Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex

Correcting Disadvantage

Thanks to an absence of fermented foods in our diet, germophobia, and an overreliance on antibiotics in our medicine to treat mild infection, our gut biomes are a mess. This is no small matter, because the gut is our “second brain,” and it is where 80 percent of our immune system lives, controlling neurotransmitter and hormone balance and acting as the gatekeeper to inflammation response. In a way, our gut is more us than anything else, since the 100 trillion bacterial organisms in our guts far outweigh the amount of “human” cells we have in our body. When you think about the gut that way, a suboptimal gut biome is the essence of deficiency.

Even worse, many of us may have started at a disadvantage. Thirty-two percent of kids these days are born via cesarean section. It is now commonly held that the immune-system challenge from commingling of intestinal (fecal) bacteria in the birth canal is an important initial hormetic stressor to build a healthy gut biome and kick-start infant immunity, and we’ve removed that first gut gauntlet for nearly half our children, to their detriment.

Additionally, studies show that almost half the people living in the United States are magnesium-deficient. That’s right, half! And what’s the problem? Oh, nothing … except that low magnesium has been linked to diabetes, hypertension, sudden cardiac death, headaches, asthma, and a lot of other ailments. But you know what happens before any of those more serious situations? You just feel like crap. Your body slows down, and it sends up warning signs in the form of irritability, fatigue, loss of appetite, weakness, and muscle twitches. Our ancestors wouldn’t have had to worry about the amount of magnesium in their blood—but we do.

What happens when an entire species that was accustomed to living outdoors and hunting and gathering suddenly decides that indoor living is the way to go? We all become deficient in vitamin D. That’s right: over a billion people are deficient in vitamin D. The list of consequences for vitamin D deficiency feels like a roll call at the sick ward: depression, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s disease. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Vitamin D is so closely tied to immune response and hormone function that those billion people are sicker and weaker than they need to be—just because they don’t get enough sunlight. It’s a free supplement—and yet not only are we not taking it, we’re actively avoiding and defending ourselves against it. Think about that the next time you go slathering on sunblock with SPF Geisha Face.

Vitamin D and magnesium are involved in hundreds of chemical processes and are thus a couple of the more standard vitamins and minerals people know to look to supplement. Does that mean that supplementing with magnesium and vitamin D will prevent you from getting every disease ever? Of course not, but your risk profile increases with deficiency.

There are other crucial supplements. Our diets are chronically deficient in fish oil and omega-3 fatty acid. We aren’t getting enough B vitamins, nor are some of us able to process what we do get. And then there are all the tiny micronutrients from plants too tedious, too bitter, and too exotic to harvest for a meal.

Supplements can help you because good supplements work. But there isn’t a single pill that’s going to fix everything that ails you. Anytime you see someone promise you that, let them know you think they are Number 1 by raising your middle finger right in their grill. What supplements do is upgrade the places in your body that aren’t easily optimized by food and exercise alone. Done right, these supplements can bring you better health, clearer thinking, and energy that your ancestors would have envied.

Owning It

We are entering the golden age of nutrition and supplementation. Yes, our stressors are many, and yes, we have traveled far from the ancestral blueprint. But we can do things that no hunter-gatherer could imagine. We can research every clinical trial ever performed, and every active form of a vitamin … on our phones. We can walk into Whole Foods or, even easier, shop online and get delivered to us the most exotic nutrients the world has ever produced. The hidden secrets of Amazonian plant doctors, now available on Amazon Prime. In a single formula you might have traditional herbs from Europe, India, Japan, Siberia, North America, and South America … conveniently blended in a plant-based capsule. All of them studied together for efficacy against placebo by accredited American research institutions. We may have dug ourselves into a hole, but we have a helicopter full of solutions to pull us out of it.

But let me be as clear as Crystal Pepsi on one important point before we go any further: to supplement, according to the dictionary and to science and to common sense, is to add an extra element or amount to something. What it does not mean is to replace that something completely.

A supplement is something that enhances or completes something else. It is anything that you do to intentionally boost your nutritional profile or increase performance. I would argue that getting twenty minutes of sun is a supplement (it increases vitamin D). That eating pumpkin seeds before you have sex is a supplement (it increases nitric oxide, which increases blood flow). That dark chocolate is a supplement when you feel the blues (it has four psychoactive mood-boosting chemicals). None of these supplements, however, are substitutes.

Supplements of any kind, but especially the supplements we are going to talk about in this chapter, are not a substitute for solid food and physical activity. Don’t have any illusions: you can’t just take a pill and own the day if you eat like a sloth and move like one too. The first move to give you every advantage should always be improvements to diet and lifestyle. (We’ll cover these in great depth in chapters 8, 10, and 12 specifically.) Eating more oily fish can boost omega-3 fatty acid levels. Eating Popeye levels of spinach and taking daily magnesium sulfate (Epsom salts) baths may help improve magnesium deficiency. But sometimes those aren’t options, or you’re doing those things and it just isn’t enough. Bridging that gap, between deficient and optimal, is a good reason to take a supplement when regular daily methods aren’t enough.

Even really successful, high-performing people are often handicapping their own potential just because they aren’t supplementing. Take mixed martial arts legends Donald Cerrone and Tyron Woodley. Donald has nearly set the record for the most wins in the UFC, and Tyron defended his UFC championship belt at the highly competitive welterweight division multiple times. They are at the top of their sport. They are in peak physical condition. They work with the best trainers in the world. They use the best gear. And they are people who need every edge they can get—because the guy in the cage with them is trying to take their money, their health, and their ranking, by pummeling them into submission. And even though Donald has a soft spot for Budweiser and Hot Tamales, these warriors prepare like the champions they are.

When I first started working with Donald and Tyron, they were as antisupplement as it gets. I wasn’t surprised: both of them had supplement sponsors in the past, but what they tried didn’t make them feel any better. With the combination of artificial ingredients, unhealthful binders, strange colors, and unnecessary fillers, most “sports” supplements are awful. So these two pros figured they were better off going without. And with stories all around them about companies spiking their products with illegal ingredients to boost effectiveness, they felt they were safer facing a drug test without any of those things in their system.

Those are all valid reasons not to take supplements—except that it meant they were leaving serious athletic potential on the table. When they agreed to try the protocol we designed for them, it was like a switch flipped. Donald went on a huge win streak, blazing through the 170-pound division and putting on some of the most impressive fights and finishes of his career. It included an incredible four-hit knockout combination straight out of a video game that went viral like chlamydia through a freshman dorm. Tyron started his supplementing right as he began training for a rematch with one of the most dangerous strikers ever to fight in the UFC, Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson. He said he felt on fire, the best he’d ever felt in training camp. And it showed: his cardio was impeccable, and he defended his belt successfully. If I were a betting man, I’d say that when you’re reading this, he still has that strap around his waist.

Fundamentally, whether you’re an MMA fighter or an M&A attorney, supplementing is about taking control of what you need to own your day. And what you need—no matter your goals, your situation, or your drive—always comes down to two common threads: combating mineral and nutrient deficiencies and increasing performance.

Essential Supplements

Throughout this section we’re going to talk about the major areas that everyone should focus on, and then in the prescription we’ll get down to brass tacks on how to get it done.

GREENS BLEND

Everyone agrees that we need a balanced spectrum of vitamins and minerals in our diet, and the best way to do that is to eat a varied diet. Consume the bountiful diversity of earth-grown foods: shellfish like oysters, grass-fed beef, leafy greens like Swiss chard, and brassica vegetables like cauliflower, on top of a whole complement of spices and herbs.

Of course it isn’t always easy to eat this way, even with the best of intentions, which is why it should be no surprise that the lion’s share of our dietary deficiencies is precisely in the area of vitamins and minerals. As I see it, you have two supplement choices: you can take multivitamins, which traditionally are notoriously hard to absorb, or you can reach for a multinutrient “green food” mix, which will cover a lot of your nutrient bases.

A good greens blend is going to be nutrient-dense and should have a good mixture of freeze-dried foods containing small amounts of many vitamins and minerals, as well as enzymes, antioxidants, and other beneficial stuff you’d probably never put in a salad—herbs, fruits, grasses, leaves, and maybe even a flower or two. When at all possible, I always recommend going with a quality greens mix because you can be sure the vitamins are being delivered into your system in a way similar to how they arrive in your normal food. Which is to say, they aren’t synthetic, they’re natural.

I liken taking the greens blend to raiding the shelves at Home Depot when you’re trying to maintain your house. When the body is looking for something to repair itself, it’ll go to the shelves in search of the best tools, and if the right nutrients are available, it will make the proper repairs in the most effective manner possible. If it doesn’t, it will simply pull from the discount bin by the register and use a glue gun and duct tape and hope for the best. By taking in these greens, you’re giving your body the run of the store.

While every greens blend is different, and therefore not a lot of studies have been done, there is no doubt that supplementing with vitamins and minerals is beneficial. If you don’t get enough of these nutrients you are more likely to be sick, violent, and all other manner of unpleasantness. As stated above, the problem with some multivitamins is that the form of the ingredient used is sometimes dissimilar to those found in food. So when it comes to a “multi,” going green is usually the way to go.

MAGNESIUM

Just like calcium, magnesium supplementation has been shown in clinical research to assist with facilitating healthy bone mass, the performance of athletes, supporting men and women during exercise, even improving blood sugar regulation through diminishing insulin resistance. But what you are gonna notice is less. Less stress, less static, and less antsiness throughout your body. You’re gonna notice everything relax, and get a little more quiet. It’s probably why the most popular magnesium supplement in the world is simply called Calm. Magnesium is involved in thousands of chemical reactions. In the Home Depot of nutrient supplementation, magnesium is the hardware section. There’s something there that connects to every aspect of your body temple.

KRILL OIL: SUPPLEMENT OMEGA-3

The reason some of your breakfast options today contain chia seeds, flax, and grass-fed beef or dairy is that those are some of the simplest nutritional sources of omega-3 fatty acids. The other, and probably the best, is oily fish. If we lived in Japan, that would be in your breakfast as well, but instead we’ll save it for lunch.

Chia and flax are not the easiest things to find on the menu, and fresh, organic oily fish is equally difficult in many parts of the world. So in lieu of that, you can supplement your diet with fish oil or, even better, krill oil. I remember the first time I tried a higher dose of krill oil, somewhere in the 5-gram range. I took it at night, and it felt like the oil’s essential omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA), along with its intrinsic antioxidant astaxanthin and its brain-healthy nutrient phosphatidylcholine, were running through my bloodstream like a fire hose, just blasting out all the inflammation in my body. It works because these hard-to-find fatty acids balance out the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, and as a result reduce normal systemic inflammation.

In chapter 2, we learned about inflammation, but here we’re more concerned with how it feels. Simply put, it sucks. It feels like inner heat. It can cause your joints to ache and your brain to be a little fuzzy. Why krill oil and not fish oil? Studies show that with krill oil you get the same metabolic effects at lower doses. Translation: it’s just more potent. And as a bonus, krill oil has even been shown to help the ladies out on their menstrual cycle. Since I am clearly unqualified to discuss the menstrual cycle, the abstract of the study says that krill oil is “significantly more effective for the complete management of premenstrual symptoms compared to omega-3 fish oil.”

SUPPLEMENT VITAMIN D

Thanks to our friend the sun and our skin’s remarkable ability to make a ton of vitamin D out of its ultraviolet B rays, vitamin D is free for all. Usually all you need is twenty to thirty minutes of direct sun exposure to your skin. Unfortunately, not all sun or all skin is created equal. Twenty minutes of sun for one person in one place can be an entirely different (and potentially worse) experience than thirty minutes of sun for another person in another place. The sun puts us in a bit of a predicament that way: too much sun is bad for the skin, but not enough sun means we don’t get adequate vitamin D.

So how do we measure? How do we find the line? Typically, we don’t. We can’t. Even if we could, it would just confirm something we already know: more often than not we are significantly deficient in this critical vitamin that is important for over two hundred bodily processes, concerning everything from optimal mood to bone health. Vitamin D supplementation has been shown in clinical research to help reduce body fat mass, maintain muscle mass and reduce fractures, and correct mood-related issues.

Kevin Estrada, a professional hockey player, was in a devastating water plane crash that ended his career. He lives in British Columbia—where it rains all the time and there’s a lot of cloud cover—and began to feel run down. His body was still broken, he had low energy, and his mood felt off. Vitamin D fit all the criteria of a supplement that could really help him. When he got his blood checked for vitamin D, of course Kevin was deficient.

He started taking vitamin D supplements, along with its ride-or-die companion vitamin K

, at 5,000 micrograms of D a day and sometimes even higher. That’s a relatively high dose, but it started to turn things around with his mood and his energy levels. It was as close to an instant fix as he’d ever thought possible, and it’s the kind of supplement most of us need if we want to consistently perform our best.

SUPPLEMENT PROBIOTICS

I take a lot of different probiotics for a lot of different reasons, but the one that saved my ass—literally—is a yeast-based strain called Saccharomyces boulardii. When I traveled to South America and particularly Peru, I’d spend my time in the Amazon rain forest. As much as I enjoyed those trips, there was one factor that sucked some of the joy out of it—from the back. I’d return from each trip and spend the next two weeks getting reacquainted with the finer points of porcelain toilet production as traveler’s diarrhea made its way through my system. As careful as I was with the water, inevitably I’d consume certain foods and vegetables, and some nasty bug would get into my GI tract.

At one point, I’d had enough. I loved, and maybe even needed, those trips to the jungle, but I didn’t want to come back and have to count steps to the bathroom. I started researching probiotics to support my gut, and I came across S. boulardii. I brought some with me on my next trip to Peru—and it was miraculous. I had no issues while I was down there, and no issues upon return. The studies back it up: whether it’s Crohn’s disease, or irritable bowel, S. boulardii is the shit for problems with your shit.

Napoleon once said, “An army marches on its stomach.” He wasn’t just talking about what went into soldiers, he was just as concerned with the amount coming out. And while we are not locked in a land war with Russia (yet), and you are probably not regularly contending with Montezuma’s revenge, we are at war against nutrient deficiency. I can assure you that you are only going to make it as far as your gut takes you. Not only is the gut largely responsible for our immune system, and perhaps even our personality, through the regulation of hormones and neurotransmitters, more simply it is responsible for digesting and disseminating our fuel source from food. A lot of weight-management issues have to do with the gut. A meta-analysis of studies showed significant improvements in obesity with probiotic supplementation. If you want to feel more like yourself again, and get that human machine humming from the inside, this supplementation regimen is essential.

There are also important impacts on regulating mood. The burgeoning field of psychobiotics, in which targeted gut treatments are being explored to assist with all sorts of medical conditions, is one of the hottest fields in medicine. It is my personal opinion, along with that of the psychiatrist Dr. Dan Engle, that the role of gut biome transplants, in which a healthy person’s microbiome is transplanted and seeded into another person, is one of the frontiers of medicine.

It’s why you’re seeing the increasing use of probiotics, yogurts advertising the cultures they have, the trend toward fecal transplants, and the chatter about the gut … everywhere. Bestselling books. Blogs. News stories. The gut biome is hot—and with good reason.

ACTIVE B VITAMINS

When Kobe Bryant or LeBron James—or a young Aubrey Marcus, starting shooting guard for Westlake High School—needed to play a basketball game with the flu, there was one vitamin to reach for: B

. B vitamins are involved in everything, from the conversion of nutrients into neurotransmitters like serotonin to proper mitochondrial function. You can feel it when you take a good B vitamin: there aren’t any questions. You will have more energy, more resilience, more bounce in your step. Think of it like this: “I’ve got your back, B.”

Not everyone handles the absorption of B vitamins well, however. A good portion of people, for instance, struggle to uptake the essential B vitamin folate, or folic acid, and supplementation with a methylated version, like 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, can make a huge difference. One study showed that people suffering from major psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or depression were deficient in folate, and benefited from methylfolate supplementation. Generally speaking, the methylated form of vitamin B, methylcobalamin, is more easily absorbed by the body, so pay attention to your body and make sure you supplement with B vitamins that are packaged the best for your system.

Pro Tip: IV Vitamin Therapy

IV vitamins have been used in emergency-room care for years. Ask any medical student or young ER doctor how they deal with a bad hangover, and they will give you two words: banana bag. They are referring to a standard IV solution bag that contains many of the vitamins and minerals you need. The advantage of the IV is that it bypasses the gut, ensuring that the vitamins are delivered into the blood. A lot of places have popped up extending this service, not just to the sick but to the healthy (or the hungover). One of the best is a program developed by functional medicine wizard Dr. Craig Koniver called Fast Vitamin IV. It offers not only the usual suspects, but a whole host of amino acids to further assist with recovery.

Whether it is a dose of vitamin B