10k steps are all the rage for a longer and healthier life. But it’s really about taking 10k Baby Steps in many different ways to help you die young, at a very old age.
10k steps is not a magical number. In fact. even fewer than that will deliver tremendous health benefits, especially if you’re older. If you know THE WHY moving your butt, fasting, resistance, and aerobic training as well as thermotherapy then your healthy success is much more likely.
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10k Baby Steps to a Longer and Healthier Life Transcript
[00:00:00] It’s been all the rage for a long time. 10,000 steps a day to better health and to help prevent a lot of the nasty things that happen to us when we get older. A lot of people were starting to wonder, where did that 10,000 number come from? Was that just a made up number? Well, it turns out the Journal of the American Medical Association, they released a study that was done that actually proves that this is the case. And in fact, it stated to get this right, the study of 78,500 people. That’s pretty good. The mean age being 61 years old, starting in 2013, shows that 10,000 steps per day may be associated with a lower risk of mortality, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Steps performed at an even higher cadence, meaning really moving a lot may even create additional risk reduction. That is fantastic. Now, 10,000 steps a day, that’s about five miles. So how whatever your activity level is through the day, that’s how much you got to supplement it. And again, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing to do. I’m not knocking it, but this is only one of 10,000 ways that you can improve your health and reduce the risk of diseases and also improve your brain chemistry and improve your emotions and your whole body and your whole function. We know about it. It’s nutrition, it’s exercise, it’s things of that sort.
[00:01:33] Well, over the years, I’ve taken my 10,000 baby steps to be in some of, if not the best health of my entire life. And I’ve done it in a multitude of different ways. A lot of those 10,000 ways. And what’s really been important for me is understanding the why. First of all, my why, why am I doing this? That helps me get my butt going and out of the chair. It gets me to the gym, it keeps me from eating something or makes me eat more of something. It’s focusing on the result that I’m looking for. But it’s also why is this the case? Why is it what we hear about resistance training and aerobic training and nutrition and fasting and thermo therapy and things of that sort so critical. I really started looking into this a number of years ago. And by the way, a lot of medical science and research is focused on this, and it has to do with the way we evolved as a species. Now, Homo sapiens have been on this earth for 200,000 years, but you can say that it’s only been for well, in the first place, the last 50 to 70 years, that the current lifestyle we have has been in place in terms of the foods that we eat, the processed foods and the fats and the sugars.
[00:03:04] And you know the story as well as how sedate we are in terms of not moving our bodies, not exercising. And you know what it really boils down to? We’re being comfortable to death. Look at the way Homo sapiens evolved on this planet for minimally 290,000 years, actually longer than that. They were under constant periods of physical stress, feast or famine. Hot, cold, the foods that they ate, they were always exercising, lifting, pulling resistance, training aerobic and typically in short sprints. We stopped doing that, but now we start seeing the megatrends in good health in terms of exercise and habits and things of that sort. So feast and famine. You’ve got fasting, even just intermittent fasting. Why is that the case? Well, first of all, let’s look at how the human body works. And in fact, every single organism on this planet is basically designed to do two things survive and procreate. That’s it. Everything from bacteria and viruses to human beings, it’s to survive and procreate. So what the body did, our amazing bodies did over 200,000 years is evolve itself to win in times of stress, which is a threat to optimize itself. So when it was not getting any food, you know, the feast or famine part that was most of our existence was like that. When we were starving, fasting, our body started to clean itself up, started to optimize itself so that it could not only survive but perform at a very high level in order to go get some more food.
[00:05:13] In terms of exercise our bodies conditioned themselves for in the first place aerobic exercise, short sprints. We didn’t go running 18 miles, we didn’t go jogging. We were running from or after something really fast. That’s what our body’s optimized itself for. And that that within that sprint would trigger all sorts of positive things in the body. And I’m talking about all sorts of some sometimes even seemingly unrelated things. Hot and cold didn’t have air conditioning and furnaces. And so that’s why thermo therapy such as saunas, so many studies out there showing, especially in the Scandinavian countries, the immense health benefits, the increased longevity, the reduction in rates of several age related diseases that happen for people who regularly take saunas, they’re stressing their body. These are all triggers. Cold therapy. Half of my shower is cold. I actually endure it because I’m focused on the why, because I know that that triggers all sorts of positive things, including autophagy, which is basically about a third of the cells in your body. And there are trillions of them at any given moment are dying or unhealthy or damaged. That cold water actually triggers your body. Other things do too, including working out and such to get rid of them.
[00:06:56] Your body’s optimizing itself, gets rid of them and makes way for new and healthy cells. And in fact, some of those new and healthy cells perform a little bit of cannibalism on the dying cells. I don’t care. It makes me healthier. And then with resistance training, it’s not just and this is a great example of how everything I’m talking about here does so much more than you think. So with resistance training, yes, you’re getting muscle tone. Yes. You’re building your strength. Yes. Especially as you get older. You want to work on your core, maintain better balance, because when you get older, sometimes a fall and a broken hip can actually be a death sentence. But it does all of these other amazing things. It triggers all kinds of great brain chemistry. It triggers all sorts of other optimizations. I’ll give you just one example, just one which I find remarkable. So as we get older, actually beginning in our twenties, we slow down our bodies to producing new blood vessels throughout our body. When you do resistance training, weightlifting, and by the way, it doesn’t have to be extreme. It actually triggers something that triggers something that triggers something in the walls of your blood vessels. Just start growing new blood vessels and the benefits of it are immense and far reaching. So the bottom line is, is that when we look at the way this miracle amazing thing that we still barely understand our bodies when we treat it the way our ancestors treated it, except in a smart, healthy way.
[00:08:53] And by the way, don’t take on any of this kind of stuff unless you consult with your doctor or a health care professional first, because we’re all different. I don’t just say that, so I don’t get sued. We’re all different and we can be overly ambitious or do something that might not be safe for us or actually really, truly do that. But when we take into account what our body wants, what our body needs, the dividends of that are absolutely huge. Take into account the fasting part of it. So you know that fasting has become something really hot these days. For good reason. In this case, it’s not just something trendy, because again, in that feast and famine situation, our body is optimizing itself. And so therefore, even with intermittent fasting, for instance, several days a week for I finished dinner by 6:30 p.m. and I don’t take in any calories. I’ll have plain coffee water. Until lunchtime. It’s not that hard to do, especially once you get used to it. And here again, it gives your body and your cells a chance to repair themselves and regenerate themselves. You know, things like resistance training, even meditation, weightlifting, all that kind of stuff, you know, heals your telomeres.
[00:10:18] If you don’t know what that is, think of a shoestring. And that little plastic cap on the end of it, that’s a telomere. It’s at the end of our DNAs. And as we get older, they fray. And when they fray, the DNA starts getting damaged. But when you do some of these things, they actually start to heal themselves down to the freaking DNA level. So my big takeaway. And what I’m living is that in understanding why this is, it gives me the rationale. So when it’s a cold morning and I take half my shower in the heat and then I crank it down to cold. If I stop and think, here’s why I’m doing it and here’s why it works, that really helps me get past it. And you know, as James clear of atomic habits often say says, you know, the short term pain leads to long term game. Short term satisfaction leads to long term pain and boring. Ain’t that the truth? So you can have that immediate satisfaction of having that piece of chocolate cake, but that and other things accumulate over time and you got a problem. And doing that, you know, cold shower and everything. Well, actually, I’ve got to tell you, I feel a cognitive boost and everything’s a lot clearer for some reason when I do it.
[00:11:42] But I know that it adds up because I’ve taken my 10,000 baby steps or I put my 10000 hours into it and it makes a difference. And you get momentum, it gets easier, and then you start seeing the results. And here’s a huge thing. I start feeling really good about myself because I’m actually doing it. And so every step along the way, it’s worth it. Every step along the way has a dividend to it and then eventually it starts kicking in. You’re like, Oh, I look better, I feel better. I’ve got more energy. You know, my blood chemistry is better. You know, I went in and got to my yearly checkup. About the only time that I go into the doctor anymore is for a checkup. And it’s like everything’s right down the middle. A few things are leaning toward the good side of all my blood work. Yeah, I felt good for a lot of reasons, so I. Honor your ancients. They gave us this example of how to live a really healthy, active life, how to avoid so many problems that a result of our advanced civilization in terms of the foods that we have and being comfortable to death. And you can join me on my intention, which is to die young at an old age.