[00:00] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: If you don’t sleep, there is literally metabolic debris that builds up in your brain that gives you the experience of being brain foggy. So like, let’s just start there. If guys are not sleeping well, hormonal environment is jacked up, when cortisol is high, testosterone levels are low, low willpower, insulin resistant, how do you possibly think you’re going to succeed with anything else on top of that?

[00:22] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So it’s foundational. Number one is sleep. Welcome

[00:27] Jim Harshaw Jr.: to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man. Real talk, unharnessing your athletic drive. For clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harsha Jr. And today I bring you Dr. Anthony Balduzzi. Dr. Balduzzi is the CEO and founder of the Fit Father Project in the Fit Mother Project.

[00:47] Jim Harshaw Jr.: He’s a naturopathic doctor, and he has helped over 60, 000 families across more than a hundred countries through his Fit Father and Fit Mother program. This guy. In our conversation that you’re about to hear, man, this is a doozy for those of you who like to geek out on health, fitness, nutrition, how do I optimize my life for productivity, performance, success, man, this is a good one.

[01:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I mean, he shatters some myths and shed some light on some real surprising truths about men’s health, about men’s fitness, and he gives you real practical. Strategies that you can use to improve your health, to improve your fitness, to improve your performance in your day to day, this is real world stuff.

[01:34] Jim Harshaw Jr.: He kind of gives us the 20 percent that gives us the 80 percent of the results. And even for those of you who are real experts at this and already geek out at this stuff, you’re going to learn some real eyeopening things. I certainly did. I love this stuff. And I learned several new things that I’m going to incorporate into my daily routine.

[01:51] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And you’re going to enjoy this as well. Now, for those of you who are in my inner circle clients, we’re going to have a private session with Dr. Balduzzi, and you’re going to get to ask him questions about your specific situation. If you’re, you’re part of that, you’re going to be excited to get direct access to him.

[02:07] Jim Harshaw Jr.: If you’re not, then. Find out how you can get to be part of our community and our program. Just go to jimharshajr. com slash call and you can sign up for a free call. There’s an application process. If you’re a great fit, we’ll have a great conversation. If not, that’s fine too, but maybe worth a call for you to explore this.

[02:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: But Anthony Balduzzi is a national. Champion bodybuilder. So this guy has walked the walk, not just talk the talk and graduate of university of Pennsylvania, which has a highly esteemed in my heart because I almost went to UPenn and, uh, have a lot of good friends who, who wrestled there, but anyway, let’s get into this really enlightening conversation with Dr.

[02:44] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Anthony Balduzzi. So what are some of the main issues that you see men facing as they age, as it relates to their health and fitness?

[02:55] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I mean, let’s just, first off, I think face the facts. Over 40 guys, I think the stats in the United States at least is that 60 percent of men are overweight. Most guys around this age are starting to get on prescription medications if they don’t have good cardiometabolic health.

[03:11] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: We have old injuries from, you know, times when we played sports and we just are feeling our age and our joints and that shifts the kind of athletics that we can do. We have busy families and our own personal vanity or keeping up with how we want to look is not our only pressure, right? We’re taking care of our, our work life, our kids, finding time for ourselves.

[03:31] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And then quite frankly, society today makes it so easy to be unhealthy. Through the fact that we have so much convenience foods and there’s a lot of like good intention for health out there, but there’s so much information that sometimes people are confused about which diet to follow or which workout to follow.

[03:46] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So it’s like a analysis by paralysis. So I think like men over 40 today are living in a bit of conflict conflict because we often feel like young in our minds, but our bodies feel older. Conflict because we want to do good, but we’re not always getting traction with our habits because our routines are busy and we need to find something that works.

[04:03] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And it’s just really easy to be unhealthy in today’s day and age. But I think the cool thing that I see, you know, through the fit father project and the fit mother project work is we’ve walked over 60, 000 moms and dads and over a hundred countries through our program is that over 40, you can reach and maintain incredible fitness and you can make a massive transformation wherever you’re at.

[04:22] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I’d say in three to three months to one year, it depends on how much weight or muscle you want to gain or lose, et cetera. You can make an amazing transformation, even if it took you decades to get quote unquote unhealthy. The body can adapt and change very quickly, but your margin for error is smaller.

[04:37] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: When you’re over 40, your routines need to be tighter. Your workouts need to be more efficient. Your nutrition needs to be more on point and you got to find a way to do it. That works in the eye of the storm of your busy life. Yeah,

[04:47] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I think that’s the crux there is, is the busy life and a lot of stakeholders were busy.

[04:52] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And everybody, I mean, everybody knows it’s important to eat right and work out. I mean, we’ve heard that millions of times, but, but I think a lot of people struggle with the, the busy factor. I think there are a lot of limiting beliefs out there around. How hard it’s going to be, how I can be consistent, you know, you’re going to want me to work out six, seven days a week and it’s got to be hard and they got to be a long workouts and I got to eat like a rabbit.

[05:18] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I mean, break some of those myths for me, I guess. For the guy who’s sitting there listening and saying, okay, I’m fit or I want to be more fit. Maybe they’re working out, but sporadically, maybe they eat kind of right, but they got to dial things in. I mean, what do you say to that guy?

[05:34] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I say that the good news is that there’s a hierarchy and order of importance of things to focus on first.

[05:40] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And I want to go through that because I think it can be a lot freeing because many guys believe that when they want to have a higher performance body level of fitness, so they need to spend a lot of time exercising. But here’s the pyramid of things you actually need to nail. First, you actually need to improve your sleep.

[05:55] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Which basically gets your nervous system out of that fight or flight kind of mentality. And there’s some really powerful research on this. Yeah. I didn’t expect that to be number one. Right. But I mean, it’s just, it’s just the facts because, and I’m not saying you need to like go sleep nine hours of perfect sleep at night, but sleep really sets the tone for your hormonal environment for the next day.

[06:12] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And you could be trying to do a lot of good things with nutrition and exercise, but if you’re not, if you’re underslept, under recovered, nervous system is not right, you’re kind of pushing a giant ball uphill. And I got so convinced of this when I started looking into the research, they took two groups of people and they put them on a diet and one group had adequate sleep, which I think they define is like over six and a half hours, around seven hours of sleep.

[06:31] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And the other group was underslept. They were more in like interrupted sleep, less than six hours. And the two groups lost different amounts of weight. The group that slept more lost more weight, but not surprisingly, which is this is amazing factor. I guess is the group that missing the sleep, they lost most of their weight from muscle tissue.

[06:47] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Because what happens is when we’re not. I adequately recovered with sleep. Our cortisol levels, the stress hormone are higher. That is a catabolic hormone. Its job is to break down stuff. It breaks down muscle tissue. It breaks down stored carbohydrates to release glucose. And it puts our body in this basically stress state all the time.

[07:02] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So we could be trying to exercise and eat right. But if we have this hormonal environment, that’s not right. We’re kind of screwed. It’s just not going to work really well. And we’ll also be chewing through muscle tissue and we want to maintain our muscle and lose the fat. So sleep is key also because.

[07:15] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Sleep helps us regulate our glucose better. So you miss a night of sleep or you get bad sleep. Your body becomes more resistant to insulin the following day. So the carbohydrates that you would normally eat in your diet, that could be fine, your body’s going to become more resistant to those. So it’s just like another non starter and your willpower reserves and your sense of being able to exert like conscious control over living healthy is going to be depleted.

[07:36] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And you have more brain fog because your brain literally cleans itself at night. There’s this, there’s immune system in your brain called the glymphatic system. There are these glial cells wrapped around all of your neurons that remove metabolic debris that we build up from metabolism, from thinking, from executive function.

[07:51] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: If you don’t sleep, there is literally metabolic debris that builds up in your brain that gives you the experience of being brain foggy. So like, let’s just start there. If guys are not sleeping well, Hormonal environment is jacked up when cortisol is high. Testosterone levels are low, low willpower, insulin resistant.

[08:07] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: How do you possibly think you’re going to succeed with anything else on top of that? So it’s foundational. Number one is sleep.

[08:14] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Quick interruption. Hey, if you like what you’re hearing, be sure to get the notes, quotes, and links in the action plan from this harshaw, jr. com slash action. That’s Jim Harsha, jr.

[08:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: com slash action to get your free copy of the action plan. Now, back to the show. So it’s interesting that you mentioned sleep because I actually always tell people that the number one, the core habit is sleep, but for a totally different reason, I didn’t expect that to come from you in terms of health. I talk about it in terms of productivity, getting things done, getting your workouts in, because I always say bedtime.

[08:50] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Is the number one habit, because if you get to bed on time, you either get enough sleep and you wake up and you can get your morning workout in. You can do your normal morning routine. You can get to work and feel good and be productive and all that. Or if you don’t get to bed on time, then you’re either going to.

[09:07] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Wake up at the same time with less sleep and be behind on everything. I just not feel well, or you’re going to sleep in to make up for that. And then you’re not going to get your workout in, not going to get your morning routine. So totally different reason. I also say sleep, but man, everything you just added to that, it like doubles down on, on my mindset, on terms of.

[09:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Sleep and for really, for, for listen, I always tell people it’s what time you get into bed. Cause you’re probably gonna, you have to wake up at the same time, more or less. Like most people have to wait and wake up at a certain time for something. And so it’s about put your phone down, go to bed so that everything else lines up

[09:39] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: in the next day.

[09:40] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And let me nail this even a little more, and then we’ll move on to the hierarchy because I think it’ll be a good place to spend our time. But I really want to nail this down because there’s an even deeper cut of this. When it comes to our health routines, we all know what we want to do. It’s essence. We need to manage our motivation and be consistent throughout the day.

[09:55] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And so if you’re missing sleep and you’re having a bad morning where you’re reactionary, your nutrition is going to reflect that reactionary mindset. You got up, you’re groggy, you get coffee, you don’t get the right kind of breakfast and now you’re going to eat unhealthy later in the day because it sets up this whole cascade of domino effects.

[10:11] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Whereas the opposite is true. If you have a great morning routine, you get up, you get your workout, your journey, your reflection, prayer, whatever that is, it sets a cascade in motion of like good positive momentum that makes it more likely that you’re going to eat healthier foods. Relate to your coworkers and your family with more emotional resilience and connection.

[10:29] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: All of this is like a momentum game. So it all does start with sleep. How

[10:33] Jim Harshaw Jr.: much is enough? What’s the right amount? I mean, I know it’s maybe debatable sliding scale there, but

[10:37] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: what’s the right. I think aim for seven hours, right? And like, yeah, that’s

[10:40] Jim Harshaw Jr.: not seven hours in bed. That’s like, it takes you maybe 20

[10:43] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: minutes to fall asleep.

[10:44] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: For sure. I think you can even aim for seven hours in bed. I mean, here’s the deal. If you’re, if you’re someone who’s really data driven, which a lot of people listening to this probably are, you can certainly get some of the devices. An aura ring, a whoop band or any other kind of thing to track like your restfulness and waking scores and like your heart rate variability, ultimately, what we need is to have the nervous system in a balanced ready state.

[11:04] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So if some guy can get this done through six hours of total sleep, another person might need a little bit more and sleep dynamically changes your needs based on how hard you’re training, which is exerting your nervous system, as well as how hard you’re working, which is also exerting your cognitive nervous system as well.

[11:19] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So it’s like, it’s like our restoration. Aspect that we need to make sure we have. Cause otherwise we’re obviously going to be pushing into burnout. If you don’t have this restoration, then you’re trying to like eat fewer calories, exercise more intensely. It’s inherently going to be a short term thing.

[11:33] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And this is mirrored in the cycles of nature. We have the light and the dark cycle of every single day. Our nervous system has that same kind of thing baked in. This is like natural law. It is inescapable. We can try to escape it for some time, but it leads to disease. Now get this. Every single, pretty much every single one of your white blood cells has a melatonin receptor.

[11:52] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And this is really interesting. Melatonin is this master nighttime hormone that gets secreted when we sense lower light in the environment. And when melatonin, it does amazing things. It helps initiate the relaxation process in the body. It kicks in that brain to start to clean itself. It gets your immune system actually regulated and active.

[12:09] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And this is why many people are now realizing melatonin is a longevity hormone too, and I’m not saying you should take supplemental melatonin, but you need to protect your own melatonin. And the one way to actually disrupt your melatonin is to be dysregulated with the light rhythms. When the sun goes down at night, the human system is designed to not to have ambient light blasting us in our eyes, but many of us are working late on computers, on phones, on TV screens.

[12:33] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And this is truly like. For someone who’s interested in performance, you need to get your body and nervous system synced up to the right kind of light pattern. So this whole light sleep aspect is foundational. I wear a sleep mask. Does that, does that help? Sleep mask is great. But I would even say like, you want to wear some of those, like, first off, take your phone and make sure you have like the night shift mode where it makes it like less bright and more orange on your phone at night.

[12:54] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And honestly, you wear some of those blue blocking glasses of some short, like everyone in your family should have these.

[12:59] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I’ve read varying reviews on those. I have a pair of those light block, those blue light blocking glasses.

[13:05] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Wear them every single night. You know, blue light, blue light is not bad. What color is the sky?

[13:10] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: The sky is blue. The reason the sky is blue is because it literally reflects that spectrum of light into our eyes and it gives us a sensation. And we’re wired to see that as like,

[13:18] Jim Harshaw Jr.: That’s daytime. That’s when we’re up, we’re active. It’s

[13:20] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: daytime. Yes. And it blue light increases reaction time. It makes us more alert.

[13:24] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It can improve our memory and our cognitive speed of processing and function. We want the exact opposite thing to happen when the body’s getting into the restoration cycle. And so we need to cut and filter out that blue light because we have screens. I mean, in an ideal world, sun goes down, technology’s off.

[13:39] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: You’re eating with your family at a dinner table, reading a book with like lower light in your environment. Like that would be perfect, but you know, we have technology. It’s a part of our lives. So if you’re having it, you got to block it and get this, the same receptors, the photoreceptors that are in your eyes, uh, melanopsin is the one that’s most sensitive to blue light is also in your skin.

[13:57] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Your skin literally senses time of light of the day and your circadian rhythm based on the kind of light expression that it’s getting. So even being in front of your TV with blue lockers, having light blasting your skin is actually dysregulating your circadian rhythm to a certain extent. And this is why people know who do shift work or sleep long.

[14:13] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: They have like a 10, 000 percent increased risk of cancer, of heart disease, of diabetes. Right. Cause it’s just like sleep is so foundational. So you got to improve that. That’s crazy.

[14:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like you could reduce your risk of cancer by

[14:27] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: having better sleep because this is your immune system and your immune system responds on melatonin.

[14:30] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: You need to protect that. So like that’s important is that restoration thing. And it certainly fits into your peak performance habits of how a great day next day starts with good sleep the night before. So that that’s key. So the good thing is like work on that component, your evening routine, morning routine, sleep and creating guardrails on that.

[14:47] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And even the most high performing guys that I see a lot of people straight. Quite frankly, like waste some time on technology, you know, like there’s still like time where you’re just mindlessly scrolling or reading something that you think is like good for you, but it’s actually just kind of wasting your time.

[15:00] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: If you can cut down that tech time and create better barriers before you go to bed, your health will improve dramatically. Great. All right.

[15:05] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Step one. I think we got our money’s worth already.

[15:08] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Go ahead. Step two is nutrition. And this is really freeing because I think a lot of guys. Over 40 think that they need to go crush it in the gym, but really, if you get the sleep down and then you get a good meal plan in place, like that’s the foundation of re changing your body composition.

[15:22] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Now, if you want to get jacked, if you want to really like have a lot of musculature, you need to resistance train. So I’m not knocking that, but I am saying that basically like for a high performance life where you have good energy, low inflammation, Consistent energy, like energy production, and you look really good nutrition is like the king paired with the sleep.

[15:40] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So this means coming down to a good nutrition routine and we can get into the aspects of what that looks like practically. But look at this, like the longest living people around the planet, the centenarians, the pockets of longevity around the world, Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, Loma Linda, California.

[15:54] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: These people are not doing P90X. They eat whole processed foods. They don’t have a lot of light exposure. They have good connections with their family. You know, they have a slower pace of life, like for longevity. You do not need to do high, high, high intensity exercise, but you do need to eat good food because food can either be a benefit in a boon from like great nutrition, good nutrients you need, or it can literally be poison because that’s what most food is today.

[16:21] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Food that has pesticides, foods that is dysregulating your blood sugar, has inflammatory fats in it. And for many people, like especially high performing guys, we use food as a stress relief, right? We’d like people turn to food as a way to like kind of cope and change their neurochemistry because they’re pushing so hard in all these areas of lives.

[16:38] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And I’m here to make the fundamental premise that as a high performing guy, if your nutrition is not dialed in, you’re low grade poisoning yourself. And you’re taking years off your life and there’s no amount of exercise that can help correct for that. Food is more foundational than exercise. So

[16:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: for me, I always try to think of like the 80, 20 rule, like what’s the 20 percent that can give me 80 percent of the results.

[16:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And the way I think about health and nutrition, I want you to sort of. Give me the thumbs up or thumbs down or somewhere in between, but like, I say I try to minimize processed food. I still eat it, but I like minimize processed food, somewhat minimize carbs and eat whole foods. Like that’s just kind of what I try to do.

[17:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I don’t like go all overboard. I eat a big, healthy salad every day for lunch and generally a healthy dinner and minimize processed stuff. Is that,

[17:24] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: is that the 80%? It truly is. It truly is. I think processed. Diet that is like, that is it now that’s like the, but the art of it is how you actually accomplish that on a daily basis.

[17:39] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And so when, when it comes to nutrition, this is a little more of the philosophy is we’re balancing two forces. We’re balancing the force of consistency with variety. And we know that there’s like a consistent diet that is like chicken and broccoli and sweet potato and like avocado oil that if I fed you that every single day for every single meal, your body composition would change, but you’d be miserable.

[17:59] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And we also know the converse of having no plan and just pure variety is like terrible because, you know, it takes a lot of cognitive work to figure out what to eat and you can’t be consistent that way. So we need to balance these forces. And I think for high performing guys, especially when we have. A routine and a work day, and we’re getting into the flow.

[18:16] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It is so, so important to standardize your first one to two meals of the day. Like, let’s say you eat the standard, like breakfast, lunch, dinner, kind of setup. Imagine the freedom of dialing in one to two go to meals early in the day that are foods you like, don’t take a lot of time to make, give your body a ton of nutrients, you actually enjoy it, and now you don’t have to exert any cognitive load to like, figure out what those meals are, they’re go to meals, and then for dinner, you can have all sorts of variety with your family, you don’t need to like, overthink it, you can just eat generally healthy foods, and hey, What we actually do with our program members, we have them plan in free meals throughout the week.

[18:51] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So one or two free meals. And so that would be like a time we go out with friends. Maybe you have pizza and a beer and it’s like, it’s not a cheat meal. It’s a free meal. It’s planned and it’s proactive as opposed to the converse, which is reactive, you know, didn’t plan right. Don’t have standardization. So I’m a huge fan of standardizing the first two meals of the day.

[19:09] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And like the first meal, particularly, Whether you choose to have that as breakfast or you intermittent fast and shift that back. I think there’s a couple of things that work really well for most guys. I was going to ask you about intermittent fasting. I do that. Okay. It’s great. I mean, so we’ll take a step back before standardizing, like just how, like all organizations in business have a structure.

[19:27] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: There’s like an org chart and then there’s stuff that hangs off of that roles, responsibilities, KPIs, like for our nutrition plan. So The timing is the structure. And so for you, it works because you have this nice routine. I can tell you get up, you maybe do your reflection, your journaling, you get the workout in and you shift that meal back.

[19:43] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And like, that’s what gives you this nice crank every morning to get going. So intermittent fasting is a wonderful option to do it. So basically you wake up, drink water, coffee, tea, whatever you want to do and shift that meal back until. Let’s say anywhere from 10, 11, noon, you get to pick when that meal comes and it needs to fit your schedule when that happens.

[20:01] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And I would say, so intermittent fasting might be like, you have that meal at 11, you have a snack at two, you have dinner at six. Fine, easy, really simple. But you can also do the breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner setup whenever that happens for you. Also really good. What every man needs to do is decide what his schedule setup is.

[20:16] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And that might be slightly different during the work week versus on the weekend. Like it’s possible you intermittent fast during Monday through Friday. But you make a breakfast with the family over the weekend. Like that’s fine, but you need to have that proactive plan and get out of all forms of reactive nutrition.

[20:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Great. Love it. All right, man, this is pretty, pretty straightforward, followable, simple stuff.

[20:35] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: But I’ll say this before, before we get into the first meal, like what, what the body needs first thing in the morning. Is to drink water, like 20 to 32 ounces of water is the first thing your body needs. Our bodies can go a long time without food.

[20:47] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: We can’t go very long without water. Every single one of your cells is filled with this like cytoplasm gel. That’s basically structured water and water is what revitalizes our body. We’re not drinking throughout the night. So one of the great high performance hacks is as simple as kick back some water, but then 10 to 30 minutes of waking up ideally immediately.

[21:05] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: If you want to supercharge it. throw some good minerals in that water. It could be as simple as a pinch of some pink Himalayan sea salt. It could be a little more intense if you want to get some kind of like supplement that has a good mineral powder or mineral drops. Minerals are amazing. And water is like the great solvent of life.

[21:20] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And I think it’s super poetic The planet is roughly 70 percent water. Our bodies are roughly 70 percent water. And the minerals that really make up saltwater are also the same exact minerals that create the electrical conductivity that makes our hearts beat. That makes all of our nerves function that leads to all the fluxing in and out of key nutrients.

[21:39] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And we’re just not getting enough minerals in today’s day and age. Our soils are depleted. We’re not eating enough fruits and vegetables, which naturally draw those minerals from the earth. So we do need to supplement for key functioning. So water and minerals, first thing in the morning is. Absolutely essential for high performance.

[21:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Okay. So I drink 12 ounces of water within three minutes, five minutes of waking up. So this

[21:59] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: is, uh, I would increase it a little bit, but good. Okay.

[22:02] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And by the way, the listener, like this is the, this is so easy. I mean, this is like the easiest thing you can do. I fell up a glass of water the night before, put a lid on it.

[22:10] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I just wake up and I don’t need, I’m still asleep, practically sleepwalking when I’m drinking it. So super easy to do. So you’re saying sprinkle in water. What a

[22:18] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: little bit of what, what kind of minerals you can do pink Himalayan sea salt, which is mostly just sodium chloride. But let’s say you took a pinch of that, like one eighth of a teaspoon.

[22:25] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It has 80 trace minerals and stuff like that. That’d be like a really simple way. There are more full spectrum mineral supplements like trace mineral drops and stuff like that that you can put in that have a lot of these trace minerals like boron, lithium, and these have benefits to mood, to hormone production for guys, boron can increase testosterone.

[22:43] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So you could get a mineral supplement, but also the pink Himalayan sea salt is sufficient. But the water plus salt or water plus minerals in the morning is great. And you know, it’s also great. It’s not just because of physiologic basis, like psychologically, it’s such, it’s the simplest thing you can do to start generating positive momentum towards your health in the morning.

[23:00] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It’s like you kick back that water. Today’s a fresh new day. No matter what happened yesterday, like I’m giving my body what it needs, you can keep on going. So. It’s like

[23:07] Jim Harshaw Jr.: General McRaven said, it’s the whole make your bed philosophy. It’s like, wake up, do something, you know, that is good, positive, moving the right direction.

[23:15] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Psychologically, this puts you in a good place and it’s so easy to do. So easy to do. Okay. So we talked about sleep. We talked about food and nutrition. And maybe there’s more there to the food nutrition thing. I’m sure there’s a, obviously hours of stuff we could talk about here, but do we cover kind of the, the 20 percent that gives us 80 percent of results or you got more there before we jump into

[23:37] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: the next thing?

[23:38] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Maybe like one more minute on nutrition to kind of, to hit some things out. Then we will move on to the key, continue through the hierarchy and talk about some exercise. Okay. So when it comes to nutrition, I think for that first meal, let’s just talk about standardizing that. If someone walks away from this conversation and you start to create a go to breakfast, it will help you so, so much.

[23:55] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Things that are really good for busy guys is doing some kind of like really good, powerful protein shake. And I’m not just talking about protein powder, but you can make like literally this kind of super food, do it yourself shake that has like some proteins, some greens, maybe some berries, maybe some hemp seeds or chia seeds, almond milk, cacao powder, like we, we give people recipes for this in our program, but some kind of like power smoothie that gets you vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, and some healthy fats.

[24:22] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Like that is a, you can blend it in five minutes. It keeps you full, super convenient, not a lot of digestive stress. That could be an option. You could also do some kind of egg based recipe, get some high quality eggs. The more orange, the yolk, the better it has all those rich nutrients, eggs. The egg yolk itself is rich in choline, which is one of our precursors to our main neurotransmitters that makes us smarter and keeps us sharper.

[24:43] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So eggs have the protein, the fat soluble vitamins. So any kind of egg based breakfast with a side of some avocado, maybe some berries. You know, maybe if you tolerate wheat, a piece of some organic sourdough or organic wheat toast of some sort, but egg based recipes also good. And maybe some power oatmeal, if you want an oatmeal that is stacked up with a little bit of a proteins, nuts, seeds, stuff like that, like that’s also an option.

[25:05] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It’s not exactly what you need to choose any of those, but what stands out to you is something that would be good for your first meal is what we need to get you to figure out. And if you just make that the one crank and change, you standardize your first meal of the day, it’s going to help you so much.

[25:18] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: It’s just going to turn the gears on all that, you know, and I guess for the rest of the day, protein forward, you know, mostly non processed foods, fruits, veggies, you know, in good shape. And obviously we help people with this in a very detailed way in our programs.

[25:31] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And for the list around what you think about this, you know, everybody’s heard the Steve jobs.

[25:35] Jim Harshaw Jr.: He wore the same clothes every day. Same kind of, you know, it’s like same standardized outfit. Didn’t have to think about it. And I’ve actually kind of drifted towards, I’m not wearing one today, but I like long sleeve black t shirt. It’s like jeans and I’ve like five long sleeve black t shirts. I just kind of rotate through them every day.

[25:49] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s like so easy. I don’t have to think about it. But this is what we’re talking about. We’re like talking about standardize this, have it in the fridge all the time, prepare it the night before, prepare a week in advance, whatever it is, like standardize it, make it easy for yourself because you have so many things pulling at you, pulling at your time, you’re checking emails as you’re like walking out the door to work, whatever, like.

[26:11] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Make this part of your life simple so that you can execute it so that you can go be the best version of yourself at work. If you feel good about yourself, you can feel confident. You can be patient when the kids are, you know, screaming and whatever else is going on in your life. You got to simplify and systematize

[26:27] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: this route.

[26:27] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yes. And that your energy levels, your emotional resilience, all of that has a true like biological neurochemical blood sugar level basis to it. So if you get good nutrition in. Nutrition that’s easy to digest. All the things I just talked about are, they’re not going to slow you down and keep you sluggish.

[26:43] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: That could be the difference between you having a really powerful, productive first six hours of the day where you get a ton of stuff done. So the promise of that is amazing. It’s time. It’s energy. It’s money is productivity. Great. Exercise. We need to move our bodies. And I want to go back to the centenarians.

[26:58] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: They’re not doing P90X, but they’re walking every day, they’re gardening. The human brain, this is actually a lot of new research, has a certain amount of activity in threshold of movement that it requires to, one, regulate the hunger and appetite hormones, Called leptin and ghrelin and to actually regulate serotonin and dopamine levels to make us feel happy and motivated.

[27:19] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And roughly the number of steps per day that we need to get is around 5, 647. That’s what some of the research shows. We need approximately approximately exactly 5, 600 and the average American gets around 4, 500 or less. And the global average is a little higher, but still under 5, 000, we’ve just stopped moving a lot over the last a hundred to 200 years.

[27:38] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: We have electricity. We work from home. Like a couple hundred years ago, people had very physical jobs. We’re walking all over the place to go places. We have cars. Now we have zoom meetings now, so we’re just not moving and it’s kind of hijacked our, our nervous system. And it honestly just makes us anxious, like more depressed and actually causes our hunger and appetite circuits to get out of whack.

[27:57] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: This is the wild part. You, while you always ask yourself, like. How do those people get to 500 pounds? Like, well, they’re literally just sitting and not moving. They don’t have the right kind of neurochemistry to manage their hunger hormones. And they just keep on eating themselves to death more or less.

[28:09] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So we actually need to move more to regulate our appetite. And so what I recommend all high performance guys do is like try to walk and move more. This could come in a discreet walk that happens in the morning as part of a routine. Maybe you get some sunshine on your eyes. Very important too for your neurochemistry.

[28:25] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Maybe you walk after a big meal that helps you regulate blood sugar, or you just take meetings while you’re walking or just accumulate steps throughout the day. But just daily activity is more important than formal workouts. Again, for muscle building and high performance, we will need to do strength training.

[28:39] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: I’ll get to that next. But if I could like give you this hierarchy, it would be sleep, Nutrition, daily movement. And if you have any of those that are not in check and you’re thinking, you’re going to throw a couple of CrossFit classes in there and it’s going to like work in your system, it’s not, something’s going to end up breaking because it’s not the most foundational, like first order principles we need to get in place.

[28:57] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So I think of exercise. As if you read all of the benefits of exercise, all of the things that it does for you and you took that and you put it in a pill and you listed all of those and you had one of those sort of prescription commercials that we all see on television, it would fly off the shelves. I mean, everybody, everybody would do it.

[29:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And you’re talking about, this is what you’re talking about, right? Exercise, move

[29:19] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: your body. I’m talking about daily movement is distinct from a formal workout, because I think the trap I feel a lot of guys get into is they say, I don’t have the time to exercise. And what they’re saying is I don’t have the time to spend one hour with my gym shoes on in a structured setting following a specific workout.

[29:37] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And that’s like, and maybe you actually do, and I might be able to convince you that you do have the time and what workouts to do. But I’m just trying to suggest that even if you don’t truly don’t have the time to do a formal workout. You do have the time to move your body every single day, and that’s going to give you a massive bang for your buck, especially if you can get outside.

[29:54] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Yeah, this is the,

[29:54] Jim Harshaw Jr.: again, this is the 20 percent that gives you 80 percent of the results. So move,

[29:58] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: movement. Because what it does is it actually not only gives you the circulation benefits, immune system benefits, the endorphins, the movement, it regulates your nervous system. And to be high performance, we want to be able to get into an engaged nervous system and operate at a high level without being overly stressed.

[30:15] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So we have the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system. Most people are aware of these. The parasympathetic is when we’re relaxed. We’re in a whole healing state. It’s the state of the nervous system we get into at night. And sympathetic is when we’re really geared up. We’re like nervous, anxious, or about to do something really hard and intense.

[30:31] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: We want to be able to get into sympathetic very briefly and periodically. For that workout right before something very big, but live in parasympathetic daily movement, particularly getting outside shifts our system into parasympathetic and like, that’s like the antithesis of being anxious and like feeling like everything’s moving a hundred miles per hour, but you’re actually not getting stuff done.

[30:51] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: That is like a sympathetic shallow way of working the deep work. The connected experience of life is when we’re in parasympathetic and daily movement is our access point to that.

[31:01] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So you talked about maybe some strength training and resistance training as well, right?

[31:05] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: That’s kind of the next level. Next level is scheduling in your formal workouts.

[31:09] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And if you love exercise and you’re already consistent, then like get it in as often as you can. This could be every single day. But if you’re also struggling. I’m going to steer to give you the good news that even doing two strength training sessions a week is like a 10, 000 times better than doing zero.

[31:24] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And over 40, you really need to focus on three areas of training. Obviously the strength and resistance training, you also need cardiovascular activity, and then you need to work on your mobility and your functional fitness so that you’re moving through the squats, the. Deadlifts, the movements that you need to be strong at when you’re 82.

[31:40] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And so we like to combine these, and this is not the only way to work out, but we combine them in our program into a type of training called metabolic resistance training, where you’re doing the right kinds of strength motions, like the squats, the deadlifts, the shoulder presses, pushups, rows, curls, short, like these things in a circuit fashion.

[31:56] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So they’re very like dense workouts in the sense that you’re getting cardio and strength all in one. Kind of probably reminds you of like a wrestling practice, right? I mean, it’s very metabolically taxing. Cardio is baked into the, it’s like the mortar that glues together the entire practice, but there’s also strength work involved in that.

[32:13] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: So for guys, it could be like a pair of dumbbells and kettlebells, and you’re doing a circuit of these types of motions. They only take around 30 minutes to do. And you have an amazing workout that gives you literally metabolic benefit. You know, it changes your gene expression to increase the longevity genes.

[32:26] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: You can build muscle doing these workouts and you can sprinkle it in throughout the week. So like strength training is foundational. Even if you don’t do the strength circuits I’m talking about, even just good old classic lift, rest, lift, rest, kind of classic strength training is, is pretty much the fountain of youth.

[32:40] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: You want to be doing that. Word about time, but

[32:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I feel like we’re just getting started in this conversation. So maybe we’ve got to have you back, Anthony, for the listener who is is taking all this in and they’ve got some action items written down based upon this really actionable, practical stuff that you just gave us, where can they find you, follow you, learn more about your programs and kind of start on this journey

[33:02] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: for sure.

[33:03] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And I’ll just say this, like, I’m grateful for the time that we did get to spend it over and together. And the way I like to deliver things is I like to give the deeper cut. So I know we only had a certain amount and it might feel a little bit overwhelming to only have these little bits, but here’s the deal.

[33:16] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: If this is an area of your life as a man that you want to push forward, you really want to dramatically improve your fitness. Then committing to a program where you have actual structure that you didn’t design, that someone else designed that you can follow through is the key. And this is exactly what we do with fit father project and fit mother project.

[33:33] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: You can go to our websites, fit father project. com or fit mother project. com where we have our exact programs that give you the meal plan, the workouts, the psychology help, and you’re in community with all the other guys who are doing this and it’s why our members get insane results. We literally have the most transformation success stories.

[33:49] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: For dads over 40 of any company online, because we have this amazing program. So you can find it at the websites and I’ll, I’ll leave this as well. The highest performing athletes in the reason that you’re in business gym is because you coach people, you help people recognize the value of having a coach, a structure outside perspective, someone to be accountable to.

[34:07] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: And if you’re not producing the results you want in this particular domain of your life with your health and fitness, it’s time to get a coach. Like Kobe Bryant had a shooting coach and a dribbling coach. And he’s one of the best basketball players that ever lived. Are you struggling with your fitness?

[34:19] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: Is it time for you to get into an actual framework? And that’s what we’d love to help you with. Fitfatherproject. com. We have an amazing YouTube channel. You can check out as well. Hundreds of videos there. And I’d love to connect with anyone who listened to this and wants some help. This is exactly what my team and I do.

[34:34] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So, so good. Really good stuff here today. Thanks, man. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom.

[34:38] Dr. Anthony Balduzzi: You’re welcome. Thanks so much.

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