#400: Why Chasing Muscle for Longevity Might Backfire: The Real Keys to Aging Well With Joel Greene.

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Knidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Natalie Knidham, your host, and we are back with a repeat guest today, the always insightful Joel Green, who really loves to kind of shake things up a little bit by stating truths that sometimes people feel are a little maybe, oh, I don't know, inconvenient. He is the author of The Immunity Code and most recently, The Way, a man who spent decades experimenting on himself, digging deep into research and fine tuning protocols, also that we don't have to. We unpack why chasing the ideal muscle look and backfire and why real longevity lives in your feet, your achilles, and even your big toe. Joel also explains how diet trains ignore key immune reactions from saturated fats, overloading macrophages to sugar, flipping cancer friendly switches. If you want to age vibrantly, not just look fit, you are going to love this one. All right, we're going to thank a couple sponsors, and then we're diving in. What if the support your body needs didn't require another thing to wear, track, or remember? Even when we eat well and sleep enough, many of us still feel wired, tired, or oddly foggy. That's often a nervous system issue, not a motivation problem. Quantum upgrade works quietly in the background, helping your system rebalance through quantum energy. You don't plug anything in, you don't download an app, you literally just stream it 24 seven while living your life. And what's really cool about it is you get to tweak it depending on what's happening in your life. So when I'm traveling, I use a certain setting. When I'm home, I use another one. 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And your cells get tired and repair slows. Blue peptide spray from young goose brings the message back loud and clear with NAD plus apex to refuel energy, methylene blue to recharge your mitochondria and GHKCU to tell your skin, Hey, start making that collagen again. It's longevity science, not cosmetic hype working at the cellular level instead of just layering on top. So keep your skin talking. Visit young goose.com use code nat 10 to get started. Or if you're already a young goose customer, you can use code five NAT to still save. Welcome back, Joel Green. It is a complete pleasure and honor to have you here today. Thank you. Nat is so good to see your face and be here again and have fun chatting with you. If there's anybody left on the planet who doesn't know who Joel Green is, you'll have listened to my very short intro, but we will have in the show notes links to the previous episodes that we've recorded together. There's a few of them and they're all highly educational. So I recommend that you check them out and dive into his books. The way is amazing. The immunity code is phenomenal. So all of that stuff. But for today, we're just going to kind of move on. So the first question I want to ask you, which is it could have been like an end of podcast kind of quickfire question, but just to get things, get the audience warmed up. What belief about health that you once held with conviction? Did you have to unlearn? And what was the cost of being wrong? Oh, gosh, what a great question. Wow. That's yeah, boy, that is a rapier right there. Yeah. Let me think about that for just a second here. I might even have to circle back on that, but let me just think a little bit about it. That's okay with me. Yeah. It's a big question. And you know, I think that one of the well, one of the many things that I adore about you is that as much as you're really right a lot of the time, every once in a while, you will come out and say, we thought this, but we know this. Yeah. In my mind in this space, anybody who's not able to do that. Is suspect. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's this is a humbling space. And I've noticed, and I'm just pondering your question here in the back of my mind while I answer this, but you know, it's a humbling. The body is humbling. Okay. Like you start off and I've seen this, I've seen this a lot. Yeah. You start off, you learn a few things. And then there's this, for whatever the reason, hubris shows up, you know, as your, as your strange bedfellow and goes, you know, you know stuff, right? Hey, you know stuff. And then the longer you do this, you know, the more that little do evaporates and you're like, and you get into like, well, it seems like this might work and might be a good thing to try. And maybe, you know, you get into scenes and maybes and mites, you get into a lot of that. And then you kind of just live there. And you kind of, you just have to because it's such a, it's the human body cannot be understood by humans. It just can't. It's too complex. I agree. You know, like an AI might have a shot, but humans can't. So you always have to have that sort of fudge factor of, you know, what I'm learning today. And I didn't know this, and I thought this and, you know, and that's, that's, that's pretty consistent. So let me come back to your question because it's such a good question. I want to make sure I answer it really good. We can finish with it. It's a bit of an anvil to start the. I said so good though. Yeah, I want to make, I want to give a good answer to that. I also think that as much as we, and I don't know if you've had this experience, but you develop a philosophy, you, you do the research, you, you do your best to kind of back it up and you, and you try it out on a bunch of people and it pans out and then you hit that one person and it doesn't work. And, and, and sometimes it's because the person in question didn't do the work or didn't, you know, they, they thought they were doing it or they wanted to do it or they meant to do it, but they really didn't. But sometimes you come across a body that there are particularities about this system and the life it's lived and the things that have the shortcuts the body has had to create to compensate for whatever. And the thing that method that we developed that we really believe is going to work, it doesn't deliver. We have to kind of for that individual go back to the drawing board. You gave me the answer. I just purlied your answer and now it's mine. Yes. Well, it was my answer. I just didn't know it wasn't until you told me. Okay, good. Happy to serve. Thank you so much. Nat, that's for those of you who don't know, Nat is a very special kind person who likes to help. So anything I can do. Yeah. Yeah. No, you know what it is? There have been so many junctures in my own journey where I thought, oh, oh, this is the way or no, no, that's the way this is the way. And I think, I think the biggest revelation that took me, I don't know, maybe 20 years to come to was to just bumble into the reality that there is a, there's a couple of curves associated with everything, the U shaped curve, and then the logarithmic curve. And what I've come to realize over time is that there's a missing framework to understand anything. And it's the, you can put it under the broad spectrum of the effects of time. And if you want to go granular, you can say, well, it's the U shaped curve, or it's the logarithmic curve. But really, it's just that everything works really great for a while. And then it starts to attenuate and drop off and adapt. And sometimes it could become negative. And so you have to kind of know upfront that the thing that you think is the answer is not the answer probably, and that over time, you're going to need to adapt and change if you do it too much. And so rather than this static equation of, ah, I found it, okay, this is it. Keto's the way. That's it. The rest of my life. That's it. That's the answer. It's that, okay, this has a lot of benefits here during this period of time, but later on down the line that can shift. And it's just, it's just that understanding that nothing is static. Everything shifts. So it's that. Yeah. No, I love that. And, you know, by the time this podcast gets released, I think there's a really fantastic conversation that you will have recorded with as a, as a gentlemanly debate with a big personality in the carnivore space, Sean Baker. And it will have aired. So guys, you can go back and check it out. It'll be on Ben Greenfield's channel. And I haven't listened to it yet because it's not out yet, but we discussed it off, off air earlier. And what I love about what you said is the ability for two men who really are the masters of their, and I, and I believe it's because you're both so well read and well informed that nobody got triggered. Don't love that word, but boils down to nobody got triggered. Nobody got mad. There was an exchange of thought and information in a rational way. And I don't, you know, in the end, it sounds to me like maybe there was a little bit more give on one side than the other. And I'm not going to spoil it. I'm not going to say who went where. But I think that if we need more of that, right? Because we need more of that conversation because that's how we learn and evolve and, and how people can figure themselves out within these big giant buckets of this is what you need to do kind of thing. I mean, I'm a huge proponent of what you, what you teach. Let's be clear. I'm a little skewed your way. But I, I just think that it's, it's those are the most important conversations to be had right now. Yeah. Navigate. I was going to mention a friend of mine, a friend of mine, Ron Penna, was the founder of Quest, Questbars, Quest Ventrician. And Ron and I used to have these debates on just wildly divergent views about things. And, you know, we would have these debates and, and I, I would just, you know, be there with conviction about certain things. And the funny thing is like over a long time, like over a decade, there's some things he was talking about that I've come around on. I'm like, yeah, I think he was right. Which means I must have done wrong. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that's, you know, that's, I've heard somewhere, somewhere out there, I think in the, in the ether is this conversation about how Google used to hire, probably still does hire. And it's, they want people that will advocate vociferously for their point of view, but are being, but are, but are open to being walked into like, okay, all right, makes sense. What you're saying, you're right. You have a better point of view. And that's just a good thing. It's a healthy thing. So 100%. Okay. Let's get into the big idea. Immunity first. Everything else follows. That's your, that's, that's the position really of the immunity code in, in large, in a big way. Right. So let's make the case. If immunity is the control knob for aging, where do diet and training truly fit? And what do you think people are overvaluing? Gosh, now you are on fire with these questions. Wow. Geez. This is really good stuff. Well, forcing my brain here to really stretch. It's good. It's like some oxygen waters. I'm going to go in the hyperbaric and we will resume this one. Yeah. So I think the quick answer to what you're saying is that what you find a universally missing from diet is accounting for how diet impacts the immune system, specifically precise mechanisms in the immune system. Let's take the example of, let's take the example of saturated fats and immune cells, macrophages. Okay. So saturated fats have had an interesting kind of renaissance in a sense. So, you know, they were bad, you know, now they're good. And you'll hear, you know, some people are in the camp of like, they're only good. Yeah. We were, so it's the exact polar opposite of, you know, the previous 30 years, we should say, well, no, they're only bad. And now they're only good. Okay. But what's missing in both of those reference frames is any accounting whatsoever for the impact on immune cells of saturated fats. And that's something to factor in. For example, saturated fat intake can have a very specific effect within macrophages. And what can happen is, so one of the triggers for cardiovascular disease, specifically arterial sclerosis, is the accumulation of cholesterol esters within macrophages. Okay. And so dieterally, overfeeding saturated fats tends to saturate macrophages with cholesterol esters. Okay. So that can be a direct precursor to cardiovascular disease. Now, that's not to say that saturated fats are good, we need them in the diet. But it is to say that there are unaccounted four variables in the equation of diet that are dramatically impactful. Okay. And that's a prime example. And we can keep extending this. So recently, you know, the sugar diet has been kind of like, ooh, the sugar diet, that's the way that's the answer, the sugar diet, right? And people love it because you know what, sugar, oh my God, this is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, well, again, same problem. What I haven't heard anybody talk about is the impact of sugar on very specific immune cells. And when you begin to inventory the impact of sugar, I'm talking table sugar, I'm talking, you know, sucrose. On immune cells, the first thing you'll say is, why aren't we looking at this? This is really important. So the first thing is that some people have tried to debunk the argument that sugar can promote cancer by saying, well, no, because cancer cells have so many different ways that they can feed themselves and sugar is negligible in that. Okay. And that sounds very convincing because there is a there is a there is a grain of truth in that. However, the missing variable in there is to understand the impact of sugar directly on immune cells that can potentiate cancer. So within certain types of macrophages, you know, in a tumor microenvironment, they will hyper express a very specific isoform of the insulin receptor. Okay. And this isoform is particularly sensitive to sugar and insulin signaling. And so what there's a clear correlation with is the excessive production of sugar and cancer onset, particularly in the tumor microenvironment and propagating tumors propagating cancer. And you can explain the whole thing by going back and looking at the impact of sugar on immune cells directly because immune cells and cancer cells kind of share a lot of things in common. Okay. Immune cells have to rapidly proliferate. You need to go from zero to billions of them overnight. Okay. Yeah. Guess what other kind of cell does that? Cancer cells. Okay. Yeah. And so and so when you begin to look at the impact of sugar on immune cells, what you see is that sugar acts as a key metabolic switch within immune cells. And it's necessary. So sugar can activate the HIF1 mechanism, which is your your oxygen starvation, Warburg metabolism, sort of whole cascade. And that normally, normally for immune cells is essential because it's what allows them to rapidly proliferate. So they're not relying on oxidative metabolism. They can proliferate rapidly. Okay. However, in the tumor microenvironment, that can be not such a good thing. Okay. Because tumors tend to thrive in a hypoxic environment. And so when you throw in all these immune cells that have their hypoxic switch turned on, you can see this propagation of immune cells and that's directly fed from sugar in the diet. So to answer your question, kind of in a long roundabout way, it is accounting for immune mechanisms through diet. And that's completely missing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I would also say that the other thing that that people overvalue is it's when they hear about something new. And when they're like, you know, the novelty of a new concept they've never heard of before, and that sometimes might fit their narrative and jumping on board. And this is the thing. This is I think people can overvalue anything, any one of these things, right? Like cardio is good, cardio is bad, weightlifting, and we're going to talk about weightlifting, like weightlifting is good, weightlifting is bad. And I think that over and over and over again, the lessons that our body teaches us is that extremes for the most part tend to backfire if they're not applied properly. Like you need short bursts of extremes for hormetic stressors and to trigger things. But to go to the extreme and stay there, it's like the sugar thing you just said, excess sugar over time, right? You go on that sugar diet, maybe a sugar diet for two days works. I don't know. Like I don't know anything about it. I haven't heard about it. I don't want to hear it on the slam. I'll remain closed-minded on that one. But if you get the wrong person hearing this message, which generally has been reduced to a sound bite, and they're off to the races. Yeah, you said a keyword. You said hormetic. And I'm a big advocate. Something like when you follow me, people will hear me say is that, trust me, in the industry, it's 10 years behind easily. And I think a lot of people think I'm just being a self-promoter by saying that. But if you just take a second and think about the word you just said, hormetic, which is homeostasis, okay, if that one thing was understood generally. So if everybody understood homeostasis as your benchmark, your baseline for anything. So in other words, if we had a missing, there's something missing, the thing that's missing is a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift at its core has this thing called homeostasis, which means that the body is not static. The body is a set of dynamic variables chasing equilibrium. That's what the body is. Okay. And so as these variables shift, you can see beneficial changes upfront. But then as homeostasis is sought, you can see kind of a dropping off. And then you can even see negatives long term from the very thing that you think solves the problem. And why do people keep going from thing to thing to thing? It's because the missing thing is a paradigm or an understanding that this is a homeostatic mechanism always seeking homeostasis. And that's what's missing. Now, that is not rocket science. Nobody's splitting the atom by saying that. But the question you have to come to is why is that missing? This is like 101 stuff. Why is this understanding of everything missing? And the answer is, I don't know what the answer is, but it's just ridiculous. We're always looking for a tribe. Maybe it's because we're always looking for a tribe. And so people, you know, we look at diet tribes, right? You look at diet tribes, the keto tribe, the carnivore crowd, the vegan tribe, the paleo tribe, the whatever. It's almost like there's this, you become part of the cool kids. And sometimes you have a certain degree of success, and then you become married to that thing. And I think if people walk away, because we've had a fairly esoteric conversation so far, and we're going to get down to nuts and bolts. But I think if, guys, if you walk away with one thing today, it's, you know, if you're looking for a tribe, don't look for it in your diet nutrition. Look for it in other places of your life. But when it comes to nutrition, and you teach this in your course so well, is that your nutritional needs today, I mean, there's a foundation that will always remain true, but it will change through your life depending on where you're at, what challenges your body is dealing with, for exactly what you just talked about in order to maintain balance when the inputs are very often imbalanced, you're going to have to do different things to restore the balance in different scenarios. And so accepting that the truth that you know today may change tomorrow is probably the biggest thing we kind of all need to to figure out. So all right, let's go to something maybe a little bit more quantifiable. So let's point, let's, can you point to a biomarker or a phenotype that most clean eating gym, going people myths, like so, which will predict how they they'll age, like is there, is there something like if people are doing most things right? And what do you think is one of the, like one or a collection of biomarkers? Because in this crowd of people that are looking for longevity, health span, we want to live a really long time, we want to be vibrant and mobile and smart and all the things through the our whole run, however long that run goes. Do you think there's a biomarker that we're not keeping an eye on that we probably should be? I could think of a couple, I think probably the top of the list is fasting insulin. And so often you hear, here, fasting glucose reported or you know, measures related to, you know, it wasn't seen all that but you don't hear these direct measures of like fasting insulin. And so that that was through my mind, probably be the top of the list. There are very specific acyl carnitines that you that are that are measurable that that do show up in tests. And they are really telling figures of not just metabolism, insulin, but also cardiovascular health. And in fact, they are predictors of general metabolic health. And so acyl carnitines are these forms of carnitine that can get overloaded in the mitochondria, then they get pushed out into the serum, and then they can drive insulin resistance and a bunch of other things. And there's very specific forms of them. So and you don't see these these markers a lot ever really. And so testing for acid. Nobody talks about it. Yeah. Yeah. And but if you start studying these and looking at these, what you see is that they are very predictive, they're highly predictive. So that would be another missing one just to answer your question there. So yeah, we can add to the show notes some of this more specific stuff. Yeah, you know, the recommendations on fasting insulin, but also these acetyl carnitines, like this is that's ancient people are I know people are listening going, okay, with their pen and paper, they're like, Okay, so what are they so I can write them down? Yeah, yeah, we can do all that. And we can we can look at the other and it's an interesting thing to look at. So this kind of came up in the debate as well, which is, you know, I would offer that you really are not designed to stay in ketosis forever, and you can break down why you can actually go into start to look at like, Well, what's so again, just coming back to homeostasis, there is an inherent imbalance between the TCA cycle and fat oxidation. And so what you see is fatty acid oxidation, and then you see the TCA cycle. And you see that the end product of the first is that you're going to need a subtle CoA to feed into the TCA cycle. And what you start to see over time is that you need oxaloacetate in order to pull that off. And the body's pretty good at providing that short term when you stop. So you normally get oxaloacetate from glycolysis. And when you stop ticking in carbs, the liver's got to do the heavy lifting. But the problem is over time is that you're asking the liver to do a lot of work to feed every cell in the body that glucose it needs in order to produce the oxaloacetate. And long story short, there's these inherent imbalances between the TCA cycle and fatty acid oxidation. And so you start to see a lot of things shift, you start to see this incomplete oxidation of fatty acids, which again, in the short term is fine, because you can make ketone bodies, but in the long term, you start to depress ATP levels. And then all this other goodies start to accumulate acylcarnitines. And just, you know, how does that show up in the person? Do they just start feeling like their energy is not where it used to be kind of thing? Like, you can see a general depression and metabolism from that. So ATP is our currency. That's, that's the body's money. The body's fine. So when your total output of ATP begins to drop off, that affects everything in the body. Yeah, it's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's get into myth busting muscle, because I've seen a couple of posts of yours on this. And I believe that I, and I didn't necessarily sit around and read all of them. So I'm sure the answer is in there. Part of what I got from what you were saying is that guys like this whole chasing the muscle God is not necessarily the key to longevity. So you've been pushing back on the meme that, you know, more muscle is more longevity, more is more. And so let's talk about, you know, the distinction between hypertrophy for looks versus athleticism, power for longevity. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. This one just, this one kind of gets me because, you know, it's, I've chased out my entire life and that's been here a long time. So not longer than me. I think we're, we're roughly the same vintage. Are we really? I might be older than you. I think you're younger than me. I think I'm older than you. Let's compare notes off here. But yeah, so, okay, so I'm just saying, having chased that carrot for literally 50 years, literally 50 years. Here's what I have witnessed. So this is just my personal, if you called me on the witness stand, this would be my testimony. My testimony is, and the first of all, let's acknowledge that there's been a bit of a rebrand that's taken place. So what started out, if you go back to the 70s, and you look at like, what was the thing that everybody was doing? It was essentially whole body calisthenics. That's what was taught in PE. If you went to a gym, kind of in the early mid 70s, what you would see was like, you know, you'd see a pommel horse, you'd see rings, you'd see all this kind of blent, you'd see some weights, you know, but you would see an equal amount of sort of things more for, and then what happened is, you do the calisthenics stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And that used to be, oh, do that. What the, what else? Not doing that again. What the heck, just. What just happened here? Neal's mic drop. Okay. Record skip. So what you saw, what you saw in the, starting in the 70s after pumping iron and fought, and begin to come out, was you saw a shift in the equipment in gyms, and you started to see the shift towards bodybuilding centric stuff. Okay. And you started to see a shift away from all the calisthenics. Like you started to see the ropes. It used to be things like there was the, you had these pins and you'd put them in the wall and you'd climb up the wall with the pins. And there was, you know, you had to climb the rope to the ceiling and then there was a pommel horse. You had to do the things. It was all functional stuff. Functional stuff. Yeah. And P-clash, you had to go through the monkey bars and you had to do 15 pull-ups. And, you know, so functional was just inherent to the way that fitness was approached. And then the shift happened and really got into high gear in the 80s. And what you saw from that was this downstreaming into the mainstream of this niche weirdo sport, which is, with the time, was considered incredibly narcissistic because you surrounded the gym with mirrors. And all people don't remember this, but at the time, like looking at yourself was frowned upon. And if you, and God help you if you were taking a selfie, I mean, that would have been the end of everything. And they're like, oh my gosh, this guy's a pathologic narcissist. Go get some help, dude. So, so this big shift happened. And what happened is this little cult niche thing that only weirdos did became mainstreamed until everybody's promoted it and mainstream medicines now promoted, but they rebranded it. Instead of calling it bodybuilding, they called it strength training. Okay. But if you go and you look at the movement, so you're doing 100, one to one, 100% identical to the same stuff that, you know, Robbie Robinson and Frank Zane and Franco Colombo and RR were doing in the 70s, absolutely no difference. What are you doing? Oh, oh, you're doing a pulldown. Oh, you're doing a row. Oh, you're doing delts, you know, it's the same stuff. Nothing has changed. Okay. So my testimony is after 50 years of doing that stuff, I can tell you that they're emphasizing that. Okay. Like now in my time, I've always, you know, for me, I've just always done a little bit different roadwork, sprinting and, you know, athletics and gymnastics was important to me. So I always did that stuff. But I'm just saying in my experience, having gone down that road and seen 50 years of people going down that road, you don't end up better off. What you end up with is shoulder injuries, lower back injuries, neck and, and I'm talking degenerative. Okay. Yeah. Neck issues, knee issues, hip issues. And so the things that you're going to want the most when you get to this age, which when you get to this age, the things that you're going to want the most, you don't have, which is mobility, flexibility, athleticism. And what I mean by athleticism is the ability to decelerate quickly under force. So you slip going down the stairs one step and boom, you compress yourself and you have to stop yourself. Okay. Well, as a kid, no big deal. Right. As an adult, Oh, I threw my back out because I slipped on the stairs. You know, and now I've got a disc issue and I got to go get that handle. Okay. The stuff that really matters. Like, and I'm just saying now at this part of my life, that's another thing I'm going to talk right now. I had this mu cell injection in my Achilles yesterday. I'm hobbling around like I'm 90 years old today. But it's like a taste of things. We're just giving you our best advice here. That doesn't mean that we are each paragon of perfection. Today. Today's an off day. I did. I may or may not have tweaked my SI joint today doing a heavy deadlift. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the point I'm making here is that now what's being sold to the public is this notion that a rebranded 70s bodybuilding is the answer. And I'm telling you, anybody that's been down that road 50 plus years ago, no, that's not the answer. Trust me. Cause when you look at everybody that actually did that and you look at what they're doing now, go look at Kevin LaVroni. Go look at Dorian Yates. Go look at everybody that was the master that they're all doing athletic stuff now. When you look at them, like Kevin LaVroni, he's sprinting, he's, you know, doing all kinds of stuff. You look at like Dorian Yates, he's into cycling and all this stuff. So, so all of us that actually bought the Kool-Aid and went down that road, found out the hard way. And now what I see off, what I see out there is this meme of, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no muscle, muscles, the answer, you know, which is another way of saying, no, no, 70 70s bodybuilding is the answer. Okay. So to put that in a, an intelligent measured sort of response, it has a place. It certainly does. I do it a couple of times a week. I'm, you know, who's kidding who I go to the gym. I do the 70s bodybuilding stick. I do biceps. I do, you know, all the beach muscles. But the issue with that is if that's what you're, if that's what your main focus is, you're going over time to lose everything you actually going to really need. So number one thing that, that is never trained that you're going to lose is you're going to lose the strength in the feet. You can lose strength in the feet, the Achilles and the cap. So you're going to lose strength there. And then from there, that compromises the knees and the hips and the lower back and all the things that, and trust me, when you get to this age, you're going to want your mobility. You're going to want your vitality and your energy. That's the number one thing. And I see guys all the time at the gym who are huge walking around and they're hobbling and they're like, I got a knee. You can't touch their shoulders. Yeah. You do this. You'd ask them to touch their shoulders, their hands stop like three to four inches above their shoulders. I had to check. Can I touch? I used to be married to a guy who literally couldn't touch his shoulders. It was like my big joke. I'm like, touch his shoulders. Come on. Oh my gosh. What if just now I went like this? But what you were talking about here is functionality, training rotation, training, like you said, like if you're about to fall down the stairs, training the reflex and the, and you can only stop yourself from falling down the stairs without throwing out your back. If you've trained outside those planes of motion that you're kind of relegated to in traditional weightlifting. Well, go ahead. No. And what I was going to say, I mean, the challenge is that when we have a population of people who have now finally heard the message that over the age of pick a number, 45, 50, whatever it is, sarcopenia really starts to pick up. And so we must work towards holding the muscle that we have in building more. And you're talking also to a portion of the population who didn't work out. So they don't have that much muscle to begin with. So they need to, they've got, they've got to make up for lost time a little bit. I think that, you know, again, like I think in an effort to get people moving in the right direction, we're over delivering on one message. And, and we need more nuance in that message still because, and I think the other thing is sorry, one last point is that in the model that you're talking about, we're chasing an aesthetic. And, and the aesthetic is never going to get you. Like I once heard this incredible quote, which was, we look at athletes and we go, Oh, wow, I want a body like that. What we don't understand is that that body is not was never the goal. It's a byproduct of the training that they did to achieve the goals that they're chasing. And, and we get caught because we're such a visual world because we care so much about how we look, we get caught wanting to look a certain way, which is when you're doing the deltoids. And like, you know, you're working, I'm working my shoulders today. Well, are you working your shoulders? Are you working your shoulders so you can move your arm in all the different planes you need to move it in? Or are you working your shoulders because your anterior and your posterior and your medial deltoids are not developed enough to give you the look that you want? It's, well, yeah. So if, if we were to put one word to what we're talking about here, it's youthfulness. Okay. That's what we're talking about is youthfulness. So a youthful person can slip on the stairs and, you know, fall down a step and they just catch themselves. They, their body absorbs the instantaneous recoil and they're fine. No issues. Okay. You can have a person who looks cosmetically good and does that same thing and throws their back out. Okay. Yeah. So the problem that we have is, I know, I don't think I know, I know the behind the scenes. So the behind the scenes has two variables that, that the average person listening can never replicate. And that is your whole day being free to look good by working out and then drugs. Okay. And that is the honest to gosh truth. So you don't know what someone's taking. And when you, if I were to take those variables away from that person and say, okay, you don't have your whole day. In fact, you don't even have two minutes. I'll, by the way, we're going to drug test you every day because we know what you're doing when you're in the bathroom. Okay. Then all of a sudden that whole paradigm would fall apart because, because they wouldn't be able to parade these, you know, cosmetically enhanced physiques that have nothing to do with anything. Okay. And don't, don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm the first guy to want to look good and, you know, train that. I, I get it. You know, I'm, we all do. We're all believers. We all want that. So we're not saying that's not important. But what we are saying here is that youthfulness and a, and a keeping youthfulness and obtaining youthfulness is a whole different animal. And with that, you have to understand if you're a listener that let's be real here. The average person's not going to gain 10 pounds of solid muscle. Okay. That isn't, that is probably, probably not going to happen. I'm not saying it can happen. It's going to be hard. It's a lot of work. That's a lot of time, a lot of dedication. And I'm not even saying, I'm not even saying it's not a worthy goal. I think you probably ought to just, you know, set that as a long-term goal. That's great. But it's very, very difficult to do. It's very hard to do for most people because the time required to do it and the, you know, the consistent dedication required to do it. So, so there's a, there's a, there's a yen and a yen here. One is, and I'll also differentiate this between sexes. I think the acquisition of muscle over 50 is a lot more important to women than it is men. Okay. I think, I think that there's a The bone, do you think, are you talking about psychologically or it's more important because we're losing our bones and without muscles, we can't rebuild our, we can't hang onto the bone. Yeah. No, for those reasons and all that. So I think it's, I think there's a higher priority on women. Plus it's harder for women to gain muscle. So I think that, you know, we can't treat both sexes the same in this conversation. So, so if you're listening, and I would just say that I'm not saying it's not important. I'm saying that there's a place for it, certainly is. And if you're a woman, there's, there's probably more of a place than there is for a guy. The thing I'm saying though is that this idea that the answer is to put on more muscle and you're going to live longer, is provably false. It's provably false. And I could prove it. I could prove it just, just purely from a vascularization argument. But can we, but can we be more specific because I think more muscle is a relative term? Yeah. If you're muscle deficient, right? If you're deficient in muscle mass, so you're at a, you're at a disadvantage. You're a disadvantage when you fall down the stairs. You're a disadvantage metabolically. You're at a disadvantage posturally, which is going to affect the way you're, or you know, like you're a diss, if you're, if you're deficient in it, it's kind of like supplements, right? If you're actually deficient in something, supplementing with the something is going to be good for you. If you're not deficient in something and you supplement with something, it's either not going to do anything or buy you. Yeah. Muscle, it's the same. It's more nuanced as a conversation. Yeah. This is hard for the polarized mind to grab onto because you, because the, you know, the, the tendency is to want to think that, oh, muscle is either bad or good. We're not, none of that is in this condo here. What we're saying is that, we're saying is that, yeah, no, we're not saying it's not important, but, but, but the way that you're going to obtain youthfulness longterm, you're not, I'm telling you right now, my personal opinion, if all you're doing is focusing on 70s bodybuilding, you're not going to get there. That's my opinion. Okay. Yeah. And something interesting to look at to the whole argument that, you know, muscle and longevity, you know, correlate, all you have to do is look at the amount of vascularization required for a pound of muscle. Okay. And so you have to look at, okay, so in order to gain this one thing, I need these other things. I need to vascularize that. So let's say I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle. All that muscle has to be vascularized. And there's a, there's a rate limiter there with respect to that. So basically, as you get older, one of the issues is that the cardiovascular system is declining in its ability to vascularize tissue. And you can make the argument and say, well, okay, but strength training is a great way to fight that. And you would be correct. That is true. Yeah. Absolutely. That's true. However, the problem is there's a systemic issue. And so you, at your max capacity, you only have your VL2 max, you, the more muscle you gain, there is a diminishing return in the ability to vascularize that muscle. Now, anybody who's ever seen like, for example, mixed martial arts, 100% knows that's true. Like the big guys don't do well because they gas out because they can't oxygenate that tissue. Yeah. It's metabolically expensive. hugely expensive. Yeah. So as you're getting older, the whole purpose of breathing is to make ATP and ATP becomes your constraint, your, your, your limiting factor. And so if you're carrying around a bunch of muscle, you have to vascularize, oxygenate that muscle in order to make ATP, but you have a, the size of the pipe is diminishing. And so you get into this inverse equation between the more muscle you have, at some point, you reach a limit in terms of how you can oxygenate that, that tissue, how you can vascularize it. And so that affects the system as a whole. Okay. It affects the whole system because you can only make X amount of ATP. Let's say your ceiling is 100. Okay. And you're, you're, you're trying to add more tissue, okay, more tissue that you have to oxygenate. So that means as a whole, there is muscle. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you could just, you could break, I mean, we could do a scientific thing on this and show like kind of this whole ratio of things, but just to say that the amount of muscle is a variable. However, the type of muscle is also extremely important. So when you look at athletic muscle and you look at youthful muscle, there's a, there's a shape element to it. You know, it's certainly attractive, but it's not excessive. And it's incredibly functional. So when you look at athletes, they look really good, but they're really good at stopping. They're really good at compressive forces. And there's, there's a, that's the thing that's going to keep you young. Youthfulness has a lot to do with being able to decelerate rapidly. And, and that and training that as, as an ongoing way of life is the thing. Well, and I've heard you talk about also sprinting, like you should be able to sprint, not, it doesn't have to be far, but you should be able to go from zero to whatever your top speed is quickly. And we lose that ability. As a matter of fact, was that an event a couple of years ago where a few men who had had a little bit too much to drink at one o'clock in the morning decided it would be a really good idea to go outside and have a race. So we know that this and well, never does. And one guy in particular who'd had a hip replacement and decided he was going to ignore the fact that he'd had a hip replacement and all of what that entails made it four steps before he pulled a hamstring. Yeah. And that guy is actually a really good athlete, really good VO two max, all the things. But the one thing that he doesn't pay attention to is mobility and flexibility. It's youthfulness. It's not there. And it's, it's that youth. Exactly. It's that it's that resilience that's built into the system. So we're getting, I do want to leave people with, we've told them a lot about what not to do, like don't chase the aesthetic, don't chase the bulk. You want to chase what you're chasing is the is is the pliability. It's the fluidity. It's the ability to not go into the office with your hand on your back going, I don't know what happened. I tried to pick up a poker clip and I threw out my back in the car, which happens, right? Like it just, it just happens. So, so let's, let's tell people what to do, like what do, what do we want? What would be a great prescription? And, and, and if there's one strength and movement test that you'd use as longevity check, checkpoints each decade, like what's your pass fail kind of thing on that? Yeah. So the simplest, easiest thing to incorporate in what you do, and it's so simple, it's so easy is take a mat, something soft as a little springiness to it, and then jump up and down or jump rope on it, for example, and do that roughly a minute a day and then work up to two, three minutes a day and just do that as part of your non-negotiable foundation across the years. And what happens is by jumping up and down on something springy, you're not, you're not taking sort of the, the, the weakest parts of your connective tissue and forcing all the load into that, you're allowing the force to be distributed kind of across all of the different parts of your connective tissue. And so they have an opportunity to strengthen over time and you're building pliability and springiness back into the first thing to go. And it's so simple and easy to do. It's like just, just, yeah, just take a soft surface, either hop on it or jump rope on it, one of the two, and just do a minute a day, the rest of your life on that and that will, that will serve you better. What about on a rebounder for people? When you say a rebounder, like a little mini trampoline, just on a mini trampoline. Yeah, maybe use something a little less skill-based because skipping, I mean, I do skipping at my gym, but it's shocking how many people really can't skip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Um, yeah, so I don't, my mind's just going like, is that two springy? I don't know. And I suppose, yeah, that's the answer. Well, it's, it's interesting, you know, I've, I've had, I have a mini trampoline at my cottage because I have my power plate here, I have my mini trampoline there. So I kind of covered, and the number of people I've put on that mini trampoline who don't move as a general rule, it is amazing how challenging it is to them to do that little, because it engages all the muscles in the foot. You mentioned the feet earlier, like I transitioned to barefoot shoes a couple of years ago. And I used to be a classical ballet dancer. So my feet used to be really strong, incredibly mobile and flexible. And I lost that over the years because we're wearing these big clunky shoes that kind of take over and do all the work. And it took a while to transition into the barefoot shoe. But what the barefoot shoe does that I think a lot of people don't realize is it reignite, it reignites all those little joints and muscles in the foot that allow for functional movement all the way up the system. It allows your brain to receive messaging from the foot again about where in space you are and that kind of stuff. And in that example, and whether you're bouncing on a trampoline or skipping, as you talk about, it's about neural messaging, and it's what you're saying, it's flexibility and strength at the same time. And maybe one of the things that people need to look out for is that as you're building strength, you also want to build flexibility. And that in and of itself might be a limiting factor to overdoing the strength piece. Yeah, I think that's great. Yeah, I'm locked, I'm stuck with you on that for sure. Yeah. And so two of the metrics, I mean, there's a few metrics people use, right? And maybe let's talk about those. There's grip strength, there's sit to stand time that it takes you to get from the floor up. And I know you've talked about this. What's the other big one? The there's grip strength, sit to stand? Well, the real indicators of big toe strength. That's the best. That's a bit. Yeah, big toe strength is a much better indicator than any of those. So grip strength really just relates to overall strength and decline of overall strength, which that's an indirect measure of basically falls. So as your overall strength, so that's a more, so in other words, if you're linking grip strength to mortality, why does grip strength relate to mortality? Because you're, you're essentially measuring loss of strength in the body as a whole. But the real specific indicator is big toe strength. So when you start to see loss of strength in the big toe, that one to one correlates to things like falls that take you out. And so when you look at old people, the big danger is falling. You know, that's what like, I've seen this a hundred times, you know, it's you get someone who's a little bit older and they're kind of getting along okay, and then they have a fall and from the fall, they have a skull, they have a stroke and all kinds of stuff. How do you make your big toe stronger? Yeah, so this is a, this is hugely, hugely important thing. Okay, I don't, I don't, I do train my big toe, but I do it indirectly. And so there's two ways to do this. The first way is that you get a band and you put it on the big toe and then you kind of go back and you go forth and you just, you know, over time train your big toe. Okay. We're gonna do your first guys. Yeah, no, it's the thing. It really is. The way that I do it, because that's, that's, that gets in time consuming. So I'm kind of grouping things together. But the way that I do it is I'll get on the seated calf machine where your legs are extended. And I just train it differently. So what I do is I get on the ball of the foot and instead of doing bodybuilding type stuff where you're doing, you're going very slow, it's all explosive force. So what I'm doing is I'm pushing the weight out and then catching it as it comes back. And so decelerating slowly, not slowly, I mean, it's a, it's a, excuse me, it's a rapid, it's a rapid, very rapid deceleration. And so, but it's all the ball of foot and the big toe. And so I'm just pushing with those things. And that's training not just the feet, but it's also training in the calves and, you know, tendons and all that stuff in that area. The trick with that is just to find the right weight, because what you don't want to do is once, once you start doing explosive movements like that, you can get hurt easily. So you got to find the right way. You got to find the way that allows you to do it explosively, but you're not going to hurt yourself and you can decelerate properly. And so, so that's a big deal. And, but it's just that shift into an athletic thing versus a body building thing. And it's just in how you're doing it. A new year doesn't need a new you. Here's a new concept. Maybe it just needs a version of you with a little more cellular horsepower. 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That's timeline.com forward slash Nat 2026 while the offer's in place. So don't delay. So the takeaways, guys, we're not saying not to go to the gym and lift weights. We're saying and yes, once or twice a week, lift heavy things, but make sure you're also training the mobility, the rotation, the flexibility, the fluidity and the deceleration, which is really interesting. I've never heard somebody talk about that. Yeah. And the interesting thing is that you can build those things into your... So I have my negotiable stuff and my non-negotiable. And in my first book, I talked about a new foundation and the problem is you need a foundation that doesn't take time. All this stuff you're being told is coming from people who've never had a real job. They don't understand what it's like to not have a real job. So you have to have a non-negotiable foundation, which is a minute here, a minute there. And into that, what you build in is this stuff. And that, done over years, transforms your life through life in profound ways because as you reach this age, you're not hobbling around. You're moving fast and quick and you can do all this stuff that you could do. And that's youthfulness. Yeah, 100%. It's funny. My parents are both in their late 80s now. And I was looking... They came to visit me not too long ago. And the reason why they look so much younger than they are is because of the way they move. It's remarkable. They move like young people. And I don't know... They don't train that, but they're at the gym every day. They're doing their things. But whatever it is that they're doing is that they still move like a much... I've seen 70 year olds move worse, like they have a lot of restrictions or don't move properly. And so that youthful movement is really what we're all after. Totally. 100%. It's that. It's... Does your movement youthful? Actually, can I steal that? That's perfect. By all means. Anytime. Okay, so for someone who's been really sedentary, right, what's the weekly split here? Like, what do you... How do we help people to get started? Because I think right now people might be a little bit confused. So for someone who has been sitting around and we can split it between men and women, if you want. But I think in general, sedentary people are sedentary people. Are there any lifts that they should really be training? And or what do you think is the best way for them to get started? I would start with a three month ramp into strengthening the feet, the Achilles and the calves. And you don't even have to... I actually have a free course where I actually have a training through this, but just generally speaking, what you would want to do, I would start... If you're really sedentary, I would just literally start at the gym on... There's three things I would do. I would start on a standing calf machine. And rather than doing reps, what you want to do is you want to do maximum contraction, maximum extension under load. So what you want to do is put the weight on that you can handle. And number one, go into an extension on the ball of your foot and hold it. Hold it for right... So you're going up on your tippy toes, guys. That's what an extension is. Yes. Hold that for a minute to two minutes under load. Okay? Well, then go down into max extension of your... So you still on the ball of your foot, your foot is hanging off the thing. And you go into max extension, where the Achilles is being stretched, the calf's being stretched, the foot's being stretched, and then you hold it for a minute to two minutes under load. And then over time, over about three months, just increase the load. Okay? So maximum extension under load, maximum contraction under load. This is really what has been... One of the things that's been shown to improve all the aspects of athletic ability is... What we're doing is we're forcing the muscles to stretch beyond their natural limit and we're doing under load. We're forcing them to push beyond their natural limit and hold it. And so do about two sets like that to start, you know, and just start with the weight you can handle. Don't overdo it. And then just over about three months you build up. The next thing I would do is what I talked about earlier is get on a... Get on a calf machine where you're seated, lying down with your feet extended, and just lightly begin to work the feet and pushing off. So what you're not doing here is you're not doing jump rope standing up before you're ready to do it. And then the next thing I would do is migrate into what we talked about earlier on a soft surface where you're hopping or you're doing jump rope. So I would do those three things and I would do that for about three months to start with, starting with the first two and then migrating into the next if you've been really sedentary. And then pick one of those, preferably the jumping rope or the hopping on a soft surface and make that daily. So that becomes a daily thing. You do that a minute a day, the rest of your life, preferably one to three minutes a day you can build up. Some days maybe you can only do a minute, some days you can do three minutes. That becomes your foundation. And then, you know, once twice a week you're in the gym and you're doing adding these extra things on. And so what this does is it keeps the contact point. So something really profound to think about is that all youthfulness has to channel power and directional changes through the feet quickly. That's youthfulness. You could define it, you could define this quality, this this effemeral ability to move. You could define it by that. You could define it by how you're able to push energy through the feet and directional changes through the feet rapidly. And so this is a key missing aspect of youthfulness. Yeah. And don't forget that that involves the brain. It involves your entire nervous system responding to that. And I think that's why that's so profound. As a matter of fact, rebuilding the calf muscle has a lot to do with getting blood back up to the heart. It's a second heart. Right? It's a second heart. And we underestimate that. So I will give people one piece of advice. If you have never done this before, start with no weight because you won't be able to walk the next day. Just to make it clear. If you've not worked on your calves for a long time, which most of us haven't, I promise you, you will be so sore. So underestimate your weight to start and just gradually load up as you go. Okay. So recovery rules, what becomes non-negotiable after 50 to actually build muscle? So what I said before is that, you know, it's hard to build muscle. And now I'm going to contradict myself. And I'm going to say that if you know how to do it properly, it's not that hard. Okay. It's just not well understood. And so there are approaches to building muscle that create a greater probability of being able to get the thing you want. And one of those involves the convergence of three different things. The first thing is overeating. Okay. So eating in excess of your daily caloric requirement and doing it in short bursts of about 10 days on and then going off for a couple weeks and then coming back to it. Okay. Yeah. I remember this from the course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the, so what's generally missing from the equation of gaining muscle is that if you overeat and you eat a lot of food, like 2x what you normally eat, you are triggering all of these growth pathways in the body. And it's, this is the natural way to mimic steroids. This is the closest a natural human being can ever get to mimicking steroids is through overfeeding. And it makes sense if you think about it. So like think about this, like just ancestrally speaking, if you were starving for a couple of weeks and you were gone and you lost a bunch of weight and then, you know, you killed a water buffalo and you ate 10 pounds of meat and you slept a lot, you would put on a bunch of muscle really fast. Okay. And you slept a lot. Yeah. And slept. Yeah. Yeah. And that's because this is something that the body is well wired to do. It's, it's, this is, you're tapping into ancestral survival mechanisms by doing that. It's whenever you tap into survival, you tap into power. So tapping into overfeeding in order to put muscle on is something the body knows how to do. And it knows how to do it even better coming off of starving. So going from fasting into overeating, the body will, it's hard wired to put muscle on. So, but the trick is to understand that you got to eat a lot and you got to, and that's hard. It's very hard. It's very hard. And for how long? So how long is each how long would you say the fast into the overfeed? Because you could have people listening to this going done. I'm in. Yeah. Joel Green said, I need to eat double my calories in order to put on muscle. I'm all in. Well, that's easy with junk food. Very hard with clean food. Correct. Very hard. So clean food, you know, after your fifth meal of a thousand calories or what in my case, I'm, you know, your dreams. Yeah. Yeah. It's the hardest thing in the world because your brain, your brain has a meter that gives you reward for food. And once you start getting, you know, tons of food, the meter goes to zero. And it's like, it's just, it's just like eating paste. Like, it's like, I can't eat anymore. But I would say, generally speaking, you know, a three to five day fast and then going to overfeeding for 10 days. So the body has a unique ability within about a 10 to 12 day window where most of the overfeeding actually goes to help put muscle on very little goes to fat. You're getting a little bit fat, but you gain a lot of muscle. The second piece of that is, and it's difficult to for a lot of people will get this. A lot of people won't. It is controlled intensity under tempo. Okay. So what do I mean by that? Controlled intensity means that you cannot look around the gym. You, you, you, you, okay. If you can look around the gym, the weight you're using is too light. So there's, there's a max intensity that's required, but there's a check and that check is called the tempo. So in other words, like there's a tempo to it. It's kind of a kind of a tempo. When you look at the people that have figured this out better than anybody that's ever lived, these are high level Mr. Olympia competitors. What you'll see is that they're doing max intensity under tempo. Now that's different from max intensity. Max intensity by itself is just the heaviest freaking weight possible for a few reps. And that you're venturing into getting her. Okay. So, so it's not that heavy. It's lighter, but it's heavier than what you're used to doing. And so what you're doing is you're, you're trying to get your rep range into roughly 10 to 12, but that's it. You couldn't do a single more rep and there's a tempo to what you're doing. So you're very slow on the, on the eccentric part. You're very slow. But there's a, but there's still a tempo to it. There's, there's still kind of a rhythm to it. But so like, I could take all the tempo out of it. I could take all the tempo and just, and I do that sometimes where I'll just, it's basically weight lowering and, you know, I'm going this slow, you know, and then very fast on the, on this part. But when you add the tempo in, it's kind of like this. There's a little bit of a cheat to it. So that kind of thing. Okay. So maximum intensity with tempo, you combine those two things. And then you don't need to train that often. If you're doing that. Now, this is a little Mike Menzner stuff. And it has its place. Mike Menzner was this big advocate of only need one or two sets, which was complete rubbish. If you looked at what he did, because he didn't count his four warmup sets. Those don't count. Those don't count. This is a two hour workout. And he's like, no, all that really counts is the 15 minutes I'm showing you. That was just to warm up to do these two intense sets. Okay. So, so there's, there's a, there's a yin and yang balance between volume and intensity, you know, but all that to say, you can train much less than you think you need to by, by ratcheting up the intensity and the tempo and the food. And you can train, you know, a couple of times a week like that. And that's kind of all you need, because then you need the recovery in between. You need lots of food, lots of sleep, you know, all that stuff. So you said earlier, three to five day fast, that's out of the realm of, of possibility for a lot of people for any number of reasons that we don't, you know, we don't really need to go into right now. So from a practical perspective, would you say that being lower in your daily calories is enough for many people to kind of mimic that, that it's like there's scarcity from to go from scarcity to abundance and scarcity to abundance and kind of build a cycle that's maybe a little less extreme, but more doable for people so that for three to five days, you're eating less. But then you know that on the other side of this, you're going to eat more. Yeah, there's a simple, I have a book out called the way which basically lays that out. And it's very simple. It's so to mimic fasting, you only need to reduce us, you only need to reduce methionine intake by about 40% and what methionine is in all your proteins. So there's a day in, in, in the way diet, which is called the ancestral pattern. And this just mimics foraging. So you're eating, you can eat across the whole day, but your protein intake is very low. So that, that, that does it right there. You're mimicking, fasting by there and you're going to be hungry on that. You're going to be hungry because really you're, you're, you're eating things that, you know, very low protein intake, mostly like fibers and, you know, some fruits and starches, but you're going to be hungry on that. So take some tessithenicine or, you know, whatever it is you need to get through that. But you can do that for three to five days on end. And then coming out of that into the next piece of the equation, which is you need a lot of protein intake. So, you know, 2.5 to three grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. So a lot of protein, yeah, a lot of protein, but it's not ongoing. Right. So you're not sure the thing, right? You're not over expressing MTOR indefinitely. No, it's very short. All we're doing is mimicking coming out of starving into overfeeding and the body will put on a lot of money. I mean, I've done this many times over the years with tons of people and every single person, two of ones like, oh my gosh, that works. And the cool thing about it that I just love is it's just food. That's all it is. It's just food. It's just the power of food. But it's, but it makes sense if you think about it. Like if our body didn't have that ability to rapidly regain muscle after starving, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. 100%. Let's talk a little bit about optimizing insulin, training the signal, non fear avoidance. So we discussed this way back on episode 86. of this podcast. Wow. We're by the time this comes out, we'll be pushing 400 or we will have broken through 400. So do you want to give the high level answer for this once more and has anything changed since 2022? And then they can kind of people can go back to the episode. Yeah, no, this, so that episode actually predated my book, The Way and everything in that episode was in the way. So that was just kind of, you know, coming attractions. No, having changed the thing. And it's this, the one word is balance in the diet is the optimal thing to train optimal insulin sensitivity. It's provable. So you look at just so quick answer here. You need six things to really train instant optimally, you need to stimulate insulin on a regular basis through carbohydrate sources that insulin sensitize. You need look around stimulation, you need out of connecting stimulation, you need GLP one, you need GIP. And then you need all that in an optimized microbiome because the two things interface quite a bit. So that's your foundation. And then you go to, well, how do I do that? And the immediate thing you see when you look at that is polarity. So, well, I need to stimulate Gugigan, but oh, that has to happen separate from stimulating insulin. They're not on the same. They're opposing. Yeah. They're not on the same beachfront. And okay, well, how do I do that? What foods? The foods are opposed, completely opposed. Like so when you look at stimulating and making insulin really sensitive optimally, really, it's carbohydrates that do that, which a lot of people, a lot of ex carnivores now doing the sugar diet have figured out like, oh, wow, my insulin's better. Wow. Okay. So mechanistically, it's provable. You can say, well, I need Gugigan to work sort of to be really sharp. I need insulin to be really sharp. The foods that are going to stimulate Gugigan are proteins primarily proteins, fats, things, fasting, things like that. The things that are going to stimulate insulin are your, your resistance arches, your pulse crops, things that make things that have a very long, low, slow yield of, of glucose into the serum, those sharpen insulin and they're opposed mutually. They're opposed in terms of when you do them and they're opposed diametrically in terms of food tribes and categories. They're different. And so right away, that proves that for optimal insulin function, you need balance in the diet, but you can extend the argument even further. So when you begin to look at the microbiome and you go, okay, well, I need an octomalic ribion and that's a simple equation, like just to, just to make it really dumb down and simple. You need two family bacteria. You need Bephidobacteria and acrimansia. If you get those two, you'll get everything else. Well, how do you do that? Well, there looks like they're, they're kind of a post-summit. Yeah. How do I stimulate the Fidobacteria? So the foods that are going to stimulate that are generally five, six categories. It's nuts, berries, resistant starches, dairy. And so those are going to stimulate your Bephidobacteria. Your acrimansia is going to be a combination of fasting, combination of things, certain types of fruits, things like that. Like red fruits, like red fruits, like red fruits, like red fruits, things like that. So those things, those things work together to stimulate those. Okay. Of that list, only one is in the animal foods category, which is your dairy that is going to really stimulate the Fidobacteria, but they work better together than they do apart. So you're going to get a better stimulation of dairy, or Bephidobacteria with dairy, combined with fruits. Okay. So all I'm doing is what we're doing here is reverse engineering how to get what we want. And it's taking us back into what I started with is balance here. That's what, so we can reverse engineer kind of what a diet should look like for most people just by going, what do I need? And then working backwards, how do I stimulate that? And so what we've done with just two examples here is shown that balance is the thing that's going to optimally stimulate insulin. And in this equation is timing. So not everything at the same time. There's, there's days that look different. There's days where I'm more on the glucagon train. There's days when I'm more on the insulin train. They're different. And that makes nature, nature forces you into this unpredictable sort of, you know, dietary consumption that keeps the body guessing, but naturally stimulates all of those mechanisms. So you get optimal insulin function. And where you screw that up is through mono dieting for too long. Yeah. Well, and I think I want to give a shout out to your program because I remember when I, back when I did, I did the coaches course at that time, you had a seven day plan. And one day we were pushing insulin and one day we weren't in the neck, you know, and, and I got into a rhythm with that seven day program. That was it turned, it became, it was a little bit hard at the beginning, just kind of getting my head around all the different things to do. But once you get into that rhythm, you, you can almost turn your brain off because you then you've learned the idea, you've learned the principles. And where it can get messy is if you don't respect that this day is in salin day and this day is when they start crossing over is when you get, when you get messy. But you guys like get the, and you still have a course, right? Do you still offer the program? Yeah. Yeah. But this is in the way. So the coaches course just had that info two years before you have a consumers course, do you have a course for people that are not coaches? I would say the book, the way is the book, that's exactly in the book, which is kind of your, you know, cheapest entry level to kind of learn all that. And then my fat loss course kind of is a step through of that. But, but you just, even with just the book, you can pick up on that, the pattern that you're talking about. So yeah, yeah. And that pattern is because I think that, you know, people listening to this or they're sitting with their pen in their paper going, okay, I'm still not sure what I'm eating. You could trust me on this, get the book. All will be clear. And it's not that we're here to sell the book. It's that it makes such a difference to your world when you start to get into these patterns. And, and what's what I love about the program, the way you wrote it is, look, there's going to be nights that are going to be nachos and beer, there's going to be that night where you're not able to be home, there's going to be the day where you're, it's going to be Thanksgiving, like how do I manage that giant Thanksgiving dinner? And you have strategies and tips and tricks for people to do this. I mean, I still do my preloading shake, you know, every once in a while, if I feel like I really need it. So there's, and there's always a rationale behind it. So if you're, if you're willing to make your nutrition, your project, and it'll take you a little while to kind of dial it in, it gives you a roadmap that you can just keep using over time to get yourself to that point of balance that you might have been missing. You know what I realized? I'm sorry, go ahead and make a shot. Yeah, no, I just, it transcends paleo, carnivore, keto, whatever. Like it just, it transcends all of those things. And all of a sudden you're eating like a normal person because you eat all the things. I just realized next time I do this, I need some glitter. And when you go, it transcends, I just whip the glitter up. If we were on zoom, you could have hit the glitter button. All right, so listeners love rules of thumbs and we're going to wind up soon, because you know, as per usual, when you and I start talking, we just keep going. But what's one rule for mornings and one for the biggest meal and one for four hours before bed to improve insulin without excessively tracking? So what's rule of thumb for the morning, one for the biggest meal, and one for four hours before bed? Rule of thumb for the morning is that you're not doing the same thing every day. So you're not doing breakfast every day, you're not doing fasting every day, that you're mixing it up, that would be rule number one. Rule for the big meal is that you strategically insert it at breakfast once or twice in your week. And it's very strategic, because that's going to help you do a lot of things. It helps reset your sleep plot, it helps you keep from overeating at dinner, it helps the accumulation of debt to key hormones sort of spins down the ratio of growing the left in and all that. So you know, those big meals are really important, it's just when you do them. So and not only when it's when in the week you do them. So there's a time of day, but then there's the place in the week. And so that matters a lot, like Sunday is really good, Wednesday is really good. And then what's the other one? Wednesday breakfast was really good. Four hours before bed, keep your mouth shut. Oh, yeah, four hours before bed. Put on your mouth tape before four hours before bed. Oh my gosh, that would change. So many marriages would be saved. Stop. That's it, you just, you hit it, you hit the answer. That's a divorce rate plunge from 70 to 30. I could just imagine, dad, I heard on your podcast that mouth tape right before bed and my wife and I are doing great. Yeah, so my wife and I are doing great, but are. So, but I was going to say, yeah, so I would just say that, again, it's just variety. There isn't, you know, you've heard, oh, don't, you've heard these kind of like all encompassing rules of like, oh, don't eat four hours before bedtime. But there is actually, you could break all those rules for different reasons. So sometimes it's better to not eat four hours before bedtime. Other times it's better to have a really small carbohydrate meal an hour or two before bedtime. Like if you're deficient on sleep, that's going to help you sleep. And then, you know, so you hear all these counter arguments, yeah, but the liver needs to, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, what's more important, good sleep or, you know, your liver doing some proposed autophagy that you think. Well, and what you're talking about is an intervention for a means. Like we're not saying anybody should eat every night, one or two hours before a meal. Like you're struggling with sleep. So let's help you to fix that. And then you're going to go back to don't eat four hours before you go to bed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, it's just, it's again, it's getting us out of this notion that the body's static. It's not, it's once again, just to hammer the head, the nail here, it's a, it's a homeostatic mechanism with a bunch of dynamic variables seeking balance, seeking homeostasis. So I need more glitter. More glitter. So in the last year, which protocol from your books, do you personally use the most? Because there's some crazy stuff and there's hip one training, there's all these things. What outcome surprised you? I just, I just use the basic pattern religiously. I just live by that basic pattern of, you know, kind of my more foraging foods days versus my more, you know, fasting protein, fat centric days. I just, I just, I kind of always live on that always. And I would say one thing that most people would be surprised on is that there's on the first day of that, there's what I mentioned before the ancestral pattern, which is you're cutting protein down generally, what you hear is more protein, more protein, but you're actually doing the reverse, you're cutting protein down. It really helps you stay lean, really helps you stay lean over time. So what we're looking for is, which is a whole other episode, it would just be to talk about the problem with weight loss and what the problem people are trying to do. One of the problems is, you know, you lose weight and you regain the weight, but then you don't have a mechanism to gradually maintain over time. And so you need several inserts into your week. You need to think about weekends, you need to think about certain nights where you have a fat brain day. But one of the most important things is just having a day that helps you stay lean that you're always in periodically. And taking your protein very low, taking your foraging foods high, you're cutting cysteine down, cysteine depletion, and it helps you drop fat. It's one of the reasons a sugar diet works is you're just cutting protein intake down. So you can make a, there's a very good case, since it goes back to the 70s, that you can get fat loss by eliminating any one macro. Doesn't matter what it is, you can eliminate fat, you'll lose fat, you'll eliminate carbs, lose fat. What people, most people don't realize is you can eliminate protein, you'll lose fat. Any one macro eliminating, you'll lose fat for a while. Works really well. Yeah, exactly. So just having a periodic insert where it looks a little more ancestral is such a bonus long term. The dividends are not immediate, but what's doing long term is it's helping you, it's helping you stay lean. And one of the big undeclared problems is just gradual weight gain over time, just year after year, just a half pound here, a pound there. And then, you know, by the time you're 60, you know, you're 60 pounds overweight and you got real problems. Yeah, that creep, and for women, especially postmenopause, we get that 10 pound bump right out of the gate. And then the one to two pounds a year after that, it doesn't take long to get to 20, 25 pounds overweight. So it's insidious. Okay, let's start by, let's start to wind ourselves down here, because we could keep going for a long time. You've spoken quite a lot and very eloquently about faith and stillness. How did those shape your health rules when the science is kind of fuzzy? Such good questions. Say that again. You've spoken about faith and stillness. How did those shape your health rules when the science is fuzzy? Like, you know, you're looking at stuff and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, so just, you know, well, I would just mirror some things I've said before, which is that, you know, we're not just a body, we're a body and a spirit, and you need to feed both. The spirit needs food too. Anybody can kind of prove this to themselves if you've ever been through a period in your life where, you know, you were just kind of go, go, go, go and pass, task, task, task, task. And after a while, your soul is just starving for, you know, some indefinable thing, but it's, it's, you know, your soul needs to be fed. And so stillness is what feeds the soul quiet and stillness and beauty. Those things feed the soul. And, you know, there's, there's some empirical evidence that suggests, you know, things like forest bathing and things like that, that there's some, there's some truth to that meditation, you know, all those things sort of empirically validate that, I would say. But it's, in the world we live in now, particularly with social media, where we're without realizing it, we're, you know, we've given a measure of self-control over to, you know, repetitive dopamine hits. Stillness is this nutrient that's missing, you know, like, if I were to describe it in dietary terms, you know, you need more nothing. Yeah, no. And in every way. Yeah. You need more nothing. You've got too much something everywhere, everywhere there's something you need some nothing. Yeah. And I think, I think stillness and nothingness and emptiness, it allows you to tap into your own clarity. And so when you're really struggling with, with whatever it is, I think that if you allow yourself to sit in quiet, you allow your own wheels to turn and to form your own opinion, which we talked about off camera earlier, is it's becoming a lost art, forming our own opinion. And it doesn't mean we have to be right all the time, but just coming out with, well, here's what I think based on what I saw. And it's so hard for so many people to be still, like when you start querying about this and go, okay, just, you know, be still, sit here, look at that, you know, and it comes after a minute or two. Yeah, if that. All right. Quick fire. Last, last couple of questions. Your pre-sleeved snack or protocol you're not willing to give up and why it works? Pre-sleeved. Well, I changed things up so much, but I would probably say it's my go-to grilled cheese when I need it. When you need it, guys, listen, when he needs it, not every night. And so like, like at a time when you're depleted and you're recovering and you're Yeah, yeah, like you need a, you need a, you need to spin down cortisol, you need a little pleasure hit, you need, you know, and then all the, all the sleep supported aspects of that small carbohydrate meal before bed, it's, it's, it's kind of a silver bullet. Like, you know, it doesn't mean by itself it's going to solve every problem you have, but as a sort of foundation, you can add all this other stuff onto it. I would say the other thing that you advocate for and advocated for very much in the course was very gentle stretch movement before you get into bed. People don't think about that, but it is, it is really powerful. Oh, gosh, it's like, like, moving from child's pose into a cat cow or something like super easy. It is, it's really powerful. I can count probably over the last 10 years, maybe on one hand, the number of nights I have not done that. And my body is so attuned to it now, like it's this huge wind down so that the couple minutes I put into kind of moving through some flows, yoga flows, by the time I hit bed, I just, I am ready to go out and it's this, it's just like laying the gas out of the bag and just, um, yeah, that I actually, that probably would have been, I should have been my answer. Well, the only thing I'll say about the grilled cheese is you would be a multi-bagillionaire if the way you advertised your way of eating is you get grilled cheese. Where's the more glitter for that one? More glitter. All right, what's a gut friendly food? Most people overlook that actually moves the needle. Oh, Dairy, Dairy, hands down. Yeah, really? Dairy. Oh, gosh, yeah, Dairy is so vilified. It's so, you know, like I'm thinking of umpteen influences right now, that we just, you know, their, their, their steam's coming down to their ears, hearing that, you know, like, It's reverse glitter. No, no, no, no, you're not talking about, you know, and all that, but no, it's, it's empirically validated. It's just, first of all, I could go on for hours, but, um, in addition to being really good for weight loss, I just, I'm, I'm just picturing these faces out there, and they're blowing up, they're blowing up, you know, they're they're giving you that. No, it's like all of the new revelatory things about all of the ingredients and dairy like lactoferrin and all this stuff is rocking the world right now. There's good stuff in there. It should not be conflated with the food grade or the food quality because that's true of all foods. You can find crummy examples of every fruit, every piece of meat. They can find higher quality examples, but just as a tool set to really round out the microbiome and help it produce the befittal bacteria that it needs, dairy is top of the list. It's top of the list. Yeah. And I'll just say that for all of you screaming that you don't tolerate dairy, definitely there's some people who do not. I hear you and Joel's got some alternatives for you, but I restored my ability to use dairy to consume dairy by doing your gut reset. So I'm just going to leave it there. Look it up. I'm telling you now, for many of you, more glitter. All right. What's the most abused supplements in the longevity space and is there a better alternative to it? What's the one thing you keep hearing over and over again and you're like, stop it. Gosh, that's a good one. That's such a good one. I think I would just say antioxidants in general as a category. It's starting to get out there now that you need a balance between pro oxidative and antioxidation. You need a balance between that. And what's killing this is the idea of your daily, whatever, insert, your daily. And so so many antioxidant products are daily, take it daily. Good for the supplement guy, bad for you. Take it sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Antioxidants need to be strategic in their nature. There's better times. It's not a simple equation. Some antioxidants can actually help pro oxidative processes in the vasculature. Certain types of berries can actually help the overall picture, even though they're antioxidants, if they're not interfering with that. But just generally speaking, this idea that I need to take my 10,000 ORAC antioxidant every single day, that's probably doing more harm than good. I would say that. Got it. All right. Last question. What health or longevity marker is best for track for someone in their 50s? It's just your body fat percentage. Yeah. Your percentage of body fat. Yeah. And fasting. Yeah. Well, they're going to go together. Absolutely. But what you see is there's so many diseases that cease to be diseases when you get lean. It's incredible what happens. Like, oh, yeah, I'm on all these statins and all these drugs and all this stuff. And then you get lean and, oh, I don't have to be on the drugs anymore because I don't have the issue anymore. And it's all body fat correlated. So body fat, again, with the body, it's difficult to stack rank things, but you can make some very good arguments based on certain things. Body fat kind of makes a very easy case for supremacy in terms of the decline of health because a lot of it does start in body fat. So what you see is that when you start to get insulin resistant in your body fat, you start to get oversubscribed with inflammatory macrophages in your body fat. You start to get fibrosis in your body fat, insulin resistance. It acts virally and it spreads to every other organ in the body. You start to get visceral fat. You get fat in muscle. You get metabolic dysfunction. You get too many free fatty acids in the blood. You get all this stuff. And so getting body fat down, getting it as low as you can get it, is such a fantastic health proposition that it kind of sits at the top of the pyramid. You'll see on this muscle thing, you'll see a lot of people in the gym who have cardiac issues and a bunch of muscle, but their body fat's heavy. They've got a lot of muscle, but their body fat's heavy. And it's getting lean. And getting lean is the thing that really will dramatically shift everything. Thank you, Joel. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm bringing you. Thanks for everything you did. Oh, thank you. This was fun. I'll bring the glitter next time. Yeah, definitely bring the glitter next time. I mean, whoever has to clean that space will never forgive you, but... It'll be me. It'll be like, clean that gutter. Nat, I'm flying you down. You need to clean up from the doctor. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, thank you so much for today. Always a pleasure connecting with you. Likewise. And, you know, looking forward to the next one. Next time we get the pleasure to be in person together. Absolutely. Oh, and where do people find you? Sorry, the final question. Where do people find you? How did they get asked? I mean, the book we talked about, but if there's courses, like what... Tell us. Yeah, the veepnutrition.com is my website. Go there and all my goodies are there. But you can also Instagram is a great resource. If you go to my link tree in Instagram, direct link is still. A lot of my goodies are there. And you can find my book, The Way on Amazon and the immunity code on Amazon. The direct version is much better. I finally saw the Amazon version in person and I was like, oh, good. The direct version? Well, yeah, the direct version is a hardcover and the paper is better. So, and it was a lot went into it to make an amazing hardcover. It's great. And it's the pictures are sharp and bright and the Amazon, it's just the paper is different and all these little things. I have that one. I have the hardcover. Yeah. So, I'll get the direct if you can. So, that's what I would say. Okay. Yeah. All right. Thanks again. Thanks for having me, Dad. I'm so good to see you. Always a pleasure. Hey, folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.