Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It is not vanity to want to take your shirt off without embarrassing the wife and kids. Your body is a temple of the holy Spirit, for goodness sake. And the Lord definitely cares what you do with it. Stick around. This one might just change how you show up for the wife and kids all summer long.
Run your home and your dough like a biblical boss.
Hey, before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to throw in a little plug here for our Abraham's Wallet boot camp, which is happening August 21 to 23 right outside Cincinnati. It's kind of right between Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
And let me say a couple things. One, it won't be a boot camp. We're calling it boot camp. But you won't be getting up at 6am hearing buglers, bugling reveille and doing calisthenics. It'll be a very pleasant time. You'll have a very nice time. And the second thing I want to say about it is I specifically am hoping to see new faces there. So if you are somebody who listens. You've never even talked to us. You've never sent us a question on email.
You don't support us in any way. You've just been listening for wanting. Like, I think this stuff is helpful. This is. This is the direction that I want to move in. I would love to see you at the retreat in August. We want to meet some more new people, and you'd be very welcome. What you would find is that you fit in just great with everybody. We've had a lot of people come from all over the country.
They appear, they think, I'm not gonna know anybody. I'll be alone for 12 hours, and then maybe I'll make one sad friend. No. The second that you show up, you'll realize I'm with a bunch of other guys who are walking the same road as I am. Not one of us has it all figured out. But you're going to leave inspired and equipped, and I promise you, you'll leave encouraged in the way that you're walking out your family leadership. I would love for you to go to abrahamswallet.com retreat and sign up for the Boot Camp 8-21-23. All right, thanks. Back to our regularly scheduled episode. Mark, let's go back. Let's go back in time to a time when Covid was running rampant across the nation.
I go find this doctor. His name is Dr. Lacroix.
David Sheldon refers to him as Dr. Fizzy Water.
And I met with Dr. Lacroix.
And the conversation I had with him was really impactful for me because I was asking him a couple of general health questions. You know, he was doing the intake stuff. Weight, height, whatever they do. And I'm asking some general questions. Well, what do you think? What should I be doing? And he says to me, well, what do you want?
And I was thinking, where.
Where are we? I'm at the doctor's office. I know doctors don't ask you that. I was like, I want to be healthy. He goes, how healthy?
What do you mean?
Well, are you never going to eat sugar again for the rest of your life? Are you going to take supplements every day? Do you work out for four hours a day?
No.
Okay, well, are you sedentary? Do you plan on moving at all? Yes.
Okay, well, it sounds like you want health somewhere between 0 and 10, so you're going to have to decide what that is, and then I'll help you get there. I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. That's your job.
I'm here to help you to achieve whatever your health goals are. I can advise you in pursuing those.
And I walked out, kind of scratching my head, going, what is this place? Well, I realized I'm with this different kind of doctor who thinks outside the lines and actually warns against many things that are encouraged in the medical community, blah, blah, blah. One of those things that I want to say to our Abe's Wallet listeners is that you are often encouraged.
One, you know, you don't need to go worry about your health until all of the lights are flashing on the dashboard and there's some emergency. If you're not. If you're not in an emergency, then just keep doing whatever you're doing. And the other one is, we're the experts. You do what we say. And I don't believe either one of those things right now. I believe that every guy listening is in charge of his own health. That's part of the deal.
And I didn't always believe that.
So that's kind of. That works into the way I think about what we're talking about today.
Physical capital.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: What do you say?
[00:04:58] Speaker B: I think about your recounting of that conversation pretty frequently because it actually really impacted me. As a financial planner, anybody, I think in these service professions is, you know, we. It's easy to say, well, doctor's just going to tell you what to do.
But on the other side of the coin, as the person who's often giving advice and seeing it ignored, you know, my wife happens to be a doctor, and she says, oh, yeah, everybody tells me they eat salad only, and somehow they're 350 pounds.
You know, I think it's, it's really helped me to think about. I didn't know his name was Dr. Lacroix, but his challenge to you, which was just like, hey, you could do whatever you want, you know, your father, Roger Manuel, my. Maybe my favorite Roger story, maybe not wisdom here. We're not saying this is how you
[00:05:55] Speaker A: should live, but entertaining.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: When he came and said, steven, the doctor told me I have the diabetes.
And you said, oh, no, dad, what are you going to do? And he said, find a new doctor.
Like, to his credit, Roger just said, that's not my goal. It's not what I want. And so Dr. Lacroix, instead of getting all wadded up, how dare he would have gone, no problem, that's fine. Yeah, sure. And so, you know, I had.
We're going to get into the details, but just to preview that before we sit back and maybe reinforce why we even care about this. Yeah, I've been, I've been at the doctor a bit lately. I went in for my annual checkup and I would say my family doctor is somewhere between the average American guy who's just going to say, oh, you're fine, and. And the kooks who want to test you for 500 things because there's always a supplement they can sell you if they test you for enough things. My guy's somewhere in between, probably.
But there was some issues that we'll talk about that he came back with.
And the second thing out of his. The first thing out of his mouth is probably very reasonable. Well, here's some standard stuff that people do when they have these issues.
And the second thing out of his mouth was, and, you know, you might need to go on these drugs.
And I was offended by that because I was like, I don't want to go on drugs for fat people.
But I wrote him an email a week later and I said, here's everything I have been doing. Here is a document that shows you my plan, and here is a week of data from that I've been collecting as I start to do this. And he wrote back and goes, I've never seen somebody take this much willingness to change their life based on some labs. And I wish every patient was like this. And it made me have some compassion for him because he wasn't just being lazy when he said, well, you might need to go on meds, he was just treating me like everyone else. He sees who to Dr. Lacroix question.
They don't really want health. They just want whatever can be fixed without any effort on their part. And I don't know where I will land on where, where I want health because my current plan is rather exhausting. But it made me have a little more compassion for the family doc who just says, we'll take a statin because you're never going to fix your cholesterol or take a blood pressure med or whatever.
And I thought that was really interesting. Just to note that most people, it's probably the same in spiritual capital. They say they want it all, but when you tell them here's the cost, they go, actually, tell me more about that new drug, because that sounds easier than what you're describing.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: I want to frame up the whole discussion for new listeners.
In our our kind of rubric for looking at the world, we, we talk about something called five capitals. The idea from Scripture is that the most important capital in your life is spiritual capital.
Do you know God? Can you walk in his ways? Do you know what his ways are? Do you know His Word? Then the next most important thing you could do with your life to build capital would be relationships.
And start with the relationships nearest you and expand out from there and those being healthy. The next thing that's the most important capital in your life would be dot, dot, dot. I think if you'd asked me this growing up, I think that I would assume that the church people would think a good education, a good mind would be next. But as we look at the Scriptures and we judge the wisdom of the Word, it has been determined that the next capital, right behind spiritual and relational, is physical capital.
That is your body and your possessions, the things that you can see and touch. As I've been considering this issue and many ramifications around it this week, it's just struck me how much the world around us treats our bodies and think of the sexual context in which we live, bodies as disposable, unimportant sort of pleasure centers that the only thing that they're good for is using while they're useful. And then we could throw them away. They're really meaningless.
And for instance, using someone else's body and then discarding it, ah, no big deal. It's just, it's just a body.
The Bible doesn't give us that idea at all.
It says that God actually inhabits our bodies and that a human being's body is holy. We can go back to God breathing life into Adam and Adam's body, pulsing with the divine Life of the maker of the universe is inside his body and God has chosen to embody us as his body. He actually did that with his own son.
He sent his son and was embodied. So clearly there's nothing lowly or wasteful about the body. You remember my college roommate Chris?
Mark and I remember wanting to challenge Chris about some of his physical habits during college, which that were a lot of times centered around Dr. Pepper and Oreos.
And Chris would say my body means nothing to me, it is meaningless to me. And well, he went down a path of Bible study and he doesn't think that way anymore. But that kind of thinking I think is common among the Christian world. We believe that the physical capital is foundational and we would tie it with multi generational stewardship that yes, your 401k and your IRAs do matter. When you think of what's my family going to look like 50 years from now? Family vision statements, very good. Let's dream about those things and think about them. It also includes the vessel that God has given you to carry out that mission.
And I would ask any of our fathers, are you caring for your body as if it is going to be the transportation that you're going to ride in for the next 50 years from which you are going to lead your family or do you act like it's disposable? Another Roger ism. My dad always said you don't see any fat 95 year olds running around. And he was right.
So, and even himself, he didn't make it to 95 because as you say, you know, getting, getting down to a, a trim 115. That wasn't really on, that wasn't really on his agenda.
So I, I will just say, guys, I think that right now this little window of going into the summer is a great time to think about these things.
We're still early in the year and people are still thinking, well I just need to get back to what I weighed last year. A lot of times that's what people are thinking about or they're thinking, I'm coming up into the summer, it's going to be active, the kids are going to be available more. We're going to be doing stuff, we will have shirts off. So let me say again, you might have heard this up front. I don't think it's vanity to want to feel unembarrassed in your own skin.
Of course it could be out of your control. I understand there are, there are some circumstances. I know a lot of overweight guys and I don't think I know any. That it's out of their control.
I think it's obedience to take care of our temple.
I think it's rightfully embarrassing if your finances are not in order. It's not the end of the world.
We can do something about it. We can shape it up. But if your finances are utter disaster and you open the hood and somebody else sees it, why are you spending money on this? You don't have any savings. Why do you have all this debt? That should be embarrassing. It's like a wake up moment. Oh, okay. I can get it together. It should be embarrassing if you've been born again for 20 years and you can't find Romans in your Bible. That should be embarrassing because you should know your way around the scriptures. That tells me that you're not growing up the way that you should.
And it should be embarrassing if your body says, I put zero thought or effort into this thing.
I'll say again, our bodies are not disposable pleasure centers, which is what the world tells us. They're temples of God.
That's. I mean, that's such a profound statement.
Our bodies are temples of God that he lives in us. So we've said this kind of stuff before, Mark. Get a haircut. Wear a shirt that actually fits you.
Do a couple of chest presses, fellas. Trim the beard.
It matters to God. I think it matters to you the way that you see and understand yourself. And it matters to those around you. I know this is something that you care about a lot. Mark, I want you to talk a little bit about the importance of physical capital.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Yeah, Steve. Before we get to the nitty gritty.
[00:15:42] Speaker A: The nitty gritty.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: There's two things I want to do. One is just tell you a principle here, and then two is to issue a very expansive disclaimer. But the.
The thing that has occurred to me is you mentioned that this isn't isolated.
I find it very interesting. I've talked to guys, including guys who don't know the Lord at all.
I had lunch with a guy not long ago, and he. I know him from the gym. He's pretty fit. But he had. He was trying out Ozempic. He was like, I'm gonna try it out. And one of the things I have read about Ozempic is that it doesn't just curb your cravings for food.
It actually can treat addiction and addictive behavior elsewhere. And this guy's like, you know, I mean, sometimes I look at a little pornography. And ever since Ozempic, I didn't want to. Like, I was just focused in on the things I thought like I needed to be doing that were healthy. And it's interesting to me that the way we treat food, which is a lot of what I think we're going to talk about today, but the way we treat food and exercise and be exercising discipline and mastery in these areas has knock on effects to all sorts of other areas of life. And that's not just, that's not just me saying, well, you know, if you're a disciplined person with your exercise, you're probably going to be more likely to be disciplined with your money. I think that's true as a personality trait. A more conscientious person tends to be more conscientious in all areas.
But it's also true, like the Bible does not separate out physical and spiritual.
Like I, I came upon Mark chapter eight today as I was reading just through the book by chance and I thought, this is actually right on topic of what we're going to talk about.
Jesus feeding the 4,000.
And I'm just going to read you two verses.
The first two from Mark chapter eight, it says in those days when a great crowd had gathered and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat.
And Jesus goes on to meet that physical need. But I thought there was two things here. One, Jesus actually cared about their physical hunger, like he had compassion on them, which is the same language we hear for when somebody is in deep physical need because they have a disability or an illness. And it says he looked and had compassion.
That's how he felt about something as kind of normal as hunger.
But the other thing is they had been out there for three days without food. And so these people had made what we at Abraham's Wallet would call a good trade, where they said our physical capital is less important than hearing this guy talk.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: True.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: And I know you could go, well, like a few chapters later, didn't they all kind of abandon him? Yes.
So I'm not sure if they were always making these good trades, but the spiritual was connected to the physical. And God's care for them was not just spiritual enlightenment. It was also, I want your bodies to not just be alive, but to actually be comfortable. And I don't even think you can hear me talk and process it if you're just dying of hunger. So God cares about these things and they're super connected.
Um, and I actually think you know, one of the things you said in the intro, you. You can't ignore this.
We'll talk about it. You can go overboard for sure.
But I think doing some level of care in this physical capital realm. And we're not going to be telling you about all the supplements you can take, and we're not going to be telling you about, you know, I told you at the start, I'm going to tell our people, like, what you think. 50% generously, maybe more like 90% of the things podcasters say about health are probably objectively wrong.
And so we're not here to give you health advice in terms of, like, the new great trends you can do to boost your testosterone. We're not doing that. You'll. You. You might be thinking we were going to give you the secret Abraham's Wallet supplement stack. What today is about.
No, it's to encourage you with the integrative nature of your physical body and how it actually matters a lot to your spiritual capital. In dadgum it, it matters to your financial capital. This doesn't just go up the ladder, it goes down, too. And if you. If you refuse to do this stuff, that's your choice, Dr. Lacroix would say, yeah, no problem. But.
But it's going to hit you spiritually. It's going to hit your relationships. I don't care that much about how I look at the beach, but I do like it when my wife looks at me and goes, hmm, I'm interested in what I'm seeing. Of course, you know, and it'll hit your finances. It'll even hit your intellect. There's stuff we're gonna talk about today that has been proven. If you don't take care of this, you're more likely to go demented by the time you're 80 years old than if you just ignore it. So we're gonna talk about it all.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: You make a great point, which is every time I'm spending money on vitamin D and I think twice about, this is vitamin D. I mean, come on, don't I get. Don't I get out in the sun every once in a while?
And then I think, you know, you're going to pay for health up front to make it happen.
There's going to be. I got to buy a new pickleball paddle every once in a while, or I can just not put any money toward it now and wait for all the medical bills to happen. So it's going to cost you somewhere.
So I'd rather put money towards health up front. Yeah.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: I'll tell you.
Can I interject there? Yes, that is totally true. And I have started buying some stuff in the same way recently.
And if it's like a lot of money, you. You're most likely in the hands of a charlatan. I will say that as well. So that's fine. I talk to people all the time. They're like, we make $150,000 a year and we spend 700amonth on supplements and healthcare. That's unnecessary. And we're gonna explain why that's not
[00:22:27] Speaker A: who we're talking to.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Matter of fact, you would be shocked, Steve. I meet with people that are in our orbit all day long and, oh,
[00:22:38] Speaker A: no, no, I didn't say they don't exist. I don't. I didn't say that. That, that they've all turned off. This episode is not about the people who are super active and I'm trying to get them to moderate. I'm speaking to so many Abe's Wallet listeners of guys who just aren't. They're just not on the ball at all when it comes to physical capital. And I want to motivate them to get going.
I know Jordan Stone's out there at 5am with this little ocean club. I know we've got.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Did you know that the 5am club dissolved?
[00:23:12] Speaker A: No, I did not.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: I was sad to hear it. Everybody moved from beautiful Florence, Oregon. But anyways, continue.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: I know we've got Cerulo out there, this big thick neck and his big biceps. He's fine. I know that Vijay is, is operating on his 3% body fat. I got. I know all of that. I know those people exist.
I'm. I'm just talking to my bros that I see every week and go like, you know, a little. A little body movement, a little care in what you put in your mouth would be great.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Fair.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: Let me just start with. Because we don't talk about this often. I don't know where guys get input. I don't think a lot from this. I'm just going to start with, hey, fellas.
I'm just putting my arm around a dude that I see regularly and say, hey, are you doing these baseline high level health things? Is your eye on this ball at all? Can I just talk about a couple things?
Here's a couple of really important things in your life.
Sleep.
Really important.
So seven to eight hours a day.
That's not just for teenagers.
Everybody needs that.
So you need rest.
You need to carve out time for rest. You need to not feel guilty for Sleeping or thinking I could maximize this time elsewhere. You need to protect sleep. That's a big deal. That's when God rebuilds your body and your mind as well.
I looked at studies this year, that very eye opening about sleep, because my aging mother struggles with sleep. And what we find is that. That actually lack of sleep starts destroying your emotional stability. It destroys your brain function, and it starts a spiraling wheel of the same stuff. So sleep is important.
Here's something I didn't know. I'm not going to go back and review in detail everything that I've uncovered with Lacroix over the years.
But drink water. Drink water like it's your job.
My, my move since I'm 20 years old is I drink when I'm thirsty. And what. What do you want from me? I think it's all going to work out fine. When I first went into La Croix and I, and I showed him some of my blood labs, which I'll talk to talk about in a minute, I had my.
I'm just kind of like, well, I don't like these numbers. What's going on here? And he, the very first thing he said to me was, how much water are you drinking?
I was like, none. I don't know. Almost none.
He's like, well, water is the number one fuel that your body uses to make things work. After that is food.
So if you want things to run the way they were designed to work. He knows I'm a God guy. Then God made you to run on water. You need to give it plenty of water, more water than you think you're thirsty for.
Did not know that. I, obviously, I'm seeing that also in my mom. Like she's got to drink water for this machine to run correctly. So I gotta throw that out to guys. I want you to keep an eye on sleep. I want you to keep an eye on water. You should be drinking a lot. Let's start at. Let's start at 64 ounces a day. That would be an, that'd be an increase for a lot of guys. Just, just drink more water.
And again, if you, if you need to hear it from somebody, hear it from us. You need to exercise.
And, and don't say that. Doing the lawn. I think I kind of work up a sweat when I'm doing the lawn. And also when I'm eating ribs, I kind of start sweating. I think that's pretty good. No, no, no, no. We need to exercise.
Just think as a, as a general rule, let's just think four times a Week. Let's think two of strength, strength training and two of just movement, cardio sports, something mobility based. That's a great baseline for you if you're not doing those things. I'm thinking of faces and names right now that I know are not doing those things.
Make that, make that a wish list thing for you. Make that something that you feel pressure. I should be doing something more in this arena. And lastly in this very short general list.
Guys, watch what you eat.
We should prefer, you should prefer protein.
There are good fats and bad fats, but you should just prefer protein for the average American consumer. And turn down processed junk, sugar. And like for instance, a meal of post Toasties is, that's not a good meal.
I always think of the, the old kids cereal commercials used to see where it's like Fruit Loops is part of a balanced meal. And you look at the Fruit Loops meal that they've set up and the meal is Froot Loops, a glass of orange juice and a side of toast.
That's the balanced meal. That's not a good meal.
So we would want to turn down sugar looking at you orange juice and Froot Loops. We want to turn down carbs looking at both of you. And the, and the toast. We want to turn up protein.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: So
[00:28:43] Speaker A: I'm going to turn it over to you, Mark. But I just want to say this is not optional graduate work for the nerds who are vain about their bodies.
I think it's baseline manhood for a guy that wants to lead his life towards the Lord.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Go ahead.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: What are your high level guys?
This is a reasonable way to treat your body.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: I think it's interesting because I, I'm not trying to be vain here, but I had no concerns about the way I looked at the beach and we're going to get into it in a second that there's, there's a way to open the hood and see what's actually going on in your body. And that's what generated a lot of my concerns is I went, I. People were looking at me and going, wow, you must do a lot of exercise and eat good. And then I had the, the blood work that revealed you have some things that are going to cause you problems if you don't make a change.
But I think that if you just don't want to go through the hassle of detailed counting calories and reading labels, you really don't have to. My wife always tells people if, if you're just looking for one piece of food, advice shop the outside of the grocery Store only, like, don't go through the aisles almost ever.
Meaning there's vegetables, meats, dairy products, fruits, all of that stuff. It's almost, it's like Weight Watchers. The, the, it's been around forever.
They have all these foods that have zero points, meaning you can eat as much as you want. I don't know for sure if this is true, but I'm pretty sure that like a chicken breast is zero points because nobody goes, oh, I'm fat because I eat 40 chicken breasts a day.
That doesn't happen in America.
So, you know, if you, you don't have to do all the careful monitor. If you just only make available to yourself things, you know, you talked about, protein, good fat and not having processed foods. You'll probably be pretty, pretty good if that's where you start.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: My, my other tip on this is if you, if you want to make a change in your life, don't say, I'm going to never eat sugar again because that'll last two and a half days and then it's over.
When I've looked at the changes that I need to make, I gave myself a deadline. It's a lot like low doe Feb. We've got 28 days, let's say no for 28 days and everybody's going, oh, this is hard. I know it's hard, but it's coming to an end. And when it comes to an end, we can make different decisions then. So I told myself I'm going to give myself six months.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna change my habits for six months. And by the way, even when I was at, at my strictest with my diet, I still gave myself Shabbats where like this is rest day. I, I, I can go more than five carbs on, on the Sabbath, FYI. So I, I gave myself a limited time and said I'm gonna make a change. Now the interesting thing that's happened, I crossed the finish line. Oh, wow. My numbers changed dramatically. What I found was so many of my habits changed because I could see the value of, you know, replacing, I don't know, a hoagie lunch with having a, a David bar and a, and a low, low fat yogurt or whatever.
Wow, that's, I feel great. I want to feel that way. So I made changes along the way, but I kept it limited. So I'd say that to anybody. If you want to make a change, say, I'm going to make a change for 30 days and just say, I'm just going to do this Thing, and then there's a release valve coming at the end, so then I can rejigger my goals, et cetera. So let's give people some test cases. All right.
I think this is very helpful because I had that interaction with Lacroix, and I thought, well, I don't really know. I mean, I'm at an age. I was in my mid-40s, and I'm thinking I'm at an age where I'm supposed to be.
It's supposed to get harder for me at some point. And I'm not always happy with my weight.
But the thing I always said to myself, I know many friends who do this. I know I'm technically overweight, but I've always been an athlete.
And I've. When I get out there, I could run for 20 minutes on the basketball court. And I think I'm generally healthy. I mean, I know I'm a little overweight, but I'm really pretty. And we just kind of tell ourselves this little story. So I thought, let me just get some information.
Well, what I did was. And I didn't even know this was possible. I wish I could have heard this episode 10 years ago. I didn't know it was possible to act as your own doctor and order up your own lab tests. I didn't know that you could walk, that I could just walk into a screening place and say, take my blood and then give me all of these details.
I didn't know you could do that. I thought only doctors had access to this for some reason. But I learned that there is this. There's a website called Walk in Labs. You can go to Walk in Labs and you can order up any kind of information you want.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: You.
[00:34:27] Speaker A: What's my testosterone? Well, you don't need a doctor to figure that out. What's my glucose? Glucose levels?
What are my triglycerides? You can find that stuff out yourself. I went to walk in labs. A really common place is called LabCorp. They're all over the place. I didn't know they existed. I walk into one of these, I take a blood test. They send me the blood results.
I start looking at the results. I can do some research on my own. I can talk to Dr. Fizzywater, and we can figure out from these numbers, where do we go from here?
So that's what I did.
The thing that were concerning for me, which is probably pretty common for people, if you did this for the first time, isn't. My blood glucose level was very high and my triglycerides were very high. Which means you eat sugar.
That's, that's what that mainly means is you have got too much carbs in your life. Okay.
So I came up with a plan. I used, I used Grok to help me come up with this very detailed plan about what am I going to do.
I think the best things that I can give you resource wise on this whole episode is walk in labs. Number one and number two, I use this app. I don't know how I found it. It's called Lose it. Lose it, exclamation point. It's just a phone app and it's a tracker for food. So if you were to pick up the aforementioned yogurt and you scan with your phone, you can scan the barcode and it goes, I know that product, I know everything that's in that product.
And this, Lose it can show you in a day's time. You tell it. Well, these are my calorie goals. And I want this many protein grams at the end of the day. And it's kind of funny, fun and video games eyes is it where at the end of the day? I mean it's, it's 7:30 and I go, I need 20 more grams of protein for the end of the day. I can hit that cottage cheese and I can get the goal.
It's just showing you as you're going. And they'll say, hey you, five days in a row, way to go. You're at eight days in a row, way to go.
Those two things helped me dramatically.
And I'll just cut to the chase and say six months later I had my blood done. My numbers were dramatically changed. I was in a very different place. I'm very excited about it. It's fun and, and kind of exciting to feel like I'm the one that's running this program. So I now keep a spreadsheet that's telling me here's what all of my, I can compare from years, here's what my blood's doing. And I, I, I like the whole thing. It's been a very good process for me. What's your process been like?
[00:37:09] Speaker B: Well, when I start doing a financial plan for a new family, one of the questions we ask is, and it sometimes makes people scratch their head, we say, what was money? What was the money culture in your home like? What were the big money kerfuffles that you remember as a kid? Was there any history?
And a good doctor does the same thing. If you go in for a physical, tell me about your family history. And anytime you've had A procedure or a surgery, there's probably a little checklist. You have these conditions in your family.
I think that's a very important piece of this too, because like I said, I was probably the guy who never would have gone in for a physical. But I started looking at my family history and I went, all the men in our family have had prostate cancer by the time they were like 50, really early. And that's growing in prevalence amongst men right now. We're not quite sure why, but I think that was what started me going to get blood tests, is the recommendation at the time was actually don't test because you get so many false positives. And then people have to have these very unpleasant biopsies and a lot of them don't reveal anything.
So it's better to just not test until you hit the age where it becomes important. Well, I said, that's stupid. I'm going to test every year my blood level and find out if there's change because.
And sure enough, in the last year, that has become standard procedure. Now they say if you have a family history of this, develop, establish a baseline. Because it's not so much about a snapshot, it's about, are we trending up?
[00:38:53] Speaker A: Because.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: Cause you might still be well within the normal range, but if we saw it double in six months, we have a problem. We want to investigate that. So that's what started me getting my blood work. And I just, I. My wife has won the genetic lottery. All of her blood work looks like perfect, no matter what she does. Mine is the opposite. I have a mother who is 110lbs, but has uncontrolled type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol. And everybody in the family on both sides of high cholesterol meds, blood pressure meds.
So I wanted to kind of start digging into this. And sure enough, I have not won the genetic lottery. So even out on the outside, if I look great inside, there's some problems. I have high cholesterol, I have high blood pressure at times.
Other stuff, like I said, thank God, no prostate cancer detection stuff yet. But I started digging into this and one of the things that stuck out to me, Steven, was what you said.
I always.
The data is so unclear on this. You can read somebody that goes, cholesterol is the devil and it's going to kill you if you don't deal with it. And then you can read another seemingly smart person who says, it doesn't matter at all, don't worry about it. Yeah, it's very hard to know what to Do I will say I think having an attitude of doing some self experimentation can be really helpful. Sleep is another one for me.
I have always had trouble sleeping and the answer was if you wake up at the exact same time every day, which I hate because it means to do our week the way we want to. I have to wake up at 5:20 to go to the gym. Well, I liked sleeping until eight on Saturdays but, but if I do that I am staring at the ceiling at midnight for the next three days cause it just throws me off. So I was like, okay, I will wake up at 5:20 on Saturday and Sunday morning too and get some stuff done. And occasionally like tonight I'm going to be flexible. My daughter needs to be picked up at 11pm somewhere. I'm not going to get as much sleep tonight but it's actually going to be okay because I will go to sleep when my head hits the pillow every other night this week. And that's better. So that's not everybody. So be willing to experiment. You can write stuff down. There's all sorts of apps, whatever works for you. I think with, with the cholesterol and blood pressure and all that.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: Well, what works for you? Give us, give us, give us some. You say there's a bunch of apps. Give, give us. What do you use?
[00:41:33] Speaker B: I'm still working on that. I have used in the past my fitness pal, which is very popular for tracking food. I, I find and I was going to talk about this later, but I'll say it now. My tendency, no shocker to you Steven, who knows me well, is to go overboard on things.
So I tend to go, let me have all the apps and all the trackers and I'm going to spend five minutes at the table before every meal just punching stuff in. And it drives my wife nuts. In fact she said to me this morning because we had a little bit of a brush up at the gyms because she said I was in the middle of a workout. Oh, my heart rate's not here and my glucose is spiking a little too much. And she said it's too much. You're overboard right now. And then we had a little bit of a tussle and then we resolved it. But she said, I think the Lord gave us that little tussle so that you could tell your people on the health episode today, don't overdo it. There is certainly a place where you can start to say I am in control of everything.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: That's not true. The Lord is in control but for me, the biggest recent helpful things. I'm using the whoop strap, which is just. It tracks kind of sleep, it tracks heart rate, some stuff like that. Jury's still out for me on whether this is truly helpful or too much data, but for the moment, it's helpful. And then the other thing that's totally revolutionized it for me, I stuck this little thing into my arm that takes a sip of my blood every 15 minutes and tells me it's a continuous glucose monitor. Tells me how my body is responding to different foods. And, Steven, you talked about glucose was an issue. I had no idea. But at my last doctor visit, for the first time ever, this just popped up. You have pre diabetes. And I thought, how, um. And even thinking about things like cholesterol, if your body has a ton of glucose running through it, if you have sugar in your blood and you feed it more, your system, the way God designed us, goes, oh, there's already so much sugar. They must want to store this food for later. So I'll turn it into fat. And that puts fat into the blood. That puts fat onto the body. So. So if you have high glucose, it's really bad. It damages your arteries. It also causes you to get fat faster.
And I had no idea that that was a problem. But when I stuck this little thing in my arm, it went from a snapshot every three or six or 12 months at the doctor. Oh, you still have high glucose. That just tells you what your average has been over the last three months with this thing. I can actually look at it after I eat. And I found out something awful. Stephen, not awful for you. You might like this. I can eat ice cream. Doesn't cause much problems. I can have that bluebell that we both love so much.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Hallelujah.
[00:44:33] Speaker B: I can eat white rice, which for a lot of people is totally not great. And I don't have a but tortilla chips crush me. And, man, I was eating a bowl of chips and salsa every day in the afternoon. Oh, that seems kind of healthy. It's not sugary, it's not fatty.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: There's tomatoes in here.
[00:44:51] Speaker B: Chips and salsa, like, that's kind of a neutral snack. Not for me. It was causing me to have high glucose, and so it actually gave me real time feedback. Now I'm not going to wear this thing forever. It's a two week, two week snapshot. And then I. I might snap one into my arm for our Texas trip, just to keep me, keep me honest in the land of brisket and Mac and cheese and all the delicious things that's available, but just that that extra data has completely changed what I do. The only other thing I would say on this is I think I read that something like 70% of Americans have this problem. They're either pre diabetic or diabetic and they don't know it. And that's just once you start digging into the rabbit hole, you find out the foods at the grocery store, all that stuff in the aisles that we talked about, almost all of them are just packed with junk carbs and sugar. And it's almost impossible to eat that way for very long and not have this problem.
You can solve it without becoming crazy, just with some super simple steps. If you eat, when you sit down, the exact same meal, person A and person B, let's say it's a plate of rice, a steak and some broccoli. The person who eats the the broccoli first, the steak second, and the rice third will have up to a 70% lower spike in their glucose versus the person who just eats it all together.
So ordering the food, I was listening to a podcast with a woman who said just don't ever eat naked carbs.
And I found that I said I'm going to run an experiment.
I ate an apple. I watched my glucose go ping straight up and I thought, oh well that makes sense. There's a lot of sugar in an apple. Then the next day I smeared it with natural peanut butter that had no sugar in it, just peanuts.
A I hadn't been eating sugar for a while, so that peanut butter tasted like I was eating Reese's cups. It really your your sensitivity to sugar changes and everything's more delicious.
But zero spike when I had the peanut butter with the apple cause I was adding some fat and protein and fiber and it just changed the way my body reacted. So you can do experiments like this. And the funny thing is what works for me is not going to be what works for you.
Even things like I noticed, hey, my blood sugar takes a big dive in the middle of the night. And I was waking up at 3am not knowing why.
Well, I asked my little AI why am I waking up at 3am Here's a chart of what my blood sugar looks like. And it goes, eat some protein before you right before you go to bed. I thought that's a weird thing. I thought you weren't supposed to eat. I did it. Blood sugar flattens out. No 3am Wake up. This doesn't work for everybody. But just the amount of data that we have access to now to go. I can actually change some things.
Um, as I focused on this, I went back for a second cholesterol check and my ldl, bad cholesterol, which we can argue if it even matters, but it had dropped 30% in three weeks, which is, like, huge. I expect that in six months, it's going to be half of what it used to be.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:48:20] Speaker B: So I'm not telling you you have to go get a CGM and you have to focus on this or that, but just increasing fiber, focusing on the order that I eat, and eliminating all the stuff that your body.
In fact, eating gummy worms was less impactful to me than eating a tortilla. So it's not always the things you think about.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:43] Speaker B: You just have to kind of figure out for your body what actually impacts health. And for me, those were probably the biggest tools was the CGM and the changing diet, including a bunch more fiber and not eating a bunch of carbs.
[00:48:59] Speaker A: Okay, how do I. How do I get an arm probe that'll sit my blood?
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Mine is called Stelo S T E L O and it was not cheap. It was, I think, $89 for one little pod that lasts you two weeks. I went in and I bought three months, which is six pods. But I don't really plan to use them all back to back to back because a. My wife doesn't love it when I'm constantly monitoring things like this, but she was thinking, oh, I'd like to see I have some sleep stuff. I'd be interested to see what my body's doing.
So it's kind of a thing that we'll probably just be using periodically to check in.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: And does Stello come with the app?
[00:49:45] Speaker B: Yeah, the app's free. You just pay for the little sensors.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: I like it.
[00:49:49] Speaker B: I've got it right here next to my desk. You take this thing and you push it against your arm and push the button and it just pow. And I looked at it and I thought, that's a big needle. I was shocked. I couldn't feel it when it went in. So somehow they have magically eliminated the pain of sticking this thing into your arm.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: All right, we gotta land this plane, guys. I'm gonna give you a one week challenge. I want you to do one of the following things. One, go to walk in labs and order a blood test. If that's something you never looked at, do it. Do it one time.
You're going to be amazed at the information that you get there.
[00:50:26] Speaker B: Can you add in the PSA level for me? Please, guys, if you're over the age of 40, please just throw it in there. It's the same blood. Just say, check my PSA level.
I would be thankful to you all for doing that because it's such a preventable thing.
[00:50:43] Speaker A: I don't even know what you're talking about. What's a psa?
[00:50:46] Speaker B: The prostate specific antigen. And it's one of those cancers that kills a bunch of young people. And if you just check this, if you just check this, it shouldn't kill anybody. We just have to keep an eye on it. Kind of like when you turn 45 and you have to get a colonoscopy, do it.
[00:51:02] Speaker A: I don't know that I've ever checked that. I'm going to add PSA to my next one. Okay, Second option is make a simple food plan with goals for the next seven days.
For instance, could I go the next seven days and not eat sugar? If that's your goal, great, make it a goal. Write it down somewhere. And tell the wife, I have found that my little goals. If I tell it to the family, well, now, by golly, I've got to do it because they're going to be watching. Tell the wife, whatever your food plan is. You know what, honey?
I'm only going to eat proteins before noon every day. Whatever.
Make a food plan with goals.
The option number three is schedule four workouts before this time next week.
And I mean schedule them. The dumbest thing you can do there's. I could put this into a number of categories.
A quiet time is falls under the same heading as this.
When you say, when there's extra time. When there's time, I'll do a workout. Well, there's never time.
When there's time, I'll spend 30 minutes with the quiet in the lazy Boy with God. That'll never happen. You're never just going to find 30 minutes. No, don't wait for a feeling to overwhelm you. Put it on your calendar. Look right now. You could stop this podcast, look at your calendar and say, I'm going to find four windows of 45 minutes in the next week when I'm going to exercise. Yes, taking a walk would even qualify. Just go for a walk for 45 minutes. You know you've got those dumbbells somewhere in the basement that you haven't touched in 15 years. Do that 45 minutes four times a week. I want you to do one thing to at least signal to yourself, physical capital matters to me. I'm going to do something because I'm going to care for this temple.
So I want you this summer, actually, I'm saying this. I want you to kick off the whole summer of paying attention to physical capital. And I want you to steward the temple God gave you.
May it be that you would make such good decisions that your wife starts to notice and the kid starts to notice, and the Lord would look at you and say, well done, good and faithful servant.
Now, finally we get to the gift that I want to give the people.
There's a new jam that's hit the airwaves. It's on Spotify right now, but I have access to the rights of this song. So we're going to tack it on to the end of this episode. And it's going to.
It could be part of your summer jam list.
My warning about this song or explanation, I suppose, is that he and I wanted to start making forays into more country music, which is in both of our backgrounds.
But we were thinking, okay, well, it can't be the kind of George Strait that we grew up on. We need to make something that's more in the vein of Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, kind of some sort of electronic Y something meets country music. So that's what we wrote. You're going to hear that there's references to beer in this, in this song, but it's like a testimony song of, like, waking up and coming to know. Coming to know God's, God's heart for life, which is faith and family, etc.
I should stay away from it.
So anyways, here it is.
It's called New Kind of Man.
And we'll see you next week. Thanks for spending some time talking to us about physical capital.
[00:55:04] Speaker C: Tired of chasing lights Burning through a thousand nights and nothing to show for all my My wilding years Be bottles on the floor Women walking out my door Hear me laughing my way through emptiness and a young man's fears don't give just a little don't stand in the middle Gotta lay no more excuses and no more killing time Living every moment Driving like a sky and every day I want to be A new kind of man Till the day I die.
I thought that life was free yeah no chains abound in me but stick around, man that's one thing I never did I got back in Newport New this is the thing I do I love them and leave them in absence I was just a kid don't give just a little don't stand in the middle Gotta lay it on the line no more excuses and no more killing time Life Living every moment Driving like a living three Beneath the sky and every day I want to be A new kind man I had made my plan Never be a man who's got a bow and apologize I swore to vow I would be hard come what may but there comes a time when the bottom line Ain't worth the prize you pay there's been some broken bones and some broken hearts Anyway now I see that faith and love Love that's what a life's made of and I want to live mine out with your sweet hand in mine I kiss that life goodbye there's something better with you and I Now it's got in the family for me I'm going to walk Walk that line don't give just a little don't stand in the middle Gotta lay it on the line no more excuses and no more killing time
[00:58:34] Speaker A: Living
[00:58:34] Speaker C: every moment Driving like a home and living three Bunny, Big sky and every day I want to be a new kind man Till the day I die Till the day I die oh, till the day I die yeah, till the day I die oh, till the day I die.
