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

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Let's Say Hello

[00:04:14.130] – Allan

Hey, Ras, how are things?

[00:04:15.970] – Rachel

Good. How are you today, Allan?

[00:04:17.870] – Allan

I'm doing all right. Really interesting weekend.

[00:04:21.530] – Rachel

Okay.

[00:04:24.330] – Allan

We had our Christmas parade here. So you're listening to this? It's just now past Christmas, but we're recording this a couple of weeks in advance, and we had the Christmas parade. And one of the things that kind of came about, and I was sort of side-swiped by this is my wife decided that I was going to wear a Santa suit and sit in the back of her golf cart and pass out candy and toys to the kids. And it was insane. Thousands of kids out there screaming “Santa! It's Santa!”

[00:04:59.130] – Allan

And then they're sitting on my lap and I'm taking pictures.

[00:05:02.910] – Rachel

How sweet. That's so cool.

[00:05:05.680] – Allan

It was just bizarre. I'll post a picture on the Facebook group. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group, and you'll see a picture of me sitting in the back of a golf cart as Santa.

[00:05:20.250] – Allan

And then the parade. We were told to get there at a certain time, and they weren't even ready to near ready to start that thing until about 2 hours later. And then we're on the parade for over an hour, and I was like, okay, I've got to go to the bathroom, so I hopped out and I'm running.

[00:05:34.500] – Allan

So you got to stand on running through the streets to get to the bathroom. And then I got to go run back and find where we are in this parade to get back on the golf cart. So some funny moments. And you walk into a place that everybody knows me. Except now I'm dressed like Santa. And as soon as I get close and they start to recognize me, I say, “Don't say a word. Don't.”

[00:05:55.170] – Rachel

That's so sweet. That's Wonderful.

[00:05:58.050] – Allan

So not something I expected, but I did the best Santa I could.

[00:06:03.190] – Rachel

That's awesome. What a fun weekend.

[00:06:05.610] – Allan

So how are things with you?

[00:06:07.320] – Rachel

Good. Really good. I'm pretty excited today. I just hired a trainer to help me get through a marathon. I've got a spring marathon already scheduled, and I've been thinking about it for a while, and I thought, you know, I do want to set a goal time for this full marathon, and I think a trainer is going to help me see my training in a whole new light. So I'm pretty excited to get started with her real soon.

[00:06:32.120] – Allan

Yeah. Is this one you've run before?

[00:06:34.350] – Rachel

No, it'll be a new marathon. It's actually one of the two runcations I've already scheduled for next year, and it's the St. Louis Marathon, and that will be in early April.

[00:06:45.270] – Allan

Ok. So based on what you know, of that course, is it similar to one you've run before?

[00:06:49.840] – Rachel

Actually, I don't have a profile yet. There's not a profile on their website that I found yet, but I'm asking around, so I'm hoping to get some insight. I hear it's hilly in that area, but I don't anticipate it being crazy hilly.

[00:07:06.400] – Allan

Yeah, but that's going to help set your expectations if you go into it. And this thing's, like Big Sur. You're like that was not what I was expecting. And then you get there. So you're not really that satisfied with your training and your time. But yeah, because if you're going to run hills, you need to do a little bit of training on hills, just know that you're getting the best you can out of your training. So I'll be interested to hear how this all goes about, because having a coach, that's what a lot of people don't recognize is how beneficial having someone there that knows the ropes, that knows what's going on to just kind of push you a little harder.

[00:07:44.250] – Allan

And yes, as a coach, at times, I hire coaches and you hire coaches, and that's what we do because we want to win. We want to do better, even if winning is just winning being better at ourselves.

[00:07:56.640] – Rachel

Sure. Sometimes it's nice to have another set of eyes on what I'm doing and how I'm progressing. It'll be interesting to see I'm sure she will push me harder than what I might push myself. And I'll have some solid accountability, too. So it should be really interesting to see how this plays out.

[00:08:15.890] – Allan

Good. And I'm pretty excited. I'm launching my new program in January, Win at Weight Loss, and you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/win and get on the waitlist for that. There are going to be limited slots because I can only handle so many clients. I don't pass my clients off to anybody else. I handle each and every one of them. This is a program, a six week program that basically teaches you everything you need to know for yourself, for your body.

[00:08:49.220] – Allan

This is not a cookie cutter, here's the four things I want you to do. I've done those before, but for most people, yeah, it works. But a lot of people, they need more. They need that next step because they plateau and they stop and it doesn't work. And so when things stop working, you need tools to get through that as well. So that's what this 6-week program win. It weight loss is. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/win. And you can get on the list. And then we'll have a conversation to see if this program is right for you.

[00:09:21.370] – Rachel

That sounds awesome. It'll be great. Good luck to everybody who signs up. Do it quick.

[00:09:26.730] – Allan

Please. Yeah. Because once I get to a number, I'm like that's all I can handle. I will have to turn that off. And then the waitlist won't be for January. It'll likely be for April. So just realize now I'm going to do these in classes or cohorts if you will. So we'll go through with a group of people, and then I'll be done. And then I'll maybe start another one. But they're going to be points of the year where I just take time off.

[00:09:49.020] – Allan

So if you miss this one, it's going to be probably two, three, four months before I do another one. And so you want to get into this one while the iron strike while the iron is hot, if you will.

[00:09:59.060] – Rachel

That's right. Do it.

[00:10:00.250] – Rachel

All right. Tara is a coach, and she was a Keto coach until she decided that maybe keto wasn't the right way for her to manage her health long-term? Are you ready to talk about Short-Term Keto with Tara Garrison?

[00:10:16.890] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:11:12.750] – Allan

Tara, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:11:15.190] – Tara

Yeah. Thanks for having me excited to be here.

[00:11:17.470] – Allan

So we're going to talk about your book, Short-Term Keto: A Four Week Plan to Find Your Unique Carb Threshold. And what I like about this. And it's what I tell a lot of people because, like, oh, you do Keto, but you don't do it all the time. Why don't you do it all the time? All the other Keto guys, they want to do it all the time, and you say I'm going to do it.

[00:11:37.590] – Allan

I told you, who's going to bark?

[00:11:40.230] – Tara

He's like, on camera. It's my time to shine.

[00:11:44.310] – Allan

Yes, it's my time to shine. So sorry about that. But I'm going to leave that in.

[00:11:51.570] – Allan

But the principle of this is that I look at and similar to you, I think look at keto as a tool.

[00:11:58.830] – Tara

Yeah, absolutely. And a powerful one. Short-term keto. I don't know if I'm jumping ahead.

[00:12:06.580] – Allan

No. Yeah. Go ahead.

[00:12:08.610] – Tara

Short-term keto. I've had a program for many years now called Keto In and Out, right? That was a precursor to this book. And really what it was born out of was seeing what a powerful tool Keto is in our day and age pretty much. I'm not going to say everybody should do keto, because I definitely have times, I just told a woman yesterday I'm like, I don't really don't think you need to do keto. I already think you're metabolically flexible, you're thin, you're healthy, you're thriving. I don't see any for it.

[00:12:39.040] – Tara

But most of us, we literally get into our car. We, like, sit down in a seat while we're still in our house. Like our garage is still our house. We sit in a seat, we drive to the grocery store and we sit in a seat, come back and we have endless access to food. And guess what happens over time at that lifestyle very sedentary and overeating. We are not forced to be in a situation in which our bodies need to run off their own body fat for fuel.

[00:13:05.340] – Tara

But if we lived in the wild and this is where it kind of gets to what you're saying here about not always being if we lived in the wild, if we lived in nature, which unless things go real bad in the next few years here, which hopefully they don't. But most likely we're not ever going to be in that situation again. We're just living out in the woods and trying to hunt for food. But that is our natural state. That is what our bodies. That's what they evolved upon over many thousands of years was not always having endless access to food and having to move even when you don't really feel like it so that you can have food. And guess what happens as a result of that, our bodies would go into ketosis naturally.

[00:13:46.740] – Tara

So what does this mean? It means when you run out of enough incoming carbohydrate to support your bodily functions, your body will turn your own body fat. Or now it's dietary fat often because we have so much food available to us. But your body will turn fat into these things called ketones. And you will run off of those as your energy source. And so many cool things happen in our bodies. As a result of that, we drop inflammation. It's more easy for us to focus. Without food, we can go longer without food without feeling hangry and angry and shaky and hypoglycemic. And all of these things.

[00:14:21.450] – Tara

Gut healing benefits. It's really powerful for the body. Our brain gets a boost. They go through our blood brain barrier. We have more mental energy, and some people hypothesize that maybe that was to help us go hunt and find more food. You know, we want to be mentally clear. So we don't do this. Why would you do this? Why would you do this? Why would you, like sit there and be uncomfortably hungry and you have everything you could ever imagine sitting in your pantry just waiting for you to eat it.

[00:14:45.710] – Tara

We're just not going to because we don't have to. Here comes keto. This intervention in which all we do is intentionally remove most of the carbohydrates from our diet, and we get this adaptation in our body. To me, the point is the adaptation and going back to this living in nature analogy, like, if you're freaking starving and you're living out in nature and you come across whatever food, whether that's potatoes or berries or whatever or animal, you're just going to eat whatever you can. Right.

[00:15:18.040] – Tara

And so a lot of people get in the mentality of carbs are bad for you. And carbs make you fat. And it's like, no, it's just an abundance and over consumption of carbohydrates all the time in which your body never, ever gets to explore this other half of its capacity, which is ketosis that can become, quote, unquote bad for you over time, because now you are kind of dependent on glucose for energy and you get hangry and shaky and all of these things if you don't have it. So keto is a powerful tool that allows us to come in and get our metabolism to be doing what it was always meant to do in the first place.

[00:15:55.770] – Allan

I do something I call Seasonal Ketosis. And so it's basically I know there's seasons of the years when I'm going to want to eat certain things or drink certain things and do certain things, usually around the holidays and football season and that kind of thing. And so I was just like, okay, I can be in ketosis. And I feel great in ketosis. But I was like, I don't want to live my life this way 24/7. So I would cycle out, and then I would cycle back in.

[00:16:24.170] – Allan

And what I found was for me, it works very well. And then I've had other people that I've worked with, and they can't necessarily bring back the carbs because the way they process carbs and the way they eat carbs just doesn't work. Can we talk a little bit about this bio-individuality I've heard used. Why are some of us wired to be fine with keto most of the time? And then others were wired more with the threshold of being able to take in more carbs?

[00:16:57.030] – Tara

Yeah, that's a great question. Any good nutrition coach, I think they're first going to want to know, where are we starting? What's going on? What's the starting point? And so if you have let's say, for example, you have type II diabetes. I'm not recommending that you bring carbs back in. Actually, the research is kind of starting to shift over the years. We used to say this is not we're not healing type II diabetes with this, we're just managing it depending on how far progressive is. We're seeing that it might be possible, at least to be able to increase the carb threshold a little bit. But we're talking years of doing keto, right.

[00:17:36.500] – Tara

So if you have prediabetes type II diabetes, you're using keto to manage something like epilepsy or some sort of therapeutic approach. It might be a long-term thing for you. For women who are perimenopausal or post menopausal, they may have higher estrogens, and that doesn't mean that they have to just live with that and be like that forever. A lot of things can be changed and shifted. But I'm saying if that's where you're starting, you might need to be keto for a long time.

[00:18:06.730] – Tara

If you're very obese, I'm just blunt with it, the more obese you are, more likely, the better keto is going to work for you, because that means you likely are not metabolically flexible. Your body has a hard time going into its own fat source and using that for fuel without you becoming extremely uncomfortable and hungry and cravings and all those things. So you do something like keto, you might do it for years. There's so many different things that could be happening in the body to cause this.

[00:18:33.920] – Tara

There's even DNA. I do DNA work with my clients. There's even predispositions that certain people have to have less normal, like impaired glucose metabolism. Right. We look at people with Alzheimer's. If you have Alzheimer's in your family, you may be possibly have some genetic predispositions to not manage glucose as well. A lot of these things can be completely changed by lifestyle, right. But it takes time.

[00:19:01.830] – Tara

And then I've had clients where they're extremely fit. They're extremely active. Their blood sugar regulation is great. They have good muscle mass. They're already quote unquote fat adapted, meaning their body can run off fat just as well as carbs. They might not even need to do keto. Everyone doesn't need to do it. And then there are some people that actually really it's probably going to be a life changing intervention for them.

[00:19:26.060] – Tara

And so I would say that the biggest hitters are if you have high blood sugar, this is going to be a winner-winner chicken dinner for you. It's just for me, people who they feel like finally, because when you have blood sugar cravings for food and your body is saying you're going to die if you don't eat like something sugary right now because it doesn't know how to go into ketosis.

[00:19:50.190] – Tara

It's pretty much it that's going to be a life changing experience for you left in your satiation hormone goes up. That's life changing for people. I've had clients that are 400 pounds plus and just lost hundreds of pounds, it's life changing for them, so it really depends on where your starting point is and for the sake of time, I won't go too far into that, but we go into detail on that of reasons you might want to try to do keto and possibly do it longer term in my book.

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[00:22:02.790] – Allan

And then the other side of it because I work with clients too, and we'll go low carb with their eating and they feel really good. They're losing the weight 40 lbs, 50 lbs gone and they feel great. And they're like, this is incredible. And then they're like, but I want to introduce carbs, but I'm afraid.

[00:22:20.020] – Tara

Yeah.

[00:22:20.830] – Allan

So what are some signs? They're like, this works so well, but they're like, I know a holiday, I know a vacation is coming. We're going to Disney. We're doing this and it's like, can I? And I'm like, Well, you need permission first, right? I know you have some signs, okay. It's probably okay for you to start reintroducing carbs.

[00:22:41.410] – Tara

Yeah. I love this question. This is one of the main reasons I even started talking about this at the time in 2018, when I started sharing this message, kind of developed this little tagline of ‘Do Keto. Not Forever.'

[00:22:52.170] – Tara

That was very rebellious of me. Very. Because I was very involved in the leaders of the keto movement, where all my friends and colleagues and this was just like an abomination at that time. In 2018, keto was like, the end. All be all. If you are a smart person, you understand that ketones are better than glucose and like that was just the mentality.

[00:23:12.780] – Tara

And I had recently gotten off of keto, so I came into it very lean, very athletic. I just qualified for the Boston Marathon, was lifting weights. Did keto. I appreciated some of the benefits that I got in terms of mental clarity. I think I needed a little more fat, so just hormonally felt better. I could go longer between meals, which was super cool without feeling hungry. I really got tapped into physiological hunger versus blood sugar hunger. And that was cool. But for me personally, I lost muscle and gained body fat.

[00:23:43.980] – Tara

And at the time I was dating one of the leaders of the keto movement, so I know I was optimizing it. I'm a trainer and nutritionist myself, but my body just wasn't loving it from a body composition or athletic performance perspective. And I had just brought carbs back in and everything was going back up for me. And I still maintained those benefits that I had received during keto. I've been able to go between meals for a long time. And so here I was like talking to all these women at conferences and they're terrified of carbohydrates, right?

[00:24:11.000] – Tara

They're terrified. They've been taught these will make you fat. These will inflame you. Even people saying they're going to kill you. There's like a lot of fear. And the clients that I've worked with. Sometimes my clients come to me and they've lost over 100 lbs on keto already. And I'm like the carb savior or something because I teach the message. They're like, Girl, are you serious? Are you telling me I can really have carbohydrates again? Because I'm terrified. And what I like to tell people is like if you've experienced a big weight loss on keto, remember that you are not in the same body right now that you started with.

[00:24:41.510] – Tara

It's hard emotionally for us to get there sometimes, right? We still see ourselves as a 200, 300, 400 pound person, but you're not. You lost 200 lbs. You lost 100 lbs. Your body is different now. The physiological processes are different. So what I say is, look, check your blood sugar management when you wake up in the morning. If you're under 90 in the morning, even if you ate some carbs the day before, that's a really good sign that you've achieved better blood sugar management. If you're starting to just gain weight back, maybe you've turned into lazy keto and you're not actually in ketosis anymore and you're gaining weight back.

[00:25:15.820] – Tara

You're just not feeling as good. You're not getting the same results because once your blood sugar management is good, you're not going to get the same drastic result from keto that you did when your blood sugar was poor. If your sleep isn't good, if you feel like you're crying a lot like that could be low serotonin. If your gut health isn't good, you just chronically have watery stools or constipation. Those are all signs that maybe it's time to just explore bringing cars back in.

[00:25:39.580] – Tara

And I just want to say one thing real quick. And that is please remember that when you first bring carbs back in, your insulin response will not be as high. And we've seen that is a rat study. But for about two weeks after getting off keto and bringing carbs back in, you may have higher blood sugar spikes than you would after those two weeks are over. Once your body gets regulated on how much insulin to produce, I say that because so many people, they're like, I try to eat one carb and my blood sugar shot through the roof.

[00:26:07.280] – Tara

I'm like, I know that's because you've been keto for so long. I've had times when I was keto and I ate carbs, and I literally fell asleep like I was in a coma. And so it's that please remember that. And the types of carbohydrates you eat are super important as well, and make a tremendous difference.

[00:26:25.080] – Allan

Yeah. Because just like, we often have that problem, they call it keto flu. I call it carb withdrawals. When you go into ketosis about a two week period of time that your body is trying to figure out. Whoa, what is this way of eating? What's going on here? Why don't I have this? It works the other way when you're trying to go back in. It's like, okay, Whoa. I've got a sugar rush just having a little bit of ice cream or a cookie,

[00:26:50.980] – Tara

Right.

[00:26:51.490] – Allan

Whoa. Where did that come from? And then your body will adapt, and we get this metabolic flexibility, where our body is able to easier go back and forth. If you said, okay, I'm going to take the weekend off or take a month off, and I'm going to go and start reintroducing carbs, and then it's not really what you want. It's not really working out. You're not feeling it. Then you just do that transition back. And it's actually not hard. It's not as hard as it was the first time.

[00:27:18.520] – Tara

Totally.

[00:27:19.070] – Speaker 1

If you get yourself into a really good state with how your insulin responses, how your pancreas is working. And like you said the other things, like Ghellin and Leptin, and just kind of making sure that you actually know what hunger is and just eating sugar for the sake of sugar.

[00:27:35.330] – Tara

I appreciate you saying that because I think you're the first person I've heard say that. I'm like, I feel like the lone wolf over here. Everyone's teaching, hey, when you go to keto, it sucks. And your gut is going to get all messed up because your enzyme regulation is off because you're not used to making that much lipase to break down fats and all these things. And it's okay. Just hang in there. But nobody's breaching that. I felt like. I've been like, I'm like, hey, also, when you bring carbs back in, some things have to get up regulated in the body to the amount of amylase you produce to break down carbohydrates in your gut, your ability to manage and process that much fiber.

[00:28:09.090] – Tara

And that's why I slowly reintroduce carbs in the book, because sometimes people are like, oh, I ate carbs, and I got really bloated. My body just hates them. I'm like, no, you're just not used to producing enough enzymes to break it down. It takes time. So I appreciate you sharing that message. It's also a transition out.

[00:28:26.760] – Allan

I actually put it in my book that I published in 2018. So in December of 2018, I had the same message that you don't have to be in keto forever. But you want to have a reason. You want to have a strategy as you go into these types of things. And so one of the most important strategies, I think, is people are looking at carbohydrates and trying to get past that fear or that phobia, which I guess carb phobia is now going to be a word if it's not, I just made it up.

[00:28:55.680] – Tara

I say it all the time.

[00:28:59.350] – Allan

Okay. Not all carbs are the same. Yeah, but we have this in our mindset. It's like I look on the label and that's mistake probably number one. But I'm looking on the label and the label says it's got this many carbs. And can you kind of go through and talk about how we can look at carbohydrates and how we can prioritize them as we begin to reintroduce?

[00:29:22.820] – Tara

Yeah. I love this question. And the reason this is one of the main reasons I wrote this book is because I noticed because I'm a keto specialist in my regular everyday life. Everyone feels the need to talk to me about keto, right? I'm sure you noticed the same. Right. And I get these people they're eating pizza and chips and whatever and fast food, and they'll say, oh, man, I know. I just got to go back to keto, and I'm like, wait a minute. That's not the only way to be healthy.

[00:29:49.390] – Tara

There's another place that's not junk food or keto that's, like, all in or all out thinking. I almost forget sometimes that when I'm telling people that it's okay to eat carbs, I don't like calling anything good or bad. It's just you're not going to get as optimal results when you're eating processed carbohydrates full of canola oil and processed white flour and sugars. And that's not going to be the same experience of what I'm talking about. And the way I like to prioritize it is non starchy vegetables.

[00:30:21.470] – Tara

So the things that we actually kind of consider vegetables, right? Broccoli asparagus cauliflower have at it, because sometimes even keto, you have to actually limit that. For some people who are really sensitive, it's like, oh, you can have carrots again. You can have any vegetable you want, and that brings us into starchy vegetables. Right. So that's kind of the next step is like potatoes, sweet potatoes. If your gut can tolerate it, it depends on the person. But some people manage beans really well. Some people have sensitivities and can't have those things.

[00:30:50.600] – Tara

But if your body processes the well, go for it. Start eating more things from nature. And then my next on my list is fruits, you know, and you could alternate that you could put fruit up there with starchy vegetables to start eating fruits again. See how your body does see how you tolerate them. There's so much fear around these foods, especially in the keto world. It's like, don't eat bananas. I just saw a share the other day and it was like, oatmeal is unhealthy. And I'm like, no for some people, maybe, but not for everyone.

[00:31:20.100] – Tara

So question some of these dogmatic beliefs that you've gotten and look at the actual research if you want to, it's not there. We're taking something that might be true for some people and trying to make it true for everyone. And so that's like, it's something to be mindful of in the nutrition world right now in our information age. And also, I am not opposed to whole grains like quinoa. And so granted, if you have leaky gut, you don't want to be eating these things, they're probably going to exacerbate it, right.

[00:31:48.180] – Tara

If you don't cook your foods like this might affect it. Right. But if you look at the actual research, there's so much in support of some of these whole grains, even oatmeal, helping with cholesterol, helping with LDL levels, helping be heart protective. And I have to go so against my programming and the keto world to say stuff like this because we've been taught for so long. Like grains are bad, like beans are horrible. Definitely don't eat those. Don't eat bananas. Those are fake foods. And I'm like, I've come to a place in my journey where I'm like, if nature is allowing it to be grown and you ask your body, how does my body actually feel when I eat these things?

[00:32:29.060] – Tara

When I eat quinoa, I feel like, amazing. My body loves quinoa as you bring these things back in, start to experiment. How do I feel? Especially after kind of that two week mark is gone. And I bet for most of you, at least it's been most of my clients experience after a phase of keto when everything's regulated in the body and they start bringing these things back in and let go of their beliefs that it's hurting them, they start to feel really good.

[00:32:51.280] – Allan

Yeah. And that's what I like with your plan is that basically it's not this. Okay, turn the switch. And now I go carb crazy. It's okay. We're going to go in and we're going to have some spinach and we're going to have some broccoli and we're going to have some cauliflower and we're going to slowly introduce these vegetables and see how our body responds.

[00:33:11.970] – Allan

It might be a little hard. At first, you might not be digesting. It the way your body needs to, and you might be gassy feel a little bloated, but give it a shot, give it a legitimate shot. And then once you kind of adapt and your body is performing well with that, you can go to the next step saying, okay, I want some sweet potato, and it's not like you eat one whole sweet potato. You have a little bit of sweet potato with dinner and see how you feel.

[00:33:34.890] – Tara

I like how your plan is kind of putting that together in a structure. So there's not a whole lot of questions of okay, do I go out for Thanksgiving dinner and that be my break, my keto thing. No, you're not going to feel well if you do that.

[00:33:49.940] – Tara

Right. And the intention is if you slam on your gut and to your blood sugar, because keto is a restrictive diet, it is. And so sometimes there's an emotional component of, oh, my gosh. I think why people get stuck in it, possibly because they're like, I like this restriction because I don't trust myself to be not, like, off the rails. Once I do eat carbs and I'm trying to show a different way of, like, honoring…

[00:34:17.640] – Tara

The way I like to put it is this imagine that you're still keto with healthy carbs as part of keto. If you kind of look at it like that instead of just like, I'm going to eat whatever the freak I want. Pizza time, soda time. That's not it. It's still eating whole foods from nature. And I'm really just trying to help people get the experience of what it can feel like when you eat carbs to support healthy functions of your body. But not so many carbs that you go into a diabetic coma being theoretical. But you know what I mean, because that deters people from understanding what it can feel like to live a balanced life again after a phase of keto.

[00:34:54.750] – Allan

Right. And once again going back to the metabolic flexibility, you might find that your carb threshold has gone up substantially. And so whereas before, when you were insulin resistant, when you were obese and when you were really struggling, 25 grams was all you could handle. And when you start looking at what, 25 grams of carbs equates to it's almost no carbs that you're eating. And then you say, okay, now I'm going to push this up. And maybe now you're eating 50, you might find yourself still in ketosis most of the day if you're doing any measurements at all.

[00:35:28.080] – Allan

Some people I've seen particularly very fit, very athletic, moving people when they're doing a lot of movement, they're doing a lot of work cleaning out their glycogen stores and doing those types of things. They can eat 100-150 and still maintain ketosis most of the day.

[00:35:45.410] – Tara

Yeah. Even Dominic Agastino shared this. I think on I believe it was on Dave Asprey's podcast or maybe Joe Rogan or something. But he was saying that he eats about 150 grams of carbs a day, and he called it more ketogenic than ketosis. And I think what he means by that is he's helping to support some probably most of you. If you're keto nerds, you've heard there's parts of your brain that really want glucose. There are certain parts of your body that do want glucose. So you're supporting those organs, you're supporting those things.

[00:36:13.160] – Tara

But you're still active enough. I mean, Dom, like, he deadlifts, like 500 lbs. It's dude strong. Right. So just like you're saying, he's using that glycogen and then intermittent fasting so that he's able to go back into ketosis easily. And I think that's become my lifestyle. I probably eat, I would say, between 100 and 200 grams of carbs. I crush it in the gym every morning. I am like, scary, almost beast mode. And that's why I can do stuff. And then I pair that with intermittent fasting.

[00:36:39.960] – Tara

It's such an easy lifestyle, and you don't have to not have any carbs, which for me, especially someone like me who's athletic. It really limits for me that kind of intensity in the gym. Right. And so it can become an easier flow of life if you're willing to add some activity into your routine as well. But the less active you are, probably the less carbs you need, I'd say across the board for human beings.

[00:37:08.430] – Allan

Yeah. And that kind of goes to the next thing. I really haven't seen anybody else that's spent a lot of time talking about this. But part of the reason that you do want to make sure you're eating those non starchy vegetables and sometimes some starchy vegetables and definitely fruits is your neurotransmitters. They're basic components. And if you're just going strict keto for a long period of time, you're probably going to have some issues with your GABA and your dopamine and serotonin and those types of things which are going to affect your sleep.

[00:37:42.900] – Allan

They're going to affect how you feel. And when your body gets stressed. Now we're talking about adrenaline and things like that. So can you talk a little bit about those neurotransmitters? Because this is a conversation that a lot of people aren't having about why carbs are actually an important component of what we eat. We got to do it right with regards to how we process. But you'll know, it because your brain will turn on when you get the formula right.

[00:38:12.410] – Tara

Right. And I love talking about this. And thank you for asking, because there's such a lack of awareness of how much nutrition impacts our mental health. And so often I see people go into these blame and shame cycles of what's wrong with me. I don't know what's wrong with me. And I'm like, actually, okay. So you had something traumatic happen and you're sleepdeprived and you're sad and you've been keto. And maybe you don't even know you have a genetic predisposition for low serotonin. And so your serotonin is in the crapper.

[00:38:40.610] – Tara

And you're feeling so just down. And guess what? Actually eating carbs is smart. Your body is probably telling you to go eat some carbs because it's like, we need to get serotonin up. So you're not so sad, friend. And then people are like, I don't know what's wrong with me. I just don't have any willpower. And I'm like, hold on on. Let's look into this. So let me give some basic information. I'd say the biggest impact that keto has on certain air transmitters would be dopamine, serotonin and GABA.

[00:39:08.020] – Tara

So when your keto, your dopamine will be higher. So when you eat a diet that's mostly fat and protein, you're going to favor dopamine production. That's because tyrosine the building block of dopamine and tryptophan the building block of serotonin, they compete to get across the blood brain barrier. So if you're eating more fats and proteins, the tyrosine is going to win. You're going to be more dopamine or making more dopamine. And then if you are eating more carbs and protein as the majority of your diet, you'll favor serotonin production.

[00:39:40.390] – Tara

So what does this mean? If you are somebody who has really low dopamine and you go, keto, you may all of a sudden start. You may have a life changing experience on your mood. You're like, all of a sudden I'm driven and I'm making my dreams come true, and I'm nice to everybody and confident and like, wow! That's where I think a lot of the zealots of keto come from these deeper biological processes they're having. They don't understand. They're like, all I know is, I got better. Things got better. Like, I felt a lot better.

[00:40:13.430] – Tara

But let's say somebody has they already have good dopamine levels, but they have low serotonin, and then they go keto, and they get higher dopamine. But they might like that a little bit, but didn't really need it that much. But they needed a little bit of serotonin that they were getting. And now all of a sudden, it's dropped. And they're in a place where they are sad and crying a lot and just feeling really emotional. And then they're likely to put more pressure on themselves.

[00:40:37.940] – Tara

Come on. Why can't you just do this thing? And it's like, you need to know that there could be a biochemistry aspect to this process for you. And so I always honor people. I'm like, Listen, if you don't feel better on keto, and you've been doing it for, like, a month and you just don't feel better. It's okay to honor that it's not the only way to be healthy. You can also eat a balanced diet and exercise and get many of similar benefits.

[00:41:02.850] – Tara

And then GABA, I really like to share about. So ketone bodies have been found to be GABAergic. So what's GABA? GABA is like, the breaks on our brain. So a lot of people who are overthinkers, they just can't stop, can't stop, can't stop, can't stop. They may like being in a ketogenic state because that overthinking is usually indicative of, well, it can also be maybe you need to meditate and work on some things like that. But glutamate is a neurotransmitter that causes it's excitatory. It's like go go in our minds. And if that conversion, it turns into GABA.

[00:41:39.470] – Tara

So if it doesn't turn into the breaks in the brain, we're just like chronically obsessing over these little things. And it makes people feel crazy. And so ketone bodies can help increase your GABA levels and help that to stop. So that can be really enjoyable experience for some people. But if you already have good GABA levels, you're not going to feel that you're not going to really need that. I like to go into this in the book of some different things you might be feeling and experiencing on keto and why.

[00:42:10.500] – Tara

And then the last one will be adrenaline. This is something that honestly concerns me. Dr Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney did a study on this because a lot of people were concerned that keto might just be this high on ketones, might actually just be high on adrenaline, which feels great and helps you lose weight in the beginning. But over time it increases cortisol and can actually cause you to gain weight and have health problems. And so they showed that as long as you have adequate salt intake on keto, that you can offset the overproduction of adrenaline on keto.

[00:42:41.910] – Tara

But if you don't, which I say is pretty like you don't know exactly what your sodium levels are and what your needs are that day. So I get concerned about people who may not have adequate salt levels on keto, and they're going into this high adrenaline state for years on end, and that can cause problems in the long run. So just something to be aware of. I share all the details of that in the book, but the impact of our how are you feeling?

[00:43:07.020] – Tara

Are you really feeling better? Are you feeling kind of crazy? Are you feeling kind of like manic and overly busy or uber-confident? Too confident, like you don't care about anybody anymore. Maybe your dopamine is through the roof. I just like to create awareness of these things so people don't have this shame and stigma of what's wrong with me, and they actually have some understanding behind it.

[00:43:26.560] – Allan

And I think this speaks to when we say food is information. Movement is information. This is how it happens. It's the neurotransmitters. It's the hormones. All those things have to balance out. All those things have to work for you. And if you're out of balance because the food you're taking in isn't serving you or your movement patterns aren't serving you, then you're giving yourself bad information and your body is responding the only way it can.

[00:43:55.880] – Tara

Right

[00:43:56.810] – Allan

Doing these experiments getting out there and experiment of one. You know, you're the most important sample size there is. And just saying, I'm going to try this four-week plan and I'm going to find my carb-lite, keto and I'm going to get into keto. And then when I'm ready to come out, I'll follow this four week plan to reintroduce and really Journal and pay attention to your mood, pay attention to how your skin looks, how you feel, how your workouts. Like you said, if you start going beast mode in the gym, something good is happening.

[00:44:26.470] – Tara

Yeah. And sleep and digestion and all those things. I love that those are the questions I have as you go through that process. And ideally, it's a four-week plan. I'd love for you to make it like twelve weeks and do one week for a whole month. But be aware. And one of the cool things. And I'm sure you're aware of this with you all the time is you might not need as many carbohydrates after doing a phase of keto to give you that get up and go, which is kind of cool.

[00:44:54.440] – Tara

So you're exactly right. Please honor your body and what your body is asking for and give things time, though. One day you ate cupcakes yesterday. My body hates carbs. No. All right. Give yourself a little bit more time to experiment than that.

[00:45:09.900] – Allan

Tara, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be what are three strategies or tactics to get well?

[00:45:18.190] – Tara

Yes. Number one, sleep so big. I don't know how to say it, but you guys know you're worthy of sleep, right? Remember that. Nothing is more important than that. Everything in the body goes up when you have adequate sleep. And I think so many people are depressed and anxious because they literally just need sleep. And all those neurotransmitters I talked about the production all goes down if you don't have enough sleep, so biochemically, you're in a bad mood and that's hard to get out of. So sleep is, I'd say the core the key stone of wellness. It's the healer.

[00:45:50.950] – Tara

Next is having a consistent routine for success. Have a consistent routine. So it's not so hard all the time. Like, I got to get to the gym some time today. I got to figure out something healthy to eat at some point like that's very stressful. So you can eliminate this decision fatigue by having I have a morning routine. I have a consistent gym time with actual times on it. I have my clutch, go to meals and I have an evening routine. I have boundaries for myself. Right. And that is like it makes it so easy. Your body knows what to expect and you know what to expect, and then you just get in flow that gets you results.

[00:46:22.090] – Tara

And I'd say the last thing is showing up for yourself and having boundaries, saying no to things that you don't want to do, doing things that bring you joy, saying no to relationships that drag you down, spending time in relationships that nourish you. Like that. It's having happiness, like prioritizing kind of that inner child saying, I'm here for you and continuing to show up for yourself in a way that you need. I'd say between that having a flow of a fit, healthy lifestyle that you can stick with with ease, sleeping and nourishing your soul, it's good stuff.

[00:46:57.250] – Allan

Thank you for that. Tara, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, Short-Term Keto or the things you're doing, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:47:06.310] – Tara

You know what I would say? Go to my website, Taragarrison.com and you can click on the book link there because I am giving away my Top 100 Keto recipes for free with anybody who orders the books. So all the info for that is just right there. It's quick, easy, instant download because I want to make sure if you read the first chapter and you're like, wow, keto sounds really cool, and I actually want to try it and use Tara's recipes. I wanted to make sure people were supported on that. So my favorite Top 100 Keto recipes that I've used with clients and boot camps and all these things over the years are all condensed into that.

[00:47:35.460] – Tara

And then you can find links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all these websites where you can purchase the book.

[00:47:40.260] – Allan

Okay, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/518 and I'll be sure to have the links there. So, Tara, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:47:50.190] – Tara

Thanks so much for having me.

Post Show/Recap

[00:47:56.270] – Allan

Hey, Ras, welcome back.

[00:47:57.990] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, what a great interview. There's a lot I'd like to talk about, but why don't we start with the idea of using keto as a short term fix?

[00:48:06.410] – Allan

Yeah, most of the people in the keto space love keto and then therefore, it's the only way to eat. And the short of it is. And anyone that's listening to this podcast more than a week knows that I don't buy into that. I'm not into the dogma of there's only one way for you to eat. There's an optimal way for you to eat where you are right now, and there are certain things you probably want to accomplish that eating the right way for that is going to serve you better.

[00:48:40.910] – Allan

I can tell you from my experience, keto is the best way for me to drop body fat. If I try to do it any other way, I tend to overeat. I don't feel satiated, and I don't enjoy myself enough to stick with it. And then there's just shortcuts. I can't say, okay, I'm going to lose weight and continue to consume beer or bread or those types of things because my body just puffs up. Now. I love beer. Don't get me wrong. And I really am kind of fond of bread, but they don't serve my body, particularly if I'm trying to lose weight.

[00:49:16.550] – Allan

And so if I'm looking to try to lose body fat, I have to go rather strict with keto, but I also have in the back of my mind. Yes, it's not permanent, but it could be if it needed to be. And so the flipping back and forth, which I do as a part of what I call seasonal ketosis is really just that thing to say. Okay, if it's a good time for me to start cutting body fat, which I'll tell you right now, it is. I'm looking for that Tough Mudder in August, so I would love to be 25 lbs less when I do that run because it's that much less weight I have to carry.

[00:49:52.940] – Allan

Now, the weight service me well right now. And if I want to lift heavy and do the things I'm doing, walk and lift heavy, I'm fine. It doesn't cause me any issues at all. But if I want to do something intense and long like the Tough Mudder, I'm going to need to do make some changes to me physically, which includes losing some body fat to perform the way I want to perform for that. So keto is a great way to improve your health. It's an elimination diet, so strictly you're eliminating whole food groups. Yeah, you are.

[00:50:26.990] – Allan

But same thing. If you're a vegan, same thing, you're vegetarian, same thing. If you're a carnivore, all those ways of eating, you're eliminating something. Even if you do the FODMAP diet, even if you do the Mediterranean diet, you're eliminating certain foods. And so elimination is what diets are. Almost none of them are just eat what you're normally eating and just eat less of it, because everybody knows that doesn't work, right? I'm starving all the time and I'm craving foods. So the eating less and moving more by itself doesn't work.

[00:51:00.990] – Allan

You've got to find a structure to how you're eating that helps you feel satiated. That lets you eat less and have the energy to move more. But you can't start with the eat less move more model. You have to think about the foods that are serving you and then go from there.

[00:51:20.030] – Rachel

Absolutely. I thought that was the greatest part about this being a short-term fix is that it's just one test, really. It's one experiment to see how your body responds when you take certain foods out of your diet and add other foods back into it and see how you feel in response. And it's pretty quick that you'll see some changes. But just like she said, you don't have to live on it forever. Once you reach maybe your body composition goal that you're trying to get through, or once you get through your Tough Mudder, maybe you can reassess your relationship with carbs.

[00:51:56.690] – Rachel

which brought me to the next point was that let's talk about carbs because carbs are not all created equal. And like I've mentioned in the past, if anybody says carbs, I instantly think of a giant baguette of bread or the pastries we eat at breakfast. I always default to bread, but that's not all the carbs. That's not it.

[00:52:17.280] – Allan

No, because carbs are going to range everywhere from the leafy greens that have almost no real usable carb. It's fiber and water. Mostly you look at celery, and everybody will say, Well, that's almost a negative in the calories, because there's so much fiber to digest that and get it to chew it, you're almost burning more calories than you are eating. That's not entirely true, but it is full of water. And so from that perspective, to say that celery is the equivalent of potatoes is the equivalent of bread is the equivalent of Twinkies. It's just not true.

[00:53:00.040] – Allan

There's a whole range of them and how your body utilizes them. That's so different. And we talked to Dr. Yeo a week or so ago, and the basic principle is that fiber is not going to be digested by you. It's going to get all the way down deep into your small intestine before bacteria are going to start hitting at it. And then it gets into your large intestine. And that's where they're going to start doing their breakdowns and stuff. So the fiber is going to go all the way through you, and you're not technically going to get any calorie load from it.

[00:53:33.060] – Allan

You're going to feel full or longer because it's not being taken up. Whereas bread and sugar and the Coca Cola and stuff that you want to drink, those things are hitting your bloodstream almost immediately. They've been almost completely digested in some cases again, if they're processed, they've been digested before you even put them in your mouth because of the processing. And so when it hits your digestive tract, they become sugar in your system. And then there's an insulin response. And there's all the other things that go along with that.

[00:54:06.390] – Allan

Different carbs are going to work differently for you. And there was an Israeli study a few years back, and they put the long-term monitors and continuous monitoring of blood glucose that you see people with typically with type II diabetes and type I diabetes. They wear this so they can constantly be monitoring their blood sugar. And they had this thing set up to basically just continually just check their glucose, check their glucose, check their glucose. And then they said, when you get ready to eat something, whatever you want to eat, a banana, a baguette, as you said or anything like that, a donut.

[00:54:46.410] – Allan

Then you go ahead and just log what you ate when you ate it, and they would say, okay, well, one person's blood sugar would just shoot up when they ate a banana, and someone else's wouldn't. And then there's the other aspects of this. If you eat a green banana, like, really green, like, hard to open. It doesn't peel, you basically cut it. That's almost entirely non-digestible starch. It's almost all fiber, and it's basically a prebiotic that's going to feed your intestinal flora, your microbes in your intestine, because you're not going to digest that as sugar.

[00:55:26.920] – Allan

Now, if you let it get ripe, and now it's a yellow or slightly browning, it's a high dose of sugar. It's changed. Same thing with a potato. If you eat a raw potato, it's almost all nondigestible-fiber. If you thecook it and eat it, it's now something that's going to boost up your blood sugar relatively quickly. If you then refrigerate it and eat it later, you've now turned it into a resistant starch. So that's all with the potato.

[00:56:01.780] – Allan

So there's a lot of variation there in the foods that we eat. And there's a lot of variation in individuals. And really, the only way, you'll know, if the food is serving you or not is trial and error. And that's what's great about keto is keto is that elimination diet that takes you off of all of that. And the other thing that at least it was great with keto was that it was all whole foods, because before the keto was really a big thing, they didn't have all the keto snacks and the keto fake recipe stuff. I still want my pizza. So make a keto pizza, which is fine. Except now you're introducing some processed foods, even with the almond flour and the coconut flour and eating a lot of cheese. So if you have a dairy problem, that's just another thing where it might not serve you to be doing this.

[00:56:57.830] – Allan

That stuff didn't exist early on in this whole drive to keto. And I approached it from a paleo perspective. And I'm like well, my ancestors would not have eaten keto pizza. And so it's just those kind of things of saying, think about food as nourishment for your body. And if the food isn't serving you towards the goals that you have for your health and fitness, then it's not the right food for you.

[00:57:27.050] – Allan

And that's kind of the message that Tara came into this was she was a fit young person trying to be competitive and athletic and get stronger and have a certain body fat percentage. And those things were really important to her. And keto was a tool that got her to a point. And then she's like, well, I'm not getting there. And I know I'm doing it right because I have the right resources there's just something about keto that's not working for me right now. And she transitioned off of keto.

[00:57:57.010] – Allan

And then she got to her body composition level. She got stronger. And that's Tara, that's perfect for her. And if you're struggling with something, consider trying keto and see how it goes. You don't have to think of it as, oh, well, once I go on it, then I'm locked in for the rest of my life but you might get there like you have Rachel and say, this does actually serve me very well. This way of eating serves me very well.

[00:58:24.920] – Allan

And if I want a beer after a race, I'll have a beer. That works perfect for you. And for Mike.

[00:58:33.830] – Rachel

Yes, it does. That's our Mo. Mike has an iron gut, so he's able to eat more non keto foods, and I'm able to eat. But that's just it is that we do enjoy certain foods when we feel like we can do that. So a beer every now and then. That's fine. I'm actually going to be experimenting with the sweet potatoes. You had mentioned this to me before about baking them and refrigerating them and baking them again to make them more insulin resistant. That's something I'll be experimenting with as I get ready for my marathon coming up.

[00:59:10.300] – Allan

And I've heard it done mostly with white potatoes. So you might want to do a little bit of reading on that. I'm not sure if it's the sweet potatoes that do that same way because they are slightly different. They're a little less starchy than the white potatoes. So I haven't looked into the sweet potatoes. But if you do that, then report back what you learn about it, because that would be very interesting.

[00:59:31.250] – Rachel

Well, you know, I'd like to choose foods that have a little bit more punch, nutrient wise. And I feel like a sweet potato might have a few extra nutrients that I could probably use in my diet, whereas a plain white potato may not. But I'll definitely try both experiments.

[00:59:46.120] – Allan

You might be surprised if you start really looking into what's in the potato. Besides the insulin response for standard potato, there's still some good nutrients in the potato, so give it a shot.

[00:59:57.940] – Rachel

Yeah, I'll check into that and let you know.

[00:59:59.990] – Allan

All right, Ras, I guess I'll talk to you again next week, then.

[01:00:03.060] – Rachel

Sure. Take care.

[01:00:04.350] – Allan

You too.

[01:00:05.220] – Rachel

Thanks.

Patreons

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

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Thank you!

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Sponsor

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

Organifi is a line of organic superfood blends that offers plant based nutrition made with high quality ingredients. Each Organifi blend is science backed to craft the most effective doses with ingredients that are organic, free of fillers and contain less than 3g of sugar per serving. They won’t take you out of ketosis, if that’s your way of eating.

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Let's Say Hello

[00:04:08.440] – Allan

Hello, Ras. How are things?

[00:04:10.480] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:04:12.450] – Allan

I'm doing all right. I've been kind of busy with the challenge. We're doing the Crush the Holidays challenge. That's been a ton of fun. I kind of push myself outside my comfort zone, doing daily videos. I've never done that before. I've done daily audios, and I'm very comfortable behind the microphone, recording and doing my thing. But then when I have to think about how does the lamp behind me look? Because one of you is OCD and had to bring up, like, fix the lamp for the love of God.

[00:04:44.830] – Rachel

Oh, goodness.

[00:04:47.470] – Allan

But it's been good. It's been a good opportunity for me to push myself a little bit outside the comfort zone that I had, and it's pushing the others. It's one of the things as we get into the holidays, it's just really easy to just say, okay, I'm on the coast for this last six weeks of the year, and then January, I'm going to hit it. But you just lost six weeks to do something different. And so they're doing things different. They're really thinking through the mindset parts of fitness and health, and they're setting plans.

[00:05:20.530] – Allan

They're setting structure. They're building habits now that will serve them tenfold next year. So I'm really excited about the people that are going through the challenge. And then, yeah, what I'm going to do is in January, I'm going to launch a new program because I had a twelve week program and it was a really good program. Don't get me wrong. I love it. But what I found was that that's a long time to be coaching someone on mindset. And so I'm working to compress that into a six week program.

[00:05:50.310] – Allan

I'm going to call Win at Weight Loss and launch that in January. So if you're interested in learning about my weight loss program, it's guarantee. It's money back guarantee. We're going to talk about mindset a lot. There'll be some standard workouts and things like that that you can do depending on what your fitness goals are. We're going to really dive in deep to what makes us overeat what makes us bend, what makes us go off plan. And what are all those saboteur things that we do and other people do that keep us from losing the weight that we deserve to lose.

[00:06:22.690] – Allan

So if you're interested in that, go to 40Plusfitness.com/win. Again, that's not 40PlusFitnesspodcast. It's 40plusfitness.com/win. W-I-N and you'll see a little form there you can fill out to get on the waiting list, and then we can have a conversation and see if this program is right for you.

[00:06:42.970] – Rachel

That sounds awesome. Sounds like a fun program.

[00:06:45.570] – Allan

Yeah. And I'm so excited with the Facebook group. It's going to the challenges, the weekly challenges and the different things that we're doing in there. I'm going to be posting more excerpts, clips, video clips. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be recording an interview with, say, Tony Horton or all these other guys like, we're going to talk about Thomas DeLauer today, you'll be able to see clips of them on the doing parts of the interview. That kind of what I call the highlights. I'm going to be posting those clips in the Facebook group.

[00:07:18.090] – Allan

So if you're interested in seeing those clips and kind of connecting more with what we're doing here on the podcast, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group. And that'll take you to our Facebook group and request entry. As long as you're cool, you can be a member.

[00:07:34.810] – Rachel

Nice.

[00:07:36.430] – Allan

Well, there's some people who decide to not be cool and they decide they want to sell you their services or they want to show you some things that aren't really in our realm, and it's fine. There are groups for that. There's people that are interested in that. But that's not what we do. What we do is encourage you. We give you guidance and help you. And it's a very supportive, active community for individuals that are looking to lose weight, get fit. And knowing that being over 40, we got to do it a little bit differently than we did when we were kids.

[00:08:12.330] – Rachel

Yeah, it's a great group, that's for sure.

[00:08:14.950] – Allan

So what about you? What have you been up to?

[00:08:17.650] – Rachel

Trying to get my head screwed on tight as we close out this year? I can't believe the year is just about over.

[00:08:25.330] – Allan

Yeah, it's going quick. And that's what I'm saying for a lot of people to take six weeks off and they just look at it and say, it's Thanksgiving and then it's Christmas, and then it's New Year, and it happens like that. So this is not taking some time right now to get into your head and have the right conversations about mindset, things that have held you back in the past and how you're going to do things differently and starting now doing those things differently rather than waiting until January 1st.

[00:08:58.450] – Allan

If you're going to join a gym, you think you're going to join gym. I know that's not for everybody, but do it now. Don't wait till January 1st when the gyms are just packed with people and you're just a number coming through the Turnstall. Go in there. Now, get familiar, get with the trainer, learn how the equipment works and then do your thing. But don't wait because you're losing an opportunity, losing days, and it just drives me crazy.

[00:09:24.120] – Rachel

Yeah, exactly. I'm already planning out my next year. I've got a couple of races on the calendar, so just doing my homework right now so that I can start the year off with a bang.

[00:09:35.960] – Allan

Good. Excellent.

[00:09:36.950] – Rachel

Good stuff.

[00:09:38.110] – Allan

All right. Well, you're ready to have this conversation with Thomas on Mineral Deficiencies?

[00:09:43.040] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:10:06.850] – Allan

Thomas, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:10:09.910] – Thomas

Thanks for having me, Allan.

[00:10:11.210] – Allan

Now, I've actually been following you for a number of years, watching some of your stuff at this point on YouTube, you have nearly 2.9 million subscribers, which is over half the size of the country I live in and nearly 1800 hundred videos. So I think if someone sat down and sat down and tried to watch your whole library, it would probably take them about a year to do it, assuming they slept 8 hours a night. So it's a lot of stuff a lot.

[00:10:41.450] – Thomas

And I usually tell people if they're first coming to my channel and saying, like, hey, just go easy. Don't binge a bunch of videos because it's just going to you're going to lose your mind. This is way too much and definitely start small.

[00:10:55.170] – Allan

But no. But the point is you have a library now. And so someone has a question around keto, around minerals, around a lot of different things. You're worth going and checking out because you're probably going to have a video on it and it's going to be very informative and it's quick. It's not a 30 minutes or an hour long video. It's 9-10 minutes, eight minutes, whatever minutes it needs to be, and you just boil it down and it's very well done. And the information is there. The research is there.

[00:11:27.240] – Allan

So again, really good stuff. I appreciate the opportunity to have you here.

[00:11:31.750] – Thomas

Thank you. And it's awesome to just be able to have a good conversation rather than just talking to a camera.

[00:11:37.060] – Allan

Yeah, I get it. We talk about minerals, and I think everybody generally knows minerals are a micronutrient of food that we get from various things we eat, and if we don't get enough of them, sometimes our body lets us know. Sometimes it doesn't, but we don't perform well. We don't feel well, if we're not nourished, and part of nourishment is making sure that we have adequate minerals. What got you so interested in mineral deficiencies?

[00:12:11.410] – Thomas

The first thing that got me really into it was magnesium just flat out. I just started reading a lot of the research on magnesium, how I stumbled across that. I don't even remember how I stumbled across so much the initial research there. But that's what fascinated me. And with magnesium, which I know we'll get into some more depth, but it opened up so many different cans of worms because I found that, wow one mineral deficiency leads to another one chelates, another, too much of this one leads to not enough of this one or too much to this one.

[00:12:42.930] – Thomas

And it was like, this never ending thing. It was just like, oh, my gosh. Mineral balance is so important. So I kind of became a little bit obsessed. If you want to call that, I ended up on the clinical advisory board for some magnesium groups. And there's some studies, Scottsdale magnesium study. And then from there, it was like, okay, I'm sitting in this magnesium world. Maybe this is a little bit biased for me to only be focusing so much on magnesium. So then from there, that kind of branched into.

[00:13:10.420] – Thomas

Okay, well, what about sort of the ugly duckling of the bunch? Let's talk about zinc and potassium. I just realized that as far as low hanging fruit, for what people can do for quicker optimization, better ultimate brain performance, minerals really are that they are a low hanging fruit that you can feel almost immediately with micronutrients such as vitamins, those kinds of micronutrients, you might feel a deficiency, but it's going to take a little while to fix it. You're not going to go and think, okay. I must hypothetically say, deficient in vitamin C, load up on vitamin C.

[00:13:45.360] – Thomas

It's going to take days for you to kind of recoup that minerals. It's one of those things where if you're deficient and you're having an issue within seconds of taking that mineral in, the issue, I don't want to say is resolved, but it's on its way to becoming resolved. And I just love that for someone who has a short attention span like myself.

[00:14:00.800] – Thomas

It was like, this is cool.

[00:14:03.790] – Allan

Yeah. And I think magnesium, as important as it is, is actually a mineral we don't talk about a lot. We talk about sodium getting too much, getting too little. Someone starts to get a little bit of a cramp as they're running and media is like, eat avocados, eat some bananas, get your potassium up. But magnesium actually plays maybe one of the biggest roles in our body's function, including cramps. Why is it so important?

[00:14:34.270] – Thomas

First of all, we used to say it's involved in, quote, over 350 different enzymatic functions within the body. Well, now that's looking to be more like 650 to 700, and it's probably growing. Like magnesium is, it is what's called a cofactor. So it is either directly involved or indirectly involved in different enzymatic reactions, which just means all kinds of different cellular processes within the body, also involved in different gene expression, meaning allowing us to literally live up to our genetic potential. Also find that it's one of the minerals that we are most efficient in as a human population, not just in any one region of the world, but in general.

[00:15:11.560] – Thomas

So that really just illuminates the issues that we face with it. And so being that it's a mineral that we are generally pretty deficient in, there's a lot of research surrounding it. So is it the most important? Maybe, maybe not. But when you look at the data because it is the most abundant in terms of that data, it certainly looks like it is.

[00:15:34.810] – Allan

So how would I know that I was deficient in magnesium?

[00:15:38.950] – Thomas

The way that I usually describe it is the first one is kind of vague. Okay, lower energy. Magnesium is absolutely critical for the formation of what is called ATP, which I know you talk about on your show a lot. But ATP adenosine triphosphate, what ultimately is the energy currency within our body without ATP cannot function. It is required for the formation of ATP. So without magnesium, we slow down the production of ATP. One of the first things you feel, which, again, is vague, is fatigue, general fatigue.

[00:16:12.290] – Thomas

And you find that. Okay, my brain just isn't firing the way that it should be. I feel like my muscles aren't contracting the way they should be. I just feel generally sluggish, although, again, that's such a vague one it's hard to really describe. So one of the other ones I talk about is if you feel like you're more reactive and almost more stressed than you ordinarily would be, that can sometimes be an acute sort of symptom of deficiency in magnesium. Or it can even be a more chronic, longer term thing.

[00:16:40.580] – Thomas

I like to recognize it as more of an acute thing, because if it's happening out of the norm, it's one of the first things that you can recognize. Personally, I'll give kind of my own anecdotal thing. I'm already a fairly high strung guy. It's just how I'm pretty wired. But if I notice that I'm over the top anxious or over the top stressed, and I like to use the example of, like, when you're driving down the freeway and you're going a little bit too fast and you catch a cop out of the corner of your eye and you get that quick surge of what feels like almost six stomach acid going into your stomach and you're like, oh, no, wasn't going too fast.

[00:17:15.910] – Thomas

If you find yourself having those kind of instances multiple times per day, that's very strong indicator that magnesium should be playing a factor there, because it's such an important role with NMDA receptors. And kind of what allows a stress response to actually hit a muscle and more than just the muscle, but the rest of our body, too. So that's a big one. And then aside with that goes right in line with sleep. Having trouble sleeping, again, magnesium is critical for what's called GABA gamma aminobutyric acid, which is like the cycle of the brain that we need to be more relaxed, to be able to sleep and to be able to get that restorative sleep that we need.

[00:17:55.070] – Thomas

So if you find really those well, the one other one we can add in there is muscle cramping, but that's going to be one that again, as we discuss a little bit more, I think we'll see come up a couple of times, so it's hard to pinpoint. But what I will say is if you're cramping in the middle of the night, not during a workout or not during an activity that's usually more indicative of a magnesium cramp versus a potassium cramp, which we'll talk a little bit more about.

[00:18:22.260] – Allan

Yes. And one of the other symptoms I see with a lot of my clients when we start talking about their magnesium intake is when they have difficulty going to the bathroom. So if you find yourself a little constipated, actually, Magnesia the medicine that you would get over the counter to clear that up. It's magnesium. Pretty good dose of it.

[00:18:42.370] – Thomas

Yeah, without a doubt.

[00:18:43.910] – Allan

So beyond what are the ways? Because if we're not getting it from the food we typically eat, is this something we need to supplement with when we notice these things? Or other different foods, we could be choosing to get a better mix of magnesium in our diet?

[00:18:59.300] – Thomas

Yeah. So magnesium is one of these, it's quite difficult to get a copious amount of it from food. I shouldn't say that you can get it from food, but what ends up happening is for people, we'll post little infographics on Instagram top magnesium rich foods. 1oz of almonds has X number of milligrams of magnesium. How many almonds you would have to eat to actually get an adequate amount would put you at eating three 4000 calories of almonds. So you have to kind of weigh these things out.

[00:19:33.390] – Thomas

I would say by far the best food source of magnesium is going to be like dark leafy Greens, Collard Greens, bok choy is really the deep leafy Greens. So the more dark green that you can get, the better. However, it is one of those supplements that I feel like because our soil is so just deprived of minerals now, like our soil is just not nearly as rich in minerals as it used to be even 50 years ago. I don't like recommending supplements. I mean, I will preface that like it's not who I am.

[00:20:03.230] – Thomas

I don't like to say, hey, just go take a pill. But magnesium is one of those that makes my list of always in my backpack, always going with me. And remember that the more muscle you have the more magnesium you oxidize because it's heavily churning in the muscle tissue, and I'm a relatively heavily muscle guys. So I know that how much magnesium I need is different from what my wife might need or different from what a sedentary individual might need. So you kind of have to find your tolerable upper intake and got some ways to kind of determine that.

[00:20:36.360] – Thomas

We can talk about it if you want, but generally, yes, I would recommend supplementing it.

Sponsor

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

Organifi is a line of organic superfood blends that offers plant based nutrition made with high quality ingredients. Each Organifi blend is science backed to craft the most effective doses with ingredients that are organic, free of fillers and contain less than 3g of sugar per serving.

In our 24/7 always on world, going without sleep seems to carry a badge of honor. But that’s not how your body sees it. Sleep is when all the wonderful things happen inside your body. Hormones reset, and healing and restoration happens. You know how much better you feel after a good night’s sleep. Getting good quality sleep is a priority for me

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[00:22:24.870] – Allan

Zinc is another one that is, I'm not going to say under discussed, but it's just something that we again when you get into talking about minerals because there's so many of them, it's one of those that I think is actually underrated. It's much more important than we give it credit for. And if you're not eating certain foods, you probably aren't getting enough.

[00:22:48.130] – Allan

Why is zinc so important?

[00:22:50.550] – Thomas

Zinc is yeah, I will agree with you that it's very underrated. Zinc is, wow. We're seeing that it's imperative for testosterone function in men and also how it can have testosterone be received by a receptor, which I'll explain in a second. Very important for the immune system. Very important when it comes down to reactive oxygen species kind of regulation. So antioxidant kind of regulation within the body. It's sort of this mystery mineral, right. We're slowly discovering more and more ways that it is applicable to daily life.

[00:23:23.970] – Thomas

The amount of zinc that we store in the cerebral cortex portion of our brain is pretty phenomenal. Normally, you see minerals kind of spread throughout different regions of the brain, not evenly, but just fairly dispersed with zinc is for the most part almost all in the cerebral cortex, which is our area of higher thinking, like the hippocampus. That's very indicative of. Okay, clearly, we're seeing zinc is involved in some levels of higher cognitive thought, right? Just higher, just levels of thinking, spatial working memory, everything like that.

[00:23:58.190] – Thomas

So just starting to scratch the surface. One of the things that I think is the most fascinating about zinc. And unfortunately, you have to kind of tread lightly with how you talk about this, but it's relationship with the immune system. There are these things called the granulocytes. And these are types of immune cells that when you first have a pathogenic, bacteria or anything, a pathogen of some kind entering in your body, these types of immune cells immediately go and they sort of engulf it. They engulf the pathogen.

[00:24:24.540] – Thomas

Well, then, the next step, what people don't always understand is that the next step involves reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress, which normally we think of as a bad thing. But when we're sick or we're dealing with something, we need a certain degree of that to come in and actually fight the infection. So essentially, zinc is playing a huge role in regulating the reactive oxygen species from coming in and attacking the pathogenic bacteria. When I say regulating it actually puts a ceiling on how much reactive oxygen species we actually sort of create.

[00:25:00.930] – Thomas

So, for example, let's say I had an infection of some kind. Okay, that infection comes in. These immune cells go and they attack it. Then the secondary response is okay, we'll trigger some forms of reactive oxygen species to go attack it. Well, without zinc, the body might just create a bunch of reactive oxygen species to just attack it. It's like putting a nuclear bomb on something that you might have just needed a. 22 caliber rifle for. So then you're getting this huge inflammatory response, huge attack on the body that you didn't need.

[00:25:31.450] – Thomas

So zinc puts that ceiling. So it helps corral the immune system, because what people don't often realize is the symptoms you feel when you get sick. That is your immune system doing the job. And the more symptoms that you have a lot of times, it's an over activity of the immune system. That's just my favorite characteristic of zinc, because people don't think about it like that. They don't think about the fact that this reactive oxygen species is normally touted as a terrible thing. Actually, when controlled is a very good thing.

[00:26:01.290] – Allan

Yeah. Just for the record, typically, when I'm in the United States, I will take zinc from the perspective of eating a lot of oysters. I love raw oysters, and I eat oysters practically every day when I can get them in the United States. But I'm not in the United States right now. So my regular regiment is to take a ZMA, which is zinc magnesium each night before I go to bed. Helps me sleep, keeps me regular. And then the zinc, just really like you said, kind of makes me wake up just feeling just a little bit more aware, not going to say it's like the adaptogens and some of the other things that you can take.

[00:26:40.440] – Allan

But I feel a lot better when I'm on a ZMA regiment.

[00:26:45.370] – Thomas

Yeah, without a doubt, it's definitely noticeable. And when you're looking at people that are over the edge of 40, especially, there are two angles in which zinc is super fascinating. For one, there was a study just specifically looking at serum testosterone levels. So they found that, okay, if you took older individuals that were deficient or sorry, not deficient, but they were lower levels of testosterone and were deficient in zinc when they gave them zinc, then their testosterone levels went up tremendously. I think it was it went from 8.3 nm per deciliter up to 16.

[00:27:21.370] – Thomas

So we're looking at almost double in a zinc deficient group. Okay. That's not saying that someone that has adequate levels of zinc can go and take zinc and explore their testosterone levels. But saying that someone that is older that is suffering from possible low T that is deficient in zinc. If they supplement with zinc, they can see a pretty tremendous increase in their testosterone levels, which is so important as we get over the age of 40 for multiple reasons, mainly just retaining muscle mass and preventing sarcopenia and the muscle wasting that just naturally starts to happen after, like, age 35.

[00:27:51.900] – Thomas

The other piece is it works in tandem with helping or calledergic receptors, which can accept the testosterone. So it's increasing the affinity of the receptor for the testosterone. I always say, what good are a bunch of cars and trucks driving on the freeway if there's no exits, right. Like if there's no exits and they're just constantly circulating, they're never able to get anywhere. They're just circulating testosterone is that way too, right. What good is a high level of testosterone if there's no exit, if there's no ability for it to leave and actually bind to a receptor.

[00:28:25.130] – Thomas

So increasing the affinity of a receptor, which zinc has the ability to do that is, in my opinion, arguably more powerful than increasing your testosterone levels. I'd rather have some moderately low testosterone, but a high affinity than high testosterone with a low affinity.

[00:28:41.880] – Allan

Yeah. And then there's a reason why they call oysters the Viagra of the sea. It actually happens. Yes. It's a real thing.

[00:28:53.250] – Allan

Another mineral that I think is really important. And, of course, it's a personal story, but it's potassium. I was training really hard, and I said, okay, I'm going to really get clean with my diet, really get clean with everything. And so I was drinking a lot of water, and I was in a very humid area, very warm. And so I was sweating a lot.

[00:29:17.920] – Allan

I was working out a lot. I was drinking a lot of water, got on an airplane for 26 hours, so very dry environment got home, didn't feel so good. The second day, I'm in the hospital and I go into the hospital and the doctor is like, well, you're dehydrated and you have low potassium and low sodium. In fact, your potassium is so low that you're really close to going into a coma. If we hadn't put you on this IV, salient IV, we could have lost you.

[00:29:50.050] – Allan

And I walked into the hospital, and this could have happened. Why is it so important for us to keep our potassium at some level, our sodium balanced and where it needs to be? I tend to run low. So every time I go in to get a blood test, I do check this and pay very particular attention to it. But I have to be very cognizant of how I feel. And if I start feeling a little woozy, I'm immediately hitting some salt and some no salt to kind of make sure I get these minerals.

[00:30:19.090] – Allan

Can you talk a little bit about why these are so important?

[00:30:21.490] – Thomas

Yeah, well, you just nailed it right there. It's the first indicator. We got to think about our brains for a minute. We think about our nervous system. And a lot of times people think, okay, my spinal cord and my nerves to my extremities. Okay, cool. The largest network of nerves neurons is in your brain. Right. So you're going to feel nervous system affects in your brain more than anything. And I always like to kind of lead off with that, because a lot of times people are feeling cognitively just down and just really run down.

[00:30:50.780] – Thomas

They got perfect sleep. Everything's in line. Why am I feeling like this? Why am I feeling foggy? The first thing I say is increased sodium and potassium, because what's happening is you have this sodium potassium pumps that are explained like a slingshot. This is a podcast, so usually I can have cool little images that pop up on my videos. But think of it like a slingshot. When you are sending what's called an action potential, the potential to create energy or create a movement. Let's say, like the literal thought of me to  thinking, I want to lift this rock up.

[00:31:23.510] – Thomas

Okay, well, that whole concept starts in the brain obviously starts with the signal to eventually move my hand to pick up the rock. Well, that's a series of what are called action potentials. Just like the name implies, the potential to make an action. Well, this travels down the nerve. It eventually goes to calcium channels and all this to ultimately move a muscle. But the simplicity of it is this, you have sodium that enters a cell and that sodium enters a cell and then potassium. That gate closes and then a different gate opens and potassium rushes out of a cell.

[00:31:53.640] – Thomas

And you have this constant changing of a sodium potassium gradient. And it is that constant changing of sodium entering into a cell and potassium releasing it. Sodium entering into a cell and potassium releasing it into an Axon that is ultimately sending that signal. Think of potassium like a slingshot. The sodium going into the cell is what is actually sending the signal. It's conducting the electricity. The sodium is like the electricity that sodium enters into a cell. But without potassium, you don't have a slingshot to pull the sodium back and kind of release it into the next cell.

[00:32:30.220] – Thomas

Okay. So that sodium and potassium relationship is so unbelievably important. And if you're deficient in potassium, what happens when you're just bombarding the cell with a bunch of sodium conducting a bunch of electricity? First of all, you're going to cramp because you don't have the release from the potassium, pulling the sodium or allowing the sodium to leave again and allowing it to go into the next phase. But you're also just left with this basically electrically charged situation. That's a huge problem. And that happens against peripherally like, our muscles and everything like that.

[00:33:05.260] – Thomas

But it's happening in our brain, too. But our brain doesn't cramp. Not literally. But what will happen in our brain is we'll just end up with this disrupted signal from that sodium potassium pump, and that's just disengaging the whole circuit from working. So all of a sudden your brain just fogs up and you feel really just weak and kind of lame, like you just don't feel like you can really have good thought. You can't articulate very well. And some of those things we're taking in some potassium or a little bit of salt with some potassium right then and there can almost instantaneously make you feel better.

[00:33:39.030] – Thomas

Salt is so important along with potassium, because they counterbalance each other. Right. So one of the symptoms of having low potassium is sensitivity to salt, because potassium is regulating that fluid balance inside and outside of the cell. If you're deficient in potassium and you're overrun with sodium, then what's happening is you don't have that balance. So when you do have more sodium, it's affecting the potassium to sodium ratio. You're only going to really develop fluid retention issues and the bloating and the facial bloating and stuff that occurs with sodium.

[00:34:13.620] – Thomas

If you are also deficient in potassium, people get afraid of sodium because I don't want to be puffy. I don't want to retain water this and that I'm worried about becoming hypertensive and full disclaimer, if you are actually hypertensive, then yes, sodium does play a role in that.

[00:34:30.300] – Thomas

Okay. But if you're a normal, healthy individual, it does not. So that's the big disclaimer there. If you are hypertensive, then yes, you do need to monitor sodium. But in a normal, healthy individual, large majority of the population, you could usually add some sodium and not have a bunch of water retention as long as potassium levels are adequate. So you'll notice if they have a bunch of salt and you're sensitive to that salt that's usually an indicator that your sodium potassium ratio is a little bit off. To go on,

[00:34:58.940] – Thomas

I mean, basically, if you're cramping during an activity, it's almost invariably a potassium issue, not a magnesium issue. So that cramp will tell you right then and there you need potassium more than anything.

[00:35:09.550] – Allan

Yeah. And if you just throw water at it, that's going to wash out some of the potassium you have existing and a lot of the sodium, and you're going to potentially put yourself in a bad fix. So don't just drink water thinking you're fixing a cramp problem. Yes, you may be dehydrated, but you need those minerals as well.

[00:35:28.200] – Thomas

Definitely. And remember that the more sodium that you have in your body as well, the more that you're going to retain these other important minerals, because sodium is the one that's really the determining factor of how much we urinate and how much we keep and how much we lose. So if you're deprived of sodium, then you're going to lose other minerals, too, because you're going to be urinating more because there's less to hold on to. It's less awesome. So things are just flowing through you. And with that urine stream, you're not just losing sodium. You're losing everything else, too.

[00:36:00.450] – Allan

Why is chromium so important?

[00:36:02.730] – Thomas

Chromium is important in a lot of different pathways, but the one that is most relevant probably to many people, as far as the metabolism is concerned, is simply for what's called GLUT4 translocation, for allowing glucose to get into a cell better. So it's chromium. There are multiple studies that demonstrate that in an insulindependent fashion, it allows glucose that is in the bloodstream to get into a cell better, because chromium allows that GLUT4 to go from the nucleus of the cell out to the outer membrane of a cell.

[00:36:37.660] – Thomas

So what that means is this thing called GLUT4 that lives inside of our cells is kind of like a big net. And normally that GLUT4 is living inside of a cell. But when it sees glucose in the bloodstream or insulin, it magically goes to the outside of a cell, and it catches the glucose in the bloodstream like a big net. Well, in most people these days, especially people over the age of 40, with mitochondrial dysfunction and levels of insulin resistance, that doesn't happen quite as much.

[00:37:04.370] – Thomas

That sleepy GLUT4 just kind of hangs out in the cell and doesn't translocate to the membrane. Well, that's a problem, because that means you're going to have high circulating blood glucose. You're also not getting energy into the cell. So the cells sort of deprived and the cells kind of running into an issue. Chromium increases that transportation. So it helps that GLUT4 get to the outside of a cell membrane quite easier. So then you can absorb that glucose better. There's also a bunch of just interesting data when it comes down to there's a study that's published in the Journal of nutritional neuroscience that found that same kind of thing in the brain like it helps the brain against what's called brain insulin resistance.

[00:37:42.960] – Thomas

That same thing where we have high levels of glucose that are circulating through the brain that aren't getting taken up by the cells. So then you're left with a highly oxidative situation in the brain where if you start getting granular with it, I mean, it could be an indicator of all kinds of different cognitive impairment that happens as we get older, not to mention mitochondrial dysfunction, like the cells within the brain are not able to utilize the fuel as efficiently. And when the cells don't utilize fuel efficiently, you're creating a lot of let's just simply call it waste, right?

[00:38:16.570] – Thomas

It's like if you have a very efficient vehicle that is driving down the highway using all of its fuel with very little waste, you have efficiency. Quite the opposite in a vehicle that has fouled out plugs and just isn't working right, then you're having a lot of waste. Well, the more brain waste we have, so to speak, the more oxidative damage we have in the brain, which can definitely lead to some cognitive decline. So most of my interest with chromium comes from the carbohydrate metabolism piece.

[00:38:43.350] – Thomas

My own opinion is that much of the metabolic decline we see after the age of 40 in all kinds of different situations is a result of just that of that mitochondrial dysfunction where mitochondria has a hard time getting energy in insulin resistance, literal deformations and mutations in the mitochondria that are just inhibiting it from actually doing something normally. It's like an entire thing. I do generally recommend people that are over the age of even any age, really. But over the age of 30, I'm a huge fan of taking NMN as well, which we can kind of have a Sidebar conversation on, but just in terms of mitochondrial support, energy metabolism and just kind of maintaining that integrity so to speak, of the mitochondria.

[00:39:32.040] – Allan

The way I like to think about it, because the mitochondria are the engines of each cell. It's like putting sugar in the gas tank. It's just not going to work well, it's not going to go well. And we're doing that every day. If we're not managing our blood sugar, managing our insulin sensitivity. And these minerals obviously play a part in that. So it's very important to make sure you're in a good mineral balance. Now, there's one mineral that a lot of people over the age of 40 start to really care about because they get osteoporosis or osteopenia.

[00:40:02.030] – Allan

And the doctors like you're losing bone density. And a lot of people say, okay, well, I need to start taking calcium, but you mentioned in one of your videos, why that might not be a good strategy as far as supplementation to supplement with calcium. Can you talk about that? And what are the things that we should be considering with regards to bone health.

[00:40:22.240] – Thomas

Yeah. I will say first and foremost, the American Heart Association had published a study that took a look at over 5000 people in this particular case, and they found that generally supplementing with calcium was not necessarily beneficial. In fact, it was actually detrimental, especially when you look at coronary artery and calcium scores and things like that. So when you're looking at overall heart health, circulatory health, things like that, I caution you tremendously with taking a calcium supplement, we do not generally find ourselves deficient in calcium. That is not a common problem.

[00:40:55.140] – Thomas

The osteoporosis piece is absolutely a real deal, but that's more about calcium getting into the right place, right? That's more about shuttling calcium into the bone, which is more of a vitamin D3 K2 issue more than anything. So if you're concerned with that, I would highly suggest vitamin D three or getting out in some sun and supplementing some vitamin K2. So it's going through the proper pathways of storing in the bone, because what happens when you take a calcium supplement is it's not like it's just magically going into the bone, it's circulating and calcium and magnesium actually oppose each other.

[00:41:27.720] – Thomas

So you're in a kind of a constant balance between magnesium and calcium. And if you have too much calcium, you're counteracting magnesium and you find yourself in this excitatory state where your muscles are contracted and where you're having much more excitability in the neurons. And you really want to keep that at bay. That's not a good thing. It's not a good thing for the heart. It's not a good thing for the muscles, not necessarily a good thing for the nervous system. So magnesium is much more important in that game than calcium.

[00:41:55.720] – Thomas

And again, with our diet, you really do seldom come across diets that are really deficient in calcium these days. We usually do get enough in, so it's not like you find out. Okay, I've got a certain degree of osteoporosis, and I'm going to go and start drinking a bunch of milk or start taking a calcium supplement. That's probably not going to help you out too much there. I just caution people with that. It's much more important to patients in the vitamin D, much more important to pay attention to the magnesium and just get good amounts of calcium from the diet rather than an exorbitant amount from a supplement.

[00:42:29.280] – Allan

Yes. And the thing I would add is if you really want your body to know what you need it to do, exercise. Do resistance training. Resistance training is going to turn on the building of bone in your body. It's going to build bone density as you get stronger as you increase the weight and the resistance. And so if your doctor tells you you have a problem, osteopenia, resistance training and a proper healthy diet are going to be your best bets.

[00:42:59.070] – Thomas

Absolutely. And it's also going to highlight deficiencies a lot faster too. So in terms of being able to showcase OK, well, maybe I'm deficient in potassium. Maybe I'm deficient in magnesium. When you start kind of up regulating the oxidation of these minerals, then you can really. They rear their ugly heads a lot more. Like you mentioned, you run low on potassium. I'm the same way. I don't know if I would know that if I wasn't working out regularly because it highlights it. I know I'm a big cramper. It's a big problem for me.

[00:43:29.100] – Allan

It highlights it. Absolutely does.

[00:43:34.290] – Allan

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

[00:43:42.420] – Thomas

Well, so I'll give you a couple that are like pragmatic and then I'll give you one that's a little bit more cheesy, which doctor. First one is stop eating after 06:37 p.m. One of the simplest things advice is that I can give people. Not only is it going to probably reduce your caloric intake because you'd be surprised at how much you eat just after dinner or even just. But as far as sleep is concerned, since having two small kids, I have really learned proper sleep hygiene is one of the most important things and the biggest lever that you can pull with sleep hygiene and ultimately body composition and mental health is really not eating a couple of hours before you go to bed.

[00:44:25.810] – Thomas

That is just such a big thing and kind of to double up on that. What I usually recommend is breakfast like a King, lunch like a Prince, dinner like a Popper where you're slowly decreasing the amount of food you're eating as the day goes on. Bigger breakfast, moderate side lunch, relatively small dinner. Then stop cold Turkey 06:37 p.m. You will find your sleep on set is much better. The next one is one that not everyone has access to, but it's something that if you can't use a sauna, you can take a very hot bath and get a similar effect.

[00:44:58.770] – Thomas

I found that especially on days I can't really get a good workout in or I feel maybe stiff sore, I'm just achieve and a good workout isn't going to play in, utilizing a sauna as what's called a hormetic stressor has been the most life changing thing for me. It really has. Someone that's battled with sleep issues, someone that's battled with stress, anxiety, depression. It's such a huge thing for me. There's multiple studies, obviously the finished studies. There's tons of them. It's huge in Finland. I could quote a bunch of different research, but try some heat therapy.

[00:45:31.140] – Thomas

Try it. Try using your sauna at the gym. I will tell you it's the best $3,500 investment you can ever make is getting a sauna and just having one. But it's not always practical. I know it's a lot of money, but I would quicker get rid of my car than my sauna. Let's put it that way. It helps with all kinds of different things in terms of just getting the heart rate up, circulatory system, all kinds of stuff like that. The third one is and it does kind of loop around with everything too, is don't be afraid to prioritize mental health above all else.

[00:46:05.590] – Thomas

As I've gotten older, I really realized that when it comes down to lifestyle, when it comes down to wellness, it's only as good as your brain. It used to be days when I would not want to skip a workout ever, because I needed to stick with what I would consider artificial programming when in reality now, it's not that I'm caving to the type fact that I'm fatigued it's more so, okay, well, some days it needs to be more of a mental workout. It needs to be something meditation, some kind of mindfulness practice things like that.

[00:46:34.830] – Thomas

Yes, sure. You may not burn 300 calories that you thought you were going to burn. You can still get activity in other ways, but prioritizing, not just adding in, but prioritizing your mental health above all else. I promise you, if you prioritize it, everything else will fall in line. Because if your head's not in the game right, trust me, you're not going to be getting the right workouts and you're not going to be making the right food choices. The biggest absolute lever you can pull is your mindfulness.

[00:47:00.010] – Allan

Well, Thomas, if someone wanted to learn more about you, the wonderful things you're doing with the YouTube channel or anything else, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:47:09.450] – Thomas

You can just send them to YouTube. I think that's the best place for them to really get a lot of knowledge. That's just simple. You can just go to YouTube and type in Thomas DeLauer and you'll be covered up with content. Also, my Instagram just Thomas DeLauer. I have cut down shorter versions of my videos there, so in three to four minute chunks, but full disclaimer and you don't get the full effect. It's just there for quick tidbits. So definitely those two places.

[00:47:35.180] – Thomas

Thomasdelauer.com. If anyone needs to actually get in touch with me literally and contact form there. But I think the videos and Instagram are probably the best.

And I wanted to also just kind of as a courtesy to people that are watching this or excuse me listening. I'm just saying that listening to a podcast listen to this podcast. If you go to Verso. There's a company called Verso. I mentioned NMN. I just highly recommend. There's a 20% off discount just because in honor of this podcast. So Verso is an NMN, which is very powerful as you get older in terms of what's called NAD, they have a lot of good information on their site. So if you just use the code Thomas20 at Verso's website, which is literally V-E-R.So just kind of a big thank you to Allan and a big thank you for everyone that's listening.

[00:48:26.490] – Allan

You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/517. And I'll be sure to have the link there.

[00:48:32.710] – Allan

Thomas, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:48:35.950] – Thomas

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Post Show/Recap

[00:48:41.770] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:48:43.160] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, give me just a second. A fan girl right now. Mike and I have been big fans of Thomas and Mike more so than me, but we've watched a lot of his videos, so it was really neat to have you listen to your conversation with him. And it was also very interesting, too.

[00:48:58.850] – Allan

Yeah. Thomas spent some money getting as big as he got. I used to see his ads on Facebook all the time, and so that's how I knew who he was. But it was his agent that reached out and said, hey, we'd like to get Thomas on the show. He's got a book coming out in March, so I'm hopeful I can get him back on the show soon to talk about his new book. But yeah, he dives deep into these topics. Keto, fasting and then, of course, anyone who's gone through Keto knows you have to take a look at your minerals and make sure that you're getting your electrolytes, getting your minerals and getting the nutrition.

[00:49:35.390] – Allan

Because these diets keto, carnivore, vegan. They're restricting food groups. And any diet that restricts food groups is something you have to pay attention to the nutritional aspects of the food that you're eating. You cannot just eat leafy Greens, carrots and potatoes and be okay. You're going to have to make sure you're getting the nutrients that your body needs. And that means a variety of foods within the realm of what you can eat. And then if you can't get what you need from the foods that you're eating, then you've got to find that alternative.

[00:50:10.520] – Allan

And sometimes that is supplements.

[00:50:13.030] – Rachel

Yeah. I appreciate how he mentioned that he prefers not to supplement unless it's absolutely necessary. And you're right, we can get all these nutrients and foods. But like I was mentioning to you, I struggle with getting enough iron in my diet. Now I'm kind of wondering how much magnesium I'm getting. I'm going to have to take a closer look at that. But when my tastes change in the summer, I can eat salads all day long, but in the winter, the last thing I want to do is have leafy Greens and so my iron will plummet and Lord knows what else.

[00:50:45.400] – Rachel

But if you can't get what you need to get in your food, then a supplement might be handy.

[00:50:52.700] – Allan

Yeah, and I wanted to have a conversation with them, but I kind of just came to the conclusion that I already knew the answer, which is probably not the right way to approach podcast. I already know the answer, so I'm not even going to ask this question. I probably should have. But a lot of people ask because you can do blood tests for this stuff. The answer is absolutely yes. When I go in for my blood test, I make sure potassium and sodium are on my blood test.

[00:51:17.570] – Allan

Because if you hear the story, I basically went into seizures and was within inches of going into a coma. I mean, quite literally, right there the numbers I had. He said, You're lucky you are not right now in a coma. You caught it just in time. You got to the emergency room just in time. And I only went to the emergency room because when I threw up, when I had the seizure, it hurt my chest. So that night I was laying there still not feeling right.

[00:51:50.340] – Allan

And my chest started hurting. And I'm like, okay, I got to go to the hospital. This might be something else. They popped the nitroglycerin in me straight away, walked me in the back, started putting me, put me on an IV, and then started taking blood and put me on EKG and did all that stuff before they came back around and said, oh, you're dehydrated and you're depleted of sodium and potassium. So it's this horrible, horrible thing because you need water. But if we put water in, it's going to wash more of the sodium and potassium out.

[00:52:22.000] – Allan

So it's like, right now you're on a saline drip. And he said that's right now all we can really do. And so I finished that saline drip. And he said, going tomorrow, get another blood test to figure out where you're studying. And it was still low. So he said, Come back to the emergency room, get another saline. So I was back in the hospital the next day getting another saline and then finally was like, okay, I'm here. They told me get some Gatorade, but I'm like, okay, now I'm not going to, Jesus Christ. What I did,

[00:52:52.520] – Allan

I actually went down the aisle and I ended up with a big bottle of spicy v8. So I'm like, okay, I'll do this because at least it feels better. They got fruit on the label and vegetables on the label.

[00:53:08.810] – Rachel

Yeah, I can see that.

[00:53:11.180] – Allan

It wasn't just glorified sugar water. But all that said is, you can measure the blood on this. But you're changing all the time. And so depending on what you ate last night, depending on how much water you drank, depending on everything else, you may be deficient tonight, even though you were fine this morning.

[00:53:30.450] – Allan

The same with iron. If you had a good meal, you could wake up in the morning, check your iron, and you're just fine. And then you come back 4 hours later. And now you're anemic again. That's just one of those things that, yes, you can test it. And maybe if you think you have a problem, go ahead and get it tested. If you're cramping, if you're fatigued, we gave you some of the minerals, the magnesium, the sodium, potassium that's around the cramping area. If you're feeling just the general fatigue.

[00:54:01.150] – Allan

You can look at chromium. You can look at some of the others, but a good, well balanced diet that is sourced from good places. So the stuff you're buying just in the general part of your grocery store is probably coming from an over farmed farm, and they put just enough of whatever it needs, nitrogen and this other stuff in the ground to grow it. When they talk about hydroponics, they're not typically putting minerals in there. They're just putting what it needs for the plant to grow and produce.

[00:54:36.410] – Allan

Okay. And so you're not necessarily getting the minerals that you need, even though you'd say, okay, what should I eat for like you said, iron? And you said spinach and kale and all those dark green leafy vegetables and red meat. But then you may not be getting much iron from them, because if there was an iron in the soil, it's depleted. Then it's leafy green, but it's not giving you exactly what you need. So supplementation might just be a solution for a lot of us. And it's unfortunate, but sourcing your food well, and then taking some precautions probably makes sense.

[00:55:14.970] – Rachel

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I agree with you. The quality of the food and where it comes from could make a big difference. And the quantity of minerals that the item contains an Apple grown here in Michigan and California versus Florida. I mean, you got three different areas, three different soil classifications. It could vary greatly. It's going back to your previous podcast about calories. It's the same thing. It's kind of a loose estimation as to how much minerals are in that particular piece of food. But you do both of you brought up a good point about exactly understanding how you're feeling and paying closer attention to your body and what signals it's giving off and then responding accordingly with a different food item that might help.

[00:56:03.470] – Allan

Yeah. There are going to be some telltale signs. Thomas, gave you quite a few of those. So if you feel fatigued, that's not normal, there's something missing, and you can look into that. If you're feeling cramps regularly in bed or just like you're out, then you might have a problem, and then you want to look at circumstances. So you're up in Michigan, where it's really right now, probably cool, cold and dry. The cold pulls all the moisture out of the air. As a result, you become a little less hydrated, and that can cause some problems.

[00:56:44.760] – Allan

I'm down in this really nice, hot, humid location, but as a result, I sweat a lot more year round. I don't have a non sweating season. I really do have to pay attention to my electrolytes because I know I have this tendency. So again, just paying attention, not being afraid of things and just saying I'm going to try it because minerals, as a general rule, if you're buying them as a supplement, are not that expensive. This is not like you've got to go out and spend $70 for a month supply of minerals.

[00:57:22.570] – Allan

You quite literally can get them for pennies a pill, and they give you a lot of what you need, and you take it for a little while and you see how you feel. Now, if the cramps go away, if you're feeling better, particularly with cramps and electrolytes, you should feel better within 30 minutes. Some of these others, you might have to take it like iron. You may have to take that for a little while to kind of get that build up, but it's just a function of saying, okay, I'm going to start taking this supplement.

[00:57:51.980] – Allan

I'm going to pay attention. And as an experiment, so I'm only going to change this one thing. I'm going to start taking this supplement. I'm not going to change my programming. I'm not going to change my food. I'm not going to change my sleep. I'm not going to change how much water I'm drinking. I'll try to just change this one thing, and then you see how it changes you, how you feel. If it doesn't change anything for you, then maybe that's not what you need it anyway.

[00:58:15.850] – Allan

So stop. And then if you feel fine after you stop, then good. You don't have to pay that Penny a pill. Just realize that your health and fitness is unique to you. We're all going to be going through this. The nutrition you have access to the nutrition that you're eating based on the variety of things that you eat, things that you like to eat, and you don't eat, particularly if you're doing something that's more of a restrictive diet of, like kicking entire food groups out, then it's just something for you to think about.

[00:58:43.920] – Allan

If I'm not eating that, how am I getting this.

[00:58:48.000] – Rachel

Right. Absolutely. And magnesium is important. More so than I thought.

[00:58:54.400] – Allan

Well, it's kind of one of those quiet little things that we never talk about, but it's involved in so much of the processes within the body. And you kind of like you build it. Another one that's really important is phosphorus. And you don't even think about that. Where am I getting my phosphorus from? Well, you can get it from cruciferous vegetables. So if you're not eating asparagus, broccoli or cauliflower, you might not be getting enough phosphorus. And as a result, your energy levels might be lower. And so there's so many things out there that can affect how your body produces energy, the B vitamins, the minerals, all those things.

[00:59:35.010] – Allan

And so just making sure that you're getting a good variety of foods and you're still not feeling it. Give a supplement a try and see if that makes you feel better. And if it does, then maybe you've solved some problems and you're not going to have to go to the doctor and said, don't understand why I'm in fatigue. It's like, well, fatigue is a symptom of just about every disease we ever talk about with our clients. So it could be any really, you could have dengue fever.

[01:00:03.140] – Allan

You could have COVID. You could have a common cold. You could have anemia. You could have a magnesium deficiency. There's so many different things that could be causing that. So making sure you're getting good food supplementing if you feel like it's necessary and then just paying attention because your body gives you this feedback loop. That's really cool.

[01:00:25.290] – Rachel

Yeah, that absolutely sounds like sound advice, Allan, great interview.

[01:00:29.570] – Allan

Thank you. And like I said, I'm going to try to get him back on. He has a book coming out in March, so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to connect, and he's a busy guy, but I'm hopeful we can connect and get him back on the show soon. Now, before we sign off, I did want to remind you if you're looking to lose weight in the new year, so we get into January, and you want to lose some weight, and you want to have a little bit of help doing that.

[01:00:53.200] – Allan

I want you to check out my win at weight loss program. It's a six week program. I can't take a ton of people because I'm not like a lot of trainers out there that say, oh, I'm a big name. So I'm going to offload you to my junior trainers. I don't do that. It's just me. So there are limited number of slots I'm going to be able to have. So go ahead and get on the waiting list. If you're interested, go to 40plusfitness.com/win.

[01:01:17.550] – Allan

That's 40plusfitness.com/win.

[01:01:21.080] – Rachel

Perfect. That sounds great, Allan.

[01:01:22.810] – Allan

All right. We'll talk to you next week, then.

[01:01:24.660] – Rachel

Take care.

[01:01:25.520] – Allan

You too.

Patreons

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

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Let's Say Hello

[00:03:46.920] – Allan

Hey, Ras. How are things going?

[00:03:49.030] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:50.980] – Allan

I'm doing all right. Sort of. I did the requisite face plant that you did earlier.

[00:03:56.930] – Rachel

Oh, no.

[00:04:00.270] – Allan

Yeah. We were celebrating Thanksgiving, and then at night, I was like, okay, I've had a few glasses of wine, and I know I'm not going to want to get up at 6:00 in the morning and take these dogs out, so I'm going to take them out right before I go to bed, which means they might just let me sleep till seven. And I went to take them out and it was raining and it had been raining. And so I walked in this field, and it's sort of like someone jerking your hands when you're standing on an ice skate on ice.

[00:04:28.500] – Allan

And so my feet went completely out from under me when the dog decided he wanted to go in a direction, and I wasn't quite positioned for it. And when you have two leashes in your hand and you're falling, there's no breakage except the face. So I did a really good face plant, and Tammy was nice enough to patch me up with some bandage and stuff. So, yeah, just a kind of a face plant. There's no other way to say it, because it was just that, but I'm recovering.

[00:05:02.190] – Allan

It's fine. It's just some scrapes and scars and scrapes and stuff, and I'm probably going to have a nice little scar above my eyebrow for a little while, maybe for a long while, but it's just one of the kind of those things you say. Okay, I need to work on my balance. I need to work on my strength. I need to make sure that I'm not put in that position again as I get older. So it's just kind of one of those reminders of being aware of your environment, doing the right things so that we don't take those bills as often.

[00:05:36.170] – Allan

And if we do, our body has the resilience to get through it and protect us.

[00:05:41.460] – Rachel

Yes, absolutely. Just like you mentioned, I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago, and I'm recovering. I still have a tiny little bruise on my cheek, but it seems to be going away. But I was just mentioning with one of my running partners, like, I think this winter I'll be practicing my gait and learning how to lift my feet up a little bit better, making sure that I pay closer attention and do all those same things, too. Yes, it's a reminder and not a fun reminder to take care.

[00:06:13.830] – Allan

And actually, I kind of follows along with that method I put out there that slip to success, which is okay something happened in our cases, face plant and forgive yourself.

[00:06:26.380] – Allan

It happened. It happened. The circumstances were what they were. And then the second stage is learn from it and then apply it. And so you're going to be training your gait. I'm going to be working a lot more on balance and continue to work on strength. And then we'll hopefully not have to deal with another face plant.

[00:06:46.350] – Rachel

Absolutely. Fingers crossed. Absolutely.

[00:06:49.830] – Allan

All right. Well, you're ready to get into this discussion with Dr. Yeo?

[00:06:52.970] – Rachel

Sure. Let's do this.

Interview

[00:07:21.280] – Allan

Dr. Yeo, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:23.850] – Dr. Yeo

Thank you so much for having me, Allan.

[00:07:25.930] – Allan

Now the book you have very compelling title, I might add, Why Calories Don't Count: How We Got the Science of Weight Loss Wrong. And that's a very compelling title.

[00:07:37.350] – Dr. Yeo

Thank you. Some people might even call it controversial. I don't think it is. I don't think it's a controversial title.

[00:07:43.380] – Allan

I don't either, especially when you go through the book several times saying, I'm not saying Calories don't entirely count. They do. If you eat in excess of the energy output, you are going to gain weight. And if you eat less than the energy output, you are going to lose weight. It's just really on how we kind of put this all together. But you had one statement in a book that it was towards the end. But I have to see this out front because this was probably the best sentence I've read a long, long time and it said, Rather than wasting our lives obsessing about our weight and how we look, we should instead focus on our health. If you focus on your health, your weight will take care of itself.

[00:08:22.830] – Dr. Yeo

Absolutely.

[00:08:24.390] – Allan

And I just love that. I'm going to use that over and over. I'm going to take that quote. And Dr. Yeo, and I'm going to post that everywhere because I think that's really the important thing of what we're after here. We take weight and we consider it some proxy for being healthy and fit and everything else is great in our lives. When it's usually just a side effect.

[00:08:47.910] – Dr. Yeo

It'S not only is it just a side effect, it's also, sadly, what we create to with beauty. And so people are going to say, Well, no, that's rubbish. I can lose a lot more weight. I don't look like how I look, but there's a difference between wanting to look like what you look in a mirror. Look, I want to look like Brad Pitt, but there are any number of reasons why I can't look like Brad Pitt. But if you actually get to the point where you're healthy, you can carry your kids.

[00:09:13.870] – Dr. Yeo

You can go up and down the stairs without getting out of breath. You can cycle to whatever you want to do and you can live your life and not feel that something is holding you back. So what if you're a little larger? I guess that's the point. Can you live your life? Can you do what you want to do and you need help for that rather than looks per se?

[00:09:30.770] – Allan

Absolutely. Now to start this off, you start off the book and you have a supposition here that talks about calories. And this is really kind of the principle of the book, and it's A does not equal B does not equal C, and I'll go through that. A is the number of calories actually in the food that does not equal the number of calories on the side of the pack, which does not equal the number of usable calories we finally get out of the food. So the trouble is this is if I'm going to look at the input, the calories that I'm eating and none of those numbers line up, then it's an impossible math for me to do, even if I have the information on the pack, even if I had a bomb called Kilometer in my house to burn everything I want to burn to figure it out, which I don't, and I'm not going to invest in one of those anyway.

[00:10:26.360] – Allan

But doesn't that create this complication to the calories in calories out model that we really can't overcome with math?

[00:10:34.560] – Dr. Yeo

I think so, at least not with the math that we're using right now. And I think that's the critical thing, as you said in the very beginning. Clearly, they count in some description to 200 calories of French fries is twice the portion of 100 calories of French fries. Clearly, obviously that's the case, but I guess so is 200 grams of French fries greater than twice the portion of 100 grams of French fries. And no one's out here trying to compare 200 grams of French fries to 200 grams of carrots.

[00:11:05.030] – Dr. Yeo

So I think there is this thing we got to get around where we need to be thinking about, sort of like the food we're eating. And while the calories have their use, I think they're complicating matters, because now you talk about people equating their weight to their health. People are equating the number of calories in a food to how good a food is. That is just not the case.

[00:11:30.270] – Allan

Because I can get a little packet of snacks and it's 100 calories, or I could eat 100 calories of chicken breasts.

[00:11:37.290] – Dr. Yeo

Exactly.

[00:11:38.110] – Allan

And it's a whole different dynamic. It's a whole different dynamic.

[00:11:40.680] – Dr. Yeo

It's absolutely different dynamic because of the amount of protein because chicken breast hasn't been processed, it's been cooked, it's been processed by being cooked. So I guess that equation, which I actually put out what it does mean is that the calories everywhere are wrong. That's the first piece of information that everyone gets out. But the issue is we eat food and we don't eat calories, and this is absolutely critically important. And our body has to work to differing degrees in order to pull the calories out after the food.

[00:12:15.730] – Dr. Yeo

And so when you actually eat something like a chicken breast, a piece of steak, a piece of fish. Ok. Like a whole food, you have to chew through it. It's either got a lot of protein or a lot of fiber depending on what you're eating. And so you have to kind of make your way through and your body takes time and takes energy. It takes energy to break down food. Whereas if you have something that's ultra processed, that's out of a pack and that has a shelf life of a million years.

[00:12:42.960] – Dr. Yeo

All right. It's been so ultra processed. And remember when I say ultra process, I'm not talking about fermenting. I'm not talking about the stuff you do in your kitchen. This is stuff that's done in a factory that we cannot replicate at home. Then, in effect, this procedure of auto processing is like an external stomach. So a lot of energy has already been in to the food and made the calories more available. So if you have 100 calories of chicken breast, as you said, versus 100 calories of an ultra processed foods, you will end up with a lot more calories from 100 calories of an ultra processed food.

[00:13:18.640] – Dr. Yeo

And naturally, an ultra processed food because of what's been happening to it has less protein and or less fiber, and it's higher in salt, sugar and fat. So this is the problem. Whereas if you have a chicken breast, you have a chicken breast, you can put salt on it if you wish. Pepper, soy sauce, whatever you want, you control what you add to it because you see the chicken breasts, you're doing something to it. Whereas when you get something out of a pack, we don't know what's in it.

[00:13:44.560] – Dr. Yeo

We just don't. And I think it's important to understand this fact.

[00:13:50.970] – Allan

Because in the key of what you just said there was we're eating food, we're not eating calories.

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[00:15:40.310] – Allan

Our ancestors before they invented calories in the I guess the late 1800 started talking about them. They didn't have calorie counts on their food. They ate till they were satiated, and then they stopped eating. And then they went back to work.

[00:15:56.320] – Dr. Yeo

So the whole concept of the calorie actually was not originally invented. It eventually became to look at human food, but was originally put together for farmers because what farmers were interested in was how much would you feed a cow or your chicken or your sheep and get good quality meat or eggs or milk or what have you that's a product. And so you could see why the farmers really cared. They really would care the calorie content of the food, what was coming out the other side of the animal.

[00:16:29.390] – Dr. Yeo

And so they could say, Well, we're going to change the food. We're going to make better investments in the food. It was only laterally that people said we can do this to human food, too. And that is when it became weaponized. Suddenly the calorie became not something about agriculture and talking about the food supply, but suddenly becoming equated to human beings. And then we worry about our health. And there we go.

[00:16:53.490] – Allan

Yeah, and all of it seems to get weaponized. I think that's what's actually kind of scary here is they'll say, okay, calories are weaponized and then, okay, fat, because fat has more grams more calories per gram than the other two. Then we've got to demonize fat. And then it's like, Well, no fat helps a little bit. But now we've got a demonized cholesterol. It's not the fast cholesterol. And then we got to demonize sugar. And then we got to demonize salt. And that's all the stuff that actually makes the food palatable in the first place, but in the right proportion in the right way.

[00:17:28.610] – Allan

The key of it to me, and you talked about this in the book was, can I eat less actual calories and be satiated? And there are certain foods that do that. And there are other foods that don't. And the first one I want to bring up is protein. Why is protein so important for weight loss?

[00:17:50.990] – Dr. Yeo

Okay, there are two different reasons, two broad reasons why, clearly, they're going to be associated. Famously, a calorie of protein makes you feel fuller, more satiated than a calorie of fat than a calorie of carb in that order. All right. And there are two different reasons why. Sorry. Like I said, we need food and not calorie. Freudian slip. And there are two stages your body goes through to extract calories from food. The first stage is digestion, which we talk about chewing, autochemical digestion. And there is a golden rule here, really quite a good golden rule, which works not only for protein, but also for fiber, but the longer something takes to digest, the farther down your gut it will go.

[00:18:41.240] – Dr. Yeo

And the farther down it goes, different hormones are released and you feel fuller. Okay. And so protein just happens to take longer to digest. It's more complicated. It's just more difficult to take it apart and something else. And so it tends to travel further down the gut, different hormones are released and you feel fuller. So that's the first thing. Now, protein is broken down into amino acids, the building blocks within your gut. And then that gets transported across the gut wall into your blood. And amino acids and sugar and fatty acids are themselves, not energy.

[00:19:16.890] – Dr. Yeo

They're few still. So they then transported to your organs, your cells, wherever you need them. They're then metabolized. And this is the second part of how we actually get the energy, digestion and metabolism. What happens with the metabolism is it takes a lot of energy to metabolize protein. For every 100 calories of protein that you eat, this is unusual. You don't normally do this. I'm just using it as an example, so that we understand. But for every 100 calories of protein we eat, we only ever use, on average, 70 calories.

[00:19:57.470] – Dr. Yeo

So it takes 30% of the protein calories you eat to handle protein. So just out of the blocks, all the protein calorie counts everywhere are 30% out because they don't take into account the 30% of energy it takes to actually deal with protein. And so it's a mix of the fact that protein takes longer to digest and more energy to metabolize together. It makes protein more satiating for us. It makes us feel fuller, even though we need exactly the same number of calories of protein and fats or carbs.

[00:20:31.210] – Allan

Yeah. Now the satiation is the important part. The 30% doesn't mean you get to eat 30% more.

[00:20:39.570] – Dr. Yeo

That's not what I mean. That's the wrong message.

[00:20:42.750] – Allan

Yeah. So just realizing that, yes. If you're looking at your macros and you're saying, okay, this meal is giving me a certain amount of protein. I think you said optimal is probably about 16%. And then I'm getting good carbs. And we'll talk about the good carbs in a minute and some fat. Then each of those is going to digest at their own pace. And because the protein takes longer to digest and uses more energy in the digestion, it makes it easier for you to stay satiated longer, eat less and lose weight.

[00:21:16.170] – Dr. Yeo

Now, that is absolutely right. But there is one thing. So if you happen to be trying to build your muscle and this could be because you're older or it could be because you are actually lifting and trying to bulk up, then there is a case to be made for thinking about how much protein you're actually getting in terms of protein calories and whether or not you need to alter whether or not you need to alter that. Now, this is not the case for everything, but I think there is a case to be made for.

[00:21:43.540] – Dr. Yeo

Maybe I need to up my protein a little bit more if I'm trying to bulk up.

[00:21:47.420] – Allan

And as a trainer, I would tell you if you feel like you're losing muscle mass due to sarcopenia because you're older, yes, you probably need more protein. And if you decide you want to take on a resistance training program for the sake of building muscle, you definitely need more protein. But as a basic, getting by 16% is probably a good number to start with. And then just see how you recover from your workouts, whether you are building muscle, losing muscle and change it out from there. Now the next one,

[00:22:18.250] – Allan

And we talked about carbs because there's different types of carbs. And I think many of us get conflated and saying, Well, okay, this is obviously a healthy carb because it grew in the ground. It's a plant. But then, of course, we dice it up and Fry it or batter it and Fry it.

[00:22:33.520] – Dr. Yeo

That's right.

[00:22:35.310] – Allan

Like in San Francisco, you talked about the baseball games, the garlic fries, where there's as much garlic as there are fries. We ruin good things all the time. But fiber and fiber, similar to protein, has a compelling path through our digestive tract that changes the way we digest it, which also metabolize it, which also again helps us with satiation.

[00:23:05.200] – Dr. Yeo

So yes, the first thing is it's quite clear we don't digest most fiber, so some fiber we're able to digest. We'll do that in a second. But the vast majority of fiber that's the stringy stuff we see in the pulp and Orange juice and celery. And what have you we don't digest. It comes out sweet corn, corn on the cob, it comes out the other side. And so as we were discussing with the protein, because the fiber, therefore slows down the digestion of everything it takes longer to digest, it makes you feel fuller.

[00:23:32.990] – Dr. Yeo

The other thing about fiber that is very useful is fiber tends to be found almost exclusively in plants, almost exclusively. The type of macros you'll find in a plant tends to be largely carbohydrates, and maybe a little bit of fat, depending on what kind of plant we're actually dealing with. And the crucial thing is the fiber slows down the extraction of the carbohydrates and therefore the absorption of the sugar. And so you'll have exactly. This is the equivalent of drinking Orange juice versus eating an Orange.

[00:24:06.290] – Dr. Yeo

Right. It's the same kind of comparison where you're getting exactly the same amount of sugar, exactly the same amount of sugar. But if you drink Orange juice, it just gets absorbed the moment it hits a small intestine, whereas the fiber takes time. And so you then have a different glucose profile. Blood sugar profile after you eat something with fiber versus not. And that plays a very big role in terms of not only satiation, but also the eventual feeling of hunger again later as well.

[00:24:36.040] – Allan

Yeah. We call that the roller coaster where basically blood sugar spikes up, insulin kicks in. It sucks that sugar sometimes sending it to the muscles and sometimes sending it to the liver. But most of the time storing it as fat. And then your sugar crashes. And now you want some more Orange juice.

[00:24:54.100] – Dr. Yeo

That's right. And the fiber, evens this whole thing out, even though you get exactly the same. And this is the thing. This is the thing you try and explain to someone says, look, I'm not saying the foods are different. I'm not saying that they are magic, and I'm not saying the different types of sugars, the actual rate and speed and kinetics. Shall we say it is everything. It's absolutely everything to how your body manages its energy.

[00:25:18.770] – Allan

Yeah. And then the fiber goes further because we're not going to be able to digest most of it into our system. So it's ending up all the way down in the large intestine and some magical things happened down there.

[00:25:30.340] – Dr. Yeo

Some magical things happened down there because fiber, as we know, keeps you regular. And that's a good thing we don't want to be storing in us unnecessarily, but more crucially or equally crucially rather. It is very important for your gut microbiome, for the bugs in your gut that actually live there, and it keeps them happy. It keeps them happy. And what do I mean by happy? It means it keeps a nice variety of bugs. That pretty much is what healthy means. When people say, What's a healthy gut microbiome, the bugs variety.

[00:26:03.330] – Dr. Yeo

You only end up with one mono, very few varieties that tends to be meaning that you eat a very boring and very uniform type of diet, which is not great for you. So variety is the spice of life, and fiber is the spice for these bugs. And it's very important for your overall health, for your gut health. For your immune system, there is hardly any body system because, look, if you have bad guts, you feel awful. You're not having a good day. So having healthy guts is important to your overall health.

[00:26:41.910] – Allan

Now, one of the fundamental problems with nutrition. And I wish we could fix this is that there are labels on processed food, and there's seldom labels on the foods that are high in protein and fiber. Because you're picking those up at a farmer's market. You're picking those up in a produce stand in a meat market, and they're not wrapped and packaged the way that's required, particularly in the United States, for them to be labeled. And so if you find yourself eating more processed food, sometimes, I don't think I'm not even sure we recognize how processed our foods are.

[00:27:17.140] – Allan

There's a scale you talk about. It's not your scale. It's a scale that's been out there for us called the Nova scales, Nova classifications. And there's four of them. Could you go through those four real quick? So we would have an understanding, because in my opinion. And again, I'm just a guy that eats and try to get choice to take care of myself is I'm always trying to eat in that number one category, most of my foods. And then if there's a two or three, it's a little bit or it's a way to flavor the one or two.

[00:27:47.650] – Allan

And then I try my best to stay away from the four as much as possible. But could you go through that scale of what that actually means?

[00:27:54.250] – Dr. Yeo

Okay. So this was actually come up from a Brazilian scientist. Oh, gosh, I'm going to have to remember his name. That's terrible. I'm going to forget it, but I'll come up with it in a second. Brazilian scientist actually came up with this Nova system of one to four relatively recently. Actually, we're probably only looking at something like 2011 to 2016 year. So what are the four Nova categories? And this is to talk about how processed the food is. So Nova one, these are what we would recognize fruit, what we recognize as whole food, a piece of steak, a chicken wing.

[00:28:29.510] – Dr. Yeo

All right. So these are just food, whole foods that we would actually go and buy from a market. And what have you now? Nova two are flavorings ingredients. Okay. So, for example, this could be ground black pepper because the pepper has been toasted. It could be oil. It could be, for example, olive oil. It could be purified salt. It could be sugar from sugar cane or otherwise. And these are there for Nova type two. Now, what happens when you mix Nova type one and two together?

[00:29:09.810] – Dr. Yeo

You get a Nova type three. So three are the processed foods that we recognize as processed, for example, bread. Because bread has gone through the process of you put yeast, some fermentation, it goes up, you do things you can drink, beer. Okay. Now beer has gone through the fermentation process. So those are Nova group three and other foods that you might Cook. So pickling. Okay. So Kimchi or Sauerkraut, that would be a Nova group three. So that is the vast majority of food. And actually Nova groups one to three are all pretty much fine, because together they form what we would call whole foods to just minimally processed foods.

[00:29:54.780] – Dr. Yeo

Then there's no group four. And the problem with Nova group four is that that is where in North America, in Europe, in the high income countries, we get more than 50% of our calories from. And these are pretty much every prepackaged foods that are out there that have gone through a process that we cannot replicate in a domestic kitchen or even a restaurant. When you go to a restaurant, you're not getting a proper restaurant, not a fast food restaurant. If you go to a proper restaurant where there's a chef and kitchen and cooking your food, those are never going to be Nova group four.

[00:30:29.590] – Dr. Yeo

Okay. Whereas if you actually have to go through a factory process, it's everything that is in there. And so that's a lot of things. Just to be clear, I'm not demonizing them per se. We eat too much of them. Ice cream is going to be nova group four, croissants are going to be Nova group Four. Pastries are going to be Nova group Four. So there are those, but they at least look something resembling sorts of Nova group four. But then you can go really extreme.

[00:31:01.050] – Dr. Yeo

Right. And you can get these cheaper Nuggets where, for example, the meat is not really meat. Meat is even a strong word.

[00:31:12.970] – Allan

I will never eat another chicken McNugget, as long as I live.

[00:31:18.250] – Dr. Yeo

I don't want to get sued by them, but it's true, but that's the way they actually make it. So those are the four Nova groups. What we've got to do. Why does the Nova group four exist? This is a question to ask. I think it's helped keep 7 billion people in the world alive. Okay. There was a reason why it came about because of the industrial processes. They have economies of scale to make. They typically have very long shelf lives and they're very easily movable, and they're very cheap calories.

[00:31:51.340] – Dr. Yeo

And so as a result, we can actually survive on food. Certainly in the UK, you can now get up to 900 calories in the old school for less than a pound, depending on where you're getting. And a pound is a dollar 20 or one dollar 30 something like that. Yeah, really cheap calories. The problem is the amount we're eating now, that's the first thing. And the second problem is that because it's cheap, the poorer among society, people in the lower socio economic classes end up eating the cheaper food.

[00:32:26.440] – Dr. Yeo

Why? Because that is what's available in their food that they happen to be living in, for example. And it is also what they happen to be able to afford. And so I think it's a double tragedy. It's a tragedy, in a sense, where it is bad for us to eat too much of it and actually the poorest amongst us who are already at risk of diseases and things anywhere also end up eating it the most. So I think there's a double tragedy that we need to try and fix.

[00:32:51.600] – Allan

Well, I think there's a third piece in there that the food companies are responsible for. They're hiring scientists to make the food hyper palatable to make it addictive. I'm going to be talking to someone in a week or so about food addiction and how we deal with that. But the reality is if you find yourself there's just this food, and I like to term it as kryptonite, like your Superman, it's going to kill you. But you can't stay away from it. You can't do anything about it.

[00:33:18.450] – Allan

They make these foods like Kryptonite, they're so delicious. Even they advertise it. You can't eat just one, stack your chips, eat three of them because different flavors, and you're going to eat a whole two of them. And that's more calories than you should have had for your dinner. And they're hyperpatable. They're going to basically become blood sugar as soon as they hit your system. I think that there's a third piece there.

[00:33:46.210] – Dr. Yeo

And it's an arms war, because what's interesting is obviously there is no Advertisement campaign for strawberries. Not that I know. Or the Advertisement, maybe sometimes the Orange juice company, but even that. But then the Advertisement campaigns that go out to support these foods are incredible. And it's weapons grade. We talk about weaponization. It's weapons grade. And so you're someone selling from the local farm because there is no way you can compete against that. Certainly when it comes to kids, I think a lot of it is adults.

[00:34:21.950] – Dr. Yeo

We are obviously impressionable, but it's the kids. It's the kids that they're looking at and watch the cartoons. And they buy the happy meals. And they do the thing.

[00:34:31.550] – Allan

And the Super Bowl, which is coming up, which Congratulations on San Francisco's win this week.

[00:34:37.190] – Dr. Yeo

Thank you.

[00:34:38.300] – Allan

Super bowl. They'll spend millions of dollars. And you think, how many bags of potato chips do they have to sell? But they obviously are because they've been doing these commercials forever. So it obviously sells more potato chips.

[00:34:56.850] – Dr. Yeo

Otherwise they won't do it right. These guys are mercenary. Of course they are. They're not going to be spending the money if they're not getting a return from this.

[00:35:04.870] – Allan

Yeah. So that's the other side of just recognizing that these ultra processed foods are food stuff. They're built to be hyperpatable. They're built to be addictive. And, yes, they are low cost. They're easy to transport. They're self stable for a long, long time. So there are benefits from a feeding the world perspective to having this technology. But I kind of think it's gone a little on the other direction. And that's part of why we're in the problems we're at. And if we can flip back and we can start thinking about this scale of how processes my food and the less processing for the most part, the better.

[00:35:43.540] – Allan

One, two, three and trying to weigh your food and think of your food in that order, the more I have in category one, the better category two is next and then three. And then occasionally, if you want that Mars bar, have a Mars bar, but recognize where you are and what you're doing and enjoy the heck out of it and then be done. Get back to protein and fiber and your weight loss goals.

[00:36:11.070] – Dr. Yeo

I mean, there is another which I do raise in the book and sort of middle ground because I do think we need somehow a society to reformulate our food system. I think somehow we've managed to in trying to keep 7 billion people alive. I do think we've broken significant elements of our food system. Okay. And we're not here to necessarily discuss that. So we need to fix that. But in the meantime, however, in the meantime, how do we try and be pragmatic? And so what I do say is yes, if we want a Mars bar, we can have a Mars bar, but can we make a better Mars bar?

[00:36:46.380] – Dr. Yeo

I think that's the question, right? Can we convince at least in the interim. So this is not the be all and end all. But can we get the companies to put in more nuts, more dates and figs to try and up the fiber and protein content of a chocolate bar or a frozen lasagna or something? And every time I say this, what's interesting is I'm not trying to countenance all of us moving to Nova four as. It's just not my point. But my point is, how do we help the people who through no fault of their own, are almost forced to live on Nova Four Foods?

[00:37:23.210] – Dr. Yeo

Can we get the companies to improve their Nova Four foods? And that's another thing I'm quite passionate about in trying to. And whenever a company, a food manufacturer, for example, speaks to me, okay. I never take money from food companies for the reason, so that I can go in and speak to the food companies and be honest with them. They can listen to me or not listen to me, but I can say, look, you guys can continue making your chocolate bars or lasagna, what have you but can you make it better?

[00:37:52.930] – Dr. Yeo

Can you up the protein? Can you up the fiber? Can you do that? Surely you can. Surely you can do it without really that much of a significant rise in cost.

[00:38:01.570] – Allan

I suppose they can, especially when you think about it. We have a tendency to think of protein as being meat coming from an animal. And we think of fiber as coming from a plant and more of this could be plant based, and you can get there. Fiber is easy. It's practically nothing from a density perspective and almost no flavor from a cost perspective.

[00:38:25.970] – Dr. Yeo

It doesn't cost anything, right?

[00:38:28.710] – Allan

Because they stripped it off of something else. It's sitting there. It's sitting there. It's ready so they can. I know they can. And hopefully they will. They'll see the problem and realize, okay, if I want my clients, my customers to live longer and eat more, I actually have to not kill them.

[00:38:45.660] – Dr. Yeo

Keep them alive. Don't kill your customer.

[00:38:52.170] – Allan

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

[00:39:00.240] – Dr. Yeo

Well, oh, my goodness. That's a very good question. Actually, I'm not going to start with nutrition. Obviously, nutrition is one of them. The first is moving and literally moving. Now the interesting thing. And this could be if you are able, going long distances running or cycling or pumping. It could be that. Or it could be going in your garden, walking your dog, mowing the lawn. They're doing something like that. And while moving per se. And maybe sometimes people don't notice. Moving per se is not a great way of losing weight per se, but it is fabulous for you.

[00:39:40.760] – Dr. Yeo

You will never, ever be able to replace the goodness of moving. And so we don't move enough. And so we got to move. So that's the first thing I would say, move. And then the second thing is really think about nutrition, not in an evangelical and puritanical fashion. You talk about it. You sound just from our conversation here. You have the right approach. Look, sometimes you want a Mars bar. Sometimes your kid has a birthday party, you want to have a slice of cake, but we have too much of that.

[00:40:08.770] – Dr. Yeo

So I think thinking about the nutrition and simply if you consider protein and fiber in the diet that you eating, even as a shorthand as a proxy. Obviously the other thing. But even if we consider protein and fiber and moving, I think those three things would actually get you a long way to getting healthier.

[00:40:31.530] – Allan

If someone wanted to learn more about you and your book, Why Calories Don't Count. Where would you like for me to send them?

[00:40:38.820] – Dr. Yeo

They can send all good bookshops. I know some people don't like Amazon, and I don't want to push people there, but all good bookshops should sell the book, Why Calories Don't Count. There's also one. And if you want to hear anything more, just me bibling on and interviewing various people. I also have a podcast called Dr. Giles Yeo, Choose the Fat and it's available at Apple and Spotify and all your favorite places.

[00:41:07.690] – Allan

Okay, well, this is Episode 516, so you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/516, and I'll be sure to have links there. Dr. Yeo, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:41:20.730] – Dr. Yeo

Allan, this has been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Post Show/Recap

[00:41:27.970] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:41:30.030] – Rachel

Allan, oh, my gosh. I don't even know where to start. There's a lot we can talk about. But I do want to mention that back when I started my weight loss journey a long time ago, pre Internet days, counting calories was a nightmare. It was just something I never wanted to do, and it's just difficult. It's just a pain to do, especially before smartphones and apps that are so helpful today. But just like a lot of people who start their weight loss journey, that's the only thing I knew about at that time.

[00:42:00.700] – Allan

Yeah, I've been on my fitness pal and some of the others, and I've talked to different people over the years that are tracking and some of them, it's quite literally, like they're doing the accounting for General Electric. I mean, it's just crazy measure every calorie, calculate these numbers, and then you're looking at your weight and they're trying to evaluate and you're like, okay, well, maybe I was off by a pecan the other day. If you find that doing the calorie counting is stressing you out. You're doing it wrong.

[00:42:38.120] – Allan

Now, full disclosure or Disclaimer, or however you want to look at it. If you have a food addiction, if you have an eating disorder or you just find that the gamification of this actually is helping you stick with it, that's great. There are a lot of people that are like that, and that's cool that the whole world is made up of different people. So I'm not going to say there's one way fits all. That'll never be the case. But if you're stressing over the calories, oh, I can't eat this.

[00:43:09.220] – Allan

It has too many calories in it. It's chicken breasts.

[00:43:17.290] – Rachel

Well, that's a good point. I mean, think about what you're eating. I think one light bulb moment that I had many years ago when I did have my fitness pal was one of the foods I did like to eat after a half marathon. I used to go to McDonald's and get the Quarter Pounder meal because I craved the salt and the fat in that meal. And one day I realized that the calorie count for the Quarter Pounder with cheese meal was the equivalent of my total calorie intake for that day.

[00:43:49.700] – Rachel

And it was a big light bulb moment for me because obviously, I can't live on one meal per day, especially running half marathons. But that probably wasn't the most healthy choice that I could have picked for that time.

[00:44:05.750] – Allan

Yeah, one, I think if you read Doctor Yeo's book, you're not going to eat fast food ever again.

[00:44:18.170] – Allan

he actually taught you a lot of people don't want to know how they make the sausage. And I'll just say, you don't want to know how they make the burgers, and you don't want to know how they make the chicken McNuggets. So sue me, McDonald's if you have to. But I'm just going to say, okay, no. Just no.

[00:44:41.470] – Allan

It's okay to have those kinds of things if you start assessing about things and get granted if you have a food issue or things like that, then yeah, I'm going to have Dr. Susan on in a few weeks, probably right around the beginning of the year. And we're going to talk about that because she has these very strict rules in her life. And everybody she coaches very strict rules and those work. But she also has this resume process, which is when you go off kilter, you understand it, you learn from it, and you kind of get yourself back into your box.

[00:45:19.930] – Rachel

Perfect.

[00:45:21.950] – Allan

That approach works. Now most of us can't live in a calorie counting box. We have jobs, we have children, we have friends and family, and we have things that pop up. Like you said, I finished this run. I'm hungry.

[00:45:38.060] – Allan

What's there? McDonald's. Okay. Is it McDonald's or banana? And I'm sorry, but back in the day, McDonald's tastes better than the banana. You need the potassium. Okay, great. But I'm going to go for the burger, too, back in the day. But I think what we're trying to come out with this is number one. Look for the foods that serve you. And we talked with Dr. Yeo about how protein and fiber are going to be your friends in this pursuit. And if you're eating the foods that provide the best quality of that, then you're not necessarily eating a whole lot of meat to get your protein, because you can get that from a vegetable source, which is another thing he talks about in the book.

[00:46:28.330] – Allan

But you look at getting protein because it takes longer to digest and it's more energy burning as you do that. So you're getting less calories out of what appears to be a lot of calories, and it's going to keep you fuller longer. The other side is the fiber. And whether you want to go keto or you want to go as far as carnivore, he doesn't like those ways of eating. From the perspective, you're not getting the fiber. And so if you find that you try keto and you're just not pooping and taking a little bit of magnesium, which we're going to have Thomas DeLauer on the show in a week or so.

[00:47:03.090] – Allan

And we're going to talk about mineral deficiencies. So if you're having trouble at the loo, as Dr. Yeo would say, then you might want to try some magnesium. But if those things aren't working, what you're doing is not serving your body and you're not feeling good and healthy, then we're missing the point. The point is to try to get healthy. The weight loss is the side effect.

[00:47:26.110] – Rachel

I love that part when you and Dr. Yeo mentioned the weight losses, the side effect and also not obsessing. If counting calories becomes too much of an obsession, if it's distracting you, then it's really not the greatest tool in the toolbox. But also, I think focusing on the protein and the fiber and the healthy vegetables that'll give you the nutrients that you need to feel energetic throughout the day and satisfy whatever activities you do as well.

[00:47:56.510] – Allan

I couldn't even imagine sitting down at, like, a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner and there being like, pumpkin pie there. And you're on my fitness pal trying to figure out how much is a slice to get the 100 grams and you're like, mom, do you have a scale so I can weigh this pumpkin pie? If you want some of the pumpkin pie, heat the pumpkin pie.

[00:48:22.560] – Rachel

Well, that's perfectly acceptable, especially during these holiday times when all these wonderful family traditional foods are coming out and you want to try your mom's recipe or your grandma's recipe or something important. I mean, there's so much meaning to that, and if you just enjoy it and have a taste of it and not overdo it, you're less likely to feel those after effects. Thanksgiving is my favorite meal. I tend to eat a little bit more than I normally do, and I feel the after effects later, so enjoy what you can and then get back to your normal eating and you'll feel much better in the days ahead.

[00:49:01.280] – Allan

Now, one of the cool things about Doctor Yeo's book is that when he gets into this, it is a lot of biochemistry, but he says it in a way that is actually follow able. Okay, he still has to use the words mitochondria, Krebs cycle or citric acid cycle and all the words because the words are the words. It's not like he can come up. But he comes up with a lot of ways to think about how that works and why things work the way they work. And then in the end, when he's explaining why protein is a better choice, why fiber is a better choice and those types of things, it clicks, you're like, oh, of course.

[00:49:45.750] – Allan

Why is it that you can eat sugar and your blood sugar shoots up and you can eat protein and it doesn't. Or you can eat sugar with fiber. And it doesn't like he was talking about the Orange juice and the Orange. And so he gives you all the background to understand. He didn't just make this up and say he doesn't want you drinking Orange juice. He's just trying to explain to you, if you're trying to lose weight, the Orange is the better deal.

[00:50:13.480] – Rachel

Sure, it makes total sense. That's so helpful, too. It's hard to imagine the glass of Orange juice being so much different than the actual Orange itself. But it does make sense when you discuss that in your interview.

[00:50:25.750] – Allan

It's not as convenient. And honestly to me, if you're trying to lose weight, drinking your calories is the worst way to do it, because again, if it's a liquid, your body is going to digest it very quickly. It's going to be out of your system and in your blood, and therefore it's not going to satiate you. It just won't. Whereas if you have to go through your system and you have to digest. Actually, physically digest that you're burning calories. Doing that digestion. If it's liquid, the digestion is over.

[00:50:55.060] – Allan

It's just flowing through and saying, okay, ha ladi da and then sugar. And it's in your system. So good. Pick me up in the morning, Orange juice and coffee. But then you're going to be hungry by 10:00am if you ate at seven because you didn't give your body that long term full feeling that it's going to get with the fiber and protein.

[00:51:20.130] – Rachel

It's important that we pay attention to how we feel after we eat these different foods. Because I think that once you find what you enjoy eating and you get a good feeling afterwards, you feel full. It's a better way to plan your meals, especially if you plan them around protein.

[00:51:39.830] – Allan

Yes. Absolutely. All right. Well, Rachel, I'll talk to you and I'll talk to everybody else next week.

[00:51:46.540] – Rachel

Take care.

[00:51:47.450] – Allan

You too.

[00:51:48.320] – Rachel

Thanks.

Patreons

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Another episode you may enjoy

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Let's Say Hello

[00:04:04.670] – Allan
Hey, Raz, how are things going?

[00:04:06.890] – Rachel
Good. How are you today, Allan?

[00:04:08.810] – Allan
I'm doing all right. I imagine Michigan's starting to get a little bit cool.

[00:04:14.030] – Rachel
Oh, yes. In fact, we have snow in the forecast, so just flurries, but, yeah, it's about to get real cold.

[00:04:23.210] – Allan
We've been really hot here. I mean, temperature here has been pretty warm and dry. We just got rain today and some wind and rain. The wind came in last night and felt really nice because when it's warmer and it's windy, doesn't quite feel as bad because the wind kind of gives you kind of a cooling coming off the water, particularly. And then today it's raining, which is good island that survives on the water that we catch. Kind of important to catch some. It's kind of important to have something to catch.

[00:04:52.490] – Allan
So, yeah, a little bit of rain. And then as we're recording this, we're going into the holiday season here in Panama. So Panama has independence from Spain.

[00:05:06.530] – Allan
Independence from Colombia, and then independence from the United States. And all of those holidays happen in November. So the first week of November is just sort of like just a big holiday week. And people like to travel and do the things inside. So tourism is picking up. People are coming. So Lulu's is starting to get busy and go. And it was kind of funny because we were sitting there and we started getting Lula's on Airbnb. And so Tammy set up and we're supposed to next day talk to our service provider that actually lets our booking agent talk to Airbnb.

[00:05:46.550] – Allan
So at this point in time, she's just set it up and we get our first reservation. Ten minutes.

[00:05:53.630] – Allan
And there's somebody hits us up for reservation.

[00:05:56.870] – Allan
We go on there like, okay, well, run, go, Mark this off on the booking engine because they're not talking yet. We don't want someone to double book. So we managed to get through that and figure that out and then figure out how when PayPal gets money, how to get PayPal to pay us. I think we've done that. Anyway, we're still ironing out like things as we're just getting things going. But things are starting to heat up here, and that's good and keeping Tammy on her toes. In fact, right now, as we're talking, she's at the airport picking up some guests that are flying in today.

[00:06:29.090] – Rachel
Oh, that sounds wonderful. How exciting.

[00:06:32.690] – Allan
Yeah. Well, how are things up there?

[00:06:34.790] – Rachel
Oh, really good. Like I mentioned, the fall is in full swing. We're in peak color right now, so the colors in our area are just beautiful. And over the weekend, Mike and I ran our Cal Haven Ultra marathon, and it's 33 and a half. Actually, it's 34 miles on the Cal Haven Trail. We run from Calaman Zoo to South Haven in Michigan, and it's a rails to trails pathway in the entire run. The girl I was running with and I we're just remarking it how gorgeous the colors are, the golds from the Oaks and the Reds and the Maples.

[00:07:13.190] – Rachel
And it was just spectacular. It was just such a wonderful day. We all had a good run, so it was a lot of fun.

[00:07:20.630] – Allan
Mike finished?

[00:07:22.010] – Rachel
He did.

[00:07:22.910] – Rachel
He and the guy he ran with, they're much faster, and they finished in 5 hours and 29 minutes,

[00:07:32.150] – Allan
That's outstranding.

[00:07:32.150] – Rachel
And they each secured first place in their respective age groups. So they did fantastic. And Luz and I finished just over 7 hours, 7 hours and two minutes, and we tied in our age group. We tried for seconds. So it was a really good day. And like I said, the fall weather was perfect. We didn't have any rain and we didn't have any blazing sun, so we couldn't have asked for better weather conditions. It was beautiful.

[00:08:01.790] – Allan
Good way to close out your season.

[00:08:03.590] – Rachel
Absolutely.

[00:08:05.270] – Allan
So now you're going to be lifting some weights.

[00:08:07.670] – Rachel
Yes, I am.

[00:08:08.570] – Allan
Which is a good time for us to be talking about Deep Fitness.

[00:08:12.650] – Rachel
Wonderful. It sounds great.

Interview

[00:09:14.690] – Allan
Philip, Andrei, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:09:18.110] – Andrei
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Allan.

[00:09:19.970] – Andrei
Yeah. Thanks, Allan. Nice to meet you.

[00:09:22.310] – Allan
Now, I've had Dr. Mcguff and I've had John Little on and similar messaging, because you guys are coming from a very solid foundation of science-based resistance training. And when I saw the full work of the book by Dr. Mcguff, and he gave you such a glowing review, I got really excited to read this book, and I'm glad I did. So the name of the book we're talking about is Deep Fitness: The Mindful, Science-based Strength Training Method to Transform Your Wellbeing in Just 30 Minutes Per Week.

[00:10:01.730] – Allan
That's a big promise. But I think you deliver. The book is phenomenal. The science is sound, and you do a really good job of explaining some things. And every once in a while, you get this kind of this. Aha moment of well, of course, that's how it works. There's a lot of that in the book, and it's a book that I'm definitely going to have as a reference that I'll go back to time and time again, because even someone who's been doing this for years, there was just a lot in there, even for me to absorb. But it was done well, it was written well, so I appreciate the opportunity to have you on the show.

[00:10:40.670] – Andrei
Thank you.

[00:10:41.990] – Andrei
Pleasure to be here with you, Allan.

[00:10:44.810] – Allan
All right. So, one of the things that kind of hit me, and you put this right in the beginning of the book, which is what most of us do is why do I want to do this? And you say fitness starts with muscle. And initially, when I was reading, I was like, okay, yeah, on one side. And I've talked to people who are on the other side of this conversation with the aerobics and the cardio and all that.

[00:11:08.030] – Allan
As we started getting into it, and it was just something really simple. Initially that kind of clicked with me, but I want to go a little deeper afterwards. But you said all these chronic diseases we have, many of them are caused because we're losing muscle.

[00:11:22.970] – Philip
Yeah. It was a pretty big revelation. This guy in the 80s, there was a really powerful renewal of interest in aging, and a massive study had laid out in gruesome detail what happens to us as we age. It's like everything you take for granted in your youth starts to corrode. They came together in a conference and trying to figure out A what was causing it. And B if you could begin to reverse it. And this guy was sitting with all these papers because he volunteered to write a report on the conference.

[00:12:06.830] – Philip
And what he realized was that every single condition that people were talking about was associated with a loss of muscle mass. And this didn't even have a word at the time. So he coined this word sarcopenia. Sarcopenia just means the wasting of muscle with age.

[00:12:28.010] – Philip
And there'a an inevitability about it. I mean, you're just not as strong. You can't sprint as fast at 90 as you could at 25. But my gosh, in our culture, that loss is drastically accelerated. And what happened as they began to look into sarcopenia, and it slowly gained prominence in the fields of research, they realized that sarcopenia was associated with every single major chronic disease of civilization. These are diseases that are rare in huntergather cultures and prominent for ours. So suddenly, the role of muscle in our health was coming into a new light.

[00:13:19.370] – Allan
I think one of the things you put in the book, which, like I said, it was kind of one of those wonderful light bulb moments. And there's many, many of those in this book was that we store sugar we eat in our muscles and our liver. And if we have less muscle, we have less storage capacity for that glycogen, which means our bodies have to store this fat. And so we start talking about the things like having pre diabetes and diabetes. The cause might not just be what we're eating, because what we were eating was probably fine for us.

[00:13:55.730] – Allan
It was the fact that we've lost so much muscle mass. We just don't have the storage capacity for it anymore. And that's causing us the problems.

[00:14:03.470] – Andrei
Yeah. And that would lead to increase in inflammation when we store body fat around organs that will also start producing those cytokines. And so on. We created havoc for our body. If we cannot store the glycogen, where it's supposed to go in the muscle or replenishing the liver, storage.

[00:14:23.390] – Andrei
Yeah. Makes total sense.

[00:14:26.630] – Philip
Sorry. I was just going to say the other side of that is glycogen is stored in the muscles. Well, a lot of it is stored in the large muscles. In the book we call the powerhouse muscles or the fast switch muscles. And that glycogen is only depleted with intense exercise. So with intense exercise, you can basically empty the muscles or not empty them, but deplete them of the glycogen. So then the storage space becomes available again.

[00:15:00.410] – Allan
And we're starting to get to a point where we're understanding more and more how different things in our body are communicating with each other. You almost want to think that our muscles are separate from our fat, which is separate from our brain, which is separate from our microbiome. But the reality is all of these things actually communicate together. They're all releasing. And one of the things you brought up in the book was myokines. Could you dive a little bit into myokines and why they're so important?

[00:15:29.270] – Philip
Yeah. For years, researchers understood that exercise had this global effect on the body. It affected every organ, every tissue and promoted health. And why? Like, they didn't know why. And then in the early 2000s, they discovered these endocrine messenger molecules called myokines. And they began to research them. And they found over 600 different kinds of Myokines that are released when muscle works. And the more intensely a muscle contracts and the stronger the muscle is, the more myokines are released, and they help in every system of the body.

[00:16:19.650] – Philip
I mean, they promote mental acuity, they promote bone mineral density, they decrease inflammation. It goes on and on and on. The Myokines have sort of been dubbed the X-Factor, the unknown factor in exercise that resulted in such positive effects.

[00:16:40.650] – Allan
And so to get the muscles to do that, we now have what you're bringing forward mindful strength training to failure, or MSTF. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and why that's so important?

[00:16:53.610] – Philip
Yeah. I mean, there are several aspects to our mindful strength training to failure. The mindful part is important because that means you're bringing the whole of the body. It's difficult to describe because we tend to sit in our heads and tell the body what to do the way you'd sit on a donkey and beat it to go harder. So what we're proposing is a mindful approach that is made possible by a very slow movement. So, for example, if you're on a weight machine, you would lift the weight very, very slowly and let it down very, very slowly.

[00:17:35.850] – Philip
And you continue to do that until you hit the point of momentary muscle failure. And that can take one and a half or two minutes. I mean, it happens quickly, and then you move on to the next exercise. Within a half hour, you can bring all the major muscles of your body to failure, and you can do one session a week and see improvements. And you really should be cautious in doing more than two sessions a week, because once you've taken a muscle group to failure, it takes time to recover.

[00:18:15.930] – Philip
You need 72 hours. And if you don't allow the muscle to remodel, you undermine its effects in strengthening.

[00:18:24.990] – Philip
And it just simplifies everything. When you go into this mindful space and you're present to this weight and you take it to failure.

[00:18:38.910] – Philip
And it is a joy. This form of training, the high intensity training is known to be a form of suffering. And with MSTF, we're really emphasizing that as you bring a mindful quality to it, it holds a joy. It holds an aliveness that you may not encounter in the rest of your week.

[00:19:06.430] – Allan
As I mentioned earlier, this is very deep in science backing. I mean, you guys spent a lot of time thinking about the whys, and this is not something that you've just done yourself. This is something that over the course of now, I guess decades have been coming to fruition, and now you guys are kind of putting it into a process that's very easy to follow. It takes less time than the standard. If you are going to talk about doing normal resistance training, I think most of us that would go in the gym and do the standard three sets of ten or whatever of X number of exercises and try to get a whole body workout and then try to do that every third or fourth time because maybe we didn't actually stress ourselves that much.

[00:19:48.790] – Allan
So we're doing four or five, maybe six workouts per week.

[00:19:52.750] – Allan
Here we're condensing it. We're a lot more mindful about the work we're doing. We're slowing way down. And so you've taken all these, all this science and you've now broken it. We have six principles that are rolled up into this model. That all are really valuable. As I went through, I was like, you can't not have that one. You can't have this one. So they're all really important. Could you go through those six principles? Because I think they're really important for someone to understand why this way of training is optimal.

[00:20:21.490] – Andrei
Well, I think they're more like a steps of getting through your workout, because ultimately, when talking about the actual training principles, you can synthesize it to around four. But speaking of how we describe them in the book, we work on them in steps. And, for instance, step one, just get ready and just get prepared. Like, understand what you're about to do if you do it on your own with your partner, have a game plan, which machine, which sequence you going to do them. Have your stop push ready water bottle already. Getting that right mindset for what you about to do, because you're working out.

[00:21:04.690] – Andrei
If you're thinking something else, you jump in. You don't have that kind of focus. It could be distracting, and you won't get quite the same workout. And this style of training is not kind of training where you do well with your chitchat and watching TV requires that mindfulness presence and that focus of what you're about to experience. That's kind of the first step is just get ready. Have a clear roadmap of how your next 30 minutes is going to look like. And then we just go through those steps.

[00:21:40.030] – Andrei
Step two is becoming present. And this is where Philip is an expert..

[00:21:48.950] – Philip
I'd be happy to talk to step two. You've got a stop watch with you, because what matters in MSTF isn't the number of reps that is irrelevant. What matters is what we call time under load, how long you go and you'll notice as you do it, you're going longer and longer before you begin pressing against the resistance. It's so important to drop down into your body and feel what you're feeling. I mean, we're trying to guide people away from the conventional approach. I'm going to do this thing.

[00:22:35.610] – Philip
Okay. Here I am. I'm ready. This is very different. This isn't a top down mode of making the body do what's good for it for its own sake. This is a matter of joining the body in its intelligence and my gosh. Once you tap into that, the resources that are available to you will take you to failure in a way that that badgering of the voice in the head can't do because it falls into storytelling, just maybe one more. Oh, I think I'm there now. I got to stop all that chit chat goes away when you drop down into the body and you're just in the moment feeling what is happening and tapping more and more deeply into your resources.

[00:23:26.610] – Philip
And Andrei, why don't you take us into step three?

[00:23:30.030] – Andrei
I guess the first step is we describe it as muscle first movement, second. So I give a little bit of history because that principle. We've been doing it for eight years now. We have a couple of Studios here in Toronto, downtown Toronto. And when I first opened this place, I thought everybody was just like me. Quickly, I realized that's not the case. And working with people, all demographics, all age groups, all different mental neurological abilities quickly learn that not everybody is able to do this training how we kind of Doug McGuff and John Little described the body by science.

[00:24:12.750] – Andrei
There are many answers to it. And one of them was some people, I would train them for months, and will still tell them, feel the lats, for example, doing a city throw exercise and tell me like, where are the lats? And it's kind of embarrassing because here's this client. I had this client for a few months, and he still doesn't know how to feel the lats. And at some point you can only repeat those cues so much, and then you move on. Right. And then actually from when I took one of the Philips workshops, he mentioned this experiment done in a scenario of neuroscience in an area of brain plasticity, where the quality of paying attention makes a neurological kind of difference in rewiring in your brain.

[00:25:05.370] – Andrei
And he was using this example from the brain plasticity in his work. And when I was listening to realize this is why people struggle filling those muscles. So I asked if each book he came, I read the book. So the experiment is basically the book is called Brain that Changes Themselves. Written by Norman Deutsche. And I think it's the first chapter about the subject of brain plasticity. And there's this guy from the States. I think he's retired now he changed, I guess, the idea of neuroscience before his time neuroscience.

[00:25:42.870] – Andrei
So the brain is sort of soft when we're younger. And then it kind of hardwired at older age cannot really wire anymore. So he challenged the whole paradigm. And she showed that the brain is still soft and plastic at any age. It might not be as soft as plastic as one of the children, but it's still soft. So one of the experiments, they talk there that kind of was light bulb for me when I heard it from Philip and read about it, they asked monkey to move index finger.

[00:26:10.290] – Andrei
They look at the brain and they saw socio neurological map turning on, then asking ask monkey to move middle finger, basically, next body part, next finger and another neurological map turn on. They call them topographical brain maps. Because typically with two body parts near each other in the brain, those neurological maps will neighbor each other as well.

[00:26:33.150] – Andrei
So what they did an experiment. They tied the two fingers together for a few months so monkey can only move two fingers together, cannot separate those two fingers. After several months, when they look at the brain, they discover those individual maps disappear. Instead, monkeys develop one large mob. They call it competitive plasticity. Basically something that you fire together are going to wire together. And what's going to happen? Something that you master day in, day out. It's quite literally what appears going to grow in real estate is going to take over the real estate of the adjustment maps that you don't use anymore.

[00:27:08.370] – Andrei
And then it occurred to me, we see searching where we move, searching where we have these dense jobs. We don't feel the back anymore. Day in, day out, year after year, your brain will adjust to a current lifestyle. We have injuries. And I realized it's not because before I was focusing on the muscle, then I realized it was not the muscle. We have to start with the brain. We have to start with rebuilding those neurological brain maps or topographical maps to strengthen the signal into the muscle before even can focus on the muscle.

[00:27:39.570] – Andrei
If you cannot send a potent signal, how can even isolate and target that muscle? So that kind of shifted my approach in the way I started hearing people. And I put this principle on top of our list and realizing that some people and it's clearly absorbed with the age related phenomenon. If I take a client in their 20s, everybody pretty much almost ten out of ten will get the cue, will get the right muscle. Feel the right muscle. With age, typically, the older somebody gets. Some people have harder and harder time, particularly those people who are new to strength training. By feeling the right muscle and by moving its mindfully slow by just feeling it,

[00:28:25.930] – Andrei
What happens again, learning from the science of neuroplasticity brain neuroplasticity, we know that one of the fastest way to create a new memory pattern in the brain is by paying close attention to a task. When we pay close attention to a task, our brain activates nucleus basalis. It's a part of the brain and the rest of the brain. And what that does, it starts producing this very potent so called modulatory neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. And when we have high level of acetylcholine, from paying attention to a task, the brain becomes soft and plastic.

[00:29:06.130] – Andrei
It's going to create those synaptic connections much faster rather than just mindlessly moving the weight up and down. So this quality of paying close attention to the map could be if you cannot feel the lats. I just tell people just that you call just feel it. I won't give you the normal cues until you can feel those right muscles, right. And after a few months, so many clients would come to me and tell me I feel muscles. I didn't know where I had right. So now I'm actually working.

[00:29:38.050] – Andrei
So that's what that step is. When you train number one error. When I ask my more experienced strandedness, I absorb it myself and I ask them, what do we think what do we see here as a mistake and how people exercise? Number one, what we see is people prioritize the movement over targeting the right muscle and what happens you're going to strengthen those existing maps. And if they're not perfect to begin with the targeted muscles you try to reach, they're going to remain unstimulated. But at the same time, you're going to strengthen the other parts in your body.

[00:30:12.610] – Andrei
And that leads to more imbalance down the road. And also you don't really get the job done because you're not targeting and stimulating the right muscles around the body. So the way we explain it here and also explain in the book is make sure you're feeling the right muscles and the joint and experience that movement experiences muscles and make the movement sort of happen as a byproduct as a result of that, rather than making about the movement if it makes sense.

[00:30:37.330] – Allan
Absolutely.

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[00:32:24.150] – Andrei
And I think we're going down to step four, which is something it's about the breath. And Philip is an expert, so he's going to elaborate on that.

[00:32:34.890] – Philip
I mean, the breath in our culture, we have a very unsettled relationship with the breath. We tend to hold it. I mean, you hold the breath when there's something you'd rather not feel or there's something you have to do, and you don't want to be confused by all the sensations that the breath evokes, because to release the body to the breath is to precipitate an avalanche of sensations and the whole of the body can release to the breath. You can measure the breath wave, the effect of the breath traveling down through the legs and traveling up through the torso.

[00:33:20.910] – Philip
So how to not only allow the breath to continue without being interrupted without being held because especially under pressure as you're holding the breath, it puts a huge amount of pressure on the internal organs. And then you find not only can you breathe continuously through the movement, but as the breath is released deeper and deeper from within the body, you are impelling the movement with the breath itself. That may sound strange, but it's as though the energy of the breath is moving the weight rather than trying to isolate the mechanics of it.

[00:34:09.510] – Philip
So what's happening is the body as a whole is gathering behind this task and all of the body is contributing to whatever the movement might be by allowing the breath to be resourced from deep within the body and mindful strength training to failure of course. What do we mean by failure? That's step five. And I'm sure Andrei could clarify that for us.

[00:34:44.710] – Andrei
While we can, while we younger have the ability, it's such a gift to be able to exercise and be able to bring those muscles to failure. At some stage. As we get older, we have injuries. Perhaps people develop what is cognitive impairment. They don't have the same ability to bring the muscle to failure, but while we can, it's the adaptation you get from reaching failure, not just increasing in strength, which is that's simple to understand. Take your muscle to full existing capacity and then some and then let your body time to recover, adapt and repeat.

[00:35:27.970] – Andrei
And each time you bring it to failure, you're going to progressively do more and more and more assuming from week to week, you can get stronger and stronger. But as well, I don't know exactly, but I would guess 80-90% of the benefits you get from this training from those last 15, 30 seconds. When you approach and failure. When you tap it into that fight and flight sympathetic nervous system, the body starts producing adrenaline, by the way, that also will raise your acetylcholine in the brain, because now your body is primed.

[00:36:05.650] – Andrei
It's an emergency. It makes you pay attention. You have to deal with it. So there are so many adaptations happen when you bring muscle to failure versus when you don't. We are in the book talking about this experiment. Do you remember the name of that protein, Philip, that they showed this in animal studies when the exercise produced an adrenaline?

[00:36:25.750] – Philip
I don't remember the name of it, but I sure remember the research.

[00:36:30.310] – Allan
It was some letters. Yes, and I think it ended with the two. It started with the C.

[00:36:35.290] – Andrei
That showed that it's an animal that when you produce adrenaline and do an exercise, there are certain epigenetic triggers that happen that otherwise would not happen. So they're modified as one group of mice that they have higher level of that protein and the control group, which is normal level. Both groups did exactly the same amount of exercise. I think they run on the treadmill for two weeks, but adaptations were significantly different. The group that had more of that protein, the increase in endurance by 103% versus control group only like eight and a half percent.

[00:37:14.390] – Andrei
They had more muscle tissue lesson, three muscle fat and so on and so forth. So even though they exercise the same amount. But that was one of the examples that showed. And it's also true for humans that detection happen on a completely different level when you have more of that protein, which the body would actuate in that fight and flight event. And so this is what MSTF really is all about. You only have to do one set. And by the way, I learned about it from Doug Mcguff and John little's book classic Body By Science.

[00:37:49.790] – Andrei
That's all it started for me. I used to go to gym like everybody else, compound movements, deadlifts, all that stuff. I kind of was okay. I had lots of aches in my joints, but I thought, you know what? I don't care. That's just how it just comes with it. And after I read the classic book, Body by Science, this is the last time I exercised convention, and I just fell in love with it. After I've been doing it for a year, all the aches and pains went away.

[00:38:20.870] – Andrei
We did it. I first tried it in my old work with some colleagues, and I've seen changes in one guy who never really exercised properly in his life. But now he had shoulders, chest, triceps, six pack. So after individually, only once a week of the style of training. So all the aches and pains disappeared. It works. Then it occurred to me this is such an amazing form to take care of the body that I need to do something with it. That kind of was why I decided to open New Element training.

[00:38:52.550] – Andrei
And this is why people come to us. That's what we do. We follow the other principles. But bringing muscle to momentary muscle failure is the foundation of the strength, and we move on.

[00:39:09.710] – Philip
I might speak to the last of those principles or steps, which is that MSTF is best understood as a lifelong practice. There's no age at which muscle strength isn't an asset. There's no age at which this protocol is unsafe, either. The slow movement of the weight was really developed for people with Osteoporosis who were in danger of injury, and they thought, Well, let's try moving it very slowly and see if they can do that. And not only did they not suffer injury, as a result, they got stronger faster than had been expected.

[00:40:03.890] – Philip
And so the safety of it. I'm 68. And when I met Andrei, I sort of internalized despite myself, you're at a certain age better not be too intense, just kind of back off a bit. And I discovered this workout through Andrei, and I go to more intensity with the workout more safely than I've ever gone in my life. And one of the consequences of this, one of the reasons that you're encouraged to do it for the rest of your life is that as the muscles come into balance, you have less aches and pains.

[00:40:51.110] – Philip
I mean, I used to have chronic little nagging things that were there for months or years, and they have disappeared from my body. So I will be doing it for the rest of my life. And there's no point at which doing it is not either safe or an asset to your health.

[00:41:13.490] – Allan
Yeah, to compare and contrast this, you go into the gym, and the first thing people do is they come in, and if anything, they've got their workout on their phone or they've got a notebook. That's about all the preparation they did. They're blaring music so they can actually not focus. And then as they get to moving, you're absolutely right. It's like, okay, well, I'm supposed to get three sets of eight with this weight. That's what I came in here to do. And that's what I'm going to do.

[00:41:41.150] – Allan
And when I get those three sets of eight, even if I got all three sets of eight, I'm done. I finished that set and move on to the next exercise. And a lot of times there really isn't even a whole structure to why they're doing the next exercise. It's just, no, I'm working chest today. That's another chest exercise. So I'll just go do that one. The other one is the breath as we're lifting. And if you're doing three sets of eight, you're told, okay, on the eccentric, breathe in on the concentric, breathe out.

[00:42:05.750] – Allan
And it's just like an engine just go. And then the other one is failure. And so few people want to work to failure, either because they have the mental concept that failure is a bad thing or because they're afraid of it. And here you're saying, okay, now we can safely work to failure predominantly because, again, we're going to be focused on working in environments where we are safe. So we're not going to put ourselves under a heavy load of doing bench press and try to go two minutes under a bench press unless we have a spotter.

[00:42:37.130] – Allan
But we're going to use machines. We're going to use resistance bands, we're going to use body weight. We're going to do this in a responsible way, but we can actually use less weight and get stronger. Which again goes into why it's a lot safer. We're moving a lot slower, which again, is why it makes it a lot safer. And then, yes, at that point, this is something you can keep doing. And that takes me to the next bit of this because I think so many people will say, hey, I want you to start doing resistance exercises and like, oh, my knee.

[00:43:10.610] – Allan
Oh, I got this back problem. My doctor is telling me not to lift weights, not to do resistance training. And so as a trainer, typically, I'd say, okay, let's try to work around those injuries, those issues. But you brought up a thing in the book that I've not seen before, and it's called, I'm going to say it wrong again, biotensegrity.

[00:43:37.130] – Allan
Can you talk about that? Because I think that's just one of those things that is never mentioned. Everybody thinks, oh, I'm bone on bone on my knees. So therefore, I can't do resistance training with my legs or my back is going to start hurting me. So I really don't need to have anything I'm doing that's going to hurt my back. Can you talk about why that's not a problem with MSTF?

[00:44:02.090] – Philip
Yeah, you're absolutely right. We shy away from engaging. The book talks about one study that was done with people with arthritis, and they were encouraged to do strength training. Say, your knee hurt. You were encouraged to do leg presses, for example, and to tolerate the pain they said up to about the level of five out of ten. If it goes above that, back off. And in the course of the study, people got stronger and their pain diminished. And that principle you mentioned, Biotensegrity really explains why that can happen.

[00:44:43.250] – Philip
We imagine that the bones are stacked on top of one another in the skeleton, the way you'd build a brick wall, one brick on top of the other. And so then, of course, if the bricks are rubbing, you don't want to exacerbate it. But that's not the way the body works. The joints between the bones aren't in contact with each other. Unless there's a shock to the system. They are floating. The bones float and they're held in this web of muscle and fascia and connective tissue.

[00:45:26.750] – Philip
And when the muscles are strong and the muscles are balanced, the joints continue to float, and it's where the muscles become weak or they're out of balance. Or there's an injury that that can be impaired. But it's all the more reason than, as Andrei was saying to reactivate what muscles have fallen asleep and strengthen them the result. I mean, I felt it myself when I talk about my sort of chronic aches and pains disappearing. I know it's because my muscles are stronger and more balanced.

[00:46:07.470] – Allan
Yes. Again, like I said, I get a lot of people that will say I can't. So you go down this mindset of having a conversation with them. Well, just tell yourself to start, tell yourself to do the brain, telling you to do something. So get a start. Do this that's the big mantra out there. But when we bring mindfulness into this and I think that's what I want to wrap up here, at least for today. I want everybody to get this book so they can learn a lot more about this.

[00:46:39.150] – Allan
But we have this mindset of the drill instructor in my head telling me to go work out, telling me to do my sets, telling me to push one more rep, telling me to do these things. And for a lot of people that they actually can get stronger, they push themselves further. They also have aches and pains and injuries. But when you lean into this, I guess the best way I can say it and use the term willingness versus willing fullness. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:47:11.130] – Allan
Because I think as people are looking at this and saying, well, do I really want to because your body wants to. Can you kind of dive into what that's about and what that feels like? Because it's really hard. I'm not even really good at it getting out of my head and getting into actually enjoying what my body can do?

[00:47:30.930] – Philip
Yes. And to give some context to that, the reaction might be what's wrong with me? I can't get out of my head.

[00:47:40.410] – Philip
But thousands of years ago, we actually experienced our thinking in the body and most commonly in the belly. We felt ourselves thinking there, and now we can't imagine any other state than thinking in the head. So it's been inculcated within us. We've been trained to think with the head, and it's such a wonderful relief to drop out of the head and into the body.

[00:48:14.950] – Philip
And that relationship with the body that we've been trained in is one that leads us to feel victimized by the body and betrayed by the body, and we want to be in charge of it, and we know what it needs for its own good and all of that noise overwhelms the body's deepest understanding. So the body, what the body feels is the present. It feels the breeze, it feels the sounds of the world. It feels everything it vibrates to the present and to join the body in that way is to join its attunement to the present.

[00:49:06.190] – Philip
And then you discover, as the body is taken towards failure, you discover the animal joy of it. You are summoned into life, and the energy of your life is coursing through your being. As you are moving this weight and feeling it all. And there is no realm of my life in my week to week existence in which I feel more alive than I do during this workout. And because of that, because I've been able to renew my relationship with the body, I look forward to it.

[00:49:57.070] – Philip
Today's the day I get to go to the gym and come back fully to life. And there's an imperative in our culture that makes us afraid of life. We make ourselves small. We'd rather not feel things in a big way. And here's this realm in which you can do it in complete safety. You can bit by bit. Allow yourself to feel what you're feeling. And that relationship you have with the resistance with the say it's the plates of the machine is no longer an adversarial relationship. There is companionship in it. If that doesn't sound too strange, because here you are no longer in the isolated ego of the self.

[00:50:52.010] – Philip
But you have dilated into the spaciousness of the present and engaged with this weight that is helping you move to the edge. It's such a deep and vivid encounter with the self.

[00:51:12.830] – Allan
Well, Philip, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:51:20.570] – Philip
Well, that's a good one, certainly what you put into your body. I mean eating. You can't out exercise a bad diet. Andrei, do you have another one?

[00:51:35.010] – Andrei
Well, clearly, MSTF. Even once weekly, if you can twice a week. It's amazing when people come to us even once a week. As you said, it's hard to believe that you can achieve this transformative benefits in only 30 minutes. But guess what? We've been doing this for eight years. We didn't write the book out of the thin air. It works if you apply this principle correctly. And if you put all the inside out benefits you get from this style. Any style of proper strength training, as long as you're not hurting yourself is the most powerful.

[00:52:11.130] – Andrei
If you put it in a pill, the most powerful help you ever invented. So essentially, it does transform your body. And it does work. So that would be my second one, once or twice of proper strength training once a week.

[00:52:24.390] – Philip
And I might say number three for me is renewing that relationship with the body to drop out of the head and trust the body's intelligence.

[00:52:37.830] – Philip
And the biological fact is, the body processes over a billion times more information than we can be consciously aware of. So to decouple from that driving need to control and drop into the present through the body and feel it through the body is to access a grace in your life that carries you forward minute by minute, hour by hour.

[00:53:11.130] – Allan
Thank you, gentlemen.

[00:53:12.330] – Allan
Andre, Philip, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, Deep Fitness or about your training up there in Toronto or any other things you've got going on, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:53:23.490] – Andrei
Well, the book has it's website, Deepfitness.life. It's available on all the major platforms everywhere in North America and UK. On our website, Newelementraining.com, we created a video library where we professionally recorded videos of all the exercises that we mentioned in the book. So people, if they needed a bit more help, they want to learn a little bit more. They can simply go to Newelementraining.com, go to Resources pages and then have access to the videos as well. And from there, find a way to contact me if they need to and have any questions.

[00:54:00.150] – Philip
I might just add that the book is available as an audiobook and as an ebook. So it's available on all platforms. And people want to find out more about my aspect of MSTF. I've got a website embodiedpresent.com that has all kinds of information, and I still actively teach workshops, and there's a listing workshops and facilitators trainings there. And in late November, I'll be in Europe. So if any of your listeners are there, I'm in Berlin, Amsterdam and England. Please do look me up.

[00:54:42.150] – Allan
Awesome. Well, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/512. And I'll be sure to have all those links there. Andrei, Philip, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:54:53.070] – Philip
Thanks for having us. It's been just fabulous, Allan.

[00:54:56.010] – Andrei
Yeah. Thank you, Allan.

Post Show/Recap

[00:55:02.770] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:55:04.390] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, what a great conversation about lifting a little bit slower. It's a nice change of pace.

[00:55:13.990] – Allan
The funny thing about weightlifting is most of what we know is really just based on bro science. It's just okay. Well, what did Arnold do to be Arnold? And then what did this guy do? And so then I grew up in the 90s buying the muscle and fitness and the Flex magazines and all that stuff and making wider.

[00:55:36.010] – Allan
I guess that's how they pronounce it, making him very rich, buying his stuff and then buying supplements that were all in these books and trying any of the workouts that were in there as well. And those magazines are still on the shelves and they're still selling. And so you open them up and it's the same workout. It's just a different bodybuilder. These guys followed the science. They really dove into this. They come on the heels of some pretty cool people. I had Dr. Mcguff on the podcast.

[00:56:04.750] – Allan
It was one of my first interviews, one of my really early interviews, episode 43. Now, I promise, if you listen to it, I don't sound the same. I've learned a lot about podcasting in that time, but it's a really good book, Body by Science, and it was kind of he wrote that with John Little, and when you read through that, it's like then you start realizing, okay, there's a whole bunch of science that's coming out about resistance training. That's not just bro science. It's actual people in lab coats, testing mostly College students, but still testing people and figuring some things out.

[00:56:40.990] – Allan
That was back in 2016 and then jumped forward a few years. And I had John Little on the show with his next book that he came out with, which was the Time Savers workout. And again, the concept was the same as if you use enough intensity and the exercises, you don't have to necessarily change the number of sets, the number of reps, or even the amount of weight to get a more intense workout, you're changing something else. That's a big part of the whole process, the volume.

[00:57:10.270] – Allan
And that is time under tension, or as these guys like to say, at time under load. And it really does make a difference. And it's typically not something when I'm training anybody that I work with tempo until they've been lifting for a good long time. But the way these guys structured it. So we're talking about Philip and Andrei in their book Deep Fitness and all of these books, all of them the way they structure it is in making sure that it's accessible to everybody. It's not just an intermediate or advanced lifting technique that you throw in there to get the muscle to grow even more.

[00:57:47.830] – Allan
It becomes a standard of the way you work.

[00:57:51.670] – Rachel
That's neat. And I think one of the things that they mentioned, too, about being mindful while you're lifting and not distracted by music or chit chat or anything like that. But if you're really paying attention to the muscle that you're trying to work with, you'll feel it if you're thinking about it and focusing on it. And I had mentioned not too long ago, I had read an article about standing with my bag against the wall and trying to do a bicep curl. And in doing that, you remove all of the momentum.

[00:58:23.290] – Rachel
You remove any of the cheating, and I lift pretty light. I lift a ten or 15 pound weight for a bicep curl. But when I stood with my back against the wall, there was no cheating, and I could barely get that ten pound weight lifted. It was so different. But what I realized was that I was really relying solely on the bicep to lift that weight and no helper muscles were involved. It's totally different. So I can imagine that if you're really mindful in the moves that you're doing, you would get a bigger impact because you're really using that primary weight and muscle and not the helper muscles around it.

[00:59:04.690] – Allan
Yes, there's the two concepts. One is the helper muscles, and it's really hard, particularly if you're standing up and you're trying to do any kind of movement. It's really hard not to shift your body weight and do something that's going to incorporate another muscle when your brain feels like the muscle you're using isn't going to be strong enough to do the work. And so anytime someone comes into the gym, it's interesting because they get really excited. We'll do the first day and they'll do some weights and we'll say, okay, this is about how strong you are and they'll do the first workout, and it's so hard.

[00:59:40.150] – Allan
And by two weeks, they've increased their lifting by 20, 30, 40, 100 percent. They're lifting twice as much weight as they were on their first workout just two, three weeks later.

[00:59:52.220] – Rachel
That's awesome.

[00:59:53.770] – Allan
Well, it is.

[00:59:54.490] – Allan
It's huge, impressive. And they're like, oh, my gosh, if this keeps happening, I'm going to be able to lift a truck. And I'm like, that's not going to happen, because what's happened in that time is your brain actually learned to talk to your muscle. If you sit on your butt all day, your brain turns off, it's not having to talk to your butt muscles at all. And so if you don't do squats, right, it's not talking to the butt at all. And so when you slow down and you start doing exercises the way you're supposed to do them, the brain is like, oh, who's that guy?

[01:00:29.590] – Allan
And literally, they start having a conversation. And then once they figure it out, it's like, oh, so we need to fire these muscle fibers to make this happen. And then when it gets smart at that, you can just keep adding weight. And then there's a point where it's like, okay, we fired almost all the muscle fibers we're talking to now. Now we've got to incorporate even more. And or we've got to make these muscles stronger and bigger because the stimulus is more than we can handle.

[01:00:57.190] – Allan
Which is another thing about their program is you are going to take this to a failure, a momentary failure, meaning that muscle can't do the work anymore because your brain has incorporated every muscle fiber it knows, and they are all firing. And that's all you can lift at that point in time. And then you effectively fail. And then your body goes back and say, okay, give me nutrients, give me rest. I've got to be stronger next time. And that's where real strength starts to happen. Because now your body is saying, I have to adapt.

[01:01:30.490] – Allan
You given it everything, the stimulus and everything it needs to adapt. And by doing it in this controlled manner, there's no way for you to change the momentum of it. And there's no way to not fire those muscles. So your brain has to stay focused on that muscle. And it's one of the things people will go do their training, like someone go for a run, they'll turn on their music to make the run easier. People will listen to certain music, what's your playlist in the gym to make the exercise easier.

[01:02:04.090] – Philip
And the reality of it is sometimes easier just means that you're not getting as strong as you can. If you're more mindful about the muscles that are supposed to be firing and you're firing those muscles maximally as much as you can, you're then creating this huge stimulus that's going to benefit you in the end. And the other thing I I think really like about this process is like I said in the past, I would probably not schedule this for anybody. That's not an intermediate level, but the way they're looking at it and it makes a ton of sense is okay so if I'm going to do three sets of ten of squats, that's 30 squats.

[01:02:49.630] – Allan
Or if I do their method and let's just say, I'm going to do 10 seconds down. I mean, 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down, and I'm only going to get five, and then I fail.

[01:03:04.510] – Allan
Okay. I just worked for roughly 100 minutes, 100 seconds. That's not even two minutes. And my leg workouts over my leg press is over. So I'm only doing five reps and not doing 10, I mean got 30. So that's my knee. And if you're worried about your knee, that worry goes away.

[01:03:34.090] – Rachel
Well, that's the interesting thing, too, is that instead of doing a slow motion like I learned from NASM to do a count of four and then pull it back up for a count of three or four or something. To me, that's slow. But to them, they're talking like 30 seconds in a movie or something. I can't imagine lowering, for example, the bicep curl again, lowering the curl down for a count of 30 seconds, and then trying to bring it back up for 30 seconds, I would be done.

[01:04:07.030] – Allan
Well, a lot of people want to do pull ups. They'll come to me as a trainer and say, what are some things you want to do? I've always wanted to do a pull up. I get that a lot. And I'll tell you how I would typically train someone for pull ups. We would start out with either a Lat machine or we would do some resistance bands or some form of assisted pull up. And then over time, you take away the assist and they can get stronger. But there's another way to do it once they start getting to the point where they're almost able to do it.

[01:04:39.010] – Allan
And that's where we would incorporate negatives. Okay.

[01:04:41.470] – Allan
Now, as you may recall from the episodes we've talked about, a negative basically means you're doing the eccentric portion of the pull of the movement. So in this case, I would get them up on a bench or a ladder. And I'd say, okay, I want you to put your chest against the bar, and then we remove the ladder, and I'm like, slowly lower yourself down. And when you get to the bottom and put the ladder or the bench back under you and say, okay, go back up there, put your chest against the bar, and I pull that ladder away.

[01:05:12.790] – Allan
Normally, a person would lower themselves. And at first, if they last 5 seconds, that's phenomenal. Once I know that they can take, like, 10 seconds to come down, that person can do a pull up.

[01:05:25.150] – Rachel
Wow.

[01:05:25.750] – Allan
Okay. So if you wanted to get really strong pull ups, the way Philip would do this is he would climb up and then he would lower himself, and he would try to make that lowering portion last 30 seconds.

[01:05:39.610] – Rachel
That's incredible.

[01:05:40.870] – Allan
Okay. And then he would try to pull himself up really slow. Now, can someone do that? 30 seconds? 30 seconds? Maybe. Maybe not. But I can tell you, if you can do that, you're going to be doing pull ups like a piston. You won't have any problem at all doing any pull ups that you want to do. So maybe you start with the lat pull down machine and you have someone feed it down to you to your chest, and then you just slowly over the course of 30 seconds try to bring that bar up.

[01:06:13.090] – Allan
Let it go up. Don't let go of it and let it go slowly up over 30 seconds. And then if you need help getting it back down, then let someone help you get it back down and then go again. And that will be giving you a lot of what we're talking about here in that you are putting time under tension or time under load on that muscle, and it's very intense. So this is something you would do probably no more than twice a week, and you're going to feel DOMS.

[01:06:44.650] – Allan
Just get ready. You are. There's just no way that you can start this type of program and not have some level of DOMS. But with everything, this is something about when they talk about mindfulness, it's just something to realize that we are helping ourselves get stronger. And if you're paying attention to the muscles and the muscles are hurting, that's just feedback. That's just feedback. You got to let that go and then get stronger and come back.

[01:07:14.650] – Allan
Well, it looks like something happened to Rachel's connectivity and she fell off the call.

[01:07:19.930] – Allan
So I guess with that, I will call it a show. So I'll talk to you next week. Bye.

Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
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Thank you!

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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.

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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:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
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CHALLENGE

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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.

SPONSOR

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

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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.

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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

[00:00:49.580] – 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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