The UGLY Truth About Muscle & Longevity: Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better! l Joel Greene l Ep #400

Opening and Guest Introduction 0:00

Hi, I'm Natalie Nidam, your host, and we are back with a repeat guest. My guest today is the always insightful Joel Green, author of The Immunity Code and most recently, The Way, a man who spent decades experimenting on himself, diving deep into research and fine tuning protocols, all so that we don't have to. We unpack why chasing the ideal muscle look can actually backfire when it comes to longevity and why real longevity may just live in your feet, your Achilles, maybe even your big toe. Joe also explains how diet trends ignore key immune reactions, which are central to long-term success.

from saturated fats overloading macrophages to sugar flipping cancer-friendly switches. If you want to age vibrantly and not just look good, you're going to love this one. Now this episode is brought to you by The Quantum Upgrade, Young Goose, and Timeline, all with special offers just for you. Check out the show notes below for details and enjoy the shows. Welcome back, Joel Green. It is a complete pleasure and honor to have you here today. Thank you, Nat. It 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. 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 podcasts kind of quick fire question, but just to get things, get the audience warmed up.

What beliefs 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. I might even have to circle back on that, but let me just think real quick about it. That's okay with me. It's a big question. And you know, I think that one of the many things that I adore about you is that as much as you're really right a lot of time, every once in a while you will come out and say, we thought this, that we know this.

In my mind, in this space, anybody who's not able to do that is suspect. Yeah. Well, yeah, 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, humblings, the body is humbling. Okay. Like you start off and, I seen this a lot. You start off, you learn a few things, and then there's this, for whatever the reason, hubris shows up. as your strange bedfellow and goes, you know, stuff, right? You know stuff.

And then the longer you do this, the more that little dude evaporates and you get into like, well, it seems like this might work and might be a good thing to try. You get in the seams and maybes and mites, and then you kind of just live there. You just have to, because it's such a... The human body cannot be understood by humans. It just can't. I agree. An AI might have a shot, but humans can. So you always have that sort of fudge factor of... you know, what I'm learning today, and I didn't know this, I thought this.

And that's pretty consistent. So let me come back to your question, because it's such a good question.

Unlearning Health Dogma 4:15

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 podcast. Gosh, it is so good, though. Yeah, i want give a great 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 do the research, you do your best to kind of back it up 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 sometimes it's because the person in question didn't do the work or they thought they were doing it or wanted to do it, or meant to, but they really didn' But sometimes you come across a body that there are particularities about this system and the life it has lived and things that the shortcuts the body has had to create to compensate for whatever And the thing that method that we developed that when you 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 purloined your answer and now it's mine. Yes. Well, it was my answer, I didn't know it until you told me. Okay, good. Happy to serve. Thank you so much. For those of you who don't now, Nat is a very special kind person who likes to help. Anything I can do. Yeah. No, you know what it is? There have been so many junctures in my own journey where I thought, oh, this is the way, or no, no that's the, way this the and 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's a couple of curves associated with everything.

The U-shaped curve and then the logarithmic curve. And what I've come realize over time is that there's a missing framework to understand anything. And you can put it under the broad spectrum of the effects of time. If you want to go granular, you could say, well, it's the U-shaped curve, or it is the logarithmic curve. But really, everything works really great for a while. Then it starts to attenuate and drop off and adapt, and sometimes it can become negative. So you have to know up front that the thing that you think is 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. 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 that understanding that nothing is static. Everything shifts. So it is that. Hey, folks, I just wanted to throw a little message in here for those of you who are sending me all these incredible questions on social media or through YouTube or even on Spotify, wherever you're listening to the podcast.

I wish I could get back to each one of your personally, but unfortunately, And because I cannot, I created, about a couple of years ago now, a membership community where I get to hang out with people just like you. I do live weekly Q&As, almost weekly anyway. We also do have podcast guests come in to answer everybody's questions and do presentations, you get to interact live with those podcast guests. We will sometimes do challenges with some of the partners, like in 2026, we have a mitochondrial enhancement challenge coming up, where we're going to be testing mitochondria function.

we are going testing people's deuterium levels. If you haven't heard about deutereum, We've got podcasts coming down the pipes on that. And then people will be invited to follow a personalized protocol and then retest their mitochondria on the other side. We offer that in the membership community and we do it at incredible discounts that you just can't find anywhere else. So if you're interested in hanging out with me and other like-minded people, which actually happen to include some pretty awesome practitioners and even some previous podcast guests who've come and joined the community, then I invite you to check it out on my website natnidam.com slash the dash longevity dash community or just go to natnim.

com and look for the longevity community tab at the top of the page. Click on that and see if this is right for you. I would love to see you there. And we could make 2026 our best year ever together. So once again, that's natnidham.com. Just look for the longevity community tab at the top of the page. Now let's get back to the show. You know, by the time this podcast gets released, I think there's a really fantastic conversation that you will have recorded with, um, 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. I haven't listened to it yet because it's not out yet, but we discussed it 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 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. I'm not going to spoil it. if we need more of that, right? Because it's, we, need of more 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 teach, let's be clear, a little skewed your way. But I, just think that it, those are the most important conversations to be had right now.

Yeah. Navigate. I was going to mention a friend of mine. My friend, Ron Pena, was the founder of Quest, Quest Bars, and Ron and I used to have these debates on just wildly divergent views about things. And we would have these debates, and I would just be there with conviction about certain things. And the funny thing is, over a long time, like over decade, there are some things he was talking about that I've come around on. I'm like, yeah, I think he is right. See? Which means I must have been. Wrong?

Immunity, Diet, and Longevity 11:45

Oh my god. Yeah. I've heard somewhere out there, I think in the ethers, this conversation about how Google used to hire, probably still does hire. And they want people that will advocate vociferously for their point of view, but are open to being walked into like, OK, all right. Makes sense what you're saying. You're right, you have a better point view. That's just a good thing. It's a healthy thing, so. 100%. Okay. Let's get into the big idea. First, everything else follows. That's the position really of the immunity code 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, you are on fire with these questions. Wow, jeez, this is really good stuff. Well, I'm forcing my brain here to really stretch. Sorry. That's good. I just need some oxygen water or something. Let's... I am 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 universally missing from diet is accounting for how diet impacts the immune system, specifically precise mechanisms in the system.

Let's take the example of Let's take the example of saturated fats and immune cells, macrophages. Okay. So saturated facts have had an interesting kind of renaissance in a sense. They were bad, now they're good. And you'll hear some people are in the camp of like, they are only good, yeah. We were... So it's the exact polar opposite of the previous 30 years, which you said, well, no, they're only bad. And now they are only good. But what's missing in both of those reference frames is any accounting whatsoever for the impact on immune cells of saturated fats.

That's something to factor in. For example, saturated fat intake can have a very specific effect within macrophages. What can happen is... One of the triggers for cardiovascular disease, specifically arteriosclerosis, is the accumulation of cholesterol esters within macrophages. Dietarily, overfeeding saturated fats tends to saturate macros with cholesterol. That can be a direct precursor to cardiovascular diseases. Now, that's not to say that saturated fat are good, we need them in the diet, but it is to There are unaccounted for 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, that the way, That's the answer, right? And people love it because you don't want sugar. Oh my God. This is amazing. Yeah. I mean, 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 effect of the sugar, I'm talking table sugar. I am talking sucrose. On immune cell, the first thing you'll say is, why aren't we looking at this?

This is really important. So the 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 grain of truth in there. However, the missing variable in their is to understand the impact of sugar directly on immune cells that can potentiate cancer. So within certain types of macrophages in a tumor microenvironment, they will hyper-express a very specific isoform of the insulin receptor.

is particularly sensitive to sugar and insulin signaling. And so what there's a clear correlation with is the excessive production of sugar in cancer onset, particularly in the tumor microenvironment and propagating tumors, propagated cancer. You can explain the whole thing by going back and looking at the impact of the sugar on immune cells directly because immune cells and cancer cells kind of share a lot of things in common. Immune cells have to rapidly proliferate. You need to go from zero to billions of them overnight.

Guess what other kind cell does that? Cancer cells. And so when you begin to look at the impact of sugar on immune cell, what you see is that Sugar acts as a key metabolic switch within immune cells, and it's necessary. So sugar can activate the HIF-1 mechanism, which is your oxygen starvation, Warburg metabolism, sort of whole cascade. And that 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 both rate rapidly.

However, in the tumor microenvironment, that can be not such a good thing because tumors tend to thrive in a hypoxic environment. And so when you throw in all these immune cell that have their hypoxic switch turned on, you can see this propagation of immune. That's directly fed from sugar in 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, I would also say that the other thing 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 was good. Cardio was bad. Weightlifting. We're going to talk about weightlifting, like weight lifting is good, weight-lifting is bad and I think that 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.

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 for two days works. I don't know. Like, I didn't hear about it. Honestly, I'll remain close-minded on that one. But if you get the wrong person hearing this message, which generally has been reduced to a soundbite, and they're off to the races. Yeah, you said a key word.

You said hormetic. And I'm a big advocate. Something like when you follow me, people will hear me say is that, no, trust me. The industry, it's 10 years behind. 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've just said, hormetic, which is homeostasis. Okay, if that one thing was understood generally, so if everybody understood homeo stasis as your benchmark, your baseline for anything. So in other words, there's something missing.

The thing that's missing is a paradigm shift. Paradigm shift at its core has this thing called homeos stasi,s which means that the body is not static. The body is a set of dynamic variables chasing equilibrium. That's what the body. As these variables shift, you can see beneficial changes upfront, but then as homeostasis is sought, dropping off, and then you even see negatives. long term from the very thing that you think solves the problem. And why, why do people keep going from thing to thing, the thing is because the missing thing.

Is a paradigm or an understanding that this is a homeostatic mechanism, always seeking homeo stasis. 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 answers is but it's just ridiculous. We're always looking for a tribe. Maybe it's because we're always looking for tribes. And so people, you know, maybe look at diet tribes, right?

You look diet, the keto tribe, carnivore crowd, 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'll get down to nuts and bolts. But I guys, if you walk with one thing today, it's... You know, if you're looking for a tribe, don't look for it in your diet and nutrition.

Look for in other places of your life. But when it comes to nutrition, and you teach this in you 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 live, depending on where you are 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 figure out. All right, let's go to something maybe a little bit more quantifiable. So can you point to a biomarker or a phenotype that most clean-eating, gym-going people miss, which will predict how they'll age? Is there something? If people are doing most things right and what do you think is one or collection of biomakers? Because in this crowd of people that are looking for longevity, health span.

We want to live a really long time, we want be vibrant and mobile and smart and all the things through our whole run, however long that run goes. Do you think there's a biomarker that we're not keeping an eye on that probably should be? I can think of a couple. I think probably the top of the list is fasting insulin. And so often you hear fasting glucose reported or you know, measures related to you A1C and all that, but you don't hear these direct measures of like fasting insulin. And so that was through my mind would probably be the top of the list.

There are very specific acyl carnitines that are measurable, that do show up in tests and they are really telling figures of not just metabolism and insulin, and also cardiovascular health. In fact, they're predictors of general metabolic health. And so acylcarnitines 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. There's very specific forms. So, and you don't see these, these markers a lot ever really.

It's a testing for acidity. Yeah. 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 acetylcarnitines, like this is, that's, people are, I know people who are listening going, okay, with their pen and paper, They're like, Okay, So what are they?

So I can write them down? Yeah, we can do all that and we, can we look at the, and then it's an interesting thing to look 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 and start to look at like, well what's happening? So again, just coming back to homeostasis, there is an inherent imbalance between the TCA cycle and fat oxidation.

Biomarkers and Ketosis Limits 25:00

And so what you see is fatty acid oxidation and then you'll see the tca cycle. and you see that the end product of the first is that you're gonna need acetyl-CoA to feed into the TCA cycle and what you start to see over time is the any doxaloacetate in order to pull that off and the body's pretty good at providing that short-term when you stop so you normally get oxalo acetate from glycolysis and when we stop taking in carbs the liver's got to do the heavy lifting but the problem is of work to feed every cell in the body the glucose it needs in order to produce the oxaloacetate.

Long story short, there's these inherent imbalances between the TCA cycle and fatty acid oxidation. You start to see a lot of things shift. which again, in the short term is fine if you should make ketone bodies, but in a long term, you start to depress ATP levels and then all this other goodies start, start accumulates, acetyl carnitines and just, how does that show up in person? Did they just start feeling like their energy is not where it used to be kind of thing? Like, You can see a general depression of metabolism from that.

So ATP is our currency. That's the body's money. The body is currently supplying. When your total output of ATP begins to drop off, that affects everything in the 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 more muscle is more longevity, more is, and so let's talk about the distinction between hypertrophy for looks versus athleticism power for longevity? Yeah, sure. Yeah. This one just, this one kind of gets me because I've chased that my entire life and I have been here a long time. No longer than me. I think we're roughly the same vintage. Are we really? I might be older than you. You're younger than I am. Let's compare notes off here. But yeah, so okay.

So I'm just saying having chased that carrot for literally 50 years literally if the years Here's what I have witnessed. This is just my personal If you called me on the witness stand, this would be my testimony Yeah, my my 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 it was taught in PE.

If you went to a gym kind of in the early mid 70's, you'd see a pommel horse, rings, all this kind, some weights, but you would see an equal amount of things more. And then what happened is... You do the calesthenic stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and that used to be... What was that? What the... Not doing that again. What? Say that. No, no, what the heck, Justin? what just happened here? Okay, record skip. So what you saw, starting in the 70s after pumping iron and it began to come out, was you saw a shift in the equipment in gyms and you started to see the shift towards, uh, bodybuilding centric stuff.

Okay. And you start to seek a, a ship away from all the calisthenics. Like you, you starting to the ropes. It used to be things like there was the, had these pins and you'd put them in the wall and climb up the walls with the pins. And you had to climb the rope to the ceiling and then there was a pommel horse, you have to do the things. It was all functional stuff, functional movement. Right. In PE class, she had go through the monkey bars and had do 15 pull-ups. So functional was just inherent to way that fitness was approached.

This 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 at the time was considered incredibly narcissistic because you surrounded the gym with mirrors. Now, and a lot of people don't remember this, but at that time, looking at yourself was frowned upon. 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 this big shift happened. And what happened is this little cult niche thing that only weirdos did um became mainstreamed until everybody's promoted it and mainstream medicine's 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 movements you're doing 101 to 100 identical to the same stuff that you know Robbie Robinson and Frank Zane and Franco Colombo and RL were doing in the 70s you absolutely no difference what are you doing oh oh you are doing a pulldown oh, you're doing a row, oh you are doing delts, it's the same stuff, nothing has changed.

So my testimony is after 50 years of doing that stuff I can tell you that emphasizing that Now, in my time, for me, I've just always done a little bit different road where sprinting and athletics and gymnastics was important to me. So I always did that stuff. But I'm just saying, my experience having gone down that road and seeing 50 years of people going down the road, you don't end up better off. What you end up with is shoulder injuries, lower back injuries and I'm talking degenerative. Neck issues, knee issues hip issues.

And so the things that you're going to want the most when you get to this age, the thing that's you going want them most you don't have, which is mobility, flexibility, 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 steps, and now I've got a disc issue and I got to go get that handled, the stuff that really matters.

And I'm just saying now at this point in my life, that's another thing I want to talk right now. mu cell injection in my Achilles yesterday, I'm hobbling around like I am 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 paragons of perfection. Today's an off day. I may or may not have tweaked my SI joint today doing a heavy deadlift. Yeah. So the point I make 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 is going to tell you no, that is not the answer. Trust me. Because when you look at everybody that actually did that, and you're looking at what they're doing now, go look Kevin Lovroni. Go look Dorian Yates. Look at everyone that was the master of that. They're all doing athletic stuff now. When you looked at them.

Why Muscle Size Is Not the Goal 33:00

Like Kevin Lavrony, he's sprinting, doing all kinds of stuff. You look like Dorien Yate. He's into cycling and all this stuff, so all of us that bought the Kool-Aid and went down the road, found out the hard way. And now what I see out there is this meme of, oh, yeah, muscle's the answer, which is another way of saying, no, 70s bodybuilding is the answers. So to put that in an intelligent, measured sort of response, it has a place. It certainly does. I do it a couple of times a week. Who's kidding who?

I go to the gym.I do the 70's body building shtick. All the beach muscles. But the issue with that is if that's what your main focus is, You're going over time to lose everything you're actually gonna really need. So the number one thing that is never trained that you gonna lose is you are gonna loose the strength in the feet. You are going to loose strength the in feet, the achilles and the caps. Your gonna looses strength there and from there that compromises the knees and hips and lower back and all the things that and trust me when you get to this age your gonna want your mobility, your going want you vitality and your energy.

That's the no. 1 thing. And I see guys all time at the gym who are huge walking around and they are hobbling and You can't touch their shoulders. You do this, you'd ask them to touch the shoulders, their hands stop like three to four inches above their shoulder. I had to check. Can I touch them? I used to be married to a guy who literally couldn't even touch his shoulders! It was like my big joke, I'm like, touch your 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, like you said, if you're about to fall down the stairs training the reflex and you can only stop yourself from falling down stairs without throwing out your back.

If you've trained outside those planes of motion that you are kind of relegated to in traditional weightlifting. Well, 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. They've got to make up for lost time a little bit. I think in an effort to get people moving in the right direction, we're over-delivering on one message, and we need more nuance in that message still. One last point is that in this model that you're talking about, you are chasing an aesthetic. And the aesthetic is never going to get you. 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 was never the goal. It's a byproduct of the training that they did to achieve the goals that their chasing. and we get caught because we're such a visual world because, we care so much about how we look. We get cut wanting to look a certain way, which is when you're doing the deltoids and like, you know, I'm working my shoulders today. Well, are you working your shoulders, so you can move your arm in all the different planes you need to move it in? Or are your working shoulders because your anterior and your posterior and medial deltas are not developed enough to give you the look that you want?

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 youth fullness 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 the instantaneous recoil and their fine no issues, okay? You can have a person who looks cosmetically good and does that same thing and throws their back out okay so The problem that we have is, I know, the behind the scenes.

So the Behind the Scenes has two variables 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. That is the honest to gosh truth. You don't know what someone's taking. If I were to take those variables away from that person, And say, OK, you don't have your whole day. In fact, we don' even have two minutes. Oh, by the way, We're going to drug test you every day because we know what you're doing when you are in the bathroom.

OK? Yeah. then all of a sudden that whole paradigm would fall apart because they wouldn't be able to parade these cosmetically enhanced physiques that have nothing to do with anything. And don't get me wrong, I'm the first guy to want to look good and train that. I get it. Hey, listen, we all do. We're all believers. So we're not saying that's not important, but what we are saying here is that youthfulness and keeping youthfulness and obtaining youth fullness 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 is probably, probably not gonna happen. I'm not saying it can't happen, it's gonna be hard. It's a lot of work. A lot a time, a lotta dedication. And I am saying, I not even saying that's it not a worthy goal. You probably ought to just, you know, set that as a long-term goal, that great. But it is very, very difficult to do. Very hard for most people because the time acquired to do it and the consistent dedication required to it.

So there's a yin and a yang here. 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 that there's a bone. Do you think you 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 on to the bone Yeah, no for those reasons and all that about so I I Think there is a higher priority on women. Um, plus it is harder for women to gain muscle.

So, um, i think That you know, we cant treat both sexes the same in this conversation. Yeah so So if you're listening and I would just say that I'm not saying it's not important. I am saying that there's a place for it, certainly is. And if you're a woman, there is probably more of a space than there for a guy. The thing I say though is that this idea that the answer is to put on more muscle and you can live longer is provably false. It's provable false and I could prove it just just purely from a vascularization argument.

But can we be more specific? Because I think more muscle is a relative term. Yeah, yeah. If you're muscle deficient, if you are deficients in muscle mass, so you at a disadvantage. You're at disadvantage when you fall down the stairs. Your disadvantage metabolically. you read a disadvantaged posturally, which is going to affect the way you or you know, like if your deficiente, 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 not efficient in, something and you supplement with something it's either not going do anything or bite you muscle. It's the same. Its more nuanced as a conversation. Yeah. This is hard for the polarized mind to grab onto because you, because the, you know, the tendency is to want to think that, Oh, muscles, either bad or good. 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 the way that you're gonna obtain youthfulness long-term, I'm telling you right now, my personal opinion, if all you doing is focusing on 70s bodybuilding, you not gonna get there.

That's my opinion. And something interesting to look at to the whole argument that muscle and longevity correlate. All you have to do is look the amount of vascularization required for a pound of muscle, okay? And so you have to look at, so in order to gain this one thing, I need these other things. I needed to vascularize that. So let's say I wanna gain 10 pounds of muscles. All that muscle has to be vascularized. And there's a rate limiter there with respect to that, basically as you get older, one of the issues is that the cardiovascular system is declining in its ability to vasculize tissue.

And you can make the argument and say, well, okay, but strength training is a great way to fight that. And that is true. Yeah, absolutely. That's true, however, the problem is there's a systemic issue. At your max capacity, you only have your VO2 max. The more muscle you gain, there is a diminishing return in the ability to vascularize that muscle. Now, anybody who's ever seen, for example, mixed martial arts, 100% knows that's true. The big guys don't do well because they gas out, because the cannot oxygenate that tissue.

It's metabolically expensive. Hugely expensive, yeah. As you're getting older, the whole purpose of breathing is to make ATP. And ATP becomes your constraint, 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 the size of the pipe is diminishing. So you get into this inverse equation between the more muscle you'll have, at some point you reach a limit in terms of how you can oxygenating that tissue, how can you vascularize it.

That affects the system as a whole. Okay, affects the whole system because you can only make X amount of ATP. Let's say your ceiling is 100. Okay. And you're trying to add more tissue. More tissue that you have to oxygenate. So that means as a whole, there is... Yeah. Yeah, so you could just break... I mean, we could do a scientific thing on this and show this whole ratio of things, but just to say that... The amount of muscle is a variable. However, the type of muscles is also extremely important.

So when you look at athletic muscle and you're looking at youthful muscle, there's a shape element to it. It's certainly attractive, but it's not excessive and it is incredibly functional. When you are looking They look really good, but they're really at stopping. They're good at compressive forces. That's the thing that's going to keep you young. Youthfulness has a lot to do with being able to decelerate rapidly and training that 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 shouldn't be to go from zero to whatever your top speed is quickly and we lose that ability as a matter of fact was at 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 can't end well. It 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 have a replacement in 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 go to max all the things. But the one thing that doesn't pay attention to is mobility and flexibility. It's youthfulness. It is not there. Exactly. 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 trace the bulk. What you're chasing is the pliability. The fluidity. 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 happens. So let's tell people what to do. Like what do we want? What would be a great prescription? 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 so easy, is take a mat, something soft that has a little springiness to it, then jump up and down or jump rope on it for example, do that roughly a minute a day and then work up to two, three minutes a days and just do as part of your non-negotiable foundation across the years. What happens is by jumping up-and-down on something springy, You're not taking the weakest parts of your connective tissue and forcing all the load into that.

You are allowing the force to be distributed kind of across all of the different parts in your connected tissue. And so they have an opportunity to strengthen over time and you're building pliability and springiness back into soft surface, either hop on it or jump rope on one of the two, and just do a minute a day the rest of your life on that, that will serve you better. Or get on a rebounder for people. When you say a rebounder, like a little mini trampoline, just bounce on a mini trampling. Yeah, I can maybe use something a.

Little less skill based because skipping. I mean, do skipping at my gym, but it's shocking how many people really can't skip. Yes. And yeah, yeah. No, isn't it? Yeah. It really is. Um, yes. So I don't, my mind's just going like, is that too springy? I dunno. and I suppose, Yeah is the answer. Well, it's interesting, you know, I've had I have a mini trampoline at my cottage because I had my power plate here, have my mini trampling there. So I'm kind of covered. And the number of people I 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 because it engages all the muscles in the foot. You mentioned the feet earlier. I transitioned to barefoot shoes a couple of years ago and I used to be a classical ballet dancer. So my feet used 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 of the work. And it took a while to transition into the barefoot shoe. But what the bear foot shoe does that I think a lot of people don't realize is 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 food 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. It's what you were saying. Its flexibility and strength at the same time. And maybe one of the things that people need to look out for is that as your building strength, you also want to build flexibility. That in and of itself might be a limiting factor to overdoing the strength piece.

Yeah, I think that's great. Yeah. I'm, walk, step with you on that for sure. And so two of the metrics, there's a few metrics people use, right? And maybe let's talk about those. There's grip strength, 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? There is grip, strength sit-to-stand. Well, the real indicator is big toe strength. That's a 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 that's an indirect measure of basically falls.

So as your overall strength, so in other words, if you're linking grip strength and mortality, why does grip strengthen relate to mortality? Because you are essentially measuring loss of strength in the body as a whole. But the real specific indicator is big toe strength. When you start to see loss in strength of the big toes, that one-to-one correlates to things like falls that take you out. And so when you look at old people, the danger is falling. you know, that's what like I've seen this a hundred times, 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've got the skull, we have the stroke and all kinds of stuff.

How do you make your big toe stronger? Yeah. So this is hugely, hugely important thing. Okay.

Feet, Calves, and Youthful Movement 50:30

I do train my big toe, but I don't 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 tow and then you kind of go back and go forth and just, you know, over time, train your big-toe. We're in it here first, guys. Yeah. No, it's the thing. It really is. The way that I do it, because that gets in time consuming, so I'm kind of grouping things together, but the way I that do is I'll get on the seated calf machine where your legs are extended and I just train it differently.

So what I get is on a ball of the foot and instead of doing bodybuilding type stuff where you're going very slow, It's all explosive force. So what I'm doing is I am pushing the weight out and then catching it as it comes back. And so decelerating slowly, not slowly. I mean, it's a, excuse me. It is a rapid deceleration. But it is all the ball of the foot and the big toe. And that's training, not just the feet, but it's also training in the calves and 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 you start doing explosive movements like that, You can get hurt easily.

So you got to find the right way. You got find a way that allows you to do it explosively, but you're not going to hurt yourself and you can decelerate properly. And so that's a big deal. But it's just that shift into an athletic thing versus a bodybuilding thing. 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, flexibility, 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. 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 have a really job, okay? So you have to a non-negotiable foundation, which is a minute here, a minutes there.

And into that, what you build in is this thing. 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 the stuff that you could do. And that's youthfulness. Yeah, 100%. You know, it's funny. My parents are both in their late 80s now. They came to visit me not too long ago. The reason why they look so much younger than they are is because of the way they move. Hmm. It's remarkable.

Like they move like young people. And I don't know, they don' train that, but you know they're at the gym every day, They're doing their things. But whatever it is that they are doing, is they still move, like a much, I've seen 70 year olds move worse. You know that have a lot of restrictions or don''t move properly. So that youthful movement is really what we're all after. Totally, 100%. It is your movement, youthful. Actually, can I steal that? That's perfect. By all means. Any time. 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. For someone, who has been sitting around and we can split it between men and women if you want. But I, think in general, sedentar people are sedenta 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.

I actually have a free course where I have training through this, but just generally speaking, What you would want to do, if you're really sedentary, I would just literally start at the gym on... There's three things I'd do. I will start on a standing calf machine, and rather than doing reps, what you want do is you wanna do maximum contraction, maximum extension under load. So what want you to is put a weight on that you can handle, number one, go into extension on the ball of your foot and hold it.

So you're going up on your tippy toes, guys. That's what an extension is. Yes. Yeah. Hold that for a minute to two minutes under load. Okay. Well, then go down into max extension of the, of you, so you still on a ball, your, foot, you foot is hanging off the thing and you go into Max extension, um, where the Achilles is being stretched, the calf's being stretch, The foot's been stretched. And then you hold It for A minute, two Minutes underload. And then over time, over about three months, just increase the load, okay?

So maximum extension under load. Maximum contraction underload. This is really what has been one of the things that's been shown to improve all the aspects of athletic ability is because what we're doing is we are forcing the muscles to stretch beyond their natural limit and we do it under a load we force them to push beyond the natural limits and hold it. And so do about two sets like that to start, you know, and just start with a 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 calf machine where you're seated, lying down with your feet extended, the feet and pushing off. So what you're not doing here is you are not jump rope standing up before you 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 hopping or you doing jump ropes. I do those three things and I will do that for about three months to start with. Starting with the first two and then migrating into the nest if you've been really sedentary.

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, and preferably one to three minutes a days you can build up. Some days maybe you could only do a minutes, some days, you do three-minutes. That becomes your foundation. And then, once twice a week you're in the gym, adding these extra things on. What this does is it keeps the contact point. 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 this quality, this ephemeral ability to move, you could find it by that. you can define it, by how you're able to push energy through and direction changes, through feet rapidly. And so this is a key missing aspect of youthful. Yeah. And don't forget that that involves the brain. It involves your entire nervous system responding to that. I think that's why that is so profound. As a matter of fact, rebuilding the calf muscle has a lot to do with getting blood back up to the heart.

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. 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. Recovery rules, what becomes non-negotiable after 50 to actually build muscle? So what I said before is that it's hard to build muscle and now I'm going to contradict myself and I am going say that if you know how to do it properly it is not that hard.

It's just not well understood. 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. 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 of weeks and coming back to it. Oh yeah, I remember this from the course. Yeah, yeah. What's generally missing from this 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.

This is the natural way to mimic steroids. The closest a natural human being can ever get to mimicking steroids is through overfeeding. It makes sense if you think about it. Think about this. Like, just ancestrally speaking, if you were starving for a couple of weeks and you're gone and lost a bunch of weight and then you killed a water buffalo and ate 10 pounds of meat and slept a lot, you would put on a ton of muscle really fast. And you slept. Yeah. That's because this is something that the body is well-wired to do.

You're tapping into ancestral survival mechanisms by doing that. Whenever you tap into survival, tap in to power. So tapping into overfeeding in order to put muscle on is something the body knows how to do. And it knows to how do it even better coming off of starving. So going from fasting into overeating, it's hardwired to but muscle. But the trick is to understand that you got to eat a lot and that's very hard. It's really hard and for how long? So how would you say the fast into the overfeed?

Because you could have people listening to this going, Done. I'm in. Joel Green said, I need to eat double my calories in order to put on muscle. Well, that's easy with junk food, very hard with clean food. Correct. Very hard. So clean foods, you know, after your fifth meal of a thousand calories or whatever, in my case, your dreams. Yeah, it's the hardest thing in the world because your brain has a meter that gives you reward for food. And once you start getting tons of food, the meter goes to zero.

It's just like eating paste because I can't eat anymore. But I would say, generally speaking, a three to five day fast and then go into overfeeding for 10 days. So the body has a unique ability within about a 10 to 12 day window where most of the over-feeding actually goes to help the muscle on, very little goes fat. You're getting a little bit of fat, but you gain a lot of muscle. The second piece of that is, and it's difficult for... A lot people will get this, lot a 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. If you can look the the weight you're using is too light. So there's a max intensity that's required, but there is a check and that check is called the tempo. In other words, there a tempo to it. It's 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 it'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 hurt. So it is not that heavy. It is lighter, but it heavier than what your used to doing, so what are you doing is 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 are very slow on the decentric part. But there is still a rhythm to it, so I could take all the tempo out of it and I do that sometimes where it's basically weight lowering and you know, I'm going this slow.

very fast 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 thing. 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 Mensner was this big advocate of only need one or two sets, which was complete rubbish if he looked at what he did, because he didn't count his four warm-up sets. Those don' count.

Those don't count. It's 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 there's, there a yin yang balance between volume and intensity, you know, but all of that to say you can train, um, much less than you think you need to by ratcheting up the intensity and the tempo and food. And you can train a couple of times a week like that. That's kind of all you'll need because then you will need the recovery in between.

You need lots of food, lots So you said earlier, three to five day fast, that's out of the realm of possibility for a lot of people for any number of reasons that 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 it's like there's scarcity from to go from scarcity to abundance and scarcity 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 are 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. So to mimic fasting, you only need to reduce methionine intake by about 40% and what methions in all your proteins.

Building Muscle With Food and Intensity 1:05:00

There's A Day in the Way diet, Which is called the ancestral pattern. And this just mimics foraging. You're eating, and you can eat across the whole day, but your protein intake is very low. So that does it right there. You're mimicking fasting by there, and you're going to be hungry on that. Because really, you are eating things that have very low protein intake, mostly like fibers and some fruits and resistant starches, but you'll be going hungry at that, so take some testofenicine or whatever it is you need to get through that but 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 3 grams of proteins per kilogram of body weight. A lot protein. Yeah. But it's not ongoing. Right. And that's the thing, right? You're not over-expressing mTOR indefinitely. No, it is very short. All we're doing is mimicking coming out of starving into overfeeding and the body will put on a ... 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 amazing. But it makes sense if you think about. If our body didn't have that ability to rapidly regain muscle after starving, we wouldn't be here to talk about 100%. Let's talk a little bit about optimizing insulin, training the signal, not fear avoidance. So we discussed this way back on episode 86 of this podcast, where by the time this comes out, we'll be pushing 400, or we will have broken through 400. Do you want to give the high level answer for this once more? And has anything changed since 2022? People can go back to the episode.

That episode actually predated my book, The Way, and everything in that episode was in The way, so that was just coming attractions. No, haven't changed a thing, it's this. The one word is balance in the diet is the optimal thing to train optimal insulin sensitivity. It's provable. Quick answer here. You need six things to really train insulin optimally. You to stimulate insulin on a regular basis through carbohydrate sources that insulin sensitize. 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. Well, I need to stimulate coca-cola, but, oh, that has to happen separate from stimulating insulin. They're not on the same- They are opposing. Yeah. ... beachfront. Okay. How do we do? 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 lots 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 glucagon to be really sharp. I needed insulin to really be sharp, the foods that are going to stimulate glucogon are proteins primarily, proteins, fats, fasting, things like that. The things that can stimulate insulin are your resistant starches, your pulse crops, and things have a very long, low, slow yield of glucose into the serum. Those sharpen insulin and they're opposed mutually, they are opposed in terms of when you do them and their opposed diametrically in term of food tribes and categories.

They're different. So right away, that proves that for optimal insulin function, you need balance in the diet, but you can extend the argument even further. When you begin to look at the microbiome and you go, okay, well, I need an optimal microbiomes, and that's a simple equation just to make it really dumbed down and simple. You need two family bacteria, Bifidobacteria and Acromansia. If you get those two, Well, how do you do that? Well there looks like they're kind of a post-summit. Yeah. How do I stimulate the Bifidobacteria?

So the foods that are going to stimulate that or generally five, six categories. It's nuts, berries, resistant starches, dairy. And so those are gonna stimulate your Biffidibacterium. Your acromansia is going to be a combination of fasting, a certain types of fruits, things like that. Red fruits. Yeah. Right. Parmigranates, and things that that, so those things work together to stimulate those. Of that list, only one is in the animal foods category, which is your dairy, that's going really stimulate Bifidobacteria, but they work better together than they do apart.

So you're going get a better stimulation of Biffidibacterium with dairy combined with fruits So all I'm doing is, what we're doing here is reverse engineering how to get what want and it's taking us back into what I started with is balance here. 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? 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 days that look different, there's day where I'm more on the glucagon train, and there are days when I am more in the insulin train. They're different. And that mimics nature. Nature forces you into this unpredictable sort of 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 monodieting 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 I got into a rhythm with that seven day program. That was it to turn 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 learn the principles. And where it can get messy is if you don't respect that this day is insulin day and this days. When they start crossing over is when you get messy. And you still have a course, right? Do you offer the program? Yeah, but this is in the way. So the coaches course just had that info two years before. Do have consumers course? You have course for people that are not coaches? I would say the book. That's exactly in the books, which is your cheapest entry level to learn all that.

And then my fat loss course is a step through of that, but even with just a book, you can pick up on the pattern that you're talking about. Yeah. Because I think that people listening to this, they're sitting with their pen and their paper going, okay, I'm still not sure what I am eating. Trust me on this. Get the book. All will be clear. And it's not that we're here to sell the books. It's that it makes such a difference to your world when you start to get into these patterns. What I love about the program, the way you wrote it is, look, there's going to be nights that are going be nachos and beer.

There's gonna be that night where you're not able to home. 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 every once in a while if I feel like I really need it. And there's always a rationale behind it, so 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 of a roadmap that you can just keep using over time to get yourself to that point of balance that you might have been missing.

It transcends paleo, carnivore, keto, whatever. Like it transcended all of those things and all the sudden you're eating like a normal person because you eat all those I just realized next time I do this, I need some glitter. And when you go, it transcends, 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 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 1 for 4 hours before bed to improve insulin without excessively tracking?

So that's a rule of thumb for morning, one to the big meal, and for four hours for bed. Rule of thumb for the morning is that you're not doing the same thing every day. So you are not breakfast every, day you aren't doing fasting every that your mixing it up. That would be rule number one. Rule for a big meal is 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 clock, it helps you keep from overeating at dinner, helps the accumulation of debt to key hormones, sort of spins down the ratio of ghrelin, leptin and all that.

You know, those big meals are really important. It's just when you do them. And not only when, it's when in the week you can do that. So there's the time of day, but then there is the place in a week. That matters a lot. Like, Sunday is really good, Wednesday is good. What was the other one? Wednesday breakfast was really great. Four hours before bed. Keep your mouth shut. Oh, yeah, four hours. You put on your mousetapes four hour before you go to bed? Oh my gosh, that would change. Stop. That's it.

You just you hit it, you get the answer. And that's a divorce rate plunge from 70 to 30. I can just imagine badly hard on your podcast of mouth tape right before bed and my wife and I are doing great. Yeah. Yeah, so my wife and I are doing great, but are so but I was gonna 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 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 for hours or four bedtimes. Other times it is better have a really small carbohydrate meal an hour or two before bed time. Like if you're deficient on sleep, that's going to help you sleep. And then, so you hear all these counter arguments, yeah, the liver needs to, blah blah and it's like what's more important good sleep or you know your liver doing some post 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 are struggling with sleep so let's help you to fix that and then you going to go back to don't eat four hours Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So yeah, it's just, again, getting us out of this notion that the body's static. It's not. Once again just to hammer the head, the nail here, It is a homeostatic mechanism with a bunch of dynamic variables seeking balance, seeking homeopstasis. I need more glitter.

Insulin Balance, Timing, and Daily Rhythm 1:17:00

So in the last year, which protocol from your books do you personally use the most? Cause there's some crazy stuff and there was hip one training. There's all this things. What outcomes surprised you? Um, I just, use a basic pattern religiously. I live by that basic of, you know, kind of my more foraging foods days versus my more fasting protein fat centric days. 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 cocaine, but you actually doing the reverse, you cutting the protein.

It really helps you stay lean, really help you staying lean over time. So what we're looking for is a whole other episode, it would just be to talk about the problem with weight loss and what the problems people are trying to do. 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, need you think certain nights where you have 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.

Taking your protein very low, taking your foraging foods high, you're cutting cysteine down, cystein depletion, and it helps you drop fat. It's one of the reasons a sugar diet works, is you just cutting protein and take down. There's a very good case, this 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, your lose fat and eliminate carbs, lose that. What most people don't realize is, if you eliminate protein, any one macro eliminating, you'll lose fat for a while.

Works really well. Until you don't. 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 stay lean. And one of the big undeclared problems is just gradual weight gain over time, just year after year, or just a half pound here, a pound there. By the time you're 60, you know, your 60 pounds overweight and you got real problems. Yeah. That creep and for women, especially post menopause, 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 over weight. So it's insidious. Okay. 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 do those shape your health rules when the science is kind of fuzzy? Such good questions, Nat. 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, so does, well, I would just mirror some things I've said before, which is that, we're not just a body, We're a Body and a Spirit and You need to feed both. Uh, the spirit needs food too. Um, anybody can kind of prove this to themselves. If you've ever been through a period in your life where, you know, we're just kind go, go go and pass, pass task, task task. And after a while, your soul is just starving for, some indefinable thing, but it's it.

You know your sole needs to be fed and so stillness, uh, is what feeds the soul quiet and stilliness and beauty. Those things feed the sole. And there's some empirical evidence that suggests things like forest bathing and things that there is some truth to that, meditation, all those things sort of empirically validate that I would say. But in the world we live in now, particularly with social media where There's never a client. Without realizing it, we've given a measure of self-control over to repetitive dopamine hits.

Stillness is this nutrient that's missing. Like if I were to describe it in dietary terms, you need more nothing. Yeah, no, and in every way. You need nothing, You've got too much something everywhere. Everywhere there's something, And I think stillness and nothingness, and emptiness, it allows you to tap into your own clarity. And so when you're really struggling with whatever it is, I thing that if you allow yourself to sit and quiet, you'll allow your wheels to turn and to form your opinion, which we talked about off camera earlier, is it's becoming a lost art, forming our own opinion.

It doesn't mean we have to be right all the time, but just coming out with, well, here's what I And it's so hard for so many people to be still. Like when you start querying about this and go cash, you know, be, still sit here, look at that, and it, it comes after a minute or two. Yeah. If that quick fire last, last couple of questions, your priestly snack or protocol you're not willing to give up and why it works. Um, 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, guys listen, when he needs it, not every night. And so like at a time when you're depleted and you are recovering and You need to spin down cortisol, you need a little pleasure hit, and then all the sleep-supported aspects of that small carbohydrate meal before bed. It's kind of a silver bullet. 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 that.

Got you. People don't think about that, but it is really powerful. Oh gosh. It's like child's pose moving from childs pose into a cat cow or something like super easy. Mm hmm. it's really. 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 of minutes I put into kind of moving through some flows, yoga flows. By the time I hit bed, I just, am ready to go out.

And it just like laying the gas out of the bag and just yeah, actually that probably would have been, it should have meant 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 the big grilled piece. You need 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? Derry. Oh gosh, yeah.

It's so vilified. I'm thinking of umpteen influences right now. There are steams coming out of their ears hearing that. Reverse glitter. You don't know what you're talking about and all that, but no, it's empirically validated. First of all, I could go on for hours. In addition to being really good for weight loss, I'm just picturing these faces out there. They're blowing up.

Stillness, Recovery, and Practical Protocols 1:25:00

Look, all of the new revelatory things about all the ingredients in dairy like lactoferrin and all this stuff is rocking the world right now. There's good stuff in there and it should not be conflated with the food grade or the fluid quality because that's true of all foods. You can find crummy examples of every fruit, every piece of meat, you can higher quality examples. But just as a tool set to really round out the microbiome and help it produce the bifidobacteria that it needs, like dairy is top of the list.

It's top. 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. For many of All right. What's the most abuse supplement in the longevity space and is there a better alternative to it? What the one thing you keep hearing over and over again and you're like, Oh, stop it.

Gosh, that's a good one. That's such a. Um, I think I would just say antioxidants in general as a category. And it's starting to get out there now that you need a balance between pro-oxidative and antioxidation. You need to balance that. And what's killing this is the idea of your daily whatever insert, your Daily. And so, so many antioxidant products are daily. daily. Good for the supplement guy, bad for you. Take it sometimes. Yeah. Antioxidants need to be strategic in their nature. There's better times and it's not a simple equation.

Some antioxidants can actually help pro-oxidated processes like in the vasculature. Certain types of berries can help the overall picture, even though they're antioxidants, but not interfering with that. But just generally speaking, this idea that I need to take my 10,000-ORAC antioxidant every single day, you're probably doing more harm than good, I would say. Got it. All right. Last question. What health or longevity marker is best to track for someone in their 50s? Um, it's just your body fat percentage, your percentage of bodyfat.

Yeah, 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. Like what happens, like, you know, oh yeah, I'm on all these statins and all of these drugs. I want all this stuff. And then you're getting lean and, Oh, and I don't have to get on the drugs anymore because I didn't get the issue anymore. 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. When you start to get insulin resistant in your body fat, you sort of get oversubscribed with inflammatory macrophages in you body. You start getting fibrosis in body, insulin resistance, it acts virally and it spreads to every other organ in the body and you get visceral fat and fat in muscle, metabolic dysfunction, too many free fatty acids in all this stuff. And so getting bodyfat 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 a lot of people in the gym who have cardiac issues and a bunch of muscle, but their body fat's heavy. They got a lotta muscle but they're body fats heavy, and it's getting lean. Getting lean is the thing that really will dramatically shift everything. Thank you. Joel. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for everything you did. Oh, thank you! This was fun. I'll bring the glitter next time. Definitely bring glitter the next. Whoever has to clean that space will never forgive you, but...

It'll be me. It will be like, Clayton, I got her! Nat, i'm tying you down. You need to cleanup from the door. All right. Well, Thank You so much for today. Always a pleasure connecting with you and Yeah. 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 did people you, how did they get access? I mean, the book we talked about, but if there's courses, like what, Yeah, 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 links to a lot of my goodies are their. And you could 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, It's different? Well, yeah, the direct version is a hardcover and the paper is better. A lot went into it to make an amazing hard cover. It is great.

The pictures are sharp and bright. In the Amazon, it is just the papers are different and all these little things. I have that one.I have the hard-cover. Yeah. So get the Direct if you can. That is what I would say. Okay. All right. Thanks again.