Being healthy is really simple. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it really isn't rocket science. Join me today as I go through the only nine things you're gonna need to be healthy. These are all backed by a mountain of scientific evidence. And if you focus on these things, you'll be healthier than ever, and you'll stop worrying about if what you're doing is enough. So this is a new year, happy new year, everybody. And with the new year comes no better time to make some lifestyle changes. So I kind of want to circle back on some really important things. I always want to stay grounded on what I feel is the most important thing. And so I always are gonna bring back these main concepts or these big rocks, as I like to say. These should sound familiar because I've talked about all of them before, 'cause they're so important, but now I have some more nuance to them, made some tweaks, and so I thought it was worth revisiting them again. So let's dive in. So the number one most important thing I'm gonna talk about here is eating a health-promoting diet. And eating a health-promoting diet, that sounds kind of vague. Well, that's 'cause it is. I think it's very, I left it intentionally vague because there is no one perfect diet. That's the biggest thing. Everyone wants to ask me, "Jordan, what's the best diet?" And there honestly is no one diet. And that's the thing. It's not cool, it's not sexy. On social media, it's awesome and easy to say, "Hey, this is the one thing, right? Like, this is what you need. You follow this, you're gonna be good." Like, it just doesn't work like that in real life, right? 'Cause for me, the biggest thing is adherence. You have to be able to have a diet that you can stick to. And if you can't stick to it, it can be quote-unquote perfect, but it doesn't matter 'cause you can't stick to it. And so that's kind of my caveat here, always, that it really depends on things. And so there are lots of things. I think the overarching theme, the biggest thing to talk about is that we need to have a diet that maintains a neutral caloric intake, meaning you're not eating more calories than you're eating, meaning you're not gaining weight. And so there's usually a couple of main ways you can do this, right? So if you're trying to make sure your calories are locked in in terms of not eating too many, there's a couple of things you can do. One, you can count macros or calories. So this involves, if you're counting macros specifically, you are weighing out your food. Like, so you're measuring your fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. You're putting them on a scale. You are seeing how many grams of whatever you're eating you are measuring, and you know exactly how much you're eating. I've done that. It can be tedious, but it also can be very rewarding and work very well. Some people will just count calories instead of macros. What this entails, though, is a very detailed process of going through, looking at things, and making sure you know exactly how much you're eating. The other thing you can also do then, if you don't wanna count that, is you can limit when you eat, or something known as time-restricted feeding. So if you're saying, "Hey, I'm only gonna eat from 12 in the afternoon until eight at night, kinda gives me an eight-hour eating window," that is when I'm going to eat. The idea behind this is that typically when you have a smaller eating window, you just don't eat quite as much. So it's another way of kinda meaning that caloric balance, but it's a way that's a little easier for some people. They don't wanna necessarily count calories. They do that, they just say, "Hey, if I shorten this window, I'm good to go." That's another idea that you can do, and it can be absolutely valid. And another idea you can do, you can also limit what you're moving, meaning specific foods. Some people say, "Hey, I don't wanna eat dairy. I don't wanna eat gluten. I don't wanna eat X, Y, and Z." Once again, I'm not here to judge and say one thing is necessarily right or wrong. This can be restrictive. I wouldn't necessarily think about doing this with someone who has an eating disorder, anything like that, but we're gonna put that to the side for a second. But this is another way to kinda limit things, right? If you say, "Hey, I have trouble with these foods. I tend to eat them a lot. When I eat them, I eat in excess of them." You know that, you can kinda limit them. That's another way to do it. Once again, lots of ways to do whatever we need to do to make sure that our calorie balance is neutral. And then another thing you could also do is, sometimes people are all about trying to hit goals, or maybe hit fiber goals or intuitive eating. Really, it comes down to whatever you want. Some people say, "I'm able to do this. I just kinda listen to my body, my cues, and I'm intuitive, and that's fine." Or you're very cognizant and you enjoy, you eat, you chew slowly, you do all these things. There's lots of ways to do this. I'm like putting this out there saying, "Hey, this is the goal. The goal is to be calorically neutral," right? Or if we're in a deficit, trying to lose weight, that's an option as well. And obviously, there's a time and place to gain weight as well when we do it in a safe fashion and make sure our body composition is good. But in general, most people need to kinda remain where they're at or below, and we need to have a way to throttle that. Most people today can't do that. That's just a fact, right? You know, with the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese, it's just very hard to do that. We live in a society where food is prevalent, it is easy to get, it's delicious, and so by default, you're probably just gonna eat more. And so that's the number one thing I talk about with when choosing a diet is making sure we are not eating too much. And then on top of that, a couple of other things, there are some commonalities, right? So you just can minimally process foods. I'm not gonna say, "Hey, we should have a diet full of Twinkies and Coke." You know, if you hit your calories and count them, could you lose weight or maintain? You could. I think we hit run into other issues there, and we're gonna talk more about that in terms of getting nutrients and whatnot, but I think that's the big thing. And then the other thing is making sure we're not having any huge lab abnormalities, right? You're saying, "Hey, I'm eating this diet," but then like, your blood pressure gets bad, your blood sugar gets bad, all these things are terrible. That may not be the right diet for you. So just despite, you know, if you say, "I just wanna do this," but all your other markers are saying, "That's not a good idea," then it might not be a good idea. And so really the overarching theme is that we are controlling our calories through a diet full of minimally processed things that should have enough micronutrients and macronutrients, everything to get our daily vitamin in, you know, mineral requirements, all those things, but we're staying at a consistent weight, our labs are being okay, and those are like the main things there. I'm not gonna be a person who says, "You have to follow his diet." I think there's people online who say, "You need to do this and do that." I've just seen with patients, varying things work. Some people want whole food plant-based, some people want keto. I mean, I'm not here to say you can't again do that. We're gonna work together, figure it out. But that is the number one most important thing, is making sure we have a healthy diet. Moving on to our next thing here, says getting enough physical activity. If you know me, I'm a sports doctor, it's super important to get physical activity. It's always the biggest thing. And the first thing we're gonna start with is, when I recommend people, is trying to get to something called the physical activity guidelines. I talk about this at Nauseum, and if you've listened to this podcast, consistently you're probably like, "Gosh, Jordan, I'm so sick of this." But it's just so important because the vast majority of people aren't getting there. The physical activity guidelines tell us that, "Hey, we wanna do 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week, or 75 minutes of vigorous, plus two days of full body resistance training." So that's the baseline kind of minimum of physical activity. If we can get there, I'd be super pumped 'cause most people aren't getting there. That's a lot of time, right? That's a lot of effort to get in and work out throughout the week. And so it's not that easy, but that is our first step. If we're not there, let's start working up. You know, if we're doing nothing, cool, then let's go 10 minutes a week, 20, 30, incrementally work up till we're getting to the physical activity guidelines. And the reason we do that is 'cause there's a whole host of benefits that happen when we get up there. There's a lot of benefits to be had from zero to anything. So like any improvement is great. And then once we start hitting the physical activity guidelines, you know, we kind of see a little plateau off. We still see improvements to gradual improvement. And if we're doing more physical activity, things like that, it helps, but it's not quite as steep as when you get up to that physical activity guideline, it's like huge improvements, huge improvements, biggest bang for your buck, and then it kind of levels off a little bit. But the more you do, it tends to go better as well on top of that. But as I mentioned, start there. And once you hit it there, more is probably gonna be better. And I think this is kind of my, this is something where I've kind of changed is that, you know, I think the best bang for your buck is probably more aerobic training. I'm a person who loves lifting. You look in the background, you see the squat rack there. I love lifting. If I chose to do that, I would just do that every day. If I could, if my body let me, I would just do heavy squats every day. It's my favorite thing. And I've never been someone who's loved cardio. That's why I was a baseball player, right? You can just run around, run to first base and you're good, or just hit bombs and just, you know, jog around there and that works too. But regardless, I've learned more and more that it's very, very important to be aerobically fit. Yeah, VO2 max is something that everyone's talking about on the internet these days. It is kind of a marker of how fit you are aerobically. And we just keep seeing time and time again, the higher your VO2 max means the more fit you are. And it pretty much means you're harder to kill. We just see people, those people live longer, have lower all-causing mortality and overall it's just a really good marker. And so we see that we have the markers that when your VO2 increases, your health tends to increase as well. We don't quite have the same numbers for resistance training and strength. So like there's a certain level, like when you're strong enough, you're probably good. Do we know what that level is? I don't. You know, I think overall, if you're throwing around some decent weight and being able to do the things you wanna do in life and you're capable, you're probably good. You're going from a squat of like 315 to 405 to 500. Like, is that better? Does it make you healthier? I don't know. I don't have a good answer for that. Whereas I know aerobic, we do have like a good data sourcing. The more fit you get, the better you are in terms of just lots of outcomes. And so I've kind of shifted there saying, hey, if we're gonna have more time in the week and you got your lifting in then, and you feel like you're at a good strength level and continue more cardio is probably better bang for your buck, but why either when you can or, and that's kind of the things, or why either when you can do both, I guess I should say. And so I'd say obviously doing both is what we definitely want to do. And on top of that, we talked about that. I think they also mentioned things like flexibility and stability, and if they're a big weak spot, go for it. I think it's one of those things. I don't think it's necessary to specifically train stability or flexibility if you're not meeting the physical activity guidelines. That's my biggest thing. I know there's some big doctors on the internet and podcasters say like they train stability specifically like multiple times a week. Like that's great if you got 10 hours a week to do stuff, go for it, knock yourself out. But if we're not meeting the physical activity guidelines, I would not waste any time on dedicated and quote unquote stability. You can mix it in, right? Do single leg things, absolutely do plyometrics. All those things are gonna be hitting stability, you know, flexibility. You're doing that with full range of motion lifts. So like you can get those things you need to incorporate into our physical activity guidelines. No one time I'd say, hey, let's do more of those things if you wanna one improve that skill 'cause it's a goal of yours, right? If you wanna get more flexible right now, I'm trying to get a little more flexible 'cause I tend to feel better when I do that. So I'm on kind of a dedicated process of doing that, but I would not let it impact my goals of working out. Absolutely, that's the number one thing. So physical activity, aerobic and resistance training, number one, number two priorities right there. Absolutely gotta have those. And then they talk about stability and flexibility. Those can be important for you potentially. I think if you have a good program of endurance exercises and resistance training, you'll get a little bit of everything in there. You should get stability and you should be getting flexibility in those programs as well. But that's just my biggest thing. I don't want you stretching for 80 minutes and be like, I'm good, I worked out. You probably didn't get the best bang for your buck with that. That's just kind of my general opinion. But physical activity, number two, very important. I want you to work out. Number three is getting enough sleep. You might say, well, what is enough sleep? Usually that's around seven to nine hours per night depending on where you are. If you're younger, right, it's more if you're a teenager, sleep all day, newborn baby, literally your life is there to sleep and eat. So obviously as we age, you need less and less, but then we kind of zone out in between seven and nine. That's kind of where we say, hey, that seems to be the sweet spot for it. And the odds are, you're not special. You're probably not someone who can just run on four to five hours of sleep. You might think you are, but you're probably not. If you're loading with caffeine, if you're constantly tired, if you're having to take naps, you're not good. That's not where we want to be. And so that's just one thing I always say. People are like, oh, I don't need sleep. Like, no, you need sleep. You gotta have sleep. It's very important. I think it helps with literally everything in life, from healing injuries or after working out, your immune system, repairing injuries, learning, consolidating memories, all those things. That's what we're looking at. And as I mentioned, how do we know if we're getting enough? Well, if you aren't exhausted every day and you're not needing coffee or taking naps, like you're probably doing okay. If you're having other issues where you feel like you're exhausted, you're tired, you're fatigued, all those things, we're maybe not getting enough sleep. If you're specifically, if you're not hitting those 79 hours, right? If you're really saying, hey, I'm hitting like five hours. Okay, that's easy. Let's bump you up to seven and try to get you to see how you're feeling, go from there. If you're hitting those things, then we might have to talk to a medical professional. But if you are relying on caffeine consistently, if you're feeling fatigued, that'd be kind of indicators that our sleep is not as good as we want it to be. Obviously also, if someone says you're like snoring, your significant other says you wake me up snoring, then we got to look for things like sleep apnea. That's a whole nother podcast and topic. But overall, what I'm looking for you is you to be rested, not have to rely on caffeine. And overall, I think this has been cool in the culture recently, a lot of people are really valuing sleep and the whole grind culture of like, hashtag team no sleep is kind of falling to the wayside, which is great. The next thing I wanna talk about here is maintaining a healthy body composition. And this one can be a little bit of challenging for people, right? Not all weight is created equal. So in your body, you have different objects. And I've seen things that are happening in terms of muscle and fat and water weight and lots of stuff going on, but not all is created equal. Where when you see someone's weight, you get a weight. Number right, it's everything, it's everything added together. It's their bones and muscles and tendons and fat and everything. And so weight can be helpful, but that's why I say body composition. So I think it's much more important to talk about body composition. So specifically, BMI is something we all talk about. It's controversial, right? But it can be useful at a population level. There's also extremes as well. So I say population level, meaning when you do research studies, on average, when you see someone with their BMI in that quote unquote healthy range, that's generally showing someone who's in a healthier body composition. Whereas if you have the extremes, you're pretty much knowing that they're not, right? If you have a BMI of like 16, you know that person's very underweight. Whereas BMI of 45, you know that person has significant adiposity most likely. And so it's one of those things. Extremes are helpful and overall population can be helpful, but it's not the best tool for every single person, but you kind of use it to narrow down. It does fail us for people who are super jacked, right? That's the thing most people are like, "BMI is a joke, man. Like I work out, I lift." Like you're probably not the population. Like that is not necessarily what we're talking about. Yes, absolutely. BMI can be off if you have too much muscle, meaning you're having more weight on you, but it's more metabolically active and we know that muscle tissue is better for you. But so most people though, the real issue where we get down to is in the quote, normal BMI, but they're significantly under muscled where they have more fat and less muscle, but you know, for whatever reason, they aren't, their weight isn't that much, quote unquote weight's not that much. So it doesn't look like a problem. So that's usually more of a bigger problem. Yes, if you are a muscle bond person, your BMI can be elevated. I think that's been me my entire life where I kind of chill in that overweight range based off of my just kind of body habitus and muscle size and whatnot. You know, I've seen the people who've gotten into the obese who are really, really strong, like really big bodybuilders, but that's rare. That's rare. So most of the time, BMI is kind of just this rough, rough tool. And then once we get to BMI, we can get more testing, right? I think kind of a little better test is waist circumference. And for men, the goal is less than 40 inches, for females less than 35. And when we start sitting underneath 40 and 35, we tend to see a decreased amount of issues with health and health outcomes specifically. Obviously, if someone's like a 39 for a male, I'm not gonna be like, "You're good, dude. That's awesome." I think probably depending where you are and depending on your bone morphology and how your hips sit, I just kind of work. I don't think 39 is like great. Like it's not like this dichotomous 30 is totally fine, 40 is bad. That's just an arbitrary number to say, "Hey, if we're kind of inching up closer to there, we kind of want to work our way down there." But overall in the literature, the 40 is kind of the cutoff for males, 35 for females. So that's just a rough estimate in terms of, I think better than BMI, but can give us something we can do in the clinic or at home, which is helpful as well. And there are ways to actually measure if you're having adequate muscle tissue in your body composition. You can measure your body with a DEXA scan, which is kind of using an x-ray to look at water, muscle tissue, lean mass, all that stuff. You can also use bioelectrical impedance, which essentially where you hold some things in your hands and step on a scale and it uses electricity to kind of guess what your body composition is. Both of those are all over the literature. DEXA is kind of our gold standard, but bioelectrical impedance is definitely better than nothing but not nearly as good as DEXA. And I certainly am not saying get whole body MRIs, that's not happening for body composition purposes, but we can do both of those to kind of assess where we're at from a muscle mass perspective. But I kind of think of it more functioning, right? 'Cause let's say you get a number and then it says like, oh, you have this percent like fat and this percent muscle, like does it matter? I don't know, to me, it's kind of the appearance, right? Like if you're someone, you can kind of look at the appearance and give an honest assessment of yourself. Say, hey, like I am appropriately muscled, I am under muscled, or I am, I have excess adiposity, that's kind of what it is. And then also functionally, how are you doing? Do you have enough muscle to do the things you want to do? Right, do you want to have certain goals in the gym, certain things in your life? So that's kind of the overall approach is like waist circumference, and then kind of given like the eyeball test of how do you feel from muscle perspective? Obviously, if you have like body dysmorphia, that's not it. But you know, talking with your, you know, significant other, talking with your trainer, talking with your physician, that might be helpful as well. If you really want to get DEXA or do a biological impedance, that might be more helpful to kind of have a better understanding of things. You can actually then look into the different ratios of fat mass to muscle mass, all those things. That's too much to deal for this right now specifically, but overall, that's kind of what I think about is starting with BMI, then working your way into waist circumference. And then if you want to learn more, you can kind of go into those further testing as well. And the next thing we want to talk about is maintaining a healthy blood pressure. So maintaining healthy blood pressure, very important. Blood pressure is essentially what we're measuring is the pressure at which the blood is pumping out of your heart. And we have the numbers, you know, 120 over 80 is like the quote unquote goal, right? So the top one is your systolic and the bottom is your diastolic. And blood pressure is really important because if it's high for a long period of time, it leads to lots of issues, things like strokes and heart attacks and kidney issues and lots and lots of things. And so this is probably one of the biggest, I mean, all of these are big, they're big rocks, right? I talk about them all the time. But these are kind of all really important things. This is definitely one of the biggest ones that is not necessarily as talked about online, but it's critically important, critically important. And it's kind of debated in the medical community about what we should be going for there. There's two different groups, JNC-8 and the ACC and AHA, they have different guidelines. Overall step back here, one-fourth over 90 is agreed by everybody that if you're over that number, you have hypertension, you have high blood pressure. And that is one where like, we need to do that. So my systematic approach is like, okay, if you're over one-fourth over 90, it's very easy. We've got to get you down below there 'cause you're at increased risk of all those things I talked about before. But then the nuance kind of comes in when the ACC, AHA, they kind of have recommendations saying, "Hey, well, actually it's like lower than that. "It's more like 130 over 80." That's kind of where we see it. And then other, so they even say like between 120 and 130 is elevated but not diagnosed high blood pressure. And so overall it's kind of this, it's kind of this yeah, informed decision-making process, kind of figure out where it is. And me personally, I shoot for 120 over 80. That's my general goal for my patients. And for me, I think it's better controls, helpful long-term, but people have different tolerances for things. And so we have to kind of have that risk discussion of do I go, do I try to get lower? 'Cause here's the question, right? If you're sitting at 122 over 70, does that matter versus 119 over 72? I mean, who knows? That's the million dollar question, right? But there's some data showing that each millimeter of mercury you go up, it leads to increased risk. But at the end of the day, if you can't get under there, and you're saying, "Hey, I have to use medicine "to get under there," but you're adamantly against that, then, well, that may not work. Or let's say you're saying, "Hey, I have to take blood pressure medication to get, "I wanna get as low as possible." And then you're taking blood pressure medications and you're feeling lightheaded, dizzy, all that stuff, then that's too low. And so generally the rule is you don't go too low unless you start having symptoms, or if you're super sick and then we're talking about shock with that. We're not talking about that when you're coming to outpatient clinic or watching this podcast. But overall, general goals, definitely want you under 140 over 90. Ideally, I think 120 over 80 is the general goal I shoot for. And I think most people can shoot for that, 'cause I think it's a good goal. And like most things here I'm talking about, it's not one time things, right? You get your reading in the doctor's office and it's 150 over 85. And you just ran, you had a bunch of caffeine this morning, you just dropped your kids off, you're running late, you ran in, physically ran into the doctor, you're sweating, they take your blood pressure, that's not what we're talking about here, right? We're talking about over time. And the reason we care is, if you measure my blood pressure while squatting, you might get up to 220, 240, I've even seen ones like 300 over 200, it's crazy high. But that's short term and then it goes back down to normal. Then your body responds to that and get used to it. What we care about is long-term exposure. And that's for a lot of these risk factors, whether it's blood sugars, blood cholesterol, all that, it's that lifetime exposure. And that's why we wanna get things early, prevent them before it ever happens, so we can prevent that lifelong exposure to high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol. So that's why it's important to know what these important things actually are, so we can identify them and then treat them if needed. Next, moving on is something that I won't spend a whole lot of time on, but don't use tobacco or other dangerous substances. It's pretty self-explanatory. Tobacco is bad for you, okay? If you haven't heard that, don't use tobacco products. If you do use tobacco products, this is not judgment by any means, and you probably already know this. And if you want to change that, please reach out to someone. It can be very helpful to get a medication if you need to, or work on counseling, work on things, or even, yeah. There's lots of different ways to do that. It's very important. And overall, I don't think there's a safe form of tobacco, like doing vaping versus cigarettes. We know cigarettes are awful. They are terrible for you. Vaping, also not good for you. We don't have the hard data like we do cigarettes that it's bad, but it's not good for you. Putting hot liquid into your lungs, not gonna be a good thing. Oral tobacco as well, in terms of like chew or dipping, also not good, can lead to potential other cancers as well. So overall, tobacco, just don't do it. I sound like a 1980s PSA, just don't do it. But it's overall just not a good thing for you. Other things we talk about alcohol, people always talk about alcohol like, "Hey, resveratrol, it's healthy. I need to have it tonight." There's pretty much no dose of alcohol that's good for you. I'll just put that out there and throw it out there, at least based off of what I've seen in the literature. I don't think it's helpful. I don't think it's good for you. I don't think it's health promoting. I think there's lots of other things you can do. So if you're sitting down at five o'clock at night, pour yourself a glass of wine and say, "I'm doing this for my health." We can talk about that. If you're doing it 'cause you really enjoy it and it's part of your social fabric or your family's routines or whatnot, I'm not here to say that you're gonna die if you do that. Not at all, I just don't think it's necessarily ideal. In terms of consuming things, the general recommendations, if you're drinking quote unquote too much, is no more than two drinks a day for a male, one drink a day for females. But I think that's probably too much as well. For me personally, if you're like, "Hey, I care about health more than anything." And then I'd say, "Don't drink, don't drink alcohol." That's probably, but we live in an imperfect world and that happens. And overall, it's one of those things where, is a drink every once in a while gonna kill you? No. Is it gonna have any appreciable effects on your health? Probably not, if I had to be honest with you. But I don't know that, I just don't know that. I just know it's not fantastically good for you. Overall, I would say probably trying to stay away as much as possible, but understanding that, hey, you know what, it's the same thing with a diet, right? I'm not gonna say like, you need it perfect every day for the rest of your life. We live in this amazing world now, right? It's the 21st century, we have amazing things to eat, we have amazing things to drink. And then a life is much, much more than just being a robot. At least that's my personal opinion. So that's kinda where I sit on that. And then other things we talk about, illicit drugs and other substances, don't recommend them. I don't think they're gonna be a good long-term healthy thing for you. I don't think recreation is very good for you. You never know what it is. Obviously lots of issues with fentanyl, at least everything. And so overall that would be on my do not recommend list from Dr. Renke perspective, but I just thought I'd mention here as well. And then someone will ask me, well, Jordan, what about toxins? What about toxins? You talked about dangerous substances, toxins are dangerous. Well, that's pretty nebulous term 'cause anything at the right dose is a toxin. Water, if you drink too much of it, is a toxin. It will lead to issues in your body and can lead to enormous disruption of your sodium and lots of issues, but it's water. It should be safe, right? So a lot of times the poison is really in the dose of things. And so toxins is a scary term people say on the internet. This is a toxin, that's a toxin. If you listen to them, you'll soon realize, everything's a toxin and I should probably stop breathing the air I breathe and then it just becomes a spiral of like it's impossible to maintain that standard, right? I think it kind of, it's a rabbit hole that a lot of people don't need to worry about right away. I think you need to focus on everything else. And then if it's still an issue with you, you can then address this and try to eliminate things where you feel it's important. And specifically some people do have triggers of their symptoms with certain exposures like foods or allergens and whatnot. And it's not a crazy thing to avoid them. I think that's it. I think a lot of people, there's kind of these two worlds, right? Where they have the traditional medicine. They say like toxins aren't a thing at all. Like don't even worry about it. Like that's all made up. And then you have like the other side of the world, functional medicine in the world, they say like it's the everything. It's the root of every single problem you've ever had. And you're killing yourself every day doing everything. I think there's probably having medium in there somewhere. I think for the vast majority of people, if you're not meeting a lot of the other big things, like you're still smoking and, or you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, you're not eating well, you're not sleeping. All those things like to me, like trying to pick out these little toxins, like, oh my gosh, your hand soap. Like don't worry about that stuff. Worry about the big things. But that being said, if you are someone who's like, hey, I have this consistent trigger to this exposure, this pollutant, this chemical, this food, whatever, it's not crazy, pull it out. Go ahead, do it. That's totally fine. I know the traditional medicine is like, oh, it doesn't matter. Well, guess what? It's your body and you can do what you want. But that being said, this is, I think for the right person for me, stepwise approach. Get those big, big, big rocks. And then if you have the itty bitty, like, hey, I want to squeak out more or hey, I'm still having symptoms or doing something. Then we can talk about, hey, removing things, trying things, going from there. That's my personal approach. Why? Because it keeps you sane, right? If you think about like everything, like, oh my gosh, it's gonna be, and we just don't have good data knowing like what actually does what. Everybody will pull out a mechanistic study saying, hey, glyphosate does this, or, you know, this does this. And then it'll take this little piece of study and then extrapolate it. And the real, like what we really know about them is very little. You know, a lot of this is observational. We have no real intervention ones. Could they be causing problems? Possibly, but long story short, I'm spending more time on this than I even want to. This is something where, hey, as we're stacking and building those big, big rocks, and I talk about big rocks just an aside here. It's that analogy, right? You have a big, let's say a big box or a big tube, and you try to fill it up. If you fill it up with sand first and then pebbles, you're gonna have no room for the big rocks. And we need those big rocks 'cause they're super important. So big rocks fill up the tank first, and then the small pebbles in the sand, I would say toxins are probably a sand one. We're like, hey, we're gonna work on this if we need to, but that's our last kind of thing. And so that's enough of me ranting. I apologize about that. But it's just something you see online. Like that's people's content. That's all we talk about is just toxins, right? Toxins is toxins that worry about it. If we need to worry about it, first of all, let's focus on the big things, the things that are pretty much the biggest return on our investment, right? You only have so much time in a day. You only have so much mental energy, so much worry to give. So focus on those things, big, big, big things. And then if we need to, absolutely. We can talk about those things, but big rocks first, everybody. Okay, so next we're talking about maintaining healthy blood sugars. Super important. It's unequivocally bad to have elevated blood sugars for a very long time. I think there's everybody on, anybody in the health community will agree that having elevated blood sugars for a long time, it's not a good thing. It's not what we're going for. How important certain things are, we'll talk about that in a second, but over having elevated blood sugar for a long time is not good. So insulin resistance is kind of the spectrum, right? So in your body, you normally can process blood sugar, right? So when you're a baby, you just eat it up, no problem, and you can process it, bring it in. Your insulin works well, you're sensitive to it. You bring it in. Insulin sensitivity is what we're going for. That's the goal. That means when you have a release of glucose or you eat glucose, something like that, your body responds to it well, right? It can take insulin and release it, and it works and it brings in that blood glucose. And you don't have just glucose hanging around your blood for long. That's insulin sensitive. On the whole other spectrum is insulin resistance. And insulin resistance in diabetes, type two diabetes specifically, is where your body is no longer sensitive to that insulin. When your body's pumping out insulin and it doesn't respond to it. You essentially continue to have the elevated blood sugars, lots of more blood sugar hanging around than what you want. And that's not good because if you have lots of blood sugar in your blood for a long period of time, it starts getting where it shouldn't be. Meaning the small blood vessels and nerves, things in like your eyes, your heart, your kidney, anywhere. Really, so it leads to things like heart attack and risk, all those things. So insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance, that's a spectrum that we're looking at there. And on the spectrum, specifically, we have prediabetes. This is right before full-blown diabetes. It's kind of, once again, I say it's a spectrum because it's really not that much different in terms of we have outcomes that say, once we get this number, you know, like in A1C of seven, we start to see these microvascular complications, meaning these small blood vessel type things. But overall, I kind of think of it as a warning sign. If someone says to me, "Hey, I was diagnosed with prediabetes." I wouldn't be like, "Oh, no biggie, man. That's no big deal." I'd be like, "Whoa, this is like our come to Jesus moment right here. We've kind of like, we got to turn the ship around and we got to make some corrections 'cause we do not want to have that long-term." And so there's certain criteria diagnosed with that. Up on the screen here, but I'll mention them. A fasting glucose means if you just get your blood sugar checked, fasting, not eating, if you're in the 100 to 125 range, that would give you a diagnosis of prediabetes. And if it's over 126, that would be actual type two diabetes. For an A1C, this is something called a hemoglobin A1C. It's measuring like the average of what you typically have over the past three months. Prediabetes is 5.7 to 6.4 and full diabetes is 6.5. And then you can also do something called an oral glucose tolerance test, which is where you take a low, since you drink a shot of sugar, about 75 grams, and you measure at two hours to see where you're at. For prediabetes at two hours, you're at 140 to 199. And if you're over 200 at two hours, then you have diabetes. And so that's kind of the overall test for diagnosing prediabetes and diabetes. And obviously we don't want to get there. My goal is to not ever get there, but we got to start somewhere, right? And you know that if you have that, then that's, hey, low hanging fruit, we can work on there and get better. Another score that we can kind of look at is something called your HOMA-IR. So this measures the ratio between your fasting insulin and your glucose. This is not a standard test. You can get it. You can get fasting glucose and fasting insulin. You can actually calculate it. And there's lots of literature on that. It's kind of, there's no like one defined number, which is kind of the problem. I think in literature, they'll say that over two is definitely insulin resistance. Anywhere between one and two is maybe some mild insulin resistance and less than one is kind of normal is generally what we're looking for there. There's some wiggle room there. But if you're saying, hey, once again, I want to optimize, I'm doing well on those other things. I want to see where I'm at. HOMA-IR is something you can look at and we can kind of decide from there. But overall, the main stuff that we talked about, really just maintaining those normal healthy blood sugars if possible. So then one thing I did want to mention with that is CGMs or continuous glucose monitors. This will be a topic for another podcast for sure, but it's super controversial. And this is my take home here. If you go on Health YouTube, meaning, or you search anywhere, you'll see people talking about CGMs and glucose and glucose spikes. And you're gonna be like, oh my gosh, I'm terrified. And all I can tell you is that if someone's telling you with complete and utter confidence that glucose spikes are always bad for you, I would be wary of that person. And I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong. So hear me out. I just don't think we have the data to know that yet. So we have lots and lots of data that when your A1C is elevated, that's a bad thing. Glucose spikes, we are just learning about this. What do they mean in people who are non-diabetic, right? So we have lots of info on continuous glucose monitors. They're simply made for type 1 diabetics, right? So what they would do is type 1 diabetics wear this so they know where they're at. And so they make sure they don't go too low or they're not too high. And now we're starting to get these with type 2 diabetics as well. And now with the healthy population where people just wear them because it's cool and someone on a podcast told them to wear it. But the problem is what do we do with this data, right? When you have an insulin spike, when it goes up to 130, 140, if you eat something, what does that mean? I don't know. I don't know. There's just not enough data to definitively tell you if they're bad. They could be an issue. They could, we could find that, hey, when this happens, this is an issue long-term. And I'm open for that data just right now. I don't think we have that. And that's the biggest thing. People will say, "Glucose spec's the worst thing for you." Like, "Show me the data. Show me the data that definitively is the worst." They'll probably tell you that it's, you know, they see it anecdotally or they're extrapolating from there. And that's okay. I'm okay with that as long as you understand that the science has not really settled on that yet. And I just really, really wanna just kind of hand that home. As I mentioned, we just don't have the data to support that yet and lots of anecdotes. And the big thing is if it makes you feel better, go for it. If you're saying, "Hey, when I do this, Jordan, and I have glucose spikes, I feel bad. And I feel better when I don't." You know, I'd say, "First of all, are you placeboing or no-ceboing yourself into that?" Is that, would you actually know that? I'm not sure, but it's one of those things. This is not a big rock, I think. I think your glucose spikes are not a big rock. Why? Because we, one, don't have the data behind it. And two, a lot of times when people report that, the only outcome, the only natural outcome there is that you must eat a low-carbohydrate diet. So essentially they're saying, "Hey, if spikes are bad, then remove the spikes, remove glucose, you're gonna essentially eat a ketogenic diet, and that's what it's gonna be." And as I mentioned before, that's not a perfect diet if you can't sustain that. And there's just lots of issues with that. But maybe we're just a little more flexible. I think kind of how I think about it is a hybrid medicine approach, right? Hybrid meaning traditional and new. There's lots of merit to that, but let's use what we know and do the best we can while also being practical on things. 'Cause this is something I see quite a bit online where people freak out. They get their CGM, they see their data go up, and then they go, "Oh my gosh, I don't know what to do. I have this number," and they worry about it. And they worry about, does it actually matter? And if we're spending time worrying about things that don't matter, man, life is way, way too short to be doing that. And so that's why for me, right now, I'm not ready to say, "Hey, this is the end-all be-all." Maybe it makes you feel better. Maybe it will be important, and I'm open to learn about that. I'm interested to learn more about that. But right now at this time, I'm not saying, this is not a big rock saying, "Hey, you need a CGM. Use those other metrics, and then we can kind of go from there and we'll learn more. I'm excited for it. Let me know if you think I'm wrong though. I always appreciate feedback, that's for sure. And then next one, we're gonna talk about maintaining healthy cholesterol numbers. So this is one, this is one of my favorite topics. I'm such a nerd. I've got tons of content on this. I mean, we're talking like a whole season on cholesterol. So go back, if you're interested and need something to fall asleep to, listen to me talk about cholesterol for hours on end. It's there, it's one. I was going to super big detail here. There's lots more about that, but overall it's controversial now. There's lots of controversy in the low carb community specifically, but just like CGMs, I don't think we have sufficient data to follow this new paradigm, but I'm interested to learn more. Essentially in the low carb community, they're saying now like LDL is not important. What matters is triglycerides and HDL and specifically that ratio. I've had a whole podcast previously about that. Why I don't subscribe to that theory yet, but overall you're gonna get a lipid panel, right? And we're gonna get things that look like your total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, triglycerides, and may or may not get an ApoB, which I talk more about what that is. Overall minimum values, I'd like to see total cholesterol under 200, LDL less than 100, HDL greater than 40 or 50, depending if you're male or female, triglycerides less than 150, and then ApoB less than 100. And then probably better goals. I think overall total cholesterol, I don't pay too much attention to that quite honestly. There's not a lot of great outcomes dedicated to total cholesterol. LDL less than 70, though that's kind of our new goal. HDL greater than 50, and the higher is probably the better. Usually there's certain situations where it may not be, but overall high is good. And triglycerides less than 100, and then ApoB anywhere in that less than 70, 85 range is kind of where we're going for. And then people will say, but what about ratios? So some people will track this and go for it. It's not my personal standard that I look for, but people either track the total cholesterol to HDL ratio or the triglyceride to HDL ratio, which is the one most people are talking about. And I think overall the total cholesterol to HDL, they say you want to be less than four, like for sure. And then triglyceride to HDL, there's no real definitive what is perfect, but I say literature and say, if you're over 2.5, that's definitely, you know, quote higher risk, where a lot of people advocate for one. And I talked about my issues with the ratios in a previous podcast, so I won't go on there, but overall cholesterol, go over this as someone, right? I'm gonna see if you're doing it yourself, but for me, the biggest things I look at right now, currently ApoB, if we can get that, that's fantastic. If not, we're gonna look at non-HDL, which is another one I didn't specifically mention, but you're gonna combine anything that's not HDL. So it's gonna be total minus HDL is gonna be your non-HDL, and that's gonna be a lot of a better marker than just necessarily LDL, but you can use that. And then LDL is kind of our other marker, a surrogate marker that we can use as well. And overall, I don't wanna bore everybody down with that, but you know, generally lower ApoB, the better, less chance of having heart disease. We want our triglycerides lower, that is also beneficial as well. And then HDL higher, those are kind of the general things we're looking for. And I have more information on that if you're interested, but I won't bore you any further on that. And then next, the last one I'm gonna talk about here is building resilient mental health. And I say this 'cause what good is it if you're jacked and super fit, but you hate your life? And I mean that seriously. You know, we have a lot of people who their life is built around being fit and being active and doing stuff. And yeah, I love being active. That's a big, I think, yeah, definitely part of my identity, but like, it's not my identity, right? It's not my one thing that defines me, who I am, Jordan Rennecke, as my fitness and my body, 'cause sometimes there's things that you can't control, right? And so if you're, have this thing where you're just constantly, constantly worried about your health and you're going in there and you're worried, worried, worried, like what good does that do, right? If you're super fit, but you're still feeling that, that's not what we wanna be or where we wanna go. So it's really, really important. And it's a wide encompassing topic, but it's really important. And I'm not just talking about the medical definition, right? It goes much further than that. I think there's multiple components into your mental health. Specifically, obviously, yeah, we do start with medical, right? True medical diagnoses. If you are diagnosed with severe depression or anxiety or even mild on the spectrum, like that's very real. And I wanna affirm you and validate that, that we should get that worked on, right? Or let's say you have something like, as unfortunate as schizophrenia or bipolar, all those are very real things and are a component of mental health, but aren't your only component of mental health. And other things I talked about is social, right? So I don't think we're meant to be alone. We're social creatures. So who's your community, right? Who's your tribe? It's very important to have people you can trust and confide in, and that's very important as well. Another thing people find very helpful is spiritual, right? There's a big spiritual component to mental health, your sense of purpose, your sense of belonging, having feelings of peace, gratitude, mindfulness. We've heard that constantly over the late media these days. And this isn't necessarily talking about religious perspective, but just lots of research on mindfulness and gratitude and all that stuff. And then being able to take on challenges. That's another component, right? So doing hard things, being able to handle a lot. And I specifically say resilience and building resilient mental health for a reason. I think it's very important that you have to have this reserve, right? To handle things. So life is gonna happen. Now, I had a football coach in high school who would say that adversity is not a matter of if, but when. And it's one of my favorite quotes, 'cause stuff's gonna happen. Life's gonna happen. How can you respond to it? How do you respond to it? That's the biggest thing. And being resilient means you have more in the tank to handle that. You can take on life coming at you and not completely collapse under that. And that's the goal is to be resilient specifically. And what life will hit you, and it's just one of those things I need to have more in the tank. And I kind of think of it as analogy, like liquid in the cup. So if you just got a glass in your cup sitting on the table and there's no water in there, and you just give it a little flick, it's gonna fall over, right? Add a little bit of water, and it's a little more stable, but pretty easy. Add a bunch more water, it's gonna take a lot more to forcefully knock that over. That's what I think of resiliency. So resiliency is the ability to withstand that pressure, you know, someone poking the cup, that's life. And the water are all the tools you have. So your support group, your faith, your counselors, your resiliency, your all these things that you're doing, that building up in that cup, that is what resiliency really is. And so I want to fill your tank as much as possible. I wanna give you the skills and encouragement to do that. That's what I think of when I think of mental health. And so it's all encompassing and it's not just there. And so that's kind of my add on there. It covers a lot of things, right? So notice what I didn't say in any of these things was like sauna is the key, red light therapy is the key. All those things are little mini tools that may be helpful in some regards, but those aren't the big things, right? The big things are those nine that I just talked about. Those are the big rocks. And if you keep revisiting them over and over and over, those are honestly all you need. You can live a long, healthy life just following those things and I think you'll do great, right? You don't have to worry about these biohackers here, this little thing there, like big rocks. Focus on the big rocks. Can you get inside those categories and delineate down and get really nit-picky and get granular? Absolutely, we can do that. I nerd out about that all the time. We can do that. But if you're just like, "Dude, Jordan, I just wanna be healthy. Tell me what I need to do." Just do those, do those things. If you worry about those things, the big rocks, you're gonna be great. You're gonna be better than 95% of you will guarantee that. So I hope you found this helpful. This is a little bit of a review, but kind of once again, I wanna start the year off saying, "Hey, this is what we're going for. This is our true north. These are the things that I worry about." But if you did listen along, I appreciate it so much. But that is gonna be the end of the podcast today. Thanks for stopping by. And if you did find this helpful though, it would mean the world to me if you liked, subscribed or shared with a friend to get the word out, that would really mean a lot. But that's it. Thanks for stopping by. Now get off your phone, get outside, and we'll see you next time. Always seek the advice of your personal physician or qualified healthcare provider for questions regarding any medical condition.
