Build Muscle To Stay Strong & Live Long

Maintaining and building skeletal muscle mass is great for strength today…and tomorrow. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, the author of “Forever Strong” explores today how to go about building muscle mass and why.

She goes over its preventative effect against “diseases of aging”, like cancer, diabetes, and obesity. She specifies which exercises are actually the most effective for muscular health and what dietary choices are critical as we age. She even gets into if there’s such a thing as acquiring TOO much muscle on the body and what to do if arthritic pain and/or illness makes exercising difficult in the first place.

Check out Gabrielle’s website: drgabriellelyon.com

Subscribe to Wise Traditions on your favorite podcast app

Find more resources at westonaprice.org

See our sponsors: Optimal Carnivore and Vintage Tradition

—

Listen to the podcast here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Gabrielle Lyon.

There’s no such thing as a healthy, sedentary person. This is episode 466, and our guest is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, a board-certified family physician, and the author of Forever Strong: A New Science-Based Strategy For Aging Well. Gabrielle is especially interested in helping us understand the critical importance of skeletal muscle health and its relationship to longevity and the prevention of diseases of aging. She covers in this episode how movement primes the system to lower inflammation and reduce the likelihood of cancer, diabetes, and obesity.

She describes the types of exercises she recommends for optimal muscular health, including rocking and resistance training. She goes over why she believes protein is the most important macronutrient to consume as we age. She offers advice for those with arthritis or who are feeling simply too sick to exercise at all. Before we get into the conversation, I want to remind you to follow The Wise Traditions Podcast on the platform of your choice. This way, you won’t miss a thing, or better yet, download the Wise Traditions Podcast app to your phone. It’s available on iOS and Android phones. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stick close.

—

Welcome to the show, Gabrielle.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

We are happy to have you. Your new book Forever Strong: A New Science-Based Strategy For Aging Well captivated me and my husband. I want to start with this. A lot of us talk about the skin being the largest organ in the body, but we overlook the second largest. Can you tell us about that?

This is human nature. We believe what we hear over and over again. We believe in repetition rather than truth.

Talk to me.

Skin is not the largest organ. It’s skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle is an organ system. I highlight skeletal muscle for the reader because there are other types of muscle. There’s smooth muscle, a muscle within the arteries, the uterus and cardiac muscle. Skeletal muscle is the muscle in the bicep or the quad, and it’s muscle under voluntary control. It makes up roughly 40% of an individual’s body making it the largest organ in the human, body organ system, which is incredible.

The skin is not. I’ve been misinformed all these years. Why is the skin not, and why has it been perceived as being the largest organ?

I think because of the surface area. We have been misguided in medicine. One of the ways in which we’ve been misguided is we’ve ignored skeletal muscle as an organ system. Skeletal muscle is typically thought about as it relates to exercise, sports performance or looking good when in reality, there is nothing more critical to our health, wellness and our longevity than the actual health of our skeletal muscle.

Let’s get into it. How can we shore up the health of our skeletal muscle?

There are two main ways in which you do that. That is through exercise movement, which we’re going to talk all about and diet.

Benefits Of Exercise

Let’s start with exercise, because surprisingly, on this show, we haven’t addressed movement much. Obviously, it’s been a part of every culture since the beginning of time. We were made to move. What do you know about the benefits of movement to muscle health? Are there specific movements and exercises that you would recommend?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. I love that you said movement. When we think about skeletal muscle as an organ system, we have to understand that when exercising or in motion skeletal muscle does certain things. Why do we care about movement? We care about movement because when we contract skeletal muscle, skeletal muscle as an organ system, that secretes myokines. Myokines are little proteins that travel throughout the body.

We look at the way skeletal muscle contracts and it secretes these myokines, but exercising skeletal muscle also improves things like insulin sensitivity. We’ve all heard about these diseases of aging. They don’t start later on. They start early with the health of our skeletal muscle. Ways in which we are inactive have a tremendous effect. What does that mean and why does that matter? There’s no such thing as a healthy sedentary person. A healthy sedentary person doesn’t exit. I think we should talk about rucking and resistance exercise. All of these things impact the health of skeletal muscle.

Even if we didn’t know the science behind some of these things when we are sedentary and seated at our desks all day, and then we come home and we watch TV, and we sit on the couch when we have a sedentary lifestyle, we’re riding around in our cars to get to and fro, we don’t feel great, and we know it deep inside. It doesn’t matter if the person who’s being sedentary is thin because it’s not about appearance. It’s about health.

I know you bring up a good point. When an individual is sedentary, you doesn’t necessarily feel the decrease in lipid oxidation and glucose utilization. We don’t feel that. It’s not felt. When an individual is sedentary, skeletal muscle over time has what we call a decreased flux. If we think about it high level, we know that skeletal muscle is important. We know that movement is important because it primes this organ system like we exercise to have a healthy cardiovascular system and thyroid endocrine system.

We can’t do much directly, but with skeletal muscle, we have direct control over that. When an individual is inactive, it’s not that the skeletal muscle isn’t contracting things or isn’t releasing things, but it also creates low levels of inflammation. It changes the actual tissue. For example, if healthy skeletal muscle looks like a filet, I know that everyone on this podcast has probably eaten a filet, unhealthy skeletal muscle, looks like a marbled ribeye steak. This happens over time. The thing is this is where these disease processes start.

If healthy skeletal muscle looks like a filet, unhealthy skeletal muscle looks like a marbled ribeye steak.

It’s interesting. they give these baseline recommendations of 150 minutes a week, of moderate to vigorous activity. Two days a week of resistance training. I think that we can go deeper. If we think about how humans were designed before we became domesticated, I think about what are the actions we must take to maintain our independence. To me, it’s not just going to the gym and getting on a machine, very helpful, but very specific things that I would tell people to do would be to carry things. Whether you’re carrying a kettlebell or your children.

I have two little children, you better believe I exercise with them. I strongly believe that that’s probably what people used to do. They used to carry their kids on their backs, chests or on their shoulders. This can also be a form of exercise. This idea of moving our body in a way that is very helpful like rucking or throwing on a backpack, etc.

Indigenous Vs. Modern Lifestyles

I’ve seen this with my own eyes. At the Weston A. Price Foundation, we value very much the research and work of Dr. Weston Price, who traveled the world in the 1930s, finding isolated indigenous people groups that were apart from modernity. He recorded a lot about their diets then. Me and some other enthusiastic researchers have started traveling the world in his footsteps. I’ve seen women carrying water jugs on their heads.

They don’t need to go to a gym or do a rucksack thing and wear babies because they’re incorporating this movement and training that is beneficial naturally as a part of their day-in and day-out lives. Whereas you and I who live in a more developed country or whatever, in a more modern lifestyle, have unfortunately defaulted to a more sedentary form of life where we have to be more intentional about our movement.

We do have to create a culture that balances the high technology culture that we have. I’m not against technology. We need it. We get to do this. This is amazing, but also being very mindful that the influence that it has is one of extreme sedentary behavior. Walking enough I don’t think it’s enough. I do think thinking about movements that potentially if we didn’t have a car, an elevator, pulleys and things to move things, what are the actions that we have to be able to do? We have to be able to get up off the floor. We have to be able to carry heavy things. We have to be able to push up EV-heavy things and lift them. We have to be able to climb up and down.

These are all actions that I think that we should incorporate into exercise that we often don’t. I know that there’s primal movement, etc., but thinking about aging, balance and plyometrics. What happens when someone falls and breaks a hip? That typically changes the trajectory of their life. If we begin to understand that skeletal muscle is the only organ system that we have direct control over, we can maintain power and strength. It’s interesting because I think for an older individual, it’s very difficult to overtrain. There’s a lot of talk about rest and recovery. I don’t feel that we are on that side of the spectrum. I think that we’re on the side of the spectrum that we have a lot to do.

That’s such a good word. What’s coming to my mind is I’ve interviewed people about vitamin A and how critical that is for your overall well-being, hormonal health and so forth. People often share with me, “I’m concerned about vitamin A toxicity.” The issue is like what you said. We err on the side of too little vitamin A and not too much. People are concerned about something that may not apply at all.

We are robust humans. I’ll tell you this, and this is maybe a little more esoteric, but capacity is cultivated within the arena of life. We are designed to do hard, physical and mental things. The moment that we take away that opportunity and we self-impose a limiting opportunity, that’s when everything changes. The moment we take ourselves out of the arena.

Wise Traditions | Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, | Muscle Mass — Muscle Mass: We are designed to do hard physical and mental things. The moment we take away that opportunity, everything in our lives changes.

That human nature is wanting to press that easy button. Don’t you think?

I don’t. I’m grateful that you mentioned that. I do believe that we have been taught that stress is bad, there is fight or flight, and that’s the only stress response. I have seen a lot of patients in my time. There is literature that shows other stress responses. I don’t want to go too far off, but I do mention this in the book. There’s fight or flight, and that’s one stress response. There’s also tendon befriend and the courage response. What we believe and how we operate within our life will truly cultivate our response to stress and the meaning of stress.

I understand what you’re referring to. It reminds me of the trend right now of cold adaptation or cold thermogenesis. It’s a purposeful hormetic stressor because it has a fabulous result for the body rather than thinking, “My only options are to jump out of the water screaming or freeze to death,” there’s something in between. That’s what you’re referring to.

1) We have to train our bodies, even when we don’t feel like it. It’s a non-negotiable. You should be doing resistance training, whether it’s 2 to 3 days a week or 4 days a week. There are multiple different ways to design a program. There are multiple different opportunities to experience that on the internet. It’s easy. The other thing to do is utilize your body throwing on a backpack. GORUCK has great and multiple different kinds of backpacks.

Train with your children on your back. Figure out different ways to do it. Do the uncomfortable and continue to do it because that’s what your body needs. The other aspect to that is, “Could you do cardiovascular activity?” There’s a lot of discussion about zone two training. You could. Are there metabolic effects to that? Yes, and/or you could do some type of high-intensity interval training.

There are multiple different protocols. You could do 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off. You could do a minute at a sub-maximal output and then a minute or two minutes to fully recover. Martin Gibala at McMaster University talks all about this one-minute workout. There is a lot of evidence behind it. Essentially, there are multiple ways to move the needle of muscle. There are a handful of pillars that one must include. In an aging population, we have to prevent injury because nothing will take us out of the game faster than a shoulder, hip or a knee injury.

Four Pillars Of Muscle-Centric Medicine

Talk to us first about the pillars. As you said, there are many ways to approach this, and I’m curious about yours.

1) Muscle health is everything. I created muscle-centric medicine. This is the way of the future. How do we do that? We think about skeletal muscle as the largest endocrine organ, the influences and the actions that one must take to maintain and develop healthy skeletal muscle. 1) Age. It is never too early to start training, nor is it ever too old to start training. I have a five-year-old. She trains with me and a 3-year-old who does whatever he does.

Understanding Skeletal Muscle

That’s not to say he’s doing max-out deadlifts, which he’s not, but they train. They work out with me. It’s fun. They move their body. We do pushups together. Never too old. Never too young. It is critical to be able to include strength and resistance training. For someone who is at home saying, “Wise Traditions has taught a lot about nutrition, but I don’t know much about movement,” I would say we start with our body weight. We start with the things that we can find and make it exciting.

You can do pushups, squats and carries. We discussed all those things. Go to a gym. Find a great trainer. Find an online trainer. You must do these things. It’s very valuable. That should be a minimum of at least 2 days a week, depending on the training schedule, 4 days. It’s all about how do you develop a very specific protocol for yourself that you are getting the result. It’s not just about doing the action. It’s about applying the right action in the right way. It’s not just about going through the motions. It’s what is the outcome that we’re looking to tolerate or to gain, and what are the actions that we’re willing to tolerate.

The other thing that I think is very important is maintaining power. Being able to move a weight quickly, and that seems to decrease as we age. How do we maintain power when it comes to aging? The other thing is adding in some high-intensity interval that is easy. High-intensity interval training could be sitting and standing from your chair. There’s no way to not do it. Do you understand? I could tell a patient in the hospital to get up out of their bed, and that could be an explosive type of exercise for them.

I remember years ago I was with Ben Greenfield at a PaleoFX Conference, and he was showing us some bodyweight training and some movement that we could do that’s simple in the morning, in a park one day. He had us getting on the ground and standing up and doing it repeatedly, let’s say, over 45 seconds to a minute span of time. It was challenging but great. That’s the ability that we don’t want to lose as we age.

If a man is eating well, sleeping well and training his testosterone does not have to decline. For women, we inevitably do go through hormonal decline, but men don’t necessarily have to. There are interesting things that can affect our aging. The most important is to always think about maintaining what you have and then improving. We shouldn’t be going to the gym to get better at exercise. We should be moving our bodies to get better at life.

We should not be going to the gym to get better at exercise but instead to move our bodies to get better at life.

Is that why people talk a lot these days about progressive overload?

That’s certainly one way to add in hypertrophy training, which is the increase in muscle mass.

If you are using, let’s say, 10 or 12-pound weights regularly like me, or even 15 pounds, if it’s always the same weights, then you’re maintaining. You’re not improving and getting stronger, which you have to do to build muscle mass and protect your muscle health.

There are many things that one could think about. Would you increase or change the tempo or increase the amount of exercise that you’re doing? Maybe you go from 15 reps to 25 reps? There are all different ways to ultimately fatigue the muscle might take a longer amount of time.

What happens to the muscle when it does get fatigued? Is that when it recruits more muscle fibers? That is why they go to failure.

It does. That is a very good question. You’re creating metabolic disturbances that are believed to be at that threshold. It’s interesting. With nutrition, I could say you need 120 grams of protein, but if I say to you, “I want you to do 3 sets of 15 reps of bicep curls,” I don’t know the effort you’re putting in. I don’t know the actual impact that it’s having on your muscles. I don’t know if we’ve gotten this stimulus necessary, but if I tell you, “I want you to do 3 sets of 15 reps and I want you to go to failure, maybe it’ll be 15 reps or 20,” but because you’ve gone to failure, we know that we have created a specific amount of influence in that muscle.

I see why it has to be more descriptive, go to failure as opposed to prescriptive, “Do this exact exercise regimen.”

—

Coming up, Gabrielle addresses the role of genetics in our muscle building, and she offers insights on what our muscle mass goals should be.

—

Optimal Carnivore Use the code Weston10 to save 10% on all products, their Grass-Fed Organ Complex and more.

Vintage Tradition tallow bombs and soaps. Get their products and find out more about their wonderful practices.

—

Gaining Better Muscle Health

I noticed in your book that you are advocating for stronger muscles and better muscle health, suggesting that all these different benefits, like it helps us burn fat, fight heart disease, reverse diabetes, to stay physically and mentally strong and boost energy. Can proper muscle health do all that?

Absolutely. Skeletal muscle health, again, is everything, because when you contract skeletal muscle, it secretes these myokines. These myokines go throughout the body. They help with low levels of inflammation and balance inflammation. What’s interesting is that non-contracting or non-exercising skeletal muscle is a problem. You have all this tissue and then you’re not doing anything with it.

I wonder if this focus on muscle-skeletal health is important because I’ve seen bodybuilders in the gym, or people who are buff, who work out all the time, who, in my estimation, aren’t nourishing themselves well, they’re not getting the sunlight, all the things that I recommend, and yet they’re thriving. Is it because of the mykines floating through their system and such?

This question is quite complex. A bodybuilder, depending on the size, would not be considered a natural amount of muscle. Maybe there’s a natural bodybuilder, and then there is a non-natural bodybuilder. Both sets have various influences or impacts on the body. I think it’s very difficult to say that a bodybuilder just because they’re a bodybuilder and have more muscle they are healthier. I don’t think that that’s true.

What I think is true is that we all have a certain genetic propensity to build a certain amount of muscle. There are certain graphs and charts that people try to use that say, “Is this person natural or not natural?” Whatever the case is, there is a genetic potential if someone is not using hormone replacement or some anabolics. The next question is, “Is there a benefit to going above and beyond? What would be genetically possible from a natural perspective?”

I don’t know the answer. The answer that I do know is that there’s plenty of evidence to suggest healthy skeletal muscle, there are charts out there. I put a chart in my book about how to determine where you are if you’re a sarcopenic, which is a loss of skeletal muscle mass, strength and size, where an individual is. I think the ultimate goal is to put on as much healthy muscle mass as you can. I say that in an absolute way, but I say it cautiously. That’s not to say you need to be an Olympia bodybuilder competitor, but it is important because it becomes more difficult to maintain skeletal muscle as we age.

As many things as we age, we get wise and we lose muscle, but why muscle is critical is not for that power and strength component and independent living. For example, when women go through menopause, oftentimes one of the things that we see is not just a decrease in bone density from hormones, but we see a decrease in skeletal muscle mass. At the same time, we see changes in their metabolic profile, meaning we see an increase in blood glucose levels and triglycerides. changes that typically we account for in skeletal muscle.

Checking Protein Amounts

There’s a lot to account for here, whether we’re male or female, what our goals are as we’re aging. I like your emphasis on natural muscle strengthening and development because we’re definitely not on a lot of artificial stuff here at the Weston A. Price Foundation, but that leads us to nutrition. What do you recommend in terms of protein amounts? I know we have to be maybe more descriptive than prescriptive, but what do you recommend as we age for that healthy skeletal muscle mass?

A huge portion of the book is all about dietary protein because it is controversial, which I love the Weston A. Price group. I have known about this when I first started learning nutritional sciences. I was thrilled to get the invitation to come and talk to you. I recommend 1 gram per pound for ideal body weight. That is on the higher end. Could you go lower? I know on Weston A. Price is into dietary fat and things of that nature. I would say that as we age, the most important macronutrient is protein because we must account for protein turnover, meaning all the cells in our body, our skeletal muscle, our gut, our heart, these tendons, which are slow to turnover, but everything turns over. We have to be able to keep up with that turnover. One gram per pound ideal body weight is what I recommend.

What do you mean when you say turns over?

Dietary protein is a macronutrient that is essential, and it is the only macronutrient that needs change as we age. For example, for dietary carbohydrates, it doesn’t matter. We don’t necessarily have an increase in carbohydrate need as we age. When we become more mature, we do need dietary protein because our skeletal muscle is always turning over. Our liver is turning over, it’s replacing itself. Our spleen and intestines, and as we age, the process becomes a bit slower. We have to be able to make sure that we have enough substrates for all of it. The guidelines that we have at 0.8 grams per kg haven’t changed. the RDA hasn’t changed since 1968 or something. It’s been a while.

The government isn’t taking into account the very things we were talking about, the bio-individuality for one thing, or what happens as we age.

The government only cares about the minimum deficiencies. It’s not necessarily the government. There’s the WHO. It’s all of these different influences that are the challenge.

Aging And Muscle Issues

I can’t remember if I saw this in your book, your podcast or something. Why do you say that all diseases of aging are issues in the muscles first?

We have to think about what are the top things that we know of right now that are going to kill us. Maybe this is up for some discussion, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that we can agree upon cardiovascular disease. We can agree upon Alzheimer’s, cancer and these diseases. While they’re very complex, we have to ask 1) What is the one thing that they all have in common?

There are multiple types of cancer. For argument’s sake to simplify the message and understanding, metabolic dysregulation and cardiovascular disease, there is a genetic component, but we must also understand that there is a metabolic component, whether it is insulin resistance, elevated triglycerides, etc. These issues of metabolic dysregulation begin in skeletal muscle decades earlier like Alzheimer’s become 70 and all of a sudden have Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s is a process that has happened over time. It is type three diabetes of the brain. It has a metabolic component. I did a fellowship in geriatrics, nutritional sciences and obesity medicine. This is what I trained in. Cancer is one of the largest risk factors of certain types of cancer. That is obesity. Obesity is not a disease of fat. Obesity is a disease of skeletal muscle first. Obesity is a disease of skeletal muscle. If you think about skeletal muscle as a suitcase, you open the suitcase and you pack in carbohydrates.

Obesity is not a disease of fat but of the skeletal muscle.

Let’s say you and I, my friend, are going on vacation and we’re going for four days. You and I have a packing issue. Quite frankly, we pack for 30 days. If skeletal muscle is a suitcase, there is no way we’re going to be able to close that suitcase, there is no way we’re going to be able to get more clothes into that suitcase. It is going to be everywhere. If the room is our bloodstream, it’s going to be everywhere. Skeletal muscle is the largest site for glucose disposal. It goes there. It is one of the primary sites that it goes first. When you then have dysfunctional skeletal muscle, you then begin to put on body fat. We are oversimplifying to make it very straightforward, but obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance are all diseases that began in skeletal muscle decades before.

Movement Vs. Meals

Most of us, including me, want to do what we can to prevent the scenario you described. We want optimal skeletal muscular health. The question is, if we eat more protein, and prioritize that, especially as we age, we do the walking and the rucking and the resistance training, is that going to be helpful, preventatively?

Totally. It’s going to be the best thing that you ever did. Let me ask you a question. What do you think is more important? Diet or exercise. Why would we try to say which one is more important? We obviously know that they are both critical. The question is, what has the most immediate influence and what is going to have the most immediate influence on muscle? The most immediate influence on preventing and maintaining the health of skeletal muscle is the influence of exercise.

That being said, it’s not like you can build muscle without protein. this is a rhetorical question. I think all of us that are OGs in this space, we all believe it’s nutrition. That’s where I started my career. The evidence would suggest that the impact of one bout of exercise is going be much more significant. If you were to say, “What is the influence of this meal versus this training session?” the training session is going to have far more of an influence.

Case Studies

I love this because we are not afraid at the Weston A. Price Foundation to get some different inputs here. We do focus a lot on nutrition, but sometimes perhaps to the unfortunate exclusion of movement. I’ve loved the emphasis of both things in this conversation, but particularly the movement. I want to ask you because I know you’ve worked with clients. You’re in the middle of your day right seeing patients and forth. Can you tell us a story of one anonymously that you saw a shift maybe their body composition as they took on this muscle-centric medicine approach?

There are countless stories. I can even share my own. I have two little children. I have a 4.5-year-old, almost 5 and a 3.5. I followed my own principles. I was able to maintain my body composition. I had my first baby in my early forties. It wasn’t as if it was defy the odds. You have this baby naturally. You do these things and then you continue to train I never stopped training. What I did was determine how much protein I needed for the first pregnancy. I was extremely sick.

For the second pregnancy, was able to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight. Within six months, I was able to put back on skeletal muscle. What I simply did was I ate 1 gram per pound ideal body weight. I trained four days a week with resistance training. I did one day a week of high-intensity interval training. That was it. My training sessions were maybe 45 minutes.

You feel the difference in your bones and in your body. You have the energy to spare to deal with your kids and the clients and all of it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have the energy to deal with my kids, but that’s one example. I have countless examples. Women who have tried everything, come to me with a stack of diet books of everything that they’ve tried. The thing is eating in a protein-forward way in this idea of forever strong. Forever strong is not a book. I wrote this book called Forever Strong is a New York Times bestseller. Being forever strong is not a book like Weston A. Price. It’s not a book. It’s a movement, a culture and a way of thinking about the universe and the world that we live in. It’s about having a creed, which we stand by. It’s about understanding that being strong and having a strong body, a weak mind, can never exist in a strong body.

That’s what we need to show up and go through life in a way that fulfills whatever it is that we want to do. You asked me this question. Give me some examples. I’m an example. I had another patient who had bad rheumatoid arthritis who lost 60 pounds and was able to come off medication. You name it. Another individual who’s in the public eye who we would consider skinny fat was able to implement her protocol with dietary protein and struggled with body dysmorphia and eating issues. This was all able to calm down because we fed her body what it needed.

That is inspiring. I do especially feel for those who struggle with arthritis because they literally have joint pain. To move is painful, then they want to move less. It becomes more and more difficult. What do you recommend for someone like that? You said you had a patient with that.

The influence of exercise can help lower inflammation. There are multiple ways in which we’re thinking about dealing with arthritis or osteoarthritis. Whether it’s getting movement patterns correct, whether it’s stem cells, or plasma-rich therapy, there are peptides and all kinds of things. When it comes to the idea of movement there’s the autoimmune inflammatory condition. There’s rheumatoid arthritis. This can have and be counterbalanced by exercise because of the anti-inflammatory effects of exercise. Osteoarthritis is a multifactorial approach, but exercise will make everything better. It’s not going to make it worse.

Advice For Bed-Ridden Individuals

I have two more questions to pose to you. One is this. What do you say to the person who literally is weak that they can’t even get out of bed, they’re not well enough to work out, or to the person who says they can’t afford a more protein-rich diet, what would you advise people in those categories?

1) The people that are really sick to do anything, and this could be a good place for a STEM suit, the TENS unit or these STEM suits. There are some that are very expensive, but there are some that are very affordable. You’re contracting the skeletal muscle. If they can’t do much, they must have dietary protein on board. They must have a protein-forward diet. It’s a non-negotiable and there’s lots of evidence to support that. That’s one piece.

Some STEM or tens unit blood flow restriction. You have to work with a provider and making sure the dietary protein is high enough. This is a great place where whey protein shakes or essential amino acids, this is a critical place for that. Creatine 5 grams. Your next question was the person who can’t afford dietary protein. If you think that you cannot afford dietary protein, how are you going to afford illness? It doesn’t have to be grass-fed. You can afford to eat eggs. This is an excuse or distraction to not do the thing that is being asked of you.

One Important Health Advice

We say this all the time, “When you invest in your food, you’re investing in your health. You spend less on your medical bills than you do when you put it proactively in your diet.” It makes so much sense. I want to pose to you the question I love to pose at the end of the show. If the readers could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

Understand that discipline is the key to longevity. I can tell you all these amazing things, and I’ve researched protein for twenty years, I’ve trained under some of the world-leading experts of protein metabolism, etc. All of that is true, but if there is no discipline to execute the information that is presented, then it doesn’t matter. Discipline is the true key to longevity.

Discipline is the true key to longevity.

Those are powerful words to end on. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been eye-opening.

I’m glad. Thank you so much.

—

A simple reminder as we wrap up, follow this show. That way you can find out when every new episode is released immediately, and you can share your favorite interviews with friends. Thank you so much for helping us get the word out in a more personal way. Thank you for reading. Stay Well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

Important Links

About Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a board-certified family physician leading a disruption in modern medicine, one that focuses on the largest organ in the body—skeletal muscle—to support longevity and fight back against the threat of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. With a background that includes a combined research and clinical fellowship in geriatrics and nutritional sciences at Washington University and undergraduate training in nutritional sciences at the University of Illinois, she is a subject-matter expert and educator in the practical application of protein types and levels for health, performance, aging, and disease prevention. Dr. Lyon’s upcoming book, Forever Strong: A New, Science-Based Strategy for Aging Well, outlines her whole-body, whole-person protocol for muscle health optimization.