Dhru Purohit Show - No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers, Cozy Earth, and Levels. You might think weight loss is all about discipline, but today’s guest reveals there is more to the story. Weight loss also involves minimizing hunger, increasing satiety, and interrupting food noise. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with exercise and nutrition expert Stan Efferding. Stan shares his top strategies for minimizing hunger and takes a deep dive into the habits that drive it. He also discusses why calorie counting can be beneficial, explores various weight-loss strategies, and offers guidance on choosing the best approach. Additionally, Stan shares valuable lessons he’s learned over the years, reveals what he’s changed his mind about, and highlights the exercises he prioritizes. If you’re looking for practical tips on nutrition, exercise, and weight loss, this episode is a must-listen! Stan Efferding is an IFBB Professional bodybuilder, World Record-holding powerlifter, and one of only ten men in the world to total over 2,300 pounds raw in competition, earning him the title of the World’s Strongest Bodybuilder. With a degree in Exercise Science from the University of Oregon, Stan has over 25 years of experience training high school, collegiate, and professional athletes. He conducts seminars nationwide, sharing expertise in sports, nutrition, and training techniques, and has been featured in publications like Muscular Development, Flex Magazine, and Power Magazine. In this episode, Dhru and Stan dive into: Strategies for minimizing hunger (00:43) Types of diets (6:44) Calorie counting and awareness (13:12) Exercise and energy expenditure (18:42) Strategies for weight loss and factors to consider when choosing one (26:30) Habits that drive hunger (32:27) What Stan got wrong and the lessons he learned (37:23) The importance of food quality and testing (44:11) Exercises to prioritize and deprioritize (48:22) Stan’s principles (54:52) Reactionary versus resolve to do better (01:02:42) Final thoughts (01:07:42) Also mentioned in this episode: Stan’s Meal Prep- Vertical Diet  For more on Stan, follow him on Instagram, Youtube, and on his Website. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers, Cozy Earth, and Levels. BIOptimizers Black Friday sale on all their products lasts all November long. Just go to bioptimizers.com/dhru and use code DHRU10 to get your discount of 25% sitewide and $100 worth of free gifts today! Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stan, welcome to the podcast. You know, I'd love to start off by talking about something that I feel is a super underrated topic and something that my community hasn't really thought about a lot of. And that's the idea of minimizing hunger. In fact, you had a quote that I pulled from a podcast that I listened to and you said, the most important thing to adhere to if you're trying to stick to a diet is to focus on minimizing hunger. If you try to just focus on willpower, you'll lose that battle each time. Talk to us about the top strategies that you share with the people who follow you, your clients over the years when it comes

to minimizing hunger. Well, I think that's an important topic because a lot of people presume to think that weight gain or weight loss is really a matter of discipline. And in fact, while it's your responsibility, you are you meaning people in general. general are kind of dealt a different deck of cards and not everybody has the same hunger signaling. This is one of the biggest underlying problems with weight loss. And I said this many years ago in a rant that I did about the Samoan population and the obesity epidemic here. Genetically speaking, some people tend to respond to hormones like ghrelin, the hunger hormone or leptin, the satiety hormone, leptin resistance differently. Somebody might,

think is easy for them to maintain a calorie deficit or maintain a normal body weight, other people struggle with a term that's been coined recently called food noise. And some people just think about food. It just overwhelms them constantly throughout the day. And if you're going to successfully diet, you can't set yourself up for failure by constantly being voraciously hungry. There's going to be, you've got to have some level of comfort or discomfort, but that process is going to require that, that you understand that your client is going to need to be able to make this part of a lifestyle that's sustainable in order for them to do that. They can't constantly be thinking about food. So these satiety signals, this hunger dysregulation, I hate to bring this up right off the bat,

but what has made this even more obvious is these new medications, the GLP1 agonist, the semaglutide, Wago, V. Zempec, what they are very successful at doing, and this isn't an endorsement by any means. There's certainly pros and cons to any medication. But what they're very successful at doing is interrupting food noise. They suppress hunger. And that's why people who go on these medications experience such an incredible success. Average long-term weight loss, dietary adherence over two years in multiple human studies, is about 2% weight loss, not significant. After two years, losing weight isn't that hard.

Most people go on a diet, lose weight initially, but gaining it back is the problem. The vast majority gain back, as much, if not more, over. 50% of the first year and somewhere north of 80 as much as 95% within two to three years of the weight is gained back. Long-term dietary adherence, about a 2% weight loss on average over two years. With Wagovi and Ozempic, the semaglutide, suppressing hunger signaling, the average sustainable weight loss was 17%. Terseptide was 23%. So you can see how significant the difference is, and the major signal there is suppression of hunger.

and give you some tools that we use to help manage hunger based on, you know, our experience with randomized control trials. Number one for managing hunger is probably going to be eating more whole foods and less ultra-processed foods. That's become quite obvious. We have studies now showing that people tend to eat as many as 500 extra calories a day when they're eating ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, calories. It's important that I make the distinction there's all three of those things.

Way protein isolate is ultra-processed, but it's not hyper-palatable or calorie-dense. And so the processing itself isn't really what drives those foods to be over-consumed. It's the kind of the combination of sugars, fats, and salt, calorie density, and hyper-pallitability. And those are, you know, it's not like we don't know what those are. That's your drinking your sugar-laden sodas and your fast foods and your pastries and those kinds of things, the cakes, cookies, candies, and those kinds of things. And we're simply over-consuming those foods because they don't satisfy us. They don't satisfy our hunger signaling.

And so we eat more of them at one sitting and we're hungry again sooner and eat again as a result. So the first thing is we try and get our clients to move away or to eat the majority of their foods as whole foods. That's your lean proteins, your fruits and vegetables, your nuts, and seeds and those kinds of things are a lot harder to overconsume and they satisfy you longer. Higher protein diets, higher fiber diets are important. And there's other smaller things that you can do, being mindful about your eating, taking longer to eat because there seems to be a time delay between when you start eating

and when your body responds to the fullness, the Ruge expansion of the stomach sending the signal for satiety. And then also one of the methods we use to kind of help with that fullness, expanding the stomach and taking more time, is we ask that they drink fluids before and during, lots of fluids before and during their meals to help with filling the stomach up. And then obviously the fibers, the salads, just not very nutrient or not very calorie dense, but you can eat a lot of them and they'll fill your. you up and keep you full for a longer period of time. And so that's what we try and do with our clients and understanding also that I've often said that there's many paths to the same destination. And there's no one best diet.

And everybody responds differently. And I think this is a good thing. Although my clients say, Stan, just tell me exactly what to eat. That's their demand of me as their coach. Just tell me exactly what to eat. Or what's the best diet. And the best diet's the one you'll follow. and exactly what the E is going to depend on what seems the least restrictive to you.

What makes you the least hungry? Clearly those tools are higher satiety foods like whole foods and protein and fiber. But now we get into all these different types of diets. We've got, which I'm going to categorize in one of three ways. There's only three kinds of diets, really, for weight loss. And this is coined by Dr. Peter Attia, got him credit for this. CR, DR, DR, and TR. Those are the three paths that you can take, the three diets that people can choose.

CR is calorie restriction. That's where you count calories. Look at the labels. Use an app, weigh and measure your food. That's an option. That's a very viable pathway that people can be successful in dieting. DR is dietary restriction. That's your eliminating food groups or macros.

That's your keto folks, your vegan folks, your carnivore folks, your whole 30s. All of those diets that tell you to, good food, bad food, eliminate these. That's a perfectly reasonable path. There's pros and cons, of course, with all of these avenues, but that is a type of dietary pattern, dietary path. The other one is TR. That's time restriction. That's obviously your 168, your omads, your one meal a day, your alternate day fasting,

and anything that incorporates limiting the window under which that you consume food. That can be successful. pathway for some people, not all. And on all of the research, on each of these different types of diets, we see inter-individual variability. We see people that are successful on these diets, and we see people that are unsuccessful on these diets. And comparing them to each other, we don't see any winner amongst them. We see that long-term dietary adherence is a challenge with all three diets, and no diet rises to the top as being the best. And so, you, You kind of have options here to choose which one feels the best to you.

And people's success or failure on those diets is going to depend on whether or not they're able to adhere to those diets long term. Yeah, that's really the key word is adherence. I want to pull another quote from a podcast that you were on on this topic. You know, on calorie restriction, you know, energy balance, you shared that the idea of calorie restriction is truthful, but not. always useful. I might have butchered that a little bit in the paraphrasing. That's perfect. But can you expand on that a little bit? Because I think that's the journey

that where a lot of our audience members are going on, where this is understanding for years they were told by many people that even have been on our podcast that, hey, calories don't matter. It's not really about calories. Maybe even some people coming in and talking about the carbohydrate insulin model, which there are some really interesting things inside of that. Even maybe I primarily believe that model in my own understanding. But now this is a lot. But now this just understanding that, hey, listen, if you're going to ultimately lose weight, there's got to be some reduction in calories that are there. And that doesn't mean that the quality of the food that you're eating isn't incredibly important. So can you expand on your original statement?

People like to demonize calories in calories out. I think it's a straw man argument. They try and simplify it as meaning that 100 calories of carrots is the same as 100 calories of cookies. And nobody's ever said that. It's a oversimplified term for really. the energy balance equation, and that's total daily energy intake. That's all of the calories you consume and total daily energy expenditure. And that's all of the activity and energy, the calories that you burn. It's a more complex equation. It accounts for things like fiber, like hormones and satiety, which can drive overconsumption of food, which would affect your energy intake side of the equation. And it accounts for how hormones affect things like your energy,

ability to exercise and burn calories. So all of those things are accounted for in that energy balance equation. At the end of the day, if you want to lose weight, you have to get into a calorie deficit. Calories do count whether you're doing keto or whether you're doing intermittent fasting or whether you're counting calories. If you're going to lose weight or if you're losing weight, you are in a calorie deficit just by definition. And that's not to say that you have to count calories. Those are other methods or ways that you can put yourself in a calorie deficit by eliminating food groups or, you know, just by eliminating the amount of time that you eat in a day. The end result of that is that if you lose weight, you created a calorie deficit, whether

intentionally or unintentionally. But whether or not you can maintain that type of diet long term becomes still the most important. Like you said, adherence is important. I coined the term compliance is the science. And ultimately, whichever diet path that you choose, being able to adhere to it long term, make it part of a lifestyle that you can sustain is going to be the most important thing. But calories do count, and it's important to learn about calories, just like you learn about budgeting your money. If you spend more than you earn, you're going to be in a deficit. And if you earn more than you spend, you're going to have a surplus, which with money is a good thing. With calories might be a bad thing.

The surplus can lead to weight gain. A lot of people just aren't aware of how many calories are in foods that they eat. I've been training clients since college. I studied exercise science in the University of Oregon, and I worked at a box gym and worked at many gyms. I've owned three different gyms over the years, and I've been training people since I was a young man since the late 80s. And I still train people. I still have clients. I still work with not just famous athletes, as many people are familiar with me for, but I work with dad bods and soccer moms and Jen Pop on simple weight loss.

And as you mentioned now, a lot of women, as they get into their 40s and 50s, you're struggling with weight largely because of either PCOS or some sort of paramedopausal. post-menopausal symptoms, things start to change for them very aggressively. I want them to be educated as to the kind of foods they eat. So I think it's a good idea, just like you'd learn to budget your money, it's a good idea, balance your checkbook, it's a good idea to use an app for a little while. So you have familiarize yourself with some of the quote-unquote hidden calories that are in some foods. A vanilla latte at Starbucks can have 700 calories. And you might not know that. She seems like a coffee. You know, it tastes good, it's got a little vanilla in it. Things like Betuccini Alfredo at Cheesecake Factory is 2,200 calories.

We should probably be pretty aware that that's going to be a calorie bomb. But even things like little sauces, salad dressings, things with very calorie-dense oils, generally speaking, that's not to speak specifically to what type of oil, but just fats in general. They're nine calories per gram. They take up a little space, just a pad of butter or a tablespoon of olive oil, even a healthy olive oil in your, you know, in preparation of your food, one tablespoon becomes two. That's 200 calories. Do that three times a day. That's 600. And it just accumulates very quickly.

And so you have to be kind of careful about understanding how many calories are in your food, because if you're overconsuming, even a healthy diet, even a healthy Mediterranean diet, I said. And eating too much cheese and nuts, you know, they're very fatty. And that, while quite healthy, certainly, quantity matters. And so, I do want people to become aware of the foods that they're eating. My clients send me a picture of each meal that they eat every day. It takes them five seconds. And that gives me an opportunity to, you know, see exactly what they're eating, make recommendations based on that.

Yeah. So just to, you know, recap a little bit of what you're saying. Calories do matter. And it's important to have calorie awareness because even with really incredible food in this hyper-palatable world, which even a lot of wellness foods, quote unquote, companies that, I'm an investor in. The foods are super tasty. It's just easy to eat a whole bag of chips, even if they have made with cassava flour and avocado oil, right? It's just, it's just too easy because they taste incredible. It's not just, you know, lays potato chips and Kellogg cereal and

these other things. There's a lot of wellness foods that, you know, wellness, quote unquote, snacks, foods that are easy to overeat. So we have to be calorie aware. And would you also say that for most people, especially my core demographic that's listening today, just through calorie restriction alone, that's not going to be the ideal way of losing weight and keeping it off for the long term. I agree. And the big thing there, what I think you're segueing into is the energy expenditure side of the equation, which is your exercise. There's many benefits to the exercise, Although I've often said that the diet, the calories that you eat are the vast majority of your weight gain or weight loss, that exercise is great for your health. And it's also very good for satiety.

Getting 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 steps a day actually helps satiate you. And lifting weights actually helps you increase your metabolism and store carbohydrates and reduce your blood sugars throughout the day. So all of those things are important, yes. Thinking you can burn calories through exercise to lose weight is not a very successful strategy, and I'll tell you why. The reasons are manyfold. One, you can eat a lot more calories than you can burn. I mean, you can train hard for an hour, and a small peanut butter and jelly sandwich would

wipe that out or one donut. So as far as the math goes, it's not a great strategy. Two, oftentimes when you try and aggressively work out, compensation takes over whereby you get tired. I call it battle ropes and burpees. You got a coach that wants to blow his whistle and make you breathe hard and sweat. And you leave the gym knowing that you trained hard, but you go home and you sit more and eat more. Part of the energy expenditure side of the equation is what's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And that's where just things like just being on your side.

feet more, just blinking and moving around and cleaning the house and just non-exercise activity. What you see as exercise activity increases, non-exercise activity may decrease. So it kind of becomes a bit of a zero-sum game for some people. You'll burn a few calories, but it's not significant enough. The third problem is that if that exercise that you're doing to burn calories isn't enjoyable or sustainable, you'll stop doing it in a very short period of time, as we spoke about, you know, dietary adherence, the exercise adherence. Say the best diets the one you'll follow. I say the best exercise is the one you'll do.

So I don't believe in prescribing per se, you know, 40 minutes on the treadmill. If that's not something somebody enjoys or will they consistently do or will be sacrificed for some other thing that catches them off guard during the day, you know, family obligations, kids, et cetera, working late, I'd rather have them find some sort of activity they enjoy. And it could be a different activity, you know, whether it's pickleball or tennis or they like to go play basketball or like to go to a Zumba class. I don't care. I'm not particular. I think exercise is great for your health, but it needs to be done consistently. And as you know and as many guests who have been on your show have said, I do think we finally reached the point at which everyone understands and

everyone has loudly spoken about the importance of some sort of resistance training. And that might not be enjoyable. Some people really hate that. And even when I've got a client and I'm taking into the the gym for the first time that don't enjoy lifting, my first goal is, to set them up on some sort of program that they enjoy? Do they like the exercise? Does it to give them some sort of loading? It doesn't have to be a squat or a bench or a deadlift. It can be any type of exercise. The machines are fine. Body weights fine. Anything you can do to challenge the muscles and progress that over time is very important as we know now. No, that's great. I'm so glad you went into the exercise conversation because that is actually an old idea that a lot of people have

that they can figure out a way through exercise to be the primary way that they lose weight. What I was sort of alluding to was the idea that there are some people, while calories do matter and we can't lose weight without going into a calorie deficit, that some people's view of that is, hey, let's eat whatever we want and as long as it's within the calorie range. It doesn't matter what the food is. There's no good food. There's no bad food that's out there. And you know what?

that probably works for some people, and it obviously does work for some people. I think largely for my audience, I think that that's something that does not work for a lot of people. And yet we want to also make sure that you don't go into some other strategy blindly. That's where the calorie awareness that you were talking about matters so much. You should be able to audit your calories and just get a sense of how much is that pour of olive oil or dressing or these hidden calories that are there. The area that I was sort of pivoting to was the idea that largely for an audience that, that it doesn't work. The primary way of losing weight is through tracking calories,

that indeed the two other ways of losing weight that you mentioned are probably going to be better options that are available for them. I think it's dietary restriction and then time restriction in some capacity. Have you generally found that certain type of people do better with one and certain type of people do better with another strategy? Absolutely, yeah. And I ask those questions. When I work with a client, I send them a detailed questionnaire.

and ask them what kind of what their personal preferences are. I even send them a list, a very long list of foods, and have them rank them from one zero to ten as to which foods they like to eat. I'm not going to give somebody a diet that has foods in there that they don't enjoy. Having said that, as you just mentioned, oftentimes people don't want to count calories, but calories do count. The types of foods count. And we talked about switching away from ultra-processed foods into more whole foods.

That helps with satiety. Talked about getting sufficient fruits and vegetables. You go from calories down to macronutrients down to micronutrients. And many years ago, there were a lot of folks posting about flexible dieting, and I think it kind of got bastardized into protein powders and pop tarts after a while. As long as you were getting the right number of calories and adequate protein, you could eat anything you wanted. And I think it was a straw man. It was a misrepresentation of what was intended. But satiety signaling is hugely important, which is why you have to start picking those foods that we mentioned, lean proteins, fruits and vegetables, fibers, et cetera.

and then you can include some of your favorite foods. Some people can. Now, what you just said was very interesting. You said that some of your clients can't eat those kinds of foods because they end up binging. You know, what's the Pringles commercial once you pop? You can't stop. I've had clients. I've told them, why don't you incorporate, you know, a measure of some of your favorite foods into your diet?

And they said, oh, no, if I eat one, I'm going to eat the whole bag. and you have to be sensitive to the fact that that's the type of individual that can't stop. And so what we often have to do is find swaps. You're more likely to eat these kinds of foods at night. You know, you're Netflix in the evening and you're relaxing. It's kind of that hedonic behavior of just chewing and might not even be the eating. You might not even be hungry. It's not just hunger that drives people to eat.

Bortem. It could be stress release. It could be childhood trauma, social situations. There's a whole bunch of different reasons why people, eat. And if you're just sitting at front of the TV at night and that becomes something to pass your time, now what's available in the house? And here's where we try and create strategies, again, satiety strategies that help people stay on their diet. And so not only do you have to get rid of the things that you're typically overeating that are hyper-palatable to process

food like the ice cream, and that's just going to kill you. And if it's sitting there in the freezer, which we learned over COVID as people were sitting in their houses, you're going to eat it. So you have to create barriers to entry where if you're going to eat ice cream, you probably should have to get in the car and drive somewhere to get it, which is unlikely to happen in your underwear and with a remote control at 930 at 10 o'clock at night. But you have swaps available. You need to have something in their refrigerator. And what I commonly recommend is lower calorie, higher protein foods. One of my favorites is Greek yogurt and berries. You can devour a lot of that and not consume nearly the calories that you would consume from ice cream.

You get a cold Greek yogurt, which we've seen in the literature now, Dr. Stu Phillips, professor at McMaster University, I just recently published some good information, saying that dairy has an independent beneficial effect on BMI and performance. And it's an independent effect of protein. It's a dairy effect. And so I do incorporate, and there's the calcium benefit as well, And then the Greek yogurt, of course, has the fermentation benefit where, you know, the Sonnenberg trials out of Stanford showed that 100% of their patients or their study subjects who consumed fermented foods had an improvement in gut microbiome diversity and density.

Greek yogurt kind of fits the bill for so many reasons. It's satiating as well. That protein breaks down a little slower. The casein protein and dairy breaks down a little slower. So when you go to bed at night, doesn't tend to raise your body. temperature as much as, say, a steak would. That's not that steak's bad. You know, that would be a preference to me that you eat lean proteins at night rather

than ice cream. So we work out swaps. A pound of strawberries is only 130 calories. But one little pint of hog andaws is 800 calories. And I know that because I used to eat a pint a night when I was trying to gain weight to get up to 300 pounds as a power lifter. And so we create swaps where you can eat, sit there. and eat as you might normally do, but eat foods that don't have as many calories. I think we

mentioned earlier something like, you know, popcorn even. It kind of depends on what's on it. Air pop popcorn is a good fiber. It's a good something to satisfy that kind of, that need to kind of sit there and crunch and eat while you're watching TV. But what's on it? You know, those popcorns with coconut oil at Costco are 1,500 calories a bag. And so you've got to be cautious that, you know, if you're putting any butter or oil on those things. Another one I like is sometimes beef jerky, particularly the kinds that are low in sugar and low in fat. Then you have that, again, that chewing mechanism

and you've got a higher protein item. If you're going to have a snack, you want it to be lower in calories and still satisfy your chewing and if it's hunger, it's driving. All of those are options that you can use to replace high-calorie foods with low-calorie foods. and use them as swaps in moments like those when you might overeat. I find providing a contrast often helps really nail the teachings home.

So if we take the other side of the first question, which is what are things that help with hunger and minimizing hunger, what would you say are the top habits that you still see regularly practice today, whether it's where you live, whether you used to live in, you know, Vegas and America, when you look around, how are people insatiably, driving their hunger, starting with like habits that they're doing, you know, first thing in the morning. Can you give us some of that contrast? Yeah, the challenge is we go back to the fact that the most convenient, tastiest foods tend to be the highest in calories and they're easier to overconsume. So people get up in the morning and they'll eat, you know, pastries or pancakes

with syrup or something on them. It's just a lot of high calorie foods. And usually, I know people think that it's sugar, but, you know, obviously sugar-laden drinks and candies are, are add to that equation, but the worst ones are the ones that are a combination of sugar and fat because they're the highest calorie things that you can over consume. And the drinks, you know, drinking calories is not a great idea. I talked about the vanilla latte at 700 calories. We talked about sodas. And, you know, you've got to find swaps for those, you know, try and find a low calorie caffeine drink or an iced tea. Try and find even a diet soda. I know that It creates a whole lot of consternation amongst the internet folks.

But when you're replacing a high-calorie sugar drink with something that satisfies your taste, we see in the research that people lose weight under those scenarios. And so it's kind of a matter of meeting the client where they're at. I mentioned not wanting to too aggressively change someone's diet. You're setting yourself up for failure when you do that. And I also mentioned the same thing with exercise. people get all gung-ho and they want to start these really aggressive programs and they abandon those because either take too much time or it's too much energy and it's just not something they enjoy.

And if you do that, you're going to abandon the program and people just won't stick to it. They're setting themselves up for failure. So we make small changes to their habits and provide them some of these, you know, I don't like to call them hacks as biohacking has kind of got a bad name in the industry now. people claiming that these little tricks are more meaningful than they are because the fundamentals are still what's most important. And I also find that meal prepping or having some consistent system in place, so you get up in the morning and having the most convenient, quickest, preferable, you know, on the list of acceptable choices available for you, whether it's, you know, buying meal prep or whether it's meal prepping your own meal. we see that in all the research to be. It's one of the things that bodybuilding figure physique, bikini wellness competitors have done for decades

that drives their success. They plan their meals in advance so that if you open their fridge when you're hungry and don't know what it is you're going to eat, you tend to pick things that are what you want to eat and you overeat them. The same thing's true if it's lunchtime and you haven't prepared and next thing you know

you're ordering something off of a menu or you're going to a fast food place. You tend to pick the foods that you're hungry for and you will overconsume them. Yeah, meal prep is one of those super underrated things. Obviously, it takes planning, even the idea of meal prepping takes planning itself to block off that time, to grocery shop, etc. That's before you even start planning out the items that you're going to be eating that

week. Yeah, I started a meal prep company for that reason. I prepped my own meals for decades. And when I was able to, I started a meal prep. prep company, I contracted with a co-packer that was able to make my menu for me and ship it to my house. And I just kept it in my freezer. And now I distribute those meals nationwide under the vertical diet. And again, it's not a shameful advertising scheme here. I just, it's very effective whether you use, you know, whether you do it yourself, whether we prep or you prep or you use a local

meal prep company. I don't care. It's a very effective method. We'll link to that in the show notes below. people can check it out. Definitely. I haven't tried it out yet, but I look forward to trying it out and sharing with my audience. You know, I want to come back to this idea. You know, you're one of the, your history in bodybuilding. You've been one of the fittest, strongest individuals that's out there. I think I even heard you say that over the course of your career in bodybuilding, you've gained and lost over a thousand pounds, which is pretty mind-blowing to hear. Yeah. And that's conservative. Yeah, and I've also heard you say that you did a lot of things the wrong way. Now, most of our audience is not planning on being a bodybuilder, but they do want to get fit. They do want to prioritize lean muscle mass. They want to stay healthy, avoid chronic disease, have a healthy gut. They like to, just like me, prioritize clean whole foods. And they want strategies that will make sense for them for the long term. So can you talk? talk about some of the things that you feel that you did, quote unquote, wrong with obviously

that was the best that you knew at the time with the information that you had and what some of the lessons are that our audience could learn from it, even if they're not, you know, bodybuilders themselves or have plans to be. Understood. A little more clarification. I was bodybuilding and powerlifting back and forth since 1988. And so, and I was kind of a skinny kid in college. I was 140 pounds when I was 18 years old. And so I spent some of the first many years of my competitive career, bodybuilding and powerlifting, just trying to gain weight. And I have a lot of clients out there. This includes Lane Johnson from the Philadelphia Eagles, who was 312 pounds and needed to be 330. It includes John Jones, who was a 205 pound in UFC heavyweight or light

heavyweight champion, and he wanted to bulk up to heavyweight champion at 250. So I do have clients, strong men, the world strongest man, Mitchell Hooper, of course, is a client of mine in Hofthor Burence, and they worked with Brian Shaw. Those are all world strongest men, as well as power lifters. So that was one aspect of what I did. I worked with people who were trying to bulk, and I bulk, ultimately up to over 300 pounds at one point in my career. But I also dieted. I dieted down to single-digit body fat as a bodybuilder to get on stage as shredded as possible. And of course, I've worked with Olympia competitors, men and women, both, Nadia Wyatt, who took third, and Miss Olympia and trained with Flex Wheeler for many years.

So I've helped people diet. I've worked with a 97-pound ballerina from the Sacramento Ballet Company. So I've worked with a lot of different men and women trying to gain and lose weight. And throughout my career, I've had to do both. I've had to bulk up and I've had to diet down. So I have some unique experience, obviously personal experience, but I also partnered with many years ago Dr. Damon McCune, who's a PhD in exercise physiology. He's a registered dietitian who was director of dietetics at UNLV.

And we carefully went through all the recommendations that we made and made and made sure that they were science-based and provided links to peer-reviewed, published research videos and articles. So everybody that reads our information has access to, you know, the science behind it. The big things I learned about bulking was I ate too and too big of a calorie surplus and I gained too much fat at times, which ultimately you just have to die at all off as an athlete. and so my biggest thing now is to use a smaller surplus to take a longer time course to try and gain as much muscle and as little fat as possible. So that was the biggest thing that I learned there. I was doing the seafood diet. Eat every time you see food. It was the gallon of whole milk a day.

And I used to drink these shakes at night with ice cream and protein powder and banana and the whole nine yards. would be these giant 1,500 calorie shakes that I would slog down. It didn't matter, whatever it was, pasta, pizza, pancakes, you know, whatever it was just to drive calories. And I found that wasn't a very effective method. I got fatter and it was very hard to get down all the food and it caused a lot of digestive distress and, you know, diarrhea and soft stool, things I often see with bulking athletes, a lot of problems with digestion. And then when I would diet down, I would over-restrict. I would eliminate things like red meat, things like dairy, things like whole eggs, things like even fruits for some people. Now, what I just mentioned is what a common, common things that women in particular sacrifice under these guru diets that they get from these quote unquote physique coaches.

For years there, it was you were just allowed to eat, you know, white fish, boneless, skinless, chicken breasts, broccoli. you know, a little bit of olive oil. Those were kind of, that was the standard diet. And what happened was is that obviously you would get incredibly hungry. But people started suffering from what we call the female triad. They started suffering from micronutrient deficiencies. Chronic calorie restriction, anemia, which is low iron, low calcium, hypothyroidism. Those kinds of things were very common.

especially in that competitive industry, the competitive dieters figure physique, bikini, wellness, et cetera. And then what was the shame is that your soccer moms, your general population, would see these women, these competitive stage physiques, in the quote-unquote best shape of their life and not understand what was going on behind the scenes.

All the things I just mentioned, all the health issues I just mentioned, plus depression, and the medication that they have to take as a result, many of them are on thyroid medication. And they don't see that. And then they embark on these journeys to follow these diets, and then they start suffering from some of the same problems, the sleep loss and just the fatigue and depression.

And I think it's a shame. And a lot of the reasons why is they went into too big of a calorie deficit, too much cardio, and they started eliminating foods that were very important to maintain their health. Red meat's important for iron, obviously. The egg yolk for biotin and coline for, you know, hair and nails and fruits obviously are hugely important, the polyphenols for your health, and just all this over-restriction and chronic dieting started to result in all these health problems.

And I think that's why that industry gets a bad name, and dieting in general gets a bad name because people were over-restricting. I did it myself, you know, egg whites and tilapia and too much cardio, and I would lose way more muscle than I should have. And when I finally figured that out and started adding less fat when I was building muscle and then dieting off less muscle when I was dieting, when I was trying to get the best condition possible, I achieved a better level of fitness. I had more energy.

I had maintained more muscle, which allowed me to get into better condition. So all of those things worked from kind of from personal experience and then ultimately understanding the science behind what I was doing wrong. You know, it seems that another stage that you hit in your journey was that at some point in time, and I'd love to learn a little bit more about this, you also really understood that the quality of the food, the quality of the calories that you're eating mattered importantly. I think you went down a Weston Price rabbit hole.

You went down probably a few other rabbit holes over there. What ultimately got you to understand and have the conviction that, hey, I'm not just trying to meet the macro goals and make sure that I have calories either in surplus or in deficit, depending on my goals, but actually that the type of food and that quality of that food and where that food is grown and where it comes from actually matters a lot. What played a role in that journey? Yeah, I think it's the micronutrient. Some of the satiety was linked to that. Mostly the blood testing. I started doing blood testing many years ago on a regular basis, and you would see deficiencies.

You'd see metabolic syndrome when you gain too much body fat. It'd be hypertension and maybe liver enzymes or kidney enzymes elevation. You start to see LDL go up your lipids, dyslidididemia. You start to see all these problems when you gain too much body fat, particularly if it's ectopic or visceral fat around the fatty liver, non-holic fatty liver disease and ultimately getting all the other. problems are kind of downstream of that, all the hypertension, dyslipidemia and the like. So that became important not to gain just too much body fat. And so I was more particular about

the types of foods I ate. But it was probably mostly in the dieting with women and seeing the results with them that made me focus on the micronutrients so heavily, as mentioned with the female triad, and all of those over-restrictive diets. Just last summer, I was working, working with a softball team, a high school softball team, and two of the girls had significantly underperformed in one of the tests that we were doing to see if they were progressing. We like to measure everything, that which gets measured, gets improved. And so we measure speed and strength for athletes, and their 40-meter laser time went down significantly when everyone else was going up and progressing.

And so we asked, you know, we pulled aside and we talked to the parents, we talk to the kids, find out what's going on. As it turns out, they had, you know, sleep is usually one of the biggest things that goes wrong, especially for high school athletes. But in this case, they started over-restricting. They had gone into a very limited restrictive diet like the guru diet I mentioned earlier. And sure enough, we had them get a blood test and they had anemia. And that will cause a significant amount of fatigue and performance to suffer. And so, you know, we had to put some things back into their diet to make sure they had sufficient iron and sufficient calories in general.

and their performance recovered and their energy levels recovered. So I saw that with women. I saw that, you know, as I was in exercise science at the University of Oregon, I was working with the Uvo track team. And women in particular, you would see a lot of times they would get stress fractures and they would from bone mineral density loss from chronic over restriction for the distance runners. And there was, I think more recently, just within the last few years, There was a huge drum up in the news about one of the Nike coaches got sanctioned

because he was over-restricting the calories for some of his athletes who suffered some of the same problems. So women are particularly susceptible. They also end up with amenorrhea, a cessation of the menstrual period. That's something that one of your listeners has suffered from. That's part of the female triad, chronic calorie restriction. And micronutrient restriction is going to cause those bronchloric. problems. You have be cautious. That's why we like focusing on performance rather than the scale.

We like focusing on, are you getting stronger? What can your body do as opposed to what does it weigh? And ultimately, form will follow function. Maybe the results don't look as immediate because you can jump on a scale week over week and see a pound or two loss. But when you're lifting weights, it can take months to start to see the real difference, to start to see the smaller waist and to start to see the leanness of your physique and to start to feel and appreciate the things that it can do, the strength that it has, the performance that it can accomplish. Yeah, I want to talk about the audience that follows this podcast, largely individuals that might be in their mid-30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond.

When you see that group that's now really doubling down on resistance training, strength training, are there any exercises that you feel that are. are becoming very popular or any type of exercising that you would recommend that this group in particular avoid. So what do you want people to minimize and what do you want people to double down when it comes to exercise? I think it's a wide open palette and I think that people are very it's very individualistic. There's no best exercise. I used to, you know, I'm a old power lifter. And so, you know, I'm hardcore, right? Go to failure, squat, deadlift bench. You know, that was that was the foundation of my lifting.

And back in the 80s and 90s, of course, the harder you trained and the more pain you were in, the more delayed onset muscle soreness you endured, of course you felt as though you were accomplishing something. But now we understand from the research that that's not necessary, that you don't have to go to failure and that there's no particularly best exercise. I would suggest that you train all of your muscle groups. That's going to be a push, pull, and legs.

As you're familiar with push, is chest, shoulders, and trisone, and pull is your back and biceps and then your leg movements, your quads and hamstrings. So I would suggest people do enough variety to get all of their muscle groups worked. I do like to see some sort of axial loading, and that would be something that would go down through the spine because how do you build bone mineral density? You do that by progressively loading the body. And so we'd like to see something of a like maybe a half, hack squat movement or a trap par deadlift. Those are both reasonably comfortable movements that

most people can do. Not everybody can enjoy a squat. But something where the loading is coming from the top down. So I like the trap bar for that. It's with the elevated handles. It's a pretty low barrier to entry. It's not much coordination or education involved in that. You can go in day one and put a little bit of weight on there and stand up with it. I use this as a strategy, to be honest and I'll wrap myself out here, but women who don't generally like to lift and maybe are opposed to the thought of lifting heavy because they feel like it's going to make them bulky, which in fact is not the case, I'll bring them in and have them on their first day, do the trap bar deadlift because it's really easy to do. Anybody can do it. And then when they come back

three days later and they do it again, they're able to lift more. They can lift more weight for more reps. And you measure this, you write it down on a card, and they see you. what they determine is immediate feedback for progress. Now, we're aware that that's what we call neural adaptation. They're just getting more practiced at the movement. They're learning to coordinate their effort, their bodies becoming better at recruiting all the muscles that are involved in the movement. It's not necessarily a strength increase or muscle increase,

but it's more of a central nervous system adaptation that we call neural adaptation. So you're just getting better, more practiced. same as if you were shooting free throws. Each time you come in, you'll make a few more. A little higher percentage. Your body's getting better at the movement. But it's a fantastic way for people to see progress. And each week, for many, many weeks, if not months,

when that client comes in, they'll see an increase in the amount of reps they can lift with the same weight or they'll be able to lift more weight. And we design programs around PR's, personal records. Not a single rep max. It could be a five rep max. but we try and measure every movement based on someone's ability to progress that over time.

Did you do one more rep, or can you add one more plate or five more pounds to one of the movements? And that is kind of the key when you ask me, what's the most, the biggest underlying thing is the best exercises of one you'll do.

Try and find resistance training movements that feel good to you. You don't have to do anything that hurts. And then secondly is, can you progress that over time? If you do 10 reps and you could have done 20, probably not a significant enough stimulus to yield an adaptation so you can get stronger or get more lean muscle mass. Initially, for newbies, anything will make you grow, even the example I just gave, 10 reps when you could have done 20. If you're a newbie, you'll get benefits from that.

But as you train a little longer over the course of a number of months and your consistent, which is, the most important thing. You'll want to start challenging yourself a little bit more and getting closer and closer to where the repetitions become harder. You don't have to go to failure, but if you can go until the weights move a little slower, so if your tempo is one, two, three, four, five, you're done. You can rack it. You don't have to do any more reps. Your tempo slowed down, right? The speed, the acceleration of the weight slowed down. You've maximized, you've maximally recruited the muscles that were necessary to perform that movement. And that's the sufficient stimulus. And you'll get results from that. Now, you keep doing that over time,

five becomes easy, and you'll do six a little slow. And then you do that for a few more weeks, and six will become easy. And you'll do seven a little slow. And you could choose to do one more rep, or you can choose to add five more pounds and make five hard again. And that's the progression. And ultimately, if you can build enough strength, you don't have to get stronger forever, but be strong enough so that your body's durable enough to be able to perform, you know, many years into the future, or to just hedge your bets against what's going to be ultimately an unavoidable decline and strength and lean mass over the years, you want to have built up some sort of reserve. Same thing's true for bone mineral density, much of which is obtained in your teens.

And I don't think that a lot of women realize that, that most of your bone mineral density is accumulated by the time you're, teens and early 20s. And from there on out, you can see a decline, a gradual decline in that in the absence of some sort of resistant stimulus to keep that bone minerals density strong. You know, you have this whole methodology. It's actually much bigger than a meal company, the vertical diet. It's like a whole methodology and approach to eating, training, life. I'd love for you to break down some of the key principles inside of it. Probably a lot of it is themes you've already covered. But you've done a really good job in the past of just highlighting the key pillars that are there. And I find that it's useful as a guiding way of

thinking for people in their health, wellness, and exercise journey. So could you cover some of those principles that are there? Yeah, we did talk. We touched on a lot of them. I don't want to be too repetitive. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And if you're trying to get the best results, you're going to want to shore up the things, the big rocks, the things that matter most. Sleep optimization, that's the biggest. You can't out supplement or out train or out diet, poor sleep. It's, as has been said, it's the foundation upon which everything else rests. Dr. Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist, said that to Joe Rogan, and it just sat with me ever sense because I have clients that constantly contact me about their current state of condition

and their level of fatigue. And it really, it's fundamentally, it's rooted in high quality sleep. So I open up my book, my ebook, the Vertical Diet 4.0 ebook that I've been expanding upon over the last seven or eight years and adding more and more information as I can ask questions. But it's now like 250 pages with over 200 references to articles and videos and peer-reviewed research. But it goes through step by step all of these things that we have. discussed today and much, much more. But sleep is the foundation and optimizing sleep, not just sleep quantity, but sleep quality. And that can include getting a sleep study if necessary for

people who suffer from apnea, whether that's due to overweight or just a thick neck from lifting or a genetic predisposition, but that's huge. And apnea can have an enormous effect on blood pressure, on cardiovascular disease risk, on insulin, you know, blood sugar metabolism, on lean mass retention and body fat when you're dieting. Your body people with apnea are poor sleep, end up losing more muscle. So it has a huge impact on all those things. So sleep is the foundation, and we really work hard on trying to optimize that, giving yourself.

And I have a whole we call a sleep hygiene list of things to optimize sleep, you know, cool room, quiet room, dark room, you know, not too much fluids before bed. a whole list of things, whether a CPAP for apnea, all those kinds of things that can help optimize your sleep. Giving yourself enough an opportunity to be successful. You know, not too much of those TV or electronics right before bed. A lot of folks will go to bed at night and they'll surf the Internet until midnight and then have to be up at 5.30 in the morning. And that's just, you're not even giving yourself an opportunity to get your seven plus hours. that that's generally burning the candle at both ends is is the primary cause of the problem.

Sleep eat train. So with the sleeping I just discussed, the eating, we spent a lot of time on, but one of the big things with eating is just consistency. Again, compliance is the science, and I tend to track. I still track. It helps hold me accountable is the biggest thing. And if I've got something I can glance at and if, you know, I still weigh daily. I don't compete in anything anymore. It's been, you know, a long time, but I still want to perform at a high level.

So I can, you know, play sports or lift or do the kinds of things that I want to do. So I still measure these things. And so, of course, eating is important. We discussed that. And then the exercise components, of course, and just being consistent there. Again, compliance is the science. Those are the big rocks. And then, you know, just the other one would be stress management.

But the biggest thing about stress management is your sleep habits, your diet and your exercise. I read a book many years ago when I was going through a difficult time with the new business that I started and started having some anxiety and stress over the business. I was sleeping four hours of nine, working, you know, too many hours. I hadn't been to the gym in a while. I was eating, you know, my college food again, fast foods and top ramen because it was cheap and quick. Drinking too much caffeine just get through the day. and I went to the library and I read a book called Stress for Success by Jim Lower. I thought it was going to give me some hack to manage stress.

I thought there was going to be something, you know, like a massage or a sauna or something, you know, a supplement. And the whole book was about the very same thing we've been discussing here. It was about optimizing your sleep, exercising regularly, stop, you know, eating like a half. I had been competing for, you know, since 88 through 90s. I competed constantly throughout those years. And then it was probably in 1999 or 2000 that I was going through this challenging time. And I just had kind of fallen away from the discipline, had replaced work, had replaced all the training with work. And it was kind of an either-or proposition for me at the time.

And I discovered that it needs to be, and again, the whole being greater the sum of its parts, it needs to, you need to pay respect, pay yourself first. I said, you know, respect the machine that's doing all the work or it's going to break down. And so I just resolved to get more sleep to join the gym again. I hadn't been in the gym in a year at that time. Probably led to all of those, all those problems, the stress and anxiety that I was experiencing. And ultimately, you know, I became more successful as a result, working less, but being more effective at work, the work that I did.

That's powerful. a great reminder because we all will fall, quote, unquote, off track at some point in time. But I think what's exciting about today's day and age, with a lot of this information being able to come directly, podcasts, social media, et cetera, and a lot of great information that's out there. You know, people like to poo poo on a lot of the quote, bad information out there. Sometimes that's information they don't agree with. But there's a lot of people that are talking about doubling down on the basics. And that's what this podcast is about. And it's a reminder that we don't need to do everything perfect. We just need to make those small decisions and continue to improve it

and create a plan that we can stick to. And ultimately, those things add up. And before we know it, we're making progress on something that when we felt like we were spiraling downwards, now we're spiraling upwards. And we're actually genuinely feeling like things have shifted around. Yeah. And you sum that up, I think, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There's many times where people, as I mentioned, they set themselves up for failure by creating this big, long list of things that they think they need to do to take themselves to the next level. And it's not that complicated. The basics will get you 98% of the results.

And a lot of the things on that list that you think you need to do probably aren't very meaningful. And that's where the vast majority of social media swims is in that pool of the 1% that is probably not too terribly meaningful, but they tend to exaggerate it or overemphasize it. And we see that. You know, name any names, we all know who the influencers are that tend to be biohackers or claim that some new thing is going to give you some extraordinary result. And that's not the case.

You know, Stan, as we're winding down this conversation, this sets us up perfectly for something that I'd love for you to chime in on. And it's the idea that behind everything that we do in our lives, how we choose to prioritize yourself, how we choose not to prioritize itself in our lives, our feeling of not doing enough, not being behind, being behind on things that everybody else has it figured out, but we don't have it figured out. This is all sort of going back to our mindset. What do you feel have been meaningful things for your clients, for yourself, that have helped people shift into a mindset of reactive?

they're constantly reacting to what everybody else is doing and therefore you're kind of regularly trying to fill this void so you start you stop get on the wagon you get off the wagon what has helped your clients and help you go from being reactionary to now sort of calmly making progress and having a deep sense of resolve to explain it in the best way that I can explain it any thoughts on that well I have a lot to a lot to say year, but I'll keep it short. You can be great at anything, but you can't be great at everything. I think in today's era of social media, we look around and we think that everybody's doing everything better than we are, and they're doing a lot more than we are. And in fact, when

you start to spread yourself too thin, you'll do everything worse. And so really, it's a matter of setting priorities. What are your primary goal that you want to achieve? Writing those down, declaring them, whether it's on a whiteboard, or write it in lip, stick on your mirror and your bathroom, whatever it is, you need to identify what those goals are. And then the daily habits that you're going to accomplish in order to move you in that direction towards those goals, and then anything that's distracting from those goals, you should quickly identify and seek to eliminate that. And then get help where needed. And I've run a number of successful businesses throughout my career. And I didn't try and be a jack of all trades master of none. I

hired a computer guy to do my computer stuff. I hired an attorney to do my legal work. I hired an accountant to do my, you know, maybe not in the position to hire a staff of people, but you can seek whatever kind of professional advice you need or whatever kind of assistance to do things that I just are a distraction or not, might take more time for you to accomplish than someone who's experienced in those matters. I've recently started using an app, F-I-V-E-R-R, where you can seek help doing things, like just if I had a simple thing to reprogram on my Shopify account. You know, normally you'd contact somebody and you'd just get charged an enormous amount of money for it for such a simple project. But I'd go on Fiverr and I would type in what I needed and somebody

would be able to fix that for me in a very short period of time for an extremely low price. But I didn't have to have a full-time staff. You know, I don't have the kind of business that requires the full-time computer guy. It's just one example. And then I economize a lot of the things in my day. You suffer from decision fatigue, if you've commonly, I'm sure, talked about. If you're just trying to do too many things, you have to streamline some of those things, whether it's the clothes that you wear or the food that you eat, like you said,

undertaking of meal prep or whether you hire a company to do that. that or whether you use a shopping company to go get your groceries and drop them off at your house. Here's one of the challenges. People often think that they create this checklist of things that they need to do in a day. And they often think that they're, you know, by checking all these things off, that they're accomplishing something. But it may come at the sacrifice of spending the time doing the thing that's the most important that would take longer. And you kind of judge your progress throughout the day by the check marks or crossing off all these little things that probably didn't make you any money and didn't get you any closer to your goal.

So oftentimes when I take out my yellow pad of paper and I'm writing down the things I need to do during the day, I might put dollar signals next to the things or dollar signs next to the things that I should be working on as a priority. Then I'll be able to spend more energy moving those things. But the things that make you more successful life always take longer. We just talked about that's the truth with dieting. It's the truth with exercise. And that's the truth with business as well. The things that make you most successful are going to materialize in one day.

You're going to take a constant investment. It might take a couple, three hours a day for months before you start to see the rewards. The same thing would be true of your lifting or your nutrition. It's going to take a while. And you'll have to have some delayed gratification and be able to identify that goal and go about doing the things every day, the daily habits that's going to get you there. That's well said. You know, earlier you talked about reducing food noise.

I think we're all just looking to, especially in an election year, reduce just noise as a whole so that we can actually, regardless of what's going on in the world, and there are many important things that are going on in the world that we just make sure to not deprioritize ourselves, that we don't go throughout the day, forgetting about what matters to us, checking in with ourselves, and then, you know, the more that we're following everybody else's priorities, that's when it's easy to get lost in every avenue of our life, health, wellness, business, etc. So that's a very great and powerful reminder for our audience. Stan, this has been awesome. You mentioned a bunch of links, including an e-book that you have a

fourth iteration of. I'd love if you wouldn't mind just sharing where people can go to get some of the things that you had mentioned. Yeah, everything's under my name, Stan Efforting. My website, stanefforting.com. And on there, there's a link to the vertical diet meal prep company. On there, there's an e-book, the vertical diet, currently in the 4.0 version. I give a free update to anybody who's bought a previous version. Since I came out with the vertical diet 1.0 seven years ago, I've updated it based on the thousands of questions that I've received from people all over the world, and I wanted to expand and answer those questions in the book. So it's now grown into the vertical diet 4.0 iteration

with clickable links and to, again, research videos and articles to help people take a deeper dive into the kind of things that they're interested in. My Instagram is Stan Efforting, and my YouTube, I have a series of rants that I did that are somewhat entertaining, is also Stan Efforting. So that's where you'll find everything. Stan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and chatting with our audience about this super important topic. Thank you for having me, brother. Hi, everyone, Drew here.

Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend,

share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com.

That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.