Stop Doing Healthy Things - Here's What Really Matters

Most people already know the basics of getting healthy. Exercise, good diet, adequate sleep, etc. But we all know that person at the gym who's been coming for years but still looks the same. Or that friend who's super focused on eating the highest quality healthiest food but is still overweight. If these people are trying to improve their health, which they probably are, why aren't they seeing any results? I've spent the last 10 years testing this stuff on myself. I increased my VO2max from 53 to 66, reduced my visceral fats from 359 grams to 54 grams, while reaching top 1% health across 100 biomarkers. I didn't get there by just collecting more health habits or taking more supplements. I actually don't have a very complicated health routine at all. What I did was measured my starting point, made targeted changes, and tested it again. In this video, I'm going to share with you how I would rebuild my health from scratch following this same principle. Because doing healthy things and being healthy or getting healthy aren't the same thing. The problem is that a lot of people treat their health like a checklist of the things that they learned online. Avoid junk food and processed food, don't touch receipts, buy another superfood, block blue light and EMF, take another supplement, get 20 minutes of sunlight, etc. Now, of course, a lot of these things are generally healthy for you, But the duration and the complexity of your daily routine... Doesn't tell you a lot about your actual health status. You go through all of that and still have poor aerobic fitness, low strength, excess abdominal fat, or cardiovascular risk factors you haven't addressed. Health is a physiological state, not a collection of rituals. I personally care a lot more about how my body functions, what it can do, how it feels, and whether the risk factors of major chronic diseases are addressed. The habits you follow are the things that can get you there. The results tell you the state of your actual health and body. And there is evidence behind monitoring your progress. A meta-analysis of 138 experimental studies on 20,000 people found that encouraging people to monitor their progress improved likelihood of reaching their goals. Now again, this is a trap that tracking the results isn't making you healthier, but it can give you feedback about what you're doing and then you can adjust the things that you do to get the results. This has been the biggest mindset shift I've had over the last five to six years when I improved my biomarkers from already above average to the top 1% health range. I started applying this intentional method to my own health. So here's the first step. Establish your baseline. Before you start changing things, you need to know where are you at. I would look at a few core areas. First, body composition. What's my body fat? What's my visceral fat and muscle mass? You don't necessarily need a DEXA scan or even an MRI for that. To estimate your general adiposity and visceral fat, you can measure your waist circumference. It's actually a recommended measurement in clinical practice for obesity. Higher waist circumference is linearly associated with all-cause mortality and heart disease risk. For men, the ideal goal is less than 90 centimeters, and for women, less than 75 centimeters. You measure it around the narrowest part of the waist, which is usually the belly button. You could also measure your hip circumference to get the waist to hip ratio. This is a little bit more accurate and generally you always want to have your waist narrower than your hips because that means you have low visceral fat. Second, fitness. How strong am I? How is my aerobic fitness? Now, there are many physical performance tests or standards you can follow, but you don't need to reach the fitness of an athlete to be considered healthy. In my opinion, the best fitness tests are relative to your own body weight. Things like push-ups, pull-ups, running, sprinting, jumping, etc. Because you could be insanely strong and lift like 300kg on the deadlift while having 30% body fat, right? That's not healthy. On the other hand, pull-ups, or if you can't do pull-ups, push-ups, are simultaneously a litmus test of upper body strength, muscle mass, and body fat. You have to be strong to move your entire body, but also lean enough to not carry unnecessary body weight. You could establish a baseline for some core fitness metrics. How many push-ups or pull-ups you can do in one set. Here's what I would consider a good standard for pull-ups for each age group. Age 20, for men 12, women 2. Age 30, men 11, women 2. Age 40, men 10, women 1. Age 50, men 9, women less than 1. Age 60, men 7, women less than 1. Age 70, men 3, women less than 1. Age 80, men 1, women less than 1. This isn't a scientifically validated standard, it's just a practical milestone. And it doesn't necessarily mean that this is the most optimal amount of pull-ups you could do. Second of all, how fast can you run one kilometer or what's your Cooper test result? This is the distance you run in 12 minutes. You can use this to calculate your VO2max. Here's what it would look like. If your VO2max is less than 15, that usually means your daily function and movement are limited. You have difficulties getting dressed, standing up and walking without assistance. VO2max of 15 to 25 is also very limited fitness. Stairs are difficult and running is nearly impossible. 26 to 35, it's still the out-of-shape territory. You get winded carrying groceries or climbing stairs. VO2max of 36 to 45, this is functional, but still below true fitness. You can exercise, but you have limited endurance. Usually, this means a Cooper test of around 2,300 meters. 46 to 55, fit and healthy, with good energy and decent endurance. This would correspond to a Cooper test of around 2,700 meters. VO2max of 56 to 65, that's extremely fit. This would be the fittest person in a normal friend group. Cooper test around 3,200 meters and VO2max of 66 to 75. That's elite amateur athlete territory. Most people can't keep up with you and you have fast recovery. You don't need to do like a max deadlift, max squat, max bench press or something else like that. Just these bodyweight related exercises are, in my opinion, one of the best ones you can do because they need to consider your own bodyweight. Cardiorespiratory fitness is consistently seen to be associated with lower mortality and several adverse health outcomes, based on a review of 199 studies and 20 million people. Third, I would look at my cardiovascular risk. What are my cardiovascular disease risk factors like blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, lipids, visceral fat, and inflammation? Heart disease is the number one cause of death in developed countries, so you shouldn't neglect this because statistically it's going to be your greatest health threat. If you haven't gotten a blood test recently, then you should go get one for at least the main markers. Hemoglobin A1c for average blood sugar, hsCRP for inflammation, ApoB for atherogenic lipid particles, fasting insulin for insulin sensitivity, and also measure your blood pressure. Having good body composition and good fitness greatly reduces your risk of heart disease, but it doesn't make you immune to it. Alright, step one was establishing the baseline, step two is finding your bottleneck and setting a target that you want to aim. If you have a good baseline you know what is wrong with you and what are the things that need most attention. If I'm already strong but have poor aerobic fitness, doing more biceps exercises isn't my biggest priority. If I have elevated blood pressure I shouldn't let a great sleep score distract me from addressing the blood pressure. Because here's a key point you want to remember. Your longevity isn't determined by your greatest strengths. It's constrained by your bottlenecks and your weaknesses. If your VO2max is already 60, going to 70 isn't going to dramatically increase your longevity. But if you have some bottlenecks in your sleep quality or your metabolic health, then fixing those bottlenecks will improve your longevity. You need to figure out what is the biggest bottleneck, what is holding you down the most. Research also supports this. A meta-analysis of randomized studies found that setting goals improved behavior change on average compared to no control conditions. Having a goal doesn't guarantee success, but it gives you a direction. So you have a specific result and a checkpoint you want to aim for. For example, over the next three months, I'm going to work on increasing my pull-ups from three to six, or whatever the goal is. Now you have a goal, and you can also structure your entire routine around achieving that goal. Because if you don't have a target, you can spend months and months doing nothing and And not knowing if you're improving or not. If you want me to help you do this work entirely, to establish your baseline and find your bottlenecks, then check out my top 1% health community. The first step is finding your health percentile. Are you in the top 10%, bottom 10%, or even top 1% of health? Then you get a program to help you improve your results. Link in the description. Alright, step 3. Choose an intervention that has evidence behind it. If you know what you need to accomplish, how can you achieve it? Of course, you can just try doing whatever and hoping that it's going to work, or you can look at the existing scientific evidence about certain activities that have been proven to get you the results that you want. For example, high-intensity interval training is an effective way to increase your VO2 max. For diet and supplementation, if you want to improve your lipids and blood sugar, you could try psyllium husk or increase your dietary fiber intake. Now, of course, there are many things that don't have evidence. It doesn't mean that it's not going to work. It just hasn't been studied. You just have less certainty about whether it's going to work or not. And also not everyone is going to get the same results as in the scientific studies. People are different. Their responses are different. You're not the statistically average person, right? Everyone is different. You also don't need to wait until you discover the perfect method. You just need to start doing something. People can lose weight using using very different dietary approaches. In the DIETFITS randomized trial, 609 adults were assigned to a healthy low-fat or healthy low-carb diet. Both groups lost weight, with no significant difference between groups after 12 months. So you need to pick something that has credible evidence or some likelihood that it's going to work. Whether it's working for you, that's something you need to check on yourself afterwards. Here are some general lifestyle recommendations I would start off with, and what most people should follow. Sleep 7-8 hours, lift 3 times a week, hit cardio 1-2 times a week, walking 9-10,000 Get some morning daylight for 10 minutes, stop eating food 2-5 hours before bed, and eat mostly whole foods. It's also important to stop doing the things that are jeopardizing your health. Scrolling your phone in bed instead of sleeping, neglecting oral hygiene, eating beyond fullness, having one extra alcoholic drink each night, spending the evening on the couch after a large meal, driving distances that you could easily walk, ignoring red flags in your blood work, and skipping workouts without a good reason. Step 4 is retesting. You're not going to see any changes overnight. Every day following healthy routines will slowly start changing your body, but the actual results will become apparent after several weeks and months. It's like the compounding effect. 1% improvement if you zoom in seems to be insignificant, but over the course of a longer time frame it's enormous and it keeps compounding the longer you do it. That's why you should retest to see if it's working or not. Yes, there are some things you can see in the mirror. If you see that you have less body fat, you have better muscle Their muscle definition etc, that is a sign of heading in the right direction. But other things you can't see with your bare eye. Here are some reasonable intervals for retesting. Waist circumference, you can measure that weekly and assess the trend over 4-8 weeks. Pull-ups and push-ups, retest every 4-6 weeks using the same technique and range of motion. Cooper test or the 1km run, retest every 6-8 weeks using the same course and similar conditions. Blood work, often 8-12 weeks after a targeted change, depending on the marker. Some markers need more time, like hemoglobin A1c. Which reflects average blood sugar levels over the preceding months. By retesting and seeing your progress, you can see whether it's working or not. You don't want to be the guy who goes to the gym every day and after five years he still hasn't improved. You also don't want to eat the same foods every day without knowing if it's improving your blood markers or not. Step five is adjusting based on the results you're getting. If you've been following some activities for weeks and months, you can see if it's working or not. However, not everyone gets the same results. For example, it's often said that around 40% of people don't respond to low intensity cardio in terms of increasing VO2max, and they would need to add high intensity cardio. However, that seems to be a bit of a myth, and if you don't respond to low intensity training, you might need to just do more and increase the volume. Adding an additional training session could do the trick and break the plateau. But this is just to illustrate the point. Sometimes it's not working and you need to adjust things. You need to change the thing you're doing or adjust the frequency, the volume or something else like that. If the diet you're eating hasn't made you lose weight, then you need to identify the reason for it. Are you eating too much food? Are you eating too late in the evening? Are you sticking to the diet during the weekdays but you have massive cheat meals on the weekend? Or what else is the reason? So the goal of this step is to see if the things you're doing are taking you in the right direction. If you're going in the wrong direction, then you need to course correct, and you need to change the thing you're doing, or you need to adjust how much you're doing, or how little are you doing. Imagine if you don't follow this step. You keep doing whatever you're doing without knowing if it's working or not. You keep heading in the wrong direction. And this is also the example of the compounding effect. If you keep negatively compounding one percent worse every day, then after years you're in a much worse position. This is what the people who go to the gym or talk about being healthy for years are doing. They're doing the same things, talking about the same things, without actually improving, and without showing evidence that what they're doing is working or not. If you see that whatever you're doing isn't working, you need to go back to step three. You need to find a new intervention that could work. Maybe you need to change your workout program. Maybe you need to increase the intensity, increase the volume, increase frequency, or even in some cases, reduce your intensity, if you're overtraining. In the context of diet and foods, check your energy intake, check your macros, then look if you can add some supplements for improving some of the blood markers you want to improve. You also need to look at your sleep, because poor sleep can undermine your training and fat loss to a certain extent. In this step, you also need to assess whether the thing you're doing is sustainable, because if you are seeing results in fat loss, but you're constantly hungry and you're thinking about food and you have a very restrictive social life because of that reason, then that's obviously not very enjoyable and it's not sustainable in the long term. So maybe you can adjust these things as well here. Maybe you can make some compromises. Alright, so here's the approach in a nutshell. Step one, establish your baseline. Step two, find your bottleneck and set a target. Step three, choose an intervention with evidence behind it. Step four, retest on a sensible schedule. And step five, adjust based on your results. This is the approach I use to optimize all my biomarkers, and this is how I would do it again if I had to. And finally, I want to say that you don't always need to keep improving. That can become a health problem in and of itself in terms of your mental health. You don't need to become an athlete, you don't need to have 100% perfect blood markers, there's no evidence that being in like top 1% health would be better than being in top 10% health for example. Your longevity is determined by many other factors that we don't know about, such as your genetics. But healthier people would be stacking the odds in their favor if that makes sense. So you don't always need to keep improving, but I would suggest reaching a point where you are above average health. You don't want to be average health, you want to be better than that. However, if you are in worse health, let's say in bottom 10% or in average health, then you would want to get to at least top 10% health. Once you reach a good level, then your main goal could be just maintaining it. Fortunately, it's a lot easier to maintain good health than it is to initially build it. If you want help applying this framework, then that's exactly what we do in my community Top 1% Health. We assess your starting point, create a baseline. Identify your bottlenecks and give you a plan to help you to improve those markers. It also doesn't take many months to see results. On screen you can see people sharing their weekly wins while applying the top 1% health framework. You can see similar results every week and over time these small improvements stack into large wins. Stop guessing whether you're healthy, measure it and do things that have been proven to improve it. Click the link below to discover your health percentile and start improving what actually matters.