Dhru Purohit Show - The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Birch Living, One Skin, and Aqua Tru. When it comes to longevity, many of us envision a future where we can keep doing what we love—whether it’s gardening, hiking, skiing, or playing with grandchildren. Taking steps now to maintain our mobility is key to ensuring a long, active, and joy-filled life. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Juliet and Kelly Starrett to discuss their no-frills approach to promoting durability and mobility as we age. Drawing from decades in the wellness industry and insights from their new book, Built to Move, they share impactful diet, lifestyle, and movement strategies to help you build strength and move freely into your 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond. They dive into at-home mobility tests like the sit-and-rise test, the power of walking, and the importance of dietary fiber, protein, sleep, and resilience. Juliet and Kelly also highlight how simple dietary changes lay the foundation for true progress and sustainable change, helping your body bounce back from injuries and setbacks as you age. Juliet Starrett is an entrepreneur, attorney, author, podcaster, and professional whitewater paddler with three world championships and five national titles. Dr. Kelly Starrett consults with pro athletes, elite military forces, and corporations on health and performance and is the author of Becoming a Supple Leopard and Ready to Run. Together, they founded The Ready State, San Francisco CrossFit and co-authored the bestsellers Deskbound and Built to Move. In this episode, Dhru, Juliet, and Kelly dive into: Why the sit and rise test is a key marker of longevity (1:58) The major milestones where declines in mobility start to happen (13:06) The power of walking for longevity (26:09) How to build up your sleep pressure (30:24) Increasing your durability to aging (41:08) Fundamentals for longevity that make the biggest impact (45:26) Breaking free from diet culture and finding what works best for you (53:02) The 800 grams of fiber challenge (57:57) Why metabolic flexibility is the ultimate marker of a successful diet (01:19:01) Recommendations for sleep (01:30:53) Creating a movement-rich environment (01:34:49) Mobility for everyday movement (01:41:50) At-home tests for determining your range of motion (01:48:22) How to get started (01:56:07) Societal shifts for creating a healthier lifestyle for the next generation (02:02:06) Final thoughts and where to follow Juliet and Kelly’s work (02:08:53) Also mentioned in this episode: Builttomove.com  Built to Move 21-Day Challenge Get Kelly and Juliet’s latest book, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully, here.  Juliet Starrett’s Instagram For more on Juliet and Kelly Starrett, follow The Ready State on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X/Twitter, and through their Website. This episode is brought to you by Birch Living, One Skin, and Aqua Tru. To get 20% off your Birch Living mattress plus two free eco-rest pillows, head over to birchliving.com/dhru today. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves.  AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $100 off when you try AquaTru for yourself.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Brod here. What are some of the top signals and signs that you aren't aging well? Well, on today's episode, we have a powerful rerun of one of our top podcasts that still so many of you have not heard. It's with Dr. Kelly Starrett and Juliette. And they're here to talk to us about some of the things that are the basics of longevity that many people don't pay attention to, including how a simple at-home test is one of the best markers of longevity. And you can listen in and see if you can do it. If you can't do it, maybe this episode gets you motivated to work on some things that actually

will make it easier for you to do it. It's a little bit of a tease, but I promise you it's worth listening to. Another thing, you know, my own mindset around the topics around longevity and aging and health and wellness, they've evolved over the last few years. And one of the things that I would say that I have doubled down on is, actually this idea of doubling down on the basics. And on today's episode with Kelly and Juliet, we talk about what are those basics that have so much evidence around them that are related to longevity. Sure, it's fine or okay to experiment with the latest technology or supplement or this

or that, but we don't want to do those things at the expense of the basics. And that's what today's episode is all about. With that it being said, I think you're going to love today's episode. so let's jump in with our interview with Dr. Kelly and Juliet Starrett. Kelly, Juliet, welcome to the podcast. I want to jump right in on something that actually blew my mind when I read your book. And it's the connection between longevity and something so simple that I think everybody should be paying attention to, but they may not know this connection, sitting down and standing up.

Who wants to start off by explaining what that connection is? So I'll start. We opened the book with something called the Sit and Rise test, which is based on a 2017 Brazilian study that showed that people who could get up and down off the floor without putting a near hand down lived longer. And we also know that people who end up in nursing homes, the number one reason that happens is they've taken a fall. Or they can't get up off the ground.

And there's been a ton of press lately. In fact, we just saw this article in the New York Times that hip fractures in the elderly are expected to rise by something like 30% over the next 20 years. And, you know, anybody who's been paying attention to the news knows that, you know, once you fall as an older person and then fall and break bones, like that starts to be the beginning of the end. And so one of the reasons, though, we wanted to start our book with this was not to scare everybody and say, okay, you're going to die if you can't do this. But because this thing that's called the sit and rise test is a really good window into your basic hip mobility and overall mobility. Can you lower yourself to the ground and get

up and down off the ground? And then secondarily, the reason that we thought it was so important to start the book with this is that the way to get better at this test is to do something that humans have been doing for a millennia, which is actually just sitting on the ground and then doing the thing, which is getting up and down off the ground. Yeah, it's so basic. I mean, anybody listening, You just heard it. You sit on the ground. Crisk cross apple sauce. Crisscross apple sauce, which, by the way,

we were just talking a bunch about my Indian culture before we started recording. I've been sitting on the ground since we were like basically could actually sit. Everyone in your family. Your aunties. Everybody in my family. My grandmother would regularly prefer to sit on the floor.

And actually when, you know, we moved to America, we got vacuums, we got other stuff. My grandmother still would prefer to squat and kind of clean the floor with this thing that's kind of like this weird broom stick. Yeah, I can envision it. And she enjoyed it. It was part of her life.

But anyways, I got excited because I was like, oh my gosh, I've been training for this my whole life and I could actually do this test. You know, we talk about VO2 Max in this podcast. We talk about grip strength. We talk about a lot of other predictors of longevity, but here is one of the simplest ones that anybody can do. In fact, if you're listening, you can pause right now

and just try it. Sit on the floor and see if you can get up without any assistance. Yeah. And it's from that cross-legged position. And the reason the cross-legged position is notable is that it's a real mid-range position. It actually doesn't require full hip range of motion or ankle range of motion. Those things are sort of put to the side. It's a test or expression of your range of motion of your hips and how easy they move.

And ultimately, as we point out, it's difficult to get people to care about the range of motion until they can't do something. And so by opening the book, what we've given people is, hey, here's something you've been doing since you were a child and every child around you. You've practiced this thing, I don't know, 100,000 times, 200,000 times your life. And now suddenly you're struggling to get up and down. What if you're sitting there and I'm like, here, hold my baby. Can you get up? You can't? I'm like, here's two cups of coffee. Here's a great glass of wine and a cigar. You still can't stand up. So I think what's interesting is that when we started with that, we got people's attention

about saying, oh, I wonder if I have blind spots because your hip range of motion for no fault of your own, suddenly become a blind spot. And that influences potentially what your knees do, how your back functions, the movement choices that you have, the amount of ability to regulate your range and balance. All of those things start to come together. But by starting with that conversation, it's easy to say, okay, okay, okay, I got what you're saying now. Where do we go on? The other thing is, I think in America or Western countries, we really think that the way we've set up our environment is how everybody lives. But it turns out something like half the world actually sits on the floor, sleeps on the floor, toilets on the ground, you know, really is like

operating in their whole environment is very floor-based. And it turns out in those countries, the amount of orthopedic injuries is much lower. And the fall risk in the elderly drops to almost zero, just simply because those people actually are practicing the thing. They're practicing getting up and down off the ground. And I want to tell you one quick story that I think you'll appreciate. Kelly was just in Japan traveling with some friends on a ski trip in February. And they got to a hotel and turned out there was like not enough rooms. And so Kelly didn't have a room. And the hotel staff was getting really nervous and sort of freaking out. And turned out what they didn't have, when they got to the bottom of it turns out what they didn't have was a

western room where the bed was off the ground, the table was off the ground, the toilet was off the ground and they had plenty of more Japanese style rooms where, you know, there was a futon on the floor and a table on the floor and, you know, even things like, you know, the, the thermostat were like at squatting height, not at face height like we would have. And Kelly was like, yes, like this room was made for me. Like, I am the American who can manage this room. But they look, they took one look at me and we're like, no, no way. They took one look at him and they're like, oh, he's going to complain. This person is going to die. They took one look at him and And they're like, we do not have a room for this guy.

But it turns out that, you know, he was totally comfortable in that environment. But it just gives you kind of an idea of like we get so accustomed to thinking that the way that we are in our environment here is how everybody is in their environment. And you really hit up two pieces that we're trying to set up with the book is the first one is people do not need another listical, right? They don't need another. Here's 17 ways to optimize. Here's your checklist. Here's how you're not, you're going to add in complex behaviors without really understanding anything about your life. And what we know is that we need to think differently about where people are going to engage with

behaviors that turn out to be well evidenced, easy, practicable to change their lives. And sitting on the ground while you watch TV is an easy thing to do. And instead of having to go to a class or talk about these things or take some course, all I need you to do tonight is sit on the ground for 30 minutes while watching TV and fidget. find all these different positions. And as you hinted at, it's interesting, your grandmother said, hey, I like to do it this way. There is some thinking. Philip Beach is a great writer about these things, but that sitting on the ground, all these ground-based positions are one of the ways the body tunes itself. And once you become accustomed to having access to that range of motion, things function better.

And that when you take them away, your grandmother might have said, I don't feel as good when I don't bend my knees all the way. or change my ankles all the way or sit in these positions or load my connective tissue in this way that's just in the background of doing something that human beings have done for a long time. Yeah. You know, Julia, you were saying about, we don't wanna scare people,

but in a way when we look at the world and chronic disease and how unfortunately people spend usually the last 15 years of their life, especially in American society, which is being exported around the world, right? India is one of the fastest growing rates of diabetes anywhere in the world, you know, the Middle East is in, you know, shambles on health-wise. As people get more money, they want to live like Americans do, which usually means a lot more sugar, more sedentary life. So there's a little part of this, which is that we don't want to leave it at fear, but we do want people to be scared enough because often what I find having taken care of my grandparents, like I kind of had two sides of the equation.

My dad's parents had a lot of mobility in their life. And my mom's side of the family, her parents had less so. And I saw that decline when I was taking care of them. And anybody who's taking care of somebody elderly who's losing their mobility, losing their body. And then they start to see that the entire body and the brain starts to decline because they can't move. It's scary. And you wouldn't want that for even your worst enemy.

And it happens quickly. Right. And it happens quickly. Yeah. So it's almost like you fall off a cliff. You fall off a cliff. So part of this is also understanding, you know, when you look at a child, you look at a baby, they're doing a lot of these movements that you're talking about in your book, Bill to Move,

link in the show notes, people, everybody go buy it. It's a fantastic read. They're doing these things naturally. At what point of the major milestones that either of you want to highlight, do you start to see big decline in our American and Western society? We wrote a book about running. And one of the things that we noticed because we had school age children at the time was that all of the kindergartners run like Usain Bolt. They all run beautifully.

They sprint on the ball of their foot. They, their mechanics are good. They're springy. And we got to first grade and we watched at Christmas around the holiday, half the kids came back and started heel striking. And so if you're listening, what that means is they fundamentally altered a running movement pattern. They went from running and landing, like if you were jumping, you'd jump and land on the balls of your feet. You wouldn't do that with your heels. And all of a sudden, half of the cohort of the kids that we observed started putting their heel out to initiate a running kind of position.

So just so everyone knows, if you take your shoes off and go run, you cannot run with your heel slamming into the ground. You'll immediately get feedback that that doesn't feel very good. So what is it about the environment and the human interaction that changed? That's like saying, okay, we're going to develop your writing. skills with your right hand and halfway through your first grade, we're going to switch the left-handed writing. That's the equivalent of that. Or you've been throwing a ball with your right hand and we're starting to throw it with your left-hand. And you're like, why are we doing that? That's a really interesting question. Well, if the whole world started to shift you into only left-handedness

or left-footedness, you suddenly would say, hey, this is something's going on here, the environment is shaping us. And I think when we start to view that way, we start to then, it's easier to understand the thousands of small choices that are made for us, we talk about environmental constraint a lot. When I was a first year physio student, I was working next to the occupational therapist. And they were working with people who had some head trauma, people who had cerebral vascular accidents, strokes, and people would have a more affected side and a less affected side. And on the, they would come in and what they would do is if your right hand was your dominant hand that was less affected, they would actually tape an oven mitt to that hand.

so you couldn't use it. And they would force this other hand the more affected side to do all the work. And so that the brain had to work and learn how to reuse that sort of injured side. And I came home and I was like, Juliet, I think I found the key. I have to get all the cookies out of the house. Then I won't eat the cookies. Like this is environmental constraint. And suddenly that idea of how the environment is shaping us in hidden ways really started to become clear to us, especially when we started owning a gym and started becoming really the touch point for so many people's wellness and fitness, we realized that so much of what we needed to do to actually help people engage with health, engage and control their lives was really about how they were being shaped by their

environment. So if you and I all sit down and the only place for us to sit culturally make sense as a chair, that's what we're going to do. Yeah. And not that sitting is bad, but the idea is if this is the only option I have, that's the only option I'll engage with. And now you can basically start to apply that across a thousand different variables. And we start to see it have real changes in how you move in your environment. Run through a little bit of a list of some of those variables, just so we can connect the dots for people, right? You're talking about at a young age, kids, they're running like Usain Bolt.

You know, are shoes part of the equation and kind of how that plays into it? Of course, you mentioned sitting as well. Like run through a few of these things that if we contrast, let's say, how my grandmother grew up and how I grew up, you would see that it's not that she's training at CrossFit or that she's trying to get better. She just has to operate a particular way to function in her world and her environment. So I think you brought up shoes and that's a really good point. And this is another thing we talked about in our book Ready to Run. But the American Academy of Pediatrics actually recommends that the best shoes for toddlers is no shoes. And then the second best option would be a shoe that

basically disrupts the foot the least and really just acts as a protection from the environment, like from stepping on rocks and so forth. Like a ballet slipper. Like a ballet slipper or something that has a very wide towbox that gives the, you know, the foot plenty of room to move around. So I think shoes are a big part of it. I think the chair is obviously sitting and the chair becomes a big part of it. You know, we read this when we were doing the research for our book, Despawn,

we read this really obscure book called The Chair by this UC Berkeley professor named Galen Crants. And she actually said that the way that modern schools were set up were really actually designed to train kids to work in industrial facilities, right, in sort of the sitting position so that we could train them to sit like that and work like that so they could move on to work in industry. And then I think the third big thing is the rise of technology. I mean, you know, sometimes people have said, hey, you know, what's the deal? Like, we didn't have to do a standing desk when we were in the 80s or 70s. Like, we were fine in the 60s. But, you know, I think the big difference is that we, we didn't have technology, you know, computers, phones. Computers phones, even television.

Or they weren't widely used. I mean, computers. Right. At the most, you know, in the 80s, we would come home and watch like an hour of love boat from eight to nine. But that was kind of the extent of it. Remember one used to say, I'm getting on the computer? Yeah, I'm getting on the computer. So I think, you know, and I think it's become so prolific. And I think the third thing that people don't think about a lot with kids actually is homework.

So homework, the amount of homework kids are given has dramatically increased over the last 30 years. And so in a kid population in particular, you know, most kids, again, because their environments are set up to be sitting, they're given a lot more homework. So between technology, sitting at school, doing homework, and then the other key thing is in kids, in particular, they're being driven to school. So it turns out that most, something like 90% of American kids live within two miles of their elementary school. and when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, it was like 75% of kids walked or a bike to school. And now it's down to something like 10%. It's just a given that if you take your kid to school, you pack them up in the car and drive. And so, you know, I'm talking a lot about all of these environmental experiences for kids,

but I think we learn those things as kids and then that translates into our adult selves, right? We've become accustomed to learning and learning while sitting and reading while sitting. And then we're on our phones and then we have commuting. and right, I just think it sort of becomes this cascading effect related to our environment. And then add in, as you've brought up, I think so correctly, there's not one smoking gun. There's not a single bullet. What we've seen is that there's been radical change in how humans, in particularly we'll talk about our culture, right, in the United States, how we've interacted with our environments

over the last 20 years. If we look at sleep, for example, is we think, and we'll talk about this more, I'm sure, we're like that all the research is out that we should sleep more and what we find is that we're actually sleeping less every year and why is that is because we're working like hand to the tooth and nail we're grinding until 12 no one's doing that that stop lying we are on TV we're on tech we're on we're hanging out we're self-soothing because this stuff is fun I think juliet and I born in the 70s sidestepped a lot of these conversations people were like well you know I wasn't on I'm like, because you would have been, I mean, I would have abused all of these technology.

There's no generations of excellence. We grew up in that environment. You would have been doing that too. 100% would have been on TikTok. I'm like, oh, give me those tasty snacks, like all these things, you know. And so I think what's important to see is suddenly if we start to aggregate all of these small things, we're starting to see the impact. And what we should always do is say, how can we make this objective, right?

Let's not talk sort of feelings about this. Let's just say we're running this experiment with our health and with our families in our society, in our culture. And we can now say, well, what are the outcomes? Well, let's look at diabetes. Let's look at obesity. Let's look at chronic pain. It's not going well. It's not going well.

Anything you care about, ACL injury rates and kids, anything you care about probably is trending downward. Or looks like, oh, my gosh, we have a public health crisis coming, right? And so I think what we should be asking then is, okay, in fitness particularly, in health, which is now almost a trillion-dollar industry, we should be viewing that as a test ground, as a teaching hospital and test kitchen, we're running this big trillion-dollar experiment, and is it working? And what we can start to say is, well, I think we've done it for 10 years. Is that a long enough experiment, or 15 years, to see inputs and outputs?

Because it is difficult, and it's complex. But what we can say is all of the things that we're currently doing doesn't seem to be enough to translate into society as a whole. objectively. So where are we going to them come back into people's lives and show them without another complex, sophisticated iteration system program on top? Because when we had complexity on top of complex systems, it's really messy. So what we need to do is start to ask ourselves, what can a person do at that hyperlocal level in their home, in their family to start to write the ship? Yeah. It's so powerful. And we were chatting a little bit beforehand, but this really

is about how do we make this accessible to the most amount of people? Because if it's not accessible and if this is not your full-time job to, you know, work in a gym or be in fitness or have all the money in the world to do whatever kind of test you want to do, you're not actually going to move the needle forward. And I love that. Dude, we call it now. I just heard this fit care. We've got sick care. And then those people who are obsessed with fitness and health and brain and longevity and durability, it's fit care. We're like, oh, we're just going to create better. tools for you to become even fitter and live longer. But then leave everybody else behind.

Right, right. And your book is about not leaving people behind. And I'm going to jump around a little bit. But because we're on this theme, I want people to understand just the power of why you've talked about walking. Like let's just build on the basics, right? Because we started off with longevity, which you guys call durability. We'll get into that and break it down for folks.

We started off by, okay, if you're sitting down cross-legged and you can get up without assistance that is a good test for you about your mobility and it's also a predictor based on some research that you shared of longevity that's there and let's call it a vital sign a vital sign and there's a bunch of other vital signs i think there's 10 total right's right but this this when we establish that and we have a benchmark an objective measure that anyone can drop in any time with their family at any place you don't need a doctor to measure this and that is a now we have a new language to be able to kind of keep talking about how do we integrate these practices. Yeah, perfect. So on that note of basics, meeting people where they're at, right,

walking is something that my audience is really starting to understand that they might have been sleeping on walking because it didn't feel like it was enough. And yet, when you look at it, most people are not walking that much in their day-to-day life because of how sedentary they are. So give us the breakdown on walking and how it's so deeply tied into so many aspects. of our health. Well, I'll just start by saying that we, as you know, owned a CrossFit gym for almost 17 years. And, you know, we first sort of started doing the mental research for this book by watching that particular population. You know, CrossFit people, you know, come three to five times a week. When they go to their one-hour crossfit class, they feel like they've done something

heroic because they've done 50 pull-ups and air squats and, you know, a ton of like sort of extreme movements that is, you know, definitely for a unique population. feels like strengthening an issue. But we were simultaneously running an in-house physical therapy clinic from which we were able to get a ton of data on these people. And these are what I would describe as your classic weekend warriors. They love to exercise, but most of them are professionals, raising kids. You know, they're trying to check the box of exercise and then move on with their life. And they like CrossFit because it's efficient.

They feel like they get a lot of bang for their buck. But what we noticed, especially in that same population of people who were turning up as patients in our physical therapy clinic, is once we started delving more deeply into what their daily practices were, in most cases, they were doing their one-hour cross-fit workout, and then they were sitting for another 16 hours a day, and then simultaneously confused about why their body felt stiff and sore, or maybe why they had, you know, torn their Achilles or otherwise had some kind of joint injury. And so it was in that environment where we started thinking, hey, we actually think people need to start moving more throughout their day. And I'm sure you've read about, you've maybe even had him as a

guest, but, you know, we've done a lot of reading on Dan Boutner's work on the Blue Zones. And, you know, speaking of your grandmother, I think we talked about this in the pre-show, you know, most people who have lived long, especially in the Blue Zones, they have never strapped on their tennis shoes and gone to CrossFit or Orange Theory. What they've done a lot in their life is move throughout their day, you know. You're right. They're into Tybo. Yeah, they're not into And I'm also a realist. I get it. Most people live in a modern, you know, American society where they don't have the luxury of being able to carry heavy things and farm and walk a lot throughout their day. So unfortunately for us, we actually need to sort of create that movement

in our lives. We need to actually intentionally decide that that extra movement is important and incorporate it into our day. There's a lot, there's lots of ways to do it. But what we've found for most people, because it's free and accessible, the best way to do that is through walking. And I just actually put this on my Instagram, but one of the one of my favorite things to ask people is like if you had a drug, if you could take a drug that would reduce your risk of death from all causes by 51 percent, it's walking 8,000 steps a day. And you reduce that risk to 65 by walking 12,000 steps a day. So we can, you know, Kelly can continue to elaborate on why we're so obsessed with walking. But I think one of the angles we take that is slightly,

different that maybe your audience hasn't heard is that people don't connect walking with their overall recovery, with their ability to get more out of their training if they are training and with things like stiffness and injury. And even sleep. And even sleep. You know, we've done some work with the Delta Force. And, you know, this is a military group that has access to literally all the greatest technology on earth, every drug, every amazing cool gadget bell whistle out there.

And if their warfighters come in complaining of not sleeping well, the first number one order of operations is they're prescribed walking 12 to 15,000 steps a day. And they're tracked. And they're tracked. And the idea there is that they are going to develop enough sleep pressure to actually sleep well through the night. And so, you know, there are so many ways in which we think walking is so critical. And, you know, Kelly, I mean, we haven't even gotten to the mental health benefits.

Yeah, absolutely. extensively on your podcast. But I mean, look, if I had to, if I was given like the worst choice in the world, which is like Juliet, if you had to like choose for the rest of your life to formally exercise or walk, you could only do one or the other. I would, even though I'm a major exerciser, I would choose walking. I think it's so critical and fundamental to the human that I would actually choose walking over a formal exercise if I had to make that horrible choice. Kelly, can you break down sleep pressure and then build that conversation a little bit further from everything that was shared.

Let's take a like a Paleolithic view. Yeah. Right? Which is my least favorite angle of attack. Well, we should do this because we've always eaten fermented mares milk soup, right? Like we just, the Paleolithic movement as a rationale isn't a good one. But what is good is to say for two and a half million years, what have been humans been doing on this planet?

Well, we go to bad when it's dark and we wake up and it's not. Okay, we can start to realize we have a 24-hour cycle that most of us can wrap We carry heavy things. We carry resources around. Babies, fuel, right? Water. We've just been moving and carrying a lot. And what we suddenly see is, if we look at the physiology of the human, for example, there's

this thing called the lymphatic system. And a lot of people are sort of, I've heard that, maybe back in seventh grade. But they've had like a lymphatic massage. They don't really know why. Right. Well, good point. And one of the things that we want people to understand is that, that you have kind of two big highways of circulation in your body. Obviously, your circuitory system.

And then the other is your lymphatic system. Your lymphatic system is the sewage system of your body. And what is happening is your body naturally is killing cells. Cells are dying. You're turning over cellular processes. There's waste materials, broken down proteins. All of that gets shuttled through your sewage system, which is your lymphatic system. So you make about three to four liters of lymphatic fluid every day that gets ultimately dumped back in and filtered by your liver and kidneys. The lymphatic system is bootstrapped into your muscle system. And so if you want to flush the toilet, if you want to move the waste, and you have to move the waste in order to bring the groceries in, garbage out, groceries in. If you don't bring the garbage out,

the groceries don't get in. And what we start to see is that if you're not moving, you're not adequately creating muscle contraction that does what? That pumps up the lymphatic system, those one-way tubes built into all your musculature. There's like a hundred thousand kilometers of, I mean, the amount of lymphatic sort of system that's built into your body is immaculate. And for example, I don't think it's like 30% of that is in your neck and head. I mean, it really is remarkable these lymphatic. I think you might have heard the lymphatic system when you're talking about breast cancer and we're looking at sentinel nodes and things like that. People can relate to that.

So one of the things we can say is, well, if you want your body to work like a body, you need to move. And it's junk movement. It doesn't matter. And it turns out moving junk movement, I'm just saying not to put a sort of negative on it, but it's simple movement. It's not complex movement. What's the easiest way to get my legs and calves to contract?

It's through walking. And if you've ever flown an airplane or not been active and your legs kind of swell up and you get cancals, that's the backing up of your sewage system. So here what we've done, we've set up an environment where people don't have to move and then we wonder why we don't feel as good, why our tissue's quality isn't is great. And the easiest thing you can do is begin to just say, hey, let's make sure that the physiology is doing what we're doing. If you don't sleep for a few days, you're going to be a disaster. If you don't move for a few days, it's going to be a problem. And if what's interesting is that oftentimes it feels for us that we're on the top of a big ship

looking down and we get all these different views of the ship. We're like rocks over there, sharks over there, monsters over there. Like let's, and you know, when we know, because we've worked in the hospital, the number one thing we try to do is get people up and moving right away. So they don't lose all those structural proteins so that they can be up and don't lose their, their blood pressure regulation. There's a whole lot of reasons why we get people moving because sedentariness is such a problem. So one of the things that we're trying to do here is help people understand that if you want and are obsessed with elite performance, that is done with the same sets of tools to go ahead and work to be 110 years old and very functional, that these

things differ by degree, not kind. And what we're talking about is if I want to reduce something we call session cost, which is, hey, I did a big workout or I had a big event or something, I can basically measure the impact on my body the next day. I can look at resting heart rate, heart rate variability, central nervous system readiness. I can do all of those things to measure my ability to recover from that kind of big event. So one of the things we're obsessed with is helping athletes reduce session costs, helping CEOs reduce session costs from big stressful events in their lives. So ultimately what we're saying is, hey, if you do these things, you actually can work harder, feel better, and improve the things you care about.

Also, if you don't care about those things, they're running in the background as basic practices that help your body do what it needs to do. I just wanted to add, could I add two more things about walking my obsession with walking? But, you know, there's this whole new field of a subspecialty of researchers that just study sedentaryism. It's like a whole field now. Sedentary biology. Yeah, sedentary biology. And what they're starting to realize is that it's all that additional movement in the form of walking

is often how people are controlling their weight throughout their lives. So people who exercise for an hour a day but then don't move, that may not be enough total movement to actually have lifelong weight control. But the people who are moving 8, 12, 15, even more, 1,000 steps a day, those people actually often do not struggle with weight control throughout their life. They've got just a little bit more of a buffer to sort of be able to be able to. eat whatever they want. If you do Peloton three hours a week versus walk 10,000 steps seven days a week, guess which one wins in terms of calorie burnage? Guess how many more cookies I get to eat

because all I've done is just move my body a little more. And I think critically we chose, the recommendation we have in this book for people is to walk eight to 12,000 steps. And, you know, the 10,000 steps idea was created by a Japanese pedometer manufacturer in the 60s. It was a marketing tool because 10,000 is an auspicious number in Japanese culture. So it wasn't at that time based on any research at all. Of course, thanks to this whole sedentary biology field, there's all this research filling in massive amount of research filling in to support the importance of walking. But, you know, the reason we chose 8,000 is because of that statistic I mentioned to you earlier that you get, you know, you get 51% reduction in all cause mortality. You know, you get the lion's share

of the benefit of walking at 8,000 steps. And as we looked at our friends and neighbors and people who were busy and time crunched, we thought, man, 8,000 is a much more reachable number for more people than 10,000 or 12,000. Look, any extra is great. But, you know, most people, Americans, the data shows are getting about 4,000 steps. And we really felt like it was realistic to say to people, hey, you know, you could double that with a couple of 20-minute walks or 3, 10-minute walks. You can double that number pretty easily amongst a busy time crunch life. It may be hard to get to 10,000, 12,000, depending on where you are in your life. So we really were very conscious about saying, hey, we want to create a number of steps that is relatable

and accessible that people might actually be able to do. And as objective, it's easy to start to see. As a vital sign now, what we can say is, oh, man, I just went through a gnarly work phase. I haven't been able to move. I've been in a busy meeting. whatever's going on, I'm below my vital sign. My blood pressure has gotten a little bit high. Oh, what do I need to do to control my blood pressure? A few things. Right. So suddenly now we have a reference mark and it doesn't feel like we're chasing something. It helps us to say, okay,

here's my baseline. I've just been below my baseline a little bit. And what we can do with this kind of thinking is suddenly take exercise off the table and start to view it as almost like an extracurricular. We can say, what is my physical practice? And what I think is important about this idea of a physical practice is that from when I wake up to when I go to bed, I have a whole lot of choice about the care and feeding of my brain and body and gut and all them things that are important to me through really simple behaviors that I can just integrate. But if I didn't get a chance to exercise, I still did a ton to burn calories, to load, to decongest, to get sunshine, to see my neighbors, to feel better, to work on my hip range of motion.

and I have this really complete physical practice that still sustains me, still helps me feel better, still helps me look less gross for my wife, right? All the things that are important to us. And what that means is then, for example, let me give you real life. Yesterday, we were invited to come speak at specialized bikes and sort of kick off a big meeting. That was at 8 a.m. that means we got up at 5. We left the house at 6. We drove two hours.

Then we drove down to L.A. Then we happened to go to see the cure last night, the Hollywood Bowl, just by accident. But there was zero chance for us to exercise or do anything like that. But we ended up walking 12,000 steps or over 12,000 steps. And so what's nice there is, boy, my sleep terrible. But I'm just below my average. It's okay. But in that mindset of what can I control here?

Well, I could go to the coolest grocery store ever, Erwan, and get really amazing food. And I could move my body. and I got to spend time with my family. And it wasn't a throwaway for me where I said, oh, I didn't get to train today. So I have to restrict or I have to do something or I'm not a good person. I was like, look at all the positive inputs I had

in my physical practice. And if I do those things more regularly, I'll actually be able to be more ready to engage with exercise because my body's prepared. So the vital signs are basically levers and we all are connecting to the fact that there's multiple levers that we can pull on in today.

And at the end of the day, because they're objective, these are all things that are going to move you in the direction of durability. Exactly. Nailed it. Let's talk about durability and why you prefer that as a term. And, you know, everybody's talking about longevity right now. So cool. And it's great and it's cool.

But durability goes back into this theme that we were talking about earlier, which is that if you look at the last 15 years of a lot of people's lives, it's hell on earth. It is miserable and it's painful and it's very, very sad. And if you have had a family member, have a family member, have a. fall, break a hip, have a sickness or disease, or even wellness, people who seemly well. But I mean that, just the hits are coming. I just want to tell everyone, if you're a human being, traffic accidents happen, disease happens, stress happens, deaths happen, the changes in your work status are going to happen. The stress and the things are coming your way because you're human.

So I think just to sort of tee this up a little bit, we ultimately prefer the word durability for exactly the reason you said, I don't think anybody cares about living to be 100 if the last 15 years are spent in a skilled nursing facility being taken care of by a nurse or by your adult children. That's an outcome nobody wants. But what people do want is to feel good in their body now and be able to do the things they want to do physically and also be able to do those things as they age and then hopefully like, you know, like fall off a cliff and die one day, right? But for me, I don't want to live to be 100 if the last 15 years aren't great and I can't move my body and I have no mental acuity. That's not what I'm interested in. What I am interested in is having a durable body. Like Kelly said, take the hits. And I'll give you one example.

In 2018, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And, you know, here I am super healthy doing all the things. But, you know, even someone like me, you know, cancer's a bitch. Excuse my language. But even someone like me who's doing all the things, you know, it might get you. or some other disease or not even a disease. You might have a death in the family or some kind of work stress or go through a period of grief. There's so many ways in which as humans were going to be tested.

And it's not really an if, it's a when. I mean, it's part of the human condition. There's things in the environment. There's things in the environment. You just don't know. Yeah, you don't know what's out there or what's coming for you. And one of the things I thought was so interesting is I was going through my sort of surgery process.

And I fortunately caught this cancer super easy, super early. So it was very treatable with a couple of pretty major surgery. But one of the things that a bunch of people said to me as I was going through my recovery process, there's like, wow, you're just, you're just recovering so quickly and you heal so quickly. Worse. And, you know, I was like, bitch, did you look at my arms? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, you think people heal faster than other people?

And I was like, look, my genetics are the same users. In fact, arguably, they're worse because I'm the one that got cancer, right? Like, like, I don't have any unique special superpower for healing. But what I did have was this really durable. body when I was given that diagnosis, a durable body that was able to manage those gnarly surgeries, and I had the tools to recover well. And by the way, the tools for recovery of a for a big surgery like that are the same things in this book built to move because they're the basics. You know, the way to recover from a hard surgery is to sleep. It's to eat fruits and vegetables.

It's to walk a lot. You know, it's to get some sunlight on your body. It's these real basic things that we talk about in this book and that I think are becoming, you know, they're becoming a point of discussion in a lot of health and fitness basis. Your range of motion, though, is the thing that I think was most people comment to me. But that was the thing that most, so my goal was to be able to do a pull-up. That was my goal, because I'd had some other friends who had breast cancer after having a mastectomy. And what I'd seen is a couple of friends who'd gone through the same process and had really been so guarded in their upper body that they actually could no longer put their arms over their head, let alone even consider doing a pull-up. And so, you know,

I just did the thing. Rather than doing it with a weight, I just made sure that in that recovery process, I touched those corners. And I was like, I know that I want to be able to put my arm over my head and I want to be able to do a pull-up. I want to be able to get that skill back. And so I just did, you know, really slow movement, managed getting over my head. I started slowly doing dumbbell overhead presses. And then at six weeks to the day from my surgery, I, did one pull-up. And people were just blown away by this. And I was like, this is actually not science. It's actually not even that. It's not some secret squirrel program, right? I just kept moving, walking, moving my body through its ranges of motion. I slept. I ate well, took care of my body. And I was

able to do a pull-up within six weeks of my double mastectomy. That's huge. And by the way, I'm glad that it sounds like you're in remission and you're doing better. Yes. I'm so glad to hear that. And it's also just a reminder that we never know what can happen. But the question is, how strong is your body overall to be able to, as you guys said, take the hits. So let's use that as an opportunity to go from durability to some of these vital signs that are there and how you ended up choosing that. So I don't know if we go through all the 10 because people can get the book and they can go through it all. But give us like at least some of the top ones that we haven't talked about yet. Julian and I have spent better part of 15 years in high-performance sports.

So Premier soccer, Premier Rugby, NFL, military. We get to see everyone's dirty laundry. We have worked with a lot of world champions, a lot of Olympians. People are asking us to come in and evaluate our program. How do you help us be more durable? How do you help us go faster? And the first order of business is the 10 vital signs here. We are trying to help organizations and teams find their blind spots.

And ultimately, what I want to understand is that we feel like the highest calling of science, this is an E.O. Wilson idea. The highest calling of science is to transform the humanities. That was what he thought great science. Pure science is important. But the highest calling of science is to actually make our lives better as humans. Well, we were like, wow, that's a pretty powerful statement. What if the highest calling of sport and high performance was to learn lessons that we could come back and transmute and to change our families and to change our communities? We were like, okay. So suddenly this sport wasn't just about entertainment.

It wasn't circus. It was, how are we going to come to understand what's really crucial for humans to operate at a high level? Because one of my favorite coaches is a guy named Franz Bosch and he has a great saying, there's more variation in waltzing than there is in sprinting. And let me set that up for people. At low load, low speed, low demand on the body, you can get away with a lot. And so most of us can get away with a lot because our lives are actually. low load, low speed, low stress.

We just kind of go through. And our body's a really durable and immaculate. But we started adding a little stress. We start adding a world championship. We started adding speed and load to that thing. And the conditions under which we can create really durable people who can handle lots of stress repeatedly, those practices really start to dovetail and to become integrated. So the 10 practices in here are the same tools that we use for our best athletes and our best

teams. I just want everyone to understand that. But we've also come to realize that those are the hinges that open the biggest doors. Are there other things? We encourage you to add to this list, there are things that have been transformative for you. But for us, we were like, here's a place to start. And the way to think about it is each vital sign creates a constellation of behaviors. And as you sort of move out that the valence around those vital signs start to interact with the other vital signs, as if we've already hinted at, if I want to get better at sleep, boy, I better start to move more. And if I want to have healthier tissues, boy, I better start to move more.

And if I suddenly you start to realize, that's right. I start to have to integrate and think of these things as a system's whole, that complexity, that conciliance in all of these behaviors. You know, people are always like, which one is the most important? I'm like, what you're really asking me is what's not important. Yeah. Yeah, you're not just walking to get better at walking. No.

You're using walking as a vehicle to improve so many aspects of help. your community, getting sunlight. You're right. I think there's a couple of things I would add to this overall conversation. I mean, you know, I am a busy working mom. And even though I happen to work in the health and fitness space, one of the things that's been really frustrating for me as, you know, not only am I in the space, but I'm an onlooker is that at least from Instagram, it looks like a lot of people in our space have enough time to be able to every single day, do a breathing practice, meditate, journal, ice bath, sauna, workout, prepare the perfect food. And, you know, I found that to be very frustrating because that's not at all what my life looks like.

As a busy working mom, I wake up in the morning and I help my kids get ready for school. I'm lucky if I can get in some exercise and a quick cup of coffee with like, you know, some creatine or something. And then I am, Kelly and I both spend the vast majority of our day in front of our computers. Like everybody else would if they just had sort of a traditional job. And then we come home. We're helping with homework, cooking dinner. Right. So what we really focused on with these behaviors is actually taking a step back and looking at our

own life from 30,000 feet and saying, okay, from this perspective as time crunch, busy working parents, raising kids, what can we actually do and what are the things that are really moving the needle for us? Expansive. Yeah. What are the behaviors that can fit into a life that looks like that, not the life that looks like the fitness influencer? What are the behaviors that are reasonable to fit into that life?

And remember the fitness influencer test is that it's not working. Right. And so we found that these 10 things were the things that we both could do in a busy time crunch life and that we found move the needle for us the most. And we also found that they were the things, you know, the lessons we learned from high performance, but also the things that when we were speaking to our neighbors, people who stopped by and said, hey, I have low back pain or hey, what should I be eating or how much Should I sleep?

You know, these are the behaviors that we were recommending to people. And I think one of the things that we also wanted to do here with this book and these vital signs is that, you know, we're consumers. We've read every book on sleep and every book on breathing and a thousand, you know, strength and conditioning and nutrition books. But we had never read. And we know those people. We know all those people.

They're all our friends and there's amazing works out there. But what we had never read was a book that talked was comprehensive in the way that it said, okay, these are these key behaviors and these are how they. they all work together and why one influences the other. And so I think that's, you know, that was our goal here. But, you know, to answer your actual question 20 minutes later after you asked it, we divided the book into what we would say five of the vital signs are more movement related. So like the sit and rise test we discussed.

And then five of them are more behavioral slash lifestyle like eating, sleep, walking, creating a movement-rich environment. And, you know, I think that's how we thought of setting up the book. And so, again, we feel like. observable, measurable, repeatable, we have to create objectives for people. And now we're in a time where we actually have some data and some research to support what we're also seeing is validated clinically. So if I want, you know, as a physical therapist, I, the last thing everyone wanted to touch was nutrition. I just, I'm like, that's a third rail. It's like a, it's like a religion.

I'm like, no thanks. Juliet is, has done a ton of nutrition learning. She is certified. She works with, You know, she's into that thing. It's her jam. For me, I'm like, ugh. Right. And but realizing that I'm never going to talk to you about the health of your tissues unless you're getting enough protein. Yeah.

Unless you're getting enough micronutrients and fiber. And so suddenly what we realize is, well, I guess I have to kind of become competent in this because we talk about body composition with 100% of our athletes. We talk about, you know, tissue health and fueling with 100% of our athletes that we have children. And, you know, so when we, when we start to look at those things, we realize we have to address some of these things because there's such salient features of the global whole. Maybe we'll break down a couple of those just because he touched on them.

Our audience loves the conversation around nutrition, food. You know, we've had different people of different angles. And then my job as a host is kind of also to be protective of our audience in the sense of I'm going to expose you to everything, but let's look at the themes that are there. And I think I loved your book because you have been hitting on a lot of the themes that we've been bringing up over the last year especially. So you've mentioned too, Kelly, and maybe whoever wants to break it down a little bit further, let's talk about the macronutrients and how your recommendation around fiber and plant food

coming from vegetables or fruits, how you ended up coming up with the recommendation that you want people to target. I'll let Julia take a swing of this, but let me just start by saying, look at us, we are survivors. Yes. We are veterans of the diet wars. Every single one of them. We've been around since the zone in the 90s. We've been around from Fat Free.

Like, we have seen it all. We've done it all. I have given myself explosive diarrhea with keto. I have done this, okay? Yeah, I mean, Kelly's right. We really, you know, I think my first exposure to diets was in the early 90s. I was in college and I was a division one rower, but following the fat-free diet. So I was living on like red vines, bagels and mocha's because they were fat-free.

So, you know, I started on early, you know, testing out things. And, you know, then we got into CrossFit and we were paleo-keto, intermittent fasting, you name it, you know, we've done it all. And I think part of it is just that we've gotten a little bit older and more reasonable. But a few years ago, we stumbled upon our friend E.C. Sinkowski's 800-gram challenge. And it's the recommendation we have in the book. And it's based on some research that she found that showed that you get the vast majority of the benefits of the micronutrients and the fiber and fruits and vegetables at about 800 grams.

And we really love this because, again, going back to those neighborhood conversations, we would have with our friends and family who are like, okay, what should I eat and how much? You know, it was the first time we could say, hey, why don't you just start by eating 800 grams of fruits and vegetables a day? And the other thing we loved about it. 1.7 pounds of melon. Yeah, and let me set this up. It's like 280 calories. Yeah.

And there's a couple things I'll say about this. I mean, you know, I think when people first hear this number, they sort of balk and say there's no way. That's so much food. I could never eat that much food in a given day. But just for reference. That's true. You couldn't. In kale, it might be hard.

But, you know, four medium to large size apples is 800 grams. And one of the things we loved when we found this is, again, as diet culture survivors, we would say, it was the first time that's sort of an eating diet recommendation, whatever word you want to use felt expansive versus restrictive. And also, I think we found it at a time in our lives when we really started thinking that we sort of lost the forest through the trees when it came to dietary recommendations in many ways. You know, like let's talk about the banana, for example. At some point, the banana became like the demon of all foods. It's obviously the scourge of society. It's a scourge of society and that it had way too much sugar and nobody should ever eat a banana.

And in fact, I didn't eat a banana for like 10 years for this exact reason. And looking back on that, I started realizing, man, we've demonized a lot of really healthy normal foods that, you know, people have been eating for millennia. Right. And just replacing with processed health food. Exactly. It's a keto cookie. It's fun.

So another big influence for me is. is a book called Deep Nutrition by Kate Shanahan. I don't know if you've come across her work. No, I haven't. But she's a genius. And she went around the world and studied food cultures. And it turns out in every culture since the beginning of time, there's sort of these four pillars that all cultures eat.

They eat fermented foods. They eat meat on the bone. They eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. And they eat some kind of fermented dairy product. This is literally since the dawn of time. Now, what those foods look like. totally vary based on culture. If you're in Korea, your fermented food is kimchi. If you're in Germany, it's a pickle. But really that there are these buckets of food that everybody's been

eating forever. And so the notion in more recent years that some of these foods are not appropriate, that we might be allergic to them all. You know, I definitely question that. But back to this 800 gram challenge, what we love about it is that it's expansive. It allows you to be able to go out to dinner with your friends. It also allows you to eat within whatever diet you like. So look, if intermittent fasting or keto or the Mediterranean diet or paleo is actually working or carnivore or being a vegan is working for someone and it is working from a calorie control standpoint or is your cultural preference. The 800 gram challenge actually fits within every single one of those diets. And you bring up a really important point. Can I ask one question before you jump in is how if somebody's

listening today and they're like, I want to do this challenge. Yeah. Right. Obviously pick up a copy of the book, but how long is this challenge? And I mean, pick up a copy of book because it'll be a nice supportive thing to do for the authors and you'll get a lot of other benefit that's there. You don't need the book to obviously do the challenge. But if you want to do the challenge, how long? And what changes should somebody see in their diet for especially somebody who's not consuming a large amount of whole fruits and vegetables?

There's a lot of people here that consider themselves very healthy, but they eat a lot of processed health food, chips, all the things. Like, what's one of the number one sellers at Whole Foods? It's potato chips. The same thing that people are buying everywhere else. Right, right. It's same way. So what changes?

Organic olive oil. Yeah. So what change? Yeah. How long should they do it? You mentioned apples as, you know, four apples is an example. Are there any other examples that are there? And what changes should they see in their body?

So the 800 gram challenge, I would say, is more like a lifestyle than a challenge. It's a vital sign. So we think, you know, start now and keep doing this for the rest of your life and you're going to get all. But you probably would see if somebody did it for 30 days. they would notice some huge benefits. So there's a couple big benefits. The first of all is it's a lot of food,

so you're going to feel satiated and you're going to feel less likely or more or less likely to actually want to eat those chips from whole food. Dude, it's cherry season. Go get a pound of cherries. Consume an entire pound of cherries. It may not be great for you.

It may be a little tough. That's 230 calories. That's less than a Starbucks cookie. Like by a long shot. Yeah. That's a pound of food, a pound. Like you're going to be like, oh, no more cherries.

I mean, so what you see is, as Julia is saying, you can eat so much more. It's so much food. And also, by the way, it includes things like potatoes and beans. Oh, culturally, inclusive? What are you talking about? Yeah. And, you know, it again, is very expensive.

The only thing it doesn't include is frying a vegetable like a potato. Those things are excluded if you fry them or if you want to. And the other thing, too, is so accessible. We get it. There are food deserts in a lot of parts of this country and people actually don't have access to, you know, good fruits and vegetables. But guess what? on the 800 gram challenge, you can also eat canned fruits or vegetables, frozen fruits or

vegetables. Those are all on the table because, again, the goal is to get these micronutrients into your body and how you do that is totally up to you. You can eat what's within your cultural preference, what's within your dietary preference. You know, one example we like to give is carnivore. Well, people who are carnivore have sort of been adding in some like berries and things to their carnivore diets of like, great, eat 800 grams of berries. It's actually not that hard. It's like five cups of berries. It's totally possible. within a carnivore diet. Again, for vegans, great. In many cases, vegans are also eating a lot of processed foods and not a lot of whole food, fruits and vegetables. But what we've found is that,

number one, it's expansive. It allows you to enjoy food with your people. You know, one of the things I like to say is that humans do two things together. We move together and we eat together. And one of my criticisms of some diets that we have out there is that they are, because you have to be so meticulous about what you eat. It pulls you away from being able to eat with your people. And I think that, you know, from a, like a community and one of the ways to combat depression and loneliness and anxiety is actually to do the things that humans do together, which is eat together.

It's actually a performance. Yeah. And so if, is it? Well, just that when we see organizations that share a meal together a week, they perform better. Perform better. And if they eat a single meal every day together, I mean, what's the research about having dinner with your kids. Like you're going to have kids who are like do less drugs and are happy and

like you, you talk to you. That's just from eating together. So imagine now we're like, hey, let's make it easier to eat together. So and then Kelly can talk a little bit about sort of the tissue impact of eating all these fruits and vegetables and getting this fiber and micronutrients into your body and then also our protein recommendations. Yeah, that'd be great. Well, and to build off one thing that you were saying, Juliet, is that also like constipation is a major issue. And when you actually audit. You know, most people have never had the benefit of tracking their food, right? It's not always easy. It's like you got to learn a little bit about it. But once you get into it, you're like, okay, I can manage this. They never see sort of their breakdown of macros or they're

under-eating on certain things. And a lot of people in the health space in particular, as a lot of these health foods have become so good. And as I think it was in the year, 2016, was the first year that we spent more money on eating out as a nation than we did on groceries. Right? That was the first year that that ended up shifting. So naturally when you're getting food from, you know, ordering Uber Eats, whatever, those things are naturally going to be concentrated sources, even if they're healthier foods. And you just see this trend where people are getting less and less fiber. So even I've noticed this trend that even a lot of my friends that are in the health space are now dealing with constipation. And when you look, we often miss the basics, which is, are you just eating enough fruits and vegetables? Are you getting enough fiber in your diet? Rubarb for everybody. Look, I want to take everything. One thing I want to say for the listeners on the tracking piece, because I also don't love having to weigh and measure my food all the time.

And what I've learned with this 800 gram challenge is that you can actually do it for like three days, like choose three days of your life and measure it. And you get some really good data. So you're not like stuck in a prison of tracking for the rest of your life. You can measure for three days and then actually really get a good sense and be able to eyeball it. The way that I eyeball it is I basically make sure I have a diverse amount of fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables in every one of my meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I know from tracking it that I'm hitting that. So it's not a prison. I know for some people tracking,

the idea of tracking anything is like, I'm out of here. But it's, you don't have to be in a prison. I do recommend people get like an $8 scale on Amazon and just track for a eight dollar scale. A $8 food scale. What is an apple way? Yeah, or even Google it and just get some rough ideas and I think people are number one going to learn that they're not even getting close to 800 grams and number two I think they're going to learn they don't have to be in a prison of tracking forever you can get some really quick data and then eyeball going forward love it everything we're talking about is great we think that these vital signs are useful now let's just pretend that we're talking about your kids do your kids need micronutrients yes do your kids growing brains need these

micronutrients yes they're not getting them if we look I mean there was a big researchers just came out that like a month ago that basically in the last week, what, 50% of the kids had hadn't eaten a fruit and only 30% of the kids had eaten a fruit and vegetable, you know, of actual vegetable. So what we're seeing is that real malnutrition and the missing of these essential building blocks of tissue health, of the brain health, of the whole thing, they're just not in the diets of our kids. And you can go, you're an expert in this, but we're seeing colorectal cancers and strange

diseases and like young kids who are only eating chicken McNuggets and I mean it's crazy even we understand we have this thing called one less fight we don't want to we don't want to have one more fight in our family about eating something so there's a couple things that we do one is that I have one daughter who is like a gourmet and loves to eat everything and I have another daughter who's like oh is that brown food I'll eat the brown food give me the brown food is that fried I love to eat the brown food and super sensitive super picky but in the morning I make her a little smoothie it's a handful of frozen berries, a splash of some kind of yogurt. And then she drinks that as she gets ready for school, she's a freshman. And then I give her a protein, which we'll talk about in a second. And then

and a vitamin. So no matter what, I know that she's had some actual fruits and vegetables, right? She's had a protein and she's had a micronutrient supplement because as soon as she leaves the house, I don't know whose kid that is. I don't know what she's going to eat. I can't be responsible for her choices. We eat crazy things when we were here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Dude. So So what I'm starting to see is that we have to be really proactive about making sure these things in. And usually, you know, everyone's like, eat your veggies. But people are like, I don't like veggies.

We're like, cool. Here are all these fruits. So we want to be thinking about it as we're trying to support growing bodies and athletic growing bodies do have on hand. People are big on collagen supplementation. But if you don't have any vitamin C in the system, you can't actually utilize that collagen. Vitamin C and collagen go together. Well, it turns out you're vitamin C depleted by the time you wake up in the morning.

I'm not trying to make vitamin C scarcity. I'm just saying, wow, what's a source of vitamin C that I could easily get in the morning? It's called a handful of fruits. And it doesn't take very much. So this is an easy way. If you're healing from surgery, I'm a physical therapist, or injury, I want you to have all the building blocks on hand so that your body can heal at its miraculous rate and not be rate limited by the nutrition that you're not getting or being aware. of. I also want to talk about the fact that there's a lot of calorie control hidden in these these two recommendations. The second recommendation we have besides the 800 gram challenge is to get more

protein. And as you've already talked about, our recommendations are actually really reasonable. 0.7 to 1 gram per pound body weight. As you get older, you probably should get a little more. If you're very active, you probably should get a little more. If you're not even hitting 0.7, just get to 0.7 grams per pound body weight to start with. And what you'll see, is suddenly, again, you're vegetarian? Cool. We're down with that. You want to supplement with vegetarian protein shakes? We're down with that. Just show us you can actually hit those numbers. And what we find is that people are way under on their protein, way under in their micronutrients. How can I talk about your Achilles hurting or your back pain hurting or your lack of focus or the fact that

your kid isn't growing or any of the body composition? You're hungry all the time. They're hungry all the time. So those two things, as we know, adding a ton of fiber and a ton of fruits and vegetables you have to eat and hitting this protein macros, boy you end up feeling full like you're like I gotta eat dinner you know like oh you know and what we found is by expanding the choices that people have and expanding their food content we actually get a lot of calorie control because I'm like look hit all these minimums for me through this vital sign and then if you want to go crush some cake go crush some cake but guess what there's probably less room for the cake you're so busy stuffing your face trying to get your minimums

all day long and you have built in calorie control one of my friends sent me a just a quick calculation. And he was like, what do you think about this diet, Kelly? He's like, I'm going to eat a, like it was like a 50 ounce rib eye. It was insane, right? It's so many calories.

And he's like, and then I'm going to eat a pound of melon. He's like, that's it or 1.8 pounds of melon. And it was 2,300 calories. So he got like, 210 grams of protein from this one steak. And I was like, that's the worst diet ever

and at least, the most boring diet ever. But what we're showing is that with eating this huge, fatty chunk of meat plus a pound of melon. He was still only eating. 2,300 calories a day. So what we're starting to see now is when we begin to help people

manage that, we see that a lot of other behaviors start to come on board. So I played around with time restricted eating, intermittent fasting, just like everyone else, because I was like, oh, calorie control for adults, I'm down. I don't sometimes don't have a big food drive first thing in the morning, have some black coffee, I feel great. I want to be less gross for my wife. Turns out this is a great way to be less gross. And but what I found... This is a theme. Can you tell this less gross thing? Just for my wife. My wife, my smoking-a-law wife. I'm glad he still has that thief.

A lot of men give up later on that life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We too. I'm really glad to you. When your wife has abs, you have to chase those abs. So one of the things that I noticed is that if I didn't eat until midday, and remember, the research came out that said, oh, if time restrict eating is a problem because we're losing a lot of muscle mass, right?

Because we're not eating. And so I found that I had to eat a lot more during the day, during my window of eating. And then I found out that I was actually underfueled for the actual. exercise I was doing the afternoon. I was bonking. I didn't feel good. I had low energy availability. And I was like, wow, this missing this crucial meal has really put me behind. Then I would realize that like 10 o'clock at night, I was deeply undercalorieed and super starving. I weigh about 238 pounds. I have big, big butt, right? I love to squat and bike. And Julie, be like, I'm not sure eating a whole chicken and a jar of peanut butter before you go to bed is going to be the best thing for your sleep.

And I was like, you don't know me. I got to get my macros. And what I found was that totally disrupted my sleep because I was eating so much in the day. And so for me, what I thought was, hey, that's a system that isn't allowing me to get enough fruits and vegetables and get enough protein. Let me just make sure that at the first meal of the day that I have, I'm putting some fruits in and getting some protein in and I can still respect those calories, but I can meet those demands of having carbohydrate available, having micronutrients and all the things on board. So it's a way of sort of framework in your life. Then if you want to turn it up, turn it. down for your specialness, your unique snowflakeness, knock yourself out. Yeah, definitely.

And I think the key theme out of that is you don't want to be so attached to anything at the sacrifice of something else. And I think there's more awareness on that. You know, we recently had on Thomas DeLauer, big YouTuber, talking about that. In his early days, you know, intermittent fasting was a huge part of his journey of losing a ton of weight, I think 110 pounds. Amazing. Amazing. And then, you know, the muscle mass conversation, lean protein conversation, you know, how do we modify this for other people? And again, it's like, what is the priorities that holistically work together in the body? And we don't want, we want to make sure that we're majoring in the majors and we don't put so much emphasis on one thing that we

lose something else that's right. Yeah. It's easy. Yeah. And I mean, that was my, you know, that was my point about this eating together as humans thing. I think people haven't, you know, it's, it's like I never wanted to be that mom, especially raising two daughters that was like microwaving my, you know, meal that was sent to me by like the paleo meal company while I'm serving my kids some other dinner, right? Like, I was like, okay, that that's not a tradeoff I'm willing to make. Like, I want to be the model I want to be, especially as a woman raising two daughters in a world where there's like massive eating disorders. And we're in fitness. Like, I want to be the mom that shows that like eating food is great and eating together is great and that, you know,

we can cook dinner and all eat the same thing. Like imagine that. We have a lot. We have this thing called the three vegetable rule. And every night for dinner, we cook three different vegetables. And there may be a salad and two other vegetables on there. They rotate. Our kids have certain favorites. But for us, we're like, oh, look at it. We're going to hit our grams. We're going to be stuffed eating this, all these veggies. And for our kids, we give them a choice where they can start to, you know, at least get some micronutrient and fiber in there. And that turned out to be really, really useful, pneumoc that we grabbed from one of our friends. And the final thing I'll say on this nutrition piece as a woman where,

I think, you know, we've had sort of a separate set of bombardment, especially on the restriction side. I think so many women I know, you know, I'm cresting into menopause now, and I know so many women that are having to sort of undo this advice we've been given for so many years, which is like, restrict your food and do a massive amount of cardio, right? Like that was sort of the, this is what you do as a woman to sort of stay lean and look good as massive amounts of cardio, restrict, restrict, restrict. And I posted a video on my Instagram recently where I ate, I, you know, videoed everything I ate

throughout an entire day, which was 800 grams of fruits and vegetables. And in my case, about 140 grams of protein. And the amount of women who texted me, called me and said, my God, that is so much food. You know, and I think they were so shocked because we've been, especially as women, been in this massive restriction mode, that it was like the first time they actually could visualize a whole day of food that included a ton of food. I did a lot of eating throughout the day and a lot of eating of diverse and different things and, you know, it wasn't all perfect and, you know, but it was a ton of food at the end of the day and still was like two, it was like 2,000 total calories. So it wasn't like a 4,000 calorie day. It was 2,000 total calories with this really reasonable amount of food.

But I think it was really interesting for me to get this feedback from women who were like, whoa, oh my God, I've never eaten that much food in my entire life, right? So, so it's like, I'm hoping this helps undo some of that sort of like trauma that women have around like, you know, the only way to be healthy is to restrict and destroy yourself with cardio. Let me just follow up by saying, have you heard of the phrase almond mom? Almond? Yeah, almond mom. It's a TikTok thing.

So our kids came to us and we're making fun of us one time. They're like, oh, you guys are almond moms. And it's when we see a parent hyper-obsessed with diet culture start to influence their children on real diet culture. What I mean diet culture, very restrictive, very control. And the almond mom is like back to the idea that like a serving of almonds is three almonds, right? Which is like no normal person could ever just eat three almonds, right? It's like 10.

At least you eat 10. But even our kids have become aware through a meme now of how we have really lost what nutrition and fueling looks like, what a diet, a human diet looks like with dieting. That it's always about, you know, weight control. And remember, my day job is to work with the best athletes on the part. planet to win more world championships. We recently were working with a two-time world champion superstar who had a couple big injuries. A surfer. A couple big injuries. And one of the things that we found was that this person wasn't able to get enough, wasn't eating. They were underfueling. And there's a phenomenon called relative energy deficiency in sport Reds. It used to be the triad

where we saw women that lose their period. We saw Lombodensi, sarcopenia. But Reds happens across the board for men and women. And what we ended up doing for this athlete was just getting him to eat some more protein and some more carbohydrate the right time. And he put on 12 pounds in six weeks because he just pulled off the lever. And he surfing great, power went up, surfing went up. So don't assume that everyone is nailing this. And also these are great recommendations. If you're getting older and want to keep your muscle mass, we find that people are under eating protein. And we're finding that people who are exercising like maniacs are not supporting their soft tissues. If we're going to get to the bottom of your soft tissue injuries and healing, we're going to have to have this conversation about micronutrients and protein.

Otherwise, I can't tell what's going on. And I think that's really at the heart of so much of the conversations we're having with experts is that there's so much noise in the data. It's hard for us to sort of ascertain what is essential. Yeah, it's true. And the protein thing is like, you know, we've had people, you know, come. on from all different sides to talk about it. But I think the ones that really, you know, as you guys are doing in your book, people are understanding that, you know, the true impact, especially as you get older when you start to talk about sarcopenia, hip fractures. And then there's this whole other

movement, which is people understanding that protein, you know, we've had on Dr. Gabriel Lyon, who really drove this home for a lot of our audience there, is that protein, which is directly connected to lean muscle mass is the thing that's going to soak up all the glucose inside of your body, right? So you get away with having more carbohydrates. Ask me, I'm afraid of a cookie. I'm not afraid of cookies. You don't keep them in the house, though, right? That's the hack.

Yep. But you're really right. What ends up happening is, you know, we know, I think we used to think as you age, all these things decline, all they all go away. It's guaranteed. I just saw a really great study that just showed that, you know, trained math. lose a little power at 60, but untrained men, who lose a lot of power between 50 and 60. And what we're actually seeing is, well, if you just keep training, you can actually maintain

a lot of your power and function. Range of motion too, can be easily maintained. But what we're seeing is it's a lot harder to put muscle mass on or change your grandma's bone density when she's 60 and 70. It's harder. So it's much easier for us to say, hey, look, here's what we know from the best athletes in the world around body weight control, if that's important to you. and just fueling and taking care of your tissues, let's get you doing that when you're a teenager. Let's get you starting to think about that so that this is just a program running in the back of your life

so that when you get to that place where we start to typically see those declines, we don't automatically have to endure them. What do you feel about the advice that a lot of people who sort of are trying to merge these worlds together? Right, let's say the traditional fitness world that's a little bit heavy on the, I would say more traditional approach to energy balance,

like it's all calories in and calories out. Then you have like a little bit more of like, hey, it's, it's, you know, quality of calories does seem to matter and could have it influence on things. And generally, if you keep your calories under control through whole foods, you're going to be in a good situation, right? Like if you're primarily focused on whole foods and you're not eating a ton of ultra processed foods, you know, the ultra processed foods calories, even if it's like 2,000 of the same calories, it may come with more environmental exposure.

It might come with more glucose, you know, ups and downs. So one of the recommendations we hear a lot on this podcast is that, hey, you could start off your morning with fruit, but if you start off your morning with protein instead, a little bit of protein and fat, you're going to be more satiated. You're going to start off with a little bit better blood sugar control, which might help with cravings. Or do you feel that, hey, look, that's restrictive. If people are just hitting their protein goals in the day, I don't care what time or when

they're eating different foods. What's your take on the situation? I mean, my take would be, I don't really care about timing. I think sometimes we've, again, lost the forest through the trees and trying to overly optimize. I think people have sort of different desires to eat when they want to eat. We say the same thing with mobilizing, for example. Like, we prefer to do our mobility work at night in front of the TV, our soft tissue work. But again, we're like, any time is great.

Like, get the 10 minutes in. So, I mean, from my perspective, you know, the goal is to get the total amount of protein every single day. and also the enough micronutrients throughout the day. And look, if you want to skip having any micronutrients with breakfast and just stick with protein and get all the rest of your micronutrients and lunch and a snack and dinner, like that's great. I mean, for me, it's really about the total. And I think sometimes when we get caught in this timing conversation, we lose people, right?

I think that's one of the ways in which in the fitness business, we lose people. Like, you know, we were on a podcast recently where someone said, okay, well, it's great. We should walk. But like, what should we be doing to optimize our walking? And when I heard that question, I was like, okay, we just lost half the audience. Because for most people, they don't want to optimize. You know, most people just want to feel good in their body and be able to do the things they want to do and, you know, have the body composition they want. And I think sometimes those of us that are in the space were like, you know, overly concerned with optimizing.

So from my perspective, I think people have to focus on what works for them with this larger principle of get enough protein, get enough fruits and vegetables for your diet. Tinker away. Yeah. Let me know how it goes. and email me if you're having some crazy results. That nut and meat diet, man, for breakfast, that is a Charles Pollocken 101. Like, have a few, like, Brazil nuts

and eat, like, some steak. Like, dude, if you're doing that, you are not the problem. Yeah, right. Just avoid the peanut butter and the whole chicken right before that. That might be a little bit. And I think that's what's great.

We're like, hey, bring it on. Show me a better way. And if that really speaks to you and you're having huge, you know, the other thing I would say is, really, you think that handful of blueberries is going to like spike your insulin and crush you, huh? You are sensitive.

You know, and ultimately, you know, one of our friends who lives up the street is this surfer named Laird Hamilton. And he has this great idea because one of the things in the book that we actually have hidden in there is a glucose tolerance test. Like, go ahead and have a Frappuccino and see if you spike and freak out because that's a problem. And also we have a 24 hour fast in here for people. We're like, go dinner to dinner and let us know what happens.

Because if you can't fast as a human being, that's a problem. Is that one of the vital signs? No. No. It's just something else. And they're like, hey, let's become curious about this because there'll be time in your life. But we, I don't know how many people we've talked to them.

Like, when's the last time you went 24 hours without eating? And they're like never once in my whole life. I'm like, but then on the flip side, the reason we have the Frappuccino test in there is because we're in this health and fitness and wellness space, we also encounter so many people who have become so sensitive that there's like three things they can eat. And that they're like, they've trained themselves to be allergic to like food and all things. And so the notion of drinking a Frappuccino, like they would literally sooner die.

You know, and it's like our point. Can you explain the test just so we have context? The glucose tolerance test is basically. No, I know. So the glucose tolerance, yes. That's what it is. We just use the Frappuccino as the example because it's like sort of horrifying

for people who care about their health. It's like a horror. Got it, got it, got it. And if you drank that and like got all queasy and passed out, we're like, hmm, you know, you have a system that's a little bit too twitchy. And, you know, to come back to our friend, Lampton, he's like, look, if we go out and you bonk,

because you're not fat adapted, then you're a liability. And if the only thing we can fuel with is this hamburger from this gas station, but you eat it and your knuckles swell up and, you know, you freak out, then you're also a liability. So we're really trying to create flexibility. Absolutely. And, you know, we sort of think that like human beings are like we're omnivores. We're sort of like garbage dumps.

We're not suggesting hamburgers from gas stations. No, but like we should, you know, we're of the mind that you should be able to manage, you know, different environments and be able to be flexible in your environment. And this is maybe not related, but I'm going to tell you the story about our cat. Okay. So I feel like somehow it's related to this because I said the word omnivore. But we have this cat named King Louis and he's in hospice. And remember, we pretend to know something about bodies.

Bodies, right? So we get this cat he's six years old. We call him a used cat because we got him at six. And three or four years into having him, we're like, man, he just like always wants to be drinking from the sink. Like he goes, he follows our friends into the bathroom and meows and they lift him up on with the sink and he drinks like massive amounts of water and drinking like drinking a weird amount of water and then we actually happen to have a friend who had a diabetic cat and Kelly and I are like I think maybe our cat has diabetes like this is so weird take take the cat into the vet he has

diabetes so we have to give him insulin shots for a year and on top of insulin shots we put him on all meat 100% because the food we were buying was the most expensive cat food you can buy in the cat food we were buying him it had grains and who knows what else don't eat well cats are obligating But cats are obligate carnivores. They only eat meat. They're not like dogs. Dogs are omnibus. Have you seen Joe Rogan's joke on this?

Hashtag vegan cats? Vegan cats, yeah. We gave our cat diabetes. So we always tell everyone we're like, we gave our cat diabetes. And then we just fed him meat. And he was fine. So he went off as he was on insulin for a year. We had to give him shots for a year.

Then we fed him an all meat diet, which we continue to do. And now he's 16. And I have no idea how the story relates to being an omnivore and flexible diets. But it's easy to be an omnivore and flexible diets. But it's easy to be. be, hey, I think I'm doing something the right thing because I've bought the most expensive thing and those things. And we forget that these underlying principles are... These underlying principles are... We're omnibors and we should be able to buffer having a

frapicino every so often, you know, if that's the only thing there is to eat on Earth. Yeah. And this is obviously getting a little bit more complicated, but what I'm about to bring up, but my audience knows we've done different discussions. One of the number one test that a lot of doctors recommend inside of our audience is actually a very cheap test to get. It's like 12 to $20. Fasting insulin. Oh, yeah. Fasting insulin.

Because glucose is going to have natural variation throughout the day, and it's not going to mean much to you, and you should have a glucose response. If you eat food, it's going to go up, but you should come down. But fasting insulin takes a long time to change, and it's a much better indicator of, hey, are you, is your body at a place where you can, you know, handle things, or have you gone a little bit too far down the direction of, you know, carbohydrates, refined processed foods, et cetera, to the point that you're, you now have this main marker that early, this is like medicine 3.0 that, you know, kind of Peter Atia talks about a little bit, that there are

early indications that it could play a role in eventual, you know, when it's high. When we're talking about high, we're talking about 15 and above. Right. Right. We want people to be 10 and below. And optimal, I think, is around like three to five, somewhere around there. Based on, you know, this is probably like 100 doctors coming on the podcast over here. And I know that not everybody agrees on different things. But could that be. So I'm just trying to make sure that my audience has connected dots because I want to come back to the the Frappuccino test, which is the glucose test, right? Yeah. So you want people that their body, which is probably a direction of can your body metabolize the amount of glucose that you just took in, that it's not going to completely throw you out of whack.

That's right. Exactly. That's the goal with that. You don't get a headache and vomit in the bushes because you have it. Okay. So even though I have a good amount of carbohydrates, I train, I actually think I would be. somebody who would feel reactive to that because... I hope you drink that and actually feel bad.

Yeah. Because you should feel that. A lot of women feel bad when they have to do the glucose tolerance test for pregnancy. Yeah. It's a lot of worse. So aren't we all going to kind of feel bad a little bit doing that? The reaction you'll see is that when people have such an adverse reaction to it, that we're saying is that, hey, you are eating in a way that hasn't created the buffers for

your, the bumpers for your body. Can I fast? Could I handle huge bullets of sugar? If you're spinning out on either side of those, what we're saying is, hey, you're probably your average typical nutrition isn't on point. That's what we're saying. And if we see this whole food nutrition, which is, again, the revolution, and risk, we're not nutrition experts.

The risk is that, hey, we're seeing in high performance sports, we're feeding our athletes whole foods again. And so let's go ahead and take that back around. But what you have brought up many times is that people think that they're eating really healthy and they're eating highly processed, highly caloricly dense foods. And that is a problem. We're trying to, hey, if you should be able to fast, you should be able to eat some junk once in a while. We're looking on both ends. That's not a recommendation. But it's just a nice way of understanding what is it my body's capable of? Totally. If you're afraid of birthday care,

when you look at people's lives, they do. They have that. They're going to be in different situations, especially, and the ones who are not, are usually probably don't have kids yet, right? They're going to be in situations, especially when they have kids, that are going to pull them in different directions. But what allows you to be more flexible in that is, again, building up lean muscle mass, right, walking on a more regular basis, having all these other aspects. Absolutely. Yeah.

You know, and that's, you know, we haven't even talked about the sleep piece. Yeah, let's talk about. So what's interesting is, you know, if we know that, man, you get a bad night's sleep, what happens to your insulin sensitivity the next day? You're pre-diabetic. Yeah. It's off. We made a, I made a comment on the, this.

the internet's recently. Yeah, this is so good. Where I was like, you should get seven to eight hours of sleep. Yeah. Just Google, how much does a sleep does a human being need? And it's like seven to eight, seven to nine. If you're a growing body, maybe it's nine or ten, right? Every athlete on a plan is like, yeah, I got to sleep.

And I sick nine hours because I'm an Olympian and I take a nap. But like the number of people that came on and the hate I got from suggesting that people sleep seven hours of a night was insane. It was a little surprising to us because we knew, we know that people have a lot of, you know, identity and investment in their diet. And so when we publish this book, we thought, okay, the thing that we're going to, you know, the thing that we're going to have to defend as sort of our point of view on food. And so we tried to make it as reasonable as possible and as universal, inclusive, accessible as possible. But I don't think we thought that the sleep piece

would be like triggering for us. Even in this day and age? Yeah. Who are the people that are coming after? So it was interesting. People who are not in our vertical. Well, so what we realized is Kelly was on a podcast that was sort of outside of this health, wellness, fitness vertical. It was sort of speaking to a different audience. Tim Ferriss? And it was Chase Jarvis. And he has a more creative audience. Yeah.

It's a creative, you know, photographers and artists. And so what we learned from that, though, and again, it was sort of like confirmation bias for us that Kelly and are like, man, we have a lot of work to do because I think, again, those of us that are in this space, I think we can think that, like, we're getting it. Like, people are getting the message. Like, they know because we know and all of our friends know. and, you know, the people we all talk to on our podcast know, okay, it's not that unreasonable to say seven to eight hours of sleep. But the moment we just took one step out of, you know, again, this little bubble.

Our little bubble. You know, Kelly really triggered people by saying seven or eight hours of sleep. And so, you know, the lesson we took from that is, man, we have a lot of work to do. We are still, we still just have to try to keep reaching across. People are like, you're like, you're like, oh, is that what it is. reaching out and like because you you know i get on i get by on just four hours sleep but just fine i'm like do you i'd like to see some objective measures please because i think that's the problem i think we're all so tolerant and that we can just subsist on you know virginia slams and tab and you know and you know just you know be stress cases we can we can take a lot in for a long time and then all the sudden we can't And the issue here is that we're seeing and talking about this long, long projection of your life.

And I think in the short term, you can do whatever you want. We know. I've seen world champions have cigarettes and eat little chocolate donuts. People have kids. They get really bad sweet. Yeah, for sure. You're going to. Good luck trying to do that.

Comma, when you have a benchmark, where we know everything gets better and you're below the benchmark, you're like, I'm just below my benchmark. So I'm just as soon as I have a chance, I'm going to get back up to my minimums. And I think that really ends up being a much better way. But if you're, let me just be clear, everyone. I'm going to double down now. If you're in chronic pain, we really need to talk about your sleep. And I understand that that might be tricky because you're in chronic pain.

But if we're going to get you out of chronic pain, we need to really improve your sleep. As much sleep and as high quality sleep as we can. If you're trying to heal from a surgery, the same. If you're trying to grow a body, the same. It means if you're a teenager, you've got to get the sleep. If you're trying to change your body composition, boy, it's a lot harder to do if under-slept. It's a lot easier to do if you're getting enough sleep. If you're trying to become more powerful, Winter World Championship, you've got to sleep. If you're trying to show up for an

interview, you better sleep because what you're going to find is that your brain is going to lie to you. And for us, sleep is a keystone habit. You know, people who get enough sleep, exercise more. They get more out of the exercise they're doing. They're more likely to make better choices when it comes to food. Their relationships are better. They show up and they're more productive and more creative and attentive at work and so they enjoy their work more. I mean, I mean, but you know, we think it's the habit from which all other good health habits. And we can start those habits. So for Juliet and I, we really start cutting off the caffeine at 12 and 1 because we're like, holy moly, if we have this caffeine, we know what's going to affect the quality of our sleep.

If I eat too late at night affects my sleep. If I, right. And so I'm, I'm not even talking about wearing the Dave Aspery glasses. I'm just talking about, man, there are some things that you can do as a human being. I'm just going to have a cocktail with my friends because I love that. It helps me on wine. Boy, that wrecks my sleep. So what we can then do is to, once we bring some consciousness, you get to be a big boy and put on your pants and be like, I'm going to have a drink with my best friends

because we're celebrating. And it's going to wreck my sleep a little bit. That's okay. Because tomorrow, I'll be back on it. But a lot of these practices and processes have been hidden from us. And once we give people the choice, then we can start to make sort of more informed decisions about the things we like to do. Absolutely. Let's pivot over to sitting because I feel like we started the interview with this idea of like why sitting on the floor is so important.

And of course, so many people, you know, me included, the Zoom class that's out there working on their laptops, running their businesses, whatever professionals. They're sitting quite a bit. But there's a whole section inside of the book about how to vary this up and actually create a life that's more. naturally designed, just like kind of not having the cookies in the home, your environment is shaped better to allow for a lot of the top tips that you have to make sure we're not over sitting. In fact, there's a word for you that you guys have for it, marathon sitting, right? That's the phrase. Yeah.

So explain what marathon sitting is and then let's go into sitting recommendations. Sure. Marathon sitting are just long bouts of sitting in the same position. We have been engaged in marathon sitting right now. Yeah, we're marathon sitting right now. Should I redesign the studio and we do podcasts on the floor? I mean, we maybe should. You would blow people's minds and they wouldn't be able to talk to you.

Yeah. Julia, you were doing great because you've been fidgeting the whole interview and I've see you moving around and shifting a little bit. I'm a little bit more stoic. I don't try to, you know, I'm trying to like get the pain inside. I really do want to fidget. I want to start moving around as well. Yeah.

And, you know, we have the way we have our podcast studio set up is it's actually at a standing desk and that, but because of the way our camera angle works, I stand and Kelly sort of perches on a stool. But back to your original question. You know, Kelly and I are trying to change the conversation a little bit because for a lot of years, everybody heard the phrase sitting is the new smoking. That was James Levine from the Mayo Clinic and a BC researcher. And he's a genius and we're fans and he's been a huge inspiration for us and in our thinking around this. However, I think the message that sitting is bad is the wrong one.

The message that we are trying so hard to spread and change people's thinking around is that moving is the goal. And moving more is the goal. It's not sitting versus standing. Standing isn't better. In fact, you know, what a lot of people experienced when they got on the standing desk revolution is that their feet hurt or their back hurt or they felt uncomfortable. And, you know, we can talk a little bit more about standing desk. But the message we're trying to get out is that more movement is better and that there are a lot of ways to do that. But, you know, one of the things we like to say is helping people change their environment so that their environment is a movement-rich environment.

And let me give you a couple examples about the way our office and our house is set up to sort of create that movement. So our entire office, every single desk in our office is a standing desk. And it's set permanently at standing desk height. Now, does that mean we and our employees have to stand all day? Not at all. Every single desk also has a stool connected to it. But what we like about having all standing desks is that we find that at that position, we move more, we get up more, we have more opportunity to fidget. We're more likely to walk away from our desk to go talk to a colleague than text them, pick up the phone. we're more likely to just move more if we're in that position. We also have taken the choice out of it. You know, we don't have an electric standing desk that we can just turn down and, you know, sit down and never sit.

The default is do the right thing. The default. We set it so that the default is to do the right thing to create an environment where we can move more. But like everybody else, we have days where we're tired, exhausted, sick, and we have days where we sit on the stool for the vast majority of the day. The other thing we like about the stool standing desk set up is that you can employ this position called perching, which is sort of like the stool. this intermediate between standing and sitting. It's like you're at the edge of the stool.

Your feet are actually both on the ground. And it actually requires you to be active a little bit in your upper body. So it's this nice, happy medium between sitting and standing. So that's what our office looks like. And then when you go to our home, we have a variety of different ways we've constrained our environment to encourage more movement. We actually have a, our kitchen counter is at a height where we can work while standing. We also have a lower part of our counter where we can sit and work if we're at home working on our laptop. And then the other thing we really encourage back to the very beginning of this conversation is actually to choose sitting on the floor to work for part of your day. So if someone were following me with a hidden camera for my, let's say,

eight-hour workday, I would do a variety of things. I would get up and down off the floor and work sitting on the floor and work sitting on the floor, I'd probably be changing positions. I'd be sitting cross-legged 90-90, long sit. Like you'd see me constantly moving positions. And then after a while, I'd move to my standing station. I'd stand at my standing station and practice my balance and maybe stretch my calves a little bit. And then after a few hours, I might feel tired, so I'll sit down and work for a few hours. You're mixing it up all the time.

I'm always mixing it up. And so what you see in that in that setup is that I'm constantly in motion. I'm moving, getting up down off the ground, fidgeting, changing positions, walking around, giving myself opportunity to move. And so that's what we think of as a movement-rich environment. And the final thing I'll say is that, you know, I think we all know, and you've probably had other guests talk about this. Like, we cannot rely on motivation anymore or willpower. We have to set up our environment to make it easy to do the right thing.

And so one of the things we know we want to do is create an environment where we automatically move more without even thinking about it. She was talking about all these fancy terms and all these important things. We found a little calculator that if she just was at moving during her work and choice during the work year, she burned an additional 100,000 calories a year. So I weigh out, outweigh Juliet at almost by 100 pounds. And so I was just like, well, let me just add 70% to that. It's 170,000 calories of cookies and ice cream, tiled on a table that I get to eat for free because I just didn't sit in a classical chair. So what we find, again, is that it's a lot of non-exercise activity, which is the game. The game is to sort of be in constant motion during the day. And then however you want to solve that, once again, we think that's up to you. We think you're clever. We think you can work it out. Harvard defines sedentary lifestyle is sitting more than six hours a day. Everybody. Everyone. Not everybody, but a lot of people.

No, no, I would say everyone because that's riding the car. That's sitting on the couch watching Netflix. That's this cumulative. Yeah. Cumulative. And let's define that. Let's be objective. If you fall below one and a half metabolic equivalence of energy expenditure,

remember the met on the old Stairmaster. Stairmaster. Right? Like, what's a met? I don't know, but I'm doing five minutes. I'm killing it. Well, one and a half Mets is a sort of measurement of how much energy your body is using at rest. And if you sit down, you're below one and a half.

If you perch or are active or standing above one and a half. So when they found out, remember the Wii came out and they were like, this is revolutionary. It turned out playing the Wii was burned as many calories as standing because it got us above one and a half metabolic equivalence. And so suddenly what we realize is, well, how can I create more muscle activity? how do I have more movement? We talked a little bit about the session cost early on. We mentioned that we could look at an athlete's sport or skill or training session and sort of assign how expensive was that on the physiology, how it was able to manage that workload and still

be able to do more work. Well, we can take a kind of a window back and say, well, what's the session costs for sitting? Not on the physiology, but access to your range of motion. And what we find is that people who do a lot of sitting end up lacking or missing their ability to extend their hip. So the problem is, and I mean taking your knee, but she's laughing because I'm obsessed with hip extension. I literally was like, I wonder, Kelly's obsessed with hip extension. And I was like, I wonder when he's going to find an opportunity to talk about hip extension. The idea here is you need to be able to have your knee come behind you, like in a lunge position.

And it is a fundamental reason. It's actually a meme on the internet about split squats or rear foot elevated split squats or Bulgarians are the worst exercise. It's the number one exercise that everyone hates the most to do. And the reason is that getting your leg behind you in a loaded lunge position is the hardest thing we do because we're so conditioned to what? The exact opposite position. So what you're not saying don't do them.

You're saying that people hate doing it because they're used to having their hip flexed all the time. So this is extended. What this allows us to do is not say, you shouldn't sit because it'll hurt your back. I'm like, your back may hurt just because you're that person and you're super stressed and your dad didn't love you. Whatever. I don't know what the reason is your back hurts. But what I can say and measure is, wow, you did all this sitting and now your hip extension sucks. You fundamentally altered just like those kids in the first grade who started heel striking.

We're starting to see that, hey, we have a society that is not able to extend their hip. I wonder why your knee hurts. Oh, and also, I see you're also missing hip extension. I wonder why you have chronic back pain. I don't know what the mectums are, but I also see you're missing hip extension here. So what we want to start to say is just like that sit and rise test, a lot of the movements that we engage in or don't engage with start to shape our ability to access our native ranges of motion. And I just want to, because we just have, we've talked a lot about the behavioral chapters and then a little bit about the sit and rise test. But there's two things I want to say on this sort of mobility piece.

I first of all, I want to define what we mean by mobility because I think it's poorly understood or people have never even heard the word. But what we mean by mobility is it is the ability to move your body freely through your environment without pain and to be able to do the things you want to do physically. So if people are asking, do I or do I not have mobility, those are the questions. Are you out of pain? Are you able to do the things you want to do physically? And that second piece is really important because for anyone who's physical in any way, worst case scenario, especially from a mental health standpoint, is to be able to be told by a doctor or physician or physical therapy, stop physical therapist. Stop doing the thing you love because you're in pain.

That's everyone's worst nightmare, especially people who are physical and like to use their bodies. And the other thing we want people to think about and hope they care about their mobility a little bit and range of motion is that if you think about your physical capability, as a human is this wide open hallway. And as we age, the hallway starts to narrow. And one of the ways that hallway starts to narrow is if we don't keep an eye on our range of motion, we can't move our body freely through its environment and we can't do it without pain. With its native range. With its native range of motion, that hallway is going to start to constrict. And the reason people should care is they are going to not, their movement opportunity is going to start to narrow. They're not going to be able to do the things they want to do physically.

I don't want to hike. I don't want to go to bike. And one story I'll tell us, I have a friend who's a financial advisor. And he meets with people about retirement planning and all the things to do to get ready to be able to retire and enjoy your retirement. Turns out that he spends like 90% of his appointments, not talking about the money piece at all. He talks to people about what it is they want to do when they retire. Yeah. And nobody ever says what I want to do when I retire.

get into my lazy boy and watch CNN for the rest of my life. That's not something anyone ever tells him. Everybody comes to him with things they want to do that involve movement. That could be totally varying, right? It could be like Kelly and I, our movement goal when we're 80s to be able to still comfortably be able to ski and mountain bike. But for many people, they want to be able to travel or play with their grandkids or be able to manage walking around Disneyland for a day, right? Everybody has these movement goals. And if you haven't kept an eye on this key thing that is range of motion, this wide open hallway, and your hallway is constricted to the point where you can't get up and down off the ground or extend your hip or put your arms over your head, you are not likely

going to be able to do those things you want to do as you age. And now maybe you think you don't need to care about it because you're 35 years old. But having that native range of motion is going to help you do more, work harder as an athlete, feel better in your body, hopefully experience less pain. So there's a benefit now, but there's a huge benefit to keeping that hallway wide open. And muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. They always come around. What age did you, when your great grandmother got a cut, did she heal? She did. She healed a little slower than the 12-year-old, right? But you always are healing and turning over. So there's no reason why we can't reclaim this range of motion, especially if we keep an eye on it, especially if your

grandma likes to squat and kneel and sit on the ground. That's one of the things we're trying to do is where do we put this formal movement practice in that's a second that's a side or separated from exercise because that's what we think. I've done the peloton. I'm good. Right. And basically you haven't moved your ankles. You haven't moved your hips in a full range of motion. You haven't extended your spine. You haven't put your arms over your head. You can start to ask, well, what is it the body's supposed to do? And suddenly you're like, whoa, that sun salutation practice, that made a lot of sense. That was like, how do I have a little breath and a little bit of movement and how do I... Little balance. How do I touch some of these positions for 10 minutes in the

morning so that if the day gets away from me, I have at least taken my hip through a full range of motion. And what we're seeing is that the average person is basically living in a little tiny movement window with like three words. Meanwhile, the body is capable of Shakespeare. And Kelly mentioned this earlier. I mean, you know, I think we have been told that that aging is just, just this sort of like downhill. Like we're all just going downhill and then we die, right? But range of motion is actually something that shouldn't have to change as we age. If you keep an eye on it, unlike, you know, everybody's going to lose a little bit of muscle mass. Like there are some things that are going to happen at the rate at which they happen. We can certainly control with

our behavior. But range of motion actually should be able to stay constant throughout our lifetime. Can you imagine? Would there be human beings for two and a half million years? We're like, well, you're over 60. You don't get up and down off the ground. Yeah. I mean, Like your grandma being case in point, right? Like if she can squat and get up and down off the ground and, you know, her preference is to do ground-based things like sweeping on the ground, you know, she's been able to maintain that range of motion by doing those things. But the other key point I want to make is it's actually not too late.

That's a question we get often as people think, well, I'm, yeah, I'm listening to this podcast. It's too late for you. Go on. I'm 55 and I've been working a desk job for the last 30 years and I can tell that I've, you know, I already can't do all the things I want to do physically. and I've had some kind of pain or whatever. It's actually not too late to start

and people can make a massive difference in the range of motion by starting whenever and just paying attention to it a little bit. But we haven't given people clear benchmarks and clear vital signs. And explain to them why they should care. So I think that's what we have tried to do is say, hey, look, I think a lot of us

are getting the message around some of these other key behaviors, keystone behaviors like nutrition, sleep, et cetera. But those people are still not looking at range of motion. They still haven't established what it is I should be able to do. Those things are always in the context of exercise, not movement choice, movement freedom, balance, those things. So when we've at least put this on the radar and we're like, look, you really like to engage in some strange esoteric practice. Let's test how well that's doing. You do Peloton and yoga.

Let's test how that's doing. You do CrossFit. Do you have access to your range of motion? When we have third party benchmarks and vital signs, we become agnostic about how you want to do that. But now we can begin a conversation about, hey, the thing that you're engaged with, maybe there's a hidden cost to that in your inability to move or expose your tissues to positions. Regarding range of motion, just to kind of close the dots on that, is that there's the sitting crisscross on the floor, right, cross-legged.

Are there other tests that people should be thinking? Is there just one or two that you want to mention right now? Sure. I mean, since Kelly already teed up hip extension, his favorite subject of all, we have. We have in the book something called the couch test, which is based on a stretch we've been recommending for years called the couch stretch. But basically, you know, you put your knee to the wall or to the corner of the couch and your shin is sort of along the wall. And then you want to try to get into an upright position. And we have demonstrations in the book so people can better visualize it.

But what it is, you can Google couch stretch. What it is is a test of your ability to extend your hip, this sort of critical range of motion that a lot of people are missing largely because we're spending most of our day sitting. Yeah, and, you know, what's nice then is, again, the test is the practice. The practice is the test. Yeah. And oftentimes the real problem we've seen is that people want to be heroic. Show me the, I'm going to go to range of motion boot camp. I'm going to hire this expert into remote Zoom coaching.

What we need to figure out is how to get these little small doses into every day's practice. Practical, regular experience with them at my life. Yes, yes. And so we started, for example, by saying, hey, let's sit on the ground. for 30 minutes tonight. I just want you to watch TV while you're sitting on the ground. We went to,

we have this story in the book, but we went to the Olympic club in San Francisco, very storied, you know, social club, athletic club in San Francisco. And they were like,

you're going to talk to mobility with all our people. And I was like, great. No chairs. And they were like, oh, well, that's weird. And I made like 300 people

sit on the floor. And these are like squash players and tennis players and like athletes and men who styled themselves as the captains of industry and athletes. And no one,

I had eventually had men in half hour laying down. They could not sit up. And I was like, what do you think the problem is? What sophisticated elite program do I want to drop into? You can't even sit on the floor, sir. So one of the things we love is that when you start to figure out, when am I going to do this? Again, I'm not just, I don't want you to kick anything else out. Well, one of the things that we know, we love sitting on the ground because Juliet talked about the positions.

But guess what's? Oh, look, what's that right there? That's my roller. It's right next to the couch. And if I'm already sitting on the ground watching TV, I might as well engage in a little soft tissue work. And now I'm conjoining what happened to me during the day with a little soft tissue mobilization. What's stiff? Oh, my feet, my calves, my back, whatever.

Hey, I'm a little bit sore. If you have a ball in a roller, you can get so much net positive input. You can make yourself feel better. You can restore your range of motion. And as little, I sound like infomercial, 10 minutes a day. But the key here is that it's 10 minutes a day, five to seven days a week. That aggregates into so much input into your body where we really see holistic wholesale changes in people's ability to access their range of motion, to develop force, to have less pain.

And if you really, it's like what we found is our minimum dose is five minutes, five minutes on the left side, five minutes on the right side, work on something that's a tissue work. Yes, soft tissue work. And since you're already sitting on the floor, it's right there. And if we can start to stack those behaviors where, well, I sit on the ground for 30 minutes on watch TV and then the roller's there and I do my 10 minutes. What you find is that you get all these ancillary benefits. Like not only do you feel better, but you start to train your brain. Well, first I sit on the ground, then I do the soft tissue, then I go to bed. And what we know is that that soft tissue work has large paris sympathetic input.

It helps you to relax. No one jumps off the massage table and is like, let's fight. No one does that. And if you can get a little soft tissue input on the ground, chances are you're going to fall asleep and stay asleep because that's what the data supports. And now we have this pretty holistic system that really you can be consistent with and work into your busy life because anyone can sit on the ground. And a foam roller is like, it's like toilet paper. You can buy a target. One quick thing, though, I want to say is that we, again, I know I said this earlier, but we like to do our soft tissue work before we go to bed at night.

but there are plenty of people who find that the window of opportunity they have is in the morning, or maybe at the tail end of their training session. I mean, we really are totally agnostic. Like, we like to do it. We enjoy it because it also helps us sleep. But again, the goal is to get that 10 minutes in a day. And when you do that is totally up to you. Is it true that sitting on the floor and not marathon sitting on chairs helps you prevent a flat butt?

Did I hear you guys talk about that one time? another podcast? I don't know about that. I'm sort of obsessed with deadlifting as a... As a primary. Well, because, you know, they're not even a flat butt, but there's this whole thing where women are getting butt implants, which is, and maybe this is more common in Los Angeles. But it's a thing.

Women are getting butt implants, and that seems crazy to me, especially as someone who's had to have some surgeries and having surgery is not awesome. I, you know, so my obsession is, hey, why don't you just take up the habit of deadlifting a little bit because you're less likely to need a butt implant? And it will also help with flat butt syndrome. Check this out. A lot of people talk about glute inhibition or glute insomnia. Right, their glutes are asleep.

My trainer told me my glutes are sleepy. So all the physical therapists will roll their eyes because we're like, that's not really a thing. Your butt is still working. But what we do see is that when you don't have access to your range of motion, we see a lot of inhibition. So your brain turns down your body's ability to access force. So restoring your range of motion is the easiest way to turn those systems back. on. Sitting on the ground won't magically give you a butt, but what it will do is start to restore how you're functioning. And lo and behold, when you can access your positions, your tissues work

better. So when we restore people's function, we restore their power. That's one of the things that always gets lost in this conversation. Why do you think we get called by the best athletes in the world who are trying to set world records because they're looking for all these pieces? And when we give them their range of motion back and show them how to optimize it, it. And what I mean, optimize, I mean, come back to basic range of motion that every physical therapist, every physician, everyone agrees is normative. Every human being should put their arm over the head. You're not going to swim fast if you can't put your arms over your head. Right. So suddenly we give your range of motion back and maintain that. And lo and behold, you go faster.

Wait for it, everybody. We see a lot of inhibition of the glutes as a result of people not being able to extend their hips. So if you are missing hip extension and you care about a butt, then what you'll find is that your butt works. And you can do this test for me. Get into a lunch position. Take yourself as far as you can and squeeze your butt. If you take the couch test, put yourself in the position where we load up your quads and the fascia of your anterior line, right? Your quads, your hips and squeeze your butt, you'll find that not only can you not squeeze your butt. You also can't breathe. So you're basically putting yourself in to position, your brain's like, I have no no muscular control here. I can't even take a breath

in this position. That's a pretty weak-ass position. And I use that on-purpose, weak-ass. So what we find is that if we can restore some of these positions, we start to see the whole system upregulate. You want to have a butt. Let's get you access to the shapes where your butt can actually work. Now, somebody who was listening is like, okay, I'm convinced I need to put attention in this area. I want to prioritize this. As they're navigating the vital signs, how do you recommend they decide what to work on first, second, third. Obviously, a lot of the suggestions and exercises you've mentioned are things that you can work into your normal day-to-day life.

And generally speaking, I've seen that when somebody is starting from zero and they're starting to put priority on something, everything's a little bit tough because you haven't done it before. Or you also get beginner gains. Yeah. Sign me up for beginner gains. Totally. When it comes to soft tissue work in particular, we get this question a lot because

people are like, well, my entire body hurts. Everything is stiff. Like, where would I even begin? And how would I begin to address this complex system in 10 minutes and night? And so our recommendation is touch anywhere to begin. And it turns out back to this sort of financial analogy of compounding interests. Look, if you start in your neck is stiff and sore, start on Monday night on your neck, and then you can systematically sort of work down your body.

Turns out you can get almost all the major tissues in your body in seven days in that 70 minutes of soft tissue work you're doing in front of the TV at night. and then, you know, go back to your head and start and work down. Or what we find is when people, you know, start somewhere, you know, press anywhere to begin, they'll actually learn how to discover the parts of their body that feel the most stiff and sore and then just gravitate towards working on those. In my case, my calves are always super stiff, super tight, super sore. So that's an area that I prioritize because I know that I feel better if I do it.

I can move better. my ankle dorsiflection is better. But then also if I, if, you know, I've been sitting on a plane or doing a lot of not moving, I also find my neck and shoulders get stiff. And so I work there. So I think, you know, we do want to give people the empowerment to be able to sort of do a little bit of, you know, press anywhere to begin, either where does it hurt on your body, where do you feel stiff or sore and start there. But just know that you can actually make a lot of progress systematically working through the whole body in just a week. zooming out from soft tissue to the whole file size.

If you go to build to move.com, we have a free 21 day program. It's a video sort of workbook that goes along with the book. In the back of the book, we're showing you how to start to feather these behaviors in. We have a 21 day program. And the idea here is you don't have to do everything all once. Read a test. Look, Juliet is a great student. She will start in the beginning of the book and go for the back.

Welcome to Mr. Monkey Brain, where I'm going to be like, what's interesting to me? So I turn to the chapter that I think I'm going to win at or suck at the most. He's like, choose your own adventure. And you can bounce around. Eventually you'll get everywhere. It really is. You know, like what we love about this conversation about health and returning agency is there's so many ways in. You might come in through disease.

You might be coming because someone else and your family has had disease. You might be getting because you're super interested in the gut. You're interested in longevity. You're interested in, you know, pelotoning faster. Eventually, we're all going to have the same conversations about sleep, about movement, about nutrition. Everything impacts everything. Of course. And so we're like, hey, look, whatever really speaks to you, let's go ahead and start

there. And let's see how you're hitting. We have this idea of the 10 out of 10 club. Everyone, by the way, all of the things we're recommending in this book are so reasonable. And if you have a blind spot, chances are, because we test this. We're like, we gave this book out to, I don't know, 10 world champions. And we're like, how's it going with your 10 out of 10? And they were like, holy moly, I wasn't walking enough.

Or I wasn't any fruits and vegetables. and, you know, I was eating all these protein shakes. So what we're trying to do, though, is say, hey, let's level everyone up. Try to be 10 out of 10. And if you find some areas that you're quickly behind on, start to focus on them for a while. If you want a full program, go to Builtamovebook.com. It's free. We just, we're trying to give people different resources because we understand people are going

to have different issues. And there's a lot of video demonstrations because some of the soft tissue work and mobilizations, we recommend, you know, we have pictures of them in the book, but we kind of bring them to life and video. But I would recommend, you know, for anyone who gets a book, start by doing all 10 of the tests and see where you are because, you know, some people will get an 8 out of 10 and some people get a 5 out of 10. But I think that will give people some information. You know, the tests that that people get a green or a thumbs up on, those are just, I would say, things people need to keep an eye on. Like, okay, great that you can squatter. You know, you were

able to do the sit and rises. That's great. But don't ignore it now. Make sure that you're still continue to sort of grease those wheels and don't lose the chance to get up and down. It's a moving target. It's a moving target. And then likewise with the things where maybe you didn't, you know, you got a yellow or a red or not as great of a score, then those are the places where you want to bring your focus and attention more to those things. Powerful.

You guys brought all the topic of kids. And I think right now we are in this stage just pivoting a little bit because a big part of this book is also the impact and how we want to change for everyone, as we mentioned in the beginning. And if we look at the state of kids right now, there's some scary things that are going on, as there is with every generation, but in particular because of technology and how bad this perfect storm of problems have gotten. And my audience in particular is quite interested in the topic of sort of advocacy of creating

a better environment for the next generation, right? One of the topics that we see throwing around a lot right now is this idea of, okay, the problem is so bad. We need to have kids right from the beginning. on these super complicated drugs to help address the obesity epidemic, right? And, you know, I would like to put it out there to both of you. If we're really, the people who are listening, right? Because the first step in this hero's journey that we're all going through that you guys

are going through as well is you're making a change in your own life. Yes, your family, household. Your own household, your own family. It's got to start there. And as you start to make those changes, you start to think, what things can we do for others to also make this accessible for them? So if you guys had a magic wand and we are trying to create a societal shift that allows the next generation to be able to step into something different and not just we're all on

OZempic for the rest of our lives because that's the way, right? What are your thoughts and suggestions of things that you would want to be paying attention to? If you had the pull to be able to sort of shift, if there was a zone, czar of food, nutrition, and fitness, and you were put in that position. What would be the things that you'd be talking about? For me, the biggest thing would be sleep. I, you know, I see massive sleep problems in my own community. And I believe a lot of the, you know, now teenage diagnoses we're seeing of depression and anxiety and loneliness and mental health challenges that have become very pronounced and especially our teen generation right now and it's been widely reported in the news.

you know, I think maybe originally stemmed from a massive amount of sleep deprivation. Or at least exacerbated by that. Or at least exacerbated by that. What can we control? Yeah. And so, you know, for me, again, I would go back to saying we've got to teach our kids how to sleep. We've got to protect their sleep when they're little. You know, like one of my biggest pepaves is I would talk to parents and they'd have an eight-month-old

old kid and say, my kid doesn't nap anymore. And I'm like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Like that's not really supported by the science. It's like eight-month-old kids need to take naps. It's actually shown they need to actually take two nests. They're singing as a badge of honor, but you're like, hey, they need to be doing it. It's not them. It's you.

You didn't protect their sleep and create space for them to take the two naps a day that all kids at eight months old need to take. And so and we don't even know what the long, the downstream consequences of all this loss of sleep are. But I think we're, you know, starting to see at least anecdotally in teenage kids, you know, thanks to technology and thanks to, you know, not prioritizing sleep and actually, you know, lionizing not sleeping. as a culture. So I mean, I think the impact on not enough sleep is huge in our in our kids. And I think it's something that, you know, is something we can control in our households. But it is difficult. I mean, you know, we're parents who have teenage kids. And we, it has to be a constant conversation about when to go to bed, how much to sleep, how much to prioritize that, where to put the phones, how to take the phones out of the room. So it's complicated for sure. But I mean, for me, of all the

sort of health interventions if I could wave a wand and have every kid get enough sleep, I think we'd be having a different conversation when it comes to diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, loneliness. I think that it would be very different. Sleep is a national priority. A gigantic priority. The second one is non-exercise activity. I think in the UK there was something that came out called the Daily Mile where they just

kids walked a mile at school. They just thought it was part of the programming. They didn't need a P teacher, didn't need a special equipment, anyone could do it. it. We have come to realize that the teacher, especially the primary school teacher, is really the person who we need to support more. We need to make sure that they have access, the kids are being fed correctly. Food insecurity is a big deal. Parents don't have any training in this. We can basically come in and teach kids how to eat, what to food, how to feed each other, how to self-soothe, all those things. That can happen in the classroom. And if your teacher can

teach your kid how to read, they can teach your kid how to squat. It's the same behavior. And, you know, we engaged in a big sort of social project where we converted our daughter's elementary school to an all-standing moving school, the first one in the world. Wow. And, you know, this is almost 10 years now, you know, where there's not a traditional desk in there. Each desk is fitted. And what we realize is that if we just looked at the structure of how this was working, if we made it so you couldn't drop kids off. We started a walking school bus in our neighborhood where parents were like, I don't have time to walk in my kids.

We're like, great. We'll be here at the corner. There'll be two adults and just drop your kid off. And what we saw was that we started walking with a gag of the kids just because someone was safe. It was easy. And we had parents come up and be like, you know, I joined you for this walk for last three months.

I lost 15 pounds. And I was like, you lost 15 pounds walking your kid the mile to school. So when we start to look at those structures of just, hey, let's make sure we're hitting the minimums. Not let's add in a very complex PE program. Yeah, we should be teaching that stuff too. But when we just started to hit these basics, it's really pretty remarkable. If we look at school lunches, I mean, there was in Texas, I think they were theoretically

talking about banning soda from a, and immediately Coke and Pepsi came in. You saw that, right? And what I'll say is, well, what's the real problem? Is it the Coke and Pepsi? No, well, the schools need the money. So let's go ahead and solve that problem so we can. actually get some of these colorically dense, very palliative, super tasty foods out of the hands of our kids. And suddenly, I think if we just do a couple of those things and really focus on the youth,

even if it was just up to high school, we just got kids to 14 and really supercharged these basic principles and showed them how to do this, I think we would fundamentally see a generation that looked a little different. Two other things, too. Our daughter, Georgia, who's a senior, is taking this really cool class called Applied Math. And when I heard that she was I was like, that sounds crazy. That sounds like something that's like way beyond calculus and super complicated. You need to be genius to be in that class. Well, turns out applied math is actually what it purports to be, which is teaching kids all these really practical skills, like how to invest in the stock market and how to understand what a mortgage is. We came home one day and our daughter's like, I'm trying to calculate how much income I'd need to make in order to afford a $3 million house. So she's here learning all these super practical financial skills. And I was like, I was like, this is such a cool class. Every kid should take this class. And then also kids have like what we know as health class, which often is like, you know, talking about sexual health and, you know, sort of like more physiologic health. But whatever happened to like the Homek class, I'm not sure it needs to be called Homek.

That seems like an outdated program. But why don't we have in junior highs and high schools classes where kids actually learn how to do things like cook? I mean, and do laundry. I mean, now that we have a kid that's on their way to college, I'm being served all this information about how parents literally have not taught their kids how to do a load of laundry and are doing it for the first time with their kid on the eve of them going off to college or that they don't know how to make a pot of rice or cook literally anything. We just heard a story of a division one athlete who didn't know how to live independently and the coach had to take this person to the store and go shopping

and then this person didn't know what to do and so they actually had to facetime their mother to say where do I put the food in the fridge. So what we're seeing is fundamentally, if people don't have access to the right position or right ideas and we don't codify it, how can we expect people to suddenly throw a hundred balls in the air around their health and fitness? It's our fault as a society. We're going to have to decide what it is we want. And I think everyone who comes on this podcast is realizing it's really going to be a socioeconomic issue, those who have and those who have not. And health is going to be this new issue of like, wow, I see that you had fruits and vegetables and proteins access to those as a kid and you did not.

It's sad, but I've never seen more people paying attention. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have bubbles as we talked about before. Right. But I've never seen within even within that, I've never seen as many people talking about it. And it's not just because I live in L.A. and you guys live in San Francisco. I've seen more and more people talking about it. I see more congressmen talking about it, right? Even though it's small, I see more congressmen.

I see more political candidates that are running for president talking about it, right? That's kind of interesting. Yeah. Who knows what that would look like? We've never met a parent who does not give a shit about their kids. Right. Their parents want their kids to be healthy and to feel good and be less bummed. 100% of parents.

Yeah. And sometimes it has to look like things are and sometimes things do have to get really bad enough to wake people up. and I think we are in one of those moments and people who are listening today are waking up. But again, it goes back to this idea. You also have to first take care of yourself. Let's hit some of the basics.

Take care of your family. Take care of you. Take care of your family. And even your family, as somebody who got into kind of health more from the food side of things early on, fitness kind of came later for me. Nobody likes to be lectured.

No. But they like to be inspired by seeing what you're up to. And I don't have kids yet. It's something on the future for my wife and I. I got married about two years ago. But growing up, I was trying to be an influence for my parents, you know, having Indian parents, they walked a lot. But I didn't see a lot of other sort of movement. Yeah, like formal exercise.

Right. There was a lot of sitting and there was a lot of walking, sitting on the floor, which was great because that helped me. And then as I started changing my diet and getting them off the standard sort of Indian diet, which is just tends to be, you know, a diet that leads to a lot of skinny fat people, right? Under protein, high carbs, you know, that sort of stuff. I saw that when I backed off and just did my thing, my parents felt inspired because they're like, oh, you know what? That high protein salad actually looks really good. That salmon looks really good.

Let me try that. So people love to be inspired because they're seeing what you're doing. And I think that both of your books is something that can help people take practical aspects. We don't have to go to V-O-2 Max and these other things yet, although that's fun to dabble in for some people. and we can start with this and be an example for others in our lives and actually head towards those goals that you're mentioning Juliet, wanting to play with your grandkids at the age of 80, right? Wanting to be able to lift up a suitcase and put it on the airplane, you know, as Peter Riptea talks about,

wanting to be able to ski or motorbike or whatever else it is. What is the reason that you want to do these things in the first place? because we have to connect to that to fight against the inertia of life. And you guys are making it possible with your book. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for that message, for being on the podcast. We'll see in 10 years. We'll see if it worked.

Let's see if it works. It looks like it's working right now. How can people keep in touch? We have a link to the book and the show notes. Please, everybody go check it out. How can they keep in touch with you? We are, I'm at Juliet-Starette on Instagram. Kelly is at the Ready State.

I do kind of the family behind the scenes stuff of what's really happening in our life if people want to follow me there. And then all things book are at builtmove.com. And the book is in bookstores and on Amazon and anywhere people find books. Amazing. Kelly, did you want to chime in? There's an account.

Somebody else runs it, right? Is that the kind of thing? No, no, no. This is us. We're users. Okay, I thought I read something on your Instagram account. Like, this is the place to find you, but it looked like more of like a branded account.

Oh, yeah. I'm still there. If you DM me, it's going to be me. It's you. We're still small. We'll link to both those in the show notes. Again, thank you guys for being on the podcast. This is a fantastic conversation.

We're going to have you back for a round two. Well, we'll talk about a bunch of different topics that we can get into. Love it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. 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'm, 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-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says try this.