 this giant medical machine that's trying to undo the damage that our terrible diet and food culture basically is causing. So if I had it my way, what would my solution be? My solution would be everybody would be a bodybuilder. Everybody would focus on going to the gym or getting some sort of exercise every single day and they would track their calories, they would monitor their calories, their macronutrients and they would understand what it is that they're eating and they would control what it is that they're eating. Hey guys, my name is Boris. I'm a board certified physician assistant working in medically supervised weight loss and today I'm going to answer the question, should everybody be a bodybuilder? And the simple answer to that question is, yes, everybody. Everybody should be a bodybuilder. Or at the very least, everybody should have a bit of the bodybuilder's mindset in their day to day life. Now do I mean I want everybody, the average Joe, everybody with just like a regular job to be like Ronnie Coleman and spend like four hours at the gym every single day squatting 800 pounds, screwing up their back, like no, no, no, no, no, that's not what I mean. I don't mean that I want everybody to try to be Mr. Olympia and go crazy with it and make it their full-time job. That's not what I mean. What I do mean is that I want everybody to be focused on their body and building their body, you know, a bodybuilder builds their body. Mr. Olympia is the reward given to the best built man. So they're building their body. They're literally building it in the way that they want to. And that doesn't mean that I want everyone to try to build giant muscles and lift a ton of weight and eat like six or 10,000 calories a day and all that crazy stuff that professional bodybuilders do. What I do mean is that I want everyone to try to build their body into the healthiest machine that they possibly can. And that does require diet and that does require exercise. So essentially, that's what I'm saying when I say I want everybody to be a bodybuilder. I love coffee. It's no secret to those of us in the medical community, people like me, physician assistants, and then doctors, nurse practitioners, basically medical providers, whose job it is to try to keep people healthy or make them healthy when they become unhealthy, you know, when they have some sort of a disease. It's no secret to us that the biggest health risk nowadays, at least in the Western world in America, more than any other place, also Canada, Great Britain, all the Western countries have a really, really big problem with what's known as metabolic syndrome, diabetes, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, cholesterol, all these things that combine and damage our bodies chronically over time and really destroy them and is actually becoming the biggest health risk nowadays. What used to kill people back in the day, like 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, was mostly things like infections, workplace injuries, accidents, stuff like that. And these chronic diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, all these chronic illnesses were around but they weren't nearly as prevalent. They weren't nearly as big of a problem as they are now. But nowadays, over 70% of people in America are at least overweight and a lot of people are obese. And I'm not using that terminology to like hate on people or to shame people. It's nobody's fault individually. It's definitely a cultural problem but the responsibility for fixing that problem and trying to help people live longer, healthier, happier lives, falls on people like me, medical providers and also on the individuals themselves, all of you watching this video, who maybe are not in the medical field but you wanna get healthier. You wanna lose 50 pounds, 100 pounds, 200 pounds. You wanna get off your diabetes and your blood pressure medications. You wanna stop using your CPAP because you have sleep apnea. You wanna give all that stuff up but you have to have it right now because it's keeping you alive. It's keeping you healthy. But if you lose weight, all kinds of studies have shown that a lot of people can actually give up all those medications and all those devices and they just don't need them anymore because now their body is functioning as it should without that added weight of having literally a lot of weight, a lot of body fat or insulin resistance and all those things that kind of go hand in hand that create those chronic diseases that destroy your body. Well, all that is basically to say we got a giant problem in this country, especially in America with lack of exercise, with lack of moving and with very, very poor diet. And I think we also have just this food culture and this drinking culture. We're going out to the bar, having a few beers, having appetizers, eating a bunch of bread before you even eat a whole entree which is gonna be like over a thousand calories just by itself. We got a huge problem and it's not going anywhere. It doesn't seem to be turning around. Now it took us like 50 years to realize cigarettes were bad and that maybe people shouldn't smoke cigarettes because they're killing us. But it's probably gonna take another 50 years before we realize sugar is bad. Refined carbohydrates are bad. Hormones in our meat are bad. All these preservatives we're using, all this fake stuff, all these fillers, all this nasty stuff that we have in processed food is bad and it's gonna take a very long time before that cultural shift happens and we have mostly healthy options to eat. But now if you go to the grocery store and you just watch people check out what they're buying, they're buying all this processed crap that's just terrible for them. And then it's no wonder that they have to see someone like me who's not only in medical weight loss but also internal medicine, like I provide primary care. And I have to give them pills to lower their blood pressure, to lower their blood sugar, to lower their cholesterol, things that they usually would not have a problem with if they had a proper diet and proper exercise. So I know it's my job to prescribe these medications and I'm happy to do so. I wanna help people live as healthy and as happy as possible. But it's also kind of sad for me because I know that all these things can be prevented. And a lot of these people probably would not have to take these medications with all these side effects and this huge cost to them and to the taxpayers and everything that's funding this giant medical machine that's trying to undo the damage that our terrible diet and food culture basically is causing. So if I had it my way, what would my solution be? My solution would be everybody would be a bodybuilder. Everybody would focus on going to the gym or getting some sort of exercise every single day and they would track their calories, their monitor their calories, their macronutrients and they would understand what it is that they're eating and they would control what it is that they're eating. So for the average person, someone who doesn't wanna be Ronnie Coleman and get on stage and have all these muscles and muscles on muscles and veins popping out of everywhere, if you don't wanna be like that and let's be real, most people don't wanna look that way, they don't want that lifestyle, they don't wanna be that way, but most people do wanna be healthy. So for the average person, what are the benefits of taking some of that bodybuilder mindset and the bodybuilder habits and things that bodybuilders do every day? What are the benefits of putting some of those things into the average person's routine? Well, they build some muscle. No, they wouldn't build as much muscle as Ronnie Coleman, they wouldn't be huge, but they build some muscle. What's the benefit of having more muscle? Well, muscle, skeletal muscle is very metabolically active. Even when you're not lifting weights or running or cycling, even just sitting still, if you have more muscle, your body has a higher metabolic rate, it's burning more calories just at baseline. So if you happen to live in America and you follow the culture, you're constantly eating lots and lots of food, you go into the office, there's donuts, it's Friday, you're off work, you go out with your friends, where are you going? Probably somewhere where there's a lot of food, at least there's some beer. So you're consuming all kinds of calories everywhere you go. So what's the benefit of having your body just at baseline burning a little bit more calories? Well, the benefit is, if you're burning more calories, you're not gonna put as many away as fat. So let's say you eat 2,000 calories in a day and your body at baseline burns 2,000 calories, you're not gonna store anything extra as fat. But if you eat 2,000 calories and your body at base burns like 1,500 calories, well then every single day, there's a 500 calorie surplus and over a week, give or take, you're gonna gain a pound. So every month that's four pounds. Over a year, that's 48 pounds, okay? You just gained 50 pounds by basically having 500 extra calories per day. What is 500 calories? Two 20 ounce things of Pepsi, regular Pepsi, not diet Pepsi. That's it. Two of those every single day on top of your basic metabolic rate, over one year, you'll gain 50 pounds, 48 pounds. Does that put it into perspective? Is that a little scary? Now imagine doing that for 10 years. That's 500 pounds. Now yeah, most people don't end up being 500 pounds. When they gain 50 or 100 pounds, they go, wow, I really need to make a change. And maybe they cut down a little bit. That's the average person. But hey, that's why we have people who are 50, 100, 200, 300, 500 pounds overweight in this country because it's just so easy to guzzle those calories down and they're not exercising, they're not building muscle. In fact, they're probably sedentary so they're losing muscle and so their metabolic rate is just going down, down, down and the calories they're eating are going up, up, up. And so that's how you get obesity. That's how you get metabolic syndrome. So the benefit of going to the gym, of building at least some muscle, is it raises your metabolic rate so you're allowed to eat more without gaining any fat. So that's benefit number one. Benefit number two, another chronic health problem that hits people a little bit later in age, usually like over 50 and especially hits women more than men, is osteoporosis. Osteomalacia and then finally osteoporosis which increases the risk for fractures. People in the medical community often say as sad as it is, it's kind of true, is if like an old lady falls and breaks her hip, that's almost a death sentence, not necessarily and not like she's gonna die from breaking the hip, but what it does is limits her mobility, which limits her ability to move around, to do activities of daily living and eventually she just ends up wasting away and not taking care of herself and then she gets malnourished and then just it's like a slippery slope downward. So you really don't wanna break a hip, especially while you're older. You don't wanna break any bones, especially while you're older and bad bone density, low bone density makes it more likely that if you have a minor trauma like falling just on a flat surface or bumping into something or basically any kind of trauma is that you will have that fracture and it will limit your mobility while you're healing from that fracture. So one other amazing benefit of resistance training of lifting weights and trying to build muscle is it also builds your bones, it strengthens and reinforces your bones. So you have higher bone density just by doing that activity. Now you can help your bone density by taking things like calcium and vitamin D, that's really good. And that's kind of our first line treatment for someone with osteomalacia before we give them things like this fascinates when they have osteoporosis. That's kind of what we recommend to people whose bone density is lower but not super low quite yet. Is vitamin D, calcium, stuff like that. But one thing that we also should be prescribing that's a little harder to prescribe because it's not really a pill you can take, it's an activity you have to do every single day or at the very least a few times per week is resistance training. At least carrying your own body weight, so walking, jogging, but preferably doing some exercise bands, some free weights, even just some of those machines at the gym, just building your muscle because you're not only building your muscle, you're also strengthening your bones. So that's benefit number two of thinking like a bodybuilder and training your muscles. And of course there's all kinds of other benefits of exercise that I can go into and make this video like three hours long but who's gonna watch a three hour video of me sitting in the car just spouting off facts on why exercise is good, you should exercise or you know, lift weights. No one's gonna wanna do that. I'm gonna keep these videos around 10 minutes. So I'm only gonna give you one more. And benefit number three of thinking like a bodybuilder and trying to build muscle and work out at least a few times per week is going to be kind of an abstract benefit but go with me here for a second. I think this is really important. What thinking like a bodybuilder and working out regularly and really learning about exercise, how to work out every part of your body, how to get a proper routine of pull movements, push movements, hinge, squat, lunge, all the basic body movements that you learn when you're getting into bodybuilding and when you're learning how to lift weights. And please don't get turned off by the fact that there is a learning curve. It does take some time to learn this stuff like it does with anything else. But like anything else, if you've never really worked out you gotta be okay with being a beginner and just learning things as you go along. And what I would highly recommend if anyone wants to start working out and lifting weights is to get yourself a good personal trainer. One that you're gonna get along with, one that kind of vibes with you on your energy level. So if you're just like a really chill person or if you're a really shy person, you don't like a lot of energy, you don't like a lot of social interaction and you get one of those super hyperactive personal trainers with like veins popping out of their neck that's constantly yelling at you, you're not gonna stick with that. You know, you're gonna hate it. You're gonna hate every moment that you're getting trained by this person. Get yourself a personal trainer whose energy and whose personality fits with yours and you'll be much more likely to stick to it long term. And that person's gonna end up teaching you how to work out, how to do every proper movement and it's gonna kind of shorten your learning curve so you get good at this stuff faster. But so the big benefit, benefit number three that I'm talking about here of learning how to lift weights and learning how to really work your body in every way that it's designed to work is that you get this feeling of ownership, of control over your own body, of your own fitness, of your own health. Obviously things happen that are not in our control. There's genetics, there's accidents, there's all kinds of stuff, but getting control of your body, of getting control of just your everyday normal health is really, really, really, really empowering. And it just lifts this like sad, cloudy veil of not understanding off of your head and it just makes you feel empowered to control your own health and your own body. As a weight loss professional, I keep hearing this every single day at work. People just say things like, if I just look at a piece of pizza, I gain 10 pounds. If I just even smell the french fries cooking at McDonald's, I gain 10 pounds. Guys, we all know that's not true. You know, if you eat one french fry, you're not gonna gain anything. If you eat one slice of pizza one day in the week, you're not gonna gain a whole lot. It's habits that build up time over time over time that makes you either gain or lose weight or stay the same. It's true, some people really do have slower metabolisms than others, but nobody's metabolism is zero. You would not be alive. Okay, actually I take it back. Nobody who's alive, whose heart is beating, metabolism is zero. It takes at least some calories to keep your machine running, even if your body happens to not burn very many calories compared to somebody else. So even if your body's burning 1,000 calories a day, which is by far the lowest basal metabolic rate I've ever seen measured. In our office, we actually have a machine that we hook our patients up to that measures how many calories their body burns, just sitting still, not doing anything. How many calories their body burns per day, just literally doing nothing, their basal metabolic rate. And usually the lowest I see is somewhere around 1,200 calories, and that's really low. So either way, if you just sit on the couch and don't do anything, your body is going to burn 1,200 calories that day. So trying to tell me something like if I look at a piece of pizza I gain weight, that's not true. And when people tell me I don't eat anything all day and I'm still the same way, I know that's not true. It can't be true, it's physically impossible. So what you're doing is you're eating your basal metabolic rate, and then some if you're gaining weight. Or at the very least you're eating your basal metabolic rate and you're not gaining and you're not losing any weight. So every single body on this planet that's walking around or that's even just sitting there and is breathing and it's heart is beating, it's burning some amount of calories. But I see that from my side, from the science, from interpreting the data, from that machine that we use, I can see that. People who are having trouble losing weight, and that's a lot of people, feel really disempowered, they feel helpless, and they feel like their body just is gaining weight and there's nothing they can do. They try, they try to exercise, they try to diet, they try to only eat salads, they try to cut out soda or french fries or whatever it is that they eat a lot of that makes them gain weight. They are trying, okay? Everybody's trying. I think it's total BS when people think that people who are trying to lose weight and are unsuccessful are just straight up lazy. Absolutely not, everybody is trying, they're freaking best. But what's going on is our bodies don't wanna lose weight. They do not, it's a survival mechanism. Our bodies evolved over thousands of years to prevent weight loss and to make it as easy as possible to gain fat and as difficult as possible to lose fat. Okay, so that's just the machinery, the programming that we're working against. Our bodies could not have possibly predicted this magical world that we live in where you can just get off the highway and in one minute you're eating a sandwich that's a thousand calories. No way, like you would have had to forage or hunt or grow stuff for like hours before you get that many calories and then you'd probably have to share it with the rest of your tribe so you'd only get like a few hundred. You know what I mean? Like our bodies are not designed for this modern world and that's why this modern world is giving us all these modern diseases. So the point I was making is everybody's trying really hard to lose weight and a lot of people feel really disempowered, really helpless by the whole process. So with thinking like a bodybuilder, actually planning your exercises, actually learning how this body, how this machine works and how it feels in motion and also tracking your calories, tracking your meals, knowing what it is in that piece of food that you're about to eat, knowing exactly how much is in there, knowing what a five ounce piece of chicken looks like and how many calories are in it, knowing what one cup of Greek yogurt actually gives you nutritionally, knowing exactly what it is on your plate, enjoying it, not seeing it like a scientist and just taking all the joy out of food, like no, getting joy from your food is as human as it gets. It's part of the human experience but really engaging your brain and learning to just know what it is that's on your plate, not just from how it smells and how it tastes and how it looks but also the numbers. How many calories is it giving you? How much protein? How much carbs? How much fat? What is it that you're actually consuming and really knowing that and learning how to instinctively do that? And again, this takes time to develop but really knowing that is incredibly empowering. It's so empowering and it just really makes you feel like you have control, some control over what your body is gonna look like and feel like and how much weight you're gonna gain or lose. So let's say you had a moment of weakness, you went to grandma's house and she just had this whole tray of fresh baked cookies and you ate the whole tray. You consumed the whole damn tray. You put the whole thing down and you had a glass of whole milk while you're at it. And then knowing these things, you basically calculated that you just took down 3,000 calories, about 400 grams of added sugar and like, I don't even know how much fat. Let's say you did that. Well, okay, that's kind of sad and you're not gonna wanna hear that but at the very least, when you step on the scale in a couple of days and you see, oh shoot, I gained, you know, a pound. I gained three quarters of a pound. You know where that came from, it was those cookies. It's not just this mystery that goes, I don't know, I'm trying my best and I'm not losing any weight. I totally forgot about those cookies. Like, no, you're thinking like a bodybuilder. You wrote those cookies down, you know exactly what you did and you know exactly what happened and now you know, okay, I'm empowered. I can make up for those 3,000 calories. I can make up for those cookies. Maybe I'll do a whole day fast. Maybe I'll do an intermittent fast for a couple of days and only start eating at lunch and you know, skip a whole meal breakfast which is gonna be 500 calories for me. Maybe I'll do that every day for one week and there you go, you just made up those 3,000 calories. There's ways around these things but getting these bodybuilder habits, thinking like a bodybuilder and just implementing that in your daily life is incredibly, incredibly empowering and just makes you feel like you have control over your body, over your weight loss or weight gain, over your circumstances and just makes you a lot more confident. So there you go. That was 3 reasons I really think it's important for everybody, everybody to at least at some level to some degree think and act like a bodybuilder. I'll see you in the next video.