The Life Plan (6 page)

Do some form of exercise every day.

Make sure that everything you put in your mouth helps you instead of hurts you.

Make sure you do not have hormone deficiencies.

An August 2008 study demonstrated that Metabolic Syndrome, which includes obesity (especially abdominal obesity), diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol problems, have a common denominator: testosterone deficiency.

Correcting testosterone deficiencies along with other hormone deficiencies in men can reverse Metabolic Syndrome and greatly improve health in many ways, from improving bone mineral density, sexual function, libido, and body fat composition to reducing risk for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease. An optimal level of testosterone can actually decrease or eliminate erectile dysfunction.

This is particularly important because erectile dysfunction (ED) is a window into your total health. Erectile dysfunction can be an early warning sign of underlying vascular disease and diabetes. Research reveals that many men experience erectile dysfunction four to five years before having a heart attack. Research published in 2009 from the Mayo Clinic shows that men with ED had an 80 percent higher risk for coronary artery disease. You’ll learn more about all of this in Chapter 10. So if you are considering hormone therapies to improve your sex life, know that you are taking care of every aspect of your health at the same time.

However, let me make one thing crystal clear: hormone therapy is
not
the reason that I look as good as I do. In fact, it is just one integral part of my program. While they certainly help me maintain my muscle mass, it’s really the combination of my diet and exercise program along with this therapy that keeps me looking fit. Together, these three aspects of the Life Plan allow me to feel younger, healthier, and sexy. There is no shortcut to optimal health, so don’t make the mistake of thinking that hormone therapies are the “secret” to big muscles or a better physique.

Whether you are 26 or 76 or anywhere in between, it’s not too late to get with the program. Let’s get started on the Life Plan right now, by reevaluating your diet and seeing if there’s room for improvement. You’ve got nothing to lose except the extra pounds that are slowing you down and ruining your quality of life.

A
s a physician, I’m fully aware that the foods we choose to eat profoundly affect our physical and mental health, our athletic performance, and how we age. Researchers are continuing to uncover the direct links between food choices and the frightening increase in diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Yet as a man, just knowing that certain foods will make me sick, and certainly make me look and feel older, is often not enough to stop me from eating things I know are bad for me.

Nutrition has always been the toughest aspect of my own personal health journey. I accomplished my health goals in spite of my bad habits and my tendency to make bad decisions about what I put into my mouth. Before my transformation, I ate too many of the wrong foods all the time, and way too much of them—breads, white rice, French fries, ice cream, any and all chocolates, all kinds of sweets, lots of red meat, fried foods; the list goes on and on. Like most men, I’m still battling with a borderline consumption disorder, and it doesn’t end with food. I’m the first to admit that I can easily drink way too much. The potbelly and added pounds I was carrying thirteen years ago were directly linked to eating too much poor-quality protein, starch, fats, and sugar, and drinking too much alcohol.

Even to this day, if I start eating the wrong foods it isn’t long before I’m completely off track. I know that in order to keep myself trim and feeling young, I need to completely cut out all the wrong foods from my diet and get them out of my house. I know that having my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer loaded up with unhealthy foods, even if they are supposed to be for someone else in my family, creates a toxic food environment for me.

My experience with eating is similar to that of most of my patients. The most vulnerable area in every man’s effort to change his body and his life seems to always be diet. It’s the deal breaker for just about everybody. But I know that if you can win the eating battle, you can win the war against excess body fat and poor health.

The first step to winning this war is to understand why you need to lose weight in the first place. Then, you’ll learn how to choose the best foods to improve your health and achieve your fat-loss goals. The goal for my Life Plan is to get you in the best shape possible, starting with your diet. If you avoid the foods that can make you sick as well as fat you’ll see a complete reversal in the signs and symptoms of aging, and you will drop those unnecessary, unhealthy pounds and increase your metabolism and energy levels.

Prevent disease

Increase metabolism and energy

Control appetite

Enhance natural hormone levels

Whether you are seven or 70 pounds overweight, those extra pounds of fat can spell trouble for your health and your sex life. First, maintaining a healthy weight now will reduce cognitive decline later on. A study in the March 2009 issue of
Archives of Neurology
investigated whether total and/or regional body fat levels influence cognitive decline. Researchers found that in men, worsening cognitive function correlated with the highest levels of all adiposity measures: The fatter you are, the more likely you will experience cognitive decline later in life.

What’s more, your weight affects every aspect of how your body functions. Obesity is such an enormous epidemic that we’ve created a new name for an old problem: Metabolic Syndrome, also known as Syndrome X. As many as 75 million Americans are now believed to be affected. Simply put, Metabolic Syndrome occurs when excess weight affects your health, particularly your heart, as well as your body’s ability to process sugar, leading to diabetes. The four key components of Metabolic Syndrome are obesity (especially abdominal obesity), diabetes or insulin resistance, elevated triglyceride levels (one of the fats in the blood), high blood pressure, and increased silent inflammation. There can also be other abnormalities as part of this syndrome, including elevated total cholesterol levels, elevated LDL (the bad cholesterol) levels, low levels of HDL (the good cholesterol), and elevated levels of fibrinogen (a protein that promotes dangerous blood clot formation). Each of these components can also be linked to sexual dysfunction.

Now for the good news—Metabolic Syndrome is completely and totally preventable and reversible. Weight loss, exercise, and correcting hormone deficiencies are the keys to preventing this disease. And, if you already have the syndrome, exercise will also correct the abnormalities that characterize the disease by improving insulin receptor sensitivity. The key is to lose body fat—especially abdominal fat.

It turns out that when body fat is stored mostly in your abdomen, health risks skyrocket. Abdominal obesity is a common problem for almost all men. It results mostly from fat being deposited inside the abdominal cavity—the so-called intra-abdominal fat or visceral fat. Unfortunately, this is the worst kind of fat to have because it not only adds inches to your waistline, it’s one of the major causes of Metabolic Syndrome.

This kind of fat doesn’t just hang out quietly, like the fat on your arms and legs or under your skin (subcutaneous fat). Abdominal fat is very much alive, actively producing harmful proinflammatory molecules called adipokines and other chemicals that cause atherosclerosis, cancer, elevated blood sugars, and insulin resistance, and contribute to silent inflammation that can occur in many places throughout the body. The reasons for this aren’t fully understood, but many experts think that intra-abdominal fat produces not only harmful hormones but also free fatty acids much more easily than subcutaneous fat. These free fatty acids are directly transported to your liver, where they can interfere with insulin metabolism and create a state of hyperinsulinemia (high insulin levels), poor blood sugar control, salt retention, high blood pressure, and silent inflammation—all major causes of disease and hormone deficiencies.

Silent inflammation is the most insidious form of inflammation because it is the root of almost all diseases. You can’t feel it. It’s an insidious killer many experts consider to be the major culprit in accelerating the aging process and causing age-related disease. Dr. Barry Sears, a leader in this field of medicine, was one of the first to point out the important role diet plays in both causing and preventing silent inflammation. I have incorporated many of his recommendations into my Life Nutrition Plan.

Insulin resistance is the central problem of Metabolic Syndrome and is associated with chronically elevated levels of insulin and blood sugars (although blood sugars can be normal, especially early in the disease). Many researchers believe that high levels of insulin cause the other components of Metabolic Syndrome to develop—obesity, high triglycerides, elevated blood pressure, and inflammation. Excess levels of insulin are also thought to be the single most important factor in accelerating the aging process. High insulin levels affect your body fat percentage, blood lipid levels, glucose tolerance, aerobic capacity, muscle mass, strength, and immune function. What’s more, insulin resistance is present in most people with cardiovascular disease.

Insulin not only regulates blood sugar, it also plays a very important role in fat metabolism by increasing the secretion of lipoprotein lipase, which increases the uptake of fat from your bloodstream into body cells. So, when insulin levels are kept low you reduce your risk for all of the serious diseases most Americans die from, and you are much less likely to convert calories into body fat.