half marathon PR. And I just want to remind everybody we just turned 50. We're not spring chickens anymore, but he just set a new PR. So this year, he has a new PR for the 5K, the 10K, and the half marathon.

[00:04:05.890] – Rachel
He has just gotten so much faster in the last couple of years, and I'm really proud and excited for him.

[00:04:12.540] – Allan
And he's in that real sweet spot of the 50 to 55 range. So he's the young and running in the group, running some of his best. He's probably winning medals and having some really good races.

[00:04:24.450] – Rachel
I think we have won some metals in our age bracket so far, but he came in 4th in his age division in this half marathon. He needed to shave nine more minutes off his time. And I want to say his time was 1 hour and 42 minutes for the half. And so I think the guy was in the 130s that just beat him off the podium. So there's some fast people in our age brackets. Seriously fast.

[00:04:53.980] – Allan
Maybe they'll age out before he does.

[00:04:56.400] – Rachel
I hope so. Yeah. Fingers crossed. We can catch up.

[00:05:01.920] – Rachel
That's so exciting.

[00:05:02.880] – Allan
All right. Well, when the weather changes, it's time for me to fly south. This year, we did the traveling to see family earlier because in September is the downtime in focus. And so this when we decided to just go ahead and try to shut down, but we actually had monthly renters in there. But this is the thing where it's like, okay, we're going to shut down and we're not going to worry about this. And we'll go. And so we're going to be traveling more during this time in September.

[00:05:31.940] – Allan
And I can just tell you going to Indiana, North Carolina and Miami. It's a much nicer time of the year. Weather wise to be there. It wasn't cold. And in fact, I think I might have put on a sweatshirt once.

[00:05:44.420] – Rachel
Oh, wow. Good.

[00:05:45.410] – Allan
I was able to wear jeans. I don't wear jeans.

[00:05:47.980] – Allan
I wore jeans a couple of times, and I was thinking when I got here I might have to buy more of it now the weather stayed nice the whole time. And so I'm still wearing shorts.

[00:05:58.210] – Rachel
Fantastic.

[00:05:59.830] – Allan
looking forward to kind of getting back to my bocas routine, starting the training for that tough Mudder in August. It's August 27th. If you're interested, you can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/Chicago and they used to call it a classic, and they made some changes to their website since last time I looked at it. So now it's a 15K. So there's a 15K and some of the children's runs on Saturday and then on Sunday they're doing a 10K and a 5K.

[00:06:30.090] – Allan
And so there are different distances in this. If you don't think you're up to the 15K, which was the classic, I think they're shortening it a little bit because it'll be closer to nine and a half miles, then the ten to twelve that it used to be, but it's still 24 25 obstacles. So it's going to be the full array of those. But if anybody's interested, go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/Chicago as we get closer to the event, if you're telling me you're going to be there, I'm on the 10 to 10 45 run.

[00:07:01.290] – Allan
So if you've signed up and you're in that same run, let me know and we meet up and do some of the course together because it very much is a team style, even if you're not on a team or bring a team, everybody's helping everybody. So you're trying to climb out of a mud pit, everybody's helping you climb out of the mud pit and then you're turning around and helping them get out of the mud pit. So it's a really cool run. It's very, very personal.

[00:07:24.610] – Allan
You need a lot of people and it's tough, tough mudder, but it is a fun run. So if you're interested in doing that, then let me know if you're in the area and I'll know more as they get closer to where they're actually going to host it. It can be anywhere within 2 miles of Chicago. They're going to call it the Chicago Tough mudder, but we'll be in a general area. So if you're in the area, maybe we do something that Saturday night, have a dinner or something.

[00:07:48.790] – Allan
If anybody's in the area, we can figure it out. But again, it's on the 27th of August, the ten to 10:45 run. And if you go to the website, you can sign up for that now. I think they're gonna be well by the time this goes live, Unfortunately, they probably raise their prices a little bit. That's kind of how they run with it is the prices go up. They have early bird and then they kind of raise the prices so you might pay a little bit more than someone else paid.

[00:08:13.740] – Allan
But for what you get in all the fund, it's well worth.

[00:08:17.200] – Rachel
It sounds awesome.

[00:08:18.830] – Allan
Alright, so you want to have a conversation with Dr. Foster?

[00:08:22.880] – Rachel
Sure.

Interview

[00:08:57.920] – Allan
Dr. Foster, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:09:01.000] – Dr. Foster
Thanks, Allan. It's a pleasure to be with you.

[00:09:03.410] – Allan
So today we're here to talk about your book, The Shift: Seven Powerful Mindset Changes for Lasting Weight Loss. And it's one of the things that has really kind of hit me over the last six years of doing this, is that for most of us, any substantive change that we make in our life has to start ahead. We have to fix our mindset first and then the good things happen. It almost never ever is going to work the other way.

[00:09:30.550] – Dr. Foster
That's exactly right. And I think for most people that's a little counterintuitive when most people are starting on a weight or wellness journey, their first thoughts and often their only thoughts are, what do I eat? How do I move and really get pretty granular about that? Is it low carb, high protein, low fat? Is it strength resistance training? Is it hit? There's a lot of stuff going through people's minds and what you eat and how you move is certainly important for your wellness. I think the missing ingredient and the thing that people most underestimate over my 30 years of clinical and research experience is the most important component to a wellness journey is your mindset.

[00:10:16.630] – Dr. Foster
And simply put, your mindset is how you think about the journey. But also importantly about how you think about yourself.

[00:10:25.290] – Allan
Yeah. My path to taking care of myself. I was not healthy. I was not fit doing great my career. That was wonderful. So what I call one for three and overall realized that was probably the worst one that I should have been focusing on. But I didn't like myself quite honestly at that point in my life, I really didn't like myself. And for the next eight years effectively punished myself to try to fix me. And so it wasn't until I came to this realization that the lacking component was compassion and love.

[00:10:59.700] – Allan
And you put that as the first mindset change and kind of really the only way this is ever going to happen is you got to get this done first. Can you talk about self compassion and why it's so important?

[00:11:12.640] – Dr. Foster
Yeah. First, Congratulations on your success. I know about your success, and it's quite impressive. And I really applaud the efforts you're doing to get that message out. That it's how you think about yourself and the journey that makes a difference. And you're right. The book starts, it's about seven different shifts that have science-based, proven techniques to help you with your wellness journey. In fact, any journey in life. But to your point, self compassion is the basis of all of it. If you look at the way most people start a journey of any sort, whether to your point, it's in your professional life or a wellness journey or a weight journey or any self improvement journey, people often view it in a deficit model.

[00:12:00.130] – Dr. Foster
So what do I have to fix? What deficiencies do I have? And that just doesn't really feel that great. Right? If instead you can build from a position of strength, not weaknesses, what strengths do I have that can help me achieve my goals. And that's all predicated on self compassion. And that basically says that I'm worth taking care of that any self improvement project that I undertake, whether it's personal, professional, whatever it is, is based on my own value, as is without any change, I am worth taking care of.

[00:12:41.140] – Dr. Foster
And that's a position of strength, and that generates power for the journey. Alternatively, I hear this a lot have been a clinical health psychologist for over 30 years, working with lots of people elbow to elbow knee to knee in their weight loss journey. I hear often that they start out at a point where weak-willed, I'm undisciplined, I have terrible eating habits, and I often say that's you you're talking about, you need yourself to be successful in this journey. And that's why self compassion is so critical.

[00:13:18.400] – Allan
Yeah. And if you don't have self compassion, I think a lot of these other things we're going to talk about, we're going to end up kind of circling back to that because you can't really see these things or do anything about it. And the next one I wanted to talk about was the unhelpful thinking and the reason this one resonated with me so much was, wow, I used to do that all the time. Wow, I used to do that all the time. Three out of the four I was guilty of practically every day of my life up until maybe even still today.

[00:13:48.520] – Allan
Occasionally I find myself with some of this unhelpful thinking. Can you go over the four categories that you had? The main ones that once we do probably the most because like I said, I saw myself in most of them.

[00:14:00.040] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, I'm sure happy to. The fundamental premise is what we think influences what we do. So if you think about different, this is steeped in 60 years of research and cognitive therapy without getting into all the details. It really is how fundamental, how basic our thought patterns are driving what we feel and what we do. So accepting that science, then there are styles that I've observed over my clinical career that really get in the way of a successful wellness journey is one is all or none. And this is things are great or they're terrible.

[00:14:37.180] – Dr. Foster
I'm on a diet or I'm off a diet. It's a good food or it's a bad food. It's viewing the world and any interaction that you encounter with as all or none. Light bulb thinking, black and white thinking lots of ways to think about that. And the problem with that essentially is that the world is not like that. And the most frequent off ramps to the journey are precipitated by these kind of unhelpful thinking styles. They're thinking styles that make you just say, the heck with it.

[00:15:09.160] – Dr. Foster
One day I've blown it. Really? So anyway, that's the first one, all or none, the other is once makes always. And I hear this frequently. So somebody will have a rough day that in it as they plan. They didn't work out as they plan. In a non wait world, people can say things like, Well, this is the way it always goes. A watch out for this kind of thinking is when you hear yourself saying things like never, always. Those are signals that that's rarely true and that you're taking one event and extrapolating that to believe it will always happen and it will never change.

[00:15:47.740] – Dr. Foster
The third is negative filtering. And again, this happens both in wellness journeys and in work journeys. I'll take the work journey in the first case here, if you get feedback from your supervisor in an annual review or quarterly review that on four criteria, you're knocking out of the park on three. But there's room for development and for opportunity and for growth on a fourth. If you're a negative filter, all you think about is that fourth one and you start to worry about your job. And is it secure?

[00:16:21.420] – Dr. Foster
And it gets you down into this swirl of negative thinking and not seeing the big picture. So it's really trying to make a mountain out of a molehill, but in an overly negative way. And the fourth, which is less common. But I put it in the book because I've seen it frequently. And also it gets across this point that the key to this is not just positive thinking. It's realistic thinking and this style that's not helpful. It's called Don't Worry, Be Happy. And these are people who go through life and again in a variety of different arenas and just say, oh, it'll get better.

[00:16:59.250] – Dr. Foster
Well, how do you think it will get better? I'm not sure it'll get better. Tomorrow will be a better day. And while that initial optimism is helpful and we're not encouraging people to be overly negative, plans work better than platitudes, it's important to say, okay, if tomorrow is going to be a better day, how will it be a different day? How will it be a different day? So those are the styles that I've noticed over my 30 years in the field that can get in the way and in simple tweaks, a technique that we talk a lot in the book about is called a reality check.

[00:17:32.700] – Dr. Foster
So when you have these thoughts, ask yourself, you can do it from a couple of different ways. One is, what would a good friend say to you? And we can talk more about that, because that's also a good self compassion technique. But the other is to act those almost as if you're a lawyer. So what are the facts to support that I have no willpower or here I go again, or I'll never be able to be successful. What are the facts to support that? And that kind of reality check can help do a check on that thinking and help you develop more helpful, more realistically, more realistic thoughts.

[00:18:07.260] – Allan
And the way I like to talk to people about these realistic thoughts a lot of times in the moment, you don't know you're doing this. It's almost invisible to you because it's just second nature is that after something goes wrong, I always find it valuable to first with the self compassion, forgive yourself and then second analyze what happened. You know, you go in and you get stressed on Friday afternoon, and so you leave there you go to the bar, you have a couple of beers to calm down and relax, and then you say, okay, yeah, sure

[00:18:38.730] – Allan
I'll go ahead and get the pizza and then you eat the whole pizza. You go home and you're like, Well, I sort of blew it. I blew the day. I might as well blow the whole weekend. And so that's your all or non thinking after. And so you realize then, okay, what happened? Well, I went there and I probably would have done better to go to the park and go for a walk. So the next time I find myself really stressed out on a Friday evening, I'm gonna go to the park and I'm gonna walk around for a little while instead of going to the bar and having a couple of beers and that's kind of that way you can take that and get to the reality of it is this is not who you are.

[00:19:13.880] – Allan
This is just an action and a point in time. And if you focus on the why it happened and get to the trigger, then you can take and avoid that unhelpful thinking and take it to the next step of saying, okay, what is the plan? What is the better action for me next time this happens? That slip to success model that I like to use with my clients is really just that three steps of reality based thinking. It happened. I can't undo it. I can't uneat the pizza, I can't undrink the beer, but I can do something better next time.

[00:19:47.420] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And I like the way that you think about that. At first you start with self compassion and self forgiveness. This is not a time to beat yourself up, self flagellation does not worth self improvement. It just doesn't. The other thing I liked about what you said, and we use this. One of my favorite phrases, clinically is ask how. Don't ask why, because if you can go retrospectively, as you just did in that example, about stress leads to a couple of beers, leads to ordering pizza.

[00:20:18.250] – Dr. Foster
You can look at each step in what we call behavioral chain and think about Where's the weakest link is that could you have avoided the stress? Could you have managed the stress differently? Could you have had the beers and not had the pizza? There's lots of ways. And then you're in charge of your destiny the next time. And the question is, if it didn't go well, how did it not go well? And how can it be improved in the future? And alternatively, if it did go well, how did it go well, so you can rinse and repeat on that rather than thinking that the stars and the moon were like, no, you made that happen.

[00:20:51.710] – Dr. Foster
So I like so much about the way you think about it in terms of looking back, having self for business and putting yourself in charge of, where could I do it differently the next time?

[00:21:02.720] – Allan
One of the things you did in the book that I really like, because I got the thinking through some of this. It seems like every time someone wants to change themselves, they want to improve their weaknesses. I'm going to eat healthier, so I'm going to lose some weight. I'm going to go to the gym five days a week, even though I hate the gym and I'm not really good at it. Or I'm going to go ahead and do this couch to 5K. Even though I've never really run in my life, we always seem to want to pick the weakest point of us and start working on that thinking that's going to give us the best return on our investment.

[00:21:39.140] – Allan
But the reality is quite opposite that we need to actually double down on our strengths to be successful in this journey. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:21:49.990] – Dr. Foster
Sure. Again, it's very common when people embrace a journey or embark on a journey to start thinking about what's wrong. It's sort of like a fix it model. And in some ways again, it's yourself you're talking about and treating yourself with some positive self regard and saying, what do I bring to this experience? What are my strengths just has a different feel to it. Then here's a long laundry list of things that I need to fix. I can think of a patient I worked with an extremely successful entrepreneur, had established a really robust retail experience, had been through the ups and downs of recessions and lots of industry pressures, lots of near bank foreclosures on the business, really high stress and was now on the other side of it and was trying to manage her weight and when she started on the weight journey, she was very quick to judge herself very quick for harsh characterizations of who she was as a person.

[00:23:00.040] – Dr. Foster
I can never follow this through. I'm not persistent. I don't have any discipline. And can we just stop for a second? Let's just talk about what you've done in your career. What are some character strengths that you have that you would think that helped you? And the first thing she said was perseverance is that no matter what was going on in the business, internally, externally, I was able to persevere. And just that little shift of getting her to think I am someone who perseveres changes the narrative, the self narrative, which is ultimately the most important one on how she can persevere through this journey.

[00:23:38.930] – Dr. Foster
And again, I want to be clear when we say character strengths. There's a whole science of positive psychology behind this. This isn't making judgments about this is good and this is bad. This is a weakness. This is a deficit. We all have character strengths. And helping, what we do in the book is help people identify what their character strengths are so they can leverage that. And again, at the end of the day, it's that slight shift in mindset that if I'm starting with something that feels good to me, something I'm good at.

[00:24:10.260] – Dr. Foster
I'm pretty good at this. That gives you a sense of self efficacy, of confidence, that I can leverage a skill set I have rather than going in this forever elusive pursuit of like a Whack Amole game of trying to whack down every weakness I have.

[00:24:26.980] – Allan
Yeah. You had a link to a strength profile quiz that you could do. And I took the time to go out and do that quiz, the VIA Character Strengths profile. And it was interesting because I think a lot of people would think, okay, if you're going to someone loses a lot of weight. They obviously have a lot of self control and all of that. Self regulation was 19th out of the 24. My top five were honesty, bravery, leadership, curiosity and love of learning. And so as I started thinking about, well, how did these strengths play out when I was actually doing what I was doing?

[00:25:04.890] – Allan
And the reality was, yes, self regulation really wasn't what did it for me. It was the liking, a high minded challenge. So I signed up for a tough Mudder and I told people I was going to do it. So I'm an honest person. I'm going to stand up to what I said. I actually signed up with my daughter. I said I'm going to be ready and I'm going to do this race with you. And from there, getting my certifications and things like that to learn what I needed to do, to take care of myself, to train myself.

[00:25:34.640] – Allan
I just look at that and say that right was my little roadmap that was in here in my head, but I didn't realize that that's what I was doing at the time was I was not trying to self regulate myself to healthy eating. I just knew that if I was being honest with myself and what I challenged myself to do, I had to do better. And I did lean on those so much more heavy, heavier heavily. Then I did on the ones that I was much weaker.

[00:26:02.920] – Allan
And I think that made all the difference.

[00:26:05.300] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, it really does. And it's good to put some words to it to actually realize these are inherent strengths that people have and they can leverage them in the process again instead of searching for these weaknesses or deficiencies.

[00:26:17.220] – Allan
And I think you said it in the book, and you just said it earlier to know what your basic strengths are, you can just look back on other things that you've been successful at. And hey, what got me there? That's the same thing that can make you successful in every journey that you take going forward, including losing weight, getting stronger and just getting healthier.

[00:26:35.780] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, I think one of the things because of the significant stigma that's associated with higher body weights in our culture, people often can in a negative way compartmentalized. So they forget about all these strengths they have in non weight and wellness journeys as if they don't exist when it comes to other areas of their life. So sometimes in the patient that I was talking about, it's just a general reminder about I've accomplished a lot in my life, and I've done so with a variety of different strengths.

[00:27:05.960] – Dr. Foster
And how can I use those strengths for other purposes in life? It's not just wellness. It's not just weight. It generalizes to a lot of other things, which is why I think it's so powerful.

[00:27:16.340] – Allan
I'm going to make sure there's a link in the show notes so you can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/507. And I'll have a link to that quiz so you can find out what your course strengths are. But it also is very valuable because it gives you all 24 of the strength profiles. So you literally can go through there and read it and say, Well, is that more like with me or less like me? So it's a great learning tool. And I encourage folks to go out there and check that out.

[00:27:41.610] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, the work that Via does under the leadership of Neil Myerson is really impressive, and I'm it's available so publicly, and that's why we recommended it in the book.

[00:27:50.900] – Allan
Cool. Dr. Foster, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:28:02.190] – Dr. Foster
I think if I had to pick three, I would go back to the beginning of our conversation and say, Start with self compassion, and I won't belabor it here because we've already discussed it, but really treating yourself as you would treat a friend as a friend would treat you with this kind positive self regard. It doesn't mean everything's perfect. You're perfect. But you're starting out with an assumption that you're worth taking care of. And any self improvement opportunity you have is because you're worth it not because you're deficient .2 is to set realistic goals.

[00:28:39.450] – Dr. Foster
People often mistakenly think that I've got to set these bold, audacious goals to get success. And while I'm not saying don't shoot for the stars, that's fine. The first step should be a small, reasonable one. And there's great science behind this. Bf Skinner, a famous psychologist, had this concept which has proven out time and time again called successive approximation, which is just fancy psychological jargon for take it one step at a time so that you approximate the goal by breaking it down into smaller steps. There's a story of a member in the book who talked about she had 100 pound weight loss goal, but she broke it down into five pound increments.

[00:29:26.540] – Dr. Foster
More importantly than that, she broke down. What do I need to do to reach those 5 pounds? What specifically behavioral goals rather than weight loss goals really drive the day? So these small, realistic goals give you an opportunity to be successful at each interval. Rather than saying I'm not going to congratulate myself for whatever it is. Running a marathon, why don't I just start with I walked a mile. That's a great way to start. And I think the third thing, which again might be counter intuitive, is to expect setbacks. To realize that the journey is not a straight line.

[00:30:06.700] – Dr. Foster
It has lots of ups and downs, whether it's on the scale, whether it's in your workout intensities, whether it's your work performance, whether it's how you perform as a parent, how you do in the workplace, it's never a straight line. And instead of using Setbacks as an opportunity to take the off ramp, use that as an opportunity for learning much in the way you talked about with the beer and stress beer pizza cycle, how do I go back and learn that and use that as an opportunity?

[00:30:40.330] – Dr. Foster
So self compassion, set small, realistic goals that are achievable and then importantly, expect setbacks. They happen one of the time to one of the people. It can be distressing, but it's also a great way to say, hey, setbacks happen. It's my next move that matters most.

[00:31:03.740] – Allan
Welcome to being human.

[00:31:05.010] – Dr. Foster
Exactly.

[00:31:07.670] – Allan
If someone wanted to learn more about you, Dr. Foster and the book, The Shift: Seven Powerful Mindset changes for Lasting Weight Loss. Where would you like for me to send them?

[00:31:16.700] – Dr. Foster
I go basically anywhere, any retail location where books are sold anywhere online. My bio is there and details about the book are there. I think the thing I would like people to know is that the reason I wrote this book is that after 30 years and after actually learning from the people I work with, I realized that while eating an activity are important, it's mindset that matters, and it matters enormously. And I think one of the things I hope people can get from a book like this is to get some small shifts that can lead to big results.

[00:31:54.470] – Dr. Foster
Because as you said at the outset, Allan, it's really important. If you have to start with mindset, the other things follow, they won't be effortless, but they will be much easier with the right mindset.

[00:32:08.920] – Allan
You can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.Com/507 and I'll be sure to have links to the book there. Dr. Foster, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:32:19.080] – Dr. Foster
My pleasure, Allan. Nice to chat with you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:32:25.490] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:32:27.580] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, I think Dr. Foster is my new best friend. He and I have a lot in common, but what he said at the very beginning, what we eat and how we move is important. But before all that mindset, my favorite word.

[00:32:42.350] – Allan
Yeah. And we've talked about this and kind of part of this, this whole because every once in a while get into a topic set. And when I was going through the layoffs, my layoff, I started talking about stress. I started looking for books on stress, and it kind of became a big thing big theme for the show for several weeks. And if you've noticed over the last several weeks, we've talked a lot about mindset, I guess on talking about it, I've talked about it. It really is a start of all of it.

[00:33:11.720] – Allan
And if you don't take the time to get your head right, then the first stumble block that you come to, you're going to trip up. And 99% of people hit that first bump in the road and they're out. They just quit because you're like, this is too hard. This isn't happening fast enough. I'm not good at this. It's never worked before. And so we talked about some of that unhelpful thinking. But that's exactly where this all comes from is if you get your mindset right, then you're in that position to recognize when you're using words like always and never or the I screwed up.

[00:33:48.060] – Allan
So I may as well you start recognizing those tendencies to just blow everything off. I'll start back on Monday kind of mindset. And really, that's been a huge stumbling block for most people. Is that going into it without having their head on straight and I'll admit that was me, too. 37 years old. I was very unhappy with myself, and I decided I needed to do something about it. But it took me eight years before I actually really did anything substantive, and it really did come down to that.

[00:34:21.960] – Allan
I didn't have the right mindset. I wasn't committed, and I didn't have self compassion. And so those big elements that were missing then allowed me to get my head right to say, okay, don't have to be perfect yet. I just need to be really good. And the better I do, then the better I can do. And they're just seeing this as a gradual progression up the Hill. And in some cases, it feels like you're walking up a sand Dune and the Sands just shifting under your feet.

[00:34:52.690] – Allan
And you just don't feel like you're really getting anywhere because it seems like you're sliding almost as much as you're stepping. But the reality is you are moving, you are moving up and you just got to keep that pace, be comfortable with it and just keep going and don't let yourself get negatively influenced by just things that are outside your control and having the right mindset does all of that.

[00:35:13.320] – Rachel
Absolutely. And you mentioned and also Dr. Foster mentioned having self compassion. If you're coming from a place of love that you want to do something that's good for yourself, you'll get farther instead of the negative thoughts that I'm overweight. I shouldn't be here at the gym or I shouldn't be seen in public. And I see a lot of that mindset, especially with brand new runners who are running, trying to lose weight. They're embarrassed to be out in the streets, they're embarrassed to be seen. But no, you got to change that shift.

[00:35:45.290] – Rachel
And you're coming from a place of self love. Then you're working on improving your health and you deserve to be anywhere you want to be, no matter how you're feeling about yourself. So yeah, I think the self compassion is also a positive shift that people need to focus on.

[00:36:03.000] – Allan
Yeah. We talked about it a few weeks ago. I forget her name, but about being your own BFF. And is it really does come down to that? The thoughts that you're in your head were things that you would say out loud to your best friend, then they're probably okay thoughts. But if you start having thoughts and you're thinking, I would never say this to my best friend's face. Even if it was true, I wouldn't say it. I wouldn't say it. And so just kind of thinking about this thought that I'm having,

[00:36:31.460] – Allan
Is it fair? And if it's something I wouldn't say to my friend, how would I say it to my friend? I need if I really needed to. So it's the I didn't mean to have the three beers and the pizza. When I went out with friends, I was going to try to be better. And I had the three beers, and then we ordered pizza, and then we ordered more pizza. And then I blew that Friday night. So then it was like a cascade through my whole weekend.

[00:36:58.440] – Allan
Well, yeah, at some point, you tell your friend it's like, well, okay. You know, that's not how you want to do it. So what are some things that you can do next time to keep that from happening? And you see just that way that I went about is more constructive than destructive. He would never tell your friend, oh, my God, you're at that. Hell, why? And look at you blew Saturday and Sunday. You may as well just quit. And you would never, ever say that to your best friend.

[00:37:27.890] – Allan
But we're saying it to ourselves in our heads all the time.

[00:37:30.780] – Rachel
Well, just like you mentioned in that example, you go out for a night, you have all sorts of beers and pizza, you know, think about that for just a minute. You know, you spent time with your friends. You were doing something you enjoy socializing or celebrating something special. Okay. It was not the greatest night. It was not the best choice. But what could you have done? And even Dr. Foster mentioned that as you look back on these little bits of flip Ops, what could you have done better?

[00:37:56.670] – Rachel
I mean, could you have maybe not had so much pizza, or would I do a lot of cases is, I'll have my snack at home just in case I can't find anything on the menu that I would like. And then just socialize that night instead of eat and socialize. So, I mean, you can have your problem solving tips ready for the next time. And he also mentioned, too, that be prepared for slip ups. These things happen. We have holidays. We have nights out with friends. You know, things do go sideways.

[00:38:25.760] – Rachel
So just be prepared, have your bag of tricks.

[00:38:27.950] – Allan
And when you take those detours know why you're doing it, don't just go in and say, oh, I'm going to do this. We were driving here and there was a sign on the side of the road. This is Squatch Museum, and I'm like, oh, okay, you know, but no, I'm having dinner with my friends, and I need to be in the Tampa by this time. I don't have time to visit the Sasquatch Museum this trip. But now I got this little tickler in my head. This is next time you're traveling through Florida, find the Sasquatch Museum because you might want to spend it, but just not letting yourself kind of get pulled off by just every little Wim, every little thing that happens, it just kind of keeps you a little bit more focused on it.

[00:39:13.000] – Allan
And I think that's why I was really impressed with the concept of focusing on strengths rather than weakness. Almost everybody goes at this and says, okay, well, I was sweettooth. I love my desserts. I like beer. I do well during the week, but then I blow my weekends and so they're like, okay, I've got this weakness and I need to fix that weakness. And then that's gonna fix me when the reality of it is maybe you have strength like, you still are physically relatively active.

[00:39:44.460] – Allan
And it's like, okay, I bump up my activity and I would actually enjoy that. Or I know that I have some drinks, like, I want to drink more water. And so I say, okay, well, if I put a plan in place, like, I've got this gallon jug and I carry that jug with me, then I know that I'll drink that water. So it's just knowing that if I have a system, I can get it done. If I have a certain thing that I'm really good at, then I get it done.

[00:40:10.190] – Allan
If I really like cooking, then I do my batch cooking on Sunday, and I've got my meals for the whole rest of the week. So all those things are where there's a strength where you identify a strength in yourself. And then you say, based on my overall strengths, not just physical capacity, mental capacity, but saying, okay, I am better when I'm focused on this. And I did go through that strength thing that he had in there and kind of look to mine and actually self regulation was out of 24.

[00:40:41.100] – Allan
It was like 19 to most people think, oh, Allan's really disciplined, and it's not a function of discipline. It's a function of structure. If I have a structure, then everything just gets easier. So for my training for the tough Mudder, I have literally blocked out every morning, Monday through Friday and part of the morning on Saturday to train. Okay. So I have five hour windows every day, six days of the week to train. And I'll be lifting six days, five days, and basically doing some cardio, six days, and then taking Sunday off.

[00:41:16.670] – Allan
And so that's my structure.

[00:41:18.100] – Rachel
That's awesome.

[00:41:18.890] – Allan
Nothing else is on my calendar. It's just. I'm in the gym at 07:00. I'm lifting. I finished my lifting. The gym doesn't open until 8:30. So the gym is mine. And then I leave the gym and I go and do some cardio. And that might be kayaking. That might be blocking. That might be some running. But basically, each day I've allotted about three and a half hours of cardio, which is about how long the tough mudder will take me. I just know, physically, if I can keep moving for three and a half hours, I can do a tough Mudder.

[00:41:50.750] – Allan
And so that's the plan.

[00:41:52.990] – Rachel
You know, it's interesting to Allan, because your tough Mudder is your a goal for next year. That's your primary focus. And so all that time that you show up for yourself in the gym, you're focused on that as your goal. So you're not focusing on I got to improve my cardio. I got to lift heavier weights, and I got to do all these things. Those are all kind of like what's going to happen as a side effect of your focus on this main goal. And similarly, that's what I think like, too.

[00:42:23.600] – Rachel
And I'm focused on a race. I've got a race that I need to prepare for, and you'll be out there for 3 hours. I'll be out there for a couple hours running. It's not how many hours I'm going to be out there in the head. It's just that I'm out there running. And so the focus is on the fun part of running, the fun part of the tough Mudder. And it's not all on the hard sweat that we need to put out at the gym to get to that point, which makes it to me it makes it exciting and fun.

[00:42:50.420] – Allan
Yeah. I look at it like this. What can I control? And what can I not control? And what I can't control is how much body fat my body decides to shed. What I can control is the level of effort I put in at the gym and the number of days I show up and will I slip up? Yes. Will there be something? One day my body is going to sit there and my knee is not going to feel really good. And so my cardio is going to have to change or my elbows kind of not feel really good.

[00:43:18.920] – Allan
And I'm going to change my lifting program a bit. Yeah. All of that's completely possible and likely actually very highly likely. And so I'm going to go at this and say, what can I control? I can control Monday. Monday, October 4 is my first morning on schedule, and literally I'm up before 07:00 and I'm at the gym. And so if it's 6:45, I'm walking to the gym. I'm already winning.

[00:43:45.540] – Rachel
That's awesome.

[00:43:46.590] – Allan
Now what I can't, like I said, what I don't have control over are some side effects, but there will be side effects. There's gonna be positive side effects of that. I'm going to lose some weight. I'm gonna probably put on a little muscle, get stronger, get some sun because most of my training will be outdoors in the sun, and we don't have an off season. It's not like cold weather like you're gonna be dealing with where you're out there trudging through the snow. None of that's no stuff for me.

[00:44:13.520] – Allan
I might be running through some sand, right?

[00:44:16.150] – Dr. Foster
That's good for you.

[00:44:17.030] – Allan
Yeah. I might be doing sprints in the sand like, yeah, I want to get some cardio in. And really, I could actually get it in a lot faster today. If I just go and do some hit training in the deep Bluff sand. I can do that and just make it a training. But I've done my training for that day. And then if I end up saying, okay, I've had enough, I'm done. Then I'm done. And I can approach it from that perspective of focusing on activity and performance of the activity.

[00:44:47.400] – Allan
And then if I'm having a good lifting day, that's great. If I'm having a bad lifting day, then evaluate what I learn, what can I do and then just keep moving through that because like I said, my strengths are honesty, integrity and just continue to push myself. It's not self regulation. So what I have to do is actually rely on systems and processes to say, okay, I have this goal at this bigger thing in front of me, and I put 1 foot is kind of a runners thing as I put 1 foot in front of the other is like if you lift it up, I'll put it down and just get that foot forward, and then it'll take care of itself.

[00:45:28.580] – Allan
And that's really how these things work. And yes, the tough mudder is there. And It's not a goal in and of itself. It's an opportunity. And it's an obstacle. And I put this big obstacle in front of me that's going to require me to change certain behaviors for that period of time. And that's something that I have now recognized that I kind of need to have. There's something in front of me that I'm moving toward or training for to excite my training to keep me active and going, because I can go in the gym every day.

[00:46:04.210] – Allan
And then it's just a point where you're saying, okay, this is the same workout I did nine months ago. I'm doing it again. I'm about the same strength. Okay.

[00:46:14.920] – Allan
And it's cool. And I feel good about it. But at the end of the day, I'm like, okay, but where am I moving? It's just having something that I feel like I'm moving toward. And for me, that's important for a lot of other people. It might not be it might be watching the scale, but you don't have total control over that. And maybe I don't have total control over whether I'm going to be in good enough shape to complete the tough Mudder myself. I am at this point going to be, I think, eight years, almost eight years older than I was the last time I did it.

[00:46:44.860] – Allan
and so that's not a little bit of time, but I'm going back and I'm going to do it again, and I fully expect that they'll probably be another one in my future. So particularly if I have a good time. But that's what this is all about. But it starts with the mindset as we said. And then it's really just about saying, okay, what's going to keep me engaged? What's going to keep me fired up? What's going to be fun and looking at what I'm doing from that perspective, it's a gift for me to complete

[00:47:15.650] – Allan
A tough Mudder is a gift.

[00:47:17.660] – Rachel
It is.

[00:47:18.830] – Allan
You know, and so that's the gift I want to give this person I love is that feeling of success at the end of a tough mudder.

[00:47:27.380] – Rachel
I love that. That sounds great.

[00:47:29.950] – Allan
Alright. Anything else you want to go over or we'll talk next week?

[00:47:32.910] – Rachel
No, that was great. I got to take that test, though, that Dr. Foster put out there.

[00:47:38.700] – Allan
It was quite interesting. And then after you get through with it, kind of go back and see.

[00:47:43.560] – Allan
Yeah. Now I kind of get that. They weren't all really strengths that I would have initially equated to health and fitness. But if you take a few minutes to sit down, you start realizing that the things that you are successful at are those things where you emphasize those strengths and they just push you faster. They make you do better. And it's really interesting. You do at some point need to address your weaknesses, but they become easier and easier to do when you get the snowball of all those strengths and those successes, those weakness sort of they just take care of themselves.

[00:48:21.990] – Rachel
I think so. I think that having those strengths are knowing what your strengths are your best tools in your toolbox for you to be able to attack your goal with.

[00:48:30.180] – Allan
All right. Well, you'll have to let me know how that goes.

[00:48:32.760] – Rachel
Yeah, will do.

[00:48:33.800] – Allan
All right. Well, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:48:35.670] – Rachel
Take care.

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Let's Say Hello

[00:00:45.420] – Allan
Hey, Raz, how are things going?

[00:00:48.240] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:00:50.140] – Allan
I'm doing well. We're recording this a couple of weeks in advance, so I'm still on my trip in the United States, kind of rounding down the Miami area, finishing out the last couple of stops up further north in Florida and then into Mississippi. But by the time this goes live October 4, I should be back at the Bed and Breakfast in Bocas Del Toro and trying to get things back into some semblance of normal.

[00:01:20.850] – Rachel
Right. Well, good. I hope you've had a good time visiting all your family and friends.

[00:01:24.490] – Allan
Yeah, it's tiring. And then a friend of mine, he's doing a YouTube channel and he asked me to go out there and like it and comments and do things like that to help him get his YouTube channel going. I went out there and he had a video where he's eating at the restaurants that I would usually be eating at, talking to friends that I would normally be talking to. And so it kind of got me a little homesick, which is strange. I'm in the United States visiting family, but I'm home sick to get back to focus.

[00:01:54.190] – Rachel
Sure. How long have you guys lived in Panama?

[00:01:57.310] – Allan
we're approaching three years.

[00:01:58.820] – Rachel
Oh, my gosh. That's a long time. That's definitely your home. I can totally see that. Yeah.

[00:02:04.790] – Allan
Yeah. So our dogs are there and our place is there and then something happens like this guy, apparently, I don't know. He just decided he wanted to throw a flower pot at the window of the gym and bust the glass. And I did bust it open open, but he busted the glass and so it's now get that fixed. And the guy came back and apologize for doing it and said he would make it right. You pay for it. But it's not my building. So we're, like manager, insert my message.

[00:02:31.580] – Allan
We got to get that window fixed, so just stop. You know, it's like if you're there, those kind of things are not hard to deal with, but when you're over 3000 miles away, it's a little bit more difficult.

[00:02:43.600] – Rachel
Oh, for sure. My goodness. Well, I'm glad you've had a good time visiting family and friends. That's the most important part. It's a long trip for you, though, but I think 4000 miles.

[00:02:53.570] – Allan
You know, when we're getting done with get done with this, we'll put over 4000 miles on a rental car. Yeah. So Tammy is gonna drive down to Key West. I think tomorrow, and I'm not gonna go. She's gonna go down there and hang out with a friend and spend the night and then drive back the next day. But, yeah, I'm not doing that part of it. I'm gonna step here and hang out my family here. So we'll put on over 4000 miles on that rental car before we return.

[00:03:20.050] – Rachel
Amazing. My gosh.

[00:03:22.730] – Allan
So it'll be a long month, long five weeks, but good stuff.

[00:03:28.000] – Rachel
Yeah. I'm glad you got to spend the time here.

[00:03:31.270] – Allan
How are things up there in Michigan?

[00:03:33.320] – Rachel
Oh, good. Good things are good. You know, one of the great grand prizes for turning 50 is a colonoscopy. So I will be prepping for that in the next few days. And hopefully by the time this air, I'll have some good results to share. But this will be my first colonoscopy.

[00:03:50.940] – Allan
That sounds like a show.

[00:03:52.390] – Rachel
It is. It's actually, it's not terrible. The prep work, I'm sure it's going to be real thrilling later, but I'm kind of excited to have this done. Colon cancer does run in my family, and since I've hit that age, it's just one of those things I can check off the list like a mammogram, which I do every year anyway, but, yeah, it's just one of those things that will give me a little peace of mind.

[00:04:16.370] – Allan
Okay. Well, good. I hope it all comes out good.

[00:04:20.820] – Rachel
Good one. Yeah, it'll be fine. But I'll be sure to share my results once I know them.

[00:04:27.600] – Allan
Good. Are you ready to talk about some resistance training?

[00:04:30.880] – Rachel
Yes. Let's do this today.

Episode

Today, I want to take some time and talk to you about some of the more intermediate and advanced resistance training, things that you can do. And these are some of these things that are appropriate for people over 40. So I'll kind of emphasize this that if you're new at training haven't been doing something for more than a year, this episode is probably not going to be for you. You might learn a few things about muscle resistance training and things like that, but just recognize that the strategies and tactics that we're talking about here today are not for the new training.

If you haven't been training for at least six months and maybe a year or more, you might not want to look into these, but this is something, if you're really interested in weightlifting resistance training, you might find interesting. So I do want to start this episode off with a caution. If you're new, if you're new to this, then yeah, definitely think twice before trying some of these. These are not things that you do, particularly for if you're just bored with your program. If you're bored with your program, change up some of the exercises, change up your sets and reps do those other things that change up the workout and make it different and more interesting.

These are not something that you want to do if you're under trained, and that means, yes, probably about a year or so of consistent training, and then you kind of plateaued and you're not seeing the improvements that you wanted to see. Most people are going to be able to get enough benefit out of just basic weightlifting that they don't really need to do these things. You can build strength and muscle without these tools without these strategies, but just recognize that, yes, if you want to optimize your growth, optimize your strength, optimize your power.

These can be very powerful tools in your tool chest. And then the other side of it is when you implement some of these things because of the additional volume because of the way you're working, you do increase your risk of injury. I do take that into account. Injury is a very important thing. It's rule number one in resistance training, do not injure thyself, and so you do not want to injure yourself. So you really have to be very thoughtful about how you approach intermediate resistance training.

To start this conversation, I really want to get into volume because that's what we're really doing when we're doing these processes, we're trying to increase the volume of work or we're trying to increase the volume of intensity for what we're doing when we're doing these exercises. So just recognize that normally we could do weights, reps and sets, and that's going to be enough for us to improve or increase the volume of the work that we're doing. If I do one more set than I did before, then I've increased the volume.

If I've added more reps, I've potentially increase the volume. And obviously, if I'm doing the same number of reps and sets and I've increased the weight, you know that I've increased the volume and each of those is specific to how you're trying to train. So are you trying to train strength? Are you trying to train for muscle growth? Are you trying to train for muscular endurance or stamina or power? And so as you look at the way you're lifting, recognize that the way your lifting needs to align with what you're doing and the volume increases that you do also have to align with that.

So there are different ways. Like I said, we can do this. We can do more work per week. We can do more work per workout. We can increase the time that it takes for us to do each exercise. It's called time and attention, and we'll get into that in a minute. But what you do, what we're doing here is we're basically in most of these, we're trying to increase the volume of work, the volume of work that the muscle has to do. And so we'll get into a lot more detail in that as we go forward, but just recognize, I'm going to keep coming back this term volume and just realize that volume just means more work.

It means more work for the muscle, either in reps, set, time under tension or the weight we're lifting. Before you get started on a program like this, it's really important for you to define the purpose of why you're doing what you're doing, because each of these strategies helps a certain aspect of muscular development. And so you don't want to do something that's going to improve your strength if you're absolutely actually trying to increase power, and you may not want to increase muscle mass if you're trying to increase power.

So in looking at what you're trying to accomplish, recognize that the goal, the purpose drives the strategy that makes the most sense for you. Probably the most common way to increase volume. And the one that I would usually start with someone who's approaching the intermediate lifting stages, meaning they've done some lifting. They're comfortable with the full body workouts. It's an hour or so of work, and they get the reps in. They get the sets in, and as a result, they're seeing some benefit. But a lot of times what happens is then that kind of plateaus, and we need to add volume and a lot of times it's really hard to add volume to a single workout.

Meaning if I have you doing one exercise, two exercises for legs, one for chess, one for back, one for shoulders, and a little bit of core work. That's practically an entire hour workout already. To add more time to that workout isn't practical for a lot of people.

So one approach is to do splits. So typically a split. What that means is that you're splitting up the work across different body parts so that you can do more work each workout. But you're also going to have to do more workouts each week.

So a very common split is the upper and lower split. So what we'll do is we'll come in, say on Monday, and we'll do a lower body workout, so that's mostly leg work. So squats, leg press, lunges, split squats, maybe a little bit of machine work. And that's your leg workout. You'll hear the term leg day called out a lot. So you do a leg workout on Monday, and then on Tuesday, you come back in and you do an upper body workout. So that's where you're doing pushups, bench press, pulls, rows, different things like that.

You you might even throw up in some arm workout, some shoulder workout, and that's your upper body work. And so you've split into an upper lower Monday, Tuesday, maybe you take Wednesday off. You come back Thursday, Friday, and you do another lower upper. As a result, you hit your legs twice in the same week, which is what you would have done before. But now you've actually added more volume because you had more time to do more exercises, more exercises, then more sets and more reps for each of those parts. And as a result, they're getting more volume.

The other common split is called a push pull legs. And the way that works is you would come in and let's say on Monday, you go ahead and do your push and push is where you're moving away from your body. So you think of pushups bench press flies overhead, press that type of thing. So you're mostly working your chest and shoulders and then probably your triceps. A pull is when you're pulling something towards yourself. So you're doing a rows, you're doing lat pull downs and then potentially some other movements where you're working your biceps.

So that would then be the pull. And then your legs obviously is just a lower body workout, and you do a leg workout. Now the advantage of pushpull legs is then you've already given yourself the full two days off from that push workout. You could come right back the next day and do another push and you can rotate this all the way through and not have a day off effectively. Although I'd still encourage you every once in a while. Do take recovery day. There's a lot of volume.

So at some point it's probably worth taking a day off. So if I'm going to do a push pull legs, I'll do a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then I take Sunday off and that's six days of lifting. Each day I'm working a different part of my body. I'm getting each body part in twice per week, which is what I was doing mostly when I was doing full body, and so it gives me the opportunity to add a lot more volume by doing the split.

But it also means you're dedicating a lot more time to the gym than you would if you were just doing two 1 hour full body workouts. Now you're in the gym up to 6 hours a week, which can be quite a bit of time. So recognize to get more volume, you've put more time in.

Now, one way to get around this little bit of volume and time is to mix in a thing we call super sets or monster sets. Now, this is where you're going to do two exercises pretty much in a circuit, and the two exercises work different body parts so effectively you can get an exercise in faster because your rest period is effectively when you're doing a different exercise.

So an example of that would be if I wanted to do bench press and then I wanted to do dumbbell rows. And so I would do my bench press. As soon as I finish my bench press, I turn around and do my set of rows. And then as I moved back to the bench and make sure I'm getting enough rest between exercises. But you can kind of see how because I did it that way. I cut out a rest period that I would have had in between each exercise.

And as a result, I could get a lot more done. A monster set is where you put three or more exercises together in a circuit. And I don't want you to get this confused with circuit training, where you would walk in and there's a series of machines and you're just doing these eight different exercises in the circuit. This is when you're going heavy. If you're intermediate lifting, you're doing a lot more weight than you would be doing on those machines. You're probably working with free weights.

And so you would put together potentially three exercises that could be again, it could be the bench press. It could be a dumbbell row, as I said. And maybe your third exercise is squats or something for your legs. And so you do that monster set, and then now you can go right back into another round, and you basically have eliminated the need for those rest that'll allow you to get more volume in a shorter period of time. So you don't necessarily have to split your workout in multiple days.

You can add super sets and monster sets to reduce the amount of time, which allows you to do more sets or exercises for each body part in the same amount of time. It also can be very fatiguing. And I found that super sets and monster sets really aren't for me because I don't recover from the cardiovascular perspective of just exercise exercise. I need that little bit of rest time to get myself fired back up to really be able to optimize the weight that I'm doing. And another aspect of this is it is really hard in a commercial gym to set up a series of super sets without really just being all over the gym.

And in an age of COVID, that's even worse if someone's trying to work out in a gym and you're taking up three or four pieces of equipment at a given point in time, it's really hard. Unless you're going to a commercial gym when no one else is there off hours or like me, own the gym, then you can go in and do it when you want to. But it's really hard in a commercial gym to do super sets and monster sets effectively without a lot of planning and doing it at times that are just more appropriate for that.

But that is a way to add more volume that you can do. So ways to add Volume Right now, we have split and we have super sets. And I mentioned earlier time under tension.

So when we're doing our normal workout and we're starting out, you probably notice a lot of muscle growth and you probably know, I mean, maybe not physically muscle growth, but you notice that you got stronger pretty quick. You might have started with five pound dumbbells and you're almost within a month, you're up to ten pound dumbbells.

That's 100% increase that's huge. What's typically happening during that period of time is not that you're piling on a bunch of muscle and getting a lot stronger. What you're doing is your brain and your muscles are beginning to communicate more effectively. So your brain is trying to fire off enough muscle fibers to do the movement that you're asking it to do. And as you go to do that movement, you get more efficient and that efficiency of the communication where your brain can know what a weight is and can fire off just the right amount of muscle fibers is a really cool thing that allows you to get stronger. Now, by doing time under tension, which just basically means slowing down our tempo.

So you think normally if you were going to do, let's say push up, you would go down a count of one, you go up. So it's really almost like up up up up right. Now, to do time under tension, I'd say slow that down to maybe 2 seconds, 3 seconds. So it's 3 seconds down 3 seconds up. Another way that you can put time under tension is when you're in that down position, maybe you stay there for a pause and that pause training will keep you fired. The muscles firing longer.

That will help your brain and your muscles talk much, much more. Because as you're trying to do the movement slower, the muscle is going to have to fire off more and more muscle fibers to keep the weight under control and moving. So time under tension is a very effective way of building muscle and strength. But time under tension is not beneficial if you're training for power. So if you're trying to do something like sprints and you want to be able to sprint faster, I would not do time under tension training for your legs because you're training your muscles to fire slowly and consistently, and that's not the kind of thing you need if you're trying to build power.

So if you want to build a little bit more muscle mass and you want to get a little stronger and you're looking for a way to kind of bump up the volume of what you're doing. Time under tension is a really good tool to do that. You can take a smaller amount of weight and make it harder for your body because you slowed down your body's, firing off more muscle fibers, and that's causing more stimulus, which will cause more growth in both the muscular and the strength aspects.

Another interesting approach is called variable resistance training, and you can do variable resistance training even as a beginner. But when you really want to kind of leverage some things, this is where a variable resistance training becomes really, really good. Basically, variable resistance training just means that you're providing a variable level of resistance based on where your strength points are in a movement. So to give you an example, because there's a certain amount of muscular leverage in working each bit of weight. If you think about a bicep curl.

So you're holding a dumbbell by your side and you want to bring that dumbbell up to basically your front deltoid to curl and use the bicep to do that. At the very bottom, you're at your worst leverage point. And so the weight that you can start at that bottom is much lighter than the way you could do. If you had your hands say just six inches away from your shoulder, you're at that point have a much better leverage point and can do a lot more weight.

So that's one of the disadvantages of fixed weights like dumbbells and kettlebells. And things like that is that they aren't variable, whereas you can use bands or chains or the cambers on certain machines to change up the resistance throughout the movement. So here's an example, let's say I had that same dumbbell in my hand, and instead of just the dumbbell, I had a chain draped over that dumbbell so that as I lifted the dumbbell closer to my chest, on my shoulder, as the dumbbell came up, more chain is off the floor, meaning there's more resistance against the movement.

So that at the top, I have a much higher resistance than I did at the bottom. Cables do the same thing. I mean, sorry, bands do the same thing. That's probably what you've experienced as you stretch a band. It provides a variable resistance. And then some machines, you may notice that if you're looking at the mechanism, the camber that's lifting the weight, that it typically spins and it's pulling typically a strap or something, it's pulling that and as it turns, if that's just around camber or around pulling, it's a very straight resistance if they put a camber on there where it's like lopsided that can provide variable resistance.

The NATOs machines were really famous for this in the 70s and 80s, as they provided this kind of variable resistance through different movements. So it's very common now to see those on machines. The cool thing about resistance training when it's variable resistance is that it is providing you the maximum amount of resistance or at least a better range of resistance as you do a lift. As you get that muscular leverage going, looking for ways to add variable resistance to an exercise can help a lot. So one way that you can do this is you can use bands.

So if you strap a band to something or you're doing the band curls that's band movements that's one thing. I talked about the chains. So you'll be doing a bench press and you can have chains over the bar. So the bar goes up, more chain is off the floor and therefore more resistance. And then there are bands that you can use to assist you on, like pull ups. So you take one of those bands, you wrap them over the bar, you put your foot in that band.

And then as you go down and you're in your weakest position at the bottom, then the band is fully extended. Therefore, it's giving you resistance up to help you. And as you get closer to the top, there's less pull on that band, and it's giving you less assistance. So there's lots of different ways to use variable resistance in assisting you to have the maximum amount of weight effectively resistance in an exercise. So you're increasing the resistance based on your strength profile and the leverage of your muscles.

So variable resistance is a pretty cool tool, and it can even be used by some beginners. And if you're using bands for your workout, then you've experienced some of that.

Another one is called negatives. And I'll explain this in a little bit more detail, because sometimes it really confuses people. But in every movement, you're going to be constricting muscle. Tighten a muscle to affect that movement. And so basically, if you're doing a curl, a bicep curl we talked about you are shortening your bicep. In shortening, it that is the concentric portion of the movement.

As you shorten your bicep, that brings the dumbbell up as you go back down, that's the eccentric portion of the movement. In the eccentric portion of the movement, you are resisting that resistance. Okay, that sounds weird, but your muscle is preventing the weight, the resistance from going where it wants to go. It's fighting gravity. And that's the point where your body is building core strength, getting really stronger and that you're firing off the things you need to be stronger to hold that weight against that resistance.

So a negative is effectively where you're doing a time under tension thing, but you're only doing it during the eccentric portion of the movement. Let's say I want to improve my pull ups, and I know I can do a few, but I want to be able to do more. I want to get stronger in the pull up. What I can do is I can get myself a little step ladder, and I can step up to a point where the bar is at my chest, and then I can let my body go down slowly fighting that resistance.

So I'm working through the negative portion of that exercise. The eccentric portion of that exercise. And I can tell you that don't do this unless you really want to have DOMS, because this is one of those situations where DOMS is going to happen if you're doing this. Another way that this could be done is you could be doing a dumbbell curl or barbell curl, and someone can help you get the bar up and then you fight it going down. And so that's another very common negative resistance training that people will do.

But again, this is is very extreme. It's a lot of volume and does some damage. So you just be aware that if you're using this as a means for building strength or some mass, but mostly strength, it's a really good tool to break through some Plateau. So if you're struggling with pull ups and you've been lifting for a while and you've been doing pull ups and doing other polls and things like that to build some strength, a negative approach, getting someone to help you through the positive or using step ladder in some cases can be a good way of getting a little bit of extra volume in there.

But again, be careful because this is bordering on more of the advanced stuff, and it is something you have to manage.

Another one I wanted to bring up, and I almost didn't want to talk about this one because it's one, it's a little controversial. And two, it's not entirely safe. You be very careful with this one. And it's called Occlusion. Now occlusion is basically where we're blocking blood flow to a muscle, and then we're doing work. And there's been some studies that basically show if you're looking to build muscle mass, Occlusion can be a good tool for allowing you to add that volume of that work and changing the nature of that work.

So the muscle does some different things. So basically what you do is let's say I wanted to do a bicep curl. I would put a strap on my arm above that bicep and tighten it just enough to slow down or reduce the blood flow to my arm. And then I would do those bicep curls. I've tried Occlusion before. It's moderately effective. It's not great effective. So it's not like some of the other things that we've talked about today, but for the advanced lifter that's looking to add a little bit more mass to a limb, because obviously there are certain parts here you just can't exclude.

So it's mostly used for arms and legs. And if you're looking to add a little bit more mass to those, this could be something you do, but I doubt there's very many people over the age of 40 that really ever need to consider Occlusion training. But I wanted you to know it was out there because you might see someone doing it and wonder what it's about. Now, by no means was this an exhaustive list of all of the things that you could find in a bodybuilding magazine or a power lifting magazine?

But I wanted to put this out there from the perspective of just understanding. There are additional strategies to mix this up. People who've been lifting for years don't necessarily still just go in and do the full body workout. And if you go into a gym, you might see some people doing some relatively strange things. And I wanted to just give you an idea of why they might be doing those things. If you have any questions, I do encourage you to come message me. Let me know what's going on.

If you have a question, you see someone doing something in a gym and you're just interested in why they might be doing that thing. Just let me know now, don't videotape them, but maybe you can just describe to me what you saw them doing.

So let me kind of summarize all this. If you've gotten into resistance training and you've lifted for a while and you find yourself beginning to Plateau with the workout that you have and you want to mix it up, that's cool. Mix it up. Add additional exercises, just pull out an exchange exercises.

Make sure you're covering all your bases. Don't be the guy that doesn't lift with the legs. You need that too. You need to at least make sure you're doing something for your legs. So if you're a runner and you want to build some more upper body strength, cool, do that. But make sure what you're doing is a balanced training based on what you're trying to accomplish. Now, when you're ready to do something more and you want to move into some of these more advanced lifting approaches, you're going to have to manage the volume.

You do not want to jump into these things full board. When I mentioned negatives, I'll only do negatives for one set. So I'll do my sets pull ups or whatever I'm doing. And then if I want to do negatives, it's only going to be pretty much on the last set. So I'm finishing out and I'll do that. Manage the volume. We're over 40. We don't want to get injured. So as you're increasing volume, do it responsibly and then have a purpose. So don't just go into this and say, I want to just try these different things for the sake of trying them.

Understand each of these different approaches has a different benefit. So don't just do something for the sake of doing it. Have a purpose, a mission, a reason why you want to do a certain thing. Time under tension is great, but not for power. It's great for muscle and strength. Negatives are really good for strength. Occlusion is good for additional muscles. So just understand what the work you're doing is going to do potentially different things and do the things that help you do that. Pick the right approach.

Like I said, don't just jump in and do something. Pick the approach or approaches. And I would recommend one at a time. So you see how it works for you. Make that change. Try it. If it doesn't work, check it. It's working for you. Then maybe you keep it. But don't pile on all of these. There's no reason for you to be doing variable resistance training, time under tension, negatives and Occlusion all at the same time. There's absolutely no reason for you to do that.

So find the thing that works for you and start working it in. And if it works, then keep it. If not, toss it out and then know when to say when. I was talking to a client, and he was asking the question, when am I strong enough? When is this enough? And the reality of it is it is enough when you can live the way you want to live now. I mentioned earlier in one of the earlier episodes that I'm planning to do a tough Mudder, and so now I have very specific purposes for my training, which is what I kind of needed.

So as I go into my training, I need to build strength, particularly in my ability to pull, because a lot of the tough Mudder activities are climbing related. So the ability to pull my body weight, it also means, yeah, I got to kind of lose a little bit of body weight and I get to build some stamina and then this one other little caveat, which is probably going to be the biggest challenge for me overall. Is there's one obstacle called the Everest. And it's a ramp that you have to run up and then jump and grab.

They do have a rope there, but I'm not sure about that, but they didn't have that when I did the first one. But running and jumping requires some speed. It requires some athleticism. And so I've got to do some work to build up a little bit of speed. So my training is going to be very specific to that. Now I know that doesn't relate to this whole process of talking about intermediate weightlifting, but just recognizing that to run faster, I need power in my legs. I don't need a lot of strength in my legs.

I need power. So I need strength in my upper body. I need grip strength. I need power to be able to run a little faster for at least a sprint. And those are the things that I'll be working on as I build what I got to build, to be able to be competitive and do what I want to do in this tough mudder. And I say you need to do the same. But also then know when to say when if you get into splits and you're working out every day of the week, eventually you're probably going to break yourself so kind of build in those rest days, build in those recovery periods and then pay attention to your body because your body is going to tell you when things are not going well, and you just have to be open minded and check the ego and listen to when your body tells you to stop.

Post Show/Recap

[00:32:27.880] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:32:29.160] – Rachel
Hey, Allan. I do love to talk about resistance training, and sometimes I often use the word weight training, but I do my fair share of weight training and body weight training. But whenever I think about increasing what I'm doing or making things a little bit harder, I just simply think about adding weights or adding more weight to what I'm doing.

[00:32:52.800] – Allan
And for most of us, that's exactly the approach to take. You get to a certain strength level where you feel good about the amount of weight you're moving, then you're good. You're maintaining muscle, you're maintaining strength. And as long as you're not struggling with that same weight, then you're staying about where you need to, because that's quite frankly, no reason for anyone to be able to put 160 pounds over their head. The most you're ever going to probably ever try to put over your head is 25 pounds and that's just putting luggage

[00:33:22.920] – Allan
The overhead bin on an airplane. So if you want to be independent and be able to do that and then being able to open a jar, so there's things that you're going to want to do for independence purposes, but you're not going to have your body weight that you're trying to put into an overhead bin. That's just unless you're bringing a person with you, we don't want to talk about that. But just realize a functional level of strength for most of us is all we need.

[00:33:50.570] – Allan
Now I have set up to do a tough Mudder in August of 2022, and you can go to 40plusFitnesspodcast.com/Chicago. I'm on the 10 to 10:45 run of that. And so if you're interested in doing a tough Mudder, there's one in Chicago I'll be doing it. I'd love to see you. If there's enough people that are interested in, we might do a little meet up or something afterwards, have a couple of beers and have some dinner or whatever. So yeah, if you're interested in maybe doing a tough Mudder, the classic is the one I'm doing.

[00:34:23.940] – Allan
There's also a 5K in 10K. There's shorter versions of it. If you don't think you're going to be quite up to that. But that said, my training for the tough Mudder is going to fundamentally alter the way that I approach training. I'll be using several of these intermediate principles of ways to increase the volume of what I do. I'll definitely be using splits because for me to get done what I got to get done, I won't be able to get it done. Just doing two to two and a half workouts per week, on average, just doing full body, and then I'll be doing a lot of things and there'll be a lot of two days kind of things where I'll do the weight training in the morning and then later on I'll do some endurance work to get myself to a point.

[00:35:12.570] – Allan
But the way I do my training will change because I'm trying to affect different things. I'm trying to affect strengthen some places, I'm trying to affect power in others and then muscular endurance and others. And so as I go through my training more so towards the back end of it is I'm starting to specialize for that sport, if you will. But on the front end, there will be some basic things that I'll be doing to build up core competencies and strength, power and endurance so that I'm able to get that done.

[00:35:42.350] – Allan
And it won't be about muscle mass. So I'm not going to try to become a body builder for the sake of doing this event because that won't benefit me at all. In fact, the goal will be to actually get stronger and smaller, so it will change a little bit about what I do. But again, that's where these kind of these intermediate level things come in, because I will be specializing. I will be doing something different as you're doing longer runs, looking at doing an ultra or anything like that crazy stuff you did this weekend with the five K, ten K half and then full marathon, four days in a row, that kind of mileage.

[00:36:19.630] – Allan
Do you really want to have leg training in your full body workout? The Monday after you do all that and short answers? No.

[00:36:28.070] – Rachel
Definitely no. Yeah.

[00:36:31.360] – Allan
So you have opportunities to use some of these principles is intermediate principles to have volume where you need it and specialize it for the types of things you need where you need it.

[00:36:42.620] – Rachel
Well, that's exactly right. My goals right now are a little different than yours, but that's the whole point about putting these types of plans together based on your goal. And you mentioned you're not going to be adding muscle mass. You want to be leaner. So you're gonna choose activities that correspond with that goal. In the offseason, I'll probably spend a little bit more time in the gym not gaining mass. Like you said earlier, the keyword for me is maintaining strength. And so in the winter, when I'm not running as often, I can do some more of those leg days to keep some strength.

[00:37:23.240] – Rachel
And yeah, it just fluctuates with what my schedule is. And just like you, you've got your eyes set on this tough Mudder, so you'll be putting your training together to address those goals.

[00:37:34.660] – Allan
Yeah. And so in that specialization, and that's where this stuff really becomes critical as a beginner. It's really just about building fundamental skills when you first start lifting weights and to go back to the whole weight training because I will go back and forth. But just recognize, I know when I say weight training is like we don't want to go pick up iron bars in a gym. If all these sweaty guys grunting and all that stuff, it's about resistance is the end game of it. It's a little bit more technical term for what we're doing.

[00:38:05.300] – Allan
We're applying resistance to build strength, muscle endurance or muscle mass or power. And so if I use one interchangeably to me, it's all the same. But I understand that some people get turned off by terms like bodybuilding and weight lifting and all that. So just realize it's all resistance training just how you decide to do it, whether it's your body weight or its weight or its resistance bands or chains, whatever it is, it's still the same are generally the same. But the perfect example would be there's an obstacle called Everest, and it's basically it's a ramp that as you get to the top of it, it gets steeper and steeper until it's straight up.

[00:38:47.950] – Allan
And to get up this thing, you have to sprint, you have to sprint and you have to keep running. And then you reach out and try to grab the edge. Now, truly athletic people can run up, grab the edge, pull themselves up and over. But because this is a tough mudder and not a competition, there'll be plenty of people that will be sitting up there ready to help you. Oh, you reach your arms out as you're running up this thing, and they'll reach down and credit grab you and help you over.

[00:39:13.950] – Allan
So it's a very helpful, very cool vibe there. But that said, I'm not a sprinter from perspective of being 56 years old at that time and trying to sprint, I'm going to have to build some speed. I'm going to build some power into my legs. And that means when I get on like a squat or a leg press, I'm not going to have a whole ton of weight on there. And I'm not going to go slow, like time under tension, like I would normally do for muscle mass.

[00:39:41.210] – Allan
It's going to be about quick, high rep, low weight stuff to get my legs faster, pumping get with the strength relative to weight that I need to build the power so that a sprint will help me at least get myself halfway up that wall and then hopefully the other half of my body up his body length. And so hopefully at that point, I'll be able to grab the edge. And then I'll probably need one or two of those guys up there to help me over. And then I'll reach out and help the person behind me, which is what it's all about.

[00:40:15.370] – Allan
So it's a very different type of training. Then I would be doing otherwise because otherwise, like you, I'd be like, okay, add more weight, slow down time under tension splits to add volume. I'm not a big fan of super sets and monster sets. That's just not something I've ever really enjoyed when I was trying to put on muscle mass. Those were actually valuable for me, and I've used them, but I'm not a fan because I actually like to lift. I like to rest. For heavy weights,

[00:40:52.210] – Allan
I will easily take two minutes to three minutes off between each set so that I've got the maximum amount of energy to apply into the next one. And that really helps me for building muscle mass. But that's not again, not the type of training I'm going to be doing here. If I did a monster set, it would be because one I didn't feel like I had enough time to get everything in or it would be where I was actually just trying to do something fast. Again, building power in parts of my body.

[00:41:18.490] – Allan
So for my legs, I might put together a period of time where I did. I'm probably not a monster set, but a super set with two exercises that were working my legs in different ways and then just the quick back and forth between the two. So there's limited rest and trying to just raise my energy level for that. But each of these has their place. But probably the only one I'd say is just don't do is the Occlusion training. There's not a lot of reason unless you're going to try to do some kind of Masters level body building or something like that.

[00:41:58.970] – Allan
Occlusion is not safe. Unless you do it wrong. You can do it really wrong. So it's not one of those things I would encourage most people to try. I've done it before when I was trying to put on mass, and again, it shouldn't have been putting on mass because I was also training for a sport, but I don't always do the right things, but there's a lot to this stuff. There's some books, ebooks, volumes of books on how to do this stuff. So simple is good.

[00:42:32.620] – Allan
And then over time adapt because most of my clients all train for a while and it's like they get that neuromuscular connection and they start getting a lot stronger and that feels good. And then now you're starting the Plateau and you're like, oh, no. What am I going to do? And then I'm like, okay, well, you're just going to change the workout up a little bit, give you something new, some workouts, some exercises that are going to complement what you've been doing and build strength in a slightly different way.

[00:42:59.410] – Allan
And then you just keep doing that. And that can work for most people almost all the time. But then there's others. They'll say, okay, I want to take it to that next level, and that's where splits and time under tension and variable resistance. All of those things can come into play at one level or another. Not all necessarily at the same time, but at different points in time, we're going to do it. I will definitely be doing negatives. I talked a little bit about negatives. I will definitely be doing negatives to build strength in my back for pull ups.

[00:43:32.130] – Allan
there's gonna be pulls. So I will do like, I think I said it in there, that I'll climb on a ladder or step, and I'll get my chest up to the bar. And then I will hold myself in that position and slowly lower myself down as a function of trying to build more strength in my back and arms.

[00:43:53.630] – Rachel
Perfect.

[00:43:54.770] – Allan
It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt a lot. And I'll have DOMS the next day. But over time that's going to build a lot more strength in my back. I'll be able to hold positions that I wouldn't normally be able to hold because there's there's all kinds of, like monkey bars and swings, and that. So there's a lot of upper body strength required climbing ropes, all of that. So I'll want to build that that up to a really high strength level and one of the fastest ways for me to get there,

[00:44:27.350] – Allan
again, someone who's lifted for a while will be these negatives. But I would not encourage most people to do negatives unless you just really want to hurt or you want to build a much stronger back than you would normally have if you became a goal. Like Rachel, you said, okay, I want to do ten foot pull ups. I want to be able to do ten pullups. We would start with just you using doing lap pull downs and some other rows to get your body basically strong. And then we'd get a resistance band, and we would use that resistance band to assist you or have Mike stand behind you and give you a little bit of assist on your pull up, and you'll be able to start being able to do pull ups.

[00:45:06.560] – Allan
You'll get to a strength level, you can then it's just a function of doing more volume to get to where you can do. The ten that you want to do is your goal that if that is the goal, but a way to get past even that would be then as an intermediate lifter to start looking at negatives or effectively, maybe even attaching weight to your torso or your legs. So you're pulling more weight up than just your body weight. So then that might be again, another strategy that I use to increase the strength that I have in my back.

[00:45:41.560] – Rachel
Wow, that all sound like really wonderful methods that we could try to employ in the gym when it's time to do something different.

[00:45:50.460] – Allan
But not all at the same time.

[00:45:52.240] – Rachel
I know. One thing at a time, right?

[00:45:56.790] – Allan
I don't want you having straps around your biceps, and then you're doing variable resistance, negatives and trying to stay time under tension the whole time. Don't.

[00:46:09.680] – Rachel
But this is great because like I said earlier, whenever I think about making any advances in the gym, I'm sure a lot of people think the same way. Just add pounds, just add weight to your weights. And obviously there's a lot of other tactics that could be employed.

[00:46:26.300] – Allan
And no, like I said earlier, that's a perfect approach if you're getting there. But there's a point you're saying, okay, I did X weight, and then I did X plus five, and then I did that plus 5. And then it's like, okay, now I'm stuck at this weight. And so let's say your original weight was 40 pounds, and then you're doing 45, and then now you're doing 50. But now you just don't seem to be able to go past that. Every time you try to put 55, you get stuck, you're like, okay, I wanted to do this many, and I didn't.

[00:46:58.580] – Allan
And I can't yet. I can't yet. And so the question will be is, what can we do then, to get you past that? Because just adding more weight won't necessarily get you there. If you can't move that weight so we can look at things that would change it up a little bit and be a little bit different, taking long, sometimes even taking a longer rest before you try to do the next set can be all that you need to get that weight moving. But you can look at some of these strategies and say, okay, what's a way for me to do this.

[00:47:31.880] – Allan
I probably should have put in here now that I'm thinking about it. And that's called drop sets. And so let's say you're trying to do deadlifts and you're doing 50 and you want to be able to do 55. I might tell you. Okay, put the two and a half on the outside of the callers, start doing them, and then maybe you only get three done. Pull those two and a half off and finish your set. And so that drop set there again. It's just a strategy.

[00:47:59.340] – Allan
There's a lot of them. But I should have probably covered that one, how they think about it. But it's just there's these strategies. And so if you're struggling with something, particularly with your weight lifting, in this case, because we're talking about, come on to the Facebook group, ask that question, say, hey, I'm stuck at this or this isn't working the way I wanted it to or I want to understand this concept a little bit better. That's why we have the Facebook group. You can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/group

[00:48:27.890] – Allan
and ask any of those questions. I'm on there regularly. I've been on there less, of course, over the last few weeks because I'm spending time with family and taking some vacation and doing that. So I haven't been out there nearly as much as I was. But as this goes live, I'm there. I'm there for you. So if you have questions about weightlifting, resistance training, all of that, just feel free to come out there and give us a call. Let us know what's going on.

[00:48:51.480] – Rachel
Perfect. And you've got so much experience in the gym. I appreciate all your insight on this. This is great.

[00:48:57.690] – Allan
Well, thank you. But I'm serious about that colonoscopy. So we're going to get you on the line. We're going to have a conversation about your experience there. And because it is something we all need to be considering. I'm looking forward. I'm actually looking forward vicariously experiencing this three.

[00:49:16.750] – Rachel
I appreciate that. I'll take copious notes and I'll let you guys know how it goes.

[00:49:23.140] – Allan
Awesome. Well, Rachel, you'll enjoy your week and I'll talk to you next week.

[00:49:26.590] – Rachel
Thanks. Bye now.

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Let's Say Hello

[00:00:52.040] – Allan
Hey, Raz. How are things?

[00:00:54.290] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you? How are you enjoying your vacation?

[00:00:57.890] – Allan
I'm enjoying it. It's just there's been a lot going on in the world. In our world. Someone poisoned our dog. But, yeah, we've had some criminals on the island. We caught one of them on camera stealing our hammock off our front porch. But it appears, and this is again coming from the police and others, is that there's this group of thieves on the island, and they're trying to soften up houses to come back later and do something more is the theory. So they poisoned a ton of dogs across the island just to make sure they could get in.

[00:01:31.950] – Allan
fortunately, we had people watching the place, and they were able to step in and do some wonderful things. And so Buster has recovered, he's doing okay.

[00:01:40.510] – Rachel
Oh, my gosh.

[00:01:41.170] – Allan
But it was just one of those hit and go moments where we didn't know if he was going to make it. And so our friends came to our rescue. It's just very stressful when you're over 3000 miles away and not in a position to do anything to help your dog. So we're on our way. So we're recording this, we're most of the way through with our holidays. And as this goes live, we'll be finishing up the final days and about to head back to Panama.

[00:02:11.290] – Allan
So I'm kind of like in that mood. Okay, let's just get back and get Lula's open and get that going. And it's made me kind of rethink a lot of stuff in my own life. As I look at what I'm doing and my training and those types of things. So I might be making some changes to the way I do personal training and to how I manage my own life just to make sure that I'm taking care of me and mine first. And then doing what's necessary to help others.

[00:02:45.920] – Rachel
Wow. I'm so sorry to hear about your dog, and I'm so glad he's okay. And you've got the most wonderful neighbors to help out.

[00:02:53.400] – Allan
And they didn't sign up for that. They were just we're going to house it.

[00:02:57.810] – Rachel
Who would have thought?

[00:02:59.170] – Allan
Yeah. And then you got a lot of other stuff. Someone stole someone's pizza. Yeah. So a lot going on back there good and bad, but Buster's fine and looking forward to getting back and see my puppies because I do miss them. And I did have one other thing that I wanted to talk about, as I talked about when you're driving and you have lots of time to think as your driving, I just I was kind of thinking about what I want to do and where I'm at, and I figured what I really needed was a kick in the pants to get myself re energized with what I'm doing personally, not necessarily with the podcast and not necessarily with the training, but just me, my training and everything.

[00:03:43.460] – Allan
So I have signed up for another Tough Mudder classic. This one is going to be August 27, that's in the Chicago area. I've already signed up. I'm in the 10 to 10:45 range of times. So if you're in the area and we got over eleven months to train for this thing now because I think this episode actually goes out around the 27 September, so we literally have eleven months to get ready for this. This is some yeah, it says it's August 27 of 2022. So you got eleven months.

[00:04:16.350] – Allan
If this is something you want to do, I'd love to meet you. Love to hang out with you at the Tough Mudder in Chicago. Again, I'm on the 10 to 10:45 leg. And one of the things I do like about the Tough Mudder is it's a very Comradery kind of run. It's not a competition where we're trying to beat each other. It's where we're helping each other. So if you're struggling with an obstacle, I help you. If I'm struggling with an obstacle, you help me. It's a really good spirit on this run, walk whatever you want to do.

[00:04:45.990] – Allan
But yeah, going into 10:00 time, you'd have plenty of time to finish, give your shot at all the different obstacles. There's 10 miles with 25 obstacles. And over that weekend, they do have some shorter runs. They have a 10K and a 5K. So if you're not feeling like it can get trained up to do the longer one, then at least look at the 5K or the 10K and consider that you could train for that because it's really, in my opinion, you're not just training for running because while there is running, it's not like just constant ten mile run.

[00:05:17.990] – Allan
You do run and you kind of stop and do an obstacle. With 25 obstacles, you're stopping quite a bit. Then you're doing an obstacle. And some of the obstacles are about fear, like you're jumping from a height into water, some of them you're swimming, some of them, you're going through a dark tube and there is the electricity.

[00:05:35.230] – Rachel
Oh, my gosh.

[00:05:37.280] – Allan
But it's a real character builder, and it's a lot of fun. So hopefully, if you guys are interested head on out there I did post in the Facebook group a link that will take you to the active. But if you just go into Toughmudder.com, you can go check out their events. And it's August 27 of 2022. And like I said right now, I'm in the 10 to 10:45 start times, and they just set you up about 500 at a time and send you out.

[00:06:07.660] – Allan
And so a lot of people be running. But you know, if you can sign up around that time, cool. If you can't. And I know there's enough people around, maybe we'll set some kind of meet up that night, have dinner or something. So check it out. And if you're interested, reach out to me and we'll figure something out.

[00:06:22.720] – Rachel
Wow. That sounds so awesome. It's great to have a goal. It's great to have something on the calendar to look forward to and to train for.

[00:06:30.040] – Allan
Yeah, I haven't had that. And I was like, with COVID, with everything else has really not been anything but training for the sake of training. And I'm not going to say it gets dull because I really enjoy lifting and doing some things. But it's just one of those things saying, I need something to put a little spark in there and being ready for that and making sure that I perform well there. It's important to me. So I'll get it done.

[00:06:53.440] – Rachel
Yep. And you picked a doozy. So you'll have your hands full for the next eleven months.

[00:06:57.740] – Allan
Absolutely.

[00:06:58.550] – Rachel
Good for you.

[00:06:59.390] – Allan
All right. You ready to have a conversation? Wait. We didn't ask about you. What are you doing?

[00:07:03.380] – Rachel
Oh, good. Good.

[00:07:05.500] – Rachel
Enjoying the time. Kids are back to school. It's quiet here at the house for a little while, and we just had a bunch of family time. My brother's in from California, so I got to see him and my parents and my in laws. My mother in law just is about to celebrate her 75th birthday. So we had a little to do for her. So it's been great having family time. It's been wonderful.

[00:07:29.360] – Allan
Okay, good.

[00:07:31.310] – Allan
alright. Are you ready to have a conversation with Dr. Davis?

[00:07:34.310] – Rachel
Sure.

Interview

[00:08:07.560] – Allan
Dr. Davis, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:08:10.800] – Dr. Davis
Hello, Allan. Thanks for having me.

[00:08:13.060] – Allan
Now. Your book, Supersize Lies, How Myths About Weight Loss are Keeping Us Fat and the Truth About What Really Works. As I was telling you before, if I were walking through a Barnes & Nobles, I would pick up this book just on that. And then once I got into it really even just the introduction, I was like, hooked. Like, I'm gonna read this. I'm gonna read every single line of this fit book all the way to the end, because I want to know what really works. But I also want to know what myths am I falling for?

[00:08:44.090] – Allan
So I appreciate the opportunity to kind of go through and say, okay, what's going on with what we're hearing? And why is everybody struggling so much with the information that's out there?

[00:08:55.670] – Dr. Davis
Well, thank you for that. And what I've done throughout my career is to really dissect the science behind all kinds of claims related to health. And I think that's so important because there's so much misinformation about so many health issues, certainly that's come to the four more than ever with regard to COVID. But it applies to so many of the things we hear about with regard to our health. So that's something that it's very important to me. I have a background in public health and epidemiology as well as journalism.

[00:09:22.480] – Dr. Davis
So I try to combine those training that I have to really look at the science and help people sort through the claim so they can figure out what's believable and what's not.

[00:09:31.990] – Allan
Because more than anything else, I just there's this tribalism and the Internet is fostering that Facebook is fostering that, Twitter. They're making people into tribes about everything, every single thing we do. It's like, no, you shouldn't do it that way or on those sites absolutely should be doing it that way. And so we have these pulls back and forth. This is the best way. No, this is the best way. They're all potentially a little right, and they're all potentially a little wrong. And I think that's where the problem comes is that we get stuck in our tribe, and it's really, really hard to step out of that.

[00:10:13.740] – Allan
And what I really liked about your book was that you didn't go in saying this is my tribe, and this is the way to do it. It was truly okay, this tribe says this and they're not wrong, but they're not right. This tribe says this and they're not wrong, and they're not right. So where do we meet in the middle? What is the common denominator? What's happening here? And why is this happening? And I want to start that out, only to say is one of the core ones is this concept that if you go in, there's a tribe and we call them the calories in Calories out tribe, CICO.

[00:10:49.660] – Allan
And they believe just heart of hearts. All you have to do is plug in everything you eat and plug in every bit of exercise movement you do, and you do all the formulas and you're going to lose weight. And it's true. Until it's not. Can we talk a little bit about what the problem is with calorie counting and why? Because if it were too true, then we would lose an incremental amount of weight every single day. And we would always lose weight. If we're always eating in a deficit of 500 calories a day, we would always lose a pound a week every week until we weight zero.

[00:11:28.900] – Allan
Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Can you tell us what's going on there?

[00:11:32.540] – Dr. Davis
Right. Well, first of all, I like another way to describe that philosophy is some people call it ELM eat less, exercise more. And I like to say, for many people, Elm Street is a dead end because they try that and they're told that's going to work and it doesn't work and they try it again and again and again, and it continues not to work. So one of the problems with calorie counting is seen, by the way, I'm not saying in my book, nor do I believe that calories don't matter at all.

[00:11:57.120] – Dr. Davis
There are some people that say that, and that's not what I'm saying. Calories do count. But as I say, counting them typically doesn't work. And one reason for that is fairly straightforward. And that is that calorie counting is an imprecise activity. You see those numbers the top of the nutrition label. It's a bold number that this food has 232 calories, and we're led to believe that's a precise number. But in fact, that number is often not accurate. Under law, those numbers people often don't know this, Allan, but under law, those numbers can be up to 20% off.

[00:12:32.660] – Dr. Davis
So often, In many cases, that error is an undercount. So it could be that we're getting actually the number of calories we think we're getting is not accurate. So just for starters, just the whole process of trying to count them accurately is not easy. And then never mind that for most of the foods, we don't have calorie counts, you're not getting most restaurants are not going to have calorie counts on menus. If you eat at someone's house, if you cook your own meal, you're not going to know.

[00:12:56.310] – Dr. Davis
And trying to estimate calories, it's very difficult trying to do so accurately. So that's the problem, for starters, is why calorie counting doesn't work. But there's a bigger problem, and that is that our bodies act in a way more complicated than just a number of calories we consume. There are other factors at work that are involved in weight regulation. One certainly is genetics. We know people. We all know, people that we say they're very lucky. They have great genetics, so to speak, because they can eat whatever they want.

[00:13:24.740] – Dr. Davis
They eat all kinds of foods and they never seem to gain weight. And then somebody else we know will eat very little, and then they gain a lot of weight. And so genetics we know from studies play a very large role in determining how food a given amount of food will affect somebody's weight, and that varies from person to person. We're also learning more and more about the so called microbiome that is the mix of microbes in our guts, and that can determine that can have a large influence in some cases, on how many of the calories we consume that we actually absorb, because it's not necessarily the calories that we consume that matters.

[00:14:00.900] – Dr. Davis
It's how many of those calories our body actually absorbs versus excretes. So that's an important consideration as well. And again, something that science is showing more and more about all the time. And then there's the whole issue of our metabolism. As we cut calories as we lose weight, your metabolism slows down so that it takes fewer calories. We have to eat fewer and fewer calories to continue to lose weight. And often it's sort of a cruel trick of evolution that actually is a gift.

[00:14:35.350] – Dr. Davis
It's there to protect us in case of famine. So essentially, our bodies become more fuel efficient as we lose weight in order to keep us from wasting away. But the problem, of course, today, thankfully, is we don't have to deal with famines in modern society and Western civilization. But if we're trying to lose weight, it's a big problem because our bodies are essentially fighting us. And so that's something else that's sort of lost in this conversation about. Well, it's just a linear process. If you cut calories, then you will keep losing weight. If you cut it down, if you have a certain negative energy balance.

[00:15:07.340] – Dr. Davis
But what that doesn't take into consideration is the way the body essentially fights back. And so all of these things, I think, and there are other factors as well are often lost in this discussion about calories and calories out because it's sort of simplified to this simple math equation. And it's in fact, far more complicated than that.

[00:15:25.780] – Allan
Yeah. And even on the other side of that formula, the burning because I had at any time fitness membership. And I went in there. They had two different types of treadmills, I mean ellipticals. And so if I got on one type of elliptical and worked out really hard for an hour, I would burn 850 calories. But the other elliptical, if I got on it for an hour, working out just as hard it was 750 calories. So I would always go to the 850 calorie elliptical to get a better work out.

[00:15:54.010] – Dr. Davis
Yes.

[00:15:56.180] – Allan
And so their estimates all the way across what our body is burning at any given time. It's an estimate. What in food is an estimate. And restaurants are off on. Even if they tell you what the calories are, they can be off significantly and you buy a can of something and you think, okay, I'm gonna eat this. And you're looking at the label. And if you don't pay enough attention, there's two and two third servings per can, and you're like, okay, well, now I've got to do complicated fraction math to figure out how much I'm eating and how much I'm getting.

[00:16:26.470] – Allan
So it does make it more difficult. But I think one of the core things that you did say in the book that I thought was really important is that tracking can be valuable. It's just when you're trying to get down to this meticulous math of plus and minuses that it's not going to serve you as well.

[00:16:45.360] – Dr. Davis
Yeah, that's absolutely true. There's no question. And the number of studies show this actually tracking what you eat and not only what you eat, but how much you eat when you ate it, whom you ate it with, where you ate it, how you felt when you're eating. All those things are very important. And I can talk more about why that's important in terms of tracking what we eat, what you eat. But what people often get hung up on when they're keeping these food diaries is the number of calories.

[00:17:11.250] – Dr. Davis
And so studies show that people often stop tracking what they're eating because keeping track of their calories are so difficult. They find that it's frustrating to try to deconstruct the foods they eat if they don't have a calorie count to try to take the ingredients and look up the calorie count of each ingredient, and they end up just giving up on the whole thing because they say this is too difficult. So I think that can become a real impediment to a very important activity. And that is tracking your food intake.

[00:17:40.930] – Dr. Davis
And so, as I say in the book, don't worry really as much about tracking your calories. But what you should do if you can is track what you're eating, because what tracking your food intake can do is give you a sense of your eating pattern so that you can go back and use this information to say, I didn't realize that in work I go and pick up a donut a couple of times a day. I didn't realize I was doing that or I didn't realize that when I get stressed, I go through the fast food drive through more often.

[00:18:09.330] – Dr. Davis
And so by doing this, it can help you understand patterns that you may not be aware of and then take action to address those patterns. So that's why I think keeping a food diary is crucial to successful weight management. But people should not let the mandate they often hear to track calories to bog them down.

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[00:20:35.100] – Allan
As we talk about these tribes, I got into early in this episode. One of the things that really comes out is this concept of villains or foods to avoid at all costs, and then the heroes, so these are the super foods that are going to change your life and make you lose weight a lot faster. Can you talk a little bit about villains and heroes and where this lore comes from and why it's really kind of a fiction?

[00:21:01.950] – Dr. Davis
Well, it's part of the overall tendency we have as human beings and certainly in our society to try to look for good guys and bad guys put white hats and black hats on people. And so the same thing certainly has happened with nutrition generally and with weight loss specifically. So that we have weight loss, the history of weight loss over the last 200 years is an effort to finger some kind of culprit and to boil it down to one food or one kind of food that is particularly villainous that if only if we avoid this particular food, then we can weigh less and manage our weight.

[00:21:34.710] – Dr. Davis
And likewise, we see increasingly, and this is driven in part by the food industry because the food industry has a great incentive, of course, to make us think that their food has some kind of magical quality to eat specific foods that they're either going to keep us healthy or help us manage our weight. And we see every day either claims and ads or news reports about some food, whether it's avocados or whether it's beans or whether it's salmon or whatever it is that have some kind of magical properties.

[00:22:05.100] – Dr. Davis
And as I like to say, these are all often foods that are part of a healthful diet and foods that we absolutely can and should eat. But to imbue them with some kind of magical qualities or special properties that are going to allow them in isolation, to make us healthier, to help us lose weight. It is a myth, and that the evidence that's often cited to support this is not compelling. It will be in animals or it'll be in test tubes or will be some kind of intermediate marker that really doesn't measure what we're trying to measure, which in this case is weight loss.

[00:22:37.200] – Dr. Davis
So often we're deceived about the benefits of these foods as well as the danger as it were of specific kinds of foods when it comes to our weight. And so the point here is that instead of fixating on specific foods either as villains or heroes, what we should be doing is looking at the overall quality of our diets. That is to say, what are our overall eating patterns? Are we eating in a healthful way overall and fixate and not to fixate on the specific foods in that diet?

[00:23:07.440] – Dr. Davis
And the advantage of that is that eating in that way and thinking that way about food allows us lots of leeway. We can construct a diet for ourselves with foods that we're going to enjoy and not feel we're being deprived, not feel that we can't ever eat foods that are supposedly bad for us, that we shouldn't eat and allow us to have a diet that can be sustained over time. And in the end, that's what counts, right? That's what matters is a diet that we can eat, that we can enjoy, that we're not going to feel dissatisfied or hungry on, and that we can follow over time.

[00:23:39.910] – Dr. Davis
And whether you're talking about your health or your weight, that's the absolute truth.

[00:23:44.120] – Allan
Yeah. And like I said with villains, it's like, okay, is this food really that bad? And maybe it is if that's all you're eating or you're eating a ton of it, so moderation could be an answer. Occasionally have a bit of ice cream, have a little bit of this. It's okay. And then with heroes, it's like, okay, don't think that grapefruit is this magical fruit that's going to change your life. If you enjoy eating a grapefruit here and there have some grapefruit, you get your vitamin C, and there's some value there.

[00:24:14.130] – Allan
But it's not going to make your waistline go smaller just because you're eating a lot of it.

[00:24:18.680] – Dr. Davis
Right. And I think, as we said, as I keep saying, weight management is an unbelievably, complex phenomenon, and to think that we can boil it down to a specific food, that whether it's carbs every carbs and that'll be the solution or always eat great food, that's the solution. It just defies logic and common sense.

[00:24:37.370] – Allan
So now I want to kind of shift over to it does work, because that's the other half of the big promise from your book, and you boil it down to something I love is just principles. And rather than not a set of rules that says this is what you must do. But here's a set of principles that if you follow these principles, you're going to improve your chances of losing the weight that you want to. Could you go through your weight loss principles?

[00:25:03.720] – Dr. Davis
Right. And that's a crucial point, Allan, because I think too often a lot of diets that people have involved rules, hard and fast rules that say you must do this. You must eat these foods. You must never eat these foods. Only eat these on every other Tuesday, whatever it is, and people get bogged in and rules that they have to follow. And, of course, again, those kinds of diets, maybe people can follow it for a few weeks or a few months. But over time that's not sustainable.

[00:25:28.350] – Dr. Davis
And often these rules are not science based at all. So what I try to do is outline principles that is general ideas about what people should do. And what I like to say is that these are guidelines and things that people can do that they can tailor to their own needs and their own preferences. And that's, again, so important for people to be able to do that, to be able to have something that they can follow over time. So the first principle is that I say, eat a whole food diet, and that doesn't mean going to the store whole foods necessarily.

[00:25:58.060] – Dr. Davis
It means eating a food that's rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, lean meats, fish, eggs, dairy. If you eat dairy and trying to minimize so called highly processed foods, things like candy, chips, soda, French fries, hot dogs, things like that. Now, notice I said minimize. I did not say eliminate entirely, because again, a diet that says a food is toxic or poisonous or whatever else you should never touch it. All that tends to do is to make people want that food more, to crave that food more.

[00:26:33.960] – Dr. Davis
But what minimize means is that over time, and it's not saying do this tomorrow if you eat those foods regularly, but over time and try to eat those foods less often so that they eventually become occasional treats and things that you eat in limited portions rather than things you eat every day. And again, this is a process that takes time. But that's going to a whole foods diet, a largely plant based diet in which you can under a plant based diet, you can have any variety of foods, so you don't have to eat specific foods.

[00:27:03.310] – Dr. Davis
If you like salmon, eat salmon. If you don't eat salmon, don't eat it. If you want to eat other fish, fine, whatever whole grains you like, you can incorporate those. But the point is that you can construct a diet of foods you actually enjoy and will eat, and whatever combination of carbs, protein and fats works, various combinations can work under a whole food diet, but that's the way to think of it, rather than thinking of a specific list of foods that you should and should not eat.

[00:27:27.760] – Dr. Davis
So I think that's one principle that I think is really important, something else. And actually, I combine these things are to focus on movement and by that I mean exercise, but also other kinds of ways of moving your body. One of the things I talk about in the book and is that exercise is an overrated way to actually lose weight. And I say that as somebody who's a huge advocate of exercise, I'm an avid exerciser myself. I'm actually my last book is called Fitter Faster. It's all about the benefits of exercise, so I absolutely encourage everybody to exercise.

[00:28:00.580] – Dr. Davis
But you need to exercise for the right reason, and that is to benefit your health and to improve your overall well being. Now, exercise movement can be in part of weight management because it can help prevent weight gain, help you keep off weight that you lost. But you shouldn't look to weight to exercise necessarily as a way to lose weight. And too often people do that. So that's why movement is an important part of weight management. But I think it's important caveat there is we need to have the right expectation when we exercise so that we don't expect it to do something that usually I can't do.

[00:28:37.400] – Dr. Davis
So movement is an important part of an overall weight management strategy for that reason. For the reason, I just said. Also getting enough sleep. That's something that's often overlooked. But a number of studies show that people who get inadequate amounts of sleep are more likely to put on weight, to be obese. And there are a number of theories as to why that's true. But the studies are pretty compelling, and so I think it's all the more reason, in addition to the health benefits of getting enough sleep, as to why in paying attention to our sleep and our sleep, hygiene is very important.

[00:29:07.580] – Dr. Davis
And then Stress. Trying to Control Stress. Again, there are studies that show that people who are under more stress are more likely to eat more. And many of us know this from our own experience that we tend to engage in stress or emotional eating and to eat foods that are not good for us when we're under stress. And also there's studies having to do with the hormone cortisol. The stress releases the hormone cortisol, which make us more likely to put on to store fat, particularly abdominal fat.

[00:29:38.200] – Dr. Davis
So that's why controlling stress through meditation, relaxation, yoga, other methods can be a crucial part of a weight management program. Another element is something you and I talked about earlier and that's tracking what you eat that's so important to do. I think that's crucial. You don't have to do it all the time permanently. But I think certainly at the beginning and during periods where periods you may be struggling to track everything you eat. And again, not just what you ate, but when you ate it with whom you ate, how you felt so that again, you can over time, look at what the patterns are of your eating and make changes if necessary.

[00:30:16.360] – Dr. Davis
Sometimes people don't like to do this because they feel ashamed of how much they are or they lie to themselves. And I think when people do that they're only doing themselves with this service. This should be an exercise in putting everything down to giving yourself as much information as you can. So if you have full information, you can use that information in a way that's going to help you going forward. So I think tracking what you eat is crucial. And again, studies show that to be the case. What I call strategic planning.

[00:30:44.630] – Dr. Davis
And by that, I mean, and planning for the inevitable challenges and setbacks are going to come with weight management. We all know that anybody who's tried this, there are challenges every day to staying on track, and we fall off the wagon for all kinds of reasons because job or family or other emergencies get in the way that prevent us from staying on track. So the point with strategic planning here is to have a strategy in place to help us when those inevitable challenges do occur. One thing I like to talk about are if then statements that we have for ourselves.

[00:31:21.780] – Dr. Davis
So, for example, we know, for example, you have a temptation when you're in line at the checkout on your work to try to get foods. You know, you don't want to eat candy or chips or something you have. If then statements ready. If I am tempted to get candy bars or chips, then I will pull out the snacks I brought with me that are carrot sticks or something else. If I tend to overeat at restaurants and we know that often, they're giant portions and that people tend to eat what's in front of them.

[00:31:55.020] – Dr. Davis
If I tend to do that, then I will get a doggie bag at the beginning of the meal and put half the food and the bag to take home before I eat. So the point is that there are automatic actions that we have ready to go almost like auto technology when we veer out of a Lane, it pulls us back in automatically, so we don't have to think about it. We're ready, we're prepared for these occurrences, and we're ready to act. And likewise, when we kind of fall out of our lanes, we kind of get off track.

[00:32:25.140] – Dr. Davis
We have ways of talking to ourselves to say if I get off track and I won't blame myself, I won't say I'm a failure, I won't give up. I'll say, you know what? I'm just going to start again and keep going. And so what research shows that people that can do that kind of self talk that can have those if in statements, when they do inevitably fall off track, they can get back on track and keep going. And that's so the point is to have this kind of planning in place so that we are ready and prepared for the inevitable challenges that do occur.

[00:32:53.710] – Dr. Davis
And we can keep going. And then finally, I talk about calling the cavalry, sometimes doing all these things ourselves. We need more help. They helped a certain extent, but we need extra help. And so there are certain things we can do to get extra help. And one that I talk about, it's something called intensive behavioral therapy, and what that is basically is listening to help professionals, whether their physicians, nurse practitioners, dietitians, to offer a certain kind of therapy called intensive behavioral therapy that helps us around things such as food planning, exercise, dealing with different kinds of barriers that we may and helping us overcome those barriers.

[00:33:36.030] – Dr. Davis
So basically helping us to manage the process of weight management. And this can occur in person. It can occur online. There's certain commercial programs like NUM and others that incorporate elements of behavioral therapy so that you can get it in various ways. But that can be very helpful to people, sometimes to get help from professionals to help them get on track and stay on track. And then for some people, surgery can be an option for people who have above a certain BMI who qualify. Surgery can be very beneficial, bariatic surgery.

[00:34:07.290] – Dr. Davis
There are various forms of it. It's not for everybody. And certainly people need to carefully weigh the risks and benefits because there are risks involved. But for certain people, it can be very beneficial. It can help them lose a substantial amount of way, keep that weight off and decrease their risk of certain conditions like diabetes. Surgery can be something that's very beneficial for certain people as well. So I think people shouldn't be afraid. I guess the point there is people shouldn't see his weakness, they shouldn't see it as failure or anything else.

[00:34:36.210] – Dr. Davis
If they say, you know what? I'm trying everything I can on my own, but I need some extra help. So I need to call in some professionals to help me take the next step. And that's something people should be ready to do if they find that what they're doing on their own isn't sufficient.

[00:34:49.080] – Allan
Yes, Dr. Davis, I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:34:59.380] – Dr. Davis
well, for me, I guess I would say mine aren't necessarily Earth shattering, and they're not necessarily surprising. But for me, at least personally, the three that I would say would be the first would be movement moving your body. As I said, I'm a big advocate of exercise for all kinds of reasons. I like to say that if there were a pill that could do all the things that exercise can do, everything from reducing risk of heart disease and cancer to improving your sex life, we'd all be clamoring for it.

[00:35:26.160] – Dr. Davis
So I think finding a way to move your body regularly, and that can be any number of things, but anything, whether you're walking to hiking, to dancing, to playing pickleball, whatever it might be that you enjoy, that you can sustain that you can keep doing that's really important. It's crucial for our health. And as I say, it's important for our weight, not necessarily to help us lose weight, but to stay at a healthy weight and to prevent weight gain. So movement would be the first thing I would say.

[00:35:53.850] – Dr. Davis
The second thing would be our diet healthy eating. And again, we've talked earlier about what that means. It's not complicated. It's not following a lot of rules. It doesn't mean you have to buy designer foods. It's a fairly straightforward process. It's focusing on your overall eating pattern. And by the way, it's not just what you eat, but it's also enjoying food with other people. I think that's so important that's an important part of healthy eating to me, and often certain diets that are too restrictive. We're involved fasting to me often take away the joy of eating, take away the pleasure of enjoying our food with other people.

[00:36:29.970] – Dr. Davis
So eating healthful foods and enjoying that food with other people would be a second principle that I would say. And the third I mentioned earlier is sleep. I think too often this is overlooked sadly, in our society. It's a badge of honor for people who say I only sleep five or 6 hours a night. I only need a little bit of sleep well, I think that's unfortunate that people say that and make us think that's something admirable, because it's not. For most of us, we need seven to 9 hours of sleep and that we often don't realize the negative effects that two little sleep have on our health and our wellbeing.

[00:37:00.200] – Dr. Davis
And so I think to focus more on sleep hygiene. Putting away the tablet, putting away the iPhone getting to sleep earlier, focusing on good sleep hygiene is crucial, again, not only for our health, but also for weight management. So again, that's something that I think many of us don't focus on enough.

[00:37:17.290] – Allan
Thank you for that. If someone wanted to learn more about you and learn more about your book, SuperSized Lies, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:37:25.160] – Dr. Davis
My website, Healthyskeptic.com. I have on there more about the book. More about Me. I have a number of videos I've created so that's a good place to start.

[00:37:34.020] – Allan
Great.

[00:37:35.000] – Dr. Davis
healthyskeptic.com.

[00:37:36.010] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/505, and I'll be sure to have a link there in the show, notes.

[00:37:42.930] – Allan
Dr. Davis, thank you. So much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:37:46.220] – Dr. Davis
It's been a real pleasure, Allan. Thank you so much.

Post Show/Recap

[00:37:52.510] – Allan
Hey, Raz.

[00:37:54.180] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, I just have to say, I love the title of his book, Super Sized Lies and The Myths of Weight Loss and The Truth. That's a pretty heavy title. Perfect.

[00:38:07.120] – Allan
Yeah. The thing I get to is everybody wants something simple. They want a rule of thumb. Just tell me one thing. Just tell me one thing. What can I eat? What can I not? That's the one rule. And people want to give you rules. If I can give you a rule and I can make money doing it, they give you a rule. So a lot of personal trainers will say, Calories in calories out. You got to get in the gym. You got to have a gym membership.

[00:38:34.320] – Allan
You got to get in the gym. We got to work out the three times per week that you're going to train with me. But that's not enough. You got to come in here another three times a week and be doing that cardio that I told you to do and then go low fat and just eat what you want and you'll be fine. And then if you get in there and you're not losing the weight, it's like what you must be eating too much because I'm working you.

[00:38:56.330] – Allan
And you know what? You're working hard than gym. And they're like, I'm working hard in the gym and you're eating too much. It's like, Well, I'm hungry because I'm working in the gym.

[00:39:07.240] – Rachel
Yeah. Calories in Calories out is probably the most common myth that he had highlighted. And it's one I've heard. And I continue to hear to this day.

[00:39:16.360] – Allan
And the problem with it is it's a myth over the long term.

[00:39:23.020] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:39:23.570] – Allan
It's not a myth myth because it's true.

[00:39:25.910] – Rachel
You're right.

[00:39:26.690] – Allan
It is absolutely true. If you eat more calories than you are burning, you're going to gain weight. The problem is. And if you're eating fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. The problem is your body is not a closed system. So when you sit there and eat less, your body's going to sit there and say, you know, something's going on in Rachel's life, and she can't get enough food for us to do the things we want to do. And we want to save the brain.

[00:39:53.930] – Allan
You want to save the liver, we want to save the kidneys. And what can we get rid of? What can we reduce? And it says, oh, well, yeah, we got some of this fat here, but we want to hold on to that, because if she goes long term without food, we're going to be screaming. You're going to be struggling. So let's let go of a little muscle because it's burning more calories. So you're in the gym working and you're not putting on any muscle or anything you might be gaining weight, but it's not muscle.

[00:40:18.460] – Allan
And then it's going to say, Well, let's reduce the size of the spleen and cut out our immune system. Let's do a little bit of work here and cut off some of our reproductive strength because we have no need to bring babies into this world if there's not enough food. And so sometimes you gotta just coax your body to understand, yes, there is enough food, good high quality nutritious food for us to survive and do well and thrive. And then at that point, your body can sit there and say, you know, yeah, we could use some of this body fat when during those periods of time when we don't have enough food.

[00:40:52.630] – Allan
But we know there's plenty of food because she eats.

[00:40:57.210] – Rachel
Right. We always have plenty enough food. We don't often feel the hunger. And we go through each day. We had breakfast at a certain time, lunch at a certain time, afternoon snack, dinner at a certain time, like we got plenty of food to do what we need.

[00:41:11.820] – Allan
And here's the interesting thing is, those meal times, there's actually no magic to them. There's no reason, we eat that way because that's how the work day was scheduled. You ate before you went to work, they gave you a lunch break. You ate a lunch and then ate after you got through with work. And then along the way, just unions and what not stepped in and says we should probably let them take a 15 minutes break. So there was a morning snack and an afternoon snack.

[00:41:39.180] – Allan
And quite literally, the five six meals a day is built around a work day in an office or a factory. It has absolutely nothing to do with your metabolism and how your body was designed. In many cases, you might go the whole morning without having to eat food because you just didn't have enough the day before. And you've got to walk 9 miles to where you can get honey or roots or kill a rabbit or a bear. And that's going to take a little bit of time.

[00:42:07.540] – Allan
And then you do it. You carry it home and you can prepare it and you Cook it and then you eat it. So you might only have one big meal each day, or you might be able to nibble on berries and things along the way. And then you go fishing, you catch some fish and you eat those fish. But it was never meant for us to sit down and eat five meals a day. And the premise behind that was when you're trying to catch calories, you get hungry by having you eat more often, you feel like you're not as hungry all the time.

[00:42:35.470] – Allan
That's all that's about. So those are myths that were built out of people were getting fatter and they knew the scientists and everything looking at it, they're eating more. We eat more than we ever did. History. because food got easier and easier, got more calorie dense and less nutritionally dense. And that, to me, is the real key to all of this. The quality of your food is more important than the amount of food.

[00:43:07.510] – Rachel
Well, I love that Dr. Davis mentioned that he said he suggested that we track what we eat and not get hung up so much on the calories because he don't need to worry about the calories in calories out equation. But to track what we eat, and the real light bulb moment for me was because then you can identify patterns of what you're eating according to certain moments in your life. If you're always stressed, some people like he had mentioned may reach for a donut or a cookie after dinner at night, it becomes a habit.

[00:43:40.200] – Rachel
And if you can kind of monitor the food that you're eating and how much and when and what for.

[00:43:45.900] – Rachel
Then you might be able to get a little insight that you could then use to change or make healthier choices.

[00:43:51.520] – Allan
Because the personal trainer is selling you the calories in calories out model makes sense because that's where they sell training. As a coach, I stepped back and say, okay, why does that not work? If you sit there and I said, if you did the math and said, okay, I'm burning 2500 calories and I'm eating 2000. I should lose 1 lb per week every week for the rest of my life till I'm down to zero.

[00:44:16.450] – Allan
And we all know that doesn't work. We all know that doesn't work. It's never that straight line ever. And so the reality of it is, if you're just selling burning calories as a model, you got to keep selling it. Whereas we know a man or a woman, we get over 40 or 50. Our metabolism seems to just stop and it doesn't stop, stop. But it's kind of one of those kind of sets of the harder we work to get our metabolism up, if you will, the harder it is, and the more we seem to want to eat and that's our body trying to protect itself.

[00:44:53.850] – Allan
So taking a little bit of time to just go about this in a smart way, like you said, the logging and understanding. Okay, when I eat this pizza or hamburger or hot dog or whatever, the next day, my body weight is higher. I look in the mirror and my cheeks and neck are puffy and my skin just doesn't look as good. So I know staying hydrated, eating high quality food, making sure I'm getting an protein for me. Those are keys. If I'm going to keep myself feeling good and energized, then that's when you give your body the right foods and you have enough energy, then it's a little bit easier to just kind of poke out or net nudge your body to say, okay, it's safe to let some of this body fat go, and then it will and then it will stop.

[00:45:50.690] – Allan
You got to let it set. And then you got to start poking at it again. Give it the general nudges. And then your body. In the terms I would just say you have to coax your body to lose weight because it doesn't want to.

[00:46:02.820] – Rachel
Yeah. Well. And also, Dr. Davis mentioned the importance of sleep and stress because when we don't get enough sleep and when we are under higher stress, our body is not functioning in its optimal fashion. And stress not only somehow makes us want to eat more, we choose the foods that we probably shouldn't choose, the candies and the rich home cooked foods. But it's just a habit. And then we have a higher cortisol level as well. And so our body is not wanting to release any of that again in the same way.

[00:46:41.650] – Rachel
So just knowing your sleeping habits and your stress levels, just be aware of what you're doing during that time.

[00:46:48.520] – Allan
Yeah. Because what's happening there is when you're in that stress situation, whether it was sleep and not getting enough sleep or just really in a high stress environment is that that cortisol is basically catabolic. So it's tearing down your muscle mass. It's basically doing a lot of things that are not good. Be great if you were being chased by a bear, you want cortisol, you want all those adrenals. But you don't want that in a general sense, day to day, chronically. And what we're doing with the foods that we're choosing is we are pumping our body now with dopamine.

[00:47:22.480] – Allan
So it creates that environment of a feeling, happy, comfortable. And so those comfort foods, whatever your comfort food is, you're turning to it to get that dopamine to get that reward. And it feels good. So of course, all doesn't feel good. Dopamine does. And so you get into that cycle. Of course, all hit dopamine. Of course, all hit hit dopamine. And that's the cycle, whether it's Donuts, pizza, candies, whatever it is, it's just that cycle. And when you start to recognize it, it's like, Why did I eat those Donuts yesterday?

[00:47:59.700] – Allan
And then you realize, oh, well, my boss yelled at me and I thought I was going to get fired the day before, the kids, for one reason or another were just assholes today. They didn't want to put on their clothes. They didn't want to get ready for school. They didn't want to do anything. And now I'm late for work. And my boss is already mad at me. And so I don't have time to make breakfast. I'll just stop at the Dunkin Donuts and get a coffee, and then you buy two Donuts, and it's like, why did that happen?

[00:48:29.380] – Allan
You see the story. So the logging what you eat and paying attention to how you felt is going to give you those subtle clues to know where those breaks are and then taking the deep breath, avoiding on Donuts drive through when you're in that position because you might just well be able to pull in order your hot black coffee and move about. But if you're in a stress position and you're looking and they got the smell and at the back end of that place at the drive through, they make sure you can smell it.

[00:49:06.940] – Allan
You end up ordering a couple of them. And that's all by design.

[00:49:11.960] – Rachel
I just want to throw in exercise as an alternate way to get your dopamine hit. All of us runners. We are happy runners. We have the runners high, like they talk about, which is essentially dopamine hits. But also, people feel a whole lot better after throwing some weights around in the gym, just a little bit of movement and just makes you feel so empowered and so energized and kind of kicks out a little bit of that stress in a healthier way.

[00:49:39.490] – Allan
And it could be something as simple as going into the stairwell at work, going up and down a flight of stairs for a couple minutes, and you're going to burn off some of that cortisol because you ran from the bear, you burn some energy, so you're going to burn off some of that, and then you're going to relax. And I'm not saying work up a sweat unless you're and you're that upset.

[00:50:02.980] – Rachel
And yeah, you could.

[00:50:05.070] – Allan
But up and down the stairs a little another technique. And my boss would call me. And if you come to my office, that was never, never, ever, ever a good thing.

[00:50:14.610] – Rachel
No, never. No.

[00:50:16.770] – Allan
That come to my office call was just, ugh.

[00:50:20.490] – Rachel
It's just like being called to the principal's office when you're a kid.

[00:50:23.580] – Allan
No, I wasn't afraid of the principal. Called your boss is like, ugh, this more work. This is going to be like who did I upset today? Who didn't I upset today? And then it was like, So what I would do when I go get on the elevator, I would just start doing the box breathing. You know, I'm going up two flights and I could have walked up the stairs.

[00:50:45.470] – Allan
But I said, no, I'm going to delay it because they see me coming off the elevator. That's what they expect. They don't expect me to go up the stairs. So I'll just go up the elevator and the time it takes for the door to close, just start doing some box breathing. 4 seconds and 4 seconds hold 4 seconds out. 4 seconds hold. You do those while the elevator is going up, you get about three or four or five of those in before the elevator doors open again and you walk out and you'll notice your stress level drops a lot just from something as simple as that.

[00:51:15.820] – Allan
So just recognizing the other things that are going on in your life will help you get past a lot of this. If someone says something and it's an absolute, this is an absolute for weight loss, they don't know what they're talking about.

[00:51:32.550] – Rachel
You're right. Good point. Good point. And I also want to point out to how individualized we all are. I say this a lot, too, that we are all different ages, different sizes, different points in our lives. And so there is no one size fits all. And if what you're doing is not working, I think reach out to you, to me, to whoever can help, because sometimes you just need a little bit of expert advice to help you get through your slump or whatever you're dealing with.

[00:52:02.820] – Allan
And the other side of it is if you hire a coach or you're talking to a coach, the coach is not going to make money making you sweat and burn calories. They're going to be paying attention to the other things going on. They're going to ask questions. It's not so much that coaches that we have the answer. It's just we have this objectivity in the conversation. It's like, Well, I can't help. And I'm like, okay, can't help what? Two Donuts every morning. That's what I see.

[00:52:33.690] – Allan
You're eating two doughnuts for breakfast every morning, and then healthy the rest of the day. And I'm like, okay, well, I see pizza in here. I see tacos. I see not that some of those can be healthy, but at the same time, a lot of folks will get into the moment and lose that ability to take a step back. And what a coach gives you is kind of that opportunity to have a sounding board, and then you say it, and then they repeat it back to you out loud.

[00:53:03.580] – Allan
You're like, aahh.

[00:53:05.690] – Rachel
Yeah, it's so helpful sometimes to have another set of eyes looking at you. For sure.

[00:53:13.470] – Allan
Alright, Rachel, anything else before we call it a show?

[00:53:16.950] – Rachel
No. This is great. I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip up here.

[00:53:20.360] – Allan
I will. I will. Thank you.

[00:53:21.870] – Rachel
Take care.

[00:53:22.730] – Allan
You too. Bye.

[00:53:24.290] – Rachel
Bye.

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