Found the Right Provider? You Might Still Be the Wrong Patient!

About 3.1 million Americans died last year from diseases that are completely preventable. Today, we’re going to dig deep into the things you can do to optimize your health and avoid the risk factors that can put you in a place you don’t want to be. We talk about healthspan and how we can live our lives to the maximum. As Valerie Orsone says, “I want to be the youngest person and die later on in life.” In this episode, I’ll show you exactly how to become the perfect patient and achieve the health goals you’ve always dreamed of. Now is the time to dig in, listen closely, and figure out what is holding you back from achieving ultimate health. This is episode 22 of Cell To Systems.

The first thing I want to talk about is baseline. When you start on this journey, a lot of people are just biohacking and guessing. Why do that? Let’s get down to the brass tacks of it. You want to work with a physician, whether that’s a medical doctor, a DO, a nurse practitioner, or whatever provider you feel most comfortable with, as long as they have the right education and continuing education and are staying current in the longevity space. Call it healthspan, longevity, cellular medicine, or whatever you want, but you want someone who really has the information and is continuing to stay on top of rapid developments. We live in the AI age, where information is available in a completely new way.

Finding the right provider takes some investigative work, and the most important thing is that you feel completely comfortable with them. They need the right education, but they also need to be the right fit for you. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a relationship where you can tell the truth. Remember, this is often a cash-pay system, not reimbursed by insurance, so the things you share with that doctor need to be honest and complete. You need a solid baseline on the important things. If you want a deeper look at the cardiac workup, go back and listen to the Pathway to Peak Performance episode featuring Dr. Abid Hussein. When you’re doing testing, let’s face it: if the cardiac system is not working and you’re not able to pump blood, nothing else is going to matter. Considering that about half of Americans are going to die from heart disease, and that it is largely preventable through diet, exercise, and lifestyle, that is the first place I would look. Too often it gets neglected, and people focus only on HDL and LDL, which is just not enough.

A lot of longevity providers say they don’t necessarily need all of the information that comes out of Function Health. I use Function Health personally, and I’m entitled to my own opinion. I like it because it gives me a snapshot in time of where I was at any given moment, so I can look back over a long period of time and understand where the smoke signal started that kicked something off. As AI becomes more prevalent on the diagnostic side, that kind of data could be incredibly valuable. Function Health offers over a hundred different tests, and some people will say that’s overkill. Fine, maybe it is. But if you can afford it, do it. If not, work with your provider to get the right workup and the right panel. Dr. Hussein’s panel is absolutely critical. You can also look back on episodes here on Cell To Systems and see what Dr. Suzanne Ferree, Kristi Fury, CFNP, and Craig Mullen have said about the different tests they use. These tests provide a baseline so we can understand where each of us is starting from, because we are all N of one. We are all different. What I’m dealing with may be completely different from what other members of the team are dealing with. We need to get specific about our goals and our situation, because we may not achieve our goals if we wind up dead. As Dr. Hussein said, half of the people who die from cardiac-related death never make it to the emergency room. That is a scary statistic, and it is something to keep in mind.

Once you’ve found the right provider and done the right testing, you get an opportunity to go beyond blood work and really test VO2 max, strength, and a whole range of other things. Some providers may have that testing, but one place where people often go now, and where longevity and cellular medicine doctors may send them, is New Hx in West Palm Beach. They can take you through those protocols and then send recommendations back to your provider. If you’re able to do that, I think it’s well worth it. Many practices have some of these tools, like a DEXA scan and Pnoe or other VO2 max capabilities. Some people like Pnoe, some people like traditional VO2 max testing. The new strength testing that New Hx has is pretty incredible. It’s next-level stuff.

Again, we are working on the baseline before we do anything else. I’m not saying you should stop exercising or sit around and wait until you get it right. If you’re already working out, keep working out. But if you want to take it to the next level, these are the things you probably want to do. Once you understand where you are and what you need to work on, it’s usually things like reducing visceral fat, increasing muscle mass, and improving VO2 max through cardio. That means strength training and cardio. You can see in the work I do that I’m committed to strength training, cardiovascular work, diet, nutrition, and hydration. Hydration may be one of the most important pieces of all.

If you look at most Americans, they are chronically dehydrated, and that has a huge impact on all sorts of functions within the body. Nothing in the body works properly unless you are hydrated. There’s a reason you’ll die sooner from lack of water or lack of hydration than from lack of food. The order of priority matters. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the bottom would say food, air, water, shelter, but it really should be air, water, food, shelter. There are a number of ways we can upgrade hydration. The formulation I personally use is the one I think is best right now, but if I find something better, I’ll use that. When I drink that in conjunction with highly purified water, not just filtered water, I avoid a whole cascade of problems.

Hunger can often be associated with thirst. Sometimes you feel hungry, but really you’re just thirsty. If you’re trying to maintain or lose body weight while preserving muscle mass and not putting on body fat, the first thing to do when you get a hunger signal at night is drink some water. I know some people don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom, but I’d rather do that than stay dehydrated. The first thing I do when I wake up is drink a good amount of water. I also take exogenous ketones and amino acids, essential aminos. I’m not sponsored by the company I’m mentioning; I just happen to like Perfect Amino by BodyHealth, and I’ve been taking it for four years. A lot of people are amino acid deficient. We’ve lived under a food pyramid that told us massive amounts of carbohydrates were good, fat was bad, and protein was somewhere in the middle. At this point, it’s clear that much of that was manipulated and not actually accurate. Whether you’re doing keto, carnivore, vegan, paleo, or Mediterranean, it comes down to your genetics and what is best for you. That’s what testing helps you figure out. Getting diet and nutrition right is critical, and timing matters too. A continuous glucose monitor may be helpful after something like a Pnoe breath analysis, which can tell you how you’re metabolizing different things.

When we look at Alzheimer’s and other neurocognitive diseases, sleep hygiene becomes incredibly important. We are all guilty of taking our phones to bed, playing games, watching videos, or falling asleep to a movie. Whether blue-light blocking glasses are really effective is debatable. Some people think they are, and others think it’s nonsense. I’m not going to risk it; I’m going to use them and hope for the best outcome. If you’re smoking, give it up. Come on. About 480,000 Americans die per year from smoking. The tobacco industry infiltrated the food business and created hyper-palatable processed foods that are not good for you. If you put enough salt, sugar, and fat into something, people become addicted to it. If you’re vaping or doing anything like that, it’s terrible for your lungs. People have figured that out. When we talk about hyper-palatable foods, we mean ultra-processed foods that are easy to pop into the microwave, often in black plastic, and that expose you to all kinds of bad compounds. Try to avoid them. I love what Kristi Fury says: if you can’t pick it, pull it, or kill it, you shouldn’t be eating it.

All right, let’s talk about sleep hygiene. Most people do not get the right amount of sleep. You don’t want too little, and you don’t want too much, but you do want to figure out where you are. One of the most important things is to understand whether you have sleep apnea. You may not think you do, but I highly recommend getting tested. Even people who are not overweight can have sleep apnea. There has even been research showing that children who wet the bed can later develop sleep apnea. Sleep disorders can cause serious problems. If you are not breathing well in the middle of the night, it can affect cognitive health, cardiovascular health, and much more.

Going back to the cardiovascular piece, Dr. Hussein talked about the Clearly test and getting the 256-slice version of it to see where plaque is in your coronary arteries and heart. That helps you understand where the plaque is and how to address it. One of the most exciting things now is that we can find it and treat it, or your doctor can. Then there is alcohol. If you look at our culture, alcohol is everywhere, and yet alcohol simply is not good for you. The social benefits may be real in some way, because people need social interaction, but at the end of the day alcohol has not proven to be great. Let’s look at the numbers. There are 178,000 deaths per year attributed to alcohol. In ages 20 to 49, one in five deaths is estimated to be linked to excessive alcohol use. That tells us a lot. Alcohol is not great. It messes up your training. It makes you want to eat more food that is not so great. A greasy breakfast or lots of carb consumption late at night that converts to sugar throws your entire system off. From a muscle protein synthesis standpoint, it pushes you way back in your ability to process protein effectively. If you are trying to go for peak performance, alcohol is just not a great thing. Some people on the show feel that moderation is fine, and that’s their opinion. But if you are truly trying to train and live the healthiest life possible, alcohol does not need to be part of your repertoire the way protein does.

We’ve talked about choosing a provider and selecting them, and if you can get into their panel, sometimes you actually have to sell them on you becoming a patient. That doesn’t mean anything shady. It means you have to prove you’re willing to commit to working with them. They don’t want to waste their time with someone who is half in. They want someone who is going all in and really wants to take this to the next level. How do you become a great patient? You do the things I talked about before. Be willing to do the testing. Then listen. Don’t listen to a bunch of nonsense you found on the internet. Listen to what your provider is saying, and hopefully they’re involved with organizations like CALM and others that are providing fantastic information to help providers level up.

So first, be willing. Then listen. Then execute. The best-laid plans that are never executed go nowhere and do nothing. The most important thing we can do is take action. If your doctor says, “We need you to be exercising, and I’d like you to work with a personal trainer because you don’t know how to exercise,” then customize your plan with your provider. There are many workout apps you can use if you don’t know how to train, and there are lots of different ways to get into exercise from the privacy and comfort of your own home. One of the programs I love most is KB Stronger. Jodie Barrett is a good friend of mine, and she is a phenomenal trainer. Her workouts are on another level. She can do hyper-customized coaching, or you can use her app for around $39 and start with bodyweight or a single kettlebell. You can ramp up your ability with very little equipment, right from home. As a father, I think about safety too. Do I want my daughter out late at night, exposed to the weirdos hanging around gyms? I’m not a fan of that. There are many programs like this out there, but that’s one worth looking into. I’m really impressed by it.

Now we integrate all of this. We’ve found the provider, we’ve done the testing, we’ve committed to the provider, we’re exercising, we’re improving diet and hydration, we’re monitoring sleep, and we’re working toward a goal. That goal has to be realistic so you won’t be defeated. I always tell people who are asking me about going into the gym and training: take it easy. Don’t overdo it. If you have a workout partner who is trying to show you how little you can lift, that is a terrible workout partner. You want someone who says, “I may be lifting heavier weights, and I’m going to need you to slowly catch up with me.” If you go too hard and beat somebody up that way, to the point where they’re so sore they can’t lift, that’s dangerous. You can develop problems pretty quickly, and you can also damage your joints in a way that keeps you from lifting for a long time. You need to ramp into it slowly. As you get better and better at exercising, you can ramp it up and increase the intensity, but at first you’ve got to start slow.

From there, we move into continuous tracking. You’ll see InBody machines in gyms or practices, and you’ll also see DEXA scans. I use DEXA as my gold standard, and then I use InBody in between. They give different readings, and they can all be off by a couple of points at any given scan. One thing I recommend is doing your scan at the same time each time, preferably in the morning when you’re fasted so you can see what’s going on. If you’re not fasted, at least try to have the same amount of food every time, because that can throw the tests off. You could get discouraged quickly if the machine tells you you’re 2 percent body fat higher than you really are, and that has happened to me. The long story short is that you want to track your progress on the DEXA, the InBody, and the scale.

Journaling also matters. Taking inventory and making sure you got everything done can happen in a couple of ways. One is simple: pack your bag. If you’re going to work, have whatever you need in the morning or don’t. Go to the gym, train, have your post-workout meal, and have it all planned out. Then make sure the last meal of the day happens back at home. Hopefully you’re not going out to eat, because as you eat clean you start to develop sensitivities to restaurant food. It won’t taste as good anymore, and it can have an incredible effect on your sleep and digestion. That food tastes great in the moment, sometimes, and there are still certain places you may love to go as a treat. But you may find that you don’t really want to do that moving forward. When you’re eating clean, you’re eating whole foods sourced from the right suppliers. I will never eat salmon in a restaurant because I believe most restaurant salmon is farmed and full of PCBs, antibiotics, and other stuff. If it’s gray and they have to dye it to make it look like salmon, that tells you something. It’s not good. That’s my opinion. You may have a different opinion, and you’re entitled to it, but in my view, stay far away from that. I like grass-fed ground beef, beef in general, wild game like elk and venison, and especially elk. I also like lamb and ground lamb, though it’s pretty fatty, so you may want to work some of that fat out. Still, there are real benefits to lamb, including high ALA content, and that can help from a training standpoint.

The journal is also about timing everything and building a calendar so you don’t miss things. If notifications are going off on your watch, maybe you prefer a traditional analog watch, but you still need some kind of reminder system so you actually do what you need to do. That brings us to supplementation. There are some things that make perfect sense for a lot of people and may not make sense for others, so these are things to discuss with your physician because some supplements are not good for certain people. If you’re using creatine, make sure you get plenty of water and plenty of fiber in your diet. Leafy greens like Swiss chard and bok choy are phenomenal. They carry a lot of water with them and provide roughage that helps move things through the system. I’m a huge fan of kimchi. It doesn’t have to be spicy; it can be fermented and almost like a version of sauerkraut. There are all kinds of fermented foods, including fermented beets and all sorts of vegetables. Fermentation is great, and I would definitely look into prebiotic, probiotic, and postbiotic support.

There are also people who advocate for raw milk. I’m not going to tell you that’s a great thing to do. I will tell you that I do use raw milk kefir occasionally, but caveat emptor, buyer beware. There’s a reason pasteurization exists. I’m not a huge fan of a lot of dairy anyway, and the dairy I do use is still somewhat processed. But I like the extra ability to get protein in. It works for me; it may not work for you. Something to think about. The other thing I want to talk about is highly inflammatory foods, especially anything with a massive amount of sugar. Stay away from sugar. Some people really have a sweet tooth, but you need to break yourself of that because sugar is absolute poison. It is pro-inflammatory and it wreaks havoc on neurocognitive function and insulin resistance, which is critical for everything, including cardiac health. Stay away from anything with sugar or added sugar. Fruit is fine in some cases, but avoid high-sugar foods. Once in a while maybe have pineapple, but I’d stick to berries and try to eat as cleanly as possible. For me, bread and pasta are a problem. If I have a meal like that, my joints get inflamed, I don’t feel well, and my digestive tract is off. That leads us to something we haven’t talked about yet: the gut microbiome.

When you work with your doctor, one of the tests you really ought to be looking at is gut microbiome testing. Dr. Hussein talked about it in the last Pathway to Peak Performance episode, and all of the providers on this show have talked about testing the gut microbiome to understand what is going on there. What are we dealing with, and how do we get it functioning at the highest level? Your immunity is encapsulated inside your gut microbiome. So you need to be careful about what you put into your system. Alcohol is a surefire way to do significant damage to your gut microbiome. Maybe you are more resilient and bounce back quickly, but I would still avoid it if at all possible.

Let me bring this back to the point of the episode. We spend a lot of time on this show talking about things that can feel over the head of the everyday patient, including myself. Even though I’ve been doing this for a long time, there are still things discussed in almost every episode that I don’t fully understand at first, and I have to go back, do the research, read up, and ask questions. The reality is that those are questions you can ask too. You can ask them in the comments or send us a direct message. New BioAge may be able to help you find a provider, so you can contact them if you want a shortcut, because a Google search may not be the best way to find a provider in your local area. And there may not even be someone local, so you may need to go the telemedicine route. If you do that, please be careful. The one thing I really want to make sure you understand is that the one-size-fits-all approach of “let’s get a GLP-1 on board and do some hormone replacement therapy” may not be enough. You need somebody who will treat you holistically.

We’ve covered a lot today, and I think the tenets are pretty clear. Go back and re-watch this episode. As you watch, you’ll notice that the first pass gives you one layer, the second pass gives you another, and the third pass gives you even more. I hope you’ll save this episode and share it with someone, person to person, patient to patient, and keep coming back to Cell To Systems because the show keeps getting better and better. We really appreciate the subscriptions. We just passed 500 subscribers, which is phenomenal for a show that’s only 22 episodes in. We can’t grow and keep delivering high-quality guests and high-quality content without your participation. So please, for the algorithm, remember to share, comment, subscribe, like, and save. Save these episodes. That tells the algorithm this content is valuable and that it’s helping you.

I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to what I have to say from my perspective. I am still a work in progress. I’m just like you. Every single day I think about what the next thing is that I can do to get better. I always want to continue to optimize. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m working toward learning more every single day. The beautiful thing is that together we can achieve a far better outcome, a far better world. We’re all in this together, and I thank you for watching today. I look forward to seeing you in the future. Thanks so much.