2975: Weekend Edition: Health = Wealth by Mr. Money Mustache on Healthy Living Advice

[00:00:00] Kennt ihr auch diesen einen Freund, der morgens einfach so ruckzuck aus dem Bett und danach aus dem Grinsen gar nicht mehr rauskommt? Der sogar noch vor dem ersten Kaffee unverschämt gut gelaunt ist und mit der Morgensonne um die Wette strahlt? Furchtbar, ekelhaft, wie kann man nur so... Ausgeruht sein? Ganz einfach, trainiere deinen Schlaf und werde auch du zum Morgenmenschen. Mit der Galaxy Watch 7 oder dem Galaxy Ring und der Samsung Health App.

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[00:00:55] This is Optimal Health Daily, Weekend Edition. Health equals wealth. By Mr. Money Mustache of MrMoneyMustache.com. And I'm Dr. Neil, your host and narrator. Welcome back to another Weekend Edition of Optimal Health Daily. This is where I read to you from some of the best health and fitness blogs on the web. Kind of like an ongoing audiobook. And with my commentary at the end. Now today's author typically writes about personal finance. He's actually a frequent author on Optimal Finance Daily.

[00:01:25] So, if you liked today's episode, definitely subscribe to Optimal Finance Daily. But for now, let's keep this intro nice and short and get right to it as we optimize your life. Weekend Edition. Health equals wealth. By MrMoneyMustache of MrMoneyMustache.com. This week, I accidentally got sucked into looking through one of those mindless, ad-laden Forbes features on the world's top billionaires.

[00:01:55] The leader of this flock, the current richest person in the world, is a dude in Mexico called Carlos Slim. With a fortune of about 74 billion dollars. And as it turns out, Mr. Slim is a bit of an optimistic last name. Then, I clicked down the list to look at the other people. And I started to notice a pattern. Despite their unimaginable heaps of wealth, as a group, they look far from exceptional in the area of health. If you ask the typical person, even here in the United States, what would you rather have?

[00:02:25] One, a gigantic amount of money, but be overweight and or frail to the point of needing an elevator to get up to the sixth floor of a building. Or two, just a comfortable amount of money and a gold quality, healthy, energetic mind and body that keeps you jumping around, having fun, with no health issues until you're 100 years old. What do you think he or she would say? I haven't formally surveyed any groups myself, but I have a feeling most people would pick the exceptional health option.

[00:02:53] The good news is, it is much easier for most of us to get exceptional health rather than billionaire wealth. All you need to do is keep your body doing something other than sitting in a chair for a few hours a day, lift some weights occasionally, and eat the most natural and unprocessed foods you can find. But yet the surprising truth is, most people are actually spending most of their time, more than 40 hours per week, pursuing the wealth rather than the health.

[00:03:19] Then, the wealth is often invested in unhealthy activities like sedentary sightseeing vacations, eating 2,000 calorie restaurant meals, and gas-powered recreational pastimes like motorboating and ATV riding. I won't get into the issue of the nation's increasing waistline, because I don't know enough about all of the complicated social and industrial factors causing it to comment. But I do know one thing. You have a chance to be super healthy,

[00:03:45] and if you're not already a permanently grinning, well-muscled ball of energy, then I suggest you should consider becoming one. The reason is because it will make you happier. Just that becoming rich and achieving an early retirement through frugality will make you happier. It's time to raise our standards for ourselves. I don't look like Vin Diesel right now, but I'm going to. I'm no longer going to settle for being moderately fit. I want to be at maximum health. Are you ready for my inspirational bombshell?

[00:04:13] Google a picture of a 74-year-old woman named Ernestine Shepard. She is currently the world's oldest female bodybuilder. I was already an optimist when it comes to old age, because I am often passed by gray-haired old men when I'm trying my best to speed along on a country road at 40 kilometers per hour on my road bike. But this lady raises my standards way higher than they've ever been. Just seeing the picture made me realize that I totally suck so far, and I must do much better from now on.

[00:04:41] If you're already at maximum health, then good for you. If you're not, what's holding you back? For me, it has been a case of excusitis. I've been telling myself that because I'm already better off than most people. That's good enough. But that's a tricky game to play. If you're not taking the best possible care of your health, who do you think you were fooling? I'm getting older. It is absolutely unacceptable for me to become one of those self-disabled people.

[00:05:07] Think a person who loses their health and mobility through decades of a sedentary lifestyle. If I ever have a serious health problem in later years, and I haven't maintained maximum health, it will be my own fault. So from this day on, it's maximum for me. And you too. There are lots of good books in the library about how to get healthy. But if you just want the mustachian summary of the most important secret steps, here it is.

[00:05:32] 1. Never eat any form of white bread, soda, candy, cake, cookies, fast food, donuts, or other fakie pants food at home or at restaurants. You can still have it at parties. I'm always amazed to see people eating these things. Because once again, who do they think they are fooling? It's not food. Your body hates that stuff. You can still get the indulgence of yummy but awful food occasionally when you're at a friend's house. But to actually buy it as part of your grocery trip? That's just self-destructive.

[00:06:00] Just this one step would cure 50% of the nation's health problems. 2. Eat lots of healthy proteins and fats. Your new snack around the house is almonds and walnuts, bananas with all-natural peanut butter, apples, mangoes, cheese, eggs, beans of all sorts, delicious slabs of fish, chicken, rice, all the olive oil you want, lots of spices, whey protein powder mixed with milk, burritos, cilantro, salads with rich, natural, oily dressing,

[00:06:30] stuff like that. You're not on a low-fat diet. You're just on a low-processing diet. Your appetite will adjust to take in the right number of calories instead of too many as soon as you drop refined flour and sugar from the diet. 3. Obey the Mustachian Commandments on Alcohol Consumption. Alcohol is fun. I drink it regularly. But I know it is toxic. You're drinking from a bottle with a skull and crossbones on it, so respect the poison and realize it is draining a tiny bit of your health directly with every sip.

[00:07:00] And 4. Always accept exercise when it stares you in the face. For example, there are only two valid reasons for a person with functioning legs to ever use an elevator or escalator. 1. You're moving a trolley or heavy equipment or construction materials between levels of the building. And 2. You are an Olympic athlete who has just finished training so hard that it would be detrimental to your competitive performance to climb even one more flight of stairs. For the rest of us, stairs are a gift from the fitness gods,

[00:07:29] so thou shalt run up them whenever thou findest them. Even if your office or hotel room is on the 15th floor. I did a test on a recent vacation. 15 floors takes only about 90 seconds at a moderate stair climbing pace, even in my current non-Vin Diesel condition. Even if you're carrying a suitcase at the airport, come on, don't be a big sissy. 5. Never use a car when a bike or your feet will suffice. Every trip under 5 miles on a day with reasonable weather must be done by foot or bike.

[00:07:59] 6. Yes, even to the grocery store or taking your small child to school, use a bike trailer. In addition, if you work less than 10 miles from home, you must bike to work at least twice a week, whenever it is above freezing and not raining or snowing. Following these steps will get you to good health. To get maximum health, you need to add weights 3 times a week for as little as 18 minutes per session, which would be 3-4 sets of 3 varied heavy exercises with no rest between them. If you like running or swimming or other sports,

[00:08:28] add in some of that too. Good for you. Now that you've heard it all in one post like that, it's a pretty easy way to add 60 years of healthy, energetic, good times to your life and millions of dollars in income and saved expenditures, don't you think? So how will you achieve maximum health from this point onwards? You just listened to the post titled, Weekend Edition, Health Equals Wealth,

[00:08:56] by Mr. Money Mustache of mrmoneymustache.com And I'll be right back with my commentary. Oikos presents 15 seconds of strength. Here we go. Steve's got a trunk full of groceries and no one to help him. Oh, that's tough, Jim. Looks like a five-trip load at least. He grabs the first bag, the second. Bob, it looks like he's trying to do it on one trip. He shimmies the door open, steps over the dog. Oh, and he stumbles. Oh, right into the kitchen without missing a beat. Jim, now that's a man who eats his protein-packed Oikos.

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[00:10:21] Turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash OHD. Go to shopify.com slash OHD. Shopify.com slash OHD. Dr. Neil here for my commentary. So obviously, Mr. Money Mustache

[00:10:50] agreed that he's not a health expert, so I'll just make a couple of slight modifications to some of his advice. So he was talking about alcohol consumption. What we know from a lot of data, lots and lots of good studies, is that moderate alcohol consumption can actually decrease the risk for certain diseases, mostly cardiovascular-type diseases, so stroke, heart attack, heart failure, those kinds of things. So what does moderate alcohol consumption actually mean?

[00:11:19] For men, it means no more than two drinks per day. For women, it's a little less. No more than one drink per day. And a drink, well, how do we define that? Typically, one drink is about one can, or 12 ounces, of beer, or it could be six ounces of wine, or about a shot, one and a half ounces of hard liquor, like whiskey or gin. So each of those that I just mentioned, one beer, one glass of wine, one shot,

[00:11:48] each of those would count as one drink. So if you had all three, that would count as three drinks. And that would put all adults over the limit for what's considered a moderate consumption. So what happens when you consume more than that on average? What you find is for ladies, an increased risk of breast cancer. So if ladies consume more than one drink per day, it increases the risk for breast cancer pretty substantially. For guys, it's colon cancer more than anything else.

[00:12:18] And again, guys, to raise the risk for colon cancer, we're talking about more than two drinks per day. And when it comes to processed foods, you don't need to completely stay away. Remember, I'm kind of a French fries pizza donut guy. I don't do it all the time, but I like those foods. And if I had to stay away from them for the rest of my life, it's just gonna make me want them more. So I would say instead of completely staying away, it might be more reasonable to say, well, I'll just have those occasionally. And then when you do have them occasionally,

[00:12:47] be sure you have a stopping point. Be sure you have just one, for example, and put the rest away. And finally, we don't have to walk or ride our bike to work every day or even three times a week. I know time is a big factor. But what the author was trying to say, which I agree with, is try and get up and move around more whenever you can. If it's parking further away in the parking lot from the grocery store, that counts. As he mentioned, if you take the stairs instead of the elevator as often as possible, that counts as well.

[00:13:17] If instead of sending an email or picking up the phone at work, you walk to the other person's office to talk to them, that counts too. Doing these little things can add up. And what I love about them is they're fairly simple and they don't really require a whole lot of extra time when you think of it this way. And so that makes it more likely to happen, hopefully. All right, that'll do it for the Sunday episode. And again, have a great rest of your weekend and I'll see you back here tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.