 This screenshot is from my online banking application for Elev8 Wellness’ first business account. I opened that account with $100 on Thursday, December 28, 2012. I left my prior employer on Thursday, January 10, 2013, and I began accepting retainer payments for Elev8 Wellness the following day, Friday, January 11. In the course of five days I made $37,992.68, receiving four paid-in-full agreements in one day (January 14, totaling 26.6k), and then began shifting solely to month-to-month agreements immediately afterward to ensure my steady “salary” for the next 11.5 years (and still going).
I hadn’t spent anything on that business other than my LLC’s registration with the state of Minnesota and professional liability insurance in December 2012. I hadn’t yet paid commercial rent, technically not even having a sole dedicated business space until the February afterward. I hadn’t bought any equipment. I didn’t have social media or a website. I didn’t have a business card. I was not even thinking about advertising or marketing. Literally, I simply sat down with people in person, presented value, and asked for their support. “You have to spend money to make money” may be a lie - a lie which Forbes tackled that same season: https://www.forbes.com/sites/actiontrumpseverything/2013/02/09/you-have-to-spend-money-to-make-money-and-other-lies-people-tell-entrepreneurs/ What you definitely have to do is you have to make a lot of money in order to be worthy to spend even a tiny amount. You have to be valuable. You have to know how to communicate. You have to be incredibly honest with yourself and others, but bold, and painfully humble, knowing your responsibilities do not just evaporate when you have a goal or a dream. Then you get the privilege to spend money. Long after, you GET to spend money. To continue making money or to scale up, yes, of course, you will spend. In the eleven-and-a-half years since, my costs have risen DRAMATICALLY. Under private health insurance in 2015, our total health costs for my family were a hundred thousand dollars. Monthly business space costs are 5k minimum. Costs are a privilege and an opportunity. I received that opportunity as a consequence of my incredible sacrifices and willingness to go without for myself for a very long time. To this day, I still get paid last. Uncle Sam. Kids. Family. Biz. Investments. Then, long after, I get to eat, get to rest, get new clothes, get to visit friends and family. And oftentimes, coming last in the equation, I don’t get to rest or visit friends and family. But never, ever, ever, did I FIRST spend money in order to make it. I have started and run several businesses of consequence. I have managed big teams. I have worked for myself exclusively for nearly twelve years, and on other businesses for over thirty. I do it to the tune of being able to support my family, my community, and a lot of causes. You don't have to spend money to make it, not initially. It can save you time on learning curves. It can save you on time with skilled labor. Money can save you a lot of time when you hire mentors and teachers. But you don't HAVE TO spend it. That's errant. It's a tool like any other, which users may distribute in place of other effort. All the same, you'll still have to figure out how to generate and present value, how to be honest, how to communicate. Money can't buy any of those.
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 I used to not know. I figured a lot of top coaches ran back-to-back appointments 12-16 hours in a row, or logged 7 day weeks all the time. When I was at Bally’s 2004 to 2010, I had a peer who once did 141 sessions in a pay period, beating my personal record of 113 (65 in one week and 48 in the other) by quite a bit. These are only the 60-minute sessions, mind you. To those hours add notes, prep, scheduling, consults, assessments, meetings, workshops for CECs, etc. When I was at Lifetime 2010 to 2012, I once had a peer who about matched my record $65k productivity in a month, and several who beat me in the quarter. This was a lot of sales, but also a lot of serviced appointments. Granted, I was managing as well. But I just figured this is how workers work. My performances stood out. My teams did set a lot of national records. But they weren’t wildly divergent from other top performers. And frankly, people had bested me lots of times at lots of junctures along the way, in a month or a week or a quarter. I didn’t see these outcomes as spectacularly unique. There are many amazing pros out there in the top one-tenth of one percent.
Then, as I ran my own business in the independent sphere, often outstripping these hours and performances, I began to realize something was a little bit different about me in 2013. At the large facilities and giant corporate companies, I maybe stood AMONG the top one-tenth of one percent. But in the independent sphere, I found not a single person running the sheer number of client appointments that I ran, week after week, year after year. No one in all of the fitness influencer or strength-coaching sphere has ever shared calendar screen captures like mine. No one. Not ever. Not close. Not by miles. For about a year or so, I would post my wake times and a message on Instagram, somewhere between 2:15am and 440ish, depending on the day. Scroll way back on my Instagram and you’ll see. But still, I found no one sharing schedules like mine. Wake times, sure. But no calendars like mine. No one. Ever. And it started to dawn on me that no one has ever even been close to the experience I’ve logged in strength coaching and training. No one. It’s not a brag. It’s just that no one else on earth is built to be able to focus on others up to 18 hours in a day without breaks, and do it for decades. No one. It’s possible there are some guys in their 70s who’ve coached or mentored as many hours as I have. But again, only I have the receipts. Plus, everyone knows how consolidated intensives simply produce more learning. A person who practices piano for six hour per day every day for five years (about 10,000 hours) is simply going to be better than a person who practices one hour every other day for sixty years (about 10,000 hours as well). I just haven’t seen one person ever share even a short season of busyness that compares to my standard week of two decades. I have some great peers. I admire some great personalities who have curated vast social media followings. But respectfully, none of them are even close to the experience I’ve logged. I love ‘em. God bless ‘em. But humbly, I am the pinnacle in this domain. Not at everything, mind you. But at quite a bit in human performance, actually. This is not an opinion of conceit. It is an objective measurable fact. We could look at my own metabolic experiments or client testimonies. However, lots of coaches have gained 80lbs of muscle and lost 70lbs of fat personally while having trained dozens of people through 50-200lb transformations. That isn’t very unique, actually. I could make a very lengthy list about bringing one of my clients to be an IFBB pro bodybuilder in her 60s, a client who lost 140lbs in 8 months, clients without limbs, clients without sight, clients with cancer, clients whose outcomes that absolutely boggle the mind, and some with 10 to 20+ year success and progress. But somewhere out there, you are still going to find a handful of coaches with a cool story for each of mine. I do doubt you'll find it all in one other person. And I am confident it's totally singular to have been doing that without a lull for two decades. Moreover, I’ve done that AND I have seen my kids nearly every day of their lives, I have kept my friendships, my relationships, and really just a fairly low-profile and balanced (as of the past 6 years) life. My wife has been urging me to create workshops for men who want to be top performers and energy dynamos, and for trainers and coaches who want to be at the top of their abilities. Part of it is because I have now coached several famous influencers. Part of it is because I have coached many clients who previously trained with famous and world-renowned trainers; yet every time their experience with me was superior. Part of it is because I genuinely have been the most overbooked professional in this industry for two decades. And the distance between my experience and that of the best-known names in fitness is not even close. Regularly, I meet with clients who worked with or are themselves world-renowned/famous influencers, clinicians or coaches. Every single time I uncover insights which that expert never dreamed of finding. It isn’t because I’m better or smarter than all of the top gurus in the world. I’m not. It’s simply because I have more experience than all of them. The way I achieved far more troubleshooting experience than every expert in the field of strength coaching and personal training is by consistently booking significantly more hours of appointments than any of them have ever covered, even in the busiest seasons of their lives. It’s just my default. wrote about it ‘19: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/experienced-coach-or-good-workout-er And ‘21: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/how-to-fit-workouts-in-a-schedule-with-no-time And last year: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/5-truths-from-45-hours-of-coaching-in-4-days But also many many times on Instagram and LinkedIn going back to 2015: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1PzPjKDwIp/?igsh=MXVlaGRrMThkdnc4ag== https://www.instagram.com/p/BxN4Nltjzvf/?igsh=MWNkZTcwdDk4czc1Ng== Going back to 2013, all work days were like that. Pick a random Thursday in ‘16; and it turns out I booked 7 hours of sessions on my “off day”. I never found a role model or mentor who even came close. A few guys on social media appeared to put in the sweat equity: Jocko Willink, David Goggins, Gary V, and Dwayne Johnson. But I also noticed they often slept in 1-3 hours later than my usual: https://www.instagram.com/p/BdDAMnznRR3/?igsh=c2Z2cTZlOTQ4NTA5 https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_training_coaching_experts/there-is-no-kinda-disciplined https://www.instagram.com/p/Bau1khXBUnq/?igsh=amx1bnhsOXJpbXlr https://www.instagram.com/p/BICdWWsDnAE/?igsh=MWc5cW1udzdwcXZi Moreover, they aren’t running packed days like mine focused on other people. Almost all of their waking hours are on self. They aren’t mentoring others thousands of hours per year. They aren’t spending time with their kids every single day of the week. I became my own role model. Most people cannot handle the intensity of 12-16 hours of coaching in a row with no breaks at all. So they don’t. Either they can’t be on their feet that long. Or they cannot mentally focus. They aren’t organized in a manner to keep the notes/memories straight. Business acumen and experience aside, even pretty tough people cannot handle it. So they don’t. It’s not a knock against any of them. They spent their energy and hours on building massive social media followings or on gaining suffixes, writing books, fame, or obsessive self-improvement which leaves little time in the week for anything/anyone else. They hit their personal limit and hire everything else out. But for me, I can. So I do. But HOW I got here may be more instructive for the newer coaches or even for the many, many, many veterans who pretend to be far more successful than you and I both know they actually are. In recent years I’m more discerning, never overtly working more than 3.5 days per week, but easily logging no fewer than 8 appointments on those 3.5 days (yes, I consider 8 coaching sessions a half day), and typically 12-16 on Sundays and Wednesdays both. Occasionally, I cannot keep a Monday or Friday less than that as well. On very rare occasion, my long days are only 10 hours of appointments (but still 2 hours of note prep and research, NOT counting bookkeeping, spreadsheets, and payment management). Ask my coworkers, employees and peers going back 20 years. This is mostly how it’s always been. I still have pages from my planners in 2004-2010 when I’d get up at 3a, take appointments 5,6,7am, management hours 8-2p, lift, director work 4-7, appointments 7p, 8p, home. And I still spent time with my wife. I still did laundry and dishes. I still mowed my lawn. I still went to family gatherings. Somehow. I wouldn’t recommend it. The cost came from my sleep, recovery, health. I could. So I did. But I also found that at the extreme limits it would impair my value. Technically, I could take even more hours, but my capacity to be electric and engaged for each hour is greatly inhibited after much more than 50 appointment hours in a week I’ve come to notice. How am I the most consistently successful strength coach on earth? It’s not marketing dollars or google ad words. In fact, I am probably the worst person on the planet with regard to these. We have previously hired SEO teams and curated social media efforts. For us, they aren’t a fit. No one addicted to screens and social media is my target audience, I’ve learned. Incredibly successful business owners and academics which I tend to coach often don’t even have a social media account. Most of my super wealthy clients do not even have Meta applications on their phones or devices. So an online presence is nice. But for advanced coaching, it’s actually a hindrance by virtue of being such a massive loss of hours and energy spent on people who aren’t ever going to be substantial supporters. This is also how I’ve discovered that the fitness trainers and coaches with massive online followings are mostly frauds. Not all. But most. The people camping out on YouTube for hours a day and viewing your videos at 3am are not serious, not committed to growth or change, and 110% not investors of any kind. Go ahead and slave to get 100 million followers; and I can pretty much guarantee you have no valid real world coaching experience or business knowledge to discuss. Pay a full-time team to optimize your social and website; and I know you haven’t developed anyone, you’ve never managed people, and you have no long-term or serious clients. I’m talking about how I gained real experience to be a real coach in the real world with real people, running a real brick-and-mortar physical storefront. For tips on the online illusion of expertise or success, you will have to go elsewhere. A few weeks ago I met with a client who’d trained at the Olympic training facility and with the founders of MAT. He has had famous coaches. I’m sure all of those experts are impressive in their own right. But I always find areas they’ve missed. These meetings were no different. I uncovered opportunities for this client to reclaim athleticism that other experts hadn’t dreamed of. However, it would be a mistake to think my expertise is what gained my success or my hours. Rather, it was these hours that gained me my high level expertise. To get the hours started first with willingness. Since everyone begins as a non-expert, the fastest path to expertise is willingness to take opportunity and to generate chances for opportunity. I began in the fitness industry with the willingness to accept any duty. If the facility needed toilets cleaned before opening at 5am, I wasn’t too proud or too good to do it. If the pro shop needed the till counted before opening on a Saturday or Sunday, so be it. When members joined at 9pm, someone needed to meet them, interview and interact with them, welcome them and hear them, guide them, and instruct them. In my mind, all of these “menial” tasks were a path to understanding the total working machine of the fitness industry and ultimately gain more chances for more opportunities to advance my understanding ever further. I could. So I did. I can. So I do. Be willing. That’s first. And from that I find is a natural gravitation toward learning. I long ago lost track of speciality certifications, workshops, classes I’ve attended since working professionally in this industry. It’s in the hundreds. I spent a good portion of 2012 memorizing the entirety of the USMLE1 medical school lecture series. I shadowed cardiologists. I trained a lot of MDs and physical therapists and exercise physiologists and PhDs in Nutrition Science. I learned a lot from them along with teaching them a great deal. I ran workshops. I hired and developed a few hundred health and fitness professionals. I found early on that the more brilliant your employees and peers and clients, the more you could learn during every minute of work. I increasingly maximized. When I gained clients who were successful business people, I learned about business. When I took on clients with outrageous health challenges, I learned health troubleshooting. Every single second is a learning opportunity. Every. Single. Second. That is the “how.” The “why” is a little trickier. The short answer is I needed to. I never had a side gig. Fitness wasn’t a side hustle. I didn’t have backers or family money. When things went sideways in my wife’s workplaces or when we started a family, there was no alternative. I had to be the greatest who ever lived. I did not have an option to fail, to flail, to falter, to be average, or even to be pretty great. I had to be superb. And it helped to have some healthy competition and know that I had some peers who were busting their asses as well. Sadly, that is missing for too many influencers or fitness pros. They don’t have mentors or even genuine hard-working peers. So they are never going to mature into the potential they have. They don’t have anything to draw them up other than views or likes, which are, by definition, a hallmark of INexperience. When I worked at Bally’s, there was a pride in having the appointment book as full as possible. I could actually SEE what other trainers’ days looked like. When I obsessed over national reports, I was legitimately intent on being at the top of those reports. I could observe the number of sessions sold or serviced by hundreds of clubs across the country. I knew what it meant to be the best, and what it would take to beat the best. I could see some absolutely freakish performances and call those clubs and talk to those trainers or directors. Today, that spirit is gone. It’s been replaced by trying to have the greatest social media followings, which is largely a measure of how little genuine coaching experience you can even have. Think about it: you can either work; or you can post. You should do some of both. But the “reports” today are not reports at all; they are merely measures of popularity which reward only the marketing. That’s where the incentive is. So that’s where the “performance” remains. I have now coached a number of influencers who have never completely more than 25 appointments in a week, most do no more than that in a month. They monetize their followings and sell online programs. So there was never the incentive for them to book up on mentoring or direct coaching. They cannot ever achieve high level mastery of exercise science or nutrition or just progressive human movement with this low volume. It’ll take them 30 years to be where I was at in my first 5-10 years, but maybe even longer since there will be no intensive consolidation of experience. But they don’t have any spirit of competition around them to hone them anyway. Almost none are starting at high volume fitness centers. And they are burning up tons of hours on videos and posts at the BEGINNING of their “careers.” It’s actually quite sad, because I think I may be among the last generation of great coaches. The measure of expertise in human performance has been steadily shifting toward entertainment, not evidence-based, not empirical, not experience-driven facts. And the young coaches don’t even know it. They are comparing themselves against equally-inexperienced online personalities. Influencers online genuinely don’t know that they are actually quite terrible and should probably not be sharing their “insights”. And the overall market has no way to know this. For a lot of people, it would stand to reason that a guy with five million YouTube subscribers must be an expert, even if you have never seen him post a single calendar shot like mine, even if you’ve never seen him post videos with different clients, even if you’ve never seen him change an ounce of body composition or personal performance himself. So people have to understand there are two markets. There is the real world market where investors will support incredibly advanced strength coaches. I would include online and virtual coaching within this market. But then there is an entertainment market which has little to nothing to do with health and fitness. The up-and-comers and the veteran coaches alike need to make a decision about which market they want, because deep personal connections are not related to Facebook ads and ebooks. Again, you could do both. I admire those who’ve generated a fair bit of effort at each. But the massive experience with real world coaching is not going to come from bending over backward to make another post, to get more content, to shoot another video, to snap a few more shots. NONE of that is exercise science. None of that is valuable experience in strength coaching. It is cinematography experience. It is entertainment experience. It is moviemaking experience. More than anything, choosing the real world market is how you become the most consistently overbooked professional trainer and strength coach on earth. Don’t look at helping people as a temporary launch point to get to your next scheme. You have to look at training/coaching itself as the actual peak. It’s not a stepping stone. It’s not a layover. Coaching is the peak. And being an online famous person is not coaching. They are unrelated. They are in opposition, in fact. The way you become the most consistently overbooked professional trainer and strength coach on earth is you must first see that it is THE height. Be willing. Make every second a learning opportunity. Be ravenous to learn, dying of thirst for experience. If you crave online fame, that’s fine. Pursue that. But please don’t try to place yourself on the same level as me or professionals like me. If you crave opportunity and learning and experience, then you will be a genuine master, a true expert. And that’s how you’ll go on to excel in the real world with real people as a real teacher. Not just for a moment. But for decades. Did You Know That "Light Physical Activity" Can Be More Fatiguing Than Heavy Weight Lifting?2/27/2024  Low force contractions induce more central fatigue and nervous system fatigue than high force contractions:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17626289/ This research demonstrates that long duration training of a low or moderate intensity is more taxing to the nervous system. Mechanistically, this aligns with our understanding of sympathetic activation. A stress state (of varying degrees) occurs during any training, any perceived anxiety-producing trigger, any prolonged activity. The stress hormone production, receptor down-regulation, and therefore CNS fatigue will have more to do with length of activity than load/intensity. Anecdotally or observationally, the lay audience can confirm this finding. Elite strength athletes are on average more recovered, less anxious, less irritable, less agitated, than non-athletes or elite ultra-endurance athletes. Gym-goers who emphasize short strength training (no matter how heavy) tend to suffer fewer CNS downsides than gym goers who emphasize lengthy routines. Orthopedic injuries (many of which stem from CNS fatigue) occur less in people whose workouts are heavy in load and short in duration than in those people whose workouts are lighter in load and longer in duration.  Metabolic stress does some of the work and mechanical tension does a lot.
Beyond being in a state of caloric surplus, rested, and some more generalized debates over volume/intensity/progressive overload, the proposed processes which stimulate muscle growth come down to metabolic stress and mechanical tension. The old theory was muscle damage. “Break it down to build it up,” was a common bro-science aphorism. Not only isn’t it true, but it actually cannot be. No expert in the field affirms this anymore, because of the many counterexamples and obvious impossible paradox therein. Elongating muscles creates the greatest muscular damage, and training which emphasizes forced stretches and hyper-mobility does NOT improve muscular size or efficiency. The contrast of gymnasts versus yogis is perhaps the clearest example of how fixation on lengthening or over-lengthening muscle tissue does not result in a size, speed, or strength gain. Are there benefits to improving control of greater range of motion? Of course. But the very act of “relaxing into a stretch” instead of developing control in it and power over it means limiting mechanical tension, maximizing damage, thereby cutting the strength and size stimuli. Metabolic stress is real but harder to nail down. Contraction of skeletal muscle does produce myokines, alters energy uptake through changes in glucose transporters, and there are some real measurable reactions in hormone responses on site and throughout the person. The degree to which this contributes to overall health and fitness is significant. The precise muscle size impact from any one cascade is unclear, however. There are plenty of athletes who contract muscles millions of times at low tensions and have zero muscular development despite the metabolic stress contribution. See olympic and elite marathoners and endurance cyclists. This leaves us with mechanical tension. I have noticed a trend with upstarts in the past five years or so where they are obsessed with mechanical tension as the be-all end-all. And I’d agree that across decades of professional experience I MOSTLY see muscle size gains in response to mechanical tension. That is, as people truly encounter muscular performance limits, and barely eke out a last or genuinely failed rep, that is where we tend to see size gains most dramatic. The journey requires progressive overload, obviously. But the individual mechanism within a workout is the enhancing of mechanical tension. To be more clear, when a relatively rested person encounters a strength exercise in a stable position and performs 5-20 reps but only ends the set because the velocity of the movement grinds to zero, THAT is that person’s maximum mechanical tension for the intended muscle group of that exercise. However, I want to caution against a cult-like insistence on ONE way and only one way. The first reason for this is that we don’t KNOW for a fact that getting to absolute muscle failure is better than getting very close. And we don’t KNOW how much better (or if) very-close is than close. The second reason I caution people is that to be able to effectively get near muscle failure, you have to first develop expertise. And to become advanced and skillful (and retain said skill) you will have to train sub-maximally some of the time. Moreover, if people do not include some power, speed, and greater range of motion training into a program at some point, the participant is more likely to get hurt or discontinue, such that he or she can no longer gain the reward of mechanical tension. At this point, most people might be asking, “What does this translate into for my workouts?” Or, “how do I apply this?” Let’s take a machine chest press as an example. Imagine you are able to press about 200lbs on this exercise for around 8 reps. Let’s say we start this workout with this exercise, such that you are fully rested once getting to this piece of equipment. Potentially, you’d perform a set of 100lbs for 5 reps, very strictly and intent on creating tension and mentally connecting with the pecs, triceps and deltoids. Afterward, you might wait 3 minutes, and perform another sub-maximal set, 3 reps with 150lbs, perhaps. Wait another 3 minutes. Now, it’s time for business. You set up with all of your normal posture, cues, settings and mentally commit to getting 9-12 clean and toilsome reps with the 200lbs. The first 7 reps may be harder than you anticipate. 8 is grueling. At the 9th rep, it’s a serious question whether you can complete it or not, but, through gritting teeth and eating the pain, you get it. Now, you fight headlong into the 10th rep and the weight is grinding to a halt; but you continue pouring your every fiber of will into budging it another millimeter. And possibly it doesn’t go. You still go to war in your heart and drive your body in the back pad as the bones in your arms seem to bend against the impossibility of the handles. THAT is mechanical tension. THAT is one working set. And THAT alone is sufficient stimulus to get stronger and gain muscle size. Afterward, you might desire doing another few exercises for the same or similar muscle groups. There’s nothing wrong with that. Potentially, you could muster almost the same wherewithal for a legitimate working set like that on the same muscle group a few times in a whole workout sessions. If you include a separate muscle group, certainly you could. However, any degree of workout far in excess of that is not supported by evidence for the purposes of this simple discussion. Certainly, you could add many more exercises and sets and reps and alternate modalities, if you want to generate some more muscular endurance or train a variety of additional skills. But for muscle size, there isn’t a need to add lots of additional sets or exercises. In time, that chest press must be 210, 220, and 12 reps or more, BUT in the same manner, the same grind, the same intentionality, the same degree of battle. THAT is how muscle is actually built.  In 2021, over 44,000 Americans died from taking a fall:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/527298/deaths-due-to-falls-in-the-us/#:~:text=The%20highest%20number%20of%20deaths,States%20was%2044%2C686%20in%202021. About 86% occur in adults over 65: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2804614#:~:text=In%202020%2C%2042%20114%20deaths,aged%2065%20years%20or%20older. But that means that over 6,000 occur in people under 65. This isn’t counting non-fatal fall injuries, which count in the millions. Almost every hip fracture and most traumatic brain injuries occur from falls. The number one risk factor is weakness: https://www.cdc.gov/falls/facts.html Literally, just become stronger, and in an increasingly greater range of motion; and you’ll nearly eliminate your risk of brain injury, hip fracture, and fall-related death: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2XOEMBuW6m/?igsh=aW1mbmxkaDV1OG1p  Even when you train and eat protein, you will eventually lose some muscle. And muscle loss is the primary contributor to loss of function with age:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2804956/#:~:text=Muscle%20mass%20decreases%20approximately%203,60%20%5B4%2C5%5D. The average is 3-8% of muscle lost per decade after 30, and that loss accelerates after 60. The implications of this cannot be overstated, as it is a causal contributor to loss of bone density, loss of insulin sensitivity (aka - becoming more prediabetic/diabetic), loss of stature, loss of balance, loss of most fitness and health markers. Weight loss doesn’t help. The average muscle and healthy tissue-loss during weight loss is 20%: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weight-loss-why-you-dont-just-lose-fat-when-youre-on-a-diet/#:~:text=A%20better%20determinant%20of%20how,to%20several%20kilograms%20of%20muscle. And it is not regained with weight gain. A person who has lost about 10lbs a few dozen times over the years has lost 2lbs of muscle, cartilage, and bone density multiplied by the same number of weight loss bouts. There’s a good chance there are 30 fewer pounds of muscle on that person, even if at the same body weight as before. There is less cartilage integrity in joints if she never lifted weights. There is less bone density. Thus, you can see that people who yo-yo in weight but don’t do resistance exercise and sufficient protein intake simply get weaker and less mobile as they age. It’s not simply that your risks of fall increase as you lose muscle, it’s that the degree of damage possible FROM THE FALL increases with loss of muscle: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10048873/#:~:text=With%20aging%2C%20muscle%20loss%20and,risk%20of%20falling%20%5B4%5D. I don’t need to enumerate the many signs of severe lean tissue loss. Inability to stand on one foot while you put a sock on the other is a decent measure. Getting on and off the floor without the use of hands is another. Handstands, pushups, pull-ups, cartwheels, full bridge, vertical jump, sprint speed, single leg squat, etc. There are many. Most “bad joints” are actually insufficient muscle. And even when the joints are indeed critically failing, you better believe that having piles of lean tissue around them makes the symptoms 1000% better. In 20 years of professional training and coaching, I have observed many people with “bad joints” get to performances they believed impossible simply by getting stronger and regaining some muscle. And this isn’t a plague of age. Young people are more susceptible to dislocations, collapse, and injury when they are detrained and have muscle weakness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8403423/ There are a number of studies showing that lean tissue loss is a predictor of mortality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6014293/ To be clear, how much loss of strength predicts IF you recover from anything, which includes respiratory infections, just fyi. After a certain degree of strength loss, people simply die. Strength loss is an independent predictor of mortality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5820209/. Weakness literally kills people. Perhaps more perplexing to people, muscle tightness and perception of inflexibility IS weakness. Tight hamstrings are weak. Tight backs have weak abs and weak hip flexors and usually weak hamstrings to boot. Tight necks are incredibly weak necks and shoulders. Aching and falling arches are weak feet and ankles. You get the idea. Muscle is next-to impossible to gain or regain or even retain as a full-grown adult. That is, unless you consistently train to get stronger across years, and consistently eat sufficient protein intake for years. But the selection of exercise is also critical. Walking isn’t a muscle builder because it occurs on a vertical skeletal alignment. That does not train the capacity of the body when the thigh is horizontal. A bicep curl is not going to help a person to stand on one leg and pull the opposite knee into her armpit. It’s not that these are no-value exercises. They are just low value with regard to high function of the body. Avoidance of contacting muscles in the shoulder WILL worsen neck and shoulder problems. Strong necks and shoulders simply don’t ache. They don’t degenerate. They aren’t tricky. As such, the selection of exercises must be some sort of approximation of the intended physical capability which the person wants to regain AND a direct confrontation of where that person is already measurably weak. This is a more difficult confrontation than one might expect. People may trend toward a longer walk or a longer bout of cardio, reasoning that the longer duration or distance is an increase in physical fitness. People may love their arm circuit training or Tabata arm series. But these will do absolutely zip nada for genuine fitness. Spending even more time in an activity which cannot confer muscular development will not magically confer muscular development, no matter how long that person spends on the activity. Cardio doesn’t help much. It is catabolic, meaning it breaks down tissue. The intensity of muscular contraction is very low. The skeletal angles are such that the muscles never must produce much force. Ergo, it won’t shield from major muscle loss AND it will often accelerate it, UNLESS the person is measurably getting stronger in lifts week over week. And without going too far into the science, suffice it to say that the person must feel the intended muscle he or she is trying to develop AND generate such tension in it that there is a serious question about whether the rep can be completed at the end of a set. That, and pretty much only that, is going to spur on muscle building. If you used to be able to squat all the way down but now can barely bend your knees, you lost far too much muscle already. If you used to do handstands but now can barely reach your hands overhead, you lost far too much muscle already. If you used to not have stiff muscles but now they’re tight all the time, you lost too much muscle and strength. Long story short: if you have not intentionally been training to gain muscle or get more athletic, you have lost a lot of muscle and healthy tissue. And if you want to turn that around, it doesn’t actually need to be too involved. What are the physical abilities you’d like to build, rebuild, or retain? Work strengthening exercises specifically toward those. That’s it. Really. And when you work them, it is critical that you create enough tension in the muscle to communicate to the body that it must adapt. What that means is that you should not pick any ol’ rep range and then stop AT that arbitrary point. For example, if you pick up a weight which you can confidently perform for an exercise 10 reps, your objective is to commit to 11-20 controlled quality reps which end at zero velocity because your muscle can no longer generate any speed of the exercise. It absolutely does not matter what you read or heard about rep ranges. It doesn’t matter what you saw in a magazine or heard in a group ex class. Your muscle fibers only know if they’ve been taken near their performative limit. That. Is. It. If you move the weight quickly and with ease and end the set before your physiology has ground to a velocity of zero while trying earnestly to complete a repetition which it cannot, then you simply haven’t trained. You have not strengthened. You have not communicated to the body to gain, regain, or retain muscle. “Failure” isn’t really even the right term. There are too many common misconceptions about this concept. People will use momentum and kipping and cheating to nab another rep. That’s not it. Really, it’s just a matter of placing effort into the exercise until your will cannot make the muscles move the exercise movement one more millimeter. That’s the stimulus. The environment which will respond to that stimulus is one of sufficiency. Vitamins. Minerals. Water. Sleep. Rest. Protein. A whole lotta protein. If you can’t imagine eating 1 or more grams of protein per pound of body weight, at the very least hit .5. If you weight 100lbs, the absolute low-end bottom of healthy intake would be a half pound of meat or equivalent protein source daily. For obvious results, double or triple this. And perhaps one can see why even really well-intentioned and hard-working exercisers and health enthusiasts tend to fail completely at making significant and obvious physical progress. Lots of light weights shy of high effort won’t do much. Lots of cardio won’t do much. Lots of green veggies won’t do much. It’s not that any of those things are bad. It’s just that none of them yield a high ROI for the most needed facets of fitness. Intense weight lifting, progressively and consistently performed, with a diet rich in protein, and sufficient sleep and stress management will outperform pretty much any other trendy programming in existence. Otherwise, you’re going to lose muscle.  MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO.
“A healthy mind in a healthy body.” Almost two-thousand years ago a Roman poet named Juvenal penned a list of what is desirable in life; and the first sentiment on that list gave rise to the Latin maxim above. Mankind viewed caretaking of physical health as central to the mental and spiritual well-being of an individual. More modern thinkers began to run astray after Descartes described the mind as a separate essence from the body in the seventeenth century. Descartes was merely describing different aspects of a person. But subsequent theorists and psychologists like Freud proposed an increasingly disparate distinction, which we can openly see in many people’s worldview today. One could say humanity lost its way from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, beginning to think of the spirit and the mind and the physical being each in unconnected silos. Practical successful therapy has not affirmed any such separation. Endocrinology and neuroscience has not affirmed any such separation. Rather, the arc of humanity came back to its senses in the present day. The deeper that researchers dig, the more our modern understanding affirms Juvenal and all those who came before him. We may utilize separate terms; but the highest state of our mental and spiritual health will be best reached by curating our physical well-being. “In everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible. Why, even in the process of thinking, in which the use of the body seems to be reduced to a minimum, it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression, discontent, insanity often assail the mind so violently as to drive whatever knowledge it contains clean out of it. But a sound and healthy body is a strong protection to a man, and at least there is no danger then of such a calamity happening to him through physical weakness: on the contrary, it is likely that his sound condition will serve to produce effects the opposite of those that arise from bad condition. And surely a man of sense would submit to anything to obtain the effects that are the opposite of those mentioned.” - Socrates In the fifth century BC, the Greek military strategist and historian Xenophon recorded this account of Socrates in the third chapter of Memorabilia. In the fitness industry, many people have quoted a preceding section of the same chapter as a way to showcase the renowned philosopher’s endorsement of exercise. Indeed it is. But the chapter as a whole is far more than that. Look closely at the closing statement: a sensible person would submit to anything to avoid mental and physical deterioration. Anything. Anything. This year, presenters at the 2023 summit for the American College of Cardiology and the World Congress of Cardiology are arguing that 8% of deaths are attributable to lack of sleep. Low sleep quality raises risk of cardiac event by nearly 70%. The findings are not even yet published, but based on 172,321 people who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 2013 and 2018, conducted by the CDC and National Center for Health Statistics. Though as of yet unpublished, these claims mimic prior published research indicating that insomnia and sleep disturbance rank among the top risks for heart attack [1.] For at least twenty-five hundred years we have known humans need sleep and humans need movement. These are two of the least provocative and least contentious sentences in health and wellness. They are so undoubted that they extend far beyond expert consensus to total unanimity. They are boring, really. But the questions of “how much?”, “how to implement?”, and “why?” open a broader discussion. That is where the interest lies. And that is where we must focus. The autonomic nervous system governs our expression of sympathetic and parasympathetic response. Otherwise known as fight-or-flight versus rest-and-digest, this relationship is tied quite tightly to risk of all-cause-mortality. Simply, during stress, heart rate rises and heart rate variability lowers. During rest, heart rate lowers and heart rate variability rises. Even modest decreases in sleep end up placing the body in greater sympathetic response THE ENTIRE DAY [2]. As such, we see contemporary studies this year finding that a single night of sleep deprivation ages the brain faster [3]. Essentially, when we persistently get low quality and short sleep, we consistently run the autonomic nervous system in sympathetic governance. There is absolutely nothing wrong with stress inherently, briefly. As Socrates said, we should attend to our fitness. Sympathetic response (as the reader will soon discover in the discussion on exercise) is part of a healthy life when accompanied by physical expression. When we need to fight or flee, absolutely we ought to do so. We ought to be able to do so. For a short duration. In fact, the short intense intentional stress of exercise appears to help bring about a subsequent parasympathetic counter-response in a symbiotic relationship covered below. In part, short intentional sympathetic response allows adenosine to tell the brain it is tired and ready for the wind down [9]. However, without sufficient sleep, by definition, we are in prolonged sympathetic agitation and unable to get all the benefits of repair and flourish from parasympathetic activation. “A peaceful heart leads to a healthy body.” - Proverbs 14:30 Years ago, studies on shortened telomeres in traumatized children gave us a clue. Unsurprisingly, then, researchers at Bar-Ilan University published findings in Nature in 2019 showing that sleep reduced DNA damage [4]. Now, the depth of this may not strike readers immediately. However, what we are talking about is slowing or reversing aging itself. What we are talking about is reducing cancer incidence. When we talk DNA damage or DNA resilience, we are talking the basis of progress and regress, growth and death, abundance or dearth. Whether we are discussing general stress, the accumulated cell damage we term “aging”, the accumulated errant cell proliferation we call “cancer,” or really any other negative experience in cell function, the crux of the matter rests firmly on chromosomal dynamics and DNA degradation. How we defend cells and rebuild health rests, quite literally, on rest. This is a significant problem, because the modern person sleeps less than in any prior period of human history. Historians and sleep researchers agree that it was entirely normal for adults, even peasants, to sleep nine to twelve hours per day regularly. Generally, they broke daily sleep into two periods, not one, which helps. Now, we can blame our single bout of sleep. We can blame the change on the incandescent lightbulb, as its widespread use aligns well with the historical timeline shift in human sleep loss. We can blame it on the Industrial Revolution and expectations of certain labor hours. And we can certainly have the discussion over blue light and work-life balance at some point. But where we lay the cultural, technological, or historical blame leaves us little workable solution anyway. None of us are totally revising the forward march of technology and modernity. Rather, we have an even bigger attached problem to address. We do not even get as much sleep as we think we do. A demographic-population-matched study of over two-thousand participants showed that, while people think they get a little over seven hours of sleep on average, they get closer to six [5]. Even our incorrect overestimate is too little. But our actual behavior is possibly half or less than half of what we genuinely need and historically used to get. It should come as no surprise. And it takes little leap of imagination or logic to see the connections to prevalence of disease, depression, and simply the overwhelming popularity of broken spirits in the world. Without adequate sleep, life is lived less vibrantly. And we can readily see the consequences of eight to ten generations in a row of increasingly sleep-deprived populations. Weight-loss studies gave us another clue to the stark divide between under-rested and adequately-rested people some time ago, as even when we account for energy/calorie matching, people who sleep more lose more of the weight from fat tissue than people who sleep less (and, therefore, lose a greater percent of weight from healthy tissue) [6, 7]. And this is not merely an observational conclusion. It turns out that the mechanism is known and understood. We are continuously making new cells. We first make progenitor cells, which will become the replacement to the old cells of whatever types we replace. When we are under-slept, under-rested, and over-stressed, the percent of the progenitor cells which become adipocytes (new fat cells) goes up a lot [8]. It is a sobering finding, showing us that sleep loss incurs measurable injury to hormonal functioning and the actual cellular life cycle within us. Juvenal and Socrates and Solomon and researchers are in agreement: to heal our spirit, we must heal our bodies. For this, sleep is clearly critical and low-hanging fruit. We could view it as the “yin,” so to speak; and, if so, then movement or exercise is the “yang” to our total wellness. Frankly, neither one exists well without the other. In terms of implementation, people struggle dearly when they endeavor to approach improvement in one and not the other. That is, there is ample evidence that exercise improves sleep [9]. Yet people with better sleep are more likely to exercise [10]. We can unpack those chicken-and-egg sequences, debate which should precede which until the cows come home, and really get nowhere fast. Fundamentally, we are not likely to make any headway until we embrace them as two halves of a whole, concurrently accessible, necessarily concurrent. Tribal societies, ancient cultures, and classical education models did not separate athletic expression from mental and spiritual pursuits. Like our reduced sleep, it is a very modern invention to think of the human condition as capable of its potential with reduced movement. Without exercise, we live smaller. 2008 might have been a crushing year for financial markets globally; but it was a banner year for exercise physiology for all mankind for all of time. The first myokine was identified, solidifying the theory that skeletal muscle is a hormonal/endocrine organ. Researchers at McMaster University provided powerful evidence that very short but intense bouts of exercise provide more/equal benefits to that of very lengthy exercise. And Dr. John J. Ratey, MD published the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science Of Exercise And The Brain. In Spark, Ratey exposed readers to some of the most recent neuroscience findings regarding exercise while repeatedly referencing the Naperville school district as an applied proof-of-concept case study. Essentially, cortisol crosses the blood-brain barrier, opening up pathways for neural damage, immune inadequacy or dysregulation, cognitive deterioration, emotional downturn, and all of the neurodegenerative diseases. One protection is BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). Exercise is uniquely positioned to express BDNF. Literally, exercise makes us better in just about every way. It is pretty cut-and-dried, not a lot of controversy. Ratey added that Naperville has been far ahead of the curve with integrating athletics of an incredibly broad selection into their academic emphasis; and Naperville alone is the only place in America in about four decades which has been able to rank in international math and science testing versus Asian countries. Spark was great. Ratey was not wrong. But science has unpacked a lot more since 2008. Namely, intense effort is superior at BDNF expression [11]. Although Ratey was mostly convinced in the benefit of aerobic exercise, intense effort is king. We have since found that lifting to limit a weight that is 70% or even 90% of an individual’s 1-rep maximum causes significant rises in BDNF long after the exercise session is over [12]. This, of course, does not mean that people should exert at an unsafe effort or in an unsafe manner. Rather, relative to their personal ability, they should work up to intensities which are high for them. And, as we already covered above, adequate sleep must exist in order to be able to operate at intense physical levels. Each reinforces the other, in kind, over time, and a greater synergy between sympathetic and parasympathetic expression may reign. The brain-protective benefit is clear. The sleep benefit is clear. The progress benefit is clear. In conjunction, the yin and yang of sleep and exercise support and gird up one another, allowing the individual to explore his or her full potential. With intentional movement and improved sleep hygiene, cardiologists say we reduce our risk of heart attack. Geneticists say we reduce DNA damage. Neurologists say we improve our ratio of sympathetic to parasympathetic response. Socrates might say we have our strongest protection for our minds. And Juvenal said, MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO. 1.) Sofi F, Cesari F, Casini A, Macchi C, Abbate R, Gensini GF. Insomnia and risk of cardiovascular disease: a meta-analysis. Eur J Prev Cardiol. 2014 Jan;21(1):57-64. doi: 10.1177/2047487312460020. Epub 2012 Aug 31. PMID: 22942213. 2.) Castro-Diehl C, Diez Roux AV, Redline S, Seeman T, McKinley P, Sloan R, Shea S. Sleep Duration and Quality in Relation to Autonomic Nervous System Measures: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Sleep. 2016 Nov 1;39(11):1927-1940. doi: 10.5665/sleep.6218. PMID: 27568797; PMCID: PMC5070747. 3.) Chu C, Holst SC, Elmenhorst EM, Foerges AL, Li C, Lange D, Hennecke E, Baur DM, Beer S, Hoffstaedter F, Knudsen GM, Aeschbach D, Bauer A, Landolt HP, Elmenhorst D. Total sleep deprivation increases brain age prediction reversibly in multi-site samples of young healthy adults. J Neurosci. 2023 Feb 20:JN-RM-0790-22. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0790-22.2023. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36804738. 4.) Zada, D., Bronshtein, I., Lerer-Goldshtein, T. et al. Sleep increases chromosome dynamics to enable reduction of accumulating DNA damage in single neurons. Nat Commun 10, 895 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-08806-w 5.) Silva GE, Goodwin JL, Sherrill DL, Arnold JL, Bootzin RR, Smith T, Walsleben JA, Baldwin CM, Quan SF. Relationship between reported and measured sleep times: the sleep heart health study (SHHS). J Clin Sleep Med. 2007 Oct 15;3(6):622-30. PMID: 17993045; PMCID: PMC2045712. 6.) Xuewen Wang, Joshua R Sparks, Kimberly P Bowyer, Shawn D Youngstedt, Influence of sleep restriction on weight loss outcomes associated with caloric restriction, Sleep, Volume 41, Issue 5, May 2018, zsy027, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsy027 7.) Nedeltcheva AV, Kilkus JM, Imperial J, Schoeller DA, Penev PD. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Ann Intern Med. 2010 Oct 5;153(7):435-41. doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-153-7-201010050-00006. PMID: 20921542; PMCID: PMC2951287. 8.) Bahrami-Nejad Z, Zhao ML, Tholen S, Hunerdosse D, Tkach KE, van Schie S, Chung M, Teruel MN. A Transcriptional Circuit Filters Oscillating Circadian Hormonal Inputs to Regulate Fat Cell Differentiation. Cell Metab. 2018 Apr 3;27(4):854-868.e8. doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2018.03.012. PMID: 29617644; PMCID: PMC5889123. 9.) Banno M, Harada Y, Taniguchi M, Tobita R, Tsujimoto H, Tsujimoto Y, Kataoka Y, Noda A. Exercise can improve sleep quality: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PeerJ. 2018 Jul 11;6:e5172. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5172. PMID: 30018855; PMCID: PMC6045928. 10.) Baron KG, Reid KJ, Zee PC. Exercise to improve sleep in insomnia: exploration of the bidirectional effects. J Clin Sleep Med. 2013 Aug 15;9(8):819-24. doi: 10.5664/jcsm.2930. PMID: 23946713; PMCID: PMC3716674. 11.) Gibbons TD, Cotter JD, Ainslie PN, Abraham WC, Mockett BG, Campbell HA, Jones EMW, Jenkins EJ, Thomas KN. Fasting for 20 h does not affect exercise-induced increases in circulating BDNF in humans. J Physiol. 2023 Jan 11. doi: 10.1113/JP283582. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36631068. 12.) Church DD, Hoffman JR, Mangine GT, Jajtner AR, Townsend JR, Beyer KS, Wang R, La Monica MB, Fukuda DH, Stout JR. Comparison of high-intensity vs. high-volume resistance training on the BDNF response to exercise. J Appl Physiol (1985). 2016 Jul 1;121(1):123-8. doi: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00233.2016. Epub 2016 May 26. PMID: 27231312.  Multiply this by 50 weeks and 20 years. There were years where I worked all 52 weeks. And there were many weeks in there where I had 55-65 appointments PLUS another 20-50 hours of management time. But I’ve also had a few reserved years where I refuse to take more than 35 appointments in a week, and where we had multiple trips or went to Greece for 3 weeks. All the same, when you add in my studies, my daily medical and scientific journal reading, my own workouts, it is A LOT of deep deep knowledge, wisdom, and experience. I conservatively place it over 70,000 hours. It could be closer to 85.
In that time I’ve discovered really wild and unexpected troubleshooting, difficult outlier challenges, rare conditions, and many insights which just cannot exist within any lesser amount of experience. There are conditions and client challenges I did not encounter in my first 8 years which I’ve many times now encountered in the past 12. And I managed gyms with thousands of members in my first 8 years in this profession. So it gives me some worry. It gives me some worry because there are now a lot of really influential people online with far less experience than I had in my first 10 years, far less even than I had in my first 5 years, or even 2, less perhaps than I had logged as a kid when I was obsessed with reading nutrition science and exercise science textbooks. And these are the voices setting the tone out in the public, out in the ether, out in parlance. It’s not all bad necessarily. It’s even sometimes flattering to see a fitness trend nowadays which I had pioneered a decade or 2 prior. Whole franchises, companies and cultural movements today are built atop metabolic experiments I ran 10, 20, 30 years ago. But it’s also disappointing to see such simpleton explanations trending, such bad science trending, such bold and wrong advice trending, such entrenched insistence that one single cult is the only way. I don’t have the will to combat it. I am busy being a real business owner with a real business and a real storefront in the real world. So I’m not wasting effort on the optics of marketing and “looking” like a trendy online personality. But I will take the time from time to time to post and share something which I hope impacts even one person or corrects one of the many pieces of popular and terrible advice floating around. Today, it’s simply this: 1.) be honest 2.) track 3.) go slow 4.) persist 5.) progress And if I had to add a 6th, it would be to remind yourself that the distance between where you are and where you want to be is FINITE and involves ACTION which is broken down into measurable objective steps. Health and fitness or careers and business aren’t magic. They are not supernatural. Are there some tricks? Sure. Are there intense techniques? Sure. I have many. I share quite a few. But categorically NO ONE is going to shake those 5 truths. I saw it in this week. I saw it in the past few decades. To get anywhere worth going, we need to be honest with ourselves. Chances are high that when we are unsure why we aren’t more successful or further along or closer to goals, the first area we must examine is our personal honesty. Then, we need to be tracking what we actually do and measuring how it will or won’t produce the desired outcome (honesty, too, will be paramount here). Implementing productive steps need to be slow. We can always accelerate if we have good footing. But we sometimes can’t even reclaim where we were if we go too fast, get hurt, or burn out. If an effort works, it does not magically keep working. Not to be too circular, but we have to keep working at what works for it to keep working. I suspect honesty and persistence together may do more than the other three combined. As we grow, we earn more growth. With each step, we can tolerate more. And with each step, the distance to the goal is closed. With each step, the distant is closer. And soon, the unknown is the known, the unbelievable is reached, the seemingly-unattainable is attained.  And that’s being incredibly, generously kind. Researchers at Harvard just committed academic fraud, sifting responses of 22,000 people who overate and developed type 2 diabetes, then lied and connected red meat, not overeating, to the development of diabetes:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/red-meat-consumption-associated-with-increased-type-2-diabetes-risk/ Their own study does not support the claim. It is a scientific and biological impossibility. When you dig further into their inclusion criteria, you find they defined lasagna and ham sandwiches as red meat. They defined a Big Mac with fries and a large coke as red meat. This is actually a really good example of how liars or idiots can abuse epidemiology to try to claim something which is scientifically known to be impossible. A disease caused by excessive and persistent elevated blood sugar toxicity CANNOT be caused by something which DOES NOT RAISE BLOOD SUGAR. Red meat has a glycemic index of ZERO. But the flour in lasagna has a GI of 70 and the whole wheat or white bread on a sandwich is a GI of 70-100. In fact, the addition of the meat to the lasagna or sandwich actually LOWERS the glycemic impact, reducing the glucose volatility and toxicity which causes type 2 diabetes. The idiots/liars used a dataset of more than 200,000 people to find 22,000 people who overate carbohydrates and calories to give themselves diabetes. The liars stratified results to make it appear like red meat and not overeating gave those 22,000 their diabetes. They did not control for the fact that more smokers ate these “red meat” meals. They did not control for the 30 oz drinks of high fructose corn syrup included in these “red meat” meals. When you observe the nature of the “study,” realizing that data collection amounted to little more than self-reporting questionnaires, you wonder how anyone could take it seriously. It’s an incredibly flawed study to begin. But as you dive into the data, what this actually means is that there were more than 22,000 people who ate more red meat and didn’t get diabetes. The dataset actually proves the precise opposite of the headlines. Red meat was associated with a statistically significant DECREASED risk of diabetes when controlling for other variables (as actual smart people or legitimate scientists would do). Either through malice or ineptitude, these liars/idiots DID NOT control for the overeating of all food. The cause of type 2 diabetes is known: persistently elevated and unregulated blood sugar. Red meat has NO carbohydrates and rates ZERO on the glycemic index. It will actually reduce the glycemic impact of carbohydrates eaten concurrently. We actually already knew for an indisputable fact that red meat decreases risk of diabetes. American consumption of red meat has plummeted EXACTLY as type 2 diabetes prevalence has skyrocketed. American red meat consumption dropped like a rock since 1976, landing it today at an all-time historic low: https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/statistics/per-capita-consumption-of-poultry-and-livestock-1965-to-estimated-2012-in-pounds/ In 1976 only 2% of Americans had type 2 diabetes: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circulationaha.106.613828#:~:text=The%208%2Dyear%20incidence%20rate,and%205.8%25%20in%20the%201990s.&text=Study%20subjects%20consisted%20of%20women%20and%20men%20aged%2040%20to%2055%20years. But as of 2022, at least 11.3% of American adults have type 2 diabetes: https://www.uptodate.com/contents/type-2-diabetes-mellitus-prevalence-and-risk-factors/print#:~:text=Other%20national%20databases%2C%20such%20as,undiagnosed%2C%20and%2095%20percent%20of Through the course of dropping our red meat consumption in half, we have increased our incidence of diabetes by nearly 600%. Public health expert, Zoe Harcombe, PhD, enumerated 14 flaws with the study which should have barred it from publishing: https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2023/10/red-meat-type-2-diabetes/ Her summary: 1) the inaccuracy of Food Frequency Questionnaires. 2) the reported intakes were ‘calibrated’, which increased risk ratios. 3) the definition of red meat included sandwiches and lasagne. 4) the serving sizes have changed since the original FFQs. 5) the intakes used to compare people have become more extreme. 6) the study claimed that women consume more red meat than men; that would be a first. 7) total red meat was claimed to have a higher risk than both processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. Total red meat is the sum of the other two. It can’t be worse than both. 8) the healthy person confounder. The red meat eater had a higher BMI and was more likely to smoke and less likely to exercise. We can’t adjust for a completely different person. 9) the reported calorie intake was absurd. 10) the characteristics table reported all food intake except the relevant ones – sugar and grains. 11) the headline claims did not adjust for the higher BMI. 12) even if there were no issues 1-11, the study could only suggest association not causation. 13) the relative risk numbers grabbed the headlines; the absolute risk differences were a fraction of one per cent. 14) the plausible mechanisms proposed applied far more sensibly to the bun, fries and fizzy drink (which were ignored) than to the burger. Largely, Harvard researchers are sloppy. More rigorous academics at Washington University took a much closer look at years of red meat and health research to find no good connection between red meat consumption and any health concerns: https://bigthink.com/health/red-meat-cancer-not-health-risk/ Unsurprisingly, some of the same Harvard researchers involved in this latest fraudulent academic work took umbrage with Washington University’s research. In fact, when Texas A&M affirmed the fact that red meat does not have a causal connection to health risks, faculty at Harvard began to gaslight those at A&M. Since the Harvard faculty didn’t have the intellectual honesty or capacity to present legitimate arguments against Washington or A&M’s studies, the Harvard faculty resorted to ad hominem attacks, accusing them of outside influence. This is more than an irony when Harvard leads all universities in foreign and corporate funding. In return for the personal attacks, the A&M chancellor called upon the president of Harvard to perform an ethics review on several of the Harvard faculty involved: https://www.tpr.org/news/2020-01-29/texas-a-m-harvard-scientists-feud-over-controversial-red-and-processed-meat-study The reader should understand that Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health is a criminal enterprise, having been forced to pay back over 1.3 million dollars which it stole from the NIH: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/harvard-university-agrees-pay-over-13-million-resolve-allegations-overcharging-nih-grants Chinese faculty at Harvard have been charged with espionage: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-and-two-chinese-nationals-charged-three-separate-china-related The total amount of foreign influence at Harvard is incalculable. But what we do know is that the T.H. Chan School of Public Health once received a 350 million dollar gift from a billionaire Chinese family: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2014/09/08/hong-kong-billionaire-brothers-to-give-350-million-to-harvard-university/?sh=3d27e05d11b1 It’s long been time to reevaluate whether any of Harvard’s public health research is trustworthy. Now we need to take a look at whether we should allow them any more funding. Moreover, what's clearer than ever is that none of us have anything to worry about with red meat in and of itself. We can get into discussions about the accompanying foods and quality of the meat, or even the sustainability concerns. But we need to be done with the doom prophets and ideologues vilifying a single whole food as the culprit in diseases which are undeniably connected to excessive consumption of processed foods.  My daughter ran into the room to have us quiz her Spanish vocabulary. My son couldn’t wait to be tested on the first 41 elements he’d just memorized from the periodic table.
Knowledge loves to be challenged. Discovery yearns to improve where it hasn’t yet explored. Authority, however… not so much. People ask me why we do a certain movement, training, or nutritional strategy; and I love that. People ask me how; and I love that. People challenge it. I love that. People bring up, “but I’ve heard…”; and I love that. “But so and so says…”; and I love it. I invite testing. I pray for it. Because I am an expert. Please, come test the limits of my mastery; and I will readily admit where I don’t know. No hesitation. No bluff. In fact, I don’t mind learning a BETTER way to do it. But some “experts”… not so much. And that’s why I put quotations around the title. People hide behind their names, titles, suffixes, education, franchises, organizations, or even hashtags like #trustthescience in an obvious effort to NOT be tested. They just straight up will not entertain inquiry. They recoil and shrink at the tiniest inference of scrutiny. That, by definition, is not expertise. I try to imagine a master martial artist claiming his technique cannot get any better, but also refusing to get in the ring, EVER. I cannot do it. It's silliness. But for some reason societally we will tolerate the very same tactic when employed in certain academic, scientific research, or political debates. It's actually more silly in those scenarios, as the person in question is making a claim to impose on our beliefs or behaviors. The master martial artist is merely claiming that his own technique cannot improve at all. I can recall talking to clients whose nutritionists and doctors countered my dietary advice all the way back to 2004. I always loved it and still do. The American Diabetes Association and Academy of Nutrition And Dietetics, which are wholly owned by industry (1,2), have long proclaimed opinions which are at odds with verifiable science. Whenever people challenged me on this, I’d just tell them to buy a glucometer. Once you DO science, you get unshackled from worrying about opinions. I right now have a client who is reversing her diabetes. There are “experts” in those organizations who will say it’s impossible; and all I can see is someone with very limited experience, and even more limited vision and imagination. Titles are great. Official licensure and proper education is necessary even. But wherever it is abused to avoid questions, we find lack of expertise. In my area of expertise, I continually find many areas of opportunity, for new learning, for improvement. And on average I have thirty-thousand to fifty-thousand MORE hours of professional experience than most of the top “authorities” in my field. I find it brazenly deceitful, therefore, when anyone in any area of health sciences and wellness declares a matter settled, rejecting the cornerstone of learning that IS inquiry. It’s never settled for experts. Static knowledge which cannot be questioned is only for the novices, the ignorant, the phonies, and the liars. Expertise invites testing. 1.) https://diabetes.org/about-us/research/pathway/supporters/corporate-sponsors 2.) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/corporate-capture-of-the-nutrition-profession-in-the-usa-the-case-of-the-academy-of-nutrition-and-dietetics/9FCF66087DFD5661DF1AF2AD54DA0DF9 |
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