Double Edge Fitness
This podcast is dedicated to showcasing to our members and any of our listeners who are interested in how this northern Nevada gym operates. Our mission is to inspire others to bring health and wellness home to truly make a difference in the household with the ultimate goal of making Reno the healthiest city in the country.In this podcast, we will be talking about things that are on our mind and answering questions from our members and our listeners to provide a unique listening experience.
Double Edge Fitness
The Lifestyle Anchor: Finding Your Health Inspiration.
Finding your anchor might be the most important health discovery you'll ever make. In this deeply personal episode, I reveal the critical insight I've gained after two decades in the fitness industry about who succeeds and who doesn't in their health journey.
While most people begin fitness focused on aesthetics and weight loss, I've observed that these motivations rarely sustain long-term commitment. The transformation we seek moves painfully slow, and we're often never satisfied with our appearance regardless of improvements. This creates a psychological trap that leads many to abandon healthy habits when visible results don't materialize quickly enough.
The solution? Finding a deeper anchor that connects your daily fitness decisions to something more meaningful than appearance. For me, this anchor solidified after reading Peter Attia's book "Outlive" and facing my daughter's Crohn's disease diagnosis. I realized that maintaining optimal muscle mass and healthy body fat levels dramatically reduces the risk of chronic diseases, with exercise being the most powerful tool against insulin resistance—the silent precursor to our major killers.
What transformed my approach was understanding that the fitter you are at 40, the fitter you'll be at 70. Your strength, VO2 max, and metabolic health today set the foundation for your quality of life decades later. This perspective makes each workout and healthy meal an investment in your future self rather than a sacrifice for short-term aesthetic gains.
Life will inevitably derail your momentum occasionally. The difference between those who succeed and those who don't is the ability to reconnect with their anchor and get back on track. Discover what deeply matters to you—whether it's being there for your family, maintaining independence as you age, or simply enjoying vibrant health—and let that drive your fitness decisions toward a sustainable lifestyle.
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All right, everybody, I'm going to break down potentially the most important thing I've ever said regarding fitness, nutrition and your long-term health. I'm going to try to keep this as concise as possible. Might make you a little upset, might open a light bulb for you, so we're going to try to do this. Something I've been thinking long and hard about is over the last 20 years. It's like who succeeds and who doesn't? Where do people lose momentum? What happens when people gain momentum? When it comes to chasing and staying after this health and fitness journey? There's quite a few thoughts that I have around this, coaching a lot of people over the years seeing, just in the last 10 years, 11 years of Double Edge Fitness, like the folks that reached the 2,000 attendance club. You know they've completed 2,000 classes. It's 200 plus visits per year for 10 years and all those people are healthy, fit, like.
Speaker 1:What is it that somebody grabs onto? To come in day in, day out, do the work in the gym, but also do the work outside the gym. What is it? I mean we have different walks of life in this category Professionals, people with multiple kids, different jobs. Like you know, it's not just they'll have other stuff going on. They're not a gym owner like me who, quote-unquote has it easy because I'm in a gym. What is it? What is it that gets people to do the work, to believe in the work day in, day out? And I truly believe it's different for everybody and I kind of want to walk through this a little bit and break down some thought processes that I have around this. So, in the industry, long time now Now, going on 20 years Got my green tea Sip on. I'm going to get dry mouth on this one. It's going to take a minute.
Speaker 1:Most people come into the gym when they fill out their 30 days, when they come in for a trial, the mass majority of the time they're coming in here to lose weight. That is the biggest driver across the industry in general. But that is the biggest driver, all right. So with that, people in their twenties, people in their thirties, arguably even people in their forties for the most part, most of these folks are driven to lose weight and I'm going to say it, but 100%. So let's back up. Can't use 100%, but 99%. Their motivation to lose weight is purely aesthetics looks. They want to look healthy. They want to lose that body fat, have some muscle, look good and feel good. Sure they get. Maybe if you've gained that college, that freshman 20, you're not feeling too great. You know you got into your career, you had some kids, things start going a little sideways. Physique-wise, you're feeling beat down, run down. But I'm willing to bet that the majority of the driver in that age range is aesthetics in that age range is aesthetics Like we want to look better.
Speaker 1:I know I do. I know that it's been an on and off goal of mine for my entire life and I believe that to be the majority of case for a lot of folks. Here's where I think that goal or that focus ends up becoming something that is a detriment in a way. So your goal is to look a certain way. Chances are you got this perception. Maybe you looked a certain way in high school and let me tell you, if you're over 30 years old, you need to give up how you potentially looked in high school. Right, you know, sometimes you got to hang up the jersey and put that part in the past. There are a lot of people that look way better at 40 than they did in high school. Okay, there's both sides of this.
Speaker 1:But if your main goal is to look a certain way aesthetically and we are comparing ourselves to Instagram, fitness influencers, magazines, whatever that might be your friend over here who's just been born with six pack abs. You know, and you know this, you know ladies looking at, you know this lady's butts perfectly developed and right. We look at these things and they become goals. I do believe that if that is the driver, that after a certain amount of time, that goal, that driver, is going to fade because it's really, really hard. There's a handful of variables how we train, how consistently we train, how hard we train, intensity, volume, massively. How we eat. And the needle on some of these goals to our personal perception of how we should look moves extremely slow, extremely slow. You know, it's taken me since 2017 to go from 18% body fat to 12% body fat. When you tell somebody like your goal over five years or seven, eight years, losing 6% body fat, that sounds crazy. That sounds you know we want it now, we want it right now, boom. And when you get into the grind of it and you're putting in the work and you think you're putting in good, consistent work and you're not getting these aesthetics results, how you perceive yourself, we get extremely discouraged.
Speaker 1:I can tell you, the majority of my life I've never liked myself in one single photo Not one. I'm not talking about shirtless photos, those two, you know. I remember a time my senior year of wrestling, you know got to hang up that high school jersey. It was pretty fit, pretty lean, but in general you're the most critical person of yourself. And one thing I know about both men and women is no matter what we get to body composition wise, we are our own biggest critics and potentially never, ever satisfied. So from a mental health standpoint, that is very daunting and gross.
Speaker 1:You know Marcus Philly if you guys don't know him, crossfit Games athlete turned. You know he's a profound person in this industry. If you don't know him, he talks about this a lot, about his obsession with leanness and this mental like lock on being, you know, 6% body fat, super lean, looking a certain way all the time and how physically, mentally taxing it was and unsustainable was. And he was never happy. Us looking at him, we can't tell a difference if he's 10% or 6% body fat and he talks about this being his own biggest critic of this and never being happy, never being happy chasing this goal. And since he turned 40, me and him happened to be the same age. He really shifted his perception to long-term health, feeling better, having energy, being able to get the most value out of workouts, so fueling properly to train well and not focusing as much on the aesthetics. And to me and you, he's still freaking, shredded. The guy is legitimately shredded, but he has that internal battle, just like I know a lot of other people do.
Speaker 1:And what I'm getting at here is what I want to dive deeper into is a thing I like to call like an anchor. What is the anchor that in your life that is going to drive you to put in this work? Now, the work we do out here in the gym is not easy. It's not easy when the day is busy Job's crazy, kids are crazy Kids. The day is busy Jobs crazy, kids are crazy Kids, activities this. You have a laundry list of things you got to get done and you still got to get to the gym. What's that anchor that's going to pull you in and help you to make this a priority? Because the reality is, the things that we prioritize are the things that we achieve. If we prioritize our health and fitness, it's going to be done. If it's not a priority. We let all these other priorities get in front of that, it's going to be a lot harder to get it done because there's always other stuff that's going to come ahead.
Speaker 1:So what we need to do is create a framework that we can have, this anchor that holds us accountable to a true meaning of long-term health and truly understanding how important it is to exercise and eat healthy. And this anchor, the framework I want to talk to you guys about, is pretty massive, it's pretty deep, and if you don't believe it with your soul and grab onto the objective data to what I'm about to lay out for you, it's going to be hard. Because I do believe that when it's goals like aesthetics, it's goals like just some weight loss or superficial goals, it's going to be really hard to hang on to that anchor because we're not going to see the results. And even if we're getting the results, there's a very high probability we're not going to see the results and even if we're getting the results, there's a very high probability we're still not going to be satisfied by them. But there is another way. There is, in my mind, a way that we can frame this psychologically to prioritize the importance of health and fitness to make it that anchor, that cornerstone.
Speaker 1:So then when you look back in 10 years, you see how far you've come and you're so proud of yourself as you're hitting these aging milestones. And you're looking around at all the other people out there in society and you're like, damn, maybe I am doing something right Now. That's kind of where I'm getting to at this point in my life. A lot of folks that I share this age range with they're not in good place when you get out there and walk through society. They're not in a good place. And although I wasn't great in my 30s, I built the framework in my mid-20s to 30s that led up to slight midlife crisis at age 38. That launched me into this new chapter of grabbing onto this anchor.
Speaker 1:I am going to break down for you guys, and this is where I think we should frame this. You need to understand that the objective data that has been collected over a very long time through science shows that people who maintain muscle mass at optimal levels and I'm starting to lean towards 50% of your body should be lean muscle mass, people who maintain body fat at optimal levels. And for me, the breaking point men need to be under 20% body fat. Women need to be under 30% body fat. But optimal 15% body fat for men, 25% body fat for women. Now you start getting below 10% body fat for men. Eh, not sure that's super sustainable for most folks. You start getting under 20% body fat for women. Other things can come into play. So for me, men 10% to 15%, women 20% to 25%, but also lean muscle mass, pushing towards that 50% of our total body composition, that 50% of our total body composition. When you understand that those two variables are massive in your long-term health, massive people with high strength, high muscle mass, high VO2 max, have thousand-fold percent I'm throwing that number out there, but it's a massive number Reduction in comorbidities from well, cardiac disease, cancer, alzheimer's, copd, type 2 diabetes is the number one driver leading into those diseases and optimal fitness is the number one driver leading into those diseases and optimal fitness is the biggest tool to prevent type 2 diabetes, to prevent these things.
Speaker 1:All right, type 2 diabetes, in my mind, if you're anywhere heading that direction, is the most scary thing I think we should understand. Yeah, cancer is terrifying, heart attacks are terrifying, alzheimer's is terrifying. But all this starts 10, 15, 20 years before you may manifest one of those diseases because of, from what I understand, what happens to our metabolic health because of, from what I understand, what happens to our metabolic health in relation to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance, from everything I've been studying the last few months, can mess you up and it starts subtly. You don't know You're walking around with an A1C of 6, a1c of 7. You don't know you're walking around with an a1c of six, a1c of seven. You don't know when your blood sugars are up, elevated, chronically, day in, day out, until it's too late. Like these, it's like a silent killer that just festers all this other disease.
Speaker 1:And the biggest thing we can do to mitigate that insulin resistance issue is exercise, building muscle and eating healthy Whole food Massive, massive. So when you think of yourself turning 50, turning 60, do you want to go into those years finding out that you are type 2 diabetic? And then you have a hell of a battle to keep that away, to hopefully prevent one of the other four main killers in society from getting you Like. I don't, I don't you guys see it. I mean I got a glucose monitor on and I may be a little too obsessive, but a lot of this is data and me learning, so I can hopefully share some insights into my own personal experience with all this stuff. But what we do in our 30s and 40s, our 50s, is going to be such a massive setup for our quality of life and health span and beyond. It's that simple. It's that simple. It's that simple, it's that simple.
Speaker 1:But being able to lock your brain, lock it in on the importance and how big of a deal it is, it allows you to take and make the daily effort of eating healthier foods, drinking less alcohol, exercising our body, you know daily exercise it makes that a priority to where you know that one hour of training per day has a massive, massive influence on our long-term health and health span Like there's nothing else that remotely compares to the outcomes long-term health as exercise, strength training, my primary metabolic conditioning and aerobic capacity. So, number one, getting strong, building muscle using our muscle. Next, building anaerobic capacity, next, our aerobic capacity. I have those in that order for a reason. It's what I believe Strength is king. Next is anaerobic cardiovascular capacity VO2 max and then our aerobic capacity, our ability to do sustained work at a lower heart rate. I believe those three in that order are truly the most important way to think about it, and one hour a day. Yes, I believe our group class facilitates training all three of those in a consistent way.
Speaker 1:That you do it three to five days a week, day in, day out, year in, year out, you are going to be crushing your long-term health. The reason I'm saying this with such conviction is just watching the people that have been in this gym and training at that level for the last 10 years. They are, you know, approaching 50 years old. Hell, one of them, I think. Now there's a few of them approaching 50 years old I can't remember everybody's age, I think one of them might be over but they are literally at the epitome or the apex of their health and fitness now and they've been at it in our gym for 10 years. You know most of them. I do know their blood work, I know quite a bit about them and I will tell you they are healthy, healthy, fit human beings and they just put in the work day in, day out, consistently, one hour group class, three to five days per week, consistently over time, and they are setting themselves up for success.
Speaker 1:Grabbing on to that long-term health anchor was one of the biggest pivotal moments of my health. That happened right before Claire went to the hospital and got diagnosed with Crohn's disease. I've said this before, you know. My wife asked me to read that book, outlived by Peter Attia. She read it. She asked me to read it. I read it and it had a massive light bulb moment because when I was age 35 or so to 38, training every day is hard, it's not easy, and I was like I'm not going to compete anymore. You know, do this for sport. What is my reason? You know, I'm still fitter than most of the people in the gym, still perform better than most people in the gym.
Speaker 1:Blood work was pretty darn good. Body composition, you know I was hovering around that 15, 16 percent. So not optimal, but not bad. But then I read that book and the fitter you are, the better your long-term outcomes are. The higher your VO2 max is at 40, the higher your VO2 max is going to be at 70 and 80. The stronger you are at 40, the stronger you're going to be at 70 and 80. The stronger you are at 40, the stronger you're going to be at 70, 80. The longer you can stem off insulin resistance and maintain good metabolic health, less the probability of one of these four horsemen is what Peter T calls them.
Speaker 1:But one of these chronic diseases cancer, heart disease, copd, alzheimer's is going to grab you and smack you upside the head at an earlier age. There's a good chance that heart disease might get you when you're in your 90s, no matter what. But if I can have a killer quality of life into my 80s because of the work I do now and I can be a great father, great grandfather, maybe great great grandfather, I don't know when the good Lord's going to come and snatch me up. No clue, things happen, people slip and fall. I just know that my time here on earth I feel that, not just because of my job, it's my responsibility to take care of my health and to take care of the body God gave me in the most meaningful way possible.
Speaker 1:And reading that and truly believing in the objective data of how health and fitness insanely improves your outcomes later in life, it was a no-brainer. It gave me permission to start pursuing excellence in my fitness, beyond the thought process of competing. You know my whole life was around some kind of sport or competing at something. Early days of doing CrossFit coaching, I was, you know, like kind of a wannabe CrossFit athlete. You know I had those aspirations to compete at CrossFit. It was very sport driven. You know, a lot of people get competitive in sport and then what do you do after that?
Speaker 1:Things tend to kind of go downhill. So you need this other anchor. You need this anchor of your long-term viability and health span to pull you back in and to keep you focused to where, when all these other things in life are coming at you, you still make time and you still prioritize eating healthy, working out daily and putting in that work. You know, a lot of times people go on a diet and it's usually around the mental confines of to get this weight off, but they're not thinking of it as this. Am I building blocks for my long-term health? Is this am I building blocks for my long-term health? Because most people don't stick to diets. They do it for a period of time, hit a quote-unquote goal and then you see them a year later and they're right back to where they were. They didn't make any sustained progress.
Speaker 1:You know, and sometimes when life yanks you right back to where you were, something catastrophic, crazy could have happened in your life that derailed your momentum. And this does happen. We want to get into that, need a little sip. But as you're working through days, months and years of your life, to pretend it's just an upward trajectory would also be something that you need to let go of. It is not a constant upward trajectory. The course of life is like a weird line chart that just Things come and smack you upside the head when you least expect it and can completely derail your momentum. A death, a marriage, a divorce, kid, getting sick, getting fired from your job, getting a new job moving Probably kind of the big ones. But it's usually these massive life events that derail us from, maybe, where we were and had good momentum, good habits. They derail us from it. On the flip side of that, these things often knock us back into it. They knock us back into gaining some momentum refocus, repurpose, reprioritize.
Speaker 1:So next phase 38, read the book, wrap my head around. You know this is my permission. Not only am I a leader to you guys and a leader in the gym, I am a fitness coach. So there is some built-in incentive to strive for excellence in what I do, because I'm supposed to do. You know, yes, be the guy, but I was struggling in a big way. I was barely working out three days a week eating pretty healthy but still, you know, having drinks and this. And that Wasn't chasing perfection by any means. Read the book. That wasn't chasing perfection by any means. Read the book. Started gaining momentum, started feeling good, started prioritizing training and training with purpose, again being very intentional. And this new chapter of my training was going to be very focused around injury prevention, listening to my body, listening to my needs for recovery, but still training like an athlete, but with the context of the 80-year-old version of myself that was the driver.
Speaker 1:Fast forward about three months, my family gets smacked upside the head. My daughter ends up in the hospital emergency surgery. She gets a big chunk of her colon cut out. She ends up with an Austin bag she is nine years old at this point and she ends up being diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Fortunately, some of this does run in the family, although it was a shock to us. We that you know, sometimes you draw a short straw and it was pretty overwhelming to sit there with your little girl being diagnosed with this and ending up in emergency surgery because her bowel ruptured. And what do you do? You know, obviously pray, obviously pray, and this, that and the other. But the conversation that happened with me and my wife is we're going to do whatever it takes to give her the best life possible, to live the best, healthiest life possible.
Speaker 1:So you dive into this world of this autoimmune disease and there's so much perspective out there, right Perspective out there. What we're getting fed by modern medicine is you take this biologic and you just go live life normally. There was no real insight into nutritional therapies when it came, especially I think there's more when you're adult with Crohn's. But when you get diagnosed as a kid, it's like they need to be on an immune modulating drug, but they can live life as normal. You know they're kids. That didn't really resonate with us very well. Now I'm not here to deny the advancements in modern medicine and what it's done to help people with autoimmune disease, chronic disease. I think there are very powerful pharmaceuticals and I think there are very powerful things in modern medicine that have truly helped in a massive way. Folks out there and Claire needs these.
Speaker 1:But we couldn't just accept the fact that this is the only way. So me and my wife, we dove in deep into food and up to this point we ate a pretty healthy lifestyle, pretty healthy right? I'm not gonna pretend it's perfect. I put us on the 80-20 category Not perfect but not bad. So you live in that 80-20, you think you know you're doing pretty good. Then you get this chronic disease diagnosis for your child and you decide we started looking at every possible avenue. What can we do to make sure one, when her colon gets the opportunity to be reconnected because she ended up with an ostomy bag for almost five months when they can do the reconnect, that her body is so healthy and so strong that we're setting her up for the best success for that. That was a very, very, very important aspect in our mind and we know and believe in our hearts that nutrition is so important when it comes to how our bodies function. So we started diving deep into the research of our food system, all the things that can be shown with Crohn's.
Speaker 1:And when you get into the autoimmune disease you get a section of groups out there that are very aggressive in their views on nutrition when it comes to managing these autoimmune diseases and it's kind of hard to slice through the noise. And it's kind of hard to slice through the noise but here in town we weren't getting anything in regards to nutrition when it came to elevating Claire's success with managing Crohn's with a nutritional approach. It was just immune-modulating drugs. That was it the food they brought her in the hospitalulating drugs. That was it the food they brought her in the hospital. I damn near lost it, damn near lost it. Talking to some of the dieticians in the hospital, they didn't know anything, asking questions about what I'm digging up on research articles, not just random blogs of people. What about this? What about this? Should we be looking at this? Knew nothing when we finally got to Stanford and met with their dietitian. Their dietitian was pretty good, very current in what's going on.
Speaker 1:We ended up settling on we're gonna do the specific carbohydrate diet. This is a diet that you remove a handful of starches. I would say. Arguably it leans more towards a ketogenic, carnivore lifestyle, but there's still fruits, vegetables and when I get my wife on and we talk about the kids, she'll be able to break it down more. She knows the details of it more's call the specific carbohydrate diet. We move quite a bit of things from carbohydrates and getting rid of everything, processed everything.
Speaker 1:Once you start learning how messed up our food supply system is, it blows your mind Like the garbage and I really want to use four-letter words right now. But the garbage that is loaded into our food system it's so bad. And the garbage that's advertised as being healthy this says it's keto, this says it's, you know, paleo approved. And then you flip it over and you look at the ingredient like there's so many additives put in this stuff. There's so many additives put in this stuff and it's to maintain shelf lives, to get costs down. Some of it's just because I don't even know why it is trash. And then you start learning about the gut microbiome. This is a catchphrase in many ways in the health sphere, but it's a big deal and I will say we still don't know everything about it. There's still lots of research that's going on about it. So, lots of research that's going on about it. But I can't help but to believe it's possibly one of the biggest things we should think about and worry about is taking care of our gut health and our gut microbiome and processed food.
Speaker 1:Whether you're a creationist which I happen to be or an evolutionist, our bodies were not designed and developed and or evolved. However you want to think about it. To handle the level of processed food that we are consuming these days in society, we're meant to consume food from nature, provided by us in my opinion, by God, but that evolved with us. However you want to frame it, I don't care. The outcome is still the same as we live here on this earth. What happens when we get out of this earth? We'll find out. We'll find out, but we all live here on this earth. So, however you want to frame that, we were designed, created, evolved to consume whole food from this planet. Right, that includes fruits, vegetables, some starches, you know. Potatoes were grown, corn was grown. These things were grown as part of cultures over centuries. Meat, fat, and that's it. Protein, fat, carbohydrate from nature is what our body was either created to consume and or evolved to consume, and it is not in a position to deal with the amount of artificially created food, additive, loaded, processed garbage that is out there, and I do believe that our gut microbiomes being so messed up from all this processed food in our environment that it is leading down this road of chronic disease.
Speaker 1:An excessive carbohydrate intake, sugar and excessive processed carbohydrates intake, sugar and excessive processed carbohydrates it's everywhere, it's in everything. I implore you to go one day and just add up the amount of sugar you consume right now and you start looking at how many packages, how many things that are quote unquote healthy have added sugar to them. The yogurt drink, it might be. If it says zero sugar, then we got to get into all the artificial sweeteners and the things they do to make that shit. So I eat plain yogurt, but you just get a vanilla yogurt, added sugar, added sugar it gets in everything. Beef, jerky, added sugar it's in everything. Added sugar is in everything. Things that don't need sugar added to it have sugar added to it. There are fruit juices like juice, those Odwalla superfood drinks oh, there's a healthy option 50 grams of sugar and some of them 10, 15 grams of added sugar.
Speaker 1:It's in effing everything and it is not good for us.
Speaker 1:It is not good for us.
Speaker 1:Now, carbohydrates are good for us. Our body needs carbohydrates. It needs carbohydrates for energy, for activity, for brain function. But the excess that takes place in our modern diet is absolutely insane. And if there's two things that you are to weigh and measure and just check in on what you consume, I mean everything. The Starbucks you pick up the little snack you grab over here. The doughnut you grab off the counter on your way into the office.
Speaker 1:Now these things seem like such small, like minuscule things, but how much they compound over time, it's massive. But if you take one day and add up how much protein you probably don't get and how much extra sugar and carbohydrate you do get, it is a mind-blowing equation that you start doing that day after day, month after month, year after year. It's no wonder when you go from 20 years old 40, 45 years old, you end up 25, 30, 50 pounds overweight. On top of that, as we age, we start moving less. I read this thing the other day, I think it said that 95% of men over age 30 never sprint again. Never sprint again. You might have to correct me on that statement, but it's pretty close statistic that a mass majority of people over age 30 never do any sprinting, never do any hard output physically. That doesn't you know how many people out there don't work out consistently, don't work out meaningfully, don't move their body, don't you know, get general movement in on a regular, consistent basis. So you add lack of movement, lack of stimulating our body and our muscles.
Speaker 1:Now we were created and or evolved from hunter-gatherer, movement, farming, very active species like we're supposed to be active, and then we end up in these desks. Lots of good came out of the Industrial Revolution and now tech and AI revolution, but what it's looking like is the human body is going to be moving less and less and less, you know, as AI and artificial intelligence starts being adapted into so many more things in our life. Like, the stimulus for movement for us is going to be the gym, you know it's going to be outdoor activities, it's going to be getting exercise in those ways. It's not going to be from as much manual labor, it's not going to be as from hunting, farming, these things, because, as we know, that's already been on a massive decline and it's going to get even on a bigger decline as the advancements in technology continue to take place. So, back to the anchor we are.
Speaker 1:I do believe there's a shift in society to start getting our food processing systems cleaner Regenerative farming, organic, get rid of the pesticides, get rid of the genetically modified GMO foods, getting rid of and cutting back on a lot of the food additives, cutting back on a lot of the food additives, stabilizers, the gums, all this stuff. I do believe there's a significant societal movement that people are looking and seeing like, hey, childhood obesity is insane. Childhood type 2 diabetes is insane. This is now starting at such a young age that it never used to happen before, and you can pretty much trace it back to the advent of how our current food system was created post, I think, world War II.
Speaker 1:And people are, I think, done ignoring the fact that, hey, we spend more money on health care than any country in the world and we have the worst health outcomes. Look it up Our country spends significantly more money on health care. Now, there's a handful of caveats to that. We can get into that some other time. Our country also demands higher quality of care. Our country also demands faster care, but we also have one of these sickest countries, so there's a lot of people that need care. So you combine a sick population who demands fast care and high quality care, prices are gonna go up, right, but another, another topic. But either way, we spend a tremendous amount of money on our health care. I can't remember the state. I want to say it's close to two trillion dollars. I have to look that up, fact check me, go for it, but it's a.
Speaker 1:It's a crazy number on our health care system and most of that can be traced back to correcting metabolic disease early on in life, living a healthy and fit lifestyle early on in life and carrying those habits and those priorities into our later years of life. You know modern pharmaceuticals have helped keep people alive longer. You know disease that would kill us off, you know, in our 50s Now they're now come able to beat some of these diseases with the advent of pharmacology and also people changing their lifestyles after contracting some sort of awful disease. Keeping people alive longer, that's also another drain on our healthcare system. But even without the drain on the healthcare system, is the quality of life of that person going to be spectacular after that? Most times it seems not.
Speaker 1:I don't know about you, but I want to have a great quality of life. I want to enjoy this blessing of life that has been stowed upon me. I want to enjoy what God has given me. I want to enjoy the opportunities in front of me and my health is the single most important aspect to be able to do that. If I don't have my health, I don't have anything. I don't have anything when you can anchor to that and anchor to the fact that just those daily doses of fitness, exercise and eating as healthy as possible, getting away from as much processed food as possible have an enormous compounding effect over time. And you take your timeline from a six-week, three-month diet challenge to this is my lifestyle timeline you actually see how much the needle starts to move. I mean just the next 20% level up that we did in our diet with my daughter's autoimmune stuff. I think a lot of you guys have seen it. But my health, my wife, my kids, they are doing awesome. We are functioning as a family in this last year than we ever did before in this last year than we ever did before. And it is truly, truly unreal to see because people like to bring up the fact that I'm on hormone replacement therapy.
Speaker 1:That's fine. That's a part of my long-term health outcome. Do some research on the long-term health outcomes of low testosterone. It's not good either. So getting to a therapeutic level and there are quite a handful of things in my younger years that I could have prevented and done differently to prevent where I'm at now and why I need to be on hormone replacement this massive diet change. So that was a fixed variable before we started eating. The way we eat, you know it's been huge in how I feel, my energy, my recovery, my training, my quality of life. I feel so good right now that I don't know how I functioned five years ago. I don't ever want to go back to that person Like it makes it so easy.
Speaker 1:Now I will digress a little bit. My anchors are pretty massive, right. I'm one, a father right, and I have a daughter that has a chronic illness. It's an autoimmune illness, so for us like to give her the best opportunities. We anchor on heavily to the fact that we need to lead by example. In our household we all do the same thing, we eat the same way. We all do this to set clear and hopefully Jackson doesn't ever get it for the best success possible. That is a massive, massive anchor for us that allows us to take and prioritize the importance of physical training and nutrition to a very strong, what some people would say obsessive place, which is fine. But I'm going to tell you it shouldn't be looked at as weird when somebody eats unprocessed food and works out every day. That should be the normal. That should be the normal. But I get it. Some people consider me a little bit cuckoo, but that is our anchor.
Speaker 1:Second to leader for you guys, I run a fitness and health facility. I want to lead by the best example possible and that's why I'm so transparent about everything that we do with our health and every, all the blood work, supplements, uh, pharmaceuticals, and the what, the reasons, the why, so that hopefully in some ways you know my experience and what I'm doing can help you guys make decisions and maybe inspire, motivate you that you can do it too, because you can, you totally can. This isn't unique to me. Now, when you have these massive, massive anchors, I got two really good ones, Third being I want to be a badass grandfather. I still want to do like muscle-ups and lift heavy weights and beat the 20-year-olds in wads when I'm 80 years old, so I got to do cool stuff now to do that at 80. But the other two anchors are way bigger and it holds me grounded to living a healthy and fit lifestyle. That's way up here.
Speaker 1:You have to find your anchors for you and one of the biggest ones you can grab onto is the long-term outcomes are so massive from these daily bouts of consistent discipline and work and prioritizing getting that workout in, prioritizing eating less processed food, prioritize planning your meals, thinking through limiting alcohol consumption all right, when you can anchor on to the importance of how much you can set yourself up for long-term health outcomes because of what you do now. Huge benefits await you, huge benefits. Huge benefits await you, huge benefits. And I really hope that you guys you know can find that anchor, whether it be for your kids, your spouse, your loved ones, your own quality of life, and grab onto it and understand how massive it is to put in this daily, consistent work, day in, day out, day in, day out, for your entire life. That it is a lifestyle, because the benefits are huge, the results are fantastic, it's worth every single bit of the effort.
Speaker 1:And I don't just looking at the people that have hit this 2000 club. I don't think one single one of them regrets the work they've put in and where they're at now on their health and fitness journey Not even remotely close. I don't think one. I know for a fact. Not one single one of them is like man wish I didn't do that work, because they're all fitter, healthier, stronger now than they were 10 years ago and they're feeling great. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome to be able to reflect on that, be able to witness it day in, day out.
Speaker 1:We all know not every day is easy, not every day is your best effort. But as long as you put in some effort and you keep yourself on track, for long term doesn't mean every month's going to be perfect every training session is going to be mean every month's going to be perfect, every training session's going to be perfect, every meal's going to be perfect. But if you're constantly fighting for awareness and prioritizing these things, you are definitely going to look back one year, five years, 10 years from now and you're going to be like damn, that was worth the work. And even if you get a little derailed surrounding yourself with people, community of people that can pull you back in, even a little setback can be a launching platform for the next evolution of you. In this journey of running this gym, I've had handfuls of setbacks where my health and fitness didn't optimal, but each time it came, I was derailed, we launched back forward. I launched back forward into another chapter, into another chapter. Getting derailed happens, life happens, life happens. But being able to grab back onto your goals, understand and believe in the priorities or not priorities, but prioritizing the importance of doing these things can really help you long-term grab onto what you need to be doing every single day.
Speaker 1:And I started this thing out with, you know, with people focusing on body composition and looks. I'm circling back to that, because if you focus on all these things, the body compositions and looks actually end up coming along with it. It's impossible to achieve these levels of fitness and metabolic health without your body looking like it's in a healthy state. Don't get me wrong. There are examples of people out there that look a certain way and their metabolic health is not great. Genetics is a factor, all right, genetics is a factor, but it is not a determining end-all factor. Understanding that the work will show, the effort will show.
Speaker 1:The timeline that a lot of us tend to put it on is not the most realistic. It is a lifelong quest. It is something that we can continuously be working at, chipping away at and building towards in a very sustainable way, and it becomes sustainable when you wrap your head truly, truly, truly around. This is not anything but something I'm doing for the rest of my life. That's what I think I want to leave you guys with.
Speaker 1:It hits me hard when I see people who have had great momentum and something derails them and they want to quit. It's not very often. I've seen people quit this gym and come back fitter, healthier. A lot of times they circle around one, two, three, sometimes four years later and they are not in a healthier place than when they left, and that hurts my soul. Now I'm sure there are people that have left the gym and gone on other things, found a fitness program that works best for them and they're able to keep consistent with it and still have great health outcomes. But in general, most people who stop not just the gym but stop training consistently, end up in a more unhealthy place than where they were. So don't quit. You know you get injured. Things happen, life happens.
Speaker 1:Come up with a plan on how you're going to overcome and regain your momentum to get back. Everybody in life ends up having obstacles that they have to overcome. It's just a part of life. Ends up having obstacles that they have to overcome it's just a part of life. So the more you can embrace that that's gonna happen and just know that you're gonna get back on track and believe in yourself that you're gonna get back on track, and then get back on track, you're still to look back on yourself one, three, five years later and be proud of yourself and what you've done, what you've overcome, all right. So find that anchor. Find that anchor that's going to anchor you into prioritizing fitness and eating unprocessed food.
Speaker 1:Next to that, you start optimizing. Once you get into eating unprocessed food and working out regularly, start optimizing your protein intake, start being strategic about your carbohydrate intake, start getting blood work, managing your saturated fat intake and you start optimizing. But phase one let's get working out and keeping it consistent. Phase two eliminating all processed garbage. Start thinking of food as fuel and building blocks for the body, and unprocessed, closer to nature, is the best, and doing that as much as you absolutely can. Once we start nailing those down three months, six months, a year then we start optimizing. Then things get fun. Things get real fun. You start seeing a version of yourself you didn't even know existed.
Speaker 1:All right, you guys, I love you. I'm here to help. I'm a resource that many of you don't take advantage of. You got questions. You want to pick my brain. You want to sit down, have a longer conversation about this stuff? I am game.
Speaker 1:If you're a member of this gym, I am very happy to help you because it's my responsibility and I enjoy it. I'm here. Take advantage of our coaches. They're very knowledgeable. They know their stuff. Pick their brains. They're very knowledgeable, they know their stuff. Pick their brains. We are a community, we are a team of people that are achieving and striving for excellence in our wellness and our health and, most importantly, those around us also. So use us, talk to us. We're here to help. So use us, talk to us. We're here to help.
Speaker 1:Find that anchor that's going to anchor you down. That's a lot deeper than something that's a superficial, short-term goal. You know, read that book, outlive, by Peter Atiyah. You'll understand more of what I'm saying. You go through that book but find that anchor of importance and you are going to have your mind blown on what happens over the course of six months, a year, five years, ten years Of being consistent on that journey. Alright, don't get discouraged, Just keep after it. I love you guys and, yeah, we're just going to keep doing the damn thing. Keep getting better every single day. All right, guys, peace.