 I want to live to be at least a hundred years old. Yeah, I'm with you on that, man. Centenarian. Some people say they want to go out. You know what? Some people say they want to go out at like 75, 80. My uncle says that. My uncle's like, I want 15 more. I'm out of here. No way, man. I think it depends on your health. And I think it depends on how you're gonna, how you perceive your health to be at an older age. You know what I'm saying? I think when people say they want to leave early, it's because they think they're not gonna be healthy or mobile or independent. You know what I mean? That's already in pain. No, that's correct. Kind of frustrated. That's such a good point because I look at someone like my uncle who's just in his 60s and to say something like only he wants 15 more years. And then I have clients who that were in their 80s and were doing, were skiing, water skiing and cross country skiing and lifting serious weights still and squatting over 200 pounds like, and they were 80, you know? I mean, and to think that they would wanna go out by that time, like when they're, I mean, they're kicking ass to it. I had, so I trained a lot of people in the older age group. Never trained anybody that was 100. I think the oldest client I trained was in their late 80s. Yeah, 80s for me. But, you know, two clients stand out for me. So one was Carol, trained Carol for about 14 years. You know, Mondays at 3 p.m. every single week and sometimes twice a week, but always once a week and she did other things on her own. And I trained her from her mid 60s to her, you know, 70s and older. And I, it was phenomenal. Now she'd always had, I wouldn't wanna say always but for a lot of her life had prioritized health. So here was this woman who, you know, I helped her build strength with resistance training. I helped to add to her current fitness routine. But because she valued it, she did a lot of the things that you should do to take care of yourself. And here was this woman that was, her husband had passed away. She would, you know, date men through dating apps. She was completely independent of fireball when she'd come into my facility. I loved training her. I also had a client named Jim. He really stands out. He's a swimmer guy. Yeah, and I've talked about him before. He actually was, he helped Doug and I film the first maps program. I didn't know that. He was, he'd be in the back doing the sound. Oh yeah? So yeah, because remember back then we didn't have a studio, Doug and I would have to do it all in one day. Your makeshift studio. Oh yeah, so we put up the green screen. Died with the blankets. Oh yeah, the whole thing. It would take us about good two and a half hours to set up and then we would go for, you know, five or six hours. And so, you know, Jim was there doing the sound or whatever. But anyway, Jim came to me already having a lifetime of fitness under his belt. He came to me in his mid sixties. They trained him into his seventies. And here was this guy that for 30 plus years swam almost every single day, paid very close attention to his nutrition. He valued it. He rode his bike as much as he possibly could. So he had cars, but if he could ride his bike somewhere, that's what he would do. Didn't matter if it rained or whatever. And so this guy was just incredible health and fitness. I remember he got a physical, I want to say when he was 69 or something like that. And he said, hey, Sally goes, do you think I should get my hormones tested? And I said, yeah, you know, aside from the regular stuff, why don't you get your testosterone levels checked and let's just see where you're at. So if you're familiar with the testosterone levels and where they're supposed to be for men, the range is usually anywhere between 200 to, I don't know, say a thousand. Usually, and there's give or take, right? These are, there's different lab ranges, but that's, we'll stick with that one. That one's a pretty average one. So 200 to 1000. And if you're above 600 for a man, you're doing pretty good. If you're in your late 60s, you typically don't expect the man to be in the, you know, 700 range. And he was, he came back with his results and he was in that range. And you know, again, he was, this was a man that was almost seven years old. So I used to love seeing the, just the benefits that fitness has on the older population because it was so, it was so drastic, you know, it was so different from between them and their peers. I also think there's, you know, and to your point too, like how you're living now has a major factor in that too. And not just like the strength training aspect and nutrition side, like community and relationships and all those things. Oh, so many things. And so if that's in place right now, I think you understand that or you get that more. And for those that don't think about that as part of their health, I think that has to be some of the conversation too. Man, I was just reading this really cool article and it's one of those things I bookmarked to go deeper in it. And there was this summit that this guy had and I forget the name of the summit, but this entrepreneur that was talking about community and this 20 year old, I guess it just like, 20 year old tech guy made really, really good money already. He convinced a group of these other 20 year olds to all invest a million dollars themselves and they all, they- Powder Mountain. Is that what it's, yes. That's it, you saw, you read that too? I read that too, yeah. Isn't it interesting? And then they- Fascinating. So what they did first, before they built this community out in some rural town, I forget where it was in Utah. Yes, you did read the same article as me. And they built this town, but before they did, they went and researched like the blue zones and all these communities and what made them great communities and they literally tried to build it from ground up. Yeah, so they had like their mailboxes, they put them all in one place. So it was just like they engineered ways for them to interact with each other and like had social like types of like, they'd all go on hikes together, they'd all have these like dance classes and things that were available to the community. So they actually interacted and you know, benefited from that by communicating with each other. Well, there's a, I think we should clarify what we mean by, you know, living long. It's not just about being alive. Right, right. Yeah, on a machine for 10 years. Right, right, because modern medicine can keep us alive longer, but does that mean we're really living, right? When I talk about living long, I want to be independent. I want to be free of major health issues. I want to be able to take care of myself. I want to be able to move my own boxes. I want to be able to talk on the phone on my own, handle my own bills, clean my house. Have a sense of purpose every day that gets me up. That's it. I want to live long, but I want to live healthy long. And I think that's why like your uncle would say something like, oh, I only want to live to 75 because people picture living a long time and they think of all the people they know who've been, and they're like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be in pain every day. I want to be in bed every day. I also heard this really good quote that it's, you know, living day to day is not living, it's surviving. Right. And so when you are living on modern medicine or on a machine, you're just surviving. You know, at that point, you're not really living. And so I understand the perspective for someone like my uncle who feels like he's declining, his health is getting worse and worse. He already feels it in his 60s now. And so in his head, it's like, Jesus, 10 years from now, I'm going to be 10 times worse. And at that point, I'm just living day to day to survive. And I don't give a shit to do that anymore. Yes. And it always used to blow me away at the gap between people who have good longevity, can not just living, you know, not just being old, but actual good longevity, good health, between them and their peers. It is, it's like another universe. I've said this so many times in the podcast, but I really mean it. When you have somebody who's 70 years old, who has good health, and you compare them to the average seven year old who typically doesn't have good health, it's almost like you're looking at two different species. On the one hand, you have someone that is fully, they're living a normal life. They're going about their day. They can do whatever they want. And then on the other hand, someone's dependent on medical care, you know, 13 different prescription drugs. By the way, I'm not exaggerating. You know, when I would train people who are older, who didn't lead this kind of a life, who came to me late, there was one woman, I remember she was 81 when she came to me and really didn't have, I wouldn't say it's super unhealthy life, but she didn't have like the healthiest life. So she was alive, but it wasn't really good. And I remember whenever I worked with someone like this, I'd say, okay, can you please bring me a list of your medications? I need to talk to your doctor. And I would always work with their doctor. This list of medications that she brought me was, it was like pages. The laundry list. It was pages. And then when I would go through this medication and I'd talk to her doctor about them. It's one for the other one. I would be like, well, okay. Why is she on this, you know, this medication? Oh, it's because this other one causes constipation. So that's a laxative to help with this. Why is she on this medication? Well, because this medication makes her anxious. So we put her on this other medication to help with her anxiety. And I realized that half of them were there to counteract the side effects of the other half. And so there's a big difference between living longer because of medicine and living longer because you're very, very healthy. And that's, I wanna make that distinction because I don't, this is a podcast about living longer and living better while you're living longer. Yeah, I think, yeah, when people think of aging and they see this pill tray that, like I know my grandma and like some other examples that I've always seen kind of grown up of like somebody who has this routine where they take pills like every before every meal, there's pills upon pills upon pills. And that became just kind of like a thing that like I just assumed that this is what happens when you get older, you start just taking these pills for all these things, for my arthritis, for, yeah, yeah, you know, like my blood pressure and a lot of these things, if you can really do a good job of addressing what's going on with your body and maintaining a good muscular body, you can prevent a lot of things like blood, high blood pressure with, you know, things that aren't like immediately gifted to you from your genetics. Something like 70% of cancers, okay? Cancer, I'm not even talking about other diseases. Something like 70% of cancers are preventable with lifestyles. So that's like cancer kills one out of three of us, right? So 70% of those deaths could have been prevented just with a different lifestyle. Heart disease, I mean, the number's probably even greater. Same thing with, you know, type two diabetes. I remember years ago, one of my idols is Jacqueline. Jacqueline is a fitness icon. The legend. And really just exemplified longevity. I mean, here's a man at the age of 55. It's 55, by the way, set the record, the world record that stood for decades in push-ups and pull-ups. At the age of 70 to celebrate his 70th birthday, pulled seven row boats, each filled with 10 people with his hands and feet shackled. With his mouth. Right, from Alcatraz to San Francisco. I went to the Arnold Classic years ago and he got a Lifetime Fitness Achievement Award. And I remember when he came out to the stage, and he was in his, he must've been in his 80s, the whole place erupted. And he couldn't get a chance to talk because nobody would sit down. We were just clapping and cheering and clapping because everybody there was obviously a fitness enthusiast. Well, finally he stepped away from the podium because we weren't giving him an opportunity to speak. And he gets down on the floor and starts- I'm without push-ups. One-arm push-ups. Yeah, dude. One-arm push-ups. And the whole place almost exploded. And for me, that's a great example of what we're talking about with longevity. There's also the factor too that, and especially today's time, it's becoming more and more of a hot topic is mental health. I mean, that's the hub, the operating system for all these things that we're talking about physically. And so learning also, part of living well and living long is also taking care of the mental aspects. So I definitely think there's a handful of pillars that we can address that I think that start now if you want to live to the age of 100 or beyond. Yes, and besides living longer, I had a long time ago, I had this argument with this lady. I was at this dinner and this lady's talking, we were talking about what we did for work. And I said, oh, I'm a trainer and this and that. And she said, oh, well, I had a friend who worked out all the time and then she ended up getting cancer and dying anyway. And so I'm just gonna live my life. So what's the point? Yeah, so here's the thing. All the stuff we're about to talk to today, a talk about today has been proven in the best studies to show to improve longevity, but it's not just about living longer. It's also about living better today. So if you follow these things, yes, you will probably live longer than if you didn't, but you'll also live better right now. So it's not just about later on, it's also about- Right, you could still be in a crosswalk and get hit at 70, but the years leading up to 70 are gonna be enhanced greatly by following all these things. That's right. So number one, here's the first one. And this is pretty interesting. This is more of a recent, I say recent discovery, but not really discovery, but rather they're now communicating it more often today than they did before. And that is to be strong. So I'll give you an example. There was a study where they tested grip strength in men and women and they gave a baseline of 57 pounds of strength for men, 35 pounds for women. Now each 11 pound increment of grip strength below those thresholds. Every time somebody was 11 pounds weaker than that, each 11 pounds weaker was tied to a 20% increase in women and 16% increase in men in risk of death from all causes, all causes. In fact, there's been lots of studies done on strength and this may just be one of the ways now, one of the single tests that we do to determine somebody's health and all cause mortality, a simple grip test because it's an easy way to test somebody's strength. It's such a major factor that I don't think we gave enough credit to growing up. It was all cardiovascular health and obviously that's important as well, but to be resilient towards diseases and other like bacteria and things like coming your way, they've shown now that having like actual muscle strength is a big component to staving that off. I also think that there, a lot of the stigma around like being strong or strength comes from the extreme examples, right? There's everybody, even if you're just the average person and you're not really familiar with this, most people have seen like the strong men. And so you think like, oh, you know, those guys don't live very long, you know? And they're the strongest people on earth. Like that's an extreme example. And every one of the topics that we've written down to talk about today, you know, it's about balance in that. It is prioritizing it as something important, but it also not becoming neurotic about it. Like getting strong is extremely important. Becoming neurotic about it, that it's your end all be all, also puts you at the end of that spectrum and the extreme or the most radical part. And so does every other point that you're gonna make today is that it's not that you don't take that and go, oh, okay, being strong. Well, wait a second. The strongest men on earth only live to age 50. That's a bunch of bullshit. No, it's like saying fruits and vegetables are healthy for you. So I'm gonna eat 10,000 calories. Right, are only fruits and vegetables, right? Correct, correct. But strength is very, very strongly connected to longevity. Remember, strength is the foundational physical pursuit. So what that means is without a good base of strength, your endurance and stamina and flexibility and all those things suffer dramatically. Here's one of the big problems as you get older. And I would see this with clients all the time. They would fall, loss of balance. And then they'd break something and then you're really screwed. There's a saying in medicine that's like, break your hip and die of pneumonia, right? Because then they're in the hospital and their health declines tremendously. Well, strength is what prevents that. When I would train older clients and help them with their balance, the thing that helped them most wasn't helping them practice balance, it was just getting them strong. When they were strong, their balance was much, much better. And think of all the times you miss a step, being able to catch yourself again, you need strength in order to do that. So being strong overall helps with that. Yeah, and you talk about quality of life and just having an able body, you have to have a strong body to have an able body. Like to get up into travel and to do things and to just be self-sufficient and to carry things to your car and to move things around. And you just need to really focus on maintaining and keeping that as much as possible as you age. Right, right, and here's another one, right? Especially for women, osteoporosis or bone loss. It affects both men and women, but especially women. The one thing that directly counteracts bone loss is building strength. Because remember, muscles, when you build muscle, you build bone. Okay, so we all know lifting weights builds muscle. It builds bone too. And so if you're working with resistance and maintaining your strength, the odds that you're gonna have weak and brittle bones is much lower. Here's another one with strength, right? Muscle helps safeguard your brain against things like Alzheimer's. In fact, there was an Australian study that showed that strength training was the only form of actually the only anything that's natural that's ever been shown to stop the progression of Alzheimer's. And there was even some evidence that it actually started to reverse it a little bit because the muscles use glucose and glycogen and help with this process of using these carbohydrates for energy, which was one of the issues with Alzheimer's. More muscle, if you go into the hospital and you're getting surgery or whatever, people with more muscle survive better. Probably because they have more active tissue that they can spare while they're laying on that bed. It also safeguards you for a less ideal diet too, right? So if you are, you know, unfortunately, we'd all like to believe that we eat good or perfect. The reality of it, nobody does. And so if you build strength or you focus on building strength, the side effect of that is that you build muscle. Muscle's an expensive tissue, to your point, it requires more glucose, more calories to support it. Therefore, the times that you decide to eat above and beyond your calorie maintenance, you're hopefully some of those calories are going over and prioritized towards maintaining that muscle mass versus adding to more fat storage on your body and then pushing you towards obesity. Completely 100%. So buildings, and now here's the thing with resistance training, by the way. When we're talking about longevity, we're not talking about bodybuilding, we're not talking necessarily about powerlifting. What does a longevity-based resistance training program look like? Here's the beauty of resistance training. Unlike other forms of activity, which we'll get into, you don't need to do it very often to reap the longevity benefits. The studies show, and in my experience also, about two days a week. Two days a week of a good resistance training program is going to not just maintain good strength but help build good strength all the way up until the day you die. In fact, there were very few clients that trained more than two days a week, except for maybe my hardcore lifter. I love that point because this is something I personally struggled with. Because I loved fitness and I was into training hard, and had athletic background, I had this all or nothing attitude a lot. And that's completely shifted in the last five to 10 years, especially the last five, but even the last 10, it began to make this transition where I used to have this attitude, and I know a lot of people do, where it's like, I'm either on, and I'm eating well, and I'm taking care of my body, and I'm exercising, and I'm training to build muscle or burn body fat, or I'm not, I'm the effort attitude. And when you are talking about longevity, that's the wrong attitude to have. And that's why it's different now for me. In fact, I just did a post on my Instagram about the first 38 years of my life, I trained for me, now I trained for you, and it was a picture of me and my son. And it really is. There's times when, I only get to the gym for one day out of that week, but in the past, because the week was going bad for me, or I didn't have a lot of time, I would have just wrote the whole week off because I'm not on my routine, I'm not falling a program to a T, when your goal is longevity and health, that's not true at all, and something is better than nothing. And it really doesn't take that much to maintain some of the strength that I've worked so hard to build over all these years. So even one day a week is better than nothing. Unlike daily activity, which is also important, the benefits of resistance training are mostly in the adaptation effects that it provides, not as much on the fact that you're just being active. Now, just being active, of course, has its own benefits, but that's not the benefits of resistance training. Resistance training sends a signal to build strength and build muscle. That's why it's the beauty of it. You only need to do it a couple of days a week to reap the benefits of resistance training unlike just being active every single day. And I think too, that's why it's so important to put it to practice now so you find out the right dose. So I know a lot of people want to just get through the workouts and they put this program in front of them and they have to attack it and really aggressively try and get through these workouts where once you start really working your way through each exercise and find out how your body responds to it, how much rest is required and you really do the due diligence on investigating this for yourself, you'll find out you need a lot less to respond. And so once you can find out what that looks like, it really does boil it down quite a bit until like two times a week is really all you need to carry on forward. Oh, I mean, you know, right now I'm working on a book on resistance training and we do talk in there a lot about longevity. That's exactly what I recommend is it is two days a week for most people full body type workouts and you're gonna get all of the longevity and health effects of resistance training from doing that. Now, if you do more, that's great. You want to get stronger. You want to build more muscle. We talk a lot about that on the podcast but for longevity purposes and quality of life purposes two days a week of resistance training is gonna give you what you need. Now we did mention diet, okay? There's a lot of diets out there. There's probably, I don't know, 1,000 diet books out there. There's a million and one different ways to eat and each diet promises to give you better fat loss and health and all this other stuff. And so it's really hard to boil down what really, what they all have in common. Like, okay, you've got all these people around the world all these different areas where people live a long time but their diets can vary quite dramatically, you know? Like, okay. Lots of different strategies. Yeah, like Okinawans don't eat the same diet as Sardinians or as the seventh day Adventists, right? Those are all areas where people live a long time. If you look at the foods that they eat they're very, very different. They're different regions of the world, different cultures. So you gotta kind of look at all of it and boil it down and figure out what's going on and here's the biggest thing they all have in common, the biggest thing. None of them overeat. All of them don't eat too many calories. In fact, even if you eat healthy, eating too many calories has got negative health effects. So that's the big first one. And of course you need to make sure you get your essential nutrients and your essential fats and proteins. But the big key is to not overeat to the point where we have studies that show that reducing calories a little bit for all animals improves longevity regardless of what the diet looks like. Well, you're bringing up blue zones, right? And it's funny because I've seen the research and the studies that almost every diet tries to attach itself to a specific blue zone. Like, oh, this is what they do over here so vegans must be the best or oh, this is what they do over here so the Mediterranean diet must be best for this. And they cherry pick data but something that they all have in common is what you're alluding to right now is that they don't eat in a massive calorie surplus. The other thing that I think they all have in common is avoiding just processed foods in general. That's a huge one. That one study that they did on processed foods, it didn't surprise us because we've been working with people for so long. We knew this, but it blew a lot of people's minds. And I'll tell you about one of the studies because there's been several now. They did a study where they had people in a laboratory and this is beautiful because diet studies tend to be difficult to really to trust because they're based off of surveys. People show up, they fill out a survey and then you gotta kinda trust what they said and I know very well that people report terribly. Just ask somebody what they ate yesterday and see what comes out. It's just not accurate. It's just never accurate, right? But so these people were actually in a lab because it was super controlled and they had two groups of people. One group had unlimited access to whole natural foods. Eat as much as you want. The other group had unlimited access to heavily processed foods. Eat as much as you want. They even controlled for the macros. So the macros of the processed foods and the macros of the whole natural foods were very similar. So it wasn't like one was low carb, one was high fat, whatever. Very, very similar. They let them eat as much as they wanted and then they watched them and they counted the calories, they counted the proteins, the fats and the carbs and then they did something that's really awesome. They switched the groups. So then they said, okay, well, maybe this group just eats more or whatever. Let's have them switch and see what happens. So now the group that was eating processed food went to eating whole natural food and vice versa. Well, this is what they found at the end of the study. Eating heavily processed foods which include foods that are in wrappers and boxes and bags, foods that have long shelf life, right? That have multiple ingredients. Eating foods like that led to, on average, an increase of calories by about five to 600 every single day. That's not a little bit. No, that adds up. By the way, if you just ate a hundred calories more every single day over your maintenance. That adds up. That would, you'd gain tens of pounds, maybe 20 pounds a year, 500 calories extra every single day. That's insane. That's a lot of food. Now, how is this possible? Why is it that these people ate so much more food with heavily processed foods? Well, it's because these foods are designed to make you overeat. They just are. You could do this, you could experiment on yourself all day long. You could eat five plain potatoes or eat a bag of potato chips which has the same amount of potatoes in them and see which one makes you hungry and which one makes you full faster. So one of the number one strategies you can do if you wanna live longer is avoid these heavily processed foods. Forget about the fact that they're not as healthy either even if they were just as healthy as your whole natural foods. Even if they were identical in every way except for the fact that they were engineered to make you eat more. They still would be terrible because they just make you eat so much more food. So cutting that out makes a big difference. So what does this mean for you listening right now? Well, I'll tell you what I did as a trainer. Oftentimes when I work with clients and we're working with nutrition it's a very difficult thing to tackle. So sometimes I would say, okay, here's what I want you to do. I don't want you to do anything else. So I want you to do. I want you to avoid eating heavily processed foods. Do nothing else. Lo and behold, they lose 15 pounds of body fat. They're not even watching anything. They're just avoiding those heavily processed foods. The reason why I love that advice too is because we talk a lot about the mental hurdle that you have to go through when you tell yourself I can't. And putting people on a diet that they have to follow something means there's certain things they can't have. Versus saying, listen, avoid heavily processed foods but enjoy all the whole foods you want. If you're still hungry, you want more, have some more. And I found the same thing out too. If I just did, and what they loved about that where they're like, oh, okay. Well, that will take a little bit of planning. I just got to get rid of all the boxes and the wrappers and shit like that in my refrigerator and cupboards. And now all I'll do is I'll just go get all these whole foods but my trainer's telling me that I can eat whenever or whatever I want as long as I just stay within that category. Then they were like, oh, this is awesome. So then it gets beyond that hurdle of like I can't or I can't have anything which I think promotes that binge eating that happens afterwards. Well, and plus I think it brings back awareness of what you're putting in your body. I think a lot of times like because everything's so easily packaged and accessible now I can just throw it in the microwave or I could just buy it at a drive through and eat it in my car. Everything's just way too convenient to where we just lose touch of like what I'm actually putting in my body and like to then seek out these whole natural foods. It's like you reconnect with that process. You might, this might spark some interest in cooking for yourself or your family again which is a whole different type of experience. So I think it's massively valuable for people to start really like seeking whole foods again and incorporating that in their diet. Yeah, they tried to tie dietary fat to the obesity epidemic in the 70s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s. Then they tried to tie the increase of carbohydrate consumption and sugars to the obesity epidemic. Both of them were wrong. Really what it was was heavily processed foods became a big part of our diet. It's one of the byproducts of the industrial revolution. We started to advance very quickly with our technology. Markets started getting bigger and of course markets always respond to the consumer demand and what did people choose to buy? And you go to the grocery store, let's think of the average person, forget the health-minded person. The average person when they go to the grocery store and they go shopping, how are they making their decisions based on what they're gonna buy to eat? It's all about what is fun to eat and what tastes the best. They're not walking around saying, oh, I need some. Craving at the time. Yeah, like, oh, this is good. This tastes good. Oh, the kids like to eat this. Oh, my husband loves this after dinner. And oh, this is my favorite snack. And so they end up picking things that really are super enjoyable to eat. Well, the market responded, produced all of these processed foods and little by little, they crept into our diets. At first it was just a little bit of our diet but we still had home-cooked meals. We still had home-cooked lunches. And now breakfast, we're not eating the home-cooked breakfast anymore like we used to. So that was the first thing to go, right? It went from, you know, bacon eggs and whatever to cereal, maybe milk and cereal or maybe Pop Tarts. Then it became lunch, became processed. Then it became snacks, then it became dinner. Before you know it, the average American's diet is 70% heavily processed food. That is the culprit for the obesity epidemic. Of course, if you throw in the inactivity, now you have your answer. That single thing right there makes the biggest difference. And if you don't wanna overeat, eliminate those foods, it makes it a lot easier for all. And circling back to the mental part, because I think that's important to address in all this is that when you are, when you let yourself go, and this is what I found when I tell clients, the first thing would be, okay, eliminate processed food, eat whole foods. The other thing that's really challenging mentally is when you allow yourself to go for such a long period of time without eating anything, that's where it becomes really tough. And I see this even with myself, you know, we just had a day a couple of days ago where I got so busy with work, I didn't eat till four o'clock, which, you know, fine, if you like to intermittent fast every once in a while, but what I notice every single time I do that is when I am deciding to finally eat, this is when I'm most likely gonna make the choices that are processed or not as ideal for me. This is when I'm more vulnerable to tell Katrina, ah, you know what, just order some burger and fries. I'm starving right now, and I justify it. I haven't eaten all day long, so I haven't had any calories. Get the five guys in the front. Calories on. Yeah, and so a strategy on top of the eating whole foods is also not allowing yourself to go really long periods of time without eating, even though we know all the healthy benefits of fasting and that's true when it's planned and you have a goal in mind, but when you accidentally just go for the day and you don't eat for six, seven hours or eight hours in between meals, what tends to happen is you are hungry and you do want something, and the cravings really kick up and you're more likely to make a bad choice versus making sure that you've got those whole foods readily available for you so you don't go those long periods of time. Have you guys ever gone grocery shopping when you're hungry? Yeah. That's what you get amazing with so it ends up in your shopping cart. Dude, I did that yesterday. I was really hungry, went to the grocery store, and I ended up with way more stuff. I got home and I looked at it, I'm like, yeah, that's the biggest mistake right there. Ice cream sandwiches, how'd that make it there? So now let's move into some of the non-diet, non-exercise stuff because what they found with people who live a long time is it's not all about being strong, it's not all about diet. There are other things that are really interesting and play a huge role in how long you live and how well you live. Here's a big one. This one shocked people when they first discovered it, but every single time they do one of these studies, it comes up, having good relationships with the people around you. This is really crazy. There was a study that showed that older people with adequate social relationships, in comparison to people who are isolated or have poor social relationships, so the adequate social relationships people, 50% greater likelihood of survival, 50% over people who have poor social relationships or those who are isolated. We are social creatures. And by the way, we're gonna speculate all the reasons why this may play a role, by the way. Don't you think this is what explains that phenomenon that we always see when a spouse dies, when they're 70 or 65 or whatever? And you've done everything with that partner, like your whole world revolves around them and then they pass and then all of a sudden they lose. Especially when they're hermits. Right, that's what I'm saying. I think those are the examples of those. And the ones that make it out are the ones that have built a strong community and support system and relationships with friends outside of just their immediate family or their spouse. Those ones tend to have the most success with continuing on and living. And the ones that don't are the ones that tend to all of a sudden die off right away. Absolutely, so here's another reason why I think good social relationships are important. I'm a better person because I know you guys than if I, versus if I didn't know you guys. Now, why is that? Well, first off, I wanna be a better friend to people who are good friends to me. So that pushes me a little bit. There's also feedback that you get from other people. If my health was declining and I wasn't taking care of myself, I may not notice or may not care, but I may have someone close to me who may say something to me like, hey man, you need to take care of yourself a little better. You need some rest or why don't you take a vacation? Let me help you with something. Absolutely, that plays a huge role. And I know this, I have older grandparents and I know my grandfather, if it wasn't for his kids telling him he probably should eat less, he probably wouldn't eat less because he's on his own. So there's that. There's also the support factor for when you are sick or when you do need help. There's nothing like somebody that you have a close relationship with who can help you. That's very different than hiring someone to help you or being in the hospital, for example. Yeah, and I think too, it speaks back to purpose. And I know too, there's another example of this when people have their identities completely wrapped in their work and their job and they're waking up and they're making a difference every day and all of a sudden now they're in retirement mode where they're coasting and it's just, they don't have that same spark, that same energy, that same drive that gets them up and gets them to interact with other people. And it's just, it's a slow decline from there. So to be able to have people around you to still have that energy and that vibrancy that is so necessary to keep you going and healthy, that's another component. Well, on the mental health and how it's therapeutic for communication. Like how important is that? Like, you know, what's saying that goes like whether you think you can or can't, you're probably right. So if you're all by yourself and you're living in your sorrow and you don't have someone to communicate that's positive and helping you reframe your situation and it's just you're stuck in your own thoughts of negativity, I mean, you end up believing that life is almost over or it does suck versus having a community or people that you can talk to. Think about times in your life when you've gone through very, very challenging moments whether it's a death or your loss of a job or a divorce or something that's been very challenging. And then think of the people close to you who were there for you. Imagine going through that without that. All people have challenging moments in their life but having that support system, boy, that's the whole turn lean on me. We are very, very social. This is why, this is one of the reasons why the current pandemic is so bad. Forget the disease itself, that's obvious. You get sick and there's a risk of death and all these other symptoms. But people oftentimes aren't even thinking about all of the other downstream potential consequences of just isolation, just not being around people. Right now, my wife is, she's not working, she's pregnant, she's at home, but things are closed. She doesn't have a lot of outlets. She's doing some social distancing obviously because it's the responsible thing to do. Boy, when I talk to her, she's like, and she's normally somebody that likes to have a lot of alone time. She likes quiet time. She's like, this is affecting me. I didn't think it would because I like to be alone. But she goes, this is really affecting me. Not being able to just go walk around at the mall or go hang out and be with my friends. Not just talk with them over the phone but actually be with them. She's starting to feel it herself. This was something that I didn't really think about very much in my teens and early 20s in that it's an actual constant conversation with both my parents. I grew up in a household that we were very private. It was, our family was everything. Everything revolved around our household. We didn't have friends. Like my parents, my entire life growing up, I can't think of a single time we had friends over for dinner or we went and did things with friends like camping or go places with their friends. I mean, I had my friends as kids growing up but they really didn't. Their whole life revolved around raising us kids and each other. And now that I understand the value of community so much in those relationships like we're talking about and now that they're getting an advanced age, right? They're in their late mid to late 60s. Like my conversation is constantly around like mom, dad, you guys gotta get out. I know you've got your partners, which is awesome but you need to have your friends too. You need to have your time where you go spend with friends and join some clubs and some groups and get out and make sure you're doing those things. I think it's so important for them living not only a long life but a happy long life. Absolutely. And this starts when it takes work and it starts with you being the good friend, right? This is how you foster these relationships. It requires you to become a better person. It's not easy to be a really good friend or a really good partner or a really good family member. It requires self work. It really does. You don't just, it's an active thing in other words. I can't just sit here and be good friends with Adam and Justin and Doug. I have to actively try to be a better person and try to be a good friend. And I think that is also one of the reasons why good relationships lead to longer, healthier lives. Now the fourth one, this one's an interesting one. It causes a lot of controversy but it's consistent. It is consistent across the board when they do studies people who have a regular spiritual practice typically in the form of organized religion live longer. There was one study I showed that people with a religious affiliation lived four years longer than people who did not. There's other studies that show that people who have religious affiliations get sick less often. And if they do get sick, it's less likely to become something severe. Spiritual practices, and this goes across the board by the way, they're not specific with what the religion is or whatever. It's just a regular spiritual practice. Spiritual practices are what give life meaning more than almost anything else. Why is that important? Why does life even have to have any meaning? Well, shit, life is hard as hell. I couldn't imagine going through, I had a really good friend who, she ended up becoming a personal trainer and working in my facility. She actually started off as a client, became a trainer, very, very good friend of mine. She lost her son at, he was a teenager when she lost her boy. I couldn't imagine going through something like that and then not having a strong sense of meaning to carry me through the rest of life. At that point, you'd be like, well, what's the point? Why am I here or whatever? And when they interview people who have regular spiritual practices, that's what they say. It gives my life meaning it makes the hard stuff worth it. And I think that's, if you're gonna live a long time, that's gonna be something that's very important. I think this one plays into the last one, right? So I think spiritual practices as an individual have its own benefits, right? Gathering your thoughts and having a meaning behind your life, even if you just did it by yourself. But you talked about organized spiritual practices, that also feeds into the community and relationship aspect. Totally, it's a built-in community. Exactly. So I think that there's a reason why all the research supports that and why it's so valuable is not just what it does for you as far as mental health, organizing your thoughts, like having meaning and purpose in your life, but then also the community that is normally attached to that practice is also extremely valuable. I think that's why this one is weighted so heavily. Yeah, and you know, it's funny about it. They control for that in some of these studies. So they actually control for people who still meet with people, still have close friends, they just don't have the spiritual practice. Spiritual practice still gets people to live longer. I'll give you an interesting observation from, I used to train a lot of doctors and surgeons. And there was this topic of conversation that came up once that fascinated me and I asked all of them each time I trained them because it came up with one. There was one doctor that I trained and she had worked on this lady and it turned out that this lady had really bad cancer. And so then she was helping her. And I remember she came into her session one day and she said, yeah, it's not much longer. And I said, oh, you know, what did you see? Did you guys, did you see that is her body not working anymore, things shutting down? She goes, no, she's lost the will to live. And usually when that happens, they die quickly afterwards. And I said, well, what do you mean? She goes, well, it's an interesting thing, but you've noticed this when they lose that will, regardless of what their tests say, oftentimes you start to see them pass away. So each doctor client that I trained for the next week, I asked them that exact question. I said, can you tell when someone's gonna pass away, besides the measurements and their organs, Shayna, can you tell when they lose their will, do you notice that there's a higher and they, oh yeah, absolutely, that blew me away. That really blew me away that they said, these are medical doctors who tend to be very objective and scientific and they said they could tell. I experienced that with a family member of mine who, same thing, she said bye to everybody way before she was supposed to, and she passed away the day after. Yeah, I think there's another component here to having a spiritual practice that people might not even really consider that they already have within them. So comparing yourself to other people and really searching out examples, role models, idols, other people out there that are doing successful things or helping humanity in some facet, but inevitably there's examples that are good, there's examples that fail you all the time and to be able to kind of reprioritize your hierarchy of values. So what you put the most value in, if it has an unachievable level, it's something that you keep striving for. So it's almost like you're pushing that care a little further away, so it helps you to then have an example that you're constantly working on which ends up making you constantly work on yourself. No, that's a great point, Justin, because when you're chasing something spiritually like that, you'll never reach perfection, right? You'll never reach God-like. Yeah, you're always trying to be better. But you are always worshiping something. So if you're not worshiping a God that you can never be like, then it's money, it's sex, it's drugs, it's power, it's something else. Celebrity, whatever. Which all of those things are obtainable. You can reach all those goals. And then what? And then what ends up happening. Remember we talked with Mark Manson about that, like how often that somebody reaches or obtains these crazy lofty goals that they set for themselves, and then they reach that hilltop and the view ain't what they thought it was. It's very depressing and scary for a lot of people. So spiritual practice, oh, by the way, with the spiritual practice, is it's something that they practice on a regular basis. So it's not somebody who says, yeah, I believe in this or yeah, I'm spiritual. It's literally people who practice on a regular basis. And I do think that people who have that, something that they're doing on a regular basis that's consistent also provides a little bit of that sense of meaning and that purpose. Because oh, every Monday I do this and in the morning I meditate or I pray or whatever, it creates that structure. And you're thinking outside of yourself. That's right. My favorite and last point that we're making is one that I used to scoff at as a trainer early on. So I love talking about this because I'm a 180 for sure from when I first started talking about this as a trainer was walking and just a movement practice. I mean, that's something too. We touched on the blue zones and we talked about what the things they do have in common. A lot of people like to cherry pick the data, support their argument or whatever they're selling. But the things that are really common is the less processed foods, lower calories, community and then movement. A lot of them have just, even if that's not necessarily strength training or exercise, if it's just hiking and walking and not going by foot instead of by car or bikes, things like that, those practices and the benefits of those are tremendous by incorporating that into your daily life. Just daily activity, every single fact, not walking or not moving and sitting a lot increases your risk of death more than cigarettes in some study, more than smoking cigarettes. And it's not, you don't have to work out every single day. We talked about resistance training. There you go, twice a week, do that and you're good. The rest of the time, just walk, just walk throughout the day, get 10,000 steps, 15,000 steps every single day, move. Now, you guys talked about that community where all those millionaires donated a million dollars to try and create a community. One of the things I'm assuming that they put in there was to encourage a community where you didn't have to drive, probably where you had to walk, I would assume. This is the way that cities used to be designed. In fact, people do live longer in places where it's harder to use your car and they're forced to move more. Walking is so powerful, in fact. I pulled up a very interesting study. Walking fast, but walking briskly, is so closely tied to longevity that when they compare people who walk briskly, who are overweight to people who are not overweight, who walk slowly, the overweight people who walk briskly outlive them. No joke. By like 15 to 20 years, isn't it? By this one single study that I pulled up. It's a big one. So that daily movement, daily activity, is such a big factor in just overall longevity. And that study's based on people that are overweight. Overweight. Right, so they're already in the most healthy condition. And just simply by making sure that they're briskly walking every single day could extend their life by 15 to 20 years. Now, here's a funny thing. When I was a trainer and I'd heard people say, things like, oh, you know, you could just park further in the parking lot instead of taking the elevator, take the stairs. And I remember hearing that and be like, oh, that's stupid. What's the big deal? Like just, you know, go get on a piece of cardio. That'll be a workout or go running or whatever. And then we, step trackers came on the market and people were wearing step trackers. And I realized that those small things added up a lot. Like you park at the other end of the parking lot or you take the stairs every day. Way more you realize. Yeah, it's like two or three thousand extra steps. Well, we used to measure, as trainers, we used to look at it as like a calorie thing always, right? Like, oh, a stupid walk from your car over to the, you know. Yeah, it's like, oh, 10 more calories, come on. Like that's not a game changer or anything like that. But it's not just that, it's just the movement, the blood flow, the oxygen moving through the body, the digestion. I mean, we didn't even touch on that with walking. Like that's a practice that I started in my 30s that I didn't do before that of just simply getting up after a meal and going for a walk. Doesn't have to be a long one. Doesn't need to be exercise or strenuous. It's such a great time. And what I love about the things that we're talking about today is there's ways to couple lots of them. Like you talked about spiritual practice and community, you can feed those both together, briskly walking, I think of relationships. Like that's become a practice for Katrina and I, a great time for us to connect and bond. It's like we just had a great dinner and a meal together. Let's not just sit down on a couch, ignore each other and watch television. Let's go for a 10 minute walk, walk our dogs, maybe walk another 10 minutes, enjoy each other and have conversation about our day and our kid and what's going on this week. The value in that, I think it's one of those things that's really hard to take a study and measure what exactly that's doing for you. It's one of those things that you're just, you're investing in long-term stuff by making sure you add that into your routine. No, one of the challenges with this one when I talk to people about walking a lot every single day is like, oh my gosh, like how do I schedule that? Because our lives are not designed to walk a lot. I mean, we wake up and we eat breakfast and then we sit in the car and we drive somewhere, drive to work and then we sit at work all day and then we get back in the car and we drive home and then we sit on the couch. So it's like our lives are not designed or so. How do you get lots of walking in your day? Well, Adam kind of hinted at it. Why don't you walk after every meal? 15 minute walk after every meal, that's a 45 minute walk a day. That's what it adds up to. And now that you've attached it to the ritual of breakfast, lunch and dinner, you're more likely to be consistent with it and you're more likely to get that daily activity. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come check us out on YouTube, Mind Pump podcast. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump. Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Okay, don't feel just late to the party. There was a time that was cool. That was you, that's why. I had the full, I told you we had this. The Pukashells, the V-neck, Ed Hardy, Axe, Body Spray. No, I never had Axe. I had Pukashells when I was in seventh grade. Oh, yes, dude. And I had Ed Hardy before it was ever in TJ Mack.