The School of Greatness - Aging in Reverse & Debunking Common Health Myths

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

The Summit of Greatness is back! Buy your tickets today – summitofgreatness.com – Peter Attia discusses why we’re living longer, but our quality of life is decreasing. Aging often comes with significant physical problems that are increasingly tough to deal with. As we get older, we may develop knee or hip problems, hearing or vision loss, or even memory problems. These things have a significant impact on our lives and our families — so how can we stay healthier longer?Mark Sisson is a decorated endurance athlete who used to race competitively in triathlons and qualified for the Olympic marathon team. He has decades of experience in what works and what doesn’t when it comes to diet and workouts for optimal performance. His bestselling book, The Primal Blueprint, is centered on the idea that when we get our bodies to burn fat instead of sugar or carbs, we function the way we were built to.Rich Roll battled alcohol addiction from the age of 17 to 31. When he finally went to a treatment center, he spent 100 days there, instead of the typical 28 days. But it changed his life, and he never returned to his previous bad habits. When he got out of the treatment center, he pursued a career most people would consider ideal and made a great living. The problem was, it wasn’t the life he wanted, and it physically took a toll on him.Dr. Nicole LePera is a Holistic Psychologist who believes that mental wellness is for everyone. She evolved her more traditional training from Cornell University and The New School to one that acknowledges the connection between the mind and body. Dr. LePera founded the Mindful Healing Center in Center City Philadelphia where she works with individuals, couples, and families taking gut health, sleep, movement, cellular health, belief, and mindfulness into treatment.In this episode you will learn,Which diseases are killing people the most and what to do about it.How we are going about medicine the wrong way.The four pillars of being a kick-ass 100-year-old.What are the three main pieces of our healthspan are.What things are attributing to bad sleeping patterns.For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1486For more Greatness text PODCAST to [phone]Peter Attia’s full episode - https://link.chtbl.com/1438-podMark Sisson’s full episode - https://lewishowes.com/podcast/mark-sisson/Rich Roll’s full episode - lewishowes.com/1061Dr. Nicole Lepera’s full episode - lewishowes.com/1061

Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection, I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend. People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jaspreet Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sincero, and many more. You'll also be able to

dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials. So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I'll see you there. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep time. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.

Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. A healthy meal, let's say an hour before bed. I'm talking about grains and lean meat and

healthy stuff. Or if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better? Or is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter? Yeah, that's a really good question. The short answer is, yeah, it does matter. So probably the two things that would have the greatest determination would be the simplicity or glycemic, the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load, because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic rollercoaster you go on at night. And then probably the amount of protein, because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food.

So the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food? Our bodies want to be very cold at night. So anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep. So what foods help you sleep better that keep you colder? What are those foods? Whether it's an hour before or three hours before? Yeah. Honestly, it's like almost anything you're going to eat is going to come with something that's going to slightly raise your temperature. So I just generally say, try to not eat too much before bed. And I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse. So I just say, I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed. So I'd have an avocado before bed. I'd have something that's like, I just generally don't eat before bed. The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going to sleep better,

sleep deeper, be cooler, and therefore help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed? Yeah. And this is, at least for me, been most easy to exhibit. And I think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting. So fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water-only fast, is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food. And it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces, one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper.

The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. You have more of it. You have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. You have more of it. You have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on. Fasting would trigger a signal that says, go get more food. Right. Be alert, be focused, alert, go get food like we don't want to die. And so that's kind of keeping you awake. But the flip side of that is the total

absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times. But I still feel quite, you know, rejuvenated by sleep. playing video games all night, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active. Is there a negative in your early ages, teens, early twenties through lacking sleep, eating poorly, or is there a way to recover in your twenties from the damage you've done in a year before 20?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiological lens. The good news is before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient. I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate. How old are you now, Lewis? You're near 30. 37. So you might not have fully appreciated.

I'm 47, so I'm a full decade older than you and when I think about 17 to 27 to 37 to 47 I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience like at 17 you could shoot me and I think I'd still get up the next day like you just couldn't right you're superman yeah you're absolutely superman and i don't know i i feel like the first observation of not being superman for me kind of kicked in about 42 ish about five years ago was the first time i was like, oh, so this is what people talk about, right? You can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day. And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise, but the same is true of physiology, right? Or I'll give you another

example. Many of my patients have observed this. I've observed this. I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink far more than anyone should. And yet somehow the next day I could get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I needed to do. I remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning. I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous. And somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a hundred mile bike ride. Oh my gosh, man. Probably still partially drunk.

But it felt fine by about like two hours into the ride. Today, if I had three glasses of wine, like the headache I'm going to have the next day is going to last me till the middle of the day. Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for its to its advantage then and now it's like it takes over it's a very good question i really i mean i could i could sort of you know speculate on what it is but i i just think there's an over so there's this thing called homeostasis right which is one of the hallmarks of youth and it's one of the hallmarks of aging. And it's the ability to, or it's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance.

So everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take pH, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated. Our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4. So 7 would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from zero to 14 to put that in perspective. So tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that? Amazing. Temperature, right? You go much below about 94, you're dead. you go much below about 94 you're dead you go much above about 104 you're dead how good are we at staying in that range oh i mean good i mean we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band so this homeostasis thing is amazing it gets weaker and weaker as we get older and so your ability to tolerate bad food, bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress,

all those things, it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker. And I think it declines non-linearly. So again, what you experience as a decline between 30 and 40, it's bad. 40 to 50, yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff. Is there a way to reverse this? I don't think we know. I think you can definitely off a cliff is there a way to reverse this i don't think we know i think you can definitely slow the progression of it and uh you know what i would say you probably can reverse it right so just as you can clearly reverse diabetes diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem and it's clearly reversible um you know so there are probably some variants of this that that are harder to reverse than others.

But no, I think we can reverse this process. But it gets harder. It gets harder as time goes on. And it gets harder the further you are into the physiologic trap. What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this, not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself. How are you thinking about it? Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago. So actually six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But at that point point a couple of things had happened so one I had become very familiar

with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training which again is a rich man's problem ultra marathons ultra biking ultra swimming hiking that's that's right that's right so I'd be again there and it's the same sort of curve, right? Where as exercise, dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down. But it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality. Now, again- Yes. Does that mean like running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?

Yeah. Great, great point. Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all, but running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now, again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O'Keefe, on my podcast, who is the world's expert on this. And it was actually James's work six years ago, because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago.

We became friends. It's one of those things, I'm sure you've experienced this, where you hear something and you don't want it to be true. So you basically come up with all the reasons you're going to poke holes in it until you can't anymore. You find the evidence the other way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago. The second piece. It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday. That's all right though. You'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month. Yeah, exactly. And then I think the second thing was I realized, it was sort of funny, but I realized my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about like, what, what was,

what was I doing this in service of? Right. Like, um, and not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things because I'm very self-motivated. So I don't like, but just as a joke, one day I asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you know what my PR is for 20 K? Bike, run, or swim? Yeah, bike on a 20K bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data, and I analyze my power data

every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. I'm really so switched on to this. she'll probably get it within a minute she'll guess what my pr is within a minute she was off by 20 minutes meaning she wasn't even in the zip code so i was like huh that's funny like it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this and what i realized was you know less about this. And what I realized was, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick-ass 100-year-old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the Centenarian Olympics.

So how do you train to kick ass at 100 should you get there? And of course, everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't care about how fast I can ride a 40 kilometer time trial, because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do. What is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then, or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it? So I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. So the pillars being stability, strength uh mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance and so each of those then has a super layer detail approach and i still ride my bike

four hours a week so it's a fraction of what i used to do and it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training um what was the fourth one? Stability, strength, mitochondria, and mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance. So you focus on those four metrics now on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. Yeah. Those four pillars sort of make up the training program, which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different set of variables for me potentially. But my Centenary Olympics has 18 events in it. I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool

where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands. So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy. And you'd be right as a 37-year-old stud. But the point is- As a 60-year-old, a lot of them aren't easy.

Most 60-year-olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s, and in your 40s? And it's actually very hard. And as I'm getting into, I'm three years away from 40, what should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, I'm healthy, I feel good. Maybe I have some aches and're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good, you know, maybe have some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part, I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about moving forward so

that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things? So I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets. I don't go to bike races. I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. There are only 168 hours in a week and, you know, I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, you know, I of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game?

Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money? So the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains for money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today. You could have totally different strategies for that and that's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital. And so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, you know, Peter at 37, I just want to focus on

running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an Ironman. So I'm going to go and do that. And, you know, I want to climb Mount Everest, and that's going to require – you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things. And truthfully, I would say do them now because it's only going to get harder. Because you're not going to be able to do it later. Yeah. I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later. So get those things out of the way.

What's a typical eating day look like for you? What are you putting in your system? And what time do you put in? Yeah, so I wake up in the the morning and I have a cup of coffee around 6.30 in the morning. I like coffee. I'm a big fan of coffee. I don't eat until 12.30 or 1. Okay. So I use what we call a compressed eating window.

Now I will wake up and I have plenty of energy because I'm so good at burning fat. I've trained my body to do that. So you have the energy. I'm so good at burning fat. I've trained my body to do that. So you have the energy. You don't need it. I have the energy. I'm not in a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that I was sleeping. It doesn't matter. I'm so good at accessing the stored body fat. I got plenty of energy. In fact, I'll go to the gym at 9.30 or 10 o'clock and I'll do my workout fasted. Sometimes it'll be a heavy leg day. Sometimes it'll be, you know, intervals of some kind. Again, I don't... And you feel fine. I feel fine. Right. And then when I get home, I won't eat. If I get home at like 11, I still won't eat for an hour and a half, partly because I'm not hungry and partly because I got stuff to do. Right, right, right. Exactly. But I'm not compelled

to go, oh my God, I just finished my workout. I must eat a post-workout shake or something. Yeah, there's so many people that say that, you know, have a protein shake within the first 30 minutes of waking up to start your metabolism, drink a shake right after a workout. Why do they say that and why do you think you don't need to? I think you don't need to because if you become good at burning fat, a couple things happen. First of all, you have the energy to get through the day. Second of all, if you're energy to get through the day. Second of all, if you're good at burning fat and you're not hungry, I say if you're not hungry, why are you eating? If you're not hungry, don't eat because that's kind of key. When you become good at

burning fat, you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're dependent on carbs a lot, which is you start to tear up your muscle tissue. Because when you're a sugar burner and you run out of sugar, or you're depending on carbohydrate. By the way, I use glycogen, glucose, carbohydrate, and sugar sort of interchangeably. But when you're a sugar burner and you haven't eaten for a while, you've depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles because your body's expecting you to have sugar all this time and that's where you store it, but you don't store very much of it. So when you run out of it, the brain... You need to fill it up. The brain goes, hey, something's off here. We got to eat.

And if we don't eat, then here's what we're going to do. We're going to signal the adrenals to create cortisol, which is going to go tear down muscle tissue so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose so I can fuel the brain. So it's like you're tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build because of your dependence on glucose. All that goes away when you become a fat burner. When you become good at burning fat, now when you don't eat, your body knows how to access the stored body fat so your energy levels don't dip,

your blood sugar doesn't eat. Your body knows how to access the stored body fat so your energy levels don't dip. Your blood sugar doesn't dip. And so you don't cut into muscle tissue. Gotcha. So you can train really hard to try to build muscle and you're still saying you don't need this post-recovery shake right afterwards if you learn how to eat the right way. Exactly.

Again, if you're the old paradigm and you are the carbohydrate-dependent athlete, then yeah, you probably do want to eat a post-workout meal because you probably will cannibalize some of the muscle tissue because you're working on an entirely different operating system. Interesting. Man. And so that 21-day transformation is how you get off of that cycle and get into the fat-burning cycle, essentially? Exactly. Okay, cool.

We'll have that linked up here as well. And also the Primal Endurance, the book. It has a lot of it in there. This has it all in here, but this is really specific to people who want to race 10Ks, 5Ks, marathons, triathlons, Spartan races, all that stuff. Have you done a Spartan race yourself? I haven't.

I did one, a short one, like a five-mile area. It's pretty intense. Yeah, it's intense. It's fun, though. It's fun, though. I wish it had been around when I was in my prime. You would have been a machine. when I was in my prime. You would have been a machine.

Because I was a good marathoner, but I had my DNA fitness thing done a few years ago, and I was like 57% endurance and 43% strength. What that means is it made me a pretty good endurance athlete, but I was never going to be the best in the world because you'd have to be 80% or 85%, right? But it also told me that I had the strength, which is sort of, in retrospect, that's why I realized I used to lift weights. Even when I was a marathoner, I lifted weights in the gym. Yeah. So I maintained my strength.

Wow. And I was a gymnast before I was ever an endurance athlete. Really? So you look at the Spartan races, and you go, well, it's got some gymnastics, some parkour-type movements. Yes, rope climbing. Yeah, yeah, some heavy lifting, all that stuff combined with the endurance.

That would have been my thing. Wow. But right now, it's like I'm too guarding of my current fitness level and health. I don't want to get injured. Yeah, of course. So the big thing for me is my ultimate Frisbee game once a week. You're an ultimate Frisbee? Oh, my God.

I love ultimate Frisbee. You've got to come out to Malibu, man. College champion with my team in college. Get out of here. It's been a small D3 school. Whatever, man. I can run and jump. We have a game in Malibu every Sunday at 9.30.

It's crazy. I would love to come. It's been years, but I'd love to come. No, no, no. It's the most fun. Can you wear cleats? You can wear cleats. I wear my Vibrams.

Of course. Yeah, guys wear cleats. Wow. No, it's – anyway, so you know. I would love to come. You know what a good workout it is then. That's one of the hardest workouts. An hour of Ultimate and I'm exhausted.

We play two hours, by the way. Oh, my gosh. I would be like, sub me in. 15 minutes. I'd have to get back in the shape of it. Wow, that's cool. In Malibu, huh?

In Malibu, yeah. 9.30 AM. I'll be there. And there's guys from West Hollywood that come out there, too. I will come out for sure. What is it,

like 30 guys go out there? Last week we had six on six. That's the most fun. Oh, wow. The summer we'll have 10 on 10 sometimes. It's a little bit crazy. Wow.

Okay, awesome. Okay, so you wait until about, you have coffee in the morning, then you wait until about noon to 1. Oh, yeah. We haven't even gotten to any food yet. And what is that meal? Yeah, so that meal is typically, it might be what I call a big ass salad. It's a big salad with lots of vegetables in it and some form of protein with lots of salad

dressing. But you have your own salad dressing. Now I have my own salad dressing because I couldn't find any that I could put a lot on and feel like this is- That isn't filled with sugar. Yeah, exactly. Or unhealthy fats or unhealthy oils, like the soybean oil that I was talking about

or the canola. It's like no canola. Our salad dressings are made with avocado oil, which is the healthiest of all the oils. So I have a big salad with chicken left over from the previous night or a piece of fish or something on it. Nice. Okay.

And then? And then I go till the middle of the afternoon, maybe late afternoon. I might have a handful of macadamia nuts. We do make a protein bar now. All my products I make for myself, by the way. Right, right. I make stuff that I wish existed. This one, the dark chocolate almond bar?

The dark chocolate almond bar. It looks amazing. It is amazing. And it's got 15 grams of protein, but mostly it's 9 grams of collagen. So it's got more collagen than a cup of bone broth. So I love bone broth, but when I'm driving my car. Let me pour out a bottle of bone broth. So, you know, I love bone broth, but, you know, when I'm driving my car, you know. Let me pour out a bottle of bone broth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the bars are there because I'm really into the repair. So one of the issues I have as a 62-year-old guy trying to keep up with 20-somethings on a sprint to the end zone to defend a long pass is my Achilles. You know, so the collagen really works well. Really? Absolutely. to the end zone to defend a long pass is my Achilles. So the collagen really works well. Really? Absolutely.

I can tell the difference between when I've been eating a lot of collagen and when I haven't in my Achilles. What happens? Is it tighter when you're not? Yeah, they feel like they're going to snap. Really? And they'll feel sore enough that I'll choose not to back way off for weeks at a time. So anyway, I might have a dark chocolate almond bar in the afternoon. I'm going to have to get all this stuff.

Yeah. I'll have to try it all out. Okay. And then in the evening, I have to have a piece of steak. I've got this great Wagyu short rib that I get. It's my favorite cut of meat anywhere in the world. And I'll have that with a whole ton of steamed vegetables or lightly grilled vegetables with some butter on it. And once in a while, I'll have a glass of wine.

And that's it. That's the whole day. Yeah. There's only much more than that. No. So here's the thing. You may have gleaned from that that it's not a lot of food. One of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat— You don't need a lot of food. You don't need a lot of food. A few years ago, I had this thought experiment. I thought, well, I used to my whole life see what I could get away with, see how much food I could eat and not feel like I was going to puke

or not feel like I was going to gain weight. It's how much food I could eat and not feel like I was going to puke or not feel like I was going to gain weight. It's how much food can I eat and not gain weight. I think a lot of people live their lives that way. They sort of finish what's on their plate. Basically, there are a lot of people who run or work out just so they can eat more. Like, why do you run so much? Lewis, well, I run because I love to eat. Well, dude, I love to eat too, but I don't want to beat myself up just so I can eat more.

So that was the thought experiment. And then if you reverse it, you go, well, if that's the case, what's the least amount of food I can eat? And maintain my body mass, maintain my energy, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. And it turns out it's about 30% fewer calories than I used to eat. Wow. Yeah. my body mass, maintain my energy, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. And it turns out it's about 30% fewer calories than I used to eat. Wow. Yeah. So I learned within the last 10 years, I've learned, you know, to sort of halfway through a meal, ask myself just sort of subconsciously, am I really hungry for the next bite?

Not am I full, not am I, you know, whatever, but am I truly hungry for the next bite. Not am I full, not am I, you know, whatever, but am I truly hungry for the next bite? And if I'm not, I'm okay pushing the plate away, wrapping it up, throwing it away, giving away whatever, because I know there's food wherever I want, whenever I want, so it's not like I'm trying to pack on the... What if you just enjoy it?

Well, if you enjoy it, keep going. But a lot of times you get into that space where you go, am I eating this because it's still there? Am I truly eating it because I enjoy it? Or am I, you know, like I used to, I had a habit of one half gallon of ice cream a night for five years. That sounds amazing.

It was. And it was in my training days. So burned it all off, never gained any weight. I actually weighed probably 20 pounds less than I weigh now. Wow. Yeah. But it was a half gallon of ice cream every night. And it was like I couldn't only eat a pint. It was like a pint of ice cream?

Don't even. Why am I going to get started on that? I'm just going to rip your throat off and want more, you know, whatever. Rip your head off. So I would, and if I, it was 10 o'clock at night and I didn't have any ice cream in the house, I'd get in the car and drive and get some. It was like a real addiction, a real sugar addiction. Clearly I got rid of that.

But it was, you know, I wonder at times whether I had described this, it's a half gallon is my dose of ice cream. Right. Sometimes, whether I had described this, it's a half gallon is my dose of ice cream. And even though I could have satisfied myself with a pint or a half a pint, because it was there, because I could eat it and I could get away with it, that became my dose. It's like people have a bag of potato chips. You have a little individual serving size of potato chips. You have one this big. There's still, to some people, each one is an individual serving size. It is.

It's tough to just have a few chips in the big bags. So what are these, you know, for athletes listening or for people that want to get back into their athletic ways? You know, I used to be a professional athlete, and I'm still, I consider myself an athlete. You've got nine pieces of primal advice for athletes. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way too and still be better entrepreneurs, be more productive,

have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things. I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur. Absolutely, absolutely. But you talk about adequate sleep, and this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts, but why just emphasize is sleep important for you?

I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that just is so such faulty logic. It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six for some reason, I feel it. I know it. I try to make up for it. I try not to let that happen. I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time pretty much every morning. So if I- 6 a.m. wake up or- Yeah, 6.30, 6 a.m., 6.30. But if I were to go to bed at one, 6 a.m. wake up?

Yeah, 6.30, 6 a.m., 6.30. But if I were to go to bed at 1, I'd still wake up at my normal time. So I have to really force myself to, not force myself, because I'm tired at the end of the day, and I have this whole wind-down process. What is that? So my wife and I will watch some, we'll do some television after dinner. We'll catch up on, we'll do some binge watching,

catching up on whatever the latest series was. But around 10, we'll break. I have a pool in my backyard and a jacuzzi. So I go in, the pool's unheated. So in the wintertime, it might be in the 50s. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold. But not to the point of shivering,

just, it's kind of a process in and of itself. Then I'll get in the jacuzzi. So my wife and I will hang out in the jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were. We turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and towel off and go up to bed.

And I sleep like a baby as a result of that. Wow, the hot-cold therapy. Yeah, the hot-cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down. And that prepares me to sleep, brings my body temperature down, which is, you know, they say that you should have a lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep the room around 67. Yes. We have blackout curtains. We keep the room around 67. Yes.

We have blackout curtains. So it's a real cool sleeping environment. Yes. I always like to keep it cold. Yeah. You've got nine pieces of primal advice for athletes. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way too and still be better entrepreneurs, be more productive,

have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things. I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur. Absolutely, absolutely. But you talk about adequate sleep, and this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts. But why, just to emphasize, is sleep important for you? I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that

just is so such faulty logic. It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six for some reason, I feel it. I know it. I try to make up for it. I try not to let that happen. I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time pretty much every morning. 6 a.m. wake up? Yeah, 6.30, 6 a.m., 6.30. But if I were to go to bed at 1, I'd still wake up at my normal time. So I have to really force myself to – not force myself because I'm tired at the end of the day. And I have this whole wind down process.

What is that? So my wife and I will watch some, we'll do some television after dinner. We'll catch up on, we'll do some binge watching, catching up on whatever the latest series was. But around 10 we'll break. I have a pool in my backyard and a jacuzzi. So I go in. The pool's unheated.

So in the wintertime, it might be in the 50s. Wow. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold. But not to the point of shivering. It's kind of a process in and of itself. Then I'll get in the jacuzzi. So my wife and I will hang out in the jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were.

We turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and towel off and go up to bed. And I sleep like a baby as a result of that. Wow, the hot-cold therapy. Yeah, the hot-cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down.

And that prepares me to sleep, brings my body temperature down, which is, you know, they say that you should have your lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep the room around 67. Yes. We have blackout curtains. So it's a real cool sleeping environment, you know. Yes. I always like to keep it cold. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And so if you do like a cold shower before bed, do you think that's a good thing? I think it's a good thing. Yeah. It'll help you sleep better. I think so. Try it.

I mean, you can't hurt. Okay. You talk about stress and rest balance. What does that mean? Well, you know, there are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable. Work stress, commuting stress. Right, right. Sometimes training stress. Waiting in the lobby stress, sometimes training stress.

Waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes of stress. Sorry. Well, I'm more stressed about the traffic coming from it. Right, right, right. Because you never know what it's going to be. It could be, you know, I planned for two hours. I got here in an hour, or I got here in less than an hour. Right.

That's good. Yeah. So you have these stresses, and some of them are imagined, even though your brain thinks they're real. They don't exist. Our stress mechanisms in the body, they evolve to handle true life or death situations. A tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's going to kill you, a broken leg that may, whatever, have its impact on you.

may, you know, whatever, have its impact on you. Not, you know, am I going to miss my kid's rehearsal or am I going to be late for work or whatever. Those cause stress, but they're not life-threatening. And yet we, the brain sees them as life-threatening. So the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now, we talked about this before the show, that meditation is a form of rest and recovery. But just taking, maybe if you need a nap, you can do that.

But certainly that goes back to the whole sleep thing being critical. But the other part of rest is recognizing, if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says, I have to go do six miles today. If you wake up that day and you feel like crap and the metrics, the heart rate variability is wrong or you're just not feeling good, then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your logbook, yeah, I got through the workout, felt like crap, but I got through the workout. I was just rested that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your logbook, yeah, I got through the workout.

It felt like crap, but I got through the workout. I was just rested that day. Just rested that, yeah. Gotcha. Okay. The third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key. So in Primal Endurance, we go back to that philosophy that the body is a very sort of temperamental,

it's in temperamental states back and forth. Sometimes you're in a state of energy and health and sometimes you're not. And you can't really plan on when those states are going to be, so you have to be willing to listen to the cues. And for that reason, we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete. So when you feel good, you can go hard. When you don't feel good, back off. reason we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete so it's it's when you feel good you can go hard when you don't feel good back off uh take time off we use

the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there's there are uh tranches of of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep deep hard hard and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off. You can break those further up into quarterly annual segments, always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad. You're going to trend toward wanting to build, to ratchet up over time, but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. And so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress.

It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement. Gotcha. The next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis, train slow to race fast. What does that mean? Yeah, so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really grok. And that is a lot of athletes, and i was certainly one for 20 years you basically go out and you train to hurt so you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's you know 75 to 90 percent of your max heart rate and you see how long you can hold that right and and so you're

training to hurt and it's and it's and it hurts you know it does hurt you but you feel tough as a result of it and But the problem is, you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? Well, one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen. Interesting. So we train you to become so good at burning fat. Now that's the

80% that we talked about with the diet. But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are, it's typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you're 40 years old. So 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never in your training. You're not going to go above that. You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. Now you, you start out and you at that 140, maybe you can above 140. Now, you start out at that 140. Maybe you can only run 13-minute miles, even though you're capable of running 7-minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever.

But now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat. And we know that at that number, 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. Really? And we know that because that's the pace at which you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen.

Or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start losing your, having to catch up or having to get winded, we know that you're going into burning, you're building up lactic acid. For those that don't know your story, you've been on the podcast before, so we'll have that episode linked up. But for those that don't know your story, if you want to give a quick recap to how you got into the whole plant-based living in the first place. Yeah, sure. I'm 48 years old right now. But about eight years ago when I was 39,

I'm 48 years old right now, but about eight years ago when I was 39, I was tipping the scales a little bit heavy. I was about 50 pounds overweight, working as a corporate lawyer, kind of toiling away the 80-hour work week, riding the elevator up and down and kind of living that lifestyle. And I was having a little bit of an existential crisis about my place in the world. Like I was married and I was building family. And of course, I love them. But at the same time, I just felt like I was on the wrong path professionally. And it was confusing. It was almost like vertigo, because my whole life had been premised on this idea of, you know, get good grades, get get into the best college, like then

go to law school and get the best law firm job. And like when you kind of, you know, are on the precipice of being a partner in a big law firm, you think, well, I did everything right. This is what I was promised my whole life was going to make me happy. And I wasn't, I was not fulfilled. And I looked around me at the people I was working with, and I just didn't aspire to have any of their lives. And so I was having this kind of, you know, kind of internal crisis about what I was doing with myself. And meanwhile, I wasn't taking care of myself. I was eating what I like to call the window diet.

Right, right. Pull your car up to a fine dining establishment, roll the window down and they hand you food. That's what you eat. So I was subsisting on, you know on cheeseburgers and french fries and nachos and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and all that kind of stuff for years and years and years. And it was starting to catch up to me, 50 pounds overweight. And then one night, shortly before my 40th birthday,

walking up a simple flight of stairs, I had to pause. I was winded, out of breath, shortness of breath, tightness in my chest, sweat on my brow. And I honestly thought I was having a heart attack. And I realized in that moment that I needed to change how I was living. And that really began the journey of exploring healthy foods and healthy lifestyle habits. I ended up adopting a plant-based diet, which, you know, look, you know, I'm the last person in the world that ever thought I would go vegan.

Like for me, like vegans are like guys that kick the hacky sack and smoke a lot of dope and like have dreadlocks, you know, which is fine. That's cool. But that was, that's not my trip, you know? So I never identified with that. But when I started eating whole foods, plant-based foods, I really started to feel so much better like incredibly better I had a lot of energy to resurgence of vitality I could have never predicted and it really kind of solved that equation of food is medicine you know Hippocrates said it in 340 BC

and of course I'd heard that quote, you know, growing up, but I never really thought about it. And I was starting to realize like, wow, we really can impact how we feel, and how our bodies function, and how our minds operate, and how we interact with other people based upon the things that we're putting in our body. It's so elementary, right? But I don't know that we really take that to heart enough. And so that's what happened to me. And I,'t know that we really take that to heart enough. And so that's what happened to me. And, you know, it's a long story, and we talked about it in the last podcast. But ultimately, I ended up becoming an ultra-endurance athlete,

and I started killing it in these crazy super multi-day, you know, double Ironman distance triathlons. And in 2010, I did something that no one else had ever done, which was do five Ironman distance triathlons on five 2010 i did something that no one else had ever done which was do five ironman distance triathlons on five hawaiian islands in under a week wow so and that kind of it takes like 24 hours don't they uh no i mean an ironman triathlon yeah so so a single ironman for your listeners who might not know is a very long triathlon which in a period of one day, you do a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and then run a marathon. So I did five of those in a row on five different islands, like traveling, flying.

You did five Ironmans? Five Ironmans on five Hawaiian islands. In a week? The goal was to do it in five days. We ran into a bunch of problems and logistical challenges and sleep deprivation and all kinds of craziness. Wow. But we got it done. I did it with my buddy Jason Lester,

and no one had ever tried it before. So it was sort of a cool kind of thing. And to do that at age 44 at the time when I did that was a really cool thing. And that's kind of like what my first book was about, kind of going from couch potato, schlubby lawyer guy to middle-aged ultra-endurance athlete. Why do you think eating a plant-based diet is so intimidating for a lot of people? Because there's this new trend, and people are going vegan,

and people are starting to just live off of plants. But why is it so intimidating? Well, I think it's intimidating for a number of reasons. I mean, the first thing is it sounds like a huge deprivation diet. Like, oh, my God, how can I go a day without eating cheese? Or how can I go a day without eating a cheeseburger? And these kinds of foods, animal products, find their way into most of the things that people are eating on a typical Western diet. And so I think that right off the bat, people are like, whoa,

not so fast. You know, that's kind of scary. And by the way, we've been told our whole lives that if you want strong muscles, you need to eat, you know, beef is what's for dinner and milk does a good. And, you know, I certainly believed all of those things my whole life. So it was really kind of anathema that you could not only only breathe air in and out of your lungs, but actually be an athlete without eating those things was something I would have never predicted. And so part of my message is that plant-based foods are incredibly healthy, and they contain everything that you need to live. And also, and this is what the Plant Power Way is really about, is it doesn't have to be a deprivation thing.

Like we look at, we try to, we always say, focus on all the new exciting foods that you're bringing into your diet, like nutrient-dense foods that are super healthy for you, as opposed to focusing on the couple things that you're giving up. What is one exercise people can start with to just be aware on the inner child or the memories of the past that will help them regulate their nervous system?

Absolutely. Awareness. You'll always hear me. Sight begins with learning how to be that aware being or to live in that conscious state, being the observer of our thoughts, our emotional reactions, the way then we're reacting. I want to say responding, they're reacting, right? In the world around us, it's that observation step. But I want to go back to something really profound that you said by acknowledging your courage in choosing, because I want to highlight how any, even if very logically, right? So many of us have lived the aftermath of those old reactive ways of being, whether it's self or other harm. And we

have all of this now, data points to say, okay, that doesn't work. So logically, this is how the new way I would like to respond in my being the next time this happens. And lo and behold, when that time comes, because that will be, I'm going to really simplify it, a new response, right? I will embody something new. I will make a new choice in that moment. Inevitably, that's going to challenge our subconscious mind that prefers those familiar patterns. It's actually an adaptation because we get to predict and there's safety in that prediction. Even if the aftermath is consequential in whatever way it is, it's known. I've verified it. Some of us for decades,

we've verified, yep, that's what happens next. And now if I'm on the brink of making a new choice in and of itself, before I even make the choice, I might be faced with the resistance, that pull back, all of the reasons why I shouldn't make that new choice. If we do dare to embody or to do something new in that moment, that resistance might even drop into our body where we feel uncomfortable. We begin to feel that discomfort of that unfamiliar experience. And some of us, again, that could contribute to leading us right back into those old familiar habits and patterns. So once we become conscious, then it really is a challenge to our mind-body system to embody these new choices. They don't come easy. And

funny enough, one of the things I was thinking about earlier when we were talking about something else was for me physically, I used to avoid not only emotional discomfort, but physical discomfort. Even though I played sports my entire life through college, when it came to stretching my muscles, and I was always very tight, tight from, you've guessed it, my nervous system and my stress response. And I remember I used to have these big trainers pushing on my hamstrings, trying to stretch me, and I'm crying. Anytime my physical body felt uncomfortable. And once I stopped playing sports in college, any physical discomfort, I would avoid it. Oh, that means my body's not meant to move like that. Oh, I don't have the stamina to walk around for this many minutes. So I'm going to

not do it erroneously or, you know, in error thinking that this discomfort was, you know, my intuition, my body telling me, oh, you've reached your limit, Nicole. And really, it was just that old pattern of avoiding things that were uncomfortable. And one of the most foundational changes that I referenced too in How to Do the Work is how, for me, rebuilding that connection to my body, challenging my body to, and it wasn't anything extreme. I didn't enter the gym. I still don't even enter the gym I it's about the small consistent for me it started which is daily stretching for ten minutes a day popping in a yoga video and stretching my body that point of discomfort and instead of abandoning yoga and I'm done

with it for the day today just allowing myself to breathe in that space and so whether or not it's your physical body, any new promise or new choice that we set the intention to make outside of that familiar comfort zone, acknowledging that it will challenge our subconscious, so keeping that promise small, and then there's the embodied practice, meeting that resistance, all the thoughts that are telling you to abandon ship, maybe all that discomfort in your body as you're doing something new, responding in a new way, taking some belly breaths instead of yelling and screaming, and then expanding

that stress resilience or that emotional resilience you were talking about earlier. Learning that you can tolerate a bit more of that discomfort than you thought that you could, and that's how you develop that confidence that you were speaking of. Yes. It's so interesting. We were talking about familiarity. I was thinking about in relationships where we'll see, I speak for myself, but I also see other people that stay in relationships that are hurtful or harmful or not a part of their vision of a high conscious relationship, but they stay because it's familiar. And then when you sometimes meet someone who is very loving and kind and generous, it's not familiar.

And you almost push that away because you're like, okay, that doesn't feel safe because it's unfamiliar. But really it's just different. And it's really probably what you need the most of is this kind of safer environment. Why are we so tied to repeating a pattern of familiarity even if it's painful as opposed to creating a loving environment in relationships that we know will support us thrive? Why do we do that? I think one of the most counterintuitive spaces to use or consider this question is why it is so difficult for many of us to be in stillness, right? To be in peace. We do on some deep level create and prefer the stress, those patterns, the negativity even of it. And again, a lot of this goes back to how embodied these topics are that we're speaking of. They're not

just thoughts in our mind. They're mapping onto physiological changes outside of our nervous system in our hormones and cortisol and how our body is adapting to the present nature of these continued habits and patterns. So our body gets used to these certain ways of being and prefers that familiar because something even as logical as peace, which we should all desire. Yes. Right? And I share my story all the time. For so long, right, being a hippie at heart, all I've been endlessly searching for is the ability, and you said one word earlier too, to be free and to be peaceful. Those for me are like, feel like what we could call core driving values.

I want to be at peace. I want to have a safe, comfortable, peaceful, calm existence. And I want to have the freedom to do that. Yet, what I would find time and time again is when there was the moment where there wasn't a stressful experience happening, or say I was home alone without anyone around me to energetically cause me any disturbance, it wasn't that logically. It was my body. I had so much trauma and stress in my nervous system. And for a lot of us,

safety doesn't, I mean, quiet, stillness, stop, doesn't feel safe if we've grown up in an environment where that wasn't present. So counterintuitively, here I am, the hippie, wondering where my safe space is. And yet, wherever you go, there you are, right? The Junk Bud Zim book. There I was all of the time, but what was there was this dysregulated nervous system. So in those moments on my couch with no one present, my body was sending me, my brain, so many messages of stress, of cortisol, of my heart, right? Still beating out of my chest because my nervous system was dysregulated. I was in fight or flight in that moment. So my mind was left with no other option but to integrate that into this meaning of what's happening. And it would then find the

stressful event. Oh, right. It was that assignment you didn't do. It was this deadline you have tomorrow. You know what? Actually, it was this fight that you had with your partner because she gave you a look that you didn't like. And now you're stressed out about that because what did that mean not realizing that my body was contributing to that story because our mind always seeks alignment scanning down what's happening in my body oh it's stressed out that must mean something stressful happened let me figure out what it is wow so does everything come back to the nervous system then like this our level our ability to have peace feel loved feel safe come back to the nervous system then? Like does our level, our ability to have peace, feel loved, feel safe, come back to how our nervous system is connected to our mind and our thoughts and our body?

Yes, if our nervous system isn't in the parasympathetic mode of safety of a particular branch of it called the ventral vagal, which allows us to be connected to the world around us, to our heart that I was talking about earlier. If we're not in that, do you feel peaceful? Do you feel calm? Are you able to breathe deeply from your belly? Do your muscles feel available but not tense? Are you in that space? And the answer probably for most of us is no. My heart's beating out of my chest. I'm sweating. I'm on edge waiting for the next

stress to happen, or I might be on the other end of that spectrum. I might be completely shut down. Energy, what energy? I can't get out of bed. Muscles, I feel like I have no ability. I'm so fatigued in my muscles. I have no interest in life. A lot of us have called that for decades, depression, have located the genetic idea of this genetic component, which there is a genetic component, but a lot of us are in a nervous system state of shutdown.

It's our nervous system that everything from our ability to be in that peaceful, connected place to even kind of how we think about ourselves, to how we navigate ourself showing up in our environments and really every choice that we make. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple podcasts. Share this

with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.