Start Here: A Master Class in Sleep, Diet, Movement, Fitness and Stress Management

A friend recently asked, “What’s a good episode to start with?” for a basic overview of health and lifestyle optimization. Great question—and honestly, I didn’t have a good answer. So here it is!

This show covers the basics from a big-picture perspective—the one to share with friends and loved ones. It’s not sciency or intimidating, just a simple, reasonable framework for how to live a healthy, happy, long life.

I hit the five key areas: sleep, diet, movement, fitness, and stress management. You’ll hear why sleep, rest, and recovery are #1—everything flows downstream from there—and how artificial light and digital stimulation after dark wreck your hormones and metabolism. I explain how walking (yes, walking!) delivers a powerful aerobic effect, why sprints give the highest return on investment of any exercise, and how most people are overdoing “chronic cardio.”

You’ll learn the simple diet fix of ditching processed junk—refined grains, sugars, and seed oils—and focusing on the nutrient-dense, animal-based foods that fueled human evolution. And we’ll finish with stress management: escaping chronic low-level stress, ending rumination, and carving out real downtime, nature time, and meaningful connection.

TIMESTAMPS:

Where should you start in your healthier living endeavors? [00:51]

The statistics for longevity for the United States population are horrifying. [02:11]

Because of artificial light and digital stimulation after dark, most of us throw off our circadian rhythm which prevents us from getting good sleep, rest, recovery, and downtime. Sleep needs to be your number one priority. [04:18]

There are many warring factions of people arguing about diet that confuse us. The number one thing you can do to optimize your diet is to start by cleaning up your act and removing the nutrient deficient heavily processed foods from your home. [17:23]

In the heavily processed foods, it’s the foreign chemical agents that cause inflammation, that cause gut dysfunction and promote obesity above and beyond their calories. [24:59]

The visceral fat is especially health destructive because it accumulates in your abdominal area around your vital organs. [27:07]

Focus on the ancestral foods: red meat, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. [29:39]

The highest rated category of fish is the oily cold water fish…the SMASH family: sardines, mackerel, anchovies, salmon, and herring. [38:30]

Some restrictive diets cause a stress response in the body. They do help as an intervention, but not as a permanent diet. [43:54]

When you are looking at the tremendous number of supplements available, you really have to understand what you are getting. [01:01:32]

Have a goal of increasing all forms of general everyday movement in your life. [01:03:48]

If you get too extreme into workouts that are medium to difficult, that are slightly too stressful to promote that long-term health benefit, you actually do the opposite [01:10:19]

Sprinting is the best workout known to mankind, the highest return on investment of any form of exercise for overall fitness benefits. [01:16:14]

You can easily overdo it when it comes to endurance training. [01:23:06]

Stressful training diminishes your testosterone. [01:26:05]

Stress management is crucial as you look to improve your well-being. We live in very stressful times. [01:29:23]

relationships, especially the romantic ones you may have, really need to be smooth functioning. [01:35:05]

Rumination has been categorized as a metabolic disease with actual blood markers. [01:37:23]

In summary, get good sleep and take breaks during the day. Clean out your food pantry by removing the nutrient-deficient chemically processed foods. Move every day. Adhere to sensible exercise patterns. Don’t overdo it. Manage your stress. [01:42:50]

LINKS:

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast – where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life. I’m Brad Kearns, NY Times bestselling author, world #1 ranked masters age 60-plus high jumper, and former #3 world-ranked professional triathlete. You’ll learn how to stay fit, strong and powerful as you age; transform your diet to lose body fat and increase energy; sort through hype and misinformation to make simple, sustainable lifestyle changes; and broaden your perspective beyond a fit body to experience healthy relationships, nonstop personal growth, and ultimately a happy, healthy, long life. Let’s explore beyond shortcuts, hacks, and crushing competition to laugh, have fun, appreciate the journey, and not take ourselves too seriously. It’s time to B.rad!

Brad (00:00:51):
How about a start here episode. So here we go, o welcome to the start here episode inspired by a friend of mine who I introduced to my podcast and he said, where should I start? What’s a good episode to start with? There’s 600 episodes recorded by now, <laugh> of basic overview of healthy living, lifestyle optimization, disease prevention, longevity, all that great stuff. And I was like, crap, that’s a great question. Let me think about it before we dig into the weeds of deep and exploration into diet or fitness or specific topics like sprinting or cold plunging. How about a start here episode? So here we go. The goal here is a big picture perspective. Gonna move quickly through the important topics. I’m going to divide the content into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 categories that I would like you to focus on and take care of the basics to give yourself a fighting chance at living a long, happy, healthy, energetic life instead of succumbing to the disastrous patterns of disease and accelerated decline that have become the norm today.

Brad (00:02:11):
The statistics are horrifying for the first time in recorded history, especially here in the United States, males have a lower life expectancy than their parents and the average US man life expectancy now today is 73 years old. I did a whole show on this absolutely shocking. Oh man. On my wonderful occasion of my 60th birthday party celebration, my friend Dr. Stevie, we both become obsessed with the actuarial life expectancy tables. He’s a former actuary from a family of actuaries, and the Social Security Administration publishes an actuarial life table. I have the link in the show notes, and we’ve become obsessed with this table because it shows the statistics and the expectations out of 100,000 births on a certain year. How many people make it to this age, this age, this age. And Stevie gave the quip on my 60th birthday. Let’s face it, half of our friends will be dead by the time we’re 80.So amidst all these horrifying statistics, I would love for my listeners, viewers to be part of those, whatever, how big the pie slice is of the people that skate free from this disastrous decline.

Brad (00:03:24):
Driven by of course hectic, high stress, modern life, and the acceleration of technology and the prevalence of unhealthy foods and all the addictive behaviors covered in Dr. Robert Lustig’s book, the Hacking of the American Mind. We definitely have the capability today to <laugh> cruise along on a very, very unhealthy path, succumb to the mainstream sick care system. No criticism and no bad talking about it. The system is there to care for illness. It’s just that they’re overwhelmed with chronic illness, lifestyle-driven illness that force the physicians, everyone in the medical world to focus on this crisis of chronic lifestyle-driven disease rather than focus on when we really need them, when we have an acute illness and require some medical intervention.

Brad (00:04:18):
So hopefully this show will be easy to understand, easy to follow, not overly intimidating, like maybe some of the shows that have a deeper exploration into complex topics, but especially some quick, easy, simple takeaway items that won’t require a burden of time, energy, budget allocation, but just things you can do right now to get going on a healthier path, cleaning up your act and so forth. So the five sections I want to cover in this show are sleep, diet, movement, fitness, two different categories, general everyday movement and fitness, a fitness regimen, and then finally stress management. And we’re gonna start with sleep. And not just sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep. We hear so much lip service about that. We still don’t do a great job with that because of the excess amount of artificial light and digital stimulation after dark that most of us introduce, which really throws off our circadian rhythm, not just that evening sleep, getting better at that, but also rest, recovery and downtime.

Brad (00:05:27):
And this is the number one category from which all other healthy lifestyle endeavors flow. You have to prioritize it, you must make it number one. Otherwise, we don’t really need to talk too much about diet, fitness, and other things that you’re doing. Of course, the evening sleep is the centerpiece, but because of the high stress, hyperconnected nature of modern life, we also have to put in those other categories, rest, recovery, and downtime. From chronic stress. We have all manner of chronic stressors at a heightened and accelerated level for the first time in the history of humanity due to the mobile device and the ability to stay connected and stay engaged all the time, rather than having all that built in downtime that we had in even decades a few decades ago when we had a defined and distinct workday or we were on the telephone connected to a cord on the wall.

Brad (00:06:31):
You’ve younger and listeners may not, may not even believe that, but then you hang up the phone, you close your computer, you disconnect from the internet, and you have live interpersonal interactions and things that are more, uh, stress balancing rather than constant, constant engagement with mobile device. So when it comes to that evening sleep block, the critical obligation here is to minimize artificial light and digital stimulation After dark, all living things on earth are governed by a circadian rhythm. That’s the rising and setting of the sun. So our sleep wake cycles have been defined by the rising and setting of the sun for over 2 million years until Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. And the acceleration of technology now allows us to make whatever day and night cycles we want through artificial light, such as the beautiful lighting in this studio, right? It could be, could be the middle of the night that I’m recording this, you don’t know, and neither does my brain if I’m blasting my eyeballs with light after dark.

Brad (00:07:42):
So it’s kind of a good checkpoint to, I call it, honor the setting of the sun and realize that now I want to make a concerted effort to minimize my exposure to intense artificial light. And of course, what goes with that hand in hand is the digital stimulation, the things that we’re doing after dark that are also overriding the natural tendency to unwind and wind down after the sun sets, the melatonin, it’s called dim light melatonin, onset, DLMO. That’s what our bodies do naturally without the interference from artificial light and digital stimulation after dark. And that melatonin onset is what makes us a little calmer. And then eventually a little sleepier as it comes to bedtime. When we interrupt that melatonin flow, that’s when we have trouble sleeping, getting to sleep, and cycling optimally through all phases of sleep overnight. Of course, this stuff is completely and wildly thrown off by the intervention of prescription sleep, medication and other substances that have a tendency to disrupt sleep.

Brad (00:08:50):
Alcohol’s getting a lot of attention these days as a sleep disruptor. What these substances do, the downers like alcohol and like sleep medication, is they knock you out quick, but they interfere with that graceful cycling through the various phases of sleep that are necessary for complete restoration. I’m talking about the REM sleep as well as the deep sleep. So ideally a nice dark mellow evening with wind down rituals, especially in that final hour before bed. One thing I like to recommend, whatever the weather is, get outside for a few minutes, look at the stars. Take your dog for a walk around the block. Maybe it’s a little chilly, you’re gonna get a little cold. That’ll help you because we require a lowering of body temperature in order to fall asleep. So that last little segment of time, great book by Arianna Huffington, the Sleep Revolution, she talks about engaging in a certain ritual that teaches your brain to realize, hey, now it’s time to wind down and go to sleep.

Brad (00:09:54):
She talks about taking a bath, putting on your pajamas rather than busting through some final emails. That’s a difficult thing to, uh, have the brain go hand in hand with downtime and unwinding and slowing down. So sleep ritual, minimizing artificial light and digital stimulation after dark, and then creating a beautiful sleep sanctuary characterized by a proper temperature. So we want a lower temperature. Ideally, the body will fall asleep in an environment 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. If 60 sounds a little cold to you and me, it definitely is, but that’s when we get under blankets, get under covers. So a cold room environment with of course, warm skin. That’s what pajamas and blankets are for. That is the key to falling asleep. So cool environment, completely dark. Again we want to tell the brain that it’s time to go to sleep and stay asleep, especially with my show about the 24 hour circadian cycle inspired by the work of Jack Kruse.

Brad (00:11:02):
He talks about this period of time between midnight and 3:00 AM when the restorative hormones come out to play. And they are very, very light sensitive. So if you say, I like falling asleep with the television on, it helps me go to sleep, it might help knock you out in some way or do something of that nature, your familiarity. But we require complete darkness in order for optimal hormone restoration during those evening cycles of sleep that your brain is very sensitive to. So that goes to the extent of covering up the little LED emissions from electronic devices. That’s why I have electrical tape and I slap it over anything that emits a light such as my air filters and, and things like that. Thankfully Jasper filter, the most amazing indoor air filter ever made. Way more powerful than the numerous air filters I have around my house that I bought on Amazon.

Brad (00:12:01):
They have a nice little button that says light, and you can turn off almost all the lights on the Jasper Air filter overnight while it’s filtering your indoor air environment to the most wonderful, fantastic extent. Something that I never really thought about until I got involved with the company and Mike Feldstein, the founder, talking so passionately about how indoor air is one of our biggest concerns for pollution exposure way more than outdoor air because indoor air is typically five times dirtier than outdoor air, unless you’re talking about a fire season or a smoggy environment or whatever. But we don’t really pay much mind to it, especially things like, uh, when you’re cooking in the kitchen that generates a lot of VOCs. That’s called volatile organic compounds that float around in your indoor air space. And if you have a nice modern home with new windows, isn’t that great?

Brad (00:12:56):
An energy efficient home? Guess what? It allows for less air circulation than the older homes with the 60-year-old windows <laugh>. Like my mom’s house that we just sold in L.A. Sorry, new buyer. The windows are indeed from the sixties, but guess what? They allow air to pass through very easily that makes it more difficult to air condition in the hot summer and more difficult to heat in the winter. But you do have that going for you. If you have an old farmhouse from 1868 out in Maine, like my cousin Babs, yeah, it’d be nice to get those fabulous new Anderson milgard windows with the double pane. But you do have that concern about indoor air quality. Sorry for that aside. But indoor air quality’s a big huge deal. Uh, and back to the topic of getting that nice dark, cool sleeping environment, including taking care of those LEDs.

Brad (00:13:53):
And if you’re worried about getting up and needing some light buy yourself, a little red light flashlight or even better, the mito red light desk lamp for 50 bucks and it’s portable. You can grab it and walk your way, uh, to the restroom or wherever you need to go at night. Hopefully you’re not waking up too much with a red light emission rather than the more, uh, invasive and disruptive light that comes from regular sources, white colored, but we call it blue light that can really interfere with melatonin production and interfere with your ability to get back to sleep if you do happen to wake up overnight. The sleep experts, of course, remind us that it’s not that big a deal if you do wake up once or twice, but you really wanna focus on returning to a relaxed state so that you can get back to sleep.

Brad (00:14:47):
So I’m talking about the environment, I’m talking about the ritual, and I think you get the point. There’s so much commentary about sleep out there, wonderful commentary helping you to get the education you need, and then it’s up to you to create that evening experience, with a nice wind down into a beautiful sleep sanctuary. Oh, not, not only, uh, dark and cool, but also free from clutter and stress provoking visions such as a pile of junk over in the corner of old paperwork. And there’s great research showing that even so much as gazing at a pile of junk in the corner of your bedroom, maybe a lot of people even combine, we’re tight on space, got a lot of bodies in the house, and so your work desk is in your sleeping environment, which is a terrible no-no, because even looking at that desk and the stress that comes from your workplace experience during the day can prompt a stress response in the body such that your sleeping environment becomes associated with stress and provokes stressful thoughts.

Brad (00:15:58):
That’s a huge compromise to this ideal of a sleep sanctuary. Not to mention having a screen in your bedroom. <laugh>, I am so adamant against this, I’m sorry for my partner who might otherwise want to have a little TV in there. And, of course it’s fun to relax and watch a show in bed. We do it in a hotel environment, right? But really try to make that commitment to have the screens elsewhere in your house. And then when you’re finished watching screen, get up and go to this nice spartan sleep sanctuary. You can Google the term sleep sanctuary or Spartan bedroom furniture, Spartan bedroom design, minimalist bedroom design, and you’ll see that the ideal sleep environment is very simple. Hey, you got a bedside stand. It’s not filled with a bunch of junk. It’s got your mito red light desk lamp on there for evening illumination.

Brad (00:16:57):
And I’m loving this new ritual that we’ve been doing sinc`e we got each got his and hers desk lamps. The Mito red desk lamps. This will illumoinate a bedroom sufficiently that final hour or 30 minutes before bed rather than having to blast through an overhead light or a lamp or whatever. So a mellow, dark evening experience that covers number one pretty well.

Brad (00:17:23):
Let’s go to number two, the topic of diet. And of course, there are hundreds of hours of content on this topic, on the B.rad Podcast and thousands and millions of hours of dietary commentary on many other great health podcasts, including stuff that can confuse the crap outta you because we have these warring factions of people trying to convince you that this special, regimented, restrictive diet is the end all. And this is terrible. And oh, back and forth, let’s argue, let’s argue.

Brad (00:17:58):
And so I’ve really tried to become thoughtful considering my deep immersion into the subject for so long, realizing that not everyone has the ability to get deeply into this and look carefully at the various voices and the various popular dietary recommendations and compare and contrast, and try to filter out the nonsense from things that are sensible and applicable to everyone. So I’m taking a few back paces up from whatever dietary recommendations and enthusiasm I’ve had for the niche topics that I’ve covered and written about for so many years, and just want to get the simple message out there that the number one thing that you can do to improve your diet, to optimize your diet is to start by cleaning up your act and removing the nutrient deficient heavily processed foods from your home so that they are out of your realm, they’re out of your world, they’re out of your temptation when your willpower is down.

Brad (00:19:03):
When’s that usually at the end of the day, right? When you’re relaxing on the couch, you’ve had a tough day and you wanna reach for whatever instant gratification food that is in your visual field, in your refrigerator, in your freezer, and that’s how things can tailspin because our willpower is broken and we just wanna reward ourselves and also have a way to relieve stress and enjoy and celebrate a bite of blank. Who are we gonna pick on? One of my favorites is Ben and Jerry’s, right? The hippie trippy guys, who if you look carefully at a lot of their flavors, they include highly refined industrial seed oils in the container of ice cream. Whew, of course, what is that for? Uh, Stability, shelf life stability, temperature stability, and inexpensive manufacturing practices that compromise something that ordinarily wouldn’t be terribly objectionable. My four time guest, Jay Feldman, Energy Balance podcast, had some great commentary, one of them saying, Hey, look, ice cream, is it the most nutritious food on the planet?

Brad (00:20:05):
No, but it’s certainly not objectionable. It’s not in the same category as Oreo cookies and the processed shit that’s out there, unless you’re buying cheaply made mainstream processed ice cream. But if you go and get a gourmet caliber ice cream, which is one of my favorite outings in town, there’s a place in Sacramento called Gunther’s Ice Cream. Been there for half a century, and they have their homemade handmade, delicious ice cream. What’s the main ingredients? We got cream, which is a saturated fat, has some health benefits, right? We got sugar, which is burned in the cell for energy. Sugar is only toxic when you overconsume it habitually and then don’t burn enough calories, which is most people most days, right? So we can appropriately criticize all the processed sugars that’s in the diet. But when you’re talking about on this basic commentary that I’m making, you got cream, you got sugar, and you got whatever, the flavoring, the chemical flavorings, and the crappy ice cream that you find in the freezer section of the grocery store.

Brad (00:21:08):
Yeah, most of that’s in the category of heavily processed nutrient deficient food. But ice cream in and of itself, the way it was made in the old days by your grandfather cranking the ice machine, it’s cream, it’s sugar, it’s a nice treat, drive across town, have a social experience, enjoy yourself a scoop of really quality ice cream. No big deal there, but the habitual act of stocking up on garbage made by the big food industry and having it there available in your freezer every night, that’s a huge difference from getting in your car or walking through your neighborhood to go get some gourmet ice cream. You see the difference. So cleaning up your act includes making great choices when it’s time to celebrate and indulge cleaning up your act essentially. And, simplifying this objective is really tackling the big three of nutrient deficient processed foods that represent the vast majority of our daily caloric intake these days.

Brad (00:22:08):
That’s research from Paleo Diet author Lauren Cordain, that 71% of calories consumed in the standard American diet today come from foods that were absent during paleolithic times. That’s the big pitch for the paleo diet, right? So we’re consuming the big three would be refined grains, sugars and industrial seed oils. So all the foods made from grains, that would be wheat, rice, pasta, flour, all that, the sugars, of course, all the ways that sugars are used and the 27 different terms that they use on the label for what is basically refined carbohydrate, sugar, food, rice brand oil, and all the things that you see on these heavily market energy bars, somehow trying to convince you that this is better than just table sugar or different effect on the body. Complete nonsense. So we have all the ways that we refined grains, sugars, and then industrial seed oils.

Brad (00:23:08):
They’re also known as vegetable oils, corn, canola, soybean, cotton seed, all the things that basically go in the foods that are packaged, boxed, wrapped, frozen, fast food, deep fried food. These are the big three categories that you really wanna work on. Total elimination from your diet as there’s absolutely no justification to consume them. So even in the categories like weight, potato chips are comprised mostly of refined industrial seed oils and refined carbohydrates from a potato, right? But there are quality brands out there that use alternative oils. I love the new potato chips that are fried or they’re prepared in tallow beef tallow, which is a temperature stable, saturated fat, much less objectionable than the refined industrial seed oils. In fact, it has a lot of health benefits, no health objections. So even in the category of ice cream or potato chips, you can make sensible choices.

Brad (00:24:07):
They don’t have to be the centerpiece of your diet. The next idea I’m gonna talk about is how to emphasize the most nutritious foods, but cleaning up your act, ditching that processed food. If you wanna celebrate and have indulgences and you say you can’t live without your bread. As one of my neighbors ended our 30 minute conversation when I spilled out everything about the primal paleo approach, <laugh>, I kind of had to laugh ’cause it’s like, wow, did I just waste my breath for 30 minutes? However, if you really love bread, get your butt to the farmer’s market on the weekend. Buy that freshly baked sourdough loaf that you will always find in my bag when I’m at the farmer’s market. And here’s my rule of thumb. If the bread goes stale in just around three days, then I give it the thumbs up to consume this freshly baked product that I enjoy tremendously.

Brad (00:24:59):
Again, it’s not a dietary nutritional centerpiece, but it’s all about enjoying life and putting four pasture-raised eggs on top of that toasted sourdough bread. I like to toast it with or fry it with, uh, butter in a pan and have a delicious nutritious breakfast with minimal objection. But just understanding the difference between heavily processed, highly destructive nutrient deficient food with chemicals and preservatives and the things that the experts are contending beyond the calorie contribution are making modern humans fat. It’s the the agents, the foreign chemical agents that cause inflammation, that cause gut dysfunction and promote obesity above and beyond their calories. I remember seeing a Instagram post recently where someone mentioned that, hey back in the seventies, we weren’t sweating like crazy in the gym. We weren’t, uh, working out less than we do now in general. And we also were having hot fudge sundaes and bottles of Coca-Cola and <laugh> whatever treats and TV dinners that were happening there.

Brad (00:26:10):
So why is the obesity curve going up at such an extreme rate in recent years? If we were still consuming processed food that wasn’t nutrient-dense back then and we weren’t exercising like crazy, could it be the chemicals and the newfangled processing agents that are in the heavily, heavily processed food today? We know, for example, that McDonald’s french fries back when I was a kid and inhaled those in my teenage years, those were fried in beef tallow until a certain year on the timeline when they figured out that refined industrial seed oils would be much cheaper and they could go all day with this crappy oil getting more and more oxidized, more and more poisonous and more and more instantly health destructive to your body than a potato fried in tallow. Which again, just like today’s quality potato chips, not many health objections of consuming a potato fried and beef tallow big difference.

Brad (00:27:07):
Interesting point to think about. ’cause we talk about, oh, we’re eating too many calories, we’re not exercising enough these days. But if things were similar 50 years ago, what is the difference? What is that X factor? It could be the chemicals in our food supply. So the empty calories interfere with your body’s ability to burn fat. They interfere with mitochondrial function. They’re literally toxic to your cells and cause you to accumulate excess body fat, especially in the form of the extremely health destructive, visceral fat, also known as belly fat. The fat, a special kind of fat distinct from typical subcutaneous fat that’s stored in the problem areas throughout your body. But the visceral fat is a especially health destructive because it accumulates in your abdominal area around your vital organs, causing them harm and dysfunction and interfering with hormone function, things like that. The visceral fat is actually its own, it’s classified as its own organ because it has the ability to secrete agents into the bloodstream, namely inflammatory cytokines that do things like convert testosterone into estrogen.

Brad (00:28:26):
It’s called aromatization. So the male, especially the males, have more tendency to accumulate visceral fat because they don’t store as much subcutaneous fat. The males get this giant beer belly, which is directly indicative of hormone dysfunction, such that whatever testosterone they have coursing through their bloodstream when they’re 40 or they’re 50 or they’re 60, has a tendency to get aromatized or converted into estrogen. What happens when you have an estrogen overwhelm in the male? That’s right. You store more visceral fat. So the accumulation of a little bit of a spare tire beget the accumulation of more and more spare tire over the years. And this comes from a number of adverse lifestyle practices, not just consuming the nutrient deficient food, but also too much stress, not enough sleep, oftentimes excess exercise and of course insufficient exercise. So we have to clean up our act and get rid of those nutrient deficient processed foods in the diet, especially the heavily processed foods that are in the box frozen, all that.

Brad (00:29:39):
If you wanna indulge, I’m not here sitting here telling you to live like a freak. Go get your ice cream, go order your potato chips. I ordered from a brand called Masa, no affiliation there, but they’re really good in their fried and tallow. And you can find quality choices in all these categories. Okay, then of course, I was talking about indulgences a lot there. Now I want you to emphasize natural, nutritious, easy to digest ancestral style foods. That is the foundational premise of the ancestral health movement that’s been going crazy for the last 15 plus years. It is the foods that nourished human evolution for 2 million years. This is the longest and most severely scrutinized study of healthy dietary habits ever known and will ever be known to mankind because we got here today consuming the ancestral foods that helped us develop the complex brain function that allowed us to rise to the top of the food chain and branch out from our ape cousins that even today the gorilla is spending nine to 11 hours a day chewing on roots, shoots, and leaves in that vegetarian dietary pattern to get the nutrients necessary to extract the nutrients necessary from those minimally nutritious foods to fuel that really tiny brain function whereby the humans, we got smarter and smarter, we gained better and better access to the most nutritious foods on the planet, which are the high protein animal foods: meat, fish, foul eggs, the things that allowed us to grow the brain and prosper and depart from the lifestyle of our ape cousins.

Brad (00:31:23):
So that’s my rationale for recommending things like eggs and red meat at the centerpiece of the diet. Tthe entire list of ancestral foods. This is a good place to jot down some notes. I said meat, fish, fowl, eggs, and also of course, the nutritious plant foods coming from the earth. Vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds per your personal preference and tolerance. But emphasizing the most nutrient dense foods on earth also have a high satiety factor. In fact, protein is the most satiating macronutrients. So if you have a protein centric diet from the most bioavailable sources of protein on earth, which are the animal foods, particularly red meat, the highest ranked meat by far above other sources like chicken, fish, and pork, I’ll talk about why shortly. But if you have a red meat focused diet, also with eggs being one of the most essential and most nutrient dense foods on earth, of course it’s the essence of life force, right?

Brad (00:32:31):
The egg, we all came from eggs ourselves. So those are the two highest ranked. And I have a wonderful chart that you can download for free at bradkearns.com called the B.rad Nutrition Guide. It’s a tiered ranking system of the most nutrient dense foods on earth, heavily emphasizing the superstars like fresh fruit and the organ meats and the red meat and the pastured eggs, and things that truly nourish and satisfy the body. So I call it a nutrient dense, animal based diet that emphasizes protein. You can learn more by going and downloading that B.rad Nutrition Guide Chart. And before I move on from diet, of course I have plenty of shows, but I’ll also say that, uh, prioritizing protein in the diet, there’s very minimal argument against this these days. So the experts are in agreement and it stands to human biology that this is our most important dietary requirement.

Brad (00:33:33):
Without sufficient protein, we will waste away and die in a matter of weeks or whatever you wanna do there. And the content of our diet in the form of carbohydrates and fats, mostly these are things that are not immediately necessary for our survival. We do have a need for certain fats. They’re called the essential fatty acids. So if we have a zero fat diet, we’re going to run into a lot of health problems. And as the proponents of low carb eating always remind us there’s no dietary requirement in human biology for carbohydrate. But if we strictly eliminate those carbohydrates, we kick into another metabolic realm. That’s the popularity, the foundational premise of the ketogenic diet. There are a lot of health benefits that people have discovered from getting away from this extreme over consumption of heavily processed carbohydrates and dialing things back all the way to the extreme of the ketogenic diet, which by and large requires that you consume under 50 grams per day of carbohydrate, which is basically the contribution of a salad and not much else. But overall long-term sustainability and the nutritional benefits of the various highly nutritious plant foods led by things like fresh fruit and raw honey and the vegetables of your choice and the fermented foods that are high-end carbohydrates.

Brad (00:35:09):
Things like sauerkraut and dark chocolate and other fermented foods. Now we’re talking about a well-rounded, well-balanced diet, but again, I’m trying to get you away from those extremes, those path where people say, oh, no, plant-based is the healthiest diet. That’s a wonderful, extremely successful propaganda example of people taking things to the extreme, to the point where somehow the true foods that fueled human evolution for 2 million years have become marginalized. A ridiculous notion that doesn’t stand up to evolutionary biology. So anyone who is telling you to cut back on your egg consumption because your cholesterol’s getting a little too high or that red meat is offensive, and so you really want to emphasize chicken and fish. They are years and decades behind the emerging research. Oh, I promised I detailed that a little bit more. The so-called white meats like chicken and pork and turkey, generally speaking, the industrialized farming today, the mechanized processing of meat, those animals are treated in a vastly more objectionable manner than the cattle that supply our red meat and especially the alternative red meat animals like bison, buffalo, deer, elk, venison, elk, things that you can find in specialty grocery stores where they don’t have that mass production.

Brad (00:36:38):
And the objections that we see with the feedlot cattle. But all feedlot cattle, all cattle are grass fed for 80% of their life. So they live this wonderful life grazing on grass on the open range, and then that last 20% of their life where they’re fattened up in the feedlot in the example of mainstream beef production. Yeah, there’s a lot of objections to that. But the cattle, the beef, the end product comes out better from the cow than it does from the chicken or the pig or the turkey because the cow is what’s called a ruminant animal. It has four stomachs. It processes that objectionable diet from the grain feed that they get at the last part of their life, and they still produce an end product that is high in saturated fat, but low in the objectionable polyunsaturated fats. Fats, unlike a chicken, a monogastric animal that’s a single stomach like a human.

Brad (00:37:33):
So the chicken eats that unhealthy chicken feed or the pig, and they produce end product, for example. Look at the bacon and how much fat is on that bacon. It’s high in polyunsaturated fats, which are many experts highly object to in the diet. So with red meat, you’re getting a less objectionable fat, the saturated fat and even has some health benefits. And with the other animals, you’re getting more objectionable source of fat as well as slightly inferior source of protein. There you go. So red meat at the priority pasture-raised eggs, the best quality eggs you can get as a priority. The organ meats, of course, are the most nutrient dense foods known to earth. If you’re plant-based and you’re frowning and squirming right now because you thought kale was the ultimate super food, you can have some fun Googling kale versus liver chart.

Brad (00:38:30):
And see from a completely objective perspective, the nutrition micronutrient contribution from a slice of liver versus a handful of kale, there’s absolutely no comparison. So the nutrient density of liver and the other organ meats are even superior to the muscle meats that we mostly consume, right? The steaks, the hamburgers. You wanna find a way to integrate the organ meats to be really exceptional. And then I talked about fish.

Brad (00:38:56):
The big concern about fish these days is the polluted waters, but the highest rated category of fish is the oily cold water fish. These are the smaller fish that haven’t consumed a lot of those heavy metals like the big apex predator fish do, which you wanna avoid. And so we’re talking about the SMASH family, and again, this is on the chart. So smash standing for sardines, mackerel, anchovies, salmon, and herring. Those are the highest rated fish with rich in the highly regarded omega threes and low with concerns about heavy metal contamination that we see from the big fish caught in the ocean, especially these days.

Brad (00:39:43):
So fish a little bit de-emphasize unless you really source and get some of that wild caught salmon flown in from Alaska, fresh on some of those great websites. Of course, big budget item too. Unlike the smash family, when you go and get, you can stock up on sardines and the other canned fish for very inexpensive. So when we’re talking about budget impact of eating an exceptionally nutrient dense diet eggs, you can’t get a better return on investment for your grocery dollar than buying a dozen eggs. Even if you go for the pasture raised eggs, sorry, it’s seven bucks a dozen instead of four, but a huge boost. And even with the beef, I talked about red meat being vastly less objectionable than the other types of foods. If you insist on paying less for mass produced regular red meat rather than grass fed, you’re still gonna be okay with your hamburgers and your steaks.

Brad (00:40:41):
The organ meat, the most nutrient dense foods on the planet are super inexpensive because there’s very little consumer demand for the hearts and the kidneys and the organs. So you can nail it there, you can nail it with your SMASH fish, the pasture raised eggs. And I have a whole show going over the chart section by section. So please take a look at that chart, download it off the website, and navigate to great food choices. So I talked about protein being the priority. That’s because we need all the essential amino acids from the diet in order to perform, recover our muscles, recover our organs, and nourish the human to thrive. So that’s the discussion about emphasizing nutrient dense foods. And then we have this other big challenge today, which some experts have beautifully described as energy toxicity. And that stands for eating too many calories and burning too few.

Brad (00:41:42):
So yes, I mean, theoretically you can get in trouble eating too many eggs and too many hamburgers and too much honey and too much fresh fruit. But really what we’re talking about with this energy toxicity problem is a massive overconsumption of nutrient deficient, processed foods that mess with the appetite center in our brain and screw up our satiety hormones, causing us to overeat because of the fact that they’re nutrient deficient and that’s why they mess with the appetite center in your brain. When you consume truly nutritious, high satiety foods such as the eggs, the hamburger, the fresh fruit, you feel full and satisfied. I don’t think too many people can raise their hand and say, yeah, I remember that time when I had too many steaks and I felt terrible the next morning. It’s more like you had too many pizza slices, or you ate the whole bag of chips, or you had the whole pint of ben and cherries instead of one scoop.

Brad (00:42:40):
And all those things that we can relate to when it comes to chowing down on processed foods when we’re depleted, overstressed and so forth. So this energy toxicity problem can be beautifully handled by emphasizing the natural nutrient-dense foods of the earth, the ancestral foods, eliminating especially those big three category of toxic modern foods. And then of course, as we’re gonna talk about in the upcoming sections, moving more in daily life and adhering to a beautiful sensible fitness regimen. I’ve mentioned a little bit about the very popular so-called, I call them restrictive diets. So it’s any strategy that systematically restricts you from, for example, eating at only certain times of the day or greatly limiting your intake of certain macronutrient, like a low fat diet or a low carbohydrate diet, or eliminating broad food categories like a plant-based diet, telling you to eliminate the animal foods or vice versa, the carnivore diet or the animal-based diet where you systematically eliminate some of the plant foods that can have nutritional benefits.

Brad (00:43:54):
There’s a little bit of caution to be issued here, and again, I’m a guy who’s been writing books about promoting such type diets for a long time. It is because you can get a little too deep into it and cause a stress response in the body from this restrictive dietary behavior that goes for fasting and especially goes for keto and carnivore. And the things where you restrict your carbohydrates to such an extent that you’re having to make your own glucose in the body. It’s called a process called gluconeogenesis. That’s a conversion of amino acids into glucose, which happens during periods of high stress or when your carbohydrate intake is extremely low, lower than your daily needs. Same for the manufacturing of ketones in the liver as an alternate fuel source, especially for the brain. And also to a lesser extent, the muscles. When your dietary carbohydrate intake is extremely limited, the body kicks into these other energy production systems as a response.

Brad (00:45:04):
Same with fasting. When you are not consuming any calories, your body will make the glucose you need through gluconeogenesis. And you also get these other highly regarded health benefits like an anti-inflammatory antioxidant benefit from restricting calories, restricting eating time, restricting macronutrients. But we must understand that the benefits from these diets are stress mechanisms in the body. So when your cells are stressed by a lack of energy, a lack of intake of carbohydrate, or a lack of intake of food, if you’re going in into time restricted feeding or intermittent fasting, all the terms we use, you kick into a stress response which delivers highly regarded health benefits, but must still be considered in the big picture as a stress response or a safe survival mechanism. When we don’t eat and we have to go through hustle through our busy day, we elicit the ketone manufacturing and the gluconeogenesis.

Brad (00:46:09):
So that’s why you can get carried away, overdoing it and become an overstressed human or pile on more stress onto the stress side of the balance scale versus the beautiful, balancing like the scales of justice, right? Where you have stressors over here and you have stress relieving activities or nurturing building activities on the other side, which would be eating a nice nutritious meal that nourishes your body in every way and turns off the stress hormone production because now you have delicious carbohydrate calories from the handful of blueberries you just ate. So it’s not to trash these restrictive diets because they’ve had great success pulling people, modern humans out of this state of unfettered access to indulgent foods, AKA energy toxicity that is the driving cause of accelerated demise, disease, dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Strongly driven by the lifestyle behavior of consuming too many calories and not burning enough.

Brad (00:47:23):
So if you can go from lazy, undisciplined, American style slob who watches a lot of screen entertainment, orders up a lot of processed food and sits around to someone who is into an intermittent fasting protocol and doesn’t eat until 12 noon and stops eating at 8:00 PM all these interventions can be wonderful health awakenings. Even going from that baseline foundation of energy toxicity to, for example, a plant-based diet and reporting in that you’ve lost weight, you feel better, you feel more alert, you sleep better, all that stuff is fantastic. Whatever it takes to intervene from this emergency crisis state of eating too much food, notably processed food and not burning enough calories is a wonderful, uh, success. However, then we have to step back and say, Hey, can I sustain this, for the rest of my life? Is it a sensible idea to sustain a plant-based diet for years to come when I’m systematically eliminating the most nutrient-dense foods on earth without dispute under the microscope of the micronutrient analysis of liver versus kale?

Brad (00:48:40):
Is that sensible or do I put myself at high risk of nutrient deficiency when I’m focused only on the plant foods? And the answer is yes, indeed. It’s a very, very high risk diet to get into the plant-based category. If you are a hardcore if ketogenic diet person and you’ve been following keto for one year, two years or seven years and feeling great, when you systematically reduce carbohydrate intake to 50 grams a day or less, good on you, thumbs up. But let me wish you good luck if you’re also aspiring to higher fitness standards and more energy output from exercise and increased general everyday movement. So I’d like to address all those extreme keto enthusiasts directly and say, Hey, if it’s working for you and you’re walking only 4,000 to 5,000 steps per day, or 1500 to 4,000 steps per day, but you’re locked in with your ketogenic diet and you make sure you don’t eat more than 50 grams of carbs per day, I will bet you on the roulette wheel that if you step up your steps to 10,000 steps a day and consequently throw in some more carbohydrate calories, of course sensibly chosen nutrient dense carbohydrate calories to fuel those extra thousands and thousands of steps per day, I promise you, you will ascend to a higher health category.

Brad (00:50:12):
So that’s the big picture takeaway I want you to have when it comes to restrictive diets that can help tremendously as an intervention. But on the big picture, I am now firmly in the camp of what you might call eat more, move more in pursuit of longevity. So that directly flies in the face of some of the world’s leading advocates of fasting and calorie restriction for longevity. I’m gonna call out people like David Sinclair and Dr. Volter Longo promoting the fasting mimicking diet and all these sort of things that again, will generate awesome results with lazy, undisciplined energy toxicity, modern humans. But if we look at the long-term big picture, the clearest path to longevity and having not only longevity but health span, being highly productive, energetic, active, and enjoying those years, rather than just hitting, hitting the hundred mark while you’re in a wheelchair and you don’t know anybody’s name around you as they’re singing happy hundredth birthday to you.

Brad (00:51:20):
I’m sorry you don’t know any of us. But anyway, blow out the candles if you can. Maybe you can’t because you have no lung capacity ’cause you’re wasting away in a wheelchair, but you still made it to a hundred. No, I like the song better when the smiling a hundred year old person is looking around doing a thumbs up and they finish their morning walk before they get the surprise party and blowing out their cake <laugh>. Okay?

Brad (00:51:44):
So, um, eat more, move more in pursuit of longevity. And the surest path as experts highly regarded, like Dr. Peter Attia says, is exercise. And I love how he’s promoting that and especially how he’s standing up saying, I used to think it was diet. In other words, Peter thought the biggest longevity intervention you could get was to optimize diet and clean up all the disastrous effects of today’s nutrient deficient processed food diet.

Brad (00:52:15):
He says nothing else even comes close to exercise, particularly maintaining muscle mass, muscle strength and muscle power throughout life. So the single biggest marker of accelerated aging today is what they call sarcopenia. And I’ll also add dynoopia. Sarcopenia is the age related loss of muscle mass. You become old, frail, hunched over, you can do less and less and less. And as your years pass, you just twist down a downward spiral of accelerated aging due to sarcopenia. Dynopenia, is the age related loss of muscle power. Of course, those two go hand in hand, but they’re not exactly the same. So I always like to say sarcopenia and dynopenia are the biggest markers of aging. And guess what? There are some of the easiest stuff to get handled right now. However old you are, you can get into a fitness regimen to build and preserve that muscle.

Brad (00:53:25):
And of course, you also need to consume dietary protein at sufficient amounts to make your workouts pay off. So especially in the senior citizen category. Yes, get to the gym. Yes, bust your butt. Work those muscles until they’re burning and tired and challenging, and then go home and throw down some protein so that you just don’t get tired and waste away and being less capable despite your efforts to become fit. You’re not eating enough protein, the workouts make you tired, you’re not recovering. And that goes for people of any age, especially in the female category and especially in the plant-based female category. Your efforts in the gym need to pay off for you by a devoted commitment to consuming sufficient dietary protein to allow you to absorb and benefit those workouts and build strong tone, lean muscles that stay on your body rather than chip away at it.

Brad (00:54:25):
Because all you’re eating is salad and lentil soup and lettuce wraps, that’s not a good deal. So of course, exercise and fitness go hand in hand. I’m just want to finish with diet and get outta here, but, and get to the movement category. I will give you a little insight about what my dietary pattern is like after many years of experimentation and reflection and deep immersion into the various protocols that I’ve talked about and written about. So my main flagship attribute here is that I don’t tolerate any nutrient deficient, heavily processed, chemically laden in foods. I just can’t do it. I care too much about my health, my body. I only have one the years are accumulating. And so there is really no justification even in the category of celebration or live a little and don’t be so uptight. Why don’t you enjoy some Ben and Jerry’s?

Brad (00:55:23):
I’ll tell you the answer is because I would rather get in my car and drive across town and enjoy Gunther’s or enjoy companies that are putting out products with a tremendous devotion to health with a clean ingredient list. And you go to those top tier grocery stores like Whole Foods or Erewhon in Los Angeles, and they have 10 different brands of ice cream on the shelf. One of ’em laughably the pint was a $17 price tag <laugh>. Uh, so good for them. It was a non-dairy ice cream made with a coconut milk. I don’t know how much it costs them to make that ice cream, but my point is, when you get premium ice cream preferably handmade right there from the establishment, it’s a big difference. And so I have zero processed foods, although I do indulge in celebrate and enjoy, especially my dark chocolate habit, which I’ve talked about so much on the podcasts and done entire shows dedicated to dark chocolate and sourcing the very best bean to bar fair trade, dark chocolate from around the earth.

Brad (00:56:25):
And I celebrate with that every single day and consume quite a bit of it as kind of my go-to treat because I’m so limited on what treats I can choose. Okay? I also talked about the fresh baked sourdough bread and the other delicacies from farmer’s market. I just visited one last weekend where this lady basically stopped me in my tracks and forced me to try her freshly baked pumpkin bread <laugh>. I’m like, no thanks. And she goes, no, no, you have to try it. It was so delicious. I’m like, all right, what do you got? What did you make this with? Well, it was, actual pumpkin. It was butter as the fat source rather than the refined industrial seed oils that are in almost all commercial breads. And so I said, yep, gimme a loaf. It was delicious. It was so rich and satisfying that even a tiny little slice does the job of having it be a celebratory food.

Brad (00:57:16):
So I will hit those farmer’s markets hard. I’ll enjoy things like the French yogurt in the exotic flavors like I like fig and I like lemon. Oh, what’s the sugar count in there? Yeah, there’s probably a good bit of sugar when you have that intense of a fig taste along with the fresh figs that the product was made with. But again, these are freshly made products that are vastly different from the product in the same category, quote, yogurt that you find on the shelf Yoplait and all the others where it says blueberry on the picture on the front. And then you look in the ingredients and there’s all kinds of processed junk in there. So I am highly scrutinized with the foods I choose, and I want to emphasize the most nutrient dense foods so that the vast majority of my calories come from things like red meat, pastured eggs, oily cold water fish, my centerpiece moring morning smoothie that I make with the world’s best protein.

Brad (00:58:16):
And that of course is the B.rad Grass Fed Whey Protein isolate, super fuel or regular whey protein isolate, and that becomes the centerpiece. I also put frozen bananas in there, frozen dates. I have coconut milk, which I think is the best nut milk better than almond and some of the other popular ones because there’s concerns about oxalates in the almond milk. And that’s my centerpiece protein smoothie. And I’ve received quite a few emails recently about people concerned with heavy metal toxicity found in popular protein supplements. So interestingly, this has largely been focused on the plant-based proteins, which again, that plant-based propaganda suggesting that you consume protein derived from a plant source, which is by definition extremely low in protein. So you need a lot of offensive intervention, generally chemical solvents, high temperature processing to extract what little protein might come from a starting point of something like a pea protein or a soy protein.

Brad (00:59:22):
So plant-based proteins, I’m gonna criticize those till the end of my days. There’s a couple that are okay, there’s this protein called chocho bean from South America that is decent because the bean is higher in protein than some of the other popular plant proteins. But if you want protein, you gotta go for the gold standard, which is grass-fed whey protein isolate vastly superior to most of the whey proteins that are called whey concentrate. Whey concentrate is around 70 to 85% purity with milk fat and lactose milk sugar leftover. That’s why whey protein quote unquote, can be difficult to digest because it does have that leftover lactose, which 80% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant. When you get whey protein isolate, especially a very high quality, carefully produced one like B.rad, we’re talking about a product that’s 95% pure with, uh, moisture and minerals left over for the final 5%.

Brad (01:00:28):
So it’s virtually zero lactose. If you are an extreme lactose intolerant person where you’ve been told don’t eat any dairy products whatsoever, okay, fine, but this is virtually lactose free and we can use that terminology on the product because it’s so pure. And then the heavy metal intervention also been found in some animal-based proteins, but what we’re talking about is a giant global commodity market where whey protein and other types of protein are sourced from all over the planet, including foreign countries with minimal regulation so that you have no idea how that product got into your jar as opposed to B.rad protein is sourced from a single supplier from grass-fed cattle in America’s dairy land of Wisconsin. So we go directly to the source and we have independent third party testing to confirm that we are free from those objectionable heavy metals.

Brad (01:01:32):
Otherwise, I would not sell anything. Of course, I’m mainly a consumer and I started the B.rad Nutrition business because of my intense interest in consuming the products that I sell to you. So I’m only going for the very best. People ask me, why did you make another protein product, Brad? I go on Amazon, I can see a hundred if not a thousand different brands, but my goal was to provide you with the very, very best. That’s why the price tag is reflective of the very best product. I’m not gonna be beating people on price when you’re talking about commodity products sourced from crappy sources from around the world thrown together, slap a label on chemically alter the flavoring, so much so that it becomes a category of heavily processed food with those concerns I talked about with the chemicals. Michael Kummer, my buddy and promoter of MK supplements. He did a great video talking about the best protein sources in the various categories from beef protein, whey protein, plant-based protein, and the concerns about heavy metals that we should now be very, very concerned about when we’re talking about a supplement.

Brad (01:02:48):
So when you’re talking about a supplement, a concentrated source of nutrition like protein, that’s when you really wanna strive for the very best because you’re getting a concentrated dose of whatever. That’s why I have objection with the very popular green powders that are touted to be this high nutrient density drink that you can stir up and get going for your busy day, but you’re getting a concentrated source of all that stuff that’s on the label bar, broccoli powder, and spirulina. So if you’re getting a slightly objectionable or tainted source, you’re getting a much, much bigger dose than you might if you had a serving of broccoli from a restaurant. You get the difference. So supplements definitely scrutinize, definitely go for highest quality and budget accordingly so that you don’t have to mess with something that can potentially be compromising your health when your whole intent here is to boost your health.

Brad (01:03:48):
Okay, uh, I talked about my dietary choices and everything is pretty well reflected on the chart. Then we’re gonna get to the next category, and that is movement increasing all forms of general everyday movement in your life. And this by many experts is ranked above in terms of health benefit, longevity, benefit disease prevention. It’s ranked above adhering to a devoted fitness regimen. This can be appreciated in the realm of science and great journalistic coverage in recent years, titled Sitting is the New Smoking and what that quip means, I’m sure you’ve heard it, is that there are many metabolic disease patterns that are driven by a lifestyle of huge sedentary influences and prolonged periods of stillness, which basically characterize the everyday modern worker, especially the office worker, the commuter, and the person who engages in digital entertainment during their leisure time. So we got strikes against us if you’re counting, yep.

Brad (01:05:01):
You take the train in, my baby takes the morning train. Bump, he works from 9 to 5, and then he comes home and watches more TV on the freaking couch and is too lazy to do chores around the house. Ch ch yeah. It’s not good when you’re stacking all these sedentary influences to the extent that we now have to urge you to create opportunities to walk more in daily life. And that’s why the longest lived citizens around the planet do things like extensive daily walking. Naturally, the more simple living people that you’ve heard about and profiled in the news, they get their 10,000 steps a day. There was a great UCLA meta study that’s often referenced. We talk about it in detail in our book, Born to Walk, that, uh, seniors who failed to get a minimum of 4,000 steps per day had dramatically increased cognitive decline versus the group of seniors who had more and more steps per day up and over 4,000 into the 8,000 to 10,000 realm.

Brad (01:06:09):
They had smaller hippo campi, smaller brains, poor memory function, poor organization of memories, poor short-term memory, poor long-term memory, directly correlated with walking less scary, scary stuff. That’s why the experts are contending that just increasing all forms of general everyday movement is your number one intervention above and beyond adhering to a devoted fitness regimen. The next section that we’re gonna talk about and all those amazing benefits of building and maintaining lean muscle mass, and of course walking would be the centerpiece, the most obvious way to increase your general movement. But of course all the other forms of movement also count. So if you like to do Tai Chi in the morning or your devoted Pilates or yoga enthusiasts, these all count toward your movement objective. But the big one is increasing that step count, especially not making this an overwhelming, daunting thing where you have to change your life and stop taking the subway and instead walking four miles to work.

Brad (01:07:21):
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about little tiny sprinkling of increased movement to break up periods of stillness during the workday. This will also help improve your cognitive function. So taking a two minute work break to go up a couple fights of stairs in the building or walk around the block or walk across the perimeter of your backyard, whatever it is, to take a few steps and then get back to it. This will help improve your blood flow, your cognitive function, and get you away from those health risks of prolonged sitting, including interesting research. Conveying that sitting still for as little as 20 minutes delivers a noticeable decrease in glucose tolerance and an increase in insulin resistance. So you stop burning fat efficiently when you’re still for as little as 20 minutes shocker. And that’s why getting up and getting the energy going, getting the blood flowing again, will not only help your metabolism, your fat burning, but also improve your cognitive function.

Brad (01:08:26):
Great research from Stanford and elsewhere that we can only really concentrate on a peak intense cognitive task for around 20 minutes without requiring a break. And if you don’t take a break, guess what happens? Breaks will be taken for you. I can confirm that because if I am sitting for too long and working on something without being mindful to get up and rush up a couple flights of stairs, which is one of the things I like to do, what happens is I start drifting over to watching YouTube videos of high-jumping rather than working on my presentation or on my podcast episode. So quick breaks, even if you have only a minute or two, they will raise your productivity, raise your energy, no excuse not to do that. And then of course, finding ways to become more active and add more daily steps with designated walks.

Brad (01:09:21):
And of course, designated aerobic exercise activity like going to the gym and putting in your time on the StairMaster, the bike, the treadmill, whatever, or getting out there into the neighborhood, especially if you have a dog and doing a nice long sustained walk of 15, 20, 30 minutes, an hour, whatever you have. There’s a research from the Cooper Institute on so-called super exercisers. These are people who exercise to the extreme of 20 or 30 hours a week, I believe. So people who walk probably five miles a day or more, maybe they’re retired, I don’t know who these people are, but they found them and they found that there is no upper limit to the health benefits of increasing all forms of general everyday movement. So if you become a walking machine and walk all over town, you are going to get healthier and healthier as opposed to the extreme exercises that we find in the other category.

Brad (01:10:19):
And this is one of the major points that we covered in Born to Walk. If you get too extreme into workouts that are medium to difficult, that are slightly too stressful to promote that long-term health benefit, you actually do the opposite. You have the tendency to start gaining visceral fat because the workout pattern is too stressful and you blow out all the potential benefits. That’s why walking is a vastly superior choice to endurance running, which by and large for most participants is too stressful. So increasing all forms of general everyday low intensity movement, I’ll call it to distinguish from the cardio freaks who think that you can sweat your way to longevity and disease prevention. It’s not so simple. Just getting out there and moving is the big one. And guess what? Even when you walk at a slow pace or a medium pace, you are getting an outstanding aerobic training effect.

Brad (01:11:21):
You are essentially and literally training like an Olympic athlete because an Olympic athlete, Olympic marathon runner is out there running 120, 140 miles a week, but their running pace is relatively the same as our walking pace. Eluid Kipchoge, I talk about him so much in the book and on the show, greatest marathon of all time. He just ran the New York City marathon, maybe his last marathon that he’ll ever run at age 41. He took 17th place. Overall, that’s a drop from when he dominated and won 13 marathons in a row, including two Olympic gold medals. But during his time when he was on top of the world performing like no other human ever has, he was the person who ran the one hour and 59 minute stage marathon event. He ran 83% of his weekly mileage in zone one. That’s the lowest zone of cardio.

Brad (01:12:16):
You hear about zone two all the time. Zone two is great. You gotta get your zone two training, but we don’t talk enough about zone one getting out there and walking. Obviously, as soon as you start walking, even if you’re walking to the mailbox 20 meters or whatever your heart rate is probably double, maybe more than double your resting heart rate. So you are literally getting a training effect just by walking. So you should never feel frustrated or allow that obsessive mentality to think, I’m not really getting a workout when I walk. I should get on to my bike in the spin class and sweat like crazy and burn my muscles. There’s a time and a place for high intensity exercise performed appropriately. And I have full shows on that, how to sprint properly. The difference between high intensity interval training and high intensity repeat training, which is, uh, less risky and doesn’t have those, uh, potential downsides of overdoing it with HIIT, the very popular HIIT protocol.

Brad (01:13:16):
But walking is king for the foundation of a healthy fit, energetic lifestyle. And then we get into fitness. And of course, I hinted at this when we talked about putting your muscles under resistance load on a regular basis in order to build, maintain, and preserve lean muscle mass, lean muscle strength, lean muscle explosive power throughout life. So that’s any type of resistance exercise. Yes, going to the gym and going through the machine circuits is a very good idea. Same with getting into free weights if you want to get into the skills and the more advanced, uh, training protocols that the people in that realm are. But for many people who are not doing sufficient or people who are novices unfit or perhaps in the older age groups, it’s as simple as doing body weight resistance exercises that are very safe, easy to learn.

Brad (01:14:12):
We’ve talked about it in Primal Blueprint Fitness for so long, the primal essential movements of pushups, pull-ups, squats and planks, and the modified versions of those centerpiece movements. For people who can’t even do a single pushup or can’t do a pull-up, which is a lot of people because it is pretty difficult to do a single pull-up, up to the raised bar. But you can do simulated or modified pull-ups called chair assisted pull-ups where you have your weight rested on the chair and then pulling up to whatever level of support you need from the chair to do a certain number of reps of pullups. Same with pushups. If you get done on the ground, you find you can’t do a pushup or you can only do a couple. You can do wall pushups or you can do chair assisted pushups. But just basic body weight exercises can get you very, very strong, very powerful, very explosive.

Brad (01:15:11):
Even if you don’t have that much time, it does not take much time to get your muscles strong. It’s not about going into the gym and busting your butt for an hour and 15 minutes with the peppy personal trainer, which again, has a high risk of attrition, injury, exhaustion, fatigue, because most people do it in an inappropriate manner. If you can instead do some bite sized, I call ’em micro workouts, little efforts to put your muscles under resistance load throughout the day. Of course, a formal workout is great. The formal workout can last only 10 minutes. Up to 30 minutes is of course super fantastic under the guidance of an expert. Wonderful. Go to the gym, hire a trainer for those six sessions, learn how to work those machines so you can do them yourself. But the starting point could be so simple. It’s as simple as standing up in your work cubicle if that’s all the space you have, and doing a set of 20 deep squats or just squatting back down to touch your chair and then stand back up.

Brad (01:16:14):
And I guarantee you, even if you’re pretty fit, when you get up to 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 squats, you are going to feel the burn in those major muscle groups of the lower body. And that is doing yourself a tremendous service to become stronger, more fit, and avoid that disastrous, evil grim reaper of sarcopenia that so many seniors are suffering from. And that is driving their accelerated aging. So resistance exercise, tremendously important. And then I’ll also put up there with the highest regard is there is a critical need for humans to engage in brief, occasional, all-out sprints. Sprinting is the best workout known to mankind, the highest return on investment of any form of exercise for overall fitness benefits, longevity, and especially fat reduction because the genetic signaling for fat loss is so powerful when you’re going at maximum output, maximum intensity, again, within reach of virtually everyone.

Brad (01:17:24):
’cause I’m not necessarily talking about sprinting high impact sprinting on flat ground, although high impact sprinting on flat ground delivers the greatest fitness benefits because you build bone density and you also have the strongest drive in those type of workouts to drop excess body fat because of the degree of difficulty. But you can also sprint with low or no impact options like sprinting on a stationary bike, sprinting on a rowing machine, sprinting in a swimming pool, a water workout, anything that takes you up to near maximum efforts where you’re breathing super hard, your muscles are burning and you can’t continue for very long. And in my show dedicated to sprinting, I talk about this template, this centerpiece sprint, sprint workout. The way to design it, which is extensive warmup, especially if you’re running or doing something high impact, you gotta get the muscles ready. It’s a high risk workout because of all the impact, but the template is four to eight reps of sprints lasting between 10 and 20 seconds with a six to one recovery to work ratio.

Brad (01:18:34):
So if you sprint for 10 seconds, you rest for a minute. If you sprint for 20 seconds, you rest for two minutes. These are leisurely rest intervals to ensure that the ensuing sprint is also crisp, powerful, highly explosive, performed with excellent technique. Again, it might be sprinting on a stationary bike if you can’t handle the impact. Maybe it’s sprinting up a flight of a couple stairs in a building or in the stadium where you’re working those muscles to maximum. And you finish that 10 to 22nd sprint and you’re breathing hard. Hopefully your hands are on your knees and you’re feeling what it feels like to drive that body to maximum intensity for a very short time. These are not exhausting workouts that are out of your capability realm because they are such short in duration. And again, you have those leisurely rest intervals in between your sprint efforts.

Brad (01:19:34):
But the goal here is the comprehensive genetic and hormonal signaling to change your body into being a leaner, stronger, quicker, more explosive, more powerful human. Are you gonna compete in an upcoming track meet pretty soon? Probably not. But those attributes I just mentioned are how senior citizens can avoid the disastrous statistic that falling. And the adverse related health consequences of falling are the single biggest driver of demise and death in Americans over age 65. The number one lifestyle risk factor for your demise is falling because what happens when you fall is you get knocked outta the lineup. And so whatever exercise or movement routine you’re going through, you’re, you’re hosed. If you break your hip or break your foot, you got a long period of off time. And then coming back, especially as a person older 65 who has maybe minimal fitness capabilities at the time of that fall, it’s really hard to come back and return to whatever level of activity, even if it was a moderate level of activity that you had before the fall.

Brad (01:20:51):
So it takes a lot of work to recover from a fall if you’re an older person. And of course, how did the fall occur in the first place? In a lot of occasions, it’s that lack of explosive anaerobic muscle function to catch yourself with that single misstep. Basically, fall prevention is a single rep max of holding unstable unsupported body weight for that one misstep. You know what I’m talking about? Your foot hits the curb and you take a massive forward unbalanced step and you catch yourself or you eat it if your muscle wasn’t powerful enough and strong enough to manage that unstable body weight. So sprinting helps prevent falling as one of the main benefits, and it also helps you perform all manner of exercise at all lower levels of exercise intensity. If you can become a competent sprinter, you become way more competent as a 30 minute bike rider or a one-hour walker, right?

Brad (01:22:00):
You teach the body to perform at maximum the heart, the lungs, the muscles can fire with more power such that they become more capable of going for longer periods at lower intensity. Can you sprint your way to a successful marathon performance? Of course not. But when an endurance-based athlete or an athlete focused mostly on cardio can include sprinting into their weekly program, boy does your performance improve in those areas of focus that you’re doing when you’re out there training on your three hour bike rides if you’re a triathlete or you’re two hour runs if you’re trying to do a marathon or an ultra marathon. So with the fitness category covered, we have the resistance exercise, putting your muscles under resistance load with its tubing machines, stuff at the gym, body weight exercise at home. We have the important need to integrate even that basic setup of four to eight reps, 10 to 20 seconds lasting, six to one recovery to work interval.

Brad (01:23:06):
You can do that on a stationary bike the next time you show up at the gym, instead of just look up at the TV and pedal casually for 45 minutes. And then before closing the the exercise category, we want to give you a strong warning to avoid chronic patterns. As I hinted about a few times, you can easily overdo it when it comes to endurance training and especially the endurance community. The Marathon, uUomise your overall health and longevity. We have all kinds of stories in the book Born to Walk about the cardiovascular risks of long-term extreme exercise. But we also have even in a basic short-term approach, if you get too into running and your heart rate goes up out of the training zone too frequently, you have a tendency to accumulate visceral fat.

Brad (01:24:06):
Visceral fat comes from an overly stressful lifestyle pattern, and that’s what those training sessions are. It’s extreme exercise. When you are going outside of a comfortable heart rate range into the medium to difficult heart rate range, you tend have a tendency to be lazier throughout the day. This is called the compensation Theory of exercise. You have a tendency to overeat because you destabilize your appetite and say tidy hormones from depleting and exhausting yourself. Not tremendously exhausting like a race that you pushed really hard, but a slightly too stressful workout will send you into this over stress spiral where you have symptoms such as feeling lazier throughout the day. It’s called the Compensation Theory of Exercise, hitting too many pints of Ben and Jerry’s at night to pair directly with your performance at that 6:00 AM spin class where they asked you to perform too many intervals at slightly too difficult and heart rate without sufficient recovery.

Brad (01:25:09):
So if you’re feeling exhausted, depleted sugar cravings, you get frequent, uh, upper respiratory illnesses like I experienced when I was a triathlete.. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I probably averaged four to six colds per year for the entire decade that I competed and traveled all over the world on the professional triathlon circuit. Yes, that extreme global jet travel is very stressful to the immune system combined with the extreme training and racing. But think about it. Now, there’s a decade of my life where I got, let’s say, 50 different colds in the last decade. Hmm. I’d probably, I’d say I had two or three colds, got hit by COVID a couple times horribly and got hit by a couple other things, right? Appendix, that was, that was no fun. I had a bout of vertigo. I had this, I had that.

Brad (01:26:05):
I had this. But while I was a triathlete, super fit, hard training, sleeping like a champ watching my diet, I had 50 colds in one decade. And that was directly attributed to the overly stressful nature of my training patterns, suppressing immune function. That’s what overly stressful training does. It suppresses immune function. It suppresses hormonal function. I’ve done entire shows on my tracking my testosterone levels as a proxy for whether or not my lifestyle endeavors are working for me and keeping me healthy, fit, energetic and youthful. And my testosterone levels in recent years in the decade from 50 to 60, I’m now 60. I have data going back, extensive blood testosterone tests in the past 10 years. And they are multitudes higher than my testosterone reports from age 20 to 30. When I was competing on the pro circuit, I was almost always serum testosterone levels of 200 to 300 when I was a young man in my hormonal prime.

Brad (01:27:11):
And that is extremely low as a direct consequence of my extreme training patterns, which suppress testosterone and chronically elevate cortisol. Cortisol and testosterone are antagonistic cortisol. Cortisol is the preeminent stress hormone. And today my testosterone levels have been always between, 550 and 1000, usually in the average of seven 50 to 800. So it could be three or four times more testosterone running through my body because I’m not doing that crazy young person’s game of extreme triathlon training and extreme global jet travel. So if you are an endurance freak right now, or a cardio freak who’s going to the gym however many days a week, or you’re putting in 20 or 30 or 40 miles a week on the roads, the key takeaway to avoid those chronic endurance training patterns is to respect your Fat Max heart rate and perform the vast majority of your cardiovascular sustained exercise at or below Fat Max heart rate.

Brad (01:28:17):
This would be zone one or zone two in the common parlance of categorizing your training intensity in the various cardiovascular training zones. And Fat Max heart rate is 180 minus your age in beats per minute. 180 minus age in beats per minute is the upper limit for a proper fat burning. A fat burning emphasis workout. A workout that should leave you feeling energized and alert and fresh and have more energy for the day rather than leave you feeling slightly fatigued, depleted dragass compensation theory, overeating, sweets later in the day, and all those symptoms of an overly stressful workout pattern. So that’s a great takeaway to avoid chronic patterns. If you’re doing endurance exercise, it’s keep it at Fat Max or below or well below. And finally, to end, I know you’ve been with me for a long time, but I wanted to give you this comprehensive starting point for healthy living.

Brad (01:29:23):
The final, the fifth and final category is stress management. Then I’m gonna give it, give you a quick list of takeaways. ’cause you might be overwhelmed processing all this information in this lengthy show. But some quick takeaways to make things happen for you right now to clean up your act and turn things around. But the final category, short one is called stress management. We have so many interferences and challenges today toward keeping us stress balanced, and having this quest for peace, contentment, relaxation, a mindful way of living, appreciating the simple pleasures of life, spending time appreciating and communing with nature, having some solo reflective time to just be by ourselves and daydream. And of course, having quality social interactions rather than the constant stream of superficial digital interactions and all the things that mobile devices and hyperconnectivity take us away from that potential for a nice, peaceful, calm, mindful, in-the-moment type of life.

Brad (01:30:29):
So with this tendency for chronic stress all day long, that’s why those other categories are especially important. The first one I talked about, sleep, rest, recovery, and downtime. As an antidote for chronic stress, I am proud to say that I’m a professional napper. So virtually every day, maybe five to six days a week, I will go down. I will get away from the screen, I will get away from what I’m doing and go down for a short nap. Even 20 minutes makes me feel completely rejuvenated afterward, like a new person, like a new day. Sometimes I wake up and I indeed, I fall asleep most of the time because I’m practiced at this. So people say, oh no, I’m a terrible napper. I can’t take a nap. My recommendation is to get away from it, get away from the frenzy, and go sit or lay down in a quiet, comfortable area and just allow yourself to decompress.

Brad (01:31:23):
You can close your eyes, you can keep ’em open and look at the birds if you want. But if you just close your eyes and rest over time with practice, you will take that opportunity, if necessary, to catch up on deficient sleep. And even though I sleep like crazy, I did a quick show, you can find it, YouTube shorts, where I talked about that I’ve discovered, uh, through trial and error and intense record keeping, that my optimal sleep is around nine hours and 15 minutes per night. I know that sounds like a lot, and I think my number is kind of high because I’m also trying to recover from really intense, challenging sprint workouts, high jump workouts at the upper age group <laugh> in the 60 plus category. Those two things don’t always go hand-in-hand, hardcore sprinting and being 60.

Brad (01:32:13):
But I put a lot of energy out for my high intensity workouts. Thus, I believe that I require a greater commitment to napping as well as a longer evening sleeping period because I notice when I’m not exercising normally I might need a little less sleep, but I was so heartened to discover randomly on the, on YouTube, from my, one of my favorite runners, the greatest middle distance runner in the world. His name is Jakob Ingebrigsten from Norway. He did a video with it was a Q and a video where he talked about his need for extensive sleep. And he says, yeah, I need around nine hours and 15 minutes every night to feel my best. And I raise my arms and triumph. I’m like, oh, yes, Jakob needs nine 15. I require nine 15. And I’m so happy to report that I’ve made that a priority in my life so that I get it virtually every day.

Brad (01:33:10):
And if I do have a necessary, uh, catchup situation going on, I will obtain that during my nap. So if you’re deficient on sleep, great books about this. One of my favorite is called Take a Nap, Change Your Life by Dr. Sara Mednick. She talks about how you will get into this napping period and catch up on either or, or both rem sleep and deep sleep to make up for your deficiencies. So naps are wonderful. Contrary to popular belief in Dr. Mednick’s book, she talks how, uh, a nap will not screw up your evening sleeping period, even if it’s as long as 90 minutes. And in some cases, taking that nap can help contribute to improvements in insomnia conditions. Because if we go too long without sleep and we’re kind of walking around like a zombie and we’re into that overly stressful lifestyle pattern contributed or driven by insufficient sleep, we’ll be too stressed to sleep.

Brad (01:34:14):
You get what I’m saying? So if you can just balance out your overall stress levels in your life, perhaps by taking a nap, maybe you’ll sleep better that night rather than this notion going around this lay person’s notion that, oh, I better not nap, or I’ll screw up my evening sleep. Okay, taking a three-hour nap, as some of you who’ve been jet lagged might discover, yeah, that could mess up your sleep when you’re trying to adjust. Flying from, uh, Los Angeles to Paris for a triathlon my first time, and, uh, I needed a quick nap after that long flight, fell asleep for five hours. What did I do that ensuing night in the ensuing several nights after? Yeah, wide awake for the whole time. So, different, totally different subject when we’re talking about how to beat jet lag, but finding ways to balance stress with sleep, rest, recovery and downtime.

Brad (01:35:05):
Avoiding those chronic exercise patterns and managing the interpersonal stress that we haven’t talked about those categories yet. But this can also include and quite likely does include dysfunctional relationship dynamics, which are a source of huge stress to people, especially in the romantic relationship, the love relationship. That’s why I have such prioritization of relationship experts on the show. I believe it goes hand in hand with all the other stuff about the right foods to choose and the right workouts to do. So you can hear all four of my shows with the legendary, John Gray had a wonderful show with relationship expert Jillian Turecki. Her podcast is called Jillian On Love, and she’s known for her very powerful, memorable, hard-hitting sound bites. So go take a listen to that show if you want. Some great takeaways on, uh, relationship dynamics and John Gray, of course, the essential male and female relationship assignments, a whole show dedicated to that I think about and talk about these every day.

Brad (01:36:14):
And it can change from an overly stressful, draining, life shortening relationship to the opposite, the centerpiece of healthy, happy long life, and how much a relationship contributes to that. And John Gray cites research that a dysfunctional argumentative relationship can cut seven years off your life, which is right up there in the highest ranking of horrible shit to do in your life. Right up there with smoking <laugh> working in the coal mine, and all the things that we know are life shortening, but a dysfunctional relationship is no joke. And on the flip side, a healthy, loving, nurturing relationship. I just heard this quip from, uh, one of my favorite authors, Scott Galloway. In his new book. He talks about how, uh, it can add four to seven years to the male’s life, slightly less for the female’s life a loving long-term partnership. So get that stuff right and put that as a high, high, uh, emphasis, priority right up there with sleep and cleaning up your diet and all that.

Brad (01:37:23):
’cause everything goes hand in hand. So relationships are in there. And also the stress that we bring upon ourselves, uh, primarily by rumination, is a big topic that interests me. And my former podcast guest, Dr. Ron Sinha, host of the Meta Health Podcast, talks about how rumination in your mind has been categorized as a metabolic disease with actual blood markers. So that rumination that causes a chronic overproduction of stress hormones can show up in your blood markers with things like elevated, uh, lipids and things that are directly associated with poor stress management. Whew, that’s pretty heavy. Dr. Cena’s message, he works in California’s Silicon Valley, providing a unique healthcare experience for the major employers down there, the big tech companies that you’ve heard of the world’s leaders, Facebook and Google and so forth. Uh, and so he works with what is widely regarded as the highest paid, the highest salaried employee population on earth, the average salaries and the average home cost in California.

Brad (01:38:39):
Silicon Valley is off the charts like nowhere else on earth. So these are the most affluent people on earth in general, collectively, but they suffer from FOMO at an extreme rate according to Dr. Sinha. And he thinks one of the reasons is there is so much affluence and so much keeping up with the Joneses that it becomes unhealthy. And there’s other research talking about the healthiest nations in the world, the countries with the highest level of happiness, excuse me, happiest, not healthiest. Of course those two are similar but I;m talking about the recent research on the happiest nations. And I’ll put some cool links in the show notes. Thank you, mom. Who finds the show links. But there’s articles you can read about the happiest nations in the rankings. And guess who’s kicking ass in that category? That’s right. It’s Scandinavia

Brad (01:39:35):
They are generally ranked like 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and seven or whatever iceland’s in there too. So if you look at the happiest nations, it’s like Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and they believe that one of the driving factors for Scandinavia being a collective group of the happiest nations is they have minimal income disparity because they’re highly socialized. They believe one of the driving factors for that high happiness rating is the minimal income disparity. They are highly socialized nations with social policies, limiting the extreme incomes ’cause of the high tax rates and the things you’ve heard about the progressive tax rate in Sweden goes up to 93% or something like that. But that minimal income disparity is a recipe for collective societal happiness. Here in the United States of America, we have the greatest income disparity ever known to any civilization in the history of humanity. So the concentration of wealth, I believe the top 1%, you might have seen these statistics.

Brad (01:40:49):
The, the highest 1%, the one percenters they call ’em, is it that they, they control I think, 80% of all the wealth. So all the wealth is held by a very, very small number of people. And the top 1% have 50% of the wealth on the top 5%, uh, control like 80% of the wealth. So you have massive, massive income disparity. You have poverty amidst billionaires, unlike any other society we’ve seen. And here we are with real research hitting the street and real life examples from Dr. Sinha in Silicon Valley where the median income is in the six figures, the median home prices, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 million in Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, the relevant counties, <laugh>, oh boy. That, median home prices for a simple little home like you might see in Ohio or Iowa or Mississippi.

Brad (01:41:46):
We’re not talking about, uh, the mansions that you see on TV, but just a basic home costing a million bucks. So you have this frenzied, uh, economic condition that leads to the fallout of FOMO. And he talks about it going down to the generations where the parents are so worried because their kids didn’t get into the prestigious private school that costs $38,000 tuition and the accelerated travel sports teams and music and all the things that’s keeping up with the Joneses and eliciting FOMO, causing chronic overproduction of stress hormones and poor stress management despite extremely affluent circumstances. Whew, enough of that BS. Let’s extricate from that. And let’s wrap up this show with an immediate action plan to start living healthy on minimal budget, minimal time commitment, summarizing all the stuff that I covered in this fantastic centerpiece show. I’m so glad I recorded it so everyone can go here and get going.

Brad (01:42:50):
But let’s focus here as we say goodbye and want to go take decisive action. So number one, wind things down at night. Minimize artificial light and digital stimulation after dark. Take that final hour before bed, get outside, walk the dog, maybe do some quiet reading. Take a bath like Ariana recommends, but wind things down. Don’t blast yourself with screen entertainment and then expect to sleep peacefully. Remember that first category was called sleep, rest, recovery, and downtime. So I also want to put on the item number one, take breaks during the day to relax and chill out. Number two, clean up your act right now. You can go down and do a pantry purge, look in your fridge, look in your pantry, and throw out those nutrient deficient, chemically processed, heavily altered foods. I would not even feed this stuff to my dog. So throw this stuff out, get it out of your realm, get it out of your visual field.

Brad (01:44:00):
And I would even do the same for your dog. Get rid of those crappy junky treats and processed food for your animals and yourself, the purge right now, you can take 15 minutes and clean up your home food environment. Number three on the flip side, now you have all the space in your pantry, in your fridge. Emphasize natural nutrient-dense foods with protein as your top dietary priority. Go to bradkearns.com. Download the B.rad Nutrition Guide to help you navigate to emphasize the right foods. Number four, JFW, as Mark Sisson says, that stands for just fing walk. So get moving, short walks, medium walks, longer walks, increase all forms of general everyday movement. Number five, adhere to a devoted sensible fitness routine, avoiding overdoing it with the chronic exercise, the extreme exercise. And so what that comprises is, of course, we want to get our aerobic quotient handled.

Brad (01:45:13):
So in addition to just moving more, you can do these dedicated cardiovascular exercise sessions at Fat Max heart rate or below, but also regular resistance workouts two times a week, 10 to 30 minutes. That’s all it takes to get to the extremely excellent, fantastic super fit category when it comes to strength training. Two times a week, 10 to 30 minutes resistance, exercise machines, stretch tubing, body weight, whatever turns you on, but put your muscles under resistance load till you get to that point where you’re burning a little bit, you’re breathing hard and you have to stop. And then of course, sprinting once in a while is fine. So we talk about this Primal bBueprint, fitness sprint once every seven to 10 days. You can do more if you’re doing low or no impact. If you’re running sprints on flat ground once every seven to 10 days is fine.

Brad (01:46:06):
And adhere to the template, memorize this four to eight repeats of only 10 to 20 seconds duration if you’re going for longer than 20 seconds. It’s not really a sprint, it’s an interval workout. Of course, those have all kinds of benefits. There’s all kinds of ways to do high intensity interval training. Hopefully not overdoing it, but a true sprint is 10 to 20 seconds, four to eight reps, six to one, recovery to rest ratio. That was number five. Fitness, get the sprinting and the strength training in along with your cardio. Number six, don’t overdo it. We talked about the chronic exercise patterns that can happen both with endurance training and with high intensity interval training. And then finally, number seven, stress management. Prioritize your loving relationships and close relationships. And if you’ve got some dysfunction happening right now, why don’t you make a step toward getting that handled?

Brad (01:47:03):
There’s all kinds of ways you can do that. You can say, Hey, can we talk for a moment? I want to say a few things. I listened to this great B.rad Podcast episode where he talked about loving relationships can make or break your longevity. They’re that important. So I want to get things handled right now. I want to apologize. I want to do this, I want to do that. I want to listen to you. I want to implement these great skills that have been delivered to us by the world’s leading experts like John Gray and put them into action. John Gottman, another of my favorite relationship experts, gives this quip. He says, at all times in a relationship, you’re either a team or you’re not a team. There’s no gray area, it’s black and white. You are either operating as a team or not a team.

Brad (01:47:51):
And this includes, again, this is Gottman. Something you might have to handle as a team is you’re being a real jerk right now. Let’s handle this matter as a team and find out how we can get to the the bottom of this problem and get away from dysfunction and get back into love and kindness and peace and togetherness, and all the things that are the most important thing in life. Thank you so much for your interest and support and sharing the message, hitting like hitting, subscribe, emailing podcast@bradventures.com. And I look forward to sharing more with you soon.

Brad (01:48:28):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email podcast@bradventures.com and visit bradkearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.

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