Interesting definition

To be clear, this is been my morning and gym routine for 30+ years even when I was building Mark’s daily Apple and Primal Kitchen. And I also couldn’t stay retired after selling, which is why I almost immediately started a shoe company.

Some people’s exercise habits look like slavery

Waking up at a normal time, puttering around in the morning, doing the crossword, drinking a couple cups of coffee and then sauntering into the gym at 11 AM for social hour deserves far more applause because it signals that you have built a life that allows you to do it

A very interesting study was just released, and it’s not the first of its kind, but it is the perfect exemplification of just how critical every day of exercise is. A single workout, just one, turns on and activates 3,000 unique exercise related proteins. These are gene signaling proteins. These are the messages that you’re sending your entire body about your behavior, your environment and your daily habits. It is the activation of these proteins that, in part, tells your nervous system about the trajectory of the organism. How active is this guy? What does he value? What is he working towards? Those 3,000 messages you’re sending your body every time you work out play an enormous role in maintaining the overall milieu of an active, healthy, abundant organism. You can skip one, sure, and come back tomorrow and get those messages sent. But can you miss two or three or four? I would advise strongly against it. This is why consistency is so important. This is why frequent exposures to intense bouts of physical output are so important. They keep the messages flowing in one direction. You do one workout and then skip a week. That’s not good enough. That doesn’t send the signal to your nervous system, to your DNA, to your epigenome that physical activity is important and that adaptations had better begin to happen. The only way you send that all important signal is to exercise consistently and regularly, to go hard and then recover and then go hard again. This is something we all knew already, but to have it spelled out in such explicit gene level detail is valuable. You don’t even have to know what the signals are actually saying. You don’t have to know the specifics. All you have to know is that they are happening.

Could have some positive effects, but don’t forget that mTOR isn’t an “aging” pathway. It’s a growth pathway. An abundance pathway. Inhibit it too much and you’ll inhibit muscle growth, vigor, energy, and recovery. In your quest to not die, don’t forget to live

Lean muscle mass acts as an organ and tissue reserve system for older adults. The more muscle you carry, the stronger you are, the more resistant you are to the ill effects of bed rest and hospital stays and aging-related diseases. You have all this tissue that could be called upon when required before the body starts breaking down critical organ systems. A recent study shows that it might go even further than that. Training consistently in old age isn’t just about organ reserve or tissue reserve, it’s about mitochondrial reserve. Researchers compared the muscle tissue of young adults, older adults who trained consistently, older adults who were relatively active, and older adults who were impaired in some way. They were essentially comparing young adults with seniors who went to the gym, seniors who just kinda puttered around, and seniors who were mostly sedentary. They examined the actual muscle tissue and gene expression profile of the muscle at rest and in response to training. The totally inactive, impaired older adults had mostly dormant muscle. It wasn’t metabolically reactive to the degree you’d expect. Many of the gene systems related to mitochondrial efficiency and function in the muscle were totally turned off, almost as if they were gene-deleted. When the researchers had them work out, their muscles barely responded. The second group of older adults, the ones who weren’t necessarily going to the gym but were still taking care of themselves and getting an average of 10,000 steps a day around with less than an hour per week of intense activity, had old muscle tissue. You looked at their muscle and how it performed and reacted to stimuli, and it was obviously that of an old person’s. It wasn’t very responsive to training, and local inflammation levels were actually lower after training, which is interesting because most people think of inflammation as a bad thing (but in this case, it’s a good thing because it means the muscles are responding to the training and the inflammation is a necessary part of the adaptation process). Then you’ve got the gym-going senior citizens, the ones who actively trained. They walked an average of 13,000 steps a day and spent around 3 hours a week doing intense training. They were much closer to young muscle tissue. In fact, about 56% of the characteristics of aged muscle seen in the other two groups were totally absent in the trained group. The trained seniors had higher inflammatory responses to exercise, which means their muscles were more responsive and recovered better and adapted, most importantly, better to the training. Mitochondrial function was preserved and enhanced, and while they weren’t quite as young as the actually young adults, they were most of the way there. “56% young.” It’s important to highlight that “young muscle mitochondria” isn’t just relevant to how much you can lift or perform physically. It also reverberates across the entirety of your physiology. How well your mitochondria perform plays a role in glucose control, inflammation, brain function, balance, metabolic flexibility, stress resilience, and recovery from illness and injury. In short, everything we care about when we talk about “health” depends partly on the “age” of your mitochondria, and hard, intense training that you give yourself time to recover from helps reduce that “age.”

Dairy abstention (calcium deficiency) Seed oils (linoleic acid) Both make heme iron from meat more problematic in the colon.

Someone asked me for what I’d recommend to someone taking GLP drugs. I’ve written posts and newsletters on this before, but there’s one newer bit of advice I haven’t mentioned before: eat more. The thing with these drugs is that they work incredibly well. Whether it’s semaglutide (Ozempic), tirzepatide (Mounjaro), or the yet-to-be-FDA-approved retatrutide, these compounds are very good at getting you to eat less. They have other effects, too, like slowed gastric emptying, “slower” digestion, and others—some positive, some more negative. But the one thing almost everyone reports is that you eat far less food on these things. That can be good if you need it. Most people eat too much. Even if it’s healthy food. I remember being at PrimalCon back in the day and being shocked by the amount of food people could put away. Everything was high quality, cooked in good fats, well-sourced, but people would routinely report that they gained weight at PrimalCon. Food is food. Volume is volume. And that’s why these drugs are having such powerful effects in the overweight and obese. They’re losing weight because they aren’t eating very much and, most importantly, they aren’t hungry doing it. But what about when you start losing too much? When you start losing muscle, losing energy? Everyone says the obvious: “make your calories count.” Get your micronutrients. Make it high quality, whole foods. With less volume coming in, the quality of what little volume you do get becomes increasingly important. And they talk about protein, too, rightfully. A big part of countering the negative effects of GLP drugs, like muscle loss, requires that you stay active. Lift weights, and support that activity by eating protein. These are all good, but you’ve heard them before. The one piece of advice you might not have heard, that sounds a bit unconventional, but that becomes useful especially as you start approaching your ideal weight: eat more. Try to eat a bit more than you feel like. Many issues we see with these drugs are from undernourishment. You're running a deficit and, depending on the drug in question, burning more energy. You need to eat a little more than you think. It’ll still be "less," don't worry.

Grandkids asking you to flex

Real trees might be more resistant to mold

And the deliberate production of mind-altering substances is how civilization happens.

Getting loaded is a human constant.