My Morning Routine For Optimizing Overall Health, Lifespan & Longevity | Dr. William Li

Today we're going to talk about my morning routine for optimizing health overall and longevity. So here's my morning routine. First of all when I wake up I don't linger in bed. I avoid sleeping in and one of the reasons that when you sleep in you get into a pattern of sleep inertia. Now sleep inertia is this weird state where once you're sleeping you don't feel like getting up and during this period of time you've got cognitive impairment meaning you're groggy and you're not thinking so clearly. You've got actually a difficulty in moving performance physical performance and you also reduce reaction time and reduce memory. That's not what I want to do in my job. All right so that's one of the things that I do when I first get up. I just get spring right out of the bed and instead of going down to breakfast and starting to eat right away which is what most of our moms told us to do when we were kids. You know the whole idea is like hurry up you got to get up and eat some breakfast so you can get to school and learn. Actually as adults we don't have to do that and in fact we do know that that's in fact not quite true. You don't actually have to do get up and eat breakfast right away. So I take my time. I take my time. I take about an hour to get ready, get showered, get cleaned up, get dressed and then I'll actually go and maybe check my email or I might go outside for a brief walk or I might read a book, read a couple of pages. Whatever I'm doing I try to take an extra hour before I actually even think about anything. Now from a food perspective. Now this is why I do this. When you get up and you wait an extra hour or more to eat you're actually extending. I'm extending my fasting time. When I'm sleeping I'm not eating and when I'm not eating I'm fasting. So when I'm sleeping I'm fasting. When I get up rather than eat right away and break my fast I take an hour and now I've gotten an extra hour of fasting. Now I'm going to tell you why this is important. Fasting does something pretty important for all your body and your overall health and longevity. First, fasting is a period of time when you're not eating. Your body shifts into gear instead of trying to store energy into your fat. It actually burns the energy. So when you're sleeping you're actually burning fat, excess fat and you're burning down visceral fat. That actually can help lower inflammation in your body. The second thing that fasting does is it actually slows down cellular aging. So clinical studies and lab studies have actually shown that during caloric restriction, not putting too many calories in your body and fasting, that it slows down the burn rate of your telomeres. Now your telomeres are the DNA caps. These are like the caps on the end of your shoelace except in this case it's at the end of your DNA. During lifetime our DNA cap burns down like a fuse and the faster it burns down the faster your cells age. So if you can slow that process down you're actually slowing down cellular aging. So fasting and when you extend your fast will actually start to slow down cellular aging. So that's another reason that I actually do that. Then of course once you start eating your body shifts gears and now you're not doing that anymore. You are into fuel loading mode and so your telomeres kind of go back to their regular burn rate. So that's some of the first things I do when I get up in the morning. Now I want to go back and talk a little bit about this fasting issue because I'm going to go backwards to the evening and tell you how I actually calculate my own intermittent fasting practice. So intermittent fasting is the most natural thing in the world because we all sleep and when we're sleeping we're not eating so we're all intermittently fasting. It's not a big deal but benefits metabolically is that what I told you is that when we're not eating our insulin levels go down. So let's say that you finish eating dinner the night before and then I don't have anything after I put the dishes away. No midnight snack. I don't actually sit on a couch and watch things, snacking on food. No bedtime snack. No extra piece of pie or ice cream or anything like that. Nope. When I'm done the night before that's it. If I eat dinner at 7 and I finish at 8 and I put my dishes away at around 8 o'clock, I don't eat again until the next day. So let's say I go to bed at 11. Now oftentimes I go to bed later than 11 to be honest with you. All that period that I'm not eating, my insulin level is going down, my metabolism is shifting gears and now I'm starting to burn down extra body fat. That actually is something that I find. I feel better doing that myself and I know it lowers inflammation. It actually slows down cellular aging. The other thing fasting does is that during that period of time when I'm actually fasting is that my gut microbiome is also resetting and my immune system is also resetting itself as well. Immune health, gut health, all right, those are really, really important. And metabolic health, super important for overall health and fitness and also important for longevity during the fasting period. Okay, so we're talking about not going to bed but getting up in the morning. So I've gotten up in the morning, I've taken my time to get ready, about an hour and I haven't eaten anything yet. All right, then I might actually go get something to eat. Now, before I tell you what I do to eat, one of the things that I'll tell you is that coffee doesn't break your fast. So I'm a big coffee drinker in the morning especially and so my own habit is that I'll get up and I'll make myself a couple of espresso, not expresso but espresso, E-S-P-R-E-S-S-O. Because when I did a gap year before I went to medical school, I spent time in Italy and I spent time in Greece and there's a lot of coffee that's drank there and I got used to that habit and of course then when I went to medical school, I often drank coffee just to stay awake and to stay alert. Now, espresso, you can do in a lot of different ways. I like to make it in a bialetti which is this metal container and you grind coffee really fine. Medium roast actually gives you the most bioactives, all right. So I actually like the taste of dark roast coffee but I know that medium roast actually has the highest levels of chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid is good for the metabolism, good for the circulation, protects my stem cells, good for my gut microbiome, it's antioxidant and it actually boosts my immunity as well. And so this is something that I want in my body, the first thing I put into my mouth, all right, boom, a cup of espresso. Medium roast actually has the highest levels of chlorogenic acid. I brew it myself. If you can get organic beans to grind, it's always better to grind it rather than have a pre-ground. I'm talking about optimal, right. So organic actually is always going to have higher levels of polyphenols like chlorogenic acid. Now why does that happen? Well, it turns out that when plants are growing, many of the polyphenols like chlorogenic acid, they actually are formed by the plant as a defense mechanism to heal themselves. What do I mean, why does a plant heal themselves? Well, think about it. When you're a coffee plant, okay, and growing and you're in a completely natural state, all right, no pesticides, you're surrounded by bugs, little bugs flying around. They're going to nibble on the leaves and nibble on the stems, and those are little micro injuries to the plant. So the plant makes polyphenols to heal itself, all right. And when we actually eat those polyphenols, those plant healing polyphenols help to heal our body and improve our health as well. So we get the benefit. And this is the reason organic is better because what do you think happens when you spray pesticides on a plant? Fewer bugs are around, all right. Fewer bugs, less nibbling, less need to create that healing level of the polyphenols, right. So conventionally grown with pesticide plants will always actually have lower levels of polyphenols than ones that are grown organically. So that's actually one of the reasons I like to have organic coffee, all right. Espresso, ground really fine, extracts a lot of the chlorogenic acid off. Remember I told you medium roast has got more chlorogenic acid than dark roast. So this is where the details can actually matter. I said I was going to talk about optimizing my health, and so I think about these things. Now when I actually have espresso, notice I didn't say I have a cafe au lait or a cappuccino, although I actually like the taste of both. But I like to actually have my espresso in the morning, which does not break my fast, and I'm going to even sip it while I'm actually checking my email or reading a book. Because if you don't add dairy to the coffee, it doesn't actually constitute breaking your fast. And obviously, don't add sugar as well into your coffee, so you won't actually break your fast, all right. So I'll have a cup or two, a single or double espresso. And by the way, some of you might be interested in knowing the origin of espresso. I like to cook, I like to spend time in the kitchen, so I have all this knowledge and I'm really passionate about food and what goes on in the kitchen. So here's a little story for you. The story goes that espresso was invented in Italy in the early 1900s, and there were two businessmen in Milan, Italy, a guy named Luigi Bezzera and Desiderio Pavoni. They were the inventors that figured out how to make coffee quickly by pushing steam through the coffee grounds, all right. And then these two, Luigi and Desiderio, actually figured out how to invent a machine that could do that at scale, meaning you could make a lot of the coffee, make it quickly and make lots of cups of coffee that way. It's forcing through ground-up coffee grinds, all right. And they named the process espresso because espresso was meant in Italian, speedy. So this is a speedy way to make a cup of coffee. Espresso means fast. And what they did is they actually introduced espresso in the 1906 Milan Fair in Italy, and it was a hit. And that was all she wrote. Then it became in the history books. We all had espresso, and then it spread everywhere. Now, remember I told you I don't add cream or dairy to my coffee in the morning for optimal health, because I know that if you add dairy milk, so that's cow fat or cream, all right, the dairy fat actually forms little tiny soap bubbles. We call them micelles. This is what we actually call them in M-I-C-E-L-L-E-S. Micelles are little tiny soap bubbles of fat that form, and those little soap bubbles trap the chlorogenic acid. It traps the polyphenols. So when you're actually drinking the coffee, all right, the soap bubbles will actually tumble down through your esophagus and your stomach and go down below, and they've trapped the polyphenols, so you don't get to absorb most of those polyphenols, all right. So when you don't actually have dairy fat, and for example, you could if you chose to use almond milk or a nut milk or a soy milk. I don't. I like my espresso straight, because otherwise it wouldn't be an espresso, all right, but I don't put dairy milk or milk in it at all, and that way I get as many polyphenols as possible. Now, as I told you, I can drink a cup of coffee after I get ready and read a book or check my emails or go outside for a quick walk or review my day schedule in my head. That's another thing that I often do. I like to be organized. It makes me less stressed. That way I'm actually able to approach the day in a calmer state of mind, right. So the key thing, if you want to optimize your health, is to start the day out without being super, super stressed out. Being a little organized helps me actually lower my stress levels. The coffee picks up my brain power, all right, my attention span, my ability to perform, but then I take a moment, all right, to kind of prepare myself by checking my schedule. Now, sometimes I will skip breakfast. I'm going to come back to tell you what I would eat for breakfast, but sometimes I skip breakfast. I might skip breakfast because I'm too busy, I'm not hungry, in which case I might just grab a handful of tree nuts and snack on them in the morning, all right. Tree nuts, good dietary fiber. I don't buy the pre-packaged stuff that's got flavors sprayed all over them, artificial colors, artificial flavors, artificial preservers. Don't do that. I would get bulk nuts and I would make my own nut snack mix. By the way, nuts also can slow cellular aging. They slow down that burn rate of the telomeres, those caps at the end of your DNA, and nuts have been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease as well. So again, you can actually, you know, skip breakfast, have your cup of coffee, and have a handful of nuts as a snack to tide you through to lunch, and you're actually doing all these things to slow down cellular aging and lower your risk of the diseases that actually can get you, you know, as you go into the second half of your life. Nuts are also good for your metabolism. They can actually help to burn down harmful body fat, and they are good for the gut health as well. So again, just make sure that you don't have any artificial chemicals in any nuts if you're actually going to do it. By the way, the other advantage of you snack on nuts is that nuts have fiber, and eating nuts actually makes you feel full. It's called satiety. So if you have some snacking at nuts in the morning, you're much less likely to overeat at lunch. In fact, you might not even overeat as much at dinner time as well. So that's a bonus for actually snacking on nuts. Now, I want to come back to breakfast for a second. So if I do eat breakfast, I have my coffee. I eat very, very lightly. One of my favorite breakfasts is actually to have some yogurt. I like whole fat yogurt, and I will actually sprinkle some nuts on it. Again, back to the whole nut story. Nuts are actually really good for you. If you want to actually take pistachios, walnuts, almonds, you can crush them up. You know, you can take a mallet, put nuts in a bag, and just smash them, and then just sprinkle the pieces right on. If you had dark chocolate, and you wanted to shave some on there, that's a way of getting some of the polyphenols from dark chocolate, and you can mix the nuts and the chocolate together on yogurt. I also like to put some chopped fruit on my yogurt. So I like it to be seasonal fruit. So in the summertime, I might take a peach, a nice, juicy peach, and cut it up, and just put pieces of it on top of the yogurt. All right, that's natural sweetener, and then you get the polyphenols, the chlorogenic acid from the peach as well. Tastes great. Yogurt, peach, a little sprinkling of nuts is amazing. Or in the winter, I might actually take a nice, juicy pear and cut that up. Great source of dietary fiber, great flavor as well. But the dietary fiber, I know the average medium-sized pear has about five to six grams of dietary fiber. That's, you know, getting your way towards that 30 grams of fiber that we probably need as adults, maybe even more we need. But that's a great start to start getting that dietary fiber in. Good for gut health, lowers inflammation. You can do that right at the get-go. And yogurt, all right? Now for yogurt, I like whole yogurt, whole Greek yogurt. And I'll tell you why. Whole Greek yogurt is a dairy product, but it's a probiotic as well. It's got healthy bacteria. So when you have yogurt and you have it, you're actually feeding your gut bacteria and adding bacteria to your gut as well. If you chop up some nuts with some fibers that feed the healthy bacteria, add some fruit with the prebiotics, you know, these are the polyphenols. Now you're really making your gut happy, your gut bacteria happy, and a happy gut that leads to a happy brain. Remember, I told you, I kind of get up in the morning, I've got to do a lot of stuff that involves brain power. So I focus on doing that so I can be as productive and as clear-minded as possible. And it also slows down cellular aging as well when you have good, healthy gut bacteria. Now, here's a couple of things about yogurt. Many people who eat yogurt say they buy low-fat yogurt. Why? Well, because, you know, it's an instinct to reach for the low-fat. It must be healthier for you, right? Better for your heart. Yogurt is whole fat. Who wants to eat fat? Well, actually, let me just tell you, you want to get whole-fat yogurt and not the low-fat yogurt. And here's why. Low-fat yogurt is made in a factory and they remove the fat, most of the fat from the yogurt. Now, what do you think happens to yogurt when you remove the fat content? Well, it just turns into like thick milk. Remove the fat, the texture completely collapses. Now, nobody would actually eat that yogurt even though it's low-fat. So the manufacturers will add emulsifiers. These are chemicals. They could be carrageenan, they could be polysorbate 80. So a whole bunch of different types of chemicals are added to the low-fat yogurt where the fat's been removed in order to reconstitute it and give it back the texture that tastes like whole yogurt, all right? Now, it turns out that those emulsifiers, and research is now being done, that we're beginning to find out those emulsifiers can damage your gut microbiome, all right? When you damage your gut microbiome and your gut bacteria, your microbiome is responsible for helping you process lipids in your body, what do you think happens? Actually, your cholesterol rises even though you're on taking the low-fat yogurt. And meanwhile, the whole-fat yogurt, which has got bacteria in it, ramps up your gut microbiome, and your blood cholesterol does not rise, all right? So ironically, whole-fat doesn't make your cholesterol rise because it's good for your gut, whereas when you get the low-fat, the chemicals that are added to create the texture, the mouthfeel of yogurt in place of the fat actually winds up damaging your gut microbiome, and then your lipids can actually rise as well. Now, not surprisingly, with better lipids and with better gut health, the risk of cardiovascular disease and the disease of other chronic diseases goes down. And this was actually studied many, many years ago. There was a researcher named Meshnikov that won the Nobel Prize eventually, but he noticed that Bulgarian monks in a monastery all seemed to live a really long time, and he speculated at that time that maybe what they were doing was benefiting from the yogurt that all the monks were eating. And this was hundreds of years ago, this whole idea of probiotic foods associated with longevity. Well, we now know that that's actually true. It actually works out that way. Okay, so I like to have yogurt. I like to have coffee. And oh, by the way, here's another little tip if you want to sweeten your yogurt. You can use a little bit of maple syrup if you like it a little bit, okay? Maple syrup has got sugar in it. It's from the tree. But a lot of the stuff that makes maple syrup amber colored are polyphenols as well. So you can actually get some of the maple polyphenols. So this has been studied in the lab by researchers in Canada, and it turns out that maple syrup has anti-angiogenic or cancer-starving molecules in it that actually improves your circulation as well. Again, every little bit that you can actually eek out in order to be able to improve your health, slow down aging, help you fight chronic diseases that could wipe you out, hey, that's actually optimizing your health. Every little bit actually counts. So I think about that. Now, the other thing you can do is put a little bit of honey. Now, honey is very, very sweet, but honey has benefits as well. Honey has a natural antimicrobial component to it, because think about it. Honey comes from a beehive, and there's baby bees in there, and the beehive is outside. But yet the baby bees don't get infected. Honey has a natural antiseptic, antibiotic property to it. And so you can actually get a little bit of that beneficial bioactives from the honey as well. Just don't use a lot, all right? So those are some of my tips. I will sometimes drink one cup, eight fluid ounces of pomegranate juice, whole pomegranate juice, because I know that pomegranate juice contains elagitannins, and that's good for my gut microbiome. And specific microbiome it's good for, specific bacteria it's good for, is that pomegranate juice causes my gut, my colon, to secrete mucus, which is healthy, normal thing that your gut does. But the mucus that it secretes is helpful for growing a specific bacteria called Ackermansia mucinophila. Ackermansia mucinophila. So I want to grow that, because Ackermansia is a healthy gut bacteria that's been shown to defend my health and your health against type 2 diabetes, it lowers inflammation, it actually also helps your immune system be strong in the case that you're fighting cancer. Remarkably, researchers have studied that in cancer patients who are receiving immunotherapy for cancer, this is the state-of-the-art of cancer therapy, it's not chemo, it's actually giving medicines to cancer patients, like really state-of-the-art, super-science-developed cancer treatments. They don't kill cancer cells directly, but they ramp up your own immune system so your own immune system can go find and wipe out the cancer in your own body. One of the most natural ways to approach cancer, it's amazing the results that it can actually have. However, it doesn't work very well if it doesn't have Ackermansia. So, a cup of pomegranate juice. Now, if you can't get pomegranate juice or you don't like pomegranate juice, I will tell you there's two other juices that have been found to grow Ackermansia. Number one, cranberry juice. Now, cranberry juice is pretty sour, and please don't put sugar, don't add sugar into the juice, but some people like cranberry juice and you might be able to put some cranberry juice into a shake if you make a shake. I don't usually have time to make a shake, but this would be a great example of you can put pure cranberry juice, just one cup, eight fluid ounces into a shake or smoothie you're making for breakfast out of fruit, whole fruits, seasonal fruits, or greens, if that's what you're doing, adding that cranberry in there will actually get the polyphenols into your body, your gut will secrete mucus and you'll grow Ackermansia. And then the final beverage that actually can grow Ackermansia for the same reason, causes your gut to secrete mucus, is Concord grape juice. Concord grape juice, by the way, is a very specific kind of grape, maybe it's a very specific kind of grape, Concord grapes. If you ever had grape candy when you were a kid, that unique grape flavor that you associate with candy, lollipops, hard candies, those squirty candies, soft squirting candies, that's actually what Concord grape juice actually tastes like. It's a very unique, distinct taste and Concord grapes are really around and you can buy whole, unadulterated Concord grape juice, unsweetened, of course, that will also grow Ackermansia. So I would drink a cup of Ackermansia. Now, when I grew up, I was always given a tall glass of orange juice by my mom. I always thought that orange juice is really great for you and I loved oranges, which sometimes I'll eat seasonally as well. But a tall glass of orange juice contains a lot of sugar because it takes eight oranges on average to squeeze in order to get a tall glass of orange juice and you get all the sugar from eight oranges, which I would never eat by itself. So if you want to actually have some citrus, which is good, orange, like for example, a mandarin, a tangerine, a sweet orange, you get the sweet hit, you get the fruit, you get the dietary fiber, you get the vitamin C in orange. You also get these bioactives called nerogenin and asperity, good for your metabolism, good for your circulation, good for your stem cells. So rather than a tall glass of orange juice, I'd rather have a small glass of pomegranate juice and if you want oranges, just eat one orange. For me, that's enough. I will sometimes have an egg, but infrequently, one egg and I don't have anything else. I don't go for the bagel. I don't go for the toast. I don't go for the French toast. I don't go for the sausage or the bacon. I skip all that stuff. And a lot of times, I just don't feel hungry enough to eat a big breakfast. So I kind of skinny it down from any of the things that I just told you that I actually do. All right. Now, one of the things before I eat, I do brush my teeth and I take care of my oral health. All right. And the reason you got to do that oral hygiene is because there's data that shows that gum health is critical for longevity. Gum health is part of gut health. Your mouth is the start of your gut. All right. It's your mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and then going down to the poop chute. All right. But it starts in your mouth with your gums. You want to take care of your gut health. Your mouth has a microbiome as well. And you want to brush your teeth and clean off any bad bacteria. The good bacteria will grow right back, whatever you're flushing out. All right. When you're rinsing and spitting it out, your good, healthy bacteria will grow back. But more importantly, when you're brushing your teeth, you're removing out of the crevice of your teeth, little bits of food that might've been stuck in there, or maybe some of the bad bacteria that might've overgrown during the evening. So brush your teeth. All right. In order to be able to have good gut health and good gut health, gut health, right? There's a gut brain axis. Good gut health is good brain health. You might've noticed, I spend a lot of time thinking about my brain and making sure that my noggin is clear and functioning. Super important for me. When you want to age, you want to live longer. You want to also be able to think and be sharp and everything else, and to be able to mentally enjoy your life. And so that's something that I think about doing. And by the way, gut health also is heart healthy, brain healthy, and metabolically healthy as well. So all critical for you want to live long and you want to live well. Hey there, I want to share another resource with you. It's my free guide on your body's five health defense systems. These five systems, antigenesis, regeneration, your gut microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity are your shields against disease. And they're responsible for maintaining your health every single day of your life. By knowing about how these systems work to defend your body, you can tap into their healing powers to live a longer, better, and much healthier life. I explain each of these defense systems to my free guide. And as a bonus, I've included some of the best foods you can eat to activate each defense system. Get my guide for free right now in the caption below. Now back to the video. Now there is data that actually ties gum infection to dementia. That's a compromise of the brain from an infection in your gums. And this is the study of over 6,000 people over 26 years, right? So it's a quarter of a century. And what the study showed is that those people who had gingivitis or gum disease, they were more likely to develop dementia as well. In fact, researchers have found that there's one bacteria that grows in the mouth that's harmful. It's called Porphyromonas gingivalis. And this bacteria was found to be associated with the development of Alzheimer's disease. Bacteria growing in your mouth, in your gums that causes gingivitis associated with Alzheimer's disease. Now we actually don't know its cause and effect. This is not the Alzheimer's causing bacteria, but we do know when it's growing around, it's more likely that the individual may develop Alzheimer's disease. So why take the chance, right? And how does it work? Well, it's thought that the brain reacts to the bacteria that's present by producing the amyloid plaque. So how does the bacteria from your mouth actually get into your brain? Well, guess what? Your mouth is connected to your sinus, which is connected to your nose and the top of your nose, which is connected to your mouth. There is a sewer grate, which is called the cribriform plate right here, right behind the nose, right behind the nose, where the bacteria has a chance of actually accessing your brain as well. We don't know exactly how it does it, but we do know that bacteria can communicate with the brain. We also know that bacteria can send signals into your bloodstream that can actually get to your brain as well. So if you want to live long and have your brain in tact, optimize your health, you got to take care of your gums, all right? All right, so here's some of the best ways of maintaining oral health. Brush your teeth and floss your teeth. Brushing is easy. Flossing requires a little bit of skill. So if you don't know how to floss, please go to your dentist or go to a dental hygienist and tell them how, ask them to teach you how to floss properly. And you should floss every time you brush. So if you're brushing twice a day or three times a day after meals, all right, you should also make sure that you're flossing to remove everything. Now, there is another bacteria that's helpful. So we talked earlier about the one bacteria, Porphyromonas gingivalis, that's harmful for your health. But there's one bacteria that's good for your health. It's called Lactobacillus ruteri, L. ruteri. Clinical studies have shown that this good bacteria reduces the incidence, the chances of having gum disease, gingivitis. And it's a bacteria that also helps fight the other bacteria that can cause cavities as well. So how good is that, right? There's a bacteria, a good bacteria that can help to fight bad bacteria and lower your risk of having cavities and gum disease, which sets you up for having brain disease as well. So I want you to sort of pay extra attention to sort of what I'm doing, because I'm actually thinking about simple things that actually have profound consequences, not tomorrow, but maybe in 10 years or 20 years. And so these are small things that are easy to do, and anybody can actually do them. By the way, you also want to be careful with really acidic beverages and foods like sodas or lemonades, because those can actually, by changing the pH, the acidity of your mouth, it allows certain bacteria to overgrow. And of course, the acidity can also kind of chip away at the enamel in your teeth as well. So make sure you rinse your mouth after you drink something really, really acidic. And this is, by the way, why people who say they take apple cider vinegar in the morning. Now, I don't. It actually works. I know I have seen the research that it actually works, but I don't do it myself. But I will tell you that if you do take apple cider vinegar in the morning, the acetic acid in the apple cider vinegar will turn on your brown fat to burn down harmful visceral fat, and it will also prevent your fat cells from growing up. So it actually sort of helps to streamline and improve your metabolism through that mechanism. But vinegar, it's pretty acidic, all right? This is acetic acid. So I would actually suggest you put it in water to dilute it or something else. Don't just swig it straight, whatever you do with apple cider vinegar. All right. Now, the other thing I do in the morning, you know, and it might be before I have my coffee or after I have my coffee, it might be before I have my breakfast, before I skip breakfast, I wind up doing it anyway, is stretching. Stretching is really, really good for your health. Stretching keeps your muscles flexible, strong, and limber, and stretching over the course of your life have been shown to decrease the risk of falling. Now, if you're younger, let's say any age under 50, you're probably not worried about falling at all under the age of 60. But once you get into those older years, it turns out that, you know, one of the most common causes of hospitalization in elderly people is slipping and falling. Well, it's not, they're not slipping on a banana peel. They're slipping because their ability to actually be limber and adjust to imbalances is impaired. And stretching from a time you're young as a habit in the morning actually helps keep you limber. So that is one of the things that I do for stretching, increases the range of motion. It keeps my agility, my muscle agility good. By the way, stretching your arms and stretching your legs. I don't have to, you don't have to do Pilates, you don't have to do yoga, but doing any kind of stretching that works for you, it's actually really good. Decreases the risk of injury later in your life. Stretching, by the way, also improves your circulation by improving blood flow. And when you stretch your circulation, your circulation kind of gets activated, muscles start to get activated. It's overall just a beneficial thing that can actually help you lower inflammation in your body. Now, I will also try, I don't always get to do this, but you're talking about how to optimize my health. I'll try to go out and get some fresh air as well. Again, this could be before breakfast or after breakfast where I skip breakfast. I like to just go outside, breathe deeply, get some fresh air, get a bit of sunshine out there, let some sunshine hit my skin. It feels really good. Get a little vitamin D. All right. Now, everything I told you, even though I've been telling you this for a while now in this video, I can do pretty quickly. All right. Get outside, open the door, just, you know, stretch, walk around a little bit. Sunshine, the ultraviolet radiation, also in your eyes, activates your brain. And it's been shown that sunlight, the ultraviolet radiation from the sunlight, improves memory and cognitive function as well. So that's another reason to go outside. Now, I know some of you may say, well, what if it's cloudy? You still got ultraviolet radiation. You got natural light. You know, I mean, we're so used to being indoors. That's one thing that's not really natural for humans, even though we built it as shelter, we built it for comfort, all right, and for convenience. But honestly, you know, one of the things that we all need is that sunlight activation. Every single animal on the planet, except the ones that are nocturnal, of course, but every single animal on the planet that uses the daytime to be active, their activity, their brain is activated when they actually are exposed to ultraviolet radiation. Okay, talked about coffee, the espresso. Oh, I hope I mentioned, don't add sugar to your coffee, all right? Don't add dairy. You can add nut milks, it's fine. And we talked about all the benefits of that. And I think I might've mentioned, if I haven't, I'm going to say it again, that I usually have full test coffee that has caffeine in it. Now, I know some people are sensitive to caffeine. If you're sensitive, then, you know, you got to go for the decaf, but I'm okay with caffeine. Caffeine has been shown to activate your cognitive function. You got better memory, you got more brain power, more ability to focus, concentrate, and perform. And caffeine obviously is a stimulant as well. So it's a good pick-me-up in the morning as well. All right, we talked about the fruit, we talked about the yogurt, and then I start my day. So let's see, what else can I tell you about starting my day? I think that's about it. These are actually my morning habits. I do it every single morning. You know, sometimes I don't do every single one of them, but I try to do most of them, most of the time. And obviously, it's not a, if you're trying to crib something from my own habits, it's not a religion. You don't have to memorize it. There's no test on it, but these are just the things that I actually do to keep myself healthy. And people always ask me, Dr. Lee, what do you do? What do you eat? How do you do things? So I thought I would let you share this video with you. I hope you learned something, and thanks very much for watching, and I'll see you next time. Hi there. If you enjoyed watching this video, I know you'll love the next one. Stay here and check it out, and I'll see you there.