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Welcome to the Health is a Skill podcast with host Todd Vande Hei! Todd is the CEO of Stark, which exists to change the future of health and fitness in the communities they serve. For the last 15 years, Todd has been on a journey to discover what it means to be in a state of peak health. After suffering from a series of seizures and being diagnosed with high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation in his early 30’s, Todd decided it was time to make a change. Those changes fell into one of four categories: lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, and stress management. But the biggest thing Todd learned through it all? Health is a skill. You’re not born with it, like some would like you to believe, and it isn’t acquired by simply buying another product or starting that new diet. Health is something you can create for yourself, and over time it is possible to attain peak health.
In my opinion, health isn't a goal.
It's a skill.
One skill to be layered on top of another.
And then over time it really becomes, I would say, effortless.
Welcome to Health is a skill.
A podcast about the comprehensive approach to mastering your health.
I'm Todd VandeHei, CEO of Starke.
And it's been my work, my pleasure, my business for the last 15 years to explore what it means to be in a state of peak health.
And I've failed a lot, but I've, over time, surrounded myself with a team of experts who have guided me and fine tuned my approach to health.
And at some point a couple of years ago, I had an epiphany.
That health really isn't a goal but a skill.
And that's why I've started this podcast.
And in today's podcast I'm going to tell you all about what the wheel of health is.
But first, I want to tell you about some amazing content that I have for you that will allow you to see your health the way I do.
And it's taking about 15 years to really fully develop this concept.
But essentially, it's a tool that you can use to become introspective about your health.
And I also share the tools that you need in order to measure how you're actually doing in terms of overall health.
So it's exceptionally effective.
It's really easy to understand.
It's very detailed.
So hopefully you don't become overwhelmed with the level of detail.
But if you go to pod todd.com.
That's pod Todd is TODAY.com pod todd.com.
You'll have access to a video where I explain all of this.
And you'll also have access to a PDF that you can download and take a look at all the forms of measure.
So let's get started.
The overarching issue with with health is that.
It just seems to be so complex.
It's confusing.
You don't really know what to do.
Even if you talk to your doctor, you've probably recognized at some point in your life that maybe he or she doesn't really know much about health either.
They know about how to screen you for sickness, but do they really know about health?
That's not been my experience.
And so what do you do about it and why is it so difficult?
The fact of the matter is, our bodies are so complex.
I mean, when I look up at the night sky, when it's really, really dark and I and I contemplate the complexity and the vastness of our universe, I'm reminded that our bodies are similar.
It's not that complex, but man, it's not that far off either.
I mean, simply to speak with you about this or anything, not just this topic, but anything.
There are literally trillions of reactions and interactions happening every single minute in you and me.
You just to listen to this, me to speak it to you.
On a related note, I love babies.
I know this sounds kind of weird.
I love kids in general.
I'm a father.
I'm a father of three.
But having spent almost 15 years exploring what it means to be in a state of peak health and still feeling confused, I look differently at them now.
They're just so.
They're so beautiful.
They're those reactions and interactions that they have worked nearly perfectly in kids, hopefully.
I mean, they're just developing so quickly.
I mean, you can see it in how they move their level of delight in simple things like, like the first time they taste ice cream.
Have you seen this?
They just open up the way they sleep, just like they look like angels.
It's just so beautiful the way they breathe into their bellies.
You can see a five year old slip into a sympathetic state when he or she is afraid of something, immediately breathing into their chest as they panic, and they shed a few tears, and how they jump up and down when they're excited, and how well their brains work, how how sharp they are.
It's really, as I said, I think it's a thing of beauty.
They're in this beautiful state where lifestyle, lack of exercise, poor nutrition in some cases and stress.
They haven't yet taken a toll on their bodies yet like they have with ours.
It's a flawless orchestra of biochemistry that includes basic things that we take for granted, like breathing and the fact that, your heart beats 40 to 100 times in a minute, pumping blood throughout your body to distribute nutrients, including oxygen, and remove waste and your cellular metabolism.
I mean, trillions of cells in your body perform these biochemical reactions that continuously, involve the production of energy.
You know, the fact that I can move around and speak to you waste removal, protein synthesis and all sorts of other cellular functions, neural activity.
The nervous system sends countless nerve impulses every minute facilitating movement like this sensation thought, and homeostatic regulation, the digestive process.
I mean, even when I'm not eating, like, I just ate lunch a little while ago, my digestive system is still processing food, still absorbing, nutrients, and still moving waste through my gut.
Detoxification and filtration.
The liver processes blood to remove toxins and other waste products, and my kidneys filter several liters of blood just to produce urine.
Hormonal regulations.
The endocrine system releases hormones constantly that regulate various body functions like metabolism, growth, my mood, your mood, reproductive processes, immune responses.
Immune system is constantly monitoring like police officers and responding to potential threats such as pathogens and abnormal cells.
Tissue repair and growth.
The body constantly repairs and replaces cells in and tissues from skin cells to blood cells, and many more.
Thermoregulation.
The body regulates its temperature through various mechanisms such as sweating and shivering, depending on the external and internal conditions.
And what about the microbiome?
I mean, this is an area of of it's fairly new science, something we've been studying for a long time, but I think most medical practitioners would agree that that our microbiome is a giant question mark in terms of how much we actually understand trillions of microorganisms, which, I mean, it's more than apples market cap, including bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes.
These microbes are critical in our digestion, our immune system, and even our mental health.
We're essentially walking ecosystem rather than a singular organism.
Like this is not just hard.
I'm mostly tied on a whole bunch of other things, and these microorganisms actually outnumber my own cells.
So like, all the tide cells are outnumbered by the organisms that I'm kind of carrying along with.
Me to help do the job of speaking to you.
So both descriptions, they underscore the profound interdependence between humans and their micro microbial companions, illustrating that our health and functioning are are just deeply intertwined with these microscopic inhabitants.
I mean, that's all going on in your body right now and in mine right now.
And it's why health is so complex.
Because we just get we get so deep into the weeds with what is flipping the switches on and off that we want in terms of outcomes, but landing in a state of peak health, which is what I would suggest you should be considering.
Get you back to that childlike state that is so beautiful, that beautiful orchestra that I, that I described, or even a healthy young adult where almost everything is working really, really well.
A sidebar so that that state of peak health.
Let me just talk a little bit about what that means.
I look at health very differently, often proclaiming that you you have no idea what health actually is.
And when I say that, I usually get kind of a blank stare.
And sometimes I don't have the time to explain it fully.
But I have you right now.
So I'm going to explain to you and your doctor you're either sick or you're healthy.
She screens you for sickness, and if you're not, let's say pre-diabetic.
You have or you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or the rest of the standard screenings for a state of sickness.
If you don't have those things, you are healthy, right?
No, I mean, not in my opinion.
In my opinion, health is what you had when you were a kid.
Unless you were a kid, which happens sometimes.
Very sad.
But by that I mean you didn't.
You didn't really feel your body unless you wanted to go, like, run and play hard or you fell out a tree while climbing.
Or like me, you had to get lots of stitches all the time.
Or you have the flu at those points in time.
You feel your body when you're young and healthy, otherwise you don't.
And those times of of sickness or injury as a child, they're they're fleeting.
They're they're fleeting periods.
They're not permanent, which is what you experience as you age.
So that's the target to get back to that point.
So the way I see health is that you're either in a state of sickness ranging from extreme chronic or acute illness, like like cancer on a continuum.
Think of a, a line graph with extreme illness on my far left.
So over here to chronic illness, which is just a little bit to the right of that, gradually moving to a state of, of not being sick, which is kind of like on the middle of that line graph.
And that's where your your doctor views you as healthy.
And but then all the way to the right, there's this in this giant section that leads to a state of peak health.
All on, all the way in on the far right.
And everything in the middle of that is better than what your doctor tells you is is healthy.
Which is frustrating to me because there's so much beautiful opportunity here to be a better version of yourself.
And when you're in that state of peak health, illnesses and injuries are fleeting and you just bounce back way more quickly.
So after 15 years of following whatever crazy lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress intervention thrown at me, I'm just I'm shocked at how responsive and how powerful our bodies truly are in attempting to get back to homeostasis.
If we let it get back there again.
The target is what I would call a state of peak health.
How we let our bodies do its job is what I would describe as the skill of health, acute and severe illness.
I would describe as the the culmination and cumulative impact of the complete absence of understanding and the complete absence of lack of action to to pursue health.
I hope I'm making sense to you, and I empathize with you because I've been there too.
You sort of you're sort of a victim of poor advice and direction from a medical system that's really it's just not set up to help you become healthy, but but rather just set up for screening for illness.
And when you're there, treat the illness usually with a drug or a surgery, which is very expensive but beneficial to a whole bunch of people inside of the medical system.
Not that I'm thinking that it's a conspiracy.
I just think that the way it's structured is a is born out of capitalism, and this is what we get.
But, you and I, as Americans, we've been trained to think that that's all okay, which in my opinion, is something that you you need to unlearn it because you can't be okay with that whole process.
You know, where it leads to.
I see it in my parents.
I experience it, in my own health journey.
It leads to a dead end or a gradual, slow, painful decline in your health.
And when I say pain, I mean, it actually hurts to get older and it hurts to be unhealthy.
So the reason I know all this and I can relate to you is because by my early 30s, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation.
I had a a cluster of grand mal seizures on a golf course in Austin, Texas.
I was traveling for business a lot.
I was drinking a lot at night with with clients, entertaining their customers, entertaining them.
I worked very, very hard and I had what I would consider a normal lifestyle, with the exception of probably working harder than most people.
I was up at six, out the door at 630 at Starbucks by 645, out the door by seven with a ground grind mocha and a bagel and cream cheese, one in each hand.
And after work I'd be nodding asleep by ten, making making it to lunch by noon.
I needed a sandwich and have some chips and some iced tea, and I'd be falling asleep by 230.
And if I wasn't falling asleep, I was the president of a manufacturing company.
I'd be at, you know, in a in an office, maybe in a meeting, in our in our conference room.
There were people falling asleep in front of me, listening to me speak to them.
And by 230, generally because I had problems with headaches, a headache would crop up.
I'd taken Excedrin, which had some caffeine in it.
I'd get home from work by six.
I'd have a glass of wine with my wife as she made dinner for the family.
I would take Tylenol by about 8:00 to make sure that I wouldn't wake up with a headache, which would be ordinarily, what would happen the next day.
That was normal.
I was happy, I mean, it felt like I had a good life and my family was safe, and I was able to, you know, care for them financially.
My doctors told me I was perfectly healthy, except for the seizures and the a-fib.
When I look back, it just sounds so ridiculous to me.
I was on a beta blocker for the latter, for the AFib, and was told I would be on that drug for the rest of my life.
I mean, it was told to me in a very, I would say, matter of fact way, like it was really no big deal.
And that was helpful from a bedside manner standpoint.
I was like, well, it really hurt that I'm sort of grieving the loss of my childhood.
That's kind of what it felt like as I became an adult and moved into health problems.
And I remember at one point I picked up my son, this is right around the same time.
I was about 32 years old.
He was sleeping.
He was a baby.
He's in his crib.
He's 24 now.
Standing by the side of his crib in the middle of the night, and he was crying.
So I picked him up and I held him up against my chest.
And I realized that his little two little legs were straddling my belly.
I had a belly, and the thought that went through my head was, I'm getting older.
It's just part of it.
Part of life.
I was 32.
Bullshit.
I would say that to my younger self right now.
That is absolute, total bullshit.
And previous to that, I also had difficulty previous to my early 30s, difficulty getting into deep sleep.
Starting as early as I can remember, I had chronic headaches through my childhood, which intensified to migraines as I got older.
I had a low back injury in college, all of which plagued me, all the way through my mid 40s when I started Starck.
Meaning I would bend over, pick up a sock, throw my back out.
I had to travel with heating pads to help with the recovery.
I had GP's and cardiologists.
I still have those neurologist and ear, nose and throat specialists who, through much of the testing after my seizures, by the way, told me that that one nostril was 100% blocked and the other one was 95% blocked.
I mean, I don't know how many check ups I had where GPS looked up my nose and didn't say anything about the fact that my nose didn't work.
That's kind of crazy.
I mean, I think breathing through your nose, as we know today.
Sidebar.
Great book called Breath by James Nester, I believe is the author.
You'll learn all about how why breathing through that your left nostril is so important in getting into a parasympathetic state.
And I couldn't.
I mean, my left nostril was 100% blocked.
So not a not a single one of those highly educated MDS were able to help me in any way or even discussed the potential underlying underlying issues, which at this point I believe were completely connected to diet, sleep, stress management, gut health, and certainly, well thought out exercise.
I mean, I believe that because much of that burden, including the brain fog that came along with it and the fatigue that came along with it, and they kind of faded into the distance within about a month.
When I think back of that on that, it just makes me more angry and more excited angry about my experiences.
I'm excited for you because this really is a story of hope.
Much of that stuff, by the way, I would put, I put about 80% of that and just changing my diet.
It was astounding what happened.
What did happen with my relationship with all of those doctors is that they put me on a drug for those seizures called Depakote, which it literally slows down your brain to bring you further away from your seizure threshold, making it harder to have a seizure.
But thinking was also harder.
It just kind of came along with the medication.
It was one of the side effects.
I mean, I just don't know in retrospect how I did it, how I dealt with life.
It was tough.
And the rest of those symptoms, they gradually faded away.
Which is why, in my opinion, health isn't a goal.
It's a skill.
One skill to be layered on top of another.
And then over time it really becomes, I would say, effortless.
It's a collection of skills, and the skills themselves are they're not exciting.
I would I wouldn't describe them.
I mean, some of the some of them are exciting actually, but most of them are, are very simple things that are difficult at first, that then become habit.
When you turn them into a habit, that's when you can add another and another and another.
And eventually, like I said, the whole thing just becomes kind of effortless.
And a lot of your chronic issues sort of fall by the wayside.
And what we would even view as acute issues like acute illness, like cancer, those things can also be pushed way back, like we we've believed for forever that cancer, just maybe it's genetic or it comes from something environmental.
I mean, what if you create it yourself?
Doctor Peter Attia talks about this a little bit in his book called out outlive.
I believe it's a great book.
How essentially, having high blood sugar circulating blood sugar can in fact feed cancer.
And so the in the absence of that high blood sugar, you sort of become an infertile ground for developing cancer, which I think is quite interesting.
Other longevity experts sort of hit on the same topic by thinking you should take a drug called metformin and do some other things.
I digress, but let's talk a little bit about homeostasis.
If everything in our bodies we're working, if we're not in a disease state or some area of our health is not compromised.
Our specialized sensors, called receptors, detect little tiny deviations which trigger signals via hormones in the nervous system to organs that can jump in and rectify the imbalance.
And those organs then can kind of do their thing, the thing that they were intended to do.
Here's an example for some of you that maybe follow me on Instagram.
You see that I use a cold plunge on a regular basis.
You want to come out?
I'm shivering for like a couple of hours.
And what's happening there is that my my thermo receptors are saying, oh shit, we have a problem sending signals to my muscles, which I would define, this.
I'm stealing this from Doctor Gabriel Lyons.
I would define that as the longevity organ which start contracting to create heat.
And the same process is how your pancreas knows to release insulin when blood glucose levels rise as well.
It's just all so beautiful that your body is able to do these things.
But the fact of the matter is our lifestyle get in the way.
And the latter example, of that, your pal, your pancreas works is is more of a nutrition, part of your lifestyle that's getting in the way.
For example, if you're sedentary and you're not eating the right macronutrients for which our bodies are designed to absorb, but are consuming foods that are engineered to be hyper palatable, that signal to your pancreas to release insulin happens over and over and over and over again to aggressively and too frequently.
And eventually you wear it out.
That's type two diabetes.
It's like like trying to cut down a redwood tree with a butter knife.
The butter knife just wasn't intended to have to do that kind of heavy lift that that kind of workload.
So if you don't consume those sugary foods, how long will you will your pancreas last?
If it's if it's not abused and actually supported by the amino acids that it needs to rebuild itself that are pulled from your high quality protein diet, I mean, maybe 100 years, maybe hundreds of years.
We we actually don't really have the answer to that.
We don't we don't really know.
But the bottom line is you want to use your body the way it was intended, and it was not intended to deal with high sugar levels, circulating blood sugar levels all throughout the course of a day because of the crazy ass foods that reading today.
So as I've learned from my from my own experiences and have had thousands of students get tested, employ changes to their lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management, then follow through with testing after that, I've seen such profound results in.
Labs and Dexa scans.
Giving your body what it needs in those four categories is almost exclusively what is necessary.
Our bodies are complex, but but how we treat them is is really not all that complex.
And so part of the skill of health is learning to unwind the negative impact that our modern lifestyles have on our hunter gatherer bodies.
Meaning we weren't designed to sit on a sofa and binge on Netflix.
We were designed to move around and hunt and gather.
I mean, you've got to treat your body, find ways in which to do your job and be a parent and run a business, or be a good boyfriend or a good girlfriend or whatever it is that you want to do in your life.
But but you have to behave more similarly to that hunter gatherer that we were designed to be.
You just it just doesn't work properly otherwise.
So let me recap those categories.
I think it's important to do that.
Lifestyle exercise, nutrition, stress management lens.
That's how I keep it all straight in my head, just to make sure I'm not forgetting any lens, lens, lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management and those all work beautifully, at least until you're you have an injury, like like Aaron Rodgers for example.
Or you get the flu, which happens periodically if your immune system is really working well, and at least until your sex organs can no longer produce optimal levels of sex hormones.
I mean, I do think on a related note, that we're outliving our testes and our ovaries, which is another several podcasts on that topic.
All of that has led me to believe that that age, genetics and medical conditions, they aren't really things to be concerned with too much meaning they're not actual barriers unless you allow them to be.
Because if you can change your lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, and stress management just in small, incremental ways, the impact of age, genetics, and medical conditions just somehow fall by the wayside.
I mean, age, whatever, genetics, I mean, they're nice to know about, but you probably actually already have a sense of what's harder for you versus others.
But epigenetics, how is your lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, and your stress management affecting your genetic expression?
I mean, you can you can switch the good genes on.
You can switch the bad genes off with those four gentle natural interventions.
Further, I think focusing on genes is a little actually dangerous to your health.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
If you believe you're a victim of your genetics, you're not going to take action in the same way as you otherwise would because you have those bad genes.
You're going to behave like like a victim of the genes.
And if you're you're aware of your genetic predisposition through exceptional body awareness and genetic testing, do not get too wrapped up in the results.
It's okay to recognize that they're there, but as soon as it starts to affect your behavior negatively, nothing's nothing good is going to happen from that.
So do not let the results of those tests reflect in your behavior.
I mean, genetically, according to my 23 and me, I have a very difficult time getting into deep sleep.
I mean, duh, I mean, I've known that since I was ten.
My lifestyle, though, has an epigenetic impact on everything.
How much time I spend in sleep, the supplements I take, the meditation I do to get myself ready for, sleeping, the sleep hygiene that I practice.
That all has an impact on the quality of my deep sleep.
If I just throw that out the window, I'm just not going to sleep as well as others would.
So I have to work harder because that exists.
But I do.
And as a result, I'm able to get high quality sleep every single night.
My stress management, too, that's a more of a perspective thing.
I mean, your perspective, it actually affects you, your health in a major way, I think much more than your genes actually do.
And that's that's arguable.
Probably, all of the longevity experts would argue that with me, but I would argue back, I mean, here's an example.
If I'm really chill, which I'm not, I wish I was if I was a type B personality, that's what I aspire to be.
Things would not affect me as much I'd have.
If I have deep spiritual beliefs, which I do, I'm able to weather the impact of stress much better.
So I'm not chill.
But I've got deep spiritual beliefs.
That impacts me on a cellular level.
Side note read The Biology of Belief.
It's a great book.
And it'll kind of inform how these things actually work.
Deep down in your body on a cellular level, you can have an impact just by how you see the world.
And it's it's part of why I think mental wellbeing is so critical to your overall health, because everything that you think has an impact on you on a cellular level.
But there are a lot of nuances and variations in lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management, and the results of which need to be measured to really understand how those interventions are affecting you as an individual.
Because you're special, you're just a special little snowflake.
I mean, everybody is unique.
And it may be totally different from your siblings, your parents, your extended family.
Because of maybe the only difference is, like, you can be a triplet, for example, but you see the world differently than your other two siblings.
Your health is going to be affected either positively or negatively.
Relative to those siblings, I think you kind of understand why I'm saying this is personalized medicine.
Do you want to you want to understand how when you do a thing like use a cold punch?
What's actually happening in your body?
And nothing can be perfectly managed because there are far too many things that are going on.
Like, did you sleep well?
What's your stress like?
Do you have the flu or are you healthy?
Otherwise pardon me, the absence of a bacterial infection or the presence of one, what's going on at work?
What's going on in relationships?
And there are a lot of things.
How are you eating?
Are you traveling and having to eat out all the time, or are you eating at home?
They all have an impact on your health.
But I want you to understand that you should attempt to try to measure and get some sense of how you are progressing.
You may not be able to pinpoint what the thing you're doing is in terms of having the biggest impact, but you can certainly get a sense of how all of the things you're doing in your life are affecting your health in total.
And that's why I wanted to introduce you to the Wheel of Health.
It's a simple concept which you can employ.
I think you can employ it intuitively.
It's kind of an introspective tool, just like evaluating how you feel about various aspects of your health and and plotting where you think you are on a scale of 1 to 10.
Just it's just kind of like the wheel of life.
If you guys are familiar with that.
And then you take action against those measurements, if you want to improve upon something in lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management and then you you sit back maybe three months later or four months later, six months a year.
And you, you look at yourself again and say, well, how am I doing in all of these areas of my health on the wheel of health?
And you determine whether or not you think you made progress.
You review it again and again and again, and then you make adjustments to your lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management interventions.
And then you take a look at again, and it just becomes a part of your annual or periodic planning process in terms of how you are going to adapt your lifestyle to make sure that you're heading in the right direction.
I'm a really, really good example of how this how well this all works.
I mentioned I have sleep issues.
I have a desiccated disc in my lumbar spine from an injury when I was 20.
Also previously mentioned.
I have a host of medical problems related to, just pushing myself really hard.
I don't regret it, by the way.
I guess in, in a way it's a blessing because I'm sitting here in front of you talking about how I've unwound all these things.
But when I think about my dad, at my age, I was on the same road that he landed on or the end of his road in his 50s.
He's still alive.
But he had some pretty serious medical issues when he was my age.
I'm 56 right now.
I was on that road when I was in my 30s.
He didn't have many of the the issues that I shared with you that I had, but he did have a quintuple bypass when he was 50.
And to this day, he's in his early 80s, continues to have issues with heart disease.
But those those more subtle issues like brain fog, fatigue and just not wanting to do things, I can totally relate to that in that way.
We were we are very familiar.
But when I changed my lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management, they all started going away.
And after over 15 years I haven't stopped and I'm still on an upswing.
I haven't stopped trying to improve upon those four categories and I'm still making progress.
And by that I mean most of my issues are behind me.
My body has been replaced by by this thing.
I mean, I kind of feel like I'm not trying to be arrogant because I'm just following our processes and coming out the other end better than the way I went in.
And it's the result of the my team's efforts with me.
But I feel like I rented a hypercar or something.
That's definitely not mine.
And that's what it feels like to be in my body.
All of which is to say that I'm not really sure what a state of health is yet, because I'm still on upswing.
I'm still.
My experience of my health is still getting better.
And my my job is to continue to explore what that means, to explore what's really possible, and then to report back to you and develop ways in which others can have similar experiences.
So let's get back to that wheel so I can describe how it works through experience testing, new research and a sophisticated medical team which includes exercise specialist.
By the way, I don't know how you can have a medical team without that.
Peter Tee and other well known longevity experts all share the opinion that exercise is the most powerful, powerful health and longevity drug ever invented.
And I would argue that maybe ever will be invented.
And I agree with that sentiment and wonder how it's it's just not a standard function of medicine.
And so misunderstood by actual medical professionals.
So myself and thousands of others have completely transformed.
But it was it was all very intentional.
And our team understands the global impact of your lens, your lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management interventions.
So here's an overview of the wheel.
Each spoke influences all the other spokes just like the wheel of life.
And by that I mean your mental wellbeing affects your body composition.
For example one spoke effects the other spoke.
They are all critical.
And by that I mean if one is severely compromised, like your nutrition, the rest of you will also be severely compromised.
Which is why, when following a lens treatment plan, each skill is deployed to impact several spokes at once.
Yeah.
Like like if you learn to meditate, a giant chunk of your wheel of health is positively impacted.
And that's why the actual deployment of skills are far simpler than the complexity of our bodies.
I hope that makes sense at this point.
So I mentioned early on that our bodies are complex and we get so wrapped up into that.
But that's the that's how you actually move the needle.
You kill like six birds with one stone.
So one of the clearest examples of how one compromised smoke affects the other.
Which is a state of sickness in a smoke, for example.
The statistics.
This one really gets me the statistics around a 60 year old female who breaks a hip.
All cause cause mortality during the first 12 months is as high as 30% for that female.
I mean, can you imagine that?
I mean, ladies, I hope you're listening now because there is a lot you can do here, but it's really, really important that you understand this.
So I'm gonna use the wheel as a guide specifically for that hip example.
Broken hip.
You break your hip and you can't move.
You're in a wheelchair.
You're using a, thing to, a little, you know, a walker or something to get around.
You can't move.
Well, and on the wheel of health, your orthopedic health score is one.
It's low as you possibly can be because your your hip is jacked.
What happens?
You have no endorphins from exercise because you can't exercise.
So your mental wellbeing gets pulled down because you need exercise to feel good.
Actually, your muscles atrophy, of course, because you're not moving, so you're not exercising.
You're not able to do resistance training or any kind of exercise at all.
So your body composition starts to deteriorate.
Your heart and lung efficiency drops because of lack of exercise.
Your cardiovascular health in total starts to decline.
Because of that, your strength declines because you have a complete lack of exercise.
You're kind of getting the idea because you lose lean mass.
You have continuously high blood glucose, so your insulin sensitivity starts to decline pulling your hormone score down.
And what about sex hormones specifically?
Because hormones is the kind of a big umbrella that's a that's a spoke that includes, several types of hormones.
What about your sex hormones?
So your 60.
Maybe you're ten years post menopause.
Meaning last time you had your period was 50.
And as a result, you've gone ten years with practically no estrogen in your body.
You've got all these estrogen receptors everywhere wanting to do their job, but they don't have the estrogen to dock in the receptor, so they can't do their job.
And that builds a barrier for delivering calcium into the structure of your bones, leading to bone mineral density issues.
I mean, maybe that's why you broke your freaking hip in the first place.
Because, you know, 220 year old females are not stepping off of a curb and breaking their hip.
It's it's only older women.
And and so that again gets us into like three other podcasts.
So we're going to we're going to put a pin on that and get to it somewhere down the road.
And of course, because you're in pain, your hip hurts, you can't sleep.
And that's whether or not you're waiting to have surgery or whether or not you just had surgery.
Or in my mom's case, let's say you had surgery a year and a half ago.
Your hip still hurts and it affects your sleep.
So you can't sleep.
Well, that means your body can't recover and your stress levels are higher because of that.
And you continue to decline just because you can't sleep.
Sleep recovery and stress, that particular spoke starts to collapse behind it.
And if you can't move, your body's ability to detoxify is also severely compromised.
So you become sort of toxic.
Your brain as a result doesn't work as well, and that speeds the decline.
It's really quite sad.
How about your gut health?
Did you know that exercise increases intestinal motility and increases biodiversity in your microbiome?
Probably not.
Let me explain what that means.
So the motility helps you.
It means that it moves.
So if you're exercising, your your intestines are literally moving around.
And it helps you get rid of waste.
The absence of things like constipation that your body was intended and needs to get rid of, and that means you're most likely, or you're more likely to not be constipated, but have healthy bowel movements.
If you exercise the alpha diversity, that means that you have a higher number of bacterial species in your body, more diversity, and that enables you to absorb and process the precious micronutrients, that you need, that your body needs and keep your immune function in tip top shape.
But because you can't move well, your gut health plummets.
You don't have that intestinal motility.
You start losing losing that alpha diversity.
And you you can't.
And your immune system can be compromised as a result.
Okay.
How about nutrients?
One of my favorite smokes because it's mostly behavioral.
You desperately need high quality diet to recover a high quality diet to recover from that injury.
You desperately need it because what do you build stuff from in your body?
Like how does you know, like, tendonitis get better or a torn muscle or a sprained ankle?
How does all that how do all those things get better?
It comes from your food.
You get it.
But because you're you're depressed because you can't move, you just don't really care anymore.
So out with a healthy diet.
This happens all the time and in with various forms of self-medication like sugar and alcohol.
And that of course compounds the problem with your hip injury.
And and all of that continues to compound in total, as those same outcomes make it difficult, more difficult for your hip to heal.
By that I mean, after we went all the way around the wheel of health, then they all continue to keep getting worse.
It's a like a downward downward spiral.
So your mental well-being begins to collapse a little bit more.
Your body comp starts getting even worse, your cardiovascular health gets worse, your hormones continue to decline further, your sleep recovery and stress keeps getting worse.
Your detoxification pathways start getting even worse.
Your gut health continues to get worse because the rest of the spokes, follow around it and less and less protein is is absorbed.
Less and less protein is actually eaten.
Exactly what you don't want to have happen, replaced by more and more foods that make you feel good, especially alcohol, especially sugar.
And then your and then back to your hip.
Your orthopedic health gets just worse and worse and worse.
And it's just you're just waiting for some other injury or some other medical condition related to any other part of your body or your mind, which is why that injury leads to death 30% of the time in just a year at 60 years old.
It's a great example for for the wheel of health.
It's also a hopeful story because you have the ability to unwind a lot of the things that are described or not allow those things to happen.
So if you really understood what was happening to your body, and the cascade effect that I just described is, is a real thing and going to happen, and how to use your newfound skills of health to recover those things don't happen in the same way.
One of the best examples of this is another orthopedic issue.
And Aaron Rodgers.
So let's just rattle off his wheel of health spokes prior to having his injury, and you'll kind of get a sense of why he was able to recover so quickly.
So his body composition going into it was probably in eight.
Like pro football, players generally don't have ideal.
Body composition, but it's pretty good.
Particularly, quarterbacks cardiovascular health, an eight, strength and strength.
In total, I would say he's probably more like a nine.
Hormones.
He's a bit older, so sex hormones are probably not optimal.
And and he can't replace them, because he would get booted.
But he's maybe an eight because he's probably got great fasted insulin and his thyroid functions really well.
Sleep recovery and stress, probably a ten.
And this is something because this is something he's worked really, really hard at with things like breathwork and meditation and great quality sleep detoxification.
I assume he's at ten because his diet is so clean, his he probably doesn't drink any alcohol, doesn't use any drugs, doesn't have any mold in his house because he's been educated about that, likely uses an infrared sauna which helps with his detoxification.
His gut health is probably also attend because he's sophisticated enough to have a natural Patrick medical doctor on staff, or at least a functional medicine doctor, and is likely has had several stool tests done, which would inform how good his gut health actually is and then what to do about it.
Nutrients.
That's probably also a ten.
This is one of his greatest disciplines.
I think he eats.
I would say eats as well as I do, which is really, really rare.
And his orthopedic health prior to the injury was probably 7 or 8, maybe has other minor injuries that he's kind of carrying along with him.
But the point is, when he ruptured his Achilles, that was his only problem.
He had surgery afterwards.
He probably used some BPC 157 to help recover, which is a peptide.
He started sleeping more than ever during that stage where he's trying to recover from this injury.
And he probably also used TRT testosterone replacement therapy, peptides, hCG or some other, therapy to optimize his testosterone levels, which all positively would have impacted his ability to recover really quickly.
Basically, he just incrementally improved all the other spokes of his wheel to help pull up his orthopedic problems, which is the hopeful part of the story.
There's a lot that you can do, so you can see how orthopedic health can impact your health in total.
But what a what if you move very well into your 80s, 90s and beyond, like like you have not just the absence of joint pain, but you have the presence of just moving really, really well.
And just the fact that you will be able to move, which your body needs to live a long time, changes your experience of life.
So let's let's move into one of my favorites.
After I take a little sip of water here, the mental well-being spoke.
In the absence of exceptional mental well-being or the presence of mental illness, a common one like depression.
What happens?
Well, you don't move much.
You see the common thread, exercise goes away, and when that goes away, what happens to your body?
Composition starts to fall.
Cardiovascular health starts to fall.
Strength starts to all hormones.
Same thing.
Potentially even worse if you're being treated for that depression with SSRI eyes.
I sleep recovery and stress starts to falter.
Detoxification starts to falter.
Gut health starts to falter.
Much of this is related to the fact that you just don't move much when you're depressed.
I mean, you kind of know these things.
I mean, think about the origination of an ulcer.
Where does that start?
Does that start in your stomach?
I know they start from your perspective on life, which is to say that you may be you may perceive your circumstances to be really, really scary.
And that heightened degree of stress can lead to an ulcer.
It generally originates from a state of of mental illness, or when you just let stress get completely out of control.
And so if you're not practicing getting better in the sleep recovery and stress spoke, when you're faced with external circumstances, you're deeply affected by them, and they can lead to all sorts of medical issues.
Some people would be the ulcer.
With me, it's most likely, heart disease.
It just depends on on who you are.
What about nutrients for depressed people?
Yikes.
I mean, that certainly falls apart because you just can't make if you're hopeless.
I mean, how do you think you eat?
You just don't eat for health when you're hopeless.
Because what?
Why would you.
You're just near the end of your days.
And and even if you're not near the end of the days, your days, it's all pointless anyway.
Because that's how you see the world in the state of depression.
Orthopedic health for depressed people.
I mean, much of the joint pain we experience comes from inflammation.
Where does inflammation come from?
Lack of exercise is a part of it.
Meds for depression and anxiety food that it a depressed person eats is like I described really horrific.
And and that can lead to increased, inflammation.
Increased inflammation impacts your ability to think clearly.
And you can become more depressed because of that.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
Just like the hip example for the six year old women, it all snowballs in the wrong direction as you're is.
You're kind of propped up by either a surgery or meds.
And I don't know about you, but.
I don't want that life.
And in my opinion, everything I just described.
It's optional.
It's not because you're old or.
Or your genes, or you have a medical condition because just so many other things that you can do outside of directly affecting that medical condition, like Aaron Rodgers did to help ameliorate those, those problems.
So the biggest takeaway is that is that you are a single person, a whole person, not a collection of body systems, which is how you're treated as a patient.
You're a single person.
You can't have your depression treated without affecting the rest of your body.
You can't have your cholesterol managed without it affecting the rest of your body.
Everything affects all of you, so you have to you have to think like that.
Secondarily, with the exception of hormone replacement therapy, your lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and stress management have nearly complete control over how you experience your life, your epigenome, what you're able to accomplish, and whether or not you're on the outside of the wheel of health and have the beauty of youth.
I have a couple more thoughts.
I have many more thoughts about the Wheel of health, but let me get these two out of my out of my head.
The outside of the wheel, which is what I would how I would define the the definition of the state of peak health is what I would also call beauty.
And by that I mean you're the most beautiful version of yourself.
If you're on the outside of that wheel at any age, you can be 60, 80, ten, whatever it is, if you're on the outside of that wheel, you're your most beautiful self.
And remember, body composition is only a single spokes.
So I'm not talking about your beautiful booty.
But I'm talking about it's part of it.
But I'm also talking about the rest of the spokes.
So your your cardiovascular health and its role in your mental acuity and your ability to have high levels of energy or the gas tank of a young person.
I think that's beautiful.
I mean, have you ever seen a female do their first pull up and see their eyes light up, how they feel, how they feel, what it means for them to be strong?
They're actually strong to be able to do that.
I think that's also a thing of beauty because it affects, again, the rest of the wheel.
Having that strength is very powerful.
Your hormones, your metabolism, your skin, your musculature all improve.
I think that's beautiful.
How much more attractive you are when you're relaxed and you have slept well.
So the sleep recovery and stress spoke.
That's beauty.
If you're detoxifying, well, your skin, your energy, your mind and a whole bunch of other things are going to be much more beautiful if you can absorb the nutrients you need because your gut health is exceptional, you'll see it in your hair, your skin, your eyes, your energy.
People will feel it in your energy.
It's beautiful and your nutrients beautiful.
I mean, you can move well, like a cat, like really exceptional or orthopedic health.
It's beautiful to see people that can move like that, especially as they as they get older.
And you can have exceptional mental well-being.
I mean, you're you're at peace.
You're excited, you're hopeful, you're able to give more to others of your time and your energy because you have so much of it.
You're resilient.
People actually describe you as having good energy.
That's beautiful.
So you want to land on the outside of the wheel by employing the skills of health and having your health.
As you age, I've got to tell you, this is this is the last thought I'm going to share with you.
It's a hopeful thought.
Stop being so wrapped up in getting getting older.
Whether you're 32, like I was when I started having all those severe medical issues, and I just attributed them to my age, or you're 50 or 60, or you're 70 or 80, or in a wheelchair and you're struggling and it hurts to be in your body.
You can get a lot of those things back.
The longer you wait, the harder it is to get them back.
But you can get you can get a lot of it back.
But having your health as you age like for me in my mid 50s, I've got to tell you, it's so much better than I think it would have been if I had it when I was 32 or when I was 20 or 15 or ten.
Because you also have you have patience and you have wisdom that, that, that don't go away.
They just accumulate.
And so the power that your health gives you at an older age is such a greater lever for you.
It is expansive.
And when I when I look out at an audience or I look at my team members at stark, or I see our students or, I'm in a community, all I see is is great potential that simply needs to be tapped and just and tapped with very, very basic skills that nearly everyone can employ.
So I'm hoping you get this as a hopeful message, and I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Episode number one.
Following.
This will be much more about the the skills themselves and various experts.
But if you if you love the idea of using health as a lever, and you love this topic and you want to learn more, be sure to hit the subscribe button.
You'll find this on all the podcast platforms.
Make comments if you have questions and make comments if you have something to share.
In addition.
One of the one of the epiphanies I also had early on is that as the body is my work product, it's a work product that we don't totally know everything about.
And so there's no surprise that I have when I find out that what I think to be true is not.
I'm pretty sure that the general concept that you can unwind a lot of health issues, no matter what your circumstances are, I'm very confident that that's not that.
That's true.
I'm not so certain that all the individual tactics are accurate and flinch when I hear a medical practitioner or a specialist speak with such authority as if they are the only one among all of humanity that is certain that that one thing is perfect.
What I'm trying to get at is that science, in and of itself is perfect.
And what I believe in is primarily science informs.
But scientists, scientists make mistakes all the time.
And so I'm looking forward to learning along with you.
Again, thank you for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you at the next podcast.
Thank you for listening to today's podcast.
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If you want to find out more about us, you can visit us at Starkey Health.