You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson.
For more, visit TheModelHealthShow .com.
Welcome to The Model Health Show.
This is fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today.
On this episode, we're diving into four science -backed tips to help you to live longer and stronger stronger with somebody who's actually doing it.
All right. This is one of my longevity mentors, because again, we could talk about this in theory, but to see somebody who is supposedly in that elderly golden age, which is still golden, but performing at a high level.
He plays tennis pretty much five to seven days a week.
He's hanging out with his wife, going to different countries and working with clients and he's been working with clients and patients for many years as a physician and as a coach and he's just such a wealth of information and i was sharing with him after the show having him here sitting in this chair here in the model health show studio having him to sit is like for me it brings up images of putting the tasmanian devil into a cage in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
All right. He wants to get out.
He wants to get from behind that chair.
And he's just so full of life and so full of energy.
And these are the individuals that we need to be learning from.
People who've gone before us and figured some things out and paved a way.
And they are willing to share what they've learned.
And so this is going to be incredibly valuable.
Now, one of the things that he's going to be talking about in these four Big tips for extending our lifespan, our health span, again, living longer and stronger.
He's going to mention the connection between longevity and metabolic health and also the biggest dietary culprit in that poor metabolic health equation that so many people, it's going to be shocking when you hear the number, are suffering with here in our modern culture.
But he shared explicitly that that number one culprit truly is highly refined sugars, in particular, what's going to be found in these ultra processed foods.
But just in general, you know, I grew up, we just always had a big bag of sugar in our house for various purposes, whether I'm making the sugar toast or making some Kool -Aid or flavor aid.
It was just a normal part of our lives and not really looking at the ramifications.
And our phenomenal special guest mentioned to me when he came into the studio, he's like, what do you got for me today?
day you already got the best stuff and he mentioned he came over to our counter and where we have snacks and and drinks and things like that for guests and for the team and he saw my favorite superfood honey sitting there and he's like since the last time I was in here I've been hooked on this honey this honey is a game changer and you might think well isn't that a sweetener like shouldn't we be concerned about if we're talking about sweeteners to call honey a sweetener is, I'm just going to say it, disrespectful because there is nothing on earth like honey.
Unlike other sweeteners, raw honey has been found to actually improve insulin sensitivity.
A recent study published in the peer -reviewed journal Nutrients detailed how raw honey intake intake can improve fasting blood sugar levels, improve lipid metabolism and reduce the risk of heart disease.
Additionally, the scientists noted the vast antioxidants and anti -inflammatory properties that honey has as well.
There's something special about honey.
It is one of those foods that in and of itself the enzymatic activity, the antioxidant activity and capacity that honey has enables this amazing food to be preserved naturally for centuries.
All right, that's magical stuff.
Now with that said, quality matters more than ever before.
Do you know about the honey gate scandal?
If you don't know about the honey gate scandal, look it up.
Honey's getting shipped into the country and also domestically as well, where they're cutting they're cutting the honey and utilizing things like high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar to try to cut the honey to create the illusion of raw honey but it's not really that so be aware and be mindful of where you're getting your honey from my favorite honey that I've been been utilizing for years is the superfood honey from beekeepers naturals yes they have the most amazing honey but there's also other properties that are coming along and components from the hive that have all these incredible regenerative
and medicinal qualities you're getting some pollen you're getting some propolis you're getting some royal jelly this superfood honey is a true true definition of a superfood.
And right now you're going to get 20 % off their amazing superfood honey and just store wide.
They're incredible brain nootropic as well based on royal jelly.
They're phenomenal propolis immune spray that I use multiple times every week.
You get 20 % off store wide when you go to beekeepersnaturals .com forward slash model.
That's B -E -E -K -E -E -P -E -R -S naturals .com forward slash model for 20 off take advantage and now let's go ahead and get into the apple podcast review of the week another five -star review titled gas by andre jordan a must listen i love sean's inspiration sincerity and authenticity about that life thank you so much for sharing that and you are absolutely about that life as well real recognize real I truly do appreciate that.
Thank you for taking a moment to leave this review over on Apple Podcasts.
And if you're hearing the sound of my voice, I'm asking you from my heart to yours to pop over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review for the Model Health Show.
All right. It's pretty easy.
Share your voice. I want to be able to see and experience the love.
Of course, you can rate the show as well.
It really does mean a lot.
And without further ado, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.
Dr. Johnny Bowden is a board -certified nutritionist and nationally renowned expert on weight loss, nutrition, and health.
He's the author of seven critically acclaimed best -selling books, and he's a health columnist for Forbes, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Men's Health, and he's been featured everywhere from the New York Times to Us Weekly to Martha Stewart Living, Oprah and Friends, and many other major media outlets.
Let's dive in this conversation with the one and only Dr. Johnny Bowden.
Dr. Johnny Boden Mr. Sean Stevenson one of my mentors especially when it comes to longevity you are approaching your 79th birthday I am you have to tell everybody that I'm waiting for 80 because that's going to be the one where they're going to say now he's the elder statesman of nutrition and I'm going to start to get those kind of girls you're already that you're already that and with that being said your level of fitness and activity and health is extraordinary extraordinary for what would be considered your age bracket.
Can you talk a little bit about your lifestyle?
Like, what does your fitness look like?
What are some of the things that you're doing?
I'd be happy to, because it really comes down to longevity.
I walk five times a week in the hills with the dog.
And I play tennis at least five times a week, maybe six, two hours a time.
And I don't really sit down very much. I mean, I was actually on the phone with BrainMD MD yesterday and they were saying, you know, I was saying I have such bad knees.
Do you have knee problems?
And I said, I've never had knee problems or back problems. And I said, I also don't sit down.
I'm walking around even my kitchen, which is about this size.
I'll walk around while I'm having phone meetings, have a standing desk.
And I don't think I sit more than a couple hours a day.
And I think that makes that, you know, that's a big part of fitness.
You know, they'd say that sitting eight hours is equivalent to smoking in terms of risk.
That might be a slight exaggeration but it's there's some truth to that yeah metabolically it's terrible yeah well fidgeting is there's a whole whole thing it's called neat non -exercise induced thermogenesis and that is this little things that we do and it's a responsible for about 10 of our calorie burn so all that fidgeting and and just you know stuff and i do this with my life that all burns calories and when we get into the things about longevity we'll talk about that because i want to make a distinction between exercise and movement yes and i think it's a very important distinction yes well
this is one of the reasons i wanted to have you here is to learn from the sensei to learn from the master himself for you you know again we can talk aspirationally about longevity and the science behind it and that's great but you're somebody who's doing this practically practically and viscerally.
And so I wanted to get from you your top tips for longevity, some things that you've learned, again, practically, viscerally, that actually work that we all need to know about.
I would love to share that.
And can I give you some context?
I told you I'm going to be 80 next year.
So I'm getting asked to do a lot of like these kind of legacy speeches.
I gave the keynote at the National Association of Nutrition professionals i'm going to give the graduation commencement speech at the functional medicine coaching academy so what i've been doing in these talks is kind of i don't want to say like a wrapping up of my career but like what have i learned in i've been doing this since i was 38 so we're going on 40 years 35 years professionally i started at equinox in 1990 so that's 35 years that i've been and in that time i was in elementary school you were in elementary school cool.
Yeah, so was my wife.
In that time, I have experimented with or tried or learned about or written about just about every diet you can mention.
At Equinox, we had kickboxing, we had aero box, we had step class, we had, you know, high intensity, we had the peak 10 program, we had everything you can imagine.
And what happens, I think, Sean, when you reach a certain age or a a certain stage with it, you start to see more forest and less trees.
You start to see what are the big issues?
What do we agree on?
What basic premises can we kind of put out there as universal if there are any?
And I'm not a big believer in a universal diet or universal supplementation program.
I'm very big into biochemical individuality.
That's what I was raised on.
I know that everybody is different.
Yet, there are some things that we all agree on.
And I remember back in the 90s even they had a big meeting in washington about diets and they had the ad they had four things represented the atkins diet the dean ornish and his no fat diet and a couple of middle ones in the middle and of course they didn't agree on anything except that they really did there were a couple of things not a lot everybody agreed that we need fiber everybody Everybody agreed that sugar was enemy number one, public enemy number one.
So there are some things that we can kind of take away from that.
And what I've been looking for in the last decade or so, the last five years, is what are those things?
Because everybody, including professionals, because I educate doctors as well.
And I got to tell you, they're just as confused as the public is about nutrition and claims and what works and what doesn't.
and this is you know everything is the latest this and they put it up on instagram and you can't resist buying it and it's all you know and we know 99 of it is marketing so people are very very confused and my goal in the last few years has been like what how can i take my 35 years of experiencing and kind of condense it into some basic principles that everybody can understand that are not complicated that the people at the dinner table when i'm sitting with my family and And I can tell them and they get it.
And that's what I've been looking for.
I made that the topic of my last talk, which was my keynote.
It was interesting the feedback I got because half the people said, Man, we needed to hear this again.
This is the basic stuff.
And the other half said, Well, we know all that stuff.
So when I tell you what I think these core principles are for longevity and health, many people will think, Well, we all know that.
but you really don't because you know you then you need to hear it again and it's not that I may be telling you something you've never heard of or known but I want people to understand the power of these very basic things and I'll start with food so having been a vegetarian and a vegan and a carnivore and having tried all these diets and more importantly having written about all all these diets.
One of my first books in 2004 was Living Low Carb.
I analyzed 38 different diets.
By the time the second edition came out, 16 of them didn't even exist anymore.
So, you know, lots of trendy diets, and we look at how they're different and stuff like that.
And by the time the fourth edition, which is out now, came, I only had four categories of diets.
They were all variations on these things.
And so I'm looking at what can we learn from all this?
having studied diets, what is the most important advice I could give to people about food?
And it's three words.
And it's going to sound like, well, I knew that.
No, you, but you don't understand the power of what I'm about to tell you.
It's three words. Eat real food.
Now, full stop. People will say, well, what's real food?
Is that kale chips?
No, that's not kale chips.
Kale is real food, chips or not?
Well, is it this? If you're not sure of what it is, take it out.
We are talking about food defined as real food in the sense that your great -great -great -great -grandmother, you might have to go back four generations, but your great -grandmother would have recognized this food.
When they did the Blue Zone study, they took a lot of supermarket food and they brought it to the elders in these different areas of the world where there are 100 -year -old people, people, you know, very large numbers of 100 -year -old people living very well, and they showed it to the elders, and you know what they said?
What is this? They didn't even know how to cook it.
Juice comes in a box.
Lunchables come in a package.
You put in a microwave. What is this?
They know how to cook meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts.
So my basic nutrition advice has always been to eat from, I narcissistically call it the Johnny Bowden four food groups food you could hunt fish gather or pluck if you could pluck it from a tree gather it from the ground hunted or fish it in another time it's probably good for you and that is more important than the macro distribution than the carb content than anything you can imagine if you start with real food uh during the pandemic there was a program called whole 30 remember Remember Whole30?
I don't know if it's even still around.
It was a 30 -day commitment to eat nothing but whole food.
They had no restrictions on fat, no restrictions on dairy, no restrictions on anything except, is this a whole food?
Would it spoil if you left it outside on the picnic table?
And people were reporting incredible results with that.
Kelly Brogan, the psychiatrist, has a program where she takes everybody off of medicines and all processed food, and she keeps some on that for a month and you can't believe the results so the only thing wrong with whole 30s they didn't have a follow -up they did the first 30 days and then what to do after but if you can adopt that premise of just eating food that actually is in its most unprocessed state that you're able to get in real life it will make a double digit percentage difference in the in the the quality of your life and and probably in if we all did that it would make a huge difference
in the health of america yeah yeah thank you for leading off with that because as you know better than most food is what makes us up we're literally made from food as i'm looking at you i'm seeing what you've eaten and vice versa and it's that powerful but we're not taught this in our highfalutin educations you know i went to a conventional university i was not taught that when we're studying the cell, we're looking at the food that you've eaten, you know, and we have the power to determine what the makeup of our cells is going to be, what our mitochondria is going to be made of, what our neurons
are going to be made of, what our, what our cardiac cells and epicardial fat, and the list goes on and on.
We get to choose in the body.
This is the thing, you know, we're experiencing, as you know, this as well, epidemics, epidemics, epidemics of chronic diseases, diseases 100 every everything everything that you can name now according to the cdc their most recent report 60 of american adults now have at least one chronic disease 40 have two or more it's worse than that 92 have at least one measure of pre -diabetes now there's more than one to get metabolic it used to be called metabolic syndrome syndrome x now the world health organization calls it cardiometabolic syndrome.
And that always starts with insulin resistance.
And the things that they usually look at to determine if you qualify to be diagnosed with this is waist size, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, insulin resistance, abdominal fat.
92 % of us have one of those measures, and prediabetes underlies every single chronic disease you can think of when we had the pandemic and everyone was looking at comorbidities they're all based on metabolic so they all have insulin resistance at the core of them lung disease kidney disease liver disease hypertension obesity heart disease and alzheimer's all have insulin resistance there and insulin resistance make no mistake is pre -diabetes yeah your doctor says i think you got pre -diabetes he's saying he or she is saying you've got insulin resistance except Except most people don't know what that is.
Yeah. They do know what pre -diabetes is.
It's exceedingly rare to find diabetes, pre -diabetes in real whole food diets as well.
Almost. Very, very rare.
Versus what we have today, which is the majority of our diet is now ultra processed foods.
So you're pointing us to number one, eat real food.
Of the longevity tenets, number one, eat real food.
It's number one for a reason.
Yeah. And you get to choose this.
You get to decide what you're making your body out of.
Yeah. And I got a little, of course, heads up of what is to come.
But you're going to be sharing with us four of these pillars of longevity.
That's the first one.
And the first one, kicking things off, eat real food.
Eat real food. But when I say food and fuel is one of those four components, I mean also supplements, really basically anything that you put into your body.
And I think supplementation is important and good and useful.
I think that, you know, everything's marketed as the next big thing that's going to change your life.
And I think one of my great nutrition teachers said that the two great dangers of nutrition are one, thinking it does nothing and two, thinking it does everything.
It does a lot, doesn't do everything.
You're not going to, you know, um, and people ask me all the time, well, what supplements should I take?
And I'm always thinking most people don't have a high pill tolerance.
I take 58 things a day.
I'm nuts. I mean, I'm two bags of this, so you probably do too.
But most people will take three things.
And when they ask me what those three things should be, I'll say magnesium, vitamin D, and omega -3.
And if you're willing to take a fourth, a good multiple, like life extensions two per day, because it has the right amount of zinc and selenium, which most of them don't.
So with four things a day, you can make a big difference in the lives of most people.
Most people do not get enough vitamin D.
They certainly don't get enough magnesium and they definitely don't get enough omega -3s.
So even though I do have an individualistic way of looking at supplementation, I do think that in terms of return on investment, those three are going to give you a lot.
So will black seed oil, by the way.
I'm very hot on that these days.
There's some really good research coming in on its metabolic effects.
So I like that one as well.
but if you want to move on to the next category I would love to I would love to and it's just the answer is going to be just as simple or the takeaway and so the next category is exercise and movement and you know ever since I wrote my program New You in 22 we've been hammering at this point that exercise and movement are not the same thing exercise is what you do when you go to the gym and you work out for half an hour and that's great and everybody should do that but But metabolically, that doesn't change very much. What changes metabolism overall is when you're constantly in motion.
So we were talking offline.
I mean, I don't sit down much. I walk everywhere.
And I take phone messages walking up and down in my garden.
I have a standing desk.
I probably sit down less than two hours a day.
So that's movement.
Walking to the mailbox.
Walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator.
the daily movement stuff that you do, fidgeting.
This is a source of burning calories.
It's called non -exercise induced thermogenesis, which is burning fat.
So all of that kind of movement stuff really, really does count.
And you don't undo eight hours of sitting and eating junk food by going to the gym and working out 45 minutes.
You just don't. And so I think both exercise and movement are really important.
And now we get to what kind of exercise.
And I'm going to give you the same basic kind of pare it down to its essential.
Just move as much as possible.
Every chance you get.
One of the best hacks I ever heard, I was on a panel with a bunch of other experts, and I wish I could credit the guy who came up with this, but it's very simple.
who said, every so often when you're standing, do 15 air squats, just 15 up and down, walk by the chair.
Here's what happens.
Lowers your blood sugar.
Insulin resistance goes down because you're creating a demand for the insulin to take the blood sugar in, even if it's only 15 seconds long.
Circulation improves.
I mean, that's a 10 second exercise that anybody can do.
We can just get up and do 15 squats while you're talking on the phone.
You can even use the table to hold on to it.
It's not hard to do.
So there's a lot of this where you can just incorporate movement in your daily life.
And of course, exercise.
I do that. I play tennis every day.
But if we were to try to pick one habit that would equal the kind of eat real food habit, and I believe that That if they taught this in every elementary school and every kid learned this and did it, it would change the budget for health care by double digit percentage.
And it would put us up a number of notches.
And that is take a 20 minute walk after dinner.
End of story. Anybody can do that.
It doesn't cost anything.
It doesn't require a 20 minute walk, preferably after dinner every day.
You're going to see a major return on investment.
And that's from somebody who has studied every exercise modality that ever came down the pike.
And if you're looking at, you know, you're advising people in their investments and saying this stock is going to return the walk after dinner, that's your best return on investment.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't do weights.
And what we have learned that has, it is different in the field of movement and exercise, this is relatively new information, is how important muscle really is.
When you and I, well, when I was coming up, muscle was all about looking good at the beach. You know, and I started as a trainer at Equinox.
Everybody just wanted to look really great and, you know, and they thought that's all there was to it.
but we now know, courtesy of Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, whose quote this is, muscle is the organ of longevity.
Let's talk about why.
What's the number one risk for death?
Everybody thinks it's heart disease or breast cancer or one of these.
It's not. It's frailty.
People with muscle don't drop dead.
They fall. People fall and they break a hip.
You look like you're going to fall and break a your hip.
I don't look like I'm going to fall and break your hip.
But somebody with no muscle, whose muscle has pretty much been eaten up by age and not doing anything to maintain it, is by definition more frail.
And as Peter Attia points out in his book, that's your number one risk factor for dying.
So you need to hold on to muscle.
And we did not know this 10 years ago.
We certainly didn't know it when I started 35 years ago.
It was just a vanity thing.
Oh, it's nice to have muscle and you look good in the magazines and things like that.
But nobody talked about it in terms of longevity.
But in fact, without that muscle, there's no longevity.
You're just a very frail old person that's waiting to die.
And there's even a disease, a medical condition called sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle over years, and we can't have that.
So two things came out of that in terms of to -dos.
One is we got to do more weight training.
you got to do some kind of resistance training and two is we need to be eating more protein our protein recommendations from the government big surprise the government got it wrong I can't believe it the 0 .8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight comes out to less than a half a gram of protein per pound it's not enough it just is not enough so you know a lot of protein experts now are talking about 100 grams a day Peter Atiyah says at least 100 Esther Blum who's one of the great experts on menopause and women's health, 100 grams a day for all her clients.
So we need more protein and we need to keep our muscle and we need to take a walk after dinner.
I love this. It's so rich, exercise and movement and understanding there's a distinction.
It's a huge distinction.
There's crossover here as well.
Oh, yeah. And we want to have multiple flavors.
Got a quick break coming up.
We'll be right back.
there's one beverage that rules them all when it comes to longevity in fact a study published just last year in the lancet found that people who regularly drink tea age slower than people who do not now there are so many varieties of tea that come teeming with health benefits and flavor profiles from green tea to ginger tea and more.
And speaking of anti -aging and anti -obesity effects, a study published in the journal Clinical Interventions in Aging took 59 overweight or mildly obese subjects to see if the renowned tea called Pu -erh makes a notable difference in weight loss.
The randomized double -blind placebo -controlled trial gave participants either a placebo or pu -erh for a 20 -week study period.
There were no other interventions noted.
Here's what happened.
The researcher stated quote consumption of pu -erh was associated with statistically significant weight loss when compared to the placebo.
Fat loss was seen for the arms, legs, and the hip and belly region unquote.
The participants who received pu -erh lost more overall all body fat.
And what was especially remarkable was that they maintained more of their muscle mass.
And that is the equation for healthy aging.
The tea that I personally drink most often is Pu -erh, but the only Pu -erh that I drink is from Peak Life.
It's triple toxin screen for purity and made through a patented cold extraction technology that makes it as effective as what was seen in this study.
It's wild harvested and truly the best Pu -erh on earth.
Head over over to peaklife .com forward slash model right now and you'll receive up to 20 off plus some limited time free bonuses like an electric frother to mix your favorite beverages and you get to try peak teas risk -free with their 30 -day money back guarantee you'll either love it or you'll receive a full refund go to peaklife .com for slash model right now that's p -i -q -u -e -l -i -f -e .com for slash model and get hooked up with all of this good stuff that's peaklife .com for slash model and now back to the show since i have you here since i have okay sensei here i want to ask you about this because hearing
about moving more it sounds good people get inspired like i i don't want to move more but why would they everything is so convenient now johnny when when you're coming up you don't got doordash you don't got uh you don't got the dating apps like you had to go out in the streets to find your lady all right there's so much convenience all right um even the the just Just the procurement of our food.
Everything is so simple.
Why on earth would we be moving more if we don't have to?
Maybe because we want to live longer and better.
I don't know. Just a wild guess.
How do we do it if it's so convenient?
If I'm comfy, why am I going to get up and move around like Johnny said?
I think we have to back up a step and talk about the psychology of this.
there's always a trade -off between convenience and quality every time you make food more convenient you probably make it less qualitatively good you put it in a package you get it in the microwave you can have it in two seconds and it's not quite the same so there's always this trade -off and it really requires a little bit of looking in the mirror and deciding what's of importance to you in your life, and DoorDash is very convenient.
It's also expensive, and it also sucks because you're basically getting fast food that's prepared, and even if it comes from a great restaurant, they throw it together.
It looks like fast food.
It is experienced as fast food.
You're eating it out of a container while you're watching TV.
I mean, all of these things that could be really nourishing, not just the food but the experience of eating and the community of eating, they're all gone.
You're just eating out of containers and you're paying a ton of money for it.
So the convenience thing is always going to be this shiny thing that grabs at you and that, you know, that we're attracted to.
Of course, we'd like to have everything just delivered to us, but what is the cost of that?
And I think that people have to actually look seriously at that.
And it's very difficult in a society that so values immediate gratification.
You want it now, and we want it.
We don't really care if it's that good.
We just want it. And maybe it requires a little bit of the stuff I'm going to talk about in the next two categories of like really some self -examination about what do you really care about?
And what are you willing to take a stand on for yourself?
What are some things that can be triggers for us to move?
Do you have a pet, Johnny do I have a pet yeah I've had I have a dog I don't consider him a pet but he's my yes you're you're a companion do you have a furry companion I have a furry companion I do indeed I've always I've had them for 30 years what I've had oh not the same ones okay no we live with dogs okay I was about to say what what do you know that we don't know no no no we We have two dogs she had.
So having a pet, that's going to be an automatic movement prompt.
It's one of the big advantages.
It's not the only one.
There are many, many more to having an animal in your life or more, but that's definitely one of them.
Okay. Are there any other things?
I'm wondering what gets Johnny up and moving.
Like what is the catalyst?
Not just the mindset piece, but practical things.
I have to force myself sometimes to do it.
Come on. But I believe that we treat our own word the way we treat the word of our friends.
So if we had a friend who constantly said, I'll meet you at 1 .30, and they constantly come late.
It's either the dog ate my homework, or there was traffic, or I got a flat tire or something.
After a while, you stop believing them.
You just don't think, oh yeah, I'll definitely be there on time.
I'm definitely going to be there.
And you know, they're not right.
I mean, because you basically make predictions based on the past. Well, we do the same thing with ourselves.
If you hear yourself saying today's the day I'm going to stop smoking enough times and it doesn't happen, you stop believing your own word. So in my coaching, when I work with clients, one of the first things I work on is rehabilitating their word so that they get to believe that if I say it, it is going to happen.
If I say it, it's law in the universe.
And I used to start very, very simply with that.
I'd have clients who were terrified of the gym.
I'm thinking of one celebrity client whose name you would know in a minute and whose songs we all sing.
And this person really was in the early early 90s.
You go into Equinox, everybody's in spandex. Everybody's working out at the meat market.
And of course it's intimidating as shit.
So what I used to do with her, I pick her up at her house.
We walk into the gym.
We'd have a smoothie and we'd walk out.
We'd come back the next day.
We'd walk around for a minute and we'd walk out.
And I literally did behavioral modification, systematic desensitization.
She'd stand on the treadmill.
we'd talk for a couple minutes out and she would get used to doing this, right?
We have to do that with our own words.
So you start with things you can't fuck up.
I will have a glass of water when I wake up.
You put the damn water on the bedpost and you drink it.
There's no ifs, ands, or buts, right?
What happens is your mind is very digital.
It's not analog. It's not, well, And under these conditions, it only knows success, failure, yes, no. So if you set the goal, I'm going to drink that glass of water, that gets coded as a win.
And what I was doing with the client that I was bringing is I'm coding wins.
Win, success, win. So when people came into the gym and they had this Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, the encyclopedia of bodybuilding, they were going to do this two -hour workout and they would get to 20 minutes and they'd leave. That's always as coded as a failure.
And people don't do what they fail at.
They don't like doing what they fail at.
They don't like failing.
But if instead of setting that goal, you set a two -minute on the treadmill goal, you may think, your conscious mind may think, well, that doesn't count.
Yeah, it does count because what you're doing is you're tricking your mind into saying, he does what he says he's going to do.
I do what I say I'm going to do.
And you take a stand that is independent of how you feel in the moment.
It's not about your feelings.
It's about, do you take a stand?
I've dated single women with kids.
And I notice how they get up at ridiculous hours, get the kids ready, drive them to school.
And you know what? They do it whether they feel like it or not.
they do it because they said they were going to do it and because that's their agreement that they made with themselves and the universe and the kid that's how we have to treat ourselves you do it not because you feel like it, you're not going to feel like it I don't feel like going for walks every day with the dog but come walk time I do it because I took I'm taking a stand for myself that's how you deal with the convenience thing that's always pulling at you Amazing, amazing.
You're getting to the heart of this matter.
And by the way, you already mentioned a couple of prompts, too, which is after dinner.
That's the prompt. Oh, yeah.
Taking your animal companion, your furry companion, for their walks.
Phone rings, get on the phone, start moving around while you're taking your calls.
Oh, yeah, I don't know why anybody sits and has phone conversations.
Walk around your kitchen.
And mine is smaller than your room right here, and you can walk in circles.
I do it. Yeah, yeah, I love this.
All right, so we've got one and two.
covered. And we've got three and four coming.
Yeah, let's get to number three.
So number three, I would call as a general bucket, relaxation and recovery.
And that would include sleep.
And I don't have to tell you, you were one of the experts in the field on sleep.
You wrote a book on it.
It's a great book, by the way.
So let's start with sleep before we go into the larger category.
So it's sort of like the same as exercise and movement.
It's like sleep is the thing we know like exercise but there's this larger category of relaxation and recovery so i absolutely believe that sleep is incredibly underappreciated as an energy producer as a mind modulator optimism you know when people sleep on things it looks better in the morning this is our language reflects how important that is and we could talk you know more than i do about it all the the neurochemical things that happen during sleep and all the biochemicals that are replaced and all the stuff that happens with, you know, with the cleanup crew, the lymphatic system or glyphatic
system, all that stuff that happens in the brain when you clean out and take out the trash autophagy.
So there's a million things that happen during sleep that are incredibly important for energy, for outlook, for weight loss.
I mean, what happened?
Here's the connection to weight loss because when I tell people about sleep, they usually go, their eyes glaze over.
Yeah, Yeah, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, it makes you fat.
And they go, oh, how does that work?
Well, here's how it works.
When you're not sleeping enough, your body sees that as a stressor.
So it releases cortisol.
And cortisol, as we now know, because it's all over TikTok, cortisol puts on cortisol belly.
It gives you cortisol face.
It gives you cortisol butt.
So this is a hormone that is very, very important for our survival.
But when it's on all the time, it's our number one stress hormone.
It disrupts our sleep.
So we see, the body sees that lack of sleep as a stressor, releases cortisol.
One of cortisol's job is to put on belly fat.
That's why they call it cortisol belly or stress fat.
So we don't want that, right?
We want to wake up refreshed.
We want to get enough restful sleep, restorative sleep.
If you use any of the wearables like the Ori, you know how much is deep sleep, how much is REM sleep.
Deep sleep is associated, if you don't have enough deep sleep, it's associated with a higher risk for Alzheimer's.
So sleep impacts your weight, your optimism, your joy, your engagement in the world.
It's so important. But bigger than even sleep is the whole category of relaxation and recovery.
Now, you know from as a trainer that you don't build your biceps when you're doing bicep curls.
You build them when they're building back up.
You actually tear down the muscle when you do that.
There's some little micro tears in the actin and myosin filaments.
And they get repaired through nourishment and recovery time.
So recovery is where it's at. Now I'm going to tell you a story you're going to love.
There's a Harvard, I think he's at one of the big hospitals in the Northeast, Jeffrey Rediger.
And he is an MD with a master's in divinity from Princeton.
it. So he's not a guy who doesn't understand the spiritual element of stuff, but he's a hardcore scientist. And he had people saying to him, you know, Jeffrey, you ought to investigate faith healing.
They go down to Brazil.
They meet some girl and they throw away their crutches.
And he said, are you kidding me?
A, it's all bullshit.
B, even if it wasn't bullshit, I could never get get a grant proposal approved for this.
They would think I'm a quack.
They would laugh me out of my position as chief psychiatrist at McLean, I think he was at. I'm not even interested in investigating this.
And he had an oncology nurse who had been with him for 20 years, who was very smart.
And she said, Jeffrey, I know how you feel about this, but I think there's something there you should investigate.
Long story short, he gets a grant, takes a year and decides to investigate gate, quote unquote, miraculous healing, spontaneous remission.
And he goes all over the place.
And he comes back. He wrote a book about this.
It's called Cured, by the way, highly recommended, but I'm going to give you the synopsis so you don't have to read it.
Comes back and he says, I was right.
98 % of it's total bullshit, but 2 % is not.
And he found a few cases where they they had actually documented, they had taken pictures, they had really, really a good chain of evidence.
They had the pictures of the tumor and six months later, there ain't no tumor and the doctors are going, we don't know what the f*** happened, is basically what they say.
He said, now, we study very unusual people in other fields.
We study Tony Robbins and Bill Gates and Michael Jordan and all these high -performing people, not because we can do that, but we might be able to learn something from them.
Maybe we should take a a look at these very, very few people who legitimately made a tumor disappear.
And this is what he found.
In every case that was legitimate, these people had changed their lives.
Now, some of them were barely literate.
Some of them were PhDs.
It had nothing to do with intelligence or even knowing that they were doing this.
But when they thought they had six months to live, a lot of them quit their jobs.
A lot of them dumped toxic relationships.
A lot of them moved to places like Brazil or the Caribbean where they're in the sun and the whole life is different.
And what he hypothesized from his very thorough study, which resulted in a very thick book, was that these people had learned to start spending time in the parasympathetic nervous system mode.
So we have two divisions of the nervous system in the autonomic nervous system.
And one is called sympathetic.
One's called parasympathetic.
And sympathetic is fight or flight.
And parasympathetic is rest and digest. We spend 90 % of our time in sympathetic nervous system mode.
We got to get to this.
We got to do this report.
We got to take the kid to soccer.
We got to do all this stuff.
And that is very, very stressful.
Cortisol levels are on the ceiling.
This breaks down everything.
This is so bad for our bodies.
On the other hand, rest and digest is where all the good shit happens.
This is where healing takes place.
This is where energy is produced in the mitochondria.
This is where detoxification takes place in parasympathetic mode.
What these people had done unconsciously was they had allowed And then they allowed themselves to be in that mode.
And what Jeffrey Rediger hypothesized was, when you're constantly in cortisol mode, in sympathetic mode, your immune system is depressed.
That's why marathoners get sick the week after their event, every single time.
Because their immune system is depressed.
And he hypothesized that once these people started spending time in that relaxation mode, their immune system woke up.
And it said, wait a minute, I could have gotten rid of this thing.
And now it's like you just woke up the police, you know, and now they're doing a cleanup thing in the neighborhood.
hood so this importance of spending some more time in a relaxed state in a loving kind not too frenetic not you know crazy kind of state is so important and you ask me like what do i do i have a special hour i do i try to do every day 20 minutes with the dog in the walk 20 minutes of restorative yoga.
By the way, the greatest thing you could do for it is literally, it isn't about stretching.
It isn't about losing weight.
It is totally about how do I get into parasympathetic mode for an hour.
So I'll do 20 minutes of that and then I do meditation.
That's my power hour for relaxation and recovery.
But folks, this is one of the pillars.
If you're not sleeping well, you don't have energy, your mind is constantly with brain fog and all and you're running on on empty and trying to get stuff done waiting to exhale take a breath and and spend some time in that beautiful relaxed rest and digest mode and and i think that that's one of the keys yeah yeah in this conversation about extending your lifespan to think about sleep in this in this equation is revolutionary at this time in human history you talked about it you've talked talk for years now but with that being said you know hearing this from you you know because part one of the mantras
in this modern culture is i'll sleep when i'm dead and the truth is that's idiot 80s that's the walls what is the wolf of wall street that's the coke addicts that are on on bare stones and stuff like that i'll sleep when i'm dead i'm gonna yeah you'll be dead much sooner than you thought exactly that's what i was gonna say yeah that's the thing you know again it's it's to associate with this in a very illogical, that's the thing, this is very logical.
And so this isn't something that we evolved out of.
We need this in order for us to get into that anabolic state, the rest and recovery, and also bringing that outside as well, not just the time we're spending on our mattress at night, but also having those practices to be able to calm down and switch to that parasympathetic so that we can just get some more time healing.
Absolutely. You can do it with breathing exercises, things that you can do at your desk and stuff like that.
There's so many different little hacks you can do with that.
But pay attention to that part of it.
It's just so critically important.
It really is. Well, we're at number four now.
Okay. And number four really does interact with the one we're talking about, with the relaxation and recovery.
And I think the best way I can enter it, I think that number four, what we're going to talk about now, which is communication, connection and relationships, is probably the most important of the four.
And I'll give you my reasoning behind that.
it? So we all know about Dave Asprey, Peter Atiyah, all these people who are going to live to 180.
Dave says he's going to do 180.
Peter wants to live to over 100.
And Peter Atiyah in his book talks about the centenarian Olympics.
How do we get to be a kick -ass 100 -year -old?
What is a kick -ass 100 -year -old?
He said, well, let's be realistic.
A kick -ass 100 -year -old could walk to the corner with a farmer's carry carrying two 10 -pound bags.
He could put a small suitcase in the overhead compartment.
He can walk unassisted.
He could take groceries from the back of his trunk and take it into the house.
It's a kick -ass 100 -year -old, right?
Somebody fully functioning.
He's got, how can we be that?
And Peter Attia, you know, made a spreadsheet.
He's very brilliant and he's very smart and he's a mathematician.
and you know, so he's a little obsessive.
So you got to do this much balance, this much stability, this much weight training, then you got to do, you know, do the walking where it puts the backpacks and do that much. And it's very complicated.
So some researchers recently said, this is a great goal.
We want to live to 100, want to be a kick -ass 100 -year -old.
Why don't we go meet some kick -ass 100 -year -olds and ask them what the hell they do?
Let's reverse engineer it.
Let's go find find a community where there's a lot of 100 -year -olds and watch them and see what lessons we can learn so they go to Sardinia one of the five blue zones and um if you've never seen Sardinia if you watched White Lotus the last season it was shot in Sardinia and you can look and see there's nothing but hills you cannot walk out of your house to buy milk without walking 10 ,000 steps it's just so they went to Sardinia where all these 100 -year -old men live the largest largest population of healthy hundred -year -old men, and they wanted to see what lessons we could learn.
And they came up with three.
And they're a little tongue -in -cheek.
You have to adapt them to modern society.
But these are the three lessons, and it will wrap up everything I'm talking about here.
So the first thing that they noticed is that it would be a really good Good idea to live where there's lots of stairs.
I mean, there's stairs.
You see the hills. Just watch White Lotus or look at some thing.
It's stairs everywhere.
Now, obviously, we're not going to all move, but the lesson that we can extract like that is walk everywhere.
Walk all the time. These guys are always in motion.
They're not taking the subway.
They're just always in motion.
Second thing that they learned is what do these guys do all day?
Well, they're mostly shepherds in Italy.
in Sardinia. What are they doing?
They're going up in the gorgeous Italian Alps in the hills, where, by the way, subconsciously, we're getting information from nature all the time.
That's why there's such a thing as ecotherapy, the benefits of being outdoors, of watching greenery.
That's part of the thing about walking 20 minutes.
It's not just about burning calories.
It's about all of that information that you get subconsciously about balance and harmony and nature and eternity, all that good stuff, right?
You're getting that.
So they're out there in the hills and they're spending their time with one of the sweetest and most docile animals on the planet, sheep.
Think about what's going on in their brain and their neurochemistry compared to, say, an EMT worker or a cop or someone who sees the dregs of society doing violent things and that's in their mind all day.
And these guys are like, they're in heaven.
and they're idyllic, beautiful pastures with gorgeous little animals that are sweet.
So the second lesson was spend as much time as you can around docile animals.
Well, you extrapolate that.
It's like be around things that bring out your kindness and your softness and your generosity and your appreciation of nature because what that does to your neurochemistry has major effects on your physiology, major.
What you think about, what you give psychic energy to has an enormous effect on the rest of you.
And the third lesson, and this was like in real estate where they say the three most important things in real estate is location, location, and then also location.
This was like that.
This was so far above the other two that it just left them in the dust. And the number one longevity tip that they learned from the people in Sardinia was, make your family and your friends your number one priority.
Full stop. And this has been shown in every major study, including the famous happiness study that's going on right now at Harvard. It's in its fourth generation.
It started in 1936.
They've been following people for, I don't know, as many years as from 1936 to now to see what they do and how they live.
And they've been tracking happiness and health and vitality.
and without a doubt the number one predictor of that is relationships connection and community and when i do private coaching now a little sort of an artist in practice one or two clients a week we go over their cholesterol tests and whatever else they want to talk about it's basically a strategy session for life but it starts with nutrition and cholesterol and always winders winds up being other stuff as well as you and i know and one of the things i i leave them with is i often they come in very confused the cholesterol tests are all over the place the doctors and how to interpret it i don't
know what they're not getting the right test they don't even know what april b is and you know we talk about all that stuff and those are risk factors but what i say to them this is my message to every client is that your health is like a bank account and you You will make some withdrawals and you will make some deposits.
And the trick is the same as with a bank account.
You want to make more deposits and you make withdrawals.
So some of these cholesterol tests are withdrawals.
Sometimes you have a high LP little a.
You can't do it. It's genetic.
It's withdrawal. Or you do an all -nighter and that's really bad on your metabolism.
It's a withdrawal. straw but many of my clients many probably the people we we know in common are making this huge deposit and they don't even realize it and they don't even appreciate it so i always ask them so what's your family life oh then they light up then all the stuff goes away oh my kids you can't believe we're going rowing this weekend we we try to go to cabo every year and i love my wife once Once they start talking, I said, okay, that is a bigger deposit in your health bank account than any of these risk factors that we're talking about.
And that doesn't mean we shouldn't fix them.
We don't want to ignore a high count on your APOB or high particle test or any of the other cholesterol red flags or any liver.
We don't want to ignore them.
But dude, look at the context.
Look at the forest. You've got the big one handled.
And people, sometimes I've seen them cry in sessions because they never thought of it that way, that they're doing this wonderful thing.
I mean, you do it every day.
You have a wonderful family.
I have a wonderful family.
We were very lucky that way.
But those things, we can't discount how we get so much in the details of what kind of exercise you're doing, what supplements you're taking.
What's your connection to your community in your life, in your life, in your relationships, and the people that you love and that love you?
because, dude, that's where it's at. Barbara Bush, who was married to the original George Bush, who nobody even remembers her, but W's father was president for four years, and he had a wife, Barbara Bush, and she gave a very famous commencement speech at Wellesley University.
It's an all -women's college.
Very famous speech in which she said, not one of you will ever, on your deathbed, ever regret not making a certain deal or not putting a certain business forward. What you will regret is not spending enough time with the people that you love, with your family and friends.
That's true that, man.
That's really where it's at. People ask me on podcasts, what is your secret?
My tennis group. We've got a group of 20 people who play tennis.
We're on a group text.
We talk to each other every day.
We have lunch with each other.
We find out what the others are doing.
We make jokes. Folks, we play in the park and there's usually more of us than there are courts so we sit on the side and we talk and we kibitz.
That's the secret, man.
That is the secret.
And you may not play tennis so you find your tennis group.
Find your equivalent of that because it makes life...
There's no point to longevity if you're not having a great life.
Yeah, that's one of the big takeaways today.
Find your tennis group.
group. It might be roller skating, it might be hula hooping, it might be art.
Bridge. I don't care what it is.
Find a group of people you can connect with and relate to.
And by the way, when they talk about this, they talk about something called soft connections, because some people might say, I don't have any friends.
You know, my friends are all dead.
Soft connections are the checkout person at Whole Foods that you say hi to every day.
The woman that just got her nails done they call nice nails the little interactions that you have with people that are very casual they count when they're figuring out like what is the effect of social connections they count i met a guy who was at ralph's checkout guy and something told me he doesn't look like a ralph's employee i mean he's not like he's just helping everybody and he said oh i'm a volunteer and somebody else you volunteer to work at this at a job that they pay for and i'm thinking that's the smartest guy i've met in a long time he's retired he has nothing to do he comes in here
and he helps people and he connects with them and he's just added 10 years to his life who's the stupid one yeah man i i love i love sitting with you truly like this is this social bank account piece, you know, this is invaluable.
And just in closing, just to encapsulate that last point, you know, for those people that are like, I understand the value of that, but I don't have it.
It is moments like this because I didn't have mentors in my physical world.
Right. And so I started to learn from people virtually and attending events and just getting outside of my normal environment where I might have felt isolated you know and just those little steps like you said those little small interactions adding to that social bank account and so now to be able to sit here with you to have you in the room with me this is a minor miracle truly in my life and for all of us just I think the the number one catalyst is our intention about it first and foremost and find your tennis group all right they exist i love that they they exist or if the group isn't already
put together put them together put them together yeah i mean come on yeah well my guy is there a best place for people to follow you instagram is good instagram what's your handle at johnny boden no h and johnny j -o -n -n -y why that's right i'm doing um mainly now i'm doing consulting with natural products companies and this art artisan coaching which i just love doing i used to i when i was doing nutrition counseling in the 90s i hated it because food diaries i mean how boring are food diaries and everybody who was doing that that's any good in my opinion has gone on and realized it ain't about food
diaries it's about your life it's about the stand you take for the things you believe like like what we were talking about.
It's about the glass ceilings that you need to break through, some of which are of your own making.
So it's about your life.
It's not about just the foods you're eating.
I hated doing that.
And I stopped doing it.
And a couple of years ago, I had a lot of requests for private coaching.
And I decided if I do it the way I like to do it, it's not going to be a drag.
And so now I do it the way I like to do.
I do one session. I'm not looking for a client base.
I like to do a couple of people a week and that's it.
And we literally look at their your life and we often start with cholesterol because that's what they i'm known for so they come to me with that but it's always bigger than that it's always the other factors in the stress alone you know which can make a difference so i love doing that kind of coaching and you can find me online and book a time with me if you like i'll get you here amazing so we got the social media so is there a website of johnnybodin .com j -o -n -n -y perfect perfect well again Again, this has been a highlight of my week.
And I mean that. You say that to all the guests.
Man, you're something else.
And it is just as soon as you step in the room, you make things different in the most amazing way.
You can't help it. You can't shake it off of you.
I was telling you before we got started, you have the glow.
And I'm grateful for you.
I appreciate you so much. I'm grateful for you.
Thank you. The one and only Dr. Johnny Bowden.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.
day. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this.
You already know what to do.
If you enjoyed this conversation, share the conversation.
Engage in these conversations with the people that you care about.
Of course, you could send this episode to people that you care about and share this information, share this knowledge, share the inspiration.
Johnny truly is an inspirational force in my life and the lives of many others.
And he's somebody to follow.
Again, pop over to Instagram.
You can follow him there.
He's at Johnny Boden.
That's J -O -N -N -Y, B -O -W -D -E -N.
You can get more from him there.
Of course, you can check out his website.
Again, I appreciate you so much for tuning into this episode.
It really does mean a lot where you're investing your time and energy.
But most importantly, what are we going to do about it?
What are we going to take from today and to put into our lives in a practical way?
And that's what it's all about, taking knowledge and turning it into real power by putting it into action.
We've got some amazing masterclasses and world -class guests coming your way very, very soon.
soon. So make sure to stay tuned.
Take care. Have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon.
And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow .com.
That's where you can find all of the show notes.
You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode.
And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well.
And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome.
And I appreciate that so much and take care.
I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great Great content to help you transform your life.
Thanks for tuning in.
