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.