How to Eat for Strength, Metabolism, and Longevity

What is the truth about nutrition is three things. One, we should eat food. Most of what Americans and increasingly the world is eating is technically not food. The food is medicine, it's information, it's instructions, it's code. It literally interacts with your body in so many different ways. And the third principle is personalization. If everybody's different. If you're getting in that, you know, one gram per pound of body weight, you know, that's for the vast majority of people, that's gonna be more than enough for you to really like maximize the benefits of protein. Just cutting things for the sake of cutting them is usually really harmful. So when people are learning about something online and they're like, oh, all carbs are bad or all fat is bad or women don't need that much protein, just arbitrarily cutting an entire macronutrient from your diet, I think it bears a lot of consequences. Is this the right kind of diet that's gonna get me to my goals? And what people don't realize is that once you get certain things down, there's elements there that are highly flexible. I have one final question. What does Forever Strong mean to you? You know, one of the things that I was thinking about for this Forever Strong experience is people have hundreds, not hundreds, that's a gross exaggeration, lots of health and wellness books. on their shelf. You know, I probably have, I don't know, 75. And the question is, what makes it so difficult to follow? And where do people go wrong? Okay, well, first of all, the body is just complex. The bodily systems, biological science is totally complex. It's not necessarily a one plus one equals two type of thing all the time and so that's that's one of the big reasons is that the human organism we just haven't figured it out completely there's a lot of gray area a lot of learning to do a lot of research to do and the second reason is that people don't necessarily have the skills or the tools to sniff out the the false stuff from what's solidly evidence-based and even learning what what does evidence-based even mean that's that's a whole thing unto itself and then I guess the third reason for confusion is nutrition is a very sort of personal and emotional type of thing and so when people do well for themselves they figure that okay well hey I've gotten in shape or I've gotten really healthy therefore I'm an expert at at nutrition because I know I know myself and so people have this tendency to figure, hey, if it works for me, it's got to work for everybody else. And then they basically start evangelizing. And that's just not an objective way to go about things. And I think that's it's a mix of those things as to why everybody is so confused. Do you think that there's so basically what I'm hearing you say so far is that there's a the human body's complex and there's probably a ton of different ways to do it right, Whether it's keto or whether it's carnivore, who knows, right? Everyone can do it their own way. But the mass of information out there, there's probably a really big challenge in identifying the good information versus someone of the hype information. Is that fair to say? That's fair. Okay. If that is our baseline understanding, do you think that once people identify the direction that they're going to go, do you think that there is one thing that holds people back in general from making progress? i i think it's a a dual matter of knowledge and priorities really i i've worked with so many people work with so many different groups of people from just elite types of competitors to just regular uh soccer moms soccer dads type of thing and the things that that the big thing that separates them is kind of knowledge, knowing what they're doing, and also how far up in their priority list is the transformation of their bodies or their health. So, you know, unless people can put that as the very top priority, they're always going to have things in their lives, whether it's work-related or whether it's home-related, that are going to distract them from the goal. So I think those are the two things that need to be in place, some basic real knowledge, some effective knowledge, and then just the prioritization of what needs to get done. Because I always say that it's really tough to change a single habit, like one single habit, it's tough to change it. When you want to change the body, you have to change your entire You have to transform your schedule. You have to transform a whole set of habits. So it is a colossal project to change the body. And people don't have an appreciation for that when they're just kind of walking into it and expecting things to just happen. We have this strong belief that eating clean equals health. And, you know, the idea can backfire. Yeah, absolutely. I think also the intention behind the clean eating is really important too. Are we doing it kind of out of fear and pushing our bodies to the limit? Or are we doing it out of this place of love and wanting to challenge ourselves in a positive way? So certainly we can be clean eating and just restricting ourselves unnecessarily depending on why we're doing it. Yeah. I mean, it's a really good point, right? I think that we've seen this both in our clinical practices and also with people that we love that they are eating clean, but also really restricting. Is there one rule that people follow that you think from a nutrition landscape does more harm than good? I think just cutting things for the sake of cutting them is usually really harmful. So when people are learning about something online and they're like, oh, all carbs are bad or all fat is bad or women don't need that much protein, just arbitrarily cutting an entire macronutrient from your diet, I think bears a lot of consequences. Do you think that medicine became obsessed with BMI and fat as opposed to training? How do you think that happened? It's kind of a statement question. I mean, listen, it's how everything happened in medicine. We just saw it was in front of us. We like to name it and then blame it. So we saw, oh, people are gaining weight. Let's find a way to measure that. Well, BMI was a sort of an easy way to do it because you just needed height and weight and you didn't need to measure anything. But it didn't really tell you what's happening under the skin because you could be a guy like Shaquille O'Neal and have a body mass index of 35 and be considered obese and yet be fit and muscular. So it didn't really represent what's really happening under the hood. And also I think we got focused on, you know, the sort of carbohydrate issue and fat is bad and eat more carbs and that's the key to health. And it was just a totally misguided approach. And I wrote a book about it called E-Fat. Which one? Which of the 14? Well, I mean, I wrote a book called E-Fat Get Then, which was really about the history of our demonization of fat and missing the boat on what really is going on. I mean, E-Fat Get Then I wrote like over 10 years ago before people were talking about keto or anything else. And now we're seeing, you know, people doing keto diets reverse diabetes, obesity, I mean, having as good or better effects than EGLP1 drugs. So I think this is now becoming kind of where... Now, this doesn't mean that all fat is good for everybody all the time because everybody's different, but I think that we really got down the wrong track for so many decades, especially with the McGovern report, the sort of efforts by certain aspects of scientific community to vilify fat and to blame it for heart disease and blame it for cholesterol. And that led to this whole high-carb diet, which created the hockey stick of obesity, diabetes, metabolic dysfunction in our biology, which is crippling our country. The economics of it, the disability, the suffering is just staggering. I mean, it's just – and thank God now we have finally, in the political discourse, the conversation about chronic disease being a thing. It wasn't even considered an object or a topic worthy of conversation until just this last year. You know, my audience knows you and you are a great scientist and a great science communicator. And one of the reasons why I wanted you to come on to the Forever Strong experience is not just because you're like a brother to me, but also because you and I were both trained by one of the world leading experts in protein metabolism. The guilt. Now, so more than ever, having good information that has high quality integrity, it's kind of like an oxymoron is critical. But one of the things that you talk about is these three pillars and also really just as it relates to body composition. So I'd love for you to tell us, someone who is trying to improve body composition, what should they do? Well, I think, you know, the first most important thing, and I say this as a person who loves nutrition, who has a Ph.D. in nutrition, who devoted their life to nutrition. resistance training is by far the most powerful tool to change your body composition. And it's not really even close. You can eat all the protein you want. You can eat an appropriate amount of calories. You can sleep enough. You can do all those things. But if you're not creating the stimulus to turn over that muscle protein and create new protein or new muscle protein, can you gain some lean body mass? Yes. Is it going to be really appreciable? No. And so really, you know, I look at protein intake now or nutrition now as more of an anti-catabolic, right? So if you don't resistance train and you eat enough calories and you eat enough protein, can you put on a small amount of lean mass? Sure. But more of what I look at is it's going to help prevent lean mass loss during catabolic periods like calorie deficit, certain disease states, and aging. but yeah but really resistance training plus protein is a synergistic effect where yes you will regardless you will add muscle mass from resistance training but when you have sufficient protein and calories on top of that you'll add more than you would have just by resistance training alone you and i have been training from a very young age and i think that both of our perspective both of our perspectives have shifted in the way that we were really focused on protein obviously because of dawn but as more and more science comes out it's really that stimulus which is um extraordinary because it seems as if it doesn't matter the age you can always improve you know with that being said do you think that there are certain rules that people should quote follow if they're wanting to improve body composition um you know i i i'm very it's hard for me to say rules because in, uh, in life, there aren't really many hard rules, but some really strong guidelines, I would say, um, of course, resistance train, that's the first thing, but you know, there's a lot of people who go to the gym and they train, but they're, they don't really, you don't really see them change. And that is because you have to be like change, whether it's emotional, psychological, educational, behavioral, or muscle mass, it requires discomfort. And so if you are not pushing yourself into discomfort when you are resistance training, you're just not going to see changes. You'll see changes for a very short period of time, and then they will plateau and you won't move past that. So really what you want is to be doing your training to sufficient intensity. And by intensity, I mean proximity to failure. The research seems to be relatively clear that, you know, between low, and when I say low, like, you know, three, four, five reps, and high reps, 20, 30 reps, there really isn't that much difference in muscular growth so long as you take each set close to failure. You probably don't have to go to failure, but you need to get pretty darn close within a couple of reps. And, um, and I will say if you've never trained to failure, you probably are really poor at estimating what your proximity to failure is. So you need to do an alpha intensity. And then if you look at intensity is kind of the drug, then volume would be the dosage. And you can tell your, your volume to your goals. Like for me, I do a lot of training volume because I'm trying to be the strongest, most muscular human being I can be. Um, but for other people, you know, you get the vast majority of training benefits in the first, you know, five, 10 sets of a body part, so long as each set's taken to sufficient intensity. Yeah. And I, by the way, I've seen you train and compete and you, you're, you're lifting extremely heavy weights. And what I like about what you said is that there's a lot of information out there that says, okay, you have to lift heavy. But, you know, as I think about Don, or as I think about some of my patients, lifting heavy for them can predispose them to injury, especially if their muscular strength is outpacing their tendon strength. And what you're saying is that it's not that you have to lift heavy, it's that you have to create enough stimulus, and that can happen in a multitude of ways. Am I understanding that correct? That's correct. And if you think about it from a mechanistic perspective, we know that basically the most dominant factor for stimulating muscular growth from resistance training is what we call mechanical tension, which is the tension that an individual fiber experiences. But people hear that and they think, well, that means you've got to train heavy. You have to understand how a fiber senses tension and how fibers are recruited in a muscle. So fibers are recruited from smallest to largest. And typically that means your slow twitch, you know, type one fibers get recruited first, then your intermediate fibers, and then finally your fast twitch glycolytic large fibers. And the reason your body does that is to conserve energy. but what that means is let's say i let's let's say i do uh two comparable sets so one like let's say i do just five reps right with heavy weight to failure the other one i do 30 reps to failure okay way lighter the reason there's going to be a similar amount of mechanical tension is because in those five reps very quickly early on in the set i am going to have to recruit those large muscle fibers to move that weight. That's going to happen very early on. In the lighter set, the first 10, 15 reps, you're probably not having to recruit a whole lot of those intermediate or large fibers. But as you start to approach failure, now you're having, you've fatigued those smaller fibers, those intermediate fibers, and now your body has to recruit those large fibers. And so actually, because those fibers are taking on a disproportionate amount of load, even at a lighter weight, they still experience a similar amount of tension. And that is what the great, I guess, unifying factor for mechanical tension to hypertrophy is, is that if you just get sets intense enough, close enough to failure, you're going to get similar growth. Now, if you get to extremes like above 30, 40 reps, below, you know, five reps, they may be suboptimal just because, you know, a one rep max, there's just not that much time under that amount of tension. Um, but, and then above 30 reps, you get so light that essentially you could just like take a couple of breaths and do another rep. You, you run out of oxygen before you typically run out of, uh, of, uh, or your muscle gets too fatigued. So stay in there between five and 30 and you go sufficient, you know, sufficient intense intensity. Um, you're going to be stimulating muscle growth. And that's a lot of flexibility. Now I noticed that you said muscle growth, is there this strength continuum, this muscle hypertrophy kind of strength continuum? Yeah. Now this is a really good question and probably very applicable, especially as you age, because it's not just lean mass that matters. Lean mass matters, especially metabolically, but strength probably matters more from a physical quality of life perspective. And so strength is a specific skill. So depending on how we're assessing it. But if we're talking about like your absolute ability to generate force, so one rep maximum, how strong are you at a given time? How much force can you generate? That is a specific skill. And we do see very clearly in the research literature, lifting heavy produces better strength outcomes than lifting light. Now, you will get stronger lifting light than if you didn't lift at all. No question about it. But for best outcomes, you want to lift heavy. Now, what I would tell people is if you're not limited by like injuries or pain or anything like that, you're probably best off just using a variety of rep ranges. One, that keeps it fun and exciting and novel. And two, it means if there are subtle differences between those rep ranges, you're experiencing some of the benefits from each. So I just tell people, you know, variety is the spice of life when it comes to training. This episode is sponsored by Our Place. I used to have 14 different pans, half of them scratched, some with these weird coatings flaking off, but none of them stacked properly and it was chaos. And honestly, I started wondering what I was actually cooking my food in. I spent half my life in the kitchen between meal prepping for the week, feeding the kids, and trying to get enough protein in. It's like a full-time job. The last thing I need is cookware that doesn't work or that's making me sick. So I switched to Our Place. Their four-piece cookware set, two always pans, and two perfect pots replace almost everything. Sauteing, searing, steaming, roasting, boiling, done. And it's not about having the prettiest kitchen. It's about having tools that actually perform when you're exhausted and still showing up to cook real food for your family. This is one of those upgrades you feel every single time you use it. Visit From Our Place, that's from O-U-R-P-L-A-C-E dot com slash Dr. Lion and use the code Dr. Lion for 10% off sitewide. They also have a 100-day risk-free trial with free shipping and returns. So there's literally no reason not to try it. How do you think the landscape would look different if muscle had been taught as an organ system? Well, it wasn't until I met you, actually, and you kind of crammed it down my throat. And I was like wait there something to this muscle thing Because we were taught to focus on fat on the body and our diet and not on protein and not on muscle And I didn't really understand what muscle was. I thought it was just this organ that kind of moved your bones around so you could. Did you think it was an organ system? Not really, no. I just thought it was like steak that you had on your muscles that you kind of moved your body around with. You're able to walk and eat and do all the things you want to do. But I didn't realize it was such an incredibly important organ that had a diverse array of functions that are critical to health and longevity, from regulating your blood sugar metabolism to regulating your immune system to regulating your overall hormonal balance to regulating your metabolic health in every way, your brain health, your mood. I mean, everything really sort of centers in your muscle, and it's something we learn nothing about in medical school. Do you think looking back, again, because... Other than the names of the muscles. This is true. And also, when you think about it, you have really made root cause medicine very popular. That's true. That's true. And when I think about root cause medicine, even if we address obesity, that's probably, in my opinion, still not the root cause. No, it's always upstream. What's causing the cause of the cause of the cause? I mean, honestly, I don't know if you know this, Gabriel, but this week, a couple of days ago, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation put out a request for proposals for functional medicine. Wow. Lifestyle medicine approaches to address chronic disease, $100 million. That's crazy. It's crazy to see the word functional medicine on a Medicare website. I remember when. And that's what, you know, we talk about root care medicine, but that's what we're talking about here. There's a whole different way of thinking about the body based on root causes and systems and optimizing health and creating health rather than just treating disease. And thinking about the body as a network and a system when everything is communicating with everything else. And that's what you've really taught us about muscle is that it's this organ system that's communicating with everything all the time. One of the things that I hear routinely in the practice and online is that I've hit midlife, nothing's working. I am training and doing the nutrition things that I should, but I'm still not losing weight or I'm regressing. So what actually happens in that midlife moment? Okay, well, there's a pretty substantial literature on a couple things that happen in midlife with women. So there's joint pain, musculoskeletal pain. there is a cascade of things that leads to sleep disturbance just lower sleep quality and quantity when you have low quality sleep and a low amount of it let's say significantly less than seven hours which is kind of the healthy threshold there then you have both a compromise in your training output, and you also have a dysregulation in your appetite. If you combine that with this increased hunger and cravings with a lesser capacity to train with the intensity and the frequency and the consistency that you need to, I think you combine that with joint pain, and then you combine that with the psychological stresses of changes in, for example, sexual health. then you kind of have a recipe for impeded progress to the tune of, it can be about twice as hard for people in midlife to reach their goals compared to if they were to attempt that in earlier adulthood. And so in a nutshell, that's kind of what's going on. And there's a lot of moving parts to that. yeah i mean again it's interesting because of the complex biological system is there anything that we know that metabolically changes per se or is it more the influence of diet and lifestyle and sleep it's a combination of those things and one of the discouraging things about midlife, especially in women, is that body fat gain and body fat patterning changes. And so while the net gains in body fat during midlife are not spectacularly greater than how they would be at any other point in life, where the body fat accumulates and where it's deposited shifts and changes more towards the central of the abdominal area. And so if you were to gain excess body fat in midlife, it would be more of sort of like an apple type of patterning than if you were to gain excess body fat in earlier adulthood or in adolescent years, certainly. So the thing about midlife is to know that, OK, there's hope and then there are solutions. It is just going to be twice as hard and you have to be a lot more strategic about it. But you also have to recognize that, OK, during midlife, people are usually peaking in their professional lives and the stress of their professional lives. And they're usually also peaking in the stress of their interpersonal lives, whether it be with dealing with ailing parents or kids going off to school and kids doing great in school, kids not doing great in school. And so you've got stress vectors from above and below happening while you're trying to change your body, which is not necessarily cooperating with you. So one of the tactics is to make more realistic goals during midlife and just lower your expectations of progress, kind of cut them in half. So whereas, for example, somebody in early adulthood might want to shoot for, let's say, one to two pounds a week drop if they had a weight loss goal. One to two pounds a week, that's aggressive. That's a pretty admirable rate of fat loss. but in midlife oh man you really want to cut that in half if you set weight loss goals yeah so the yo-yo way that a lot of people diet and again i hate to pick on women but especially uh women tend to yo-yo diet um there's there's some evidence that yo-yo dieting in particular where you're losing weight gaining weight losing weight gaining weight and i'm not talking about like bodybuilders who do like specified slow gains in body mass followed by targeted cuts in fat mass because they're, again, they're resistance training, they're building lean mass and they're slowly stripping away fat mass and preserving lean mass. I'm talking about people who aren't really resistance training or they're not really doing it right. They're not eating a high protein diet. They're trying to lose fat as quickly as they can. And we know from research studies, if you are not resistance training, you're not watching your protein and you're trying to lose fat really quickly, I mean, you can lose up to half of the amount of weight you lose from lean mass. and then when you regain it the research shows you do regain some lean mass but the regaining of lean mass is very sluggish compared to fat mass fat mass goes up much more rapidly especially if you regain very quickly and so what you can have happen through multiple cycles of this is a person getting less and less lean mass more and more fat mass which means one less of a metabolic sink, two, worse health outcomes, and three, a lower metabolic rate overall. And so long term, your capacity to actually get better body composition gets worse and worse. Now, the great thing is you can correct this. You don't break your body. There is no such thing as a broken body or broken metabolism or anything like that. But you've got to be more targeted. you got a resistance train, watch your protein intake, and you have to diet in a way that is reasonable. And if you, the research does show there's kind of an inflection point and it's kind of around that 500 calorie deficit per day number that beyond that, you do see kind of a dip in how quickly you lose lean mass versus people who stay like a 500 calorie per day deficit or less. and if you are somebody who's looking to build muscle if you're always restricting you're probably putting a limiter on yourself because research does show that in the calorie deficit your basal levels of protein synthesis will drop by about 10 to 20 percent so again if the goal long term and there's so many women i've had to convince of this too if the goal is to look better long term you actually it's counterintuitive you should probably spend more time at maintenance or in a slight surplus than you do in a deficit and the deficit should be targeted specific it should it should be like how sun tzu said to fight war you get in dominate and get out that's how you do a deficit uh lane you're hilarious and the best i have um two final questions the the next question is really about if someone was thinking about how to design a muscle-centric nutrition plan what would be the most impactful shift for them i mean the most impactful shift is going to be their dietary protein intake right i mean and anybody who's been following us is going to know what we're going to say um calories do matter because you know basal levels of protein synthesis energy availability matters for protein synthesis but all things being equal if you're getting in that you know one gram per pound of body weight you know that's for the vast majority of people that's going to be more than enough for you to really like maximize the benefits of protein. It's just an easy number to remember. Um, that that's going to be the biggest shift. And if you're eating that amount, the source becomes less important. The timing becomes less important. Um, but if you're somebody who is like, I don't just want to do the minimum. I, you know, I want to maximize everything. Then I would say, you know, animal sources tend to be more bioavailable. um but again if you're eating that one gram per pound number and you're mixing in some animal and plant sources you're going to be totally fine you don't have to i have people say i don't track my plant sources if you're eating enough total protein track it it's fine um and then as far as timing goes i would say three to five protein feedings per day just hit that total number and If you're doing that, man, you are you are ninety nine point five percent of the way there. You're doing all the things. And then, you know, other nutritional shifts that aren't necessarily muscle centric. But I do think getting enough dietary fiber in is a really good thing. If you're just healthy overall, it creates a better micro environment for building muscle. So you have lower levels of inflammation. You're going to have better blood lipids. And it's just it's just good overall. I look at, you know, kind of there's like this animal versus plants. And I'm like, but why not? Most people will chase the best diet, the best diet for this. And a lot of food anxiety creeps up. Have you had any experience with food anxiety? Do you think that that works long term? Can you scare yourself into being fit? well i think that people just sort of ruminate and worry about um is this the right kind of diet that's going to get me to my goals and what people don't realize is that once you get certain things down the there's elements there that are highly flexible so once you nail down the optimal amount of protein that you can realistically consume, and once you nail down the total caloric intake, then there is a lot of flexibility in terms of the proportion of carbohydrate and fat in your diet that can arrive at similar body composition results. Now, the variations and how you individualize this sort of thing really can depend on somebody's exercise performance goals. like if somebody has um some very kind of competitive type of athletic goals then they're not necessarily going to do great with severe carbohydrate restriction um whereas if somebody does not have those competitive type of um athletic performance goals then it really is kind of a matter of of preference whether they like a high fat low carb or whether they like a high carb low fat type of model or somewhere in between, or if they just want to kind of vary that through the week. It all works. You just have to find out what you prefer and what you can be consistent with under the umbrella of a healthy food selection just for long-term health purposes. It makes me think about this muscle-centered lifestyle. And if someone wants to live a muscle-centric lifestyle, but they struggle with digestion and absorption. What do you think would make the biggest difference immediately? It's an amazing question and something that I get asked a lot, and I know you get asked a lot as well, is this conversation around protein and digestion too. Because people have different kind of tolerances for protein. Like for instance, if someone has acid reflux, let's say, they might not have an appetite for hot and cooked protein as much because their appetite might be lower. So the goal is always get the protein in in the way that you can. So it might mean a protein shake for someone in the morning who doesn't have a good morning appetite. It might mean eating colder varieties of protein for people who have lower appetite, or it might mean for someone who has a really big appetite, actually having hot and cooked meals. But you have to cater it to what your body wants and what feels good to you while I'll still, you have to hit those protein goals. You have to. What about the role of nutrition? You've been talking about nutrition for a long time. You've written multiple books. Have you landed somewhere on what we should be having? Yes. I think there's some, you know, I sort of try to distill what is the truth about nutrition is three things. One, we should eat food. And when I say that, I really mean that because most of what Americans and increasingly the world is eating is technically not food. What do you mean by that? Well, if you actually look at the dictionary definition, I'd encourage you to post it on this conversation. On our other strong experience. What is the dictionary definition of food? It's basically more or less something that supports the growth and health of an organism. Do our ultra-processed foods do that? Hell no. They do the opposite. Well, they provide calories. Well, calories doesn't necessarily support the health and growth of an organism. It can to some degree. and you need a certain amount of calories to live and thrive, and it does provide calories. But at the same time, people can eat an enormous amount of calories. You could eat 3,000 calories of Coca-Cola a day. That doesn't mean you're going to be undernourished. And be massively nutritionally deficient and actually cause massive harm to your health and have plenty of calories. So I think what we've learned is that the idea that we should be thinking about food as food is really important. And it's a simple idea, but I think most people don't realize that most of what's consumed today is technically not food. It's food-like substances or frankenfoods or science projects that are highly addictive. I mean, the state of California and the city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against all the major food companies talking about the way in which their foods have been designed and marketed to be addictive and to be harmful, and we know they're harmful, and they're pushing them in ways that are really unethical. It's like smoking. You know, like the tobacco companies marketed smoking knowing it was killing people. So I think we're in that situation. So that's the, you know, first thing. The second principle, so eat real food, whole food, real food. If it's basically your great-grandmother would recognize it as food, eat it. It's not a Go-Gurt or a Lunchable or Pop-Tart. They wouldn't know what that is. The second principle is that food is medicine. It's information. It's instructions. It's code. It literally interacts with your body in so many different ways, not just the proteins, fats, and carbs, and they're not all created equal. There's different quality protein, there's different quality fats, or different quality carbohydrates, the same amount of grams of fat. If trans fat versus omega-3 fats will have profoundly different effects on your body, in fact, opposite effects, even the same amount of fat. And then there's all the other stuff in food, the dark matter of nutrition. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. If coffee is what gets you through the morning, but also what leaves you jittery, unfocused, or crashing by mid-afternoon, you're not alone. A lot of people are using coffee to push through. I might be one of them. But not actually support the brain. And that's why for Sigmatic's focus, organic dark roast is different. You're getting a premium organic Arabica coffee blend with lion's mane and hey, I'm talking Mufasa style and shaga mushrooms. Lion's mane supports focus and mental clarity. 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I mean, with training, I think, um, some of the biggest myths that are out there is there's like you know rep ranges is one that you you know that there's you know magical rep ranges another one is that you know there are certain movements that you know produce way more muscle growth than other movements and the reality is like there are some subtle differences like if we look at uh for example isolation movements versus compound movements this is i'm thinking about squats first a study looking at squats on smith machine versus leg extensions and they showed overall in the quadricep similar amounts of growth basically the same amount of growth but regionally the leg extensions produce more growth of the rectus femoris which is kind of that middle muscle in your quadricep and the squats produce a little bit more growth than the vastus lateralis now they weren't huge differences but it's worth noting and again variety is the spice of life so i would say like there aren't necessarily like magic exercises but you are probably best off doing a combination of compound lifts that move multiple joints for a given exercise as well as isolation exercises um but you know the myth that like high reps tone and uh you know that's been around for god knows how long ever since people got into lifting weights and that low reps make you bulky that's that's it's just absolute nonsense what makes you look bulky is body fat body fat is what makes you look bulky now if you have a lot of muscle and a lot of body fat, you will look bulkier. But body fat is what really makes you look bulky. And, you know, I think I really feel like, you know, women like you and the people out there that are doing good work, the worry about women becoming too muscular, I think, has been tamped down. You know, even with men, I'll meet someone like, oh, I don't want to get too muscular. I'm like, listen, I have tried for 25 years to get too muscular. yeah i'm drug free right and in a t-shirt i look like a really athletic guy like i look like maybe i played football or wrestled i don't look like the hulk you know what i mean um and so i would tell people unless you just have unbelievable genetics you're not going to get too big by accident it's like getting into a car and worried you're going to become a nascar driver that's not going to happen and if you do have these great genetics by chance for building muscle then you can just always like back off and not do so many sets and not go so close to failure and you're good like congratulations yeah i have that problem all the time i'm just i'm just kidding i'm still trying to put on muscle right um then i think gab sorry i wanted to touch on one more thing i think you know age and sex gets um is very weaponized now uh and there's a lot of predatory marketing used so i see so much predatory marketing around menopausal women especially so much predatory yeah so much predatory marketing well you can't do the same types of exercises because of your hormones and and you can't do this and always when i ask for evidence it's always it's all that there's like a bunch of circular dancing around the topic and well you and usually they tell me well you're not a woman you wouldn't understand i'm like no but i can read research literature you know like so it and to be fair lane you've so you i've worked with you when i was competing and you've worked with countless women so it's kind of that's like saying you can't be a good uh cancer doctor unless you have had cancer and gone through that so i i think that that's just that doesn't quite make sense yeah i mean i want to be clear there are things about aging and menopause, which may make it more difficult. So menopause, you know, when hormonal shifts happen, you may feel less energetic, have a harder time sleeping, your recovery is worse. It may make it more difficult, but the stuff that works is the stuff that works regardless of age. And I mean, we even have research studies. I think the oldest person I found in a research study that they saw significant hypertrophy with was 89 years old. As far as I'm aware, there is no population that i know of where resistance training does not with sufficient intensity does not produce hypertrophy and so and but but you're told all the time well it's too late to start you know and and now it's getting so bad where i have men who are like 30 years old like well i just turned 30 so i know i know my testosterone is low and i'm like what are you talking about like maybe if you're really overweight you don't sleep very well you have a lot of stress maybe your testosterone is low but like you're in your prime like and really i don't feel all that different now at 44 compared to when i was 30 and when i the difference is i sleep a little bit less because i have two kids but like as far as everything else i don't really feel that much different you know and i think a lot of people this predatory marketing is done to basically make them feel like they need some sort of special magic solution that only certain people sell and again like the research shows whether it's old whether it's female um you build similar amounts of muscle as a percentage of your starting lean mass so if we look at like young men versus women as a percentage of their starting lean mass they build the same amount of muscle women just start with less lean mass. So they build less as an absolute amount. Same thing for elderly. They start with less, but when they start resistance training, they build a similar amount. And I've seen what's funny is women proportionally actually get a little bit stronger than men relatively. What is one recommendation or one thing that you wish people would stop doing immediately? Wow. You threw me for a curve ball there. People usually ask the opposite. What's the one thing you tell people to do. Okay, so stop. Stop thinking that you need to wait in the morning before you start eating. Stop that. That's nonsense. Stop it, stop it, stop it. People make all kinds of funky claims. And that kind of goes the other way, too. People think that they need to stop eating at 6 p.m. California time. You know what I mean? Stop that too. Look at the bigger picture. Look at how your diet looks in total. Look at what is going to fit with what you realistically can sustain from just a social standpoint as well as just a performance standpoint, everything. But look at the big picture. Don't worry about nitpicky timing stuff And especially the rule that, man, it really kind of upsets me when people go, oh, you got to wait for X amount of time after you wake up before you eat. Otherwise, you won't be able to squint your eating window down to this amount of hours. It's just kind of frustrating. So if you're telling me to pick one thing for people to stop, it's stop listening to that kind of advice. You know, stress, anxiety, the nervous system, regulation, dysregulation. And have you seen that play a role in digestion and absorption of nutrients? Oh, big time. I would say that the root cause of all chronic illness is usually within the nervous system, to be honest with you. I think we think of the nervous system as being like, you know, the vagus nerve and trauma. We talk about it in that context, but it's really the control center of our body. So the autonomic nervous system controls where do we send blood flow? How do we, which muscles should we move? How do we function? I mean, regulating body temperature, like these really essential functions of our body. So if you're constantly dysregulating your nervous system, I mean, digestion is one of the there's a direct pathway between the brain and our digestion. And we've heard this referred to as the gut brain axis, but it will literally control the contractions of your, you know, the your entire digestive system. So it directly impacts your digestion. yeah i agree with you and i've seen it even when i was in college before being able to put words to it this idea of just being so stressed and so anxious and you know during that time i would go through periods of eating more and then eating less as a way of trying to manage my nervous system do you have practical tips for people who say for example are under really high stress and still trying to maintain a healthy nutrition plan. Yeah, I would say the key word I think of is like safety. I always want people to think of what is going to make my body feel consistent. What is going to make my body know that my body, my brain has its back and that I have its back. And what I think that often looks like is probably eating more regularly and eating with some level of routine and consistency so that your body can anticipate when am I getting food next? When are these nutrients coming? I think that's something that's really, really important. And then also, again, really listening to your symptoms. If you're noticing when you're eating a certain food that it's not sitting well, not only asking, is this food making me sick? What environment was I eating that food in? Was I sitting up properly? Was I de-stressed? What was my mind state? What was my physical posture? Thinking about those other factors of your nervous system that impact digestion. Think about those other factors of your physical form that impact digestion and your health too. So we're very quick to say I'm allergic to this food. I've been tolerant to this food and cutting those foods out. But eating slowly in an excellent posture in a present state does so much more for digestion than just cutting foods out. So I would say finding that safety is essential. What do you think the, if we go along the lines of how we're trending right now, most people are not training. We know that obesity is a problem. What do you think the dangers of sarcopenia are going to be? I mean, we're seeing it, Gabrielle. We're seeing this explosion of chronic illness, which ultimately comes down to metabolic health. So when we look at every almost known big problem today, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, things like infertility, mental illness, depression, these are metabolic problems. We have a metabolic health crisis. 93.2% of Americans, according to a tough study, looking at their labs and their data and everything else, found that 93.2% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which means they have some degree of insulin resistance as evidenced by abnormal cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, they're overweight or obese, or they've had a heart attack or stroke. That means that only 6.8% aren't. And that is why we spend more than twice any other nation on health care, why our health care costs are $1 out of $5 of our entire GDP, why $1 out of $3 of the federal government is spent on health care, why 40% of the health care bill is paid for by the government, and why it's crippling our economy. So much $2 trillion a year of our taxpayer dollars are going to pay for something that is 100% preventable and reversible. And we're not addressing that. And that's why I'm so excited about this Medicare innovation because they're actually saying, hey, guys, maybe we should start looking upstream at the issue. So I think that it's a real crisis in terms of the economic burden, the social burden, this burden on individuals and families, the suffering. I mean, it's just endless. And the way we're doing this is also having consequences globally for the environment, for climate, how we grow food, what we're growing. It was all the way back to the farm, and I wrote a book about it called Food Fix, and an updated version is coming out in February called Food Fix Uncensored, which essentially lays out a lot of the links between our food system and our chronic disease epidemic. Life can be chaotic, especially if you're reaching a stride in your career. And what I'm hearing you say is as opposed to making it be all about restriction and these goals of building and losing as extreme as they were when you were younger, that you reorient yourself to potentially slower progress. Yeah, yeah. You know, we brought up Jenna. The thing people don't realize about her is she has been super consistent with her training and nutrition for years, years and years. I mean, over five years, she's been just incredibly consistent. and um she took really seriously kind of the threats of what happens in the menopausal transition and there's just a lot of uh um a lot of kind of doomsday type type of messages that are sent out in in the fitness space and the health and wellness space to women who are entering midlife and so she pre-committed to not letting menopause defeat her and so she actually was ready for it and she just was really consistent with her training and nutrition. So it takes years. It really takes years. That's the thing. People want things to happen in weeks or months, but the best transformations you see, it's years. Yeah. And definitely it seems the earlier someone starts, the better. Obviously, it's never too late, but it's much easier to go into perimenopause, menopause, fit and strong, then looking back and go, you know what, I probably should do this now. So if you're listening to this, one thing that I think both Alan and I fully wholeheartedly agree is that pre-commit, again, it's never too late to start, but things don't get easier. It's just the way in which the world is. And you might not be able to plan for every storm, but you definitely can prepare for it. So one of the other things that I was also thinking about is this idea that, you know, we should restrict calories. So one of the things that I see in my practice, and that even I've talked to you about is that, you know, if I wanted to get really lean, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to totally cut my calories. I remember I was training, I must have been training two hours a day. And I was like, lean, I'm eating too many carbs. I'm eating too much food. And I think I was at, I don't know if you remember this, but I do because it was me. I was at 90 grams or less of carbs a day with a high volume of training and I'm a small person. So I guess the biggest question is when someone is trying to lose weight and they cut all of their calories, you know, what is the metabolic implications of that? well there's a few things you do have a drop in metabolic rate from restricting calories it's it's a relatively small drop um and it does tend to get like uh corrected relatively quickly once you get back into a maintenance level but i think the real problem is the way most people diet which is they go on a pretty restrictive diet for however many weeks or months they lose some weight but they're losing fat mass and lean mass. And when they regain, they tend to preferentially regain fat mass. Elimination mindset that you had mentioned, this idea of eliminating food groups. What long-term impact does that seem to have on people that are really going for overall health, whether it's their metabolism or their mood? It can have the impacts, again, on this physiological sense or can have an impact on an emotional sense as well. If we constantly restrict one nutrient, it's not a perfect science, but there is a potential higher likelihood that we might reach for those, let's say we restrict potatoes or cooled potatoes, resistant starches, we might then reach for other carbohydrates like cake and ones that we're not intending if our body still needs those carbohydrates for fuel, especially if we're active. It's really important. So there's a risk on a physiological level of maybe reaching for more and also an emotional level of cravings going up and everything like that too. Also, when you're in that fear mindset, we don't have as high of a control over our behaviors. So it's really important both from this physiological sense and this physical sense that we're getting a balance of those macronutrients and it's going to look different for every single person what suits their metabolism. Yeah, I've seen a lot of people that are afraid to eat because they're afraid of having symptoms. You know, is there an alternative solution to just removing these foods? If someone was thinking, okay, from a practical standpoint, how can I eat in a way that doesn't just continue to interfere with my digestion or eliminate foods? This is like the biggest conversation online because you'll see so many people who say, I felt amazing when I did the carnivore diet. I felt amazing when I did the vegan diet. And they're being authentic. It's that these nutrients, while they are beneficial to us, like let's say fiber as an example, we couldn't count the number of studies that show the benefits of fiber for us. But people don't tolerate it that well. So the goal in any kind of elimination diet that someone would be doing is to do it very short term. And while you're doing it, you also want to heal whatever the issue is that has made you resistant to that, you know, component of digestion. So if it's something like fiber, it might be maybe you need to heal the lining of the gut. Maybe you need some support there. But I think the goal, the reason people feel better on eliminations is because there's actually a body process that's not functioning highly that you need to actually work on instead of just cutting these foods out. You know, do you think that and, you know, as we think about cutting foods out, do you think that when people are eating less, maybe say undernourished? Is that an overlooked aspect of healing? Oh, it's such an overlooked aspect. I mean, not to also harp on the carbohydrate part of the equation, but certainly we need some level of carbohydrates. It's grossly exaggerated how many we need usually. People think we need actually a lot more than we probably need for functioning, but without it, like our brain doesn't function as well. And all of the kind of nervous system conversations that we're having, they do center around like having chronic low blood sugar could be a huge issue for stress, anxiety, and those things too. 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Use my code DrLyon for 20% off. that's cozyearth.com and then you use the code dr lion you know in that vein do you think that there's one overarching myth so for example for me it's that you can only absorb 30 grams of protein or that protein is bad for your kidneys i mean that one should die we're still waiting for it to die and to me that really holds people back because there's you know there's this discourse internal discourse that people have do you think that there's one myth like that that you've just oh i mean you've been doing this how many years at least 20 yeah right i don't at least is there one like that that you're just like i can have one is still here yeah um it's kind of a recent thing where protein the protein hype and craze is getting some backlash from people who just swung the pendulum back the other way and saying oh yeah too much protein is dangerous and all this stuff and not only that you're not going to get any benefits of eating protein beyond 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. Oh man, that's frustrating because people don't look at the nuance and the detail there. There's a lot of data showing that you can get body composition benefits from protein above and beyond 1.6 grams per kilo of body weight. And there's some great data showing that you can get body composition improvements from protein intakes even a gram per pound and beyond so 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight and beyond and these the benefits of these very high protein intakes mainly have to do with less of muscle gain but more of fat loss and controlling fat gain and even a phenomenon called recomposition where you gain some lean body mass and lose some fat mass simultaneously. And that's kind of a glorious thing when we see it happen consistently as a result of increasing protein intake, and in some cases on top of existing habitual diets, which is a really, really interesting phenomenon. So to say that, oh, you don't need any more protein than 1.6 grams per kilo of body weight, That's just getting really refuted by just multiple lines of evidence. And so I think that when people ask the protein question, how much do you need per day? How much is beneficial? Everybody fails to say, OK, what population are we talking about and what goal are we talking about? So when you establish the population and the goal, then you can have a productive conversation about protein. and if someone is traveling right say it's crazy they're getting on an airplane how do you have them think about kind of that landscape or if again they're in constant movement you live in New York City it's crazy there people are running to the subway running away from the subway how does one begin to create safety from just a very practical standpoint I think first of bringing those snacks with you, being prepared, having those things with you, and then just really like checking in with yourself a lot. I have literally sat on an airplane and been like, this is crazy that we're like flying through the air, even though I fly often. And it's, you know, it's like, it's just a crazy experience and it's okay to acknowledge that. But being consistently checking in with yourself and even asking yourself, what do I need right now to feel a little bit more comfortable? And then I think preparation can be really important. Like even silly things that I have clients do is bring like ginger tea bags and going to Starbucks and getting a hot cup of water before you get on the airplane, something like that. Just having those, if you need those digestive supportive tools, if you need those certain foods to help manage blood sugar, just having them with you and really getting to know yourself and what makes you feel more comfortable and more stable and routine. Is there a game plan? Do you recommend that your clients have a game plan, for example, if they are traveling and they ran out of snacks. Do you have a list? Do you say, okay, well, you're going to have beef jerky. You're going to grab boiled eggs. There's always yogurt. Do you have a list of the, oh my gosh, moment? I'm totally unprepared. Absolutely. Honestly, you named a couple of my favorites in airports, by the way. Hard boiled eggs, huge hit. Usually like a little bit of hummus or something with some vegetables, if you need that carb, can be really good. always if they do have some sort of protein bars that that feel like they're a good fit it really depends on again what airport you're flying out of or anything like that um and and anytime um i do have clients i travel with little protein sachets i'll have i've had clients travel with gluten-free bread i mean whatever you know suits them but in in the airport setting i i have to be honest hard-boiled eggs or even like egg bites from starbucks i'll have clients get because There's usually a Starbucks in the airport. Anywhere you can get a little bit of protein, I think, can be really, really functional and helpful. And when someone is in more of a relaxed state, say going on vacation, do you find that this is the moments where they have more flexibility? Or would this be the moment where you follow your same plan, but you're able to be really consistent? I don't know that you've seen this too with your patients, but I find that my clients end up losing weight on vacation. and it's pretty effortless. And it's just because they're so much more able to be present and less likely to snack or even binge when they're on vacation because they're so present and so calm. So yeah, I find that vacations often where people get so nervous. Oh my gosh, I'm going to eat everything. They end up, it's not usually the case where people have those concerns. Now, if people do have those concerns, again, that's where I'm also really considering like when you have a plate, Not to, you know, basically reiterate your mission, but it's true. And that's why I support your mission so much, obviously. But really, where's the protein on my plate? Just making sure you're covering satiety throughout the entire trip, too, just to make sure. That's a really good point. You know, one of the things that is what happens to people is there are expected challenges and then there's unexpected challenges. The expected challenges are the following. You might feel tired. You might be traveling. You might be tempted to miss your workout. These are all the expected challenges. And often we act like we're surprised by them as opposed to how do we double down on really figuring out what we need to do and plan for it. Right. So, for example, if I know that I'm traveling at the end of the week, I make sure that my training is really tight so that when I miss a day, I'm not so worried about it. Absolutely. And I think that's really about setting up those non-negotiables also. What is my deal with myself? What does it look like? If I can't work out on vacation, how am I feeling like I'm compensating for that so that I also feel good because you're sitting on an airplane for potentially a long period of time? But setting up those boundaries with yourself and those non-negotiables, I think, are not restrictive. I think they can be totally self-loving. But just what is that absolute boundary that we need to set with ourselves and to prepare, I think it's important to set those. When you think about boundaries, do you think about training? Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Talk to me about resistance training or muscle health. Well, I think that there is, I think that this is such an interesting conversation that I've been seeing so much too. It used to be a lot about how women don't need to train as much as men. And of course, now the conversation because of you and many other amazing people has swung back to, okay, women actually do. And it's very critical for our health. But now I'm seeing really funny enough kickback on that again, because people like, no, you actually don't need to train as much as these people are saying, these people, meaning like world-renowned doctors are saying, I think that it's all about, everything is about individual input and what you can actually do. But that doesn't mean that there aren't standards for what you need to be doing. So it's like, understand the standard for what your body needs. And then you also have to make it realistic within your life. I will also say that for clients like mine who are more, like live in more complicated or complex, like chronically ill bodies, it doesn't matter if it's harder because you still have to find a way to do it. So the answer is how do you find a way within your own life? Whatever, even if it's smaller parts throughout the day and you're doing five minutes here and five minutes there, whatever you need to do, you have to find a way to do it. And that's like a harsh message almost, but it's the, the actual amount that you need to do doesn't change. It's just that you have to find a way to do it for yourself because it's critical for our health critical. One of the things that in retrospect, I never asked you was the mindset of wellness. Yeah. I think it goes back to something even deeper. And I think it goes back to something I use regularly now in my practice, which is called the ACE questionnaire. And this is a questionnaire you can find online. It stands for adverse childhood events. There's a tremendous amount of research on this. It looks at traumas and events that happen when you're a child that govern your health and having more adverse events. And it can be something like a divorce. It can be something horrible, like having an alcoholic parent, or it can be a parent in jail, or it can be sexual abuse, or it can be your parents just didn't pay attention to you. Whatever it was, Gabor Monte talks about big T or little T trauma. It could be something in any realm of that. How you register that as a kid controls your life. It controls your beliefs, your mindset, your way of thinking about yourself, the environment. And so if you don't address those traumas and you don't address that childhood stuff, it's very hard to overcome these adult behaviors that are self-destructive. And we see the dramatic and direct correlation between the number of adverse childhood events and the degree of illness, whether it's cancer or heart disease or autoimmune diseases or depression or mental health issues or obesity. I mean, you name it. And I think a lot of obesity in this country is related to trauma. And I see this, you know, people who are resistant to getting better. I mean, there are some of those just an information problem. Like they just don't know what to do and they don't have the right information. And then you tell them and they do it and it's like, boom, they're better. But then there's that group that's not getting better. And then you have to ask yourself why. And I think a lot of it has to do with mindset and your beliefs and what they're struggling with that is not necessarily related to any medical problem. It's more of a psychological trauma that keeps them stuck in a certain pattern of living and behaving that doesn't allow them to take care of themselves. If you don't love yourself, if you don't have self-worth, if you don't have agency. Yeah, I mean, so many people walk around with a lack of self-love and lack of self-worth and self-destructive behaviors and trying to manage their emotions through food or through binge-watching, whatever, or just not taking care of their life. Alcohol, drugs, there's so many different ways that people kind of adapt to managing the wounded child inside. if you don't deal with that, and there are a lot of exciting ways to deal with it now, whether it's psychedelic medicine, metabolic medicine, there's a lot of ways that you will stay stuck. So you've got to get your mindset right. And your mindset plays an enormous role. I almost died last year, and I felt like crap. I was exhausted. I had four hours sleep for six weeks. I had massive sleep debt. I was on the most amount of narcotics you could imagine. everything in my body hurt all the time and i got out of the hospital and the first day out of the hospital i was in physical therapy and i did it every single day except like sunday what was that cultivated or and i was like it was what was between my head i was like i am not gonna let this take me down and i don't even know if there's a i don't even know if there's an exit to this i really didn't know because i was in pain for six months i was in pain for six months i felt like shit for so long. And I didn't know that I'd get to the other side. And now I feel amazing because I put in that effort, you know, or I just was in a bike accident and rather than just taking the excuse to sit in bed and watch TV or binge on Netflix, I actually working out. I'm in the gym. I'm using my body. I'm doing those things that I need to do to maintain my health and to accelerate my healing. I feel like, wow, you're healing so fast. I'm like, yes. And it's not by accident. because I am very strong mentally. Is that practiced? I mean, listen, I've done decades of work on myself. I've done 10-day meditation retreats. I've done many psychedelic journeys. I've done lots of different therapeutic interventions. So I know my mind, and I spend a lot of time learning how to kind of repair those things that happened to me in childhood that left me with some very destructive patterns. And so, yeah, I think there's a mindset to it. Some people are born with it. Some people are intrinsically motivated. Some people have to be motivated from the outside. But even if you have to be motivated from the outside, that's okay. Like, get a group of people. Do it. Go have fun with somebody else. Go to the gym. Hey, take a friend to the yoga class. But take action is what I'm hearing you say. Yeah, it's not the big things that matter. It's the micro little things that matter every day. So it's a thousand little choices you make every single day that matter. and those add up you know like i didn't gain 25 pounds of muscle overnight but it was 300 hours in the gym over the course of a year that i did and i you know it wasn't like every time i went the gym i got like better but it was like i could see slowly over time i was like oh i couldn't do this now i can do this like i was in the gym yesterday working my training he had me doing these uh you know single arm presses on the floor but with with my legs up so i'm losing balance so I have to maintain my core strength. And like the first time I did, I was flopping all over. Now I'm like, okay, I got this, you know? So, and it's amazing to see, like I'm 66 now, which is incredible to say. You don't look 66. Yeah, well, I mean, this is what 66 looks like if you take care of yourself. Like this is what it looks like. You have to tell your trainers that you have a new program. I'm going to give them a book. Yes. I'm going to give them a Forever Strong Playbook. And there's actually foundational movements like that. So that cross balance, which is incredible. Yeah, I've done a lot of core stuff. And so just to see the way in which if you provide the right inputs, the body responds. Extraordinary. I have one final question. What does Forever Strong mean to you? You know, people ask me, what is the definition of health? And the definition of health for me is to be able to get up in the morning and do whatever I want to do. If I want to hike up a mountain that's 10,000 feet high, I want to do that. If I want to go for a bike ride, I want to do that. You know, I've got three bike rides planned this year. I've got a week in Cuba. a week in Greece and a week in Oman on these trips with friends. And I love to go with friends. It's community building. And, you know, these are things that I want to do. I don't want to, I'm 66. I want to do what I'm 86. I don't want to not be able to do it. And so Forever Strong means just doing the simple little things every day that can keep you going. I met a guy, I'll end with this story, who was 95 years old. And he was like a spring chicken bopping around, running around. He had a girlfriend that was 20 years younger than him. I'm like, what is your secret? Because you're eating bagels. You're eating all this crap. I was at a shiva at my stepfather's funeral. It's kind of reception. And he's like, whatever I did yesterday, I do today. I played singles tennis yesterday. I played singles tennis today. I'm like, okay. And I think that's what happens. When people get older, something happens. They get injured. Something breaks down. They get sick. And they stop. Don't stop. I love that. If you want to be forever strong, don't stop. I love that. It means two things, physical and mental. And, you know, I was watching this interview with Pierce Morgan and Chris Williamson, and I really like what Chris said. And Pierce Morgan said, if you wanted to become mentally tougher, should you do mental training or physical training? And Chris didn't hesitate. He said physical training. Like physical training, if I had not started bodybuilding when I was 18 and had to experience some of the setbacks and difficulties and working through problems and working through injuries and whatnot, that taught me so much about life because I thought those things were hard. And then life started, you know, kicking me a couple of times and then you realize, oh, no, that stuff actually isn't that hard. But if I hadn't had those exposures to difficulty at a controlled dose, I wouldn't be able to tolerate it. And that's it's so funny that that's kind of what exercise does physically, you know, I describe it's kind of like a, all right, this gets people upset, but it's kind of like a vaccine, right? You're giving a controlled dose of a stressor and your body gets better at handling the stressor. Because if you look at what exercise does in the short term, increases your heart rate, blood pressure, reactive oxygen species, your inflammation levels, your cortisol. If I told you all that, something did all that, you'd go, oh, that sounds terrible. But these are controlled doses. It's what we call hormesis. you give a controlled dose of a stressor to your body and the body responds by getting better at handling it and so not only did i get better at handling it physically i got better at handling things mentally so i always say you know people will tell me all the time but just lifting weights it's just lifting weights and i said well that's not how i feel about it you know not not only do i love competing i love pushing myself i love pushing my body past what i thought was possible for me. I love the idea that, you know, at 44, when I see people I went to high school with and they're really struggling and I don't wish that on anybody. I love that I still feel like I did when I was 25. Forever strong to me means self-loyalty and community loyalty. I think that honoring yourself is what strength is. Knowing yourself is what strength is. And then incorporating that and uplifting others to bring you along on that mission of self-accomplishment and self-love is what being forever strong is. I think that it's just the alignment of a healthy mind, healthy body, and that you are doing all of this because you enjoy it. You enjoy the process. I think that when people can enjoy the process, then they'll be able to stick to it and just have fun maintaining good health, good body composition. It's easier said than done because you have to find what you prefer in terms of food selection and meal patterning through the day and the week. You have to find what you enjoy in terms of training. But actively seek that out, what you enjoy and prefer. and then you can be forever strong.