The Holistic Transformation Program: Built on 15 Years of Evidence, Not an AI Prompt

I started coaching nutrition back in the early 2010s while running my gym, CrossFit 214.

The paleo diet was gospel in the CrossFit world at the time — meat, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds. Loren Cordain's plan to fix everything wrong with modern eating. So we ran paleo challenges with the fervor of a cult that just found its second book. Results: mixed.

Some athletes felt incredible. More energy, less body fat, glowing skin, the whole testimonial package. Others did the exact same challenge and looked... exactly the same. Same body, same mood, mildly annoyed they gave up beer for a month for nothing. ‍

I'll never forget the athletes who'd build a "breakfast" out of four eggs, half a pound of bacon, and a mountain of sweet potato hash — then act genuinely baffled when the scale didn't move. "But it's paleo!" they'd say, while inhaling something north of 2,000 calories before 8 a.m. Paleo tells you what to eat. It says nothing about how much. Turns out your body doesn't care that the calories are Whole30-approved.

Turns out the obvious answer wasn't obvious to me yet: paleo fixes food quality, not food quantity — and quantity is at least half the game. Cutting processed junk — bread, beer, sugar, fast food — genuinely calmed people's gut inflammation. But if the goal was fat loss, paleo made no promises about calories or macros, the two things that actually move body composition. ‍

Fat loss only happens one way: your body has to be convinced to burn it for fuel, and the biggest lever for that is a calorie deficit. Bodybuilders have known this since the invention of the muscle tank. So I went and studied how bodybuilders actually cut fat to step on a stage half-naked and covered in glaze. I reverse-engineered RP Strength, the most popular bodybuilding nutrition program at the time, to understand how they manipulated macros and energy intake to drive results.

I still remember pulling up one of my athlete's actual RP templates and backing into the numbers — total calories, macro splits, the whole thing. The math explained everything I was seeing. Yes, people lost weight fast. They were also starving. The deficits were steep, and the diet leaned heavily on carbs, which do almost nothing for satiety compared to fat and protein. Great for a fast cut. Miserable to sustain.

So I tweaked it. I dropped carbs a bit to protect insulin sensitivity — most people don't realize competitive bodybuilders are quietly setting themselves up for diabetes down the road — and bumped fat and protein, betting that more of both could improve sustainability without giving up results.

I was right

The results were dramatic. Paleo's food-quality rules plus real calorie and macro control worked far more consistently for clients chasing body composition change.

Still — not everyone responded. Gut inflammation: controlled. Calories: dialed. Macros: precise. So what else was hiding in the variance?

I kept digging. Sleep kept coming up as "important" in that vague, everyone-knows-you-should-sleep-more way, so I actually read Dr. Matthew Walker's research and started having athletes track sleep daily. The pattern jumped out almost immediately — the clients not responding were the ones running on garbage sleep, night after night. Turns out almost nobody hits great body composition results on less than seven solid hours of actual sleep. And since nobody sleeps every minute they're in bed, that means roughly eight hours of lights-out time, whether you remember waking up at 2 a.m. or not. ‍

One client stands out. A new mom, trying to lose the baby weight, doing everything right — clean food, macros tracked to the gram, training hard. The scale wouldn't move an inch. Turned out she'd been taking Ambien nightly for years. Ambien doesn't give you restorative sleep — it sedates you, which is not the same thing, no matter how dead to the world you look. It took her three rough nights to get off it cold turkey. On night three, she slept harder than she had in years. She woke up with real energy for the first time in a long time — and almost immediately, the fat started coming off like clockwork.

So I added consistent bedtimes, wind-down routines, caffeine cutoffs, and screen discipline. Results got more consistent. Still not universal.

Food: dialed. Sleep: dialed. And there were still outliers.

More digging turned up more variables that actually mattered: hormonal profile, gut health, hydration, training approach — where less is usually more — and mineral deficiencies nobody was screening for.

Prescription drugs were a big one. Two dermatology staples in particular, finasteride and spironolactone, cause real hormonal collateral damage. I saw it firsthand in blood work from several female athletes on spironolactone for acne — their testosterone was so low it didn't even register on the lab report. We fixed the underlying inflammation driving the acne, got them off the drug, and their results took off. First time building real muscle. Strength numbers climbing every week.

It got complicated fast. But I ran it like an experiment: anything that reliably improved consistency, I kept. Anything that didn't move the needle, I cut loose without sentiment.

The Holistic Transformation Program is what's left after 15 years of that process — a 12-week system built from what actually works, not what sounds good on a supplement label. We start with an optimization phase, where you get to ride the "wait, I forgot I could feel like this" high for a while. Then we teach you how to ease off peak-optimal into something sustainable — built around your life, not a stage-ready fantasy.

Here's the thing about all of this: none of it is secret anymore. I'm running into more and more people who can rattle off half the list above — food quality, calorie deficits, sleep architecture, hormone panels — because AI made it trivially easy to assemble a plan that hits every factor on paper. And yet. These are smart, motivated people, 40 to 50 pounds overweight, weak, running on empty — with a technically correct plan sitting untouched in a Google Doc. ‍

Knowing the mechanisms was never the hard part. Stacking them into habits that survive a real week — with a job, a kid, a bad night, a birthday party with cake — is the hard part. That's coaching. Not information. Execution, troubleshooting, and the mindset work to actually prioritize it when life pushes back. ‍

If you're one of those people who already knows all of this and still can't get it together — that's exactly who I built this for.

Let's talk about getting you actual results — not just a plan collecting dust and a convincing talk track: Book a High Touch Performance Consultation

If You Have a Toddler, You Should Be Cold Plunging

Hear me out.

Cold plunging has gone mainstream. Every gym has one. Every influencer's morning routine includes one. And almost all of it is marketed the same way: get in, reduce inflammation, speed up recovery, come out feeling like a new athlete.

Here's the problem. That's not really what's happening.

What the science actually says

Cold water immersion after training doesn't help you build muscle. It gets in the way of it.

When you plunge after a strength session, you blunt the exact signaling your body needs to adapt — satellite cell activation, anabolic signaling proteins, the whole cascade that turns a hard training session into actual tissue growth. Research on post-exercise cold water immersion has shown it can reduce muscle protein synthesis by as much as 20% in the hours following a lift, and repeated use over a training block measurably attenuates long-term gains in both muscle mass and strength.

And the recovery pitch doesn't hold up the way people think, either. Yes, cold water can dull the feeling of soreness in the first 24 hours. But dulling the feeling isn't the same as restoring the function. The strength and power you lost from a hard session — jump height, force output — doesn't come back any faster. You just stop noticing the discomfort while the adaptation you trained for gets quietly sabotaged.

So if you're plunging post-leg-day expecting it to help you recover faster and grow faster, you're working against yourself on both counts.

That's not why I do it.

Why I actually get in

I cold plunge for my nervous system, not my muscles.

Here's what's happening physiologically the second you drop into cold water: a hard sympathetic nervous system activation — that “oh shit” moment. Heart rate spikes. Breathing goes ragged. Catecholamines dump into your system. Researchers who study this — Dr. Susanna Søberg's work is some of the best out there — call it the "cold shock" response, and it's the same circuitry that fires when someone cuts you off in traffic, or your boss corners you with bad news you weren't ready for.

The water isn't the point. The stress response is the point. And that's exactly why I use it.

Cold immersion is what's called a hormetic stressor — a controlled dose of something uncomfortable that makes the system more resilient when it's applied deliberately and recovered from. You're not avoiding the stress response. You're practicing it, on your terms, in a container you control.

And the tool you use to practice it is your breath.

The instant your body wants to hyperventilate and panic, you have a choice: let it, or slow it down and stay in the seat. That's the whole rep. Every session is a rehearsal of noticing an involuntary stress response and choosing your reaction to it instead of being run by it. Do that enough times in cold water, and you start finding a half-second of space between the stressor and your reaction everywhere else too — traffic, a hard conversation, a bad email.

Two nights ago I spent twenty minutes putting together a genuinely good dinner for my toddler — fruit, cheese, chicken, cut up exactly the way he likes it. He looked at the plate, and threw the whole thing on the floor without eating a single bite.

Without the cold tub that lands as pure, immediate frustration. Now there's a pause. Long enough to laugh, clean it up, and not let a two-year-old's food strike hijack my night. That pause isn't magic. It's a rep I've built, one cold plunge at a time.

The actual protocol

If you want to try this for the reason I'm describing here's where to start.

Temperature: Start in the high 40s (°F). Uncomfortable, not unsafe. As your tolerance builds, drop it. I started in the mid-to-high 40s and have progressed down into the 44–45° range over several weeks.

Duration: 2 minutes minimum. That's the floor, not the ceiling. Build from there. Shivering means it’s time to get out. Taking too long to warm up afterwards? Shorten your next session.

Breath count as your governor: Instead of watching a clock, count your breaths. Start with 21 breaths as your baseline. When you're new to this, you'll blow through 21 breaths in 60–90 seconds — fast, shallow, panicked. That's fine.

As your control improves, you're not trying to add more breaths. You're trying to slow the ones you're taking. Longer inhales, longer exhales, more control per breath. That's what progress actually looks like here — I'm currently down to around 15 breaths across a 2–3 minute session, which means each one is slower and more deliberate than when I started. An experienced plunger can stretch 21 breaths across 3–4 minutes. That's the skill: not enduring more, but needing less to stay regulated.

One rule: if you're pairing this with strength training, keep it separate — different day, or several hours removed. Don't let a good stress-inoculation practice quietly cost you the training adaptations you're also working for.

The point isn't the water

Nobody needs another gadget that promises to fix their inflammation. What most people actually need is more practice staying regulated when something uncomfortable happens without warning — because that's most of life. A tantrum. A missed deadline. Traffic. A plate of good food on the floor.

The cold plunge is just a cheap, repeatable way to rehearse that. Stopping inflammation and recovering faster were never the point.

Want a system built around what your body and your life actually need — not what's trending? Book a High Touch Performance Consultation and let's build yours.

Ozempic Works Exactly As Advertised. That's the Problem.

Let's get one thing straight up front: the shot works. Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound — they do the thing they promise. The scale goes down. Your face gets a little more chiseled. The jeans get loose. The before-and-after is real.

I'm not here to tell you it doesn't work. I'm here to tell you what it's actually working toward.

Because the drug has exactly one job: make the number on the scale smaller. And it is very, very good at its job. The trouble is that "smaller" and "better" are not the same word — and your body knows the difference even when your bathroom scale doesn't.

Here's the line the marketing will never draw for you: skinny and fit are not the same thing. The shot can absolutely make you skinny. It will never make you fit. Fit is reserved for people willing to do the work — there's no injection for it, and there never will be. Skinny might make you look good in a photo. Fit is what makes you feel good, move well, and walk around with the quiet confidence of someone who actually lives in a body that works.

What "weight loss" actually costs

When you drop weight fast on appetite suppression, you don't get to pick what leaves. Fat goes. So does muscle. And not a rounding-error amount.

Across the major trials, somewhere between a quarter and 40% of the weight people lose on these drugs is lean mass — muscle, not fat. In the big semaglutide trial it landed around 40%. Read that again. For every ten pounds gone, up to four were the tissue that keeps you strong, keeps your metabolism humming, and keeps you functional.

Do you know how hard it is to build four pounds of muscle?!

That's the deal nobody prints on the pen. You wanted to lose fat. You're also paying in muscle. And muscle is the one thing you actually wanted to keep.

This is how you end up skinny fat: lighter on the scale, softer in the mirror, weaker in the gym, slower metabolism at rest. Smaller pants, flat ass, no engine.

Short term: the dopamine hit

Short term, it feels like winning. The scale rewards you every morning. People notice. You buy new clothes. It's a genuine high, and I get the appeal — you've fought your appetite and the unending food noise your whole adult life and someone finally handed you an off switch.

But here's what's happening under the hood while you celebrate: your metabolism is quietly downshifting. Less muscle means fewer calories burned doing absolutely nothing. Your body gets better at storing and worse at spending. You're building a deadly trap and standing in the middle of it.

Long term: the bill comes due

Fast forward. Most people don't stay on these forever — monetary cost, brutal side effects, turns of life. The average tenure is actually about six months, which isn’t very long for a drug designed to be taken for life. And when you stop, appetite comes roaring back to a body carrying less muscle and a decimated metabolism, the weight comes back too. Except now it returns as fat, onto a frame with less muscle to catch it. Same number on the scale, worse body underneath it.

That's the long game the ads skip. Not "will I lose weight" — you will. It's "what will I be made of on the other side, and will it hold?

And then there's the part that has nothing to do with mirrors: capability. The strength to throw your kid over your shoulder at 45. The engine to keep up on the trail without tapping out. The muscle that quietly protects your joints, your bones, your blood sugar, your brain, your next three decades. You don't get any of that from being lighter. You get it from being stronger — and the shot doesn't build strong. It can't. That was never its job.

Now fast-forward thirty years

This is where the two paths really split, and it's the part almost nobody thinks about in their 40s.

Shot-induced weight loss doesn't just cost huge amounts of muscle — it costs bone. Less muscle means less load on the skeleton, and bone density quietly walks out the door right behind it. It shows up in the data: in one large trial, adults 75 and older on semaglutide had close to five times the rate of hip and pelvic fractures compared to placebo. The FDA label itself flags a possible fracture risk in older adults and women. Fair caveat — researchers still argue over how much is the drug versus the crash weight loss doing the damage. But the fix nobody argues about is the exact thing the shot skips: load the muscle, feed the body, keep the bone. In plain English - get fit.

So picture the two crowds at 75.

One built nothing. They got skinny in their 40s, shed the muscle, lost the bone, and never replaced either. Now a missed step off a curb is a trip to the ER. Walkers. Hip surgery. The slow slide into frailty — and everything that rides shotgun with it, including the cognitive decline that tracks hard with a sedentary, deconditioned body.

The other crowd did the work. Kept the muscle. Kept the bone. Kept the balance and the engine. At 75 they're not managing frailty — they're on international trips, on the floor with the grandkids, spending down decades of healthspan they deliberately banked. Same age. Completely different runway.

A shot can get you skinny. It can never build that. Only effort and expert guidance can — and only if you start now.

What working with me does instead

Here's the fair part, because I promised fair: while the marketing might be, the drug itself isn't evil. It's a tool with one narrow function. Used inside a real system — intelligently programmed exercise, effective nutrition, powerful supplementation, and a support team to help execute — it can absolutely be part of the plan. The research says so plainly: keep training hard and eating enough protein, and you protect the muscle.

The problem is almost nobody uses it that way. They use it asthe plan. And the drug alone is a plan to get skinny fat.

What I do is the opposite of a shortcut. We test — real biometrics, body composition, blood work — so we actually know what's fat, what's muscle, and what's moving. We build the engine instead of shrinking it. You lose fat and not just keep the muscle, we add to it. You come out the other side lighter where it counts and stronger everywhere it matters. And it holds — because you built it instead of borrowing it from a pharmacy.

One path ends with you smaller and softer, quietly hoping the weight stays off.

The other ends with you capable — the kind of strong that shows up when your kid wants a piggyback ride two miles into a hike and you don't have to say no.

The scale can't tell the difference between those two people.

Your life can.

Pick your side

Strip away the pharmacology and this was never really about a drug. It's about which camp you're standing in.

There's a crowd that just wants the number to drop and doesn't ask what it costs. That's them. No judgment — but that's not us.

Us? We want to know what this body can actually do. And here's the part that matters most: we are not defined by where we start. Some of us are coming off an injury. Some haven't trained in ten years. Some are starting from flat on their back after a setback that took everything. Doesn't matter. If you value being fit over just being skinny — if you'd rather build something real than borrow it from a pharmacy — you're already one of us. You just haven't started yet.

So start. Come see what you're actually capable of. I promise you won't regret it.

Book a High Touch Performance Consultation and let's build something that holds — no matter where you're starting from.

The Great American Potato Chip: Guilty Pleasure or Just Misunderstood?

It's July 4th weekend. There's a bag of chips on the table next to the potato salad, and somewhere in your brain a tiny voice is whispering these are bad for you. ‍

Are they, though?

Not always. Not automatically. The potato chip has been lumped into the same "junk food" bucket as gas station donuts and gummy worms for so long that nobody bothers asking what's actually in the bag anymore. Turns out the answer matters. A lot.‍ ‍

Let's break down when chips are a problem, when they're not, and how to eat them like someone who actually knows what they're doing

It's Not the Potato. It's What It's Swimming In.

A potato, sliced thin and fried, is not the enemy. It's a starchy vegetable. The issue is almost never the potato — it's the oil it got dunked in.

Most mass-market chips are fried in seed and vegetable oils — soybean, canola, sunflower, corn. These oils are high in linoleic acid, an omega-6 fat that's unstable at high heat and, for a lot of people, associated with more inflammation in the body. Fry that oil at high temperatures, let it sit on a shelf for months, and you've got a snack that's fighting your body instead of fueling it. ‍

Chips fried in avocado oil or beef tallow are a different animal. Both are far more heat-stable, meaning they don't break down and oxidize the same way seed oils do under the fryer. Less oxidative stress, less gut inflammation, same crunch.

Same potato. Same salt. Completely different fat delivery system. That distinction is the whole ballgame.

Read Past the First Three Ingredients

Here's where most people stop paying attention — right after they've confirmed it says "potato chips" on the bag.

Keep reading. The ingredient list is where flavored chips get sneaky. Once you get past potatoes, oil, and salt, a lot of brands start adding sugar, maltodextrin, "natural flavors" that are doing a lot of unexplained work, and a handful of things that sound like they belong in a chemistry set, not a snack bowl.

The standard to hold a bag to is simple: potatoes (or sweet potatoes), a stable fat like avocado oil or beef tallow, and seasoning — salt, pepper, maybe some herbs. That's it. That's a clean chip.

Anything past that list, get skeptical. Not because one weird ingredient is going to wreck your Fourth of July — it won't — but because it's usually a sign the whole product was engineered for shelf life and addictiveness, not for you.

Brands like Boulder Canyon and Jackson's make clean versions of this. But — and this matters — they also make flavored, sugar-and-additive-loaded versions sitting right next to the clean ones on the same shelf. Same logo, different product. Read the bag every time. Don't assume the brand name is a blanket pass.

Okay, the Ingredients Are Clean. Now What? ‍

Let's say you did the work. Avocado oil, salt, potato. Nothing sketchy on the label. Are you in the clear?

Mostly — but there's still a math problem to solve, and it's about calories, not toxins.

From a macronutrient standpoint, chips are pure fat and carbohydrate. No protein to speak of. And that matters more than people realize, because protein and carbs/fats play very different roles in your body. Protein is a building block — it goes toward repairing and building the structures that make up muscle, tissue, and cellular machinery. Carbs and fat are fuel. They get burned for energy or they get stored. ‍

Take in more fuel than you burn, and your body does exactly what it's designed to do: store the surplus. Doesn't matter how clean the oil was. A calorie surplus from beautiful, artisanal, seed-oil-free chips still shows up the same way a calorie surplus from anything else does.

So the ingredient question and the quantity question are two separate conversations. You have to win both.

The Bag Doesn't Want You to Stop

Here's the part that's not your fault: chips are engineered — even the clean ones, by nature of the format — to be very hard to stop eating.

Salt, fat, and carbs together hit a combination that appears to blunt your brain's normal satiety signaling. Individually, each of these can drive us to eat more. Stack all three at once — which is exactly what a potato chip is — and you can plow through a genuinely large number of calories before your body sends the "okay, that's enough" signal. That's not weak willpower. That's the product doing exactly what a crunchy, salty, fatty food does to a human brain. ‍

Which is exactly why "just have a few" is bad advice. Nobody has a few. You have a few, then you're methodically checking the bag for structural integrity by hand, and forty-five minutes later it's empty and you don't remember agreeing to that.

The Actual Fix (It's Not Willpower)

You're not going to out-discipline a bag of chips at a July 4th cookout. Nobody has. Don't try.

Instead, take the decision out of the moment entirely:

Weigh out a real serving in a bowl before you start eating, based on what your day's fuel needs actually look like. For most people, that's about 1–2 ounces. Put the chips in a bowl, put the bag away — not just "on the other side of the table," actually away — and eat from the bowl. When the bowl's empty, you're done deciding. You already decided, back when your brain was still in charge. ‍

This one move solves the satiety-override problem without requiring you to have more self-control than the rest of the country trying to enjoy a barbecue.

So — Can You Actually Eat Chips and Still Be Healthy?

Yes. Genuinely, yes. Just not mindlessly, and not straight out of the bag.

Check the ingredients. Potato, stable fat (avocado oil or tallow), salt — good. A paragraph of stuff you can't pronounce — skip it, or at least know what you're signing up for. Once the ingredients pass, portion your serving like you actually plan on eating dinner too. That's the whole system.

Nobody's saying skip the chips this weekend. Just stop treating the bag like it's got a bottom you'll never reach. It doesn't. That's kind of the point.

Happy Fourth. Go enjoy the potato salad too — that's a conversation for another day.

Precision isn't about restriction — it's about knowing exactly what you're working with, down to the ingredient label. That's the whole philosophy behind the Holistic Transformation Program. If you want that kind of clarity applied to your whole plate, not just the chip bowl —‍ ‍

Book your free High Touch Performance Consultation →

Tyler Nicholson | Nicholson Human Performance | nicholsonhp.com

The Air You're Breathing at Night Is Sabotaging Your Sleep

And your Oura ring can't save you from a room full of your own CO2.

I consider myself pretty dialed in when it comes to sleep. Consistent bedtime, cool room, no screens, mouth tape on, Oura ring tracking every stage. By most metrics, I'm getting "good" sleep. Eight hours. Decent HRV. Scores in the green.

So why was I waking up with a foggy head, slow to fire, dragging through the first two hours of the morning like I hadn't slept at all?

I started chasing this down the way I chase everything — with data.

Enter the Aranet4

I picked up an Aranet4 CO2 monitor a few months back. It's a palm-sized device that tracks carbon dioxide levels in real time using a true NDIR (non-dispersive infrared) sensor — the gold standard for accuracy. I'd been using it sporadically at the office and in various rooms around the house, mostly out of curiosity.

Then I started leaving it on the nightstand.

What I found was uncomfortable. Overnight CO2 levels in our bedroom were regularly pushing past 1,800 ppm — sometimes higher. Our bedroom door stays closed. We run a furnace fan.

Here's the basic physiology: every breath you take, your lungs exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide. The CO2 is a waste product of metabolism — your cells produce it, your blood carries it to your lungs, and you off-gas it with every exhale. Do that 15–20 times a minute in a sealed bedroom for eight hours, and the CO2 concentration in the room climbs steadily all night. Two people in a closed room accelerate it even faster. Your bedroom isn't just a sleep space — it's a slow CO2 accumulator.

Here's the thing about 1,800 ppm: it's not harmless.

What CO2 Actually Does to Your Brain

Most people think CO2 is only dangerous because it’s causing global warming. That's not what the research says.

A landmark study found that compared to a 600 ppm baseline, participants showed moderate but statistically significant drops in decision-making performance at just 1,000 ppm. At 2,500 ppm, large and statistically significant reductions showed up on seven out of nine cognitive performance measures. nih

Another more recent meta-analysis confirmed it: complex task performance declined significantly when exposed to CO2 concentrations in the 1,000–1,500 ppm range, and the effects worsened between 1,500 and 3,000 ppm. Prolonged exposure amplifies the adverse effects. ScienceDirect

I was regularly hitting 1,800 while unconscious and supposedly "recovering."

Patrick McKeown — author of The Oxygen Advantage and The Breathing Cure, and one of the most credible voices in breathwork science — has written extensively on what CO2 does to your brain during sleep. His framework makes the mechanism clear: excessive breathing depletes CO2, which causes blood vessels to narrow — reducing blood flow and making it harder to get oxygen to different parts of your body, including the brain. High ambient CO2 in a closed room pushes your body to breathe harder and faster at night, disrupting the deep, slow, efficient breathing that recovery actually requires.

McKeown's research on sleep apnea adds another layer. The brain has chemoreceptors — essentially CO2 sensors — that monitor blood CO2 levels and trigger arousal signals when things get out of balance. Individuals with high sensitivity to CO2 will have an exaggerated physiological response, leading to heavier breathing and frequent arousals from sleep. You might not fully wake up. But you're getting pulled out of deep sleep. That's why your HRV looks fine but your morning feels like garbage.

The Bedroom CO2 Research Is Damning

The sleep science on this is stacking up fast.

A field study on healthy young adults compared sleep quality at three CO2 levels: 750 ppm, 1,000 ppm, and 1,300 ppm. At 1,000 ppm, sleep efficiency dropped and time awake increased by five minutes. At 1,300 ppm, deep sleep duration decreased significantly, and salivary cortisol after waking — a marker of stress and sympathetic activation — went up measurably. The researchers concluded that bedroom CO2 at or above 1,000 ppm should be avoided. ScienceDirect

Read that again. 1,000 ppm. The threshold most people consider "acceptable." Still enough to tank your deep sleep and spike your morning cortisol.

I was sleeping at nearly double that.

Elon Musk caught on to this too — he reportedly keeps a CO2 monitor on his desk that beeps whenever levels rise above 1,000 ppm, noting that his thinking gets hazier above that threshold. I'm not typically in the habit of citing Elon for health protocols, but when the trillionaire and the breathwork researcher agree, it's worth paying attention.

My Trial-and-Error Protocol

Here's where I made a few mistakes worth sharing, because this stuff isn't always intuitive.

First attempt: I set the furnace fan to run on low all night. I figured circulating the air in the bedroom would fix the issue. CO2 dropped somewhat, but not below 1,000 — and I had the timer shut off at 6:00 AM. Problem was, we don't actually get out of bed until 6:30. So I was waking up in the highest-concentration window of the night. Not ideal.

Second attempt: I adjusted the timer. Better, but still couldn't consistently get levels below 1,000 through the full night. The bedroom was still too sealed, and circulating indoor air just moves the same CO2 around.

Current protocol: Before bed, I run the whole house fan for 15–20 minutes to flush the entire house with fresh outdoor air. This is the key step — outdoor air sits at 400–450 ppm, so you're essentially resetting the baseline before you seal the room. Then the furnace fan runs on medium all night to maintain circulation without letting CO2 creep back up unchecked.

The result? I checked the Aranet this morning. CO2 never broke 1,000 ppm all night. I woke up without the fog. Alert. Ready. That's not a coincidence — that's the difference between sleeping in fresh air and sleeping in a CO2 bath.

It Gets Worse When You Travel

Home is a problem you can solve. But if you're on the road and you're not thinking about this, you're giving away sleep every time you check into a hotel.

Research tracking CO2 during real travel found that hotel rooms with just two to three occupants exceeded 800 ppm — the threshold considered suboptimal for ventilation. Airplane cabin CO2 regularly exceeded that same threshold during flight. nih

The average CO2 concentration in an aircraft cabin runs around 1,350 ppm and can reach 3,000 ppm. You land exhausted from a two-hour flight. You thought it was the travel. It was the air. ScienceDirect

Hotel rooms are often worse than planes. Small room, sealed windows, HVAC that recirculates air rather than exchanging it, and sometimes two people. You can easily push 1,500–2,000 ppm overnight without realizing it. The Aranet4 is small enough to throw in your carry-on. I bring mine on every trip now. When I check into a room, I crack a window before bed regardless of temperature. If it's not possible, I run whatever ventilation I can and at minimum open the door to the hallway for 10 minutes before sleeping to reset the CO2 baseline — back toward that 400–450 ppm outdoor air standard.

The Action Plan

If you're doing everything "right" — training, eating well, hitting your sleep hours — and still waking up not quite right, check your air before you blame your program. Here's how:

1. Get an Aranet4. It's the gold standard consumer CO2 monitor. Amazon Prime Day deal is live right now — grab it while it's on sale.

2. Leave it on your nightstand with the bedroom door closed. Check the morning history.

3. Target below 1000 ppm overnight. Under 750 is ideal.

4. Flush before bed. Open windows or run a whole-house fan for 15–20 minutes. You're pulling in 400–450 ppm outdoor air to displace the accumulated indoor CO2 before you seal everything up for the night. If the weather is right, keep the windows open all night.

5. Keep air moving. Furnace fan on medium through the night. Even a small window crack can make a dramatic difference — one study found that cracking a bedroom window by just an inch or two dropped CO2 from 2,400 ppm to under 1,000 ppm by 3 AM in a typical bedroom. Mattress Nut

6. Travel with it. Crack the hotel room window before bed. Don't assume the HVAC is handling it — it's usually not.

The Invisible Variable

Most people optimizing their sleep are laser-focused on supplements, sleep scores, mattresses, and temperature — and completely ignoring the air they're breathing for eight hours straight.

You can have a perfect sleep protocol and still be slowly suffocating yourself on your own exhaled CO2 every night. The data was right there. I just hadn't measured it.

Now I have. And the mornings are different.

If you want to close the gap between how hard you're working and what you're actually getting back — in sleep, in performance, in how you show up — that's exactly what we build at NHP. Book a consultation at nicholsonhp.com and let's look at the full picture.

The Long Game: What Fitness Actually Means When You're a Dad

The Dad Day community recently surveyed hundreds of dads with one question: what's motivating your workouts right now?

54% said general health. Sounds about right. But when you dig into the comments, the real answer comes into focus — and it has nothing to do with six-packs or transformation photos.

"Want to surf into my 70s and beat my son at basketball for at least 10 more years."

That's not a health goal. That's a fatherhood goal wearing a health goal's clothes.

If you haven't come across Dad Day, worth a follow. It's a community built for dads who are serious about showing up fully — physically and mentally — for the long haul. The full piece is here: The Real Reason Dads Are Working Out.

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I'll tell you where I'm coming from on this one, because it's personal.

Sixteen months ago, an L5 disc herniation put me flat on my back. Not metaphorically — literally. I worked lying face down on the floor for months because standing for more than 15 minutes was impossible and sitting in a chair was intolerable. I couldn't walk my dog without excruciating pain. The gym wasn't even a conversation. If you've had a similar injury, you know how debilitating and demoralizing this is — it strips away the things you don't realize you're taking for granted until they're gone.

That came on top of a complete patellar tendon rupture from a volleyball injury in 2021 that devastated my left leg. I still have pain and numbness in my back and my left leg might never be 100%, but I'm making real progress restoring function.

I haven't been able to run or jump in five years.

My son Ethan is 19 months old.

The urgency I feel isn't abstract. It's specific. It's Ethan in the backyard, and whether or not I can keep up with him when he wants to run and play.

This isn't new territory. I had seven knee surgeries growing up. The last of them ended my scholarship track career — and still didn't fix the underlying problem. Rebuilding my own body is what pulled me into the fitness industry. I know what it means to work back from damage that was supposed to be repaired a long time ago.

Which is why the data from that Dad Day poll hit close to home.

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One dad in the survey put it this way:

"The whole genesis of my weight lifting was because I was so tired after holding my kids. I thought, as a 35-year-old, I can't wait any longer to build the strength I should have already had."

He didn't start because he wanted to look different. He started because being winded by holding his own kids was unacceptable. The regret wasn't vanity. It was capability — and the gap between where he was and where he needed to be as a father.

That gap is what I help people close.

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One of my clients, Michael, is a good example of what this looks like in practice.

He came to me a few years ago as a recreational mountain biker. Motivated, already training consistently, but not seeing the progress he knew should be there. He'd never done serious weight training before his 30s. He's also the owner of a rapidly growing small business and a dad of three. The demands on him are real.

Yet somehow he almost never misses a session.

Today, Michael back squats 355 for 3 reps, deadlifts 405, and does weighted pull-ups with 70 pounds hanging from him. His cardio capacity has kept pace with his strength and he regularly runs half marathons for fun. He's not training for aesthetics — he's training to be the kind of man, dad, and business owner who has the physical reserves to match his ambitions.

That's what a precision system built around your actual life produces. Not the program that gets you through 90 days. The one that compounds over years.

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The long game isn't a metaphor. It's a training philosophy.

When the goal is fatherhood — keeping up with a 5-year-old, being physically present at 55, not getting winded during bedtime — everything in the training has stakes. The work connects to something real.

Most fitness programs are built around appearance. NHP is built around function. Precision testing, real data, a system designed around who you need to be at 45, 55, 65 — not who you want to look like in a mirror.

If you're a dad reading this, the motivation isn't your problem. You already know why. The question is whether the plan you're running is actually built for the long game.

If it's not — let's talk.

Whether your goal is taking your fitness to the next level to keep pace with life and little ones, or you just want to put the pieces back together, I understand.

Happy Father's Day.

Stay strong out there,

Tyler

Want to chat? Grab a time for us.

12 Tips to Not Feel Like Garbage on Vacation (or Your Next Work Trip)

Summer is here, and so are your excuses to eat airport Auntie Anne's at 7am and call it breakfast. Before you do that — read this. Whether you're heading to Cabo or a conference in Cleveland, the difference between coming home refreshed and coming home bloated and behind is almost entirely about a few decisions you make before you land.

Here's the playbook:

1. Book an Airbnb or VRBO, not a hotel.
A full kitchen and a real fridge change everything. You go from being entirely dependent on restaurant roulette to having actual control over what goes in your body. This one decision unlocks most of the list below.

2. Hit the grocery store the moment you arrive.
Don't unpack — go straight to the store. Stock your fridge with zero-prep foods: rotisserie chicken, lunch meat, hard-boiled eggs, pre-cooked sausage, apples, berries, baby carrots, bell peppers. Foods that require no thought and no cooking. Grab them, eat them, move on.

3. Can't get to a store? Use Instacart or Amazon Prime Fresh.
Order your cart while you're waiting at the gate and time delivery for right after check-in. This is not a hack — it's what high-functioning executives actually do. Save your usual cart in the app and re-order in two taps.

4. Eat out? Use the Seed Oil Scout app.
Seed Oil Scout finds restaurants cooking with clean oils — avocado, olive, beef tallow — instead of the industrial seed oils that will leave you inflamed, bloated, and wondering why you feel like you were hit by a bus. Free download. Use it.

5. When you eat out, order like an adult.
Meat and vegetables. Every time. Save your carbs and sweets for a premeditated treat — something you've actually been looking forward to. Anticipation is half the fun. Reflexive bread basket consumption is not a treat, it's a tax.

6. Always eat breakfast at your Airbnb.
Start every day with guaranteed clean fuel. While you're eating, mentally plan your next meal — roughly 4 hours out. This one habit keeps you ahead of hunger instead of reacting to it.

7. Pack your food and take it with you.
Yes, to the beach. Yes, to the conference room. Meat and fruit keep just fine in a bag at room temperature for a few hours. Humans survived without refrigeration for millennia. Your chicken breast will make it to noon.

8. The "dietary restriction" hack for catered work lunches.
If you can't bring your own food and lunch is being ordered in, tell the office manager you're celiac, diabetic, and lactose intolerant. Is it a white lie? Technically. Is it actually inaccurate that you react poorly to wheat, sugar, and dairy? Not really. Problem solved, no awkward explanations required.

9. If you're skipping alcohol, order a cover drink.
Soda water and lime. Bitters and soda. Something in your hand that reads like a cocktail. This neutralizes well-meaning friends who want to buy you a drink and ends the conversation before it starts.

10. Manage jet lag before it manages you.
Adjust your meal timing to the destination's time zone as quickly as possible — your circadian rhythm is tightly coupled to when you eat, not just when you sleep. Get morning light in your eyes within the first hour of waking. Avoid eating in the middle of your night. These aren't wellness tips — they're basic biology.

11. Survive the airport — and bring two meals.
This is where discipline goes to die. Before you leave home, pack two meals in your carry-on. You cannot get anywhere in under 4 hours door-to-door, so that's one meal you'll need minimum. The second is insurance for delays, a long rental car line, or just arriving hungry at 9pm with nothing open. Lunch meat, berries, almonds, an apple — all pass through security without a second glance. TSA does not care. The goal is simple: don't arrive in a hole.

12. Supplements go in a pill organizer. Full stop.
A weekly pill organizer is the difference between actually taking your supplements on the road and leaving a $50 bottle of fish oil untouched in your luggage. One grab, one swallow, done. No excuses.

13 (Bonus!). Hydrate like it's your job.
Travel is dehydrating — the stress, the recycled airplane air, the schedule disruption. Aim for 75–100% of your bodyweight in ounces of water daily. Throw several LMNT or SaltT packets in your bag and actually use them. Dehydration mimics hunger, causes headaches, and tanks your energy — none of which you need on day two of a five-day trip.

The goal isn't to be miserable. It's to come home the same person who left — or better. You do that by making a few decisions ahead of time so you're not white-knuckling it through a continental breakfast at 6am wondering why you feel terrible.

Want a system that actually sticks — on the road and at home? Book a free High Touch Performance Consultation.

The NHP Standard

You bring the hunger. We bring the system.

Do you know what a perfect day looks like? Not in a vague, motivational sense — we mean specifically. What you eat and when. How you train, how hard, and why. How much water, and how your hydration strategy shifts around your sessions. What your wind-down looks like so your sleep actually does what sleep is supposed to do.

A perfect day isn't luck. It's a stack — habits layered deliberately on top of each other to produce the optimal response from your body. Most people have never designed one. They've cobbled together pieces from different sources, tried things that worked for someone else, and filled the gaps with effort. A lot of effort. And they're still leaving enormous results on the table.

Most people are putting in real work. The problem isn't the effort — it's that they don't know exactly what they're aiming for.

We work with high-level performers who are already serious about their health. They're training, they're eating with intention, they're trying. And yet there are still major gaps — obvious opportunities they can't see because no one has shown them what a truly optimized day looks like for their body, their life, their goals.

You can't hit the bullseye if you don't know what it looks like. That's where we come in.

What we expect from you

We work with people who hold themselves to a high standard. That means showing up with a clear why — not just wanting to "get in shape," but a real reason that pulls you forward when it's inconvenient. It means setting ambitious goals and actually believing you can hit them. And it means being willing to be uncomfortable in the short term: changing habits, trying approaches you haven't before, trusting a process even when results are still loading.

We won't ask you to grind harder. We will ask you to be open.

What we bring

Your effort is already there. Our job is to make sure it isn't wasted.

We bring the plan — built around how you actually live — and the support to execute it consistently. We build systems that compound. We hold you accountable without it feeling like surveillance. We take the guesswork out of the equation so every hour you invest is moving you toward something specific.

You don't need to work harder. You need a more refined approach.

Who we love working with

Our best clients are driven people who've let fitness slip — not because they stopped caring, but because competing priorities took over. They're athletes, executives, parents, high performers who already understand the value of showing up. They don't need to be convinced that this matters. They need someone to take their existing effort and aim it precisely.

What we can achieve together

The goal isn't just to look better or perform better — though both will happen. The goal is to put you in the top 1% of your demographic across every dimension that matters: health, longevity, body composition, performance, and simply feeling your best every single day.

That kind of result doesn't come from trying harder. It comes from knowing more and executing smarter. We give you both.

It starts with understanding exactly where you are. We use extensive biometric testing to build a complete picture of your current state — not estimates, not guesses, not generic baselines. Real data about your real body. From there, we benchmark your progress with the same precision, so you always know what's working and what needs adjusting.

Then we fine-tune the things that actually move the needle:

• Nutrition — Food dialed in to your biology, your goals, and your lifestyle — not a template.
• Training — Structure and progression built to produce results, not just burn calories.
• Sleep — The most underrated lever in performance. We treat it like the priority it is.
• Supplementation — What actually works, for you specifically, based on what your data shows.

The systems, the habits, and the knowledge you'll build through this process aren't temporary. They become yours. You stop guessing and start operating from a level of clarity most people never experience.

Ready to find out what your best looks like?

Book a High Touch Performance Consultation. We'll map out exactly where you are, where you want to be, and what it's going to take to get there.

Book your consultation →

No pressure. No templates. Just a real conversation about your goals.

Why Your "Normal" Testosterone Test Might Be Lying to You

In April 2026, the FDA signaled a notable shift in how it thinks about testosterone therapy. The agency announced it's encouraging drug makers to pursue a potential new indication for testosterone replacement therapy: treating low libido in men with idiopathic hypogonadism—low testosterone without an identifiable cause. Up to now, FDA-approved TRT products have been indicated only for men with specific forms of hypogonadism tied to known structural or genetic causes.

That's a meaningful change. It means the conversation around testosterone is widening to include men who feel terrible but don't have an obvious medical explanation for it—and that describes a lot of guys walking around right now. But it also raises a question worth sitting with: if a man has low testosterone "without a known cause," does that mean there genuinely isn't one? Or does it mean nobody looked hard enough?

That distinction is the entire point of this article.

The Diagnostic Threshold Problem

You've been dragging through workouts, struggling with stubborn belly fat, watching your motivation flatline. You finally ask your doctor to check your testosterone. The result comes back "normal." You leave the office no closer to answers than when you walked in.

Here's the problem: that single number on your lab report is telling you maybe a quarter of the story.

Most physicians follow a simple rule: if your total testosterone is below 300 ng/dL on two morning tests and you have symptoms, you qualify for testosterone replacement therapy. Anything above that number? You're "fine."

But "fine" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. A 42-year-old with a total testosterone of 380 ng/dL is technically normal—and technically miserable. He may have declining free testosterone, rising inflammation, early insulin resistance, and a body that no longer responds to the same diet and training that worked five years ago. The lab says he's healthy. His life says otherwise.

Functional medicine doesn't accept "above the cutoff" as a diagnosis. It looks at the full picture. And "idiopathic"—the medical term for "we don't know why"—is often just an invitation to dig deeper.

A Quick Note on How We Work

At Nicholson Human Performance, we work with a lot of athletes—both men and women—on testosterone and broader hormone optimization. Hormonal health is central to performance, recovery, body composition, and how you actually feel day to day.

But here's our approach, and it's worth being upfront about it: we optimize first through holistic methods before going the pharmaceutical route. TRT and hormone replacement are real tools with a real place. They're just rarely the right first move. More often, low or imbalanced hormones are a downstream symptom of something fixable. So before anyone talks about a prescription, we want to understand the whole system.

To understand that system, you have to understand what your lab numbers actually mean.

Total, Free, and Bioavailable: Why the Distinction Matters

Testosterone in your bloodstream comes in three forms, and only one of them is actually doing the work. And yes—this matters for women too. Testosterone is a critical hormone for female strength, libido, mood, and body composition; it's just present in smaller amounts.

Total testosterone is everything—all the testosterone floating around in your blood. The problem? Most of it is bound to proteins and unavailable to your tissues. Measuring total testosterone is like checking how much money is in everyone's wallet at a coffee shop and concluding you can afford a latte.

Free testosterone is the small fraction that's completely unbound and ready to bind to receptors in your muscles, brain, and reproductive tissues. This is the testosterone actually doing what testosterone does—building muscle, sharpening focus, driving libido, maintaining bone density.

Bioavailable testosterone is free testosterone plus the portion loosely bound to albumin (a blood protein that releases its grip easily). It's the broader pool of testosterone your body can actually access.

Here's why this matters: a person can have a perfectly respectable total testosterone reading while their free testosterone tells a completely different story. If too much of that testosterone is locked up by binding proteins, the body operates as though it's deficient—because functionally, it is.

Enter SHBG: The Hormone Traffic Cop

Sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) is a protein your liver produces that binds tightly to testosterone—and to estrogen—and pulls them out of circulation. Think of SHBG as a strict warehouse manager—the more hormone it locks away, the less is available for your tissues to use.

When SHBG runs high, free testosterone runs low—even if total testosterone looks great on paper. This is the missing piece most conventional panels skip entirely.

So what drives SHBG up? Two big culprits: estrogen dominance and liver dysfunction.

The Estrogen-Liver-SHBG Loop

This is where things get interesting, and where most people get stuck without realizing it.

Estrogen tells the liver to produce more SHBG. So when estrogen levels climb, SHBG climbs with it, and free testosterone gets squeezed out. Now, why would someone have elevated estrogen?

Body composition is the biggest driver. Adipose tissue—particularly visceral fat around the midsection—contains an enzyme called aromatase that converts testosterone into estrogen. The more body fat a person carries, the more testosterone gets converted into estrogen, which then drives SHBG up, which then reduces available testosterone further. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that gets worse the longer it runs.

Liver function is the other half of the equation. Your liver is responsible for clearing estrogen from your body. If it's overwhelmed by alcohol, processed foods, environmental toxins, or just chronically inflamed from a poor diet, it can't keep up with estrogen clearance. Estrogen accumulates. SHBG rises. Free testosterone drops.

And here's the kicker—your standard liver enzymes (ALT, AST) can look perfectly normal while your liver is still sluggish at processing estrogen. The liver isn't damaged. It's just overworked and underperforming. SHBG itself becomes a useful proxy: if it's elevated and your enzymes look fine, you're likely seeing impaired estrogen clearance without overt liver damage.

Why This Matters for Women, Too

Everything above isn't a men's-only story. Estrogen clearance, liver health, and gut health are foundational to hormonal balance in women—arguably even more so, because the female hormonal system is more sensitive to small shifts.

When a woman's liver clears estrogen efficiently and her gut isn't recycling it back into circulation, estrogen and progesterone stay in better proportion. That balance influences menstrual cycle regularity, PMS severity, mood stability, energy, and how the body handles the transition through perimenopause and menopause. Poor estrogen clearance, on the other hand, can tip a woman toward estrogen dominance—contributing to heavy or irregular cycles, stubborn fat gain, breast tenderness, low mood, and disrupted sleep.

The same levers that help men—reducing visceral fat, supporting the liver, cleaning up the gut, managing stress, and dialing in thyroid function—directly improve hormonal balance for women. A well-functioning liver and a healthy gut are non-negotiable foundations for hormonal health, regardless of sex. The mechanisms are shared; only the downstream symptoms look different.

The Gut Connection Nobody Talks About

Your gut microbiome plays a surprisingly large role in estrogen levels for everyone. After the liver conjugates estrogen for excretion, it gets dumped into the gut. A healthy microbiome ushers it out of the body. A dysbiotic microbiome contains bacteria that reactivate the conjugated estrogen, allowing it to be reabsorbed back into circulation.

Constipation, low fiber intake, antibiotic overuse, and poor microbiome diversity can all contribute to estrogen recycling. So can a diet low in cruciferous vegetables. You can have a liver doing its job and still end up with elevated estrogen because your gut is sending it back into circulation.

What Actually Moves the Needle

Before you start on testosterone or hormone replacement, here's what we ask you to address first—because those interventions don't fix any of the underlying problems. In fact, they can mask them.

Body composition. Reducing visceral fat reduces aromatase activity, which reduces estrogen production at the source. Resistance training is non-negotiable. It builds muscle, improves insulin sensitivity, and consistently lowers SHBG over time.

Liver support. Cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale—support the liver's detoxification pathways and help process estrogen for excretion. Cutting alcohol, even moderately, gives the liver significant breathing room. Supplements like milk thistle, NAC, and glycine support liver function, though the foundation has to come from diet first.

Gut health. Fiber, fermented foods, and a diverse plant-based diet feed beneficial gut bacteria and improve estrogen clearance. Addressing constipation is critical. Estrogen that doesn't leave the body via the bowel ends up back in circulation.

Sleep. Poor sleep tanks both hormone production and liver detoxification capacity. Most people trying to optimize their hormones are losing the war in bed before they ever set foot in a gym. Seven to nine hours, consistently.

Stress management. Chronic cortisol elevation impairs estrogen clearance and suppresses healthy hormone production directly. Without addressing this, every other intervention fights against a stacked deck.

Thyroid function. Hypothyroidism slows liver detoxification and worsens estrogen dominance. A complete thyroid panel—not just TSH—should be part of any hormone workup, for men and women alike.

The Bigger Question

TRT and hormone replacement have their place. For people with genuinely low or imbalanced hormones after addressing root causes, they can be life-changing. But starting down that road without first understanding why hormones are off means accepting a long-term prescription to treat a symptom of a deeper problem—and in the case of TRT, once the body adapts to exogenous testosterone, natural production shuts down. There's no easy off-ramp.

The functional medicine question isn't "Are your levels low enough to qualify for treatment?" It's "Why are your hormones off, and what can we fix before we start replacing them?"

If your only data point is a total testosterone number, you don't have enough information to answer that question. You need free testosterone, SHBG, estrogen, a complete thyroid panel, liver markers, inflammatory markers, and fasting insulin—at minimum—to understand what's actually happening.

This Is Complicated, We Made It Simple

If you read this far and thought, that's a lot of interlocking systems to manage—you're right. Body composition feeds estrogen, estrogen drives SHBG, the liver and gut control clearance, and thyroid and stress sit underneath all of it. Pulling one lever moves three others.

That complexity is exactly why we built the Holistic Transformation Program. It's a step-by-step guide that takes the guesswork out of optimizing your health and fitness—including hormonal health, for both men and women. Instead of trying to assemble all of this on your own, you get a clear, sequenced path: what to test, what to address first, and how to actually move the needle in the right order.

Get the full picture. Address the foundation. Then, if hormone therapy is still the right call, you'll be making that decision from a position of knowledge instead of guesswork.

Ready to find out what your numbers are actually telling you?

If you're tired of guessing—or tired of being told you're "fine" when you don't feel fine—let's talk. Book a call and we'll map out what's really going on with your hormones, your labs, and your performance.

NHP Coaching Consultation

How America Got Sick: The Forgotten History of Food in the United States

From famine fears to engineered addiction — the decisions, deals, and deceptions that turned the American food supply into a public health catastrophe.

Part I: The Fear — "The Battle to Feed Humanity Is Over"

In the years following World War II, the world was riding a demographic shockwave. Soldiers came home, families expanded, and the global population — which had taken all of human history to reach 2.5 billion — was suddenly accelerating toward numbers no one had thought possible. By 1960, the world held 3 billion people. Projections showed it doubling within decades.

The anxiety was real and widespread. In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, one of the most alarming books of the twentieth century. His opening line pulled no punches: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." He predicted India would never be self-sufficient in food and suggested that entire nations would simply cease to exist under the weight of their own populations.

Ehrlich wasn't a fringe voice. He was a respected academic, and his fears reflected the mainstream consensus of the era. William Paddock published Famine 1975! two years earlier. René Dumont's Nous Allons à la Famine made similar warnings in France. World leaders, scientists, and policy planners all operated under a shared dread: that the human species was reproducing itself toward a cliff.

In India, the crisis felt immediate. In 1966, the country produced roughly 10.4 million tonnes of wheat — nowhere near enough for its population. Famine wasn't theoretical; it was unfolding in real time. The question wasn't whether a food catastrophe would happen. It was how many hundreds of millions would die when it did.

What almost no one anticipated was that a quiet agronomist from Iowa was about to prove everyone wrong.

Part II: The Green Revolution — Miracle and Bargain

Norman Borlaug didn't look like a man who would save a billion lives. He was a plant pathologist from a small farm in rural Iowa, a man who got his PhD from the University of Minnesota and then spent years in the fields of Mexico, crossbreeding wheat varieties to resist rust, a parasitic fungal disease devastating harvests across the developing world.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug and his team developed semi-dwarf, high-yield wheat varieties that could produce dramatically more grain per acre. When Mexico's agricultural crisis threatened to spiral, these new strains helped the country not only feed itself but become a net wheat exporter. It was proof of concept on a national scale.

Then came India and Pakistan. In 1965, facing severe food shortages, Borlaug imported 550 tons of seed — 250 tons to Pakistan and 200 to India. The results were staggering. Pakistan's wheat yields nearly doubled. India went from begging for food aid to producing record harvests by 1968, the same year Ehrlich declared the battle already lost. By 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

William Gaud of the United States Agency for International Development gave it a name: the Green Revolution.

But Borlaug's miracle came with a Faustian bargain that wouldn't become clear for decades. The new agricultural paradigm required enormous inputs: synthetic fertilizers derived from petroleum, chemical pesticides, monocrop planting strategies that stripped soil of biodiversity, and heavy irrigation that drained aquifers. Farming was transformed from an ecological process into an industrial one. The goal was no longer to work with the land but to extract maximum yield from it. Calories became a commodity to be manufactured at scale.

The Green Revolution solved the immediate crisis — global famine deaths declined by 90 percent through the 1970s and continued falling in every subsequent decade. But it also rewired the entire food system around one overriding principle: produce as many cheap calories as possible, as fast as possible, at whatever long-term cost.

That principle would prove to be catastrophically exploitable.

Part III: When Big Tobacco Bought the American Diet

This is the part of the story that most people have never heard, and it may be the most consequential chapter in the history of American public health.

By the early 1980s, the major tobacco companies were in trouble. Scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer had been mounting since the 1950s, public sentiment was turning, and the threat of massive litigation loomed. RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris, the two largest cigarette makers in the world, needed somewhere to put their money — somewhere profitable, relatively unregulated, and ideally suited to the specific expertise they'd spent decades perfecting: the science of addiction.

They chose food.

In 1985, RJ Reynolds acquired Nabisco for $4.9 billion, creating the infamous RJR Nabisco. That same year, Philip Morris purchased General Foods for $5.6 billion. Three years later, Philip Morris bought Kraft for $12.9 billion. Then, in 2000, Philip Morris acquired Nabisco itself for $14.9 billion, merging it with Kraft to create the world's second-largest food company behind Nestlé.

Almost overnight, the companies that had made Marlboro and Camel cigarettes now controlled Oreos, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Jell-O, Lunchables, Chips Ahoy, Ritz Crackers, Kool-Aid, Oscar Mayer, Maxwell House, Teddy Grahams, Planters Nuts, Velveeta, Post Cereals, and Life Savers — a staggering share of the products lining American grocery store shelves.

The Playbook

What happened next wasn't accidental. It was strategic.

A landmark 2023 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction, led by researcher Tera Fazzino at the University of Kansas, examined food products made by tobacco-owned companies between 1988 and 2001 and compared them to products made by non-tobacco-owned competitors. The findings confirmed what many had long suspected: tobacco-owned food companies disproportionately produced what researchers call "hyper-palatable" foods — products engineered with specific combinations of fat, sugar, and sodium designed to trigger the brain's reward system, overwhelm the body's satiety signals, and make people eat far more than they otherwise would.

As Fazzino put it: "These foods have combinations of ingredients that create effects you don't get when you eat those ingredients separately. These combinations don't really exist in nature, so our bodies aren't ready to handle them."

The industry had a term for this. They called it the "bliss point" — the precise ratio of sugar, fat, and salt at which a product becomes maximally craveable without becoming so intense that consumers stop eating. It was food science in the service of compulsion, and the tobacco companies were uniquely equipped to execute it. They had spent generations perfecting the chemistry of nicotine addiction — adjusting doses to keep smokers hooked without making them sick. They applied exactly the same logic to food.

Marketing to Children

The tobacco playbook didn't stop at product formulation. Tobacco companies had long understood that lifetime brand loyalty begins in childhood. Just as Joe Camel was designed to make cigarettes appealing to kids, tobacco-owned food brands invested heavily in marketing directly to children — through cartoon mascots, toy tie-ins, school lunch programs, and products like Lunchables that were designed, from the ground up, to be sold to and by kids.

Lobbying Against Regulation

And just as Big Tobacco had spent decades fighting warning labels, funding doubt about cancer research, and capturing regulatory agencies, the food divisions employed the same lobbying infrastructure to fight nutritional transparency, resist labeling requirements, and push back against any government effort to limit what could be marketed to children or added to food.

The tobacco companies eventually divested from the food industry — Philip Morris spun off Kraft in 2007 — but by then, the damage was done. The hyper-palatable product formulations they pioneered had become the industry standard. Today, more than half of all calories consumed by Americans come from ultra-processed foods. The playbook didn't leave when the tobacco companies did. It became the norm.

Part IV: The Low-Fat Disaster

Running parallel to the tobacco takeover of the food industry was one of the most consequential blunders in the history of public health policy.

In 1977, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs — known as the McGovern Committee — issued its landmark Dietary Goals for the United States, advising Americans to slash their fat intake to no more than 30 percent of total calories and replace those calories with carbohydrates. Three years later, the first official Dietary Guidelines for Americans codified that advice into national policy.

The logic seemed sound at the time. Early research had linked saturated fat and cholesterol to elevated blood cholesterol and, by extension, heart disease. Fat is more calorie-dense than carbohydrates — nine calories per gram versus four — so reducing fat seemed like a straightforward way to reduce both heart disease risk and caloric intake.

But the guidelines were based on indirect and incomplete evidence, and they ignored significant dissent within the scientific community. Worse, the nuance in the original recommendation — reduce saturated fat, not all fat — was lost almost immediately as the message spread through media, marketing, and doctors' offices. What Americans heard was simple and absolute: fat is bad, and the less you eat, the healthier you'll be.

The Food Industry's Gift

For the newly tobacco-owned food industry, this was an extraordinary gift. Manufacturers responded by flooding grocery stores with low-fat and fat-free versions of everything: cookies, yogurt, salad dressings, frozen meals, snack bars. The labels screamed "fat-free" and consumers, convinced they'd found a guilt-free pass, ate them in enormous quantities.

There was just one problem. Fat carries flavor, moisture, and texture. When you remove it, food tastes like cardboard. The solution was to replace the fat with sugar, refined starches, and chemical additives. A fat-free cookie might have even more calories than the original — the fat was gone, but it had been swapped for simple carbohydrates that spiked blood sugar, triggered insulin release, and were efficiently converted to body fat.

Americans dutifully followed the guidelines. They cut their fat intake. And they got fatter and sicker than ever before.

The Inflection Point

The data is stark. NHANES surveys show that adult obesity rates in the United States were relatively stable at around 15 percent for decades. Then, beginning in roughly 1980 — the exact moment the low-fat guidelines took effect — obesity rates bent sharply upward, more than doubling to over 30 percent in just twenty years. That's not a gradual drift. It's an inflection point, and it coincides almost perfectly with the convergence of two forces: federal policy pushing Americans away from fat and toward refined carbohydrates, and a tobacco-controlled food industry engineering products to be as addictive as possible.

Type 2 diabetes followed the same curve. Heart disease, the very condition the low-fat guidelines were supposed to prevent, did not decline at the rate hoped for. Metabolic syndrome became epidemic. By the 2000s, nutrition researchers were openly acknowledging that the low-fat experiment had backfired dramatically.

It wasn't until the 2000 Dietary Guidelines that the government began walking back the advice, shifting from "low-fat" to "moderate fat" and acknowledging for the first time the adverse effects of low-fat diets. The 2015 guidelines finally stopped setting a cap on total fat intake altogether. But by then, three decades of damage had been done, and the processed food industry — built on cheap refined carbohydrates and engineered palatability — had no reason to change.

Part V: The Bill Comes Due

The consequences of these converging forces — industrialized agriculture optimized for cheap calories, a food supply reformulated by tobacco companies for maximum addictiveness, and three decades of misguided dietary policy — are now measured in trillions of dollars and millions of lives.

The CDC reports that 60 percent of American adults now live with at least one chronic disease, and 40 percent have two or more. The nation's annual healthcare expenditures have ballooned to approximately $4.9 trillion, with roughly 90 percent of that spending going to people with chronic and mental health conditions. A 2025 report from the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease estimated that chronic illness could cost the United States $47 trillion over the next 15 years. Between 2024 and 2025, total health expenditure rose 7 percent to over $5.6 trillion — roughly 18.5 percent of the entire U.S. economy.

These aren't obscure diseases. They're the ones you see everywhere: obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, certain cancers, fatty liver disease, kidney disease, and a growing list of metabolic conditions that barely existed at these rates a half-century ago. Many of these illnesses are not genetic destiny. They are the predictable downstream effects of a food system that was re-engineered, for profit, to prioritize cravability over nutrition and volume over quality.

Ultra-processed foods now make up the majority of calories consumed in the American diet. These products — assembled from industrial ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, emulsifiers, artificial flavors, and dozens of additives that don't exist in any kitchen — are cheap, shelf-stable, aggressively marketed, and ubiquitous. They fill school cafeterias, hospital vending machines, gas station shelves, and the center aisles of every grocery store in the country. For many Americans, particularly in low-income communities where fresh food is scarce and processed food is subsidized and abundant, they're not a choice. They're the default.

Part VI: The Pharmaceutical Windfall — Treating Symptoms, Not Causes

If the food industry created the crisis, the pharmaceutical industry learned how to monetize it in perpetuity. Rather than addressing the root cause — a food supply engineered for addiction and stripped of nutritional value — the medical establishment settled into a far more profitable rhythm: manage the symptoms with drugs, indefinitely, and never seriously challenge the dietary environment producing the patients.

Statins: The Most Profitable Drug Class in History

No drug better illustrates this dynamic than statins.

Pfizer's Lipitor (atorvastatin), approved in 1997, became the bestselling pharmaceutical product in human history. Over its roughly fifteen years of patent protection, Lipitor alone generated more than $125 billion in sales. At its peak in 2006, it brought in $12.9 billion in a single year — roughly a quarter of Pfizer's entire annual revenue. To this day, statins as a class remain among the most prescribed medications in the world, with over 200 million prescriptions written annually in the United States alone. The U.S. healthcare system spends approximately $10 billion a year on statins, with patients paying an additional $3 billion out-of-pocket. The American Heart Association's guidelines now recommend that anyone with a 7.5 percent or higher ten-year risk for heart attack be prescribed a statin — a threshold so broad it effectively doubles the eligible population.

The marketing pitch is straightforward: statins lower LDL cholesterol, and high LDL cholesterol is associated with heart disease. The implication, repeated so often it has become medical gospel, is that taking a statin meaningfully reduces your personal risk of a heart attack or death.

The actual numbers tell a more complicated story. Statin efficacy is typically reported in relative terms: a "26 percent reduction in mortality," for instance. That sounds dramatic. But when you look at the absolute numbers from the landmark trials, the picture shifts. In the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study (WOSCOPS), one of the foundational statin trials, the mortality rate dropped from 4.2 percent in the control group to 3.1 percent in the statin group over five years. That's an absolute reduction of 1.1 percent — meaning roughly 91 out of 100 people who took the drug for five years received no mortality benefit. The number needed to treat (NNT) — the number of patients who must take the drug for one person to benefit — was about 91 to prevent one death.

As guidelines have expanded statin use to lower- and lower-risk populations, the NNT has gotten worse. One analysis found that under 2016 prescribing guidelines, the NNT to prevent a single cardiovascular event in a primary prevention population had ballooned to 400. That means 399 out of 400 people taking the drug daily for years will see no cardiovascular benefit from it. For lower-risk individuals — the vast population now being swept into statin eligibility — a study in the British Journal of General Practice calculated an NNT of 138 people treated for five years to prevent one death, and 155 people treated to prevent one stroke.

Meanwhile, the side effects are not trivial. Common complaints include muscle pain, fatigue, cognitive issues, and sleep disturbance. Statins are also associated with an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes — the very disease most often co-occurring with the cardiovascular conditions statins are supposed to prevent. Rarer but serious adverse effects include liver damage and a muscle-wasting condition called rhabdomyolysis. While a 2020 study (the SAMSON trial) suggested that up to 90 percent of statin side effects may be attributable to the nocebo effect — patients experiencing symptoms because they expect them — the debate over real-world side effect rates versus clinical trial data remains active. What's not debatable is that most people prescribed statins will need to take them for life, generating a permanent revenue stream for an industry built on chronic disease management.

None of this is to say statins are useless. For people who have already had a heart attack or stroke — secondary prevention — the evidence for benefit is considerably stronger. But for the tens of millions of otherwise healthy Americans now taking a daily statin based on a risk calculator, the question that rarely gets asked is the obvious one: if the primary driver of their elevated cholesterol is a diet dominated by ultra-processed food, why is the first-line treatment a pill rather than a serious intervention in what they're eating?

The answer, of course, is that pills are profitable and dietary change is not.

GLP-1 Drugs: The Next Trillion-Dollar Bet

If statins represent the pharmaceutical industry's first great harvest from the food crisis, GLP-1 receptor agonists — drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound — represent the second, and it's shaping up to be even larger.

Originally developed to manage blood sugar in type 2 diabetes patients, GLP-1 drugs work by mimicking a gut hormone that signals fullness to the brain, slows gastric emptying, and reduces appetite. The weight loss results, typically 15 to 20 percent of body weight, are genuinely dramatic, and the drugs have been embraced with an enthusiasm bordering on euphoria. By 2025, approximately one in eight American adults reported taking a GLP-1 medication. Eli Lilly's CEO estimated that 20 to 25 million patients were currently on the drugs from the two major manufacturers alone.

The revenue numbers are staggering. In just the first quarter of 2025, Novo Nordisk's Ozempic generated nearly $5 billion and Wegovy brought in $2.6 billion. Eli Lilly's competing drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, generated $3.8 billion and $2.3 billion respectively in the same quarter. By the end of 2024, the leading GLP-1 products had accumulated $71 billion in cumulative U.S. revenue, and analysts project that figure will reach $470 billion by the end of 2030. The weight-loss drug market alone is expected to grow to $100 billion annually by the end of the decade. These are numbers that would make Lipitor blush.

But there are complications, and they're significant.

The side effects are widespread. Gastrointestinal issues — nausea, vomiting, diarrhea — are the most common, and they're not mild for many users. More concerning is what happens to the body beyond the scale. Research shows that as much as 40 percent of all weight lost on GLP-1 drugs is lean muscle mass, not fat. This muscle wasting can lead to sarcopenia — a condition that compromises balance, metabolism, and bone strength, particularly dangerous in older adults. The cosmetic effects have become so pronounced they've earned their own term: "Ozempic face," describing the hollowed, sunken look that results from rapid fat and muscle loss in the face. Hair loss, dehydration, and nutritional deficiencies are also common enough to have spawned an entire secondary market for supplements, electrolyte products, and protein shakes marketed specifically to GLP-1 users.

Then there's the durability problem. These drugs are designed as lifelong medications. Stop taking them, and the weight comes back — fast. A JAMA study found that nearly 47 percent of diabetic patients and 65 percent of non-diabetic patients stopped taking their GLP-1 within a year. Fewer than one in four patients remained on the medication after twelve months. When people quit, they rapidly regain fat, but the muscle they lost doesn't come back nearly as easily. The result is a body composition that may be worse than where they started — less muscle, more fat, and a slower metabolism.

And the cost is breathtaking. Wegovy's list price has been over $1,300 a month, and Ozempic over $1,000. Even with price cuts announced for 2027, these drugs remain among the most expensive chronic medications available — and they're intended for permanent use.

The Perverse Logic

Step back and look at the full picture. The food industry, shaped by tobacco-industry playbooks, engineered products to be maximally addictive, flooding the market with hyper-palatable ultra-processed food that drives overconsumption, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The government, through misguided dietary guidelines, accelerated the problem by pushing Americans toward the very refined carbohydrates that feed the cycle. And now the pharmaceutical industry sells the country two classes of drugs — one for the cholesterol and one for the weight — to manage the predictable consequences of a food supply that has never been reformed.

At no point in this chain does anyone with significant financial incentive suggest the obvious: stop eating the food that's making you sick.

There's a reason for that. A patient who changes their diet is a customer lost. A patient who takes a statin every morning for thirty years is a revenue stream. A patient who injects a GLP-1 every week at over a thousand dollars a month — potentially for life — is a windfall. The system isn't broken. For the companies profiting from it, it's working exactly as designed: the food industry creates the patients, and the pharmaceutical industry treats them, and neither has any interest in the other going away.

The United States spends more on healthcare than any other nation on earth. Chronic diseases driven largely by diet and lifestyle consume the vast majority of that spending. And the primary medical response remains pharmaceutical management of symptoms rather than elimination of causes. It is, by any honest accounting, one of the most lucrative feedback loops in the history of commerce.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The history of food in America is not a story of individual failure. It's a story of systems — agricultural, corporate, regulatory, and political — that were built, rebuilt, and exploited across decades, often with the best of intentions and sometimes with none at all.

We solved the wrong problem. The post-war fear of famine led us to build an agricultural system that could produce virtually unlimited calories. Then the tobacco industry figured out how to make those calories irresistible. Then the government told everyone to eat more of exactly the kind of food that system was designed to produce. And when the predictable diseases arrived, the pharmaceutical industry stepped in — not to fix the cause, but to sell a lifetime of treatment for the consequences. Now we spend trillions of dollars a year on this cycle, and every player in the chain profits from its continuation.

Understanding this history doesn't fix it. But it makes one thing clear: what we're facing isn't a mystery. It's a consequence. And the solutions won't come from the same playbook — or the same players — that got us here.

Sources include research from the University of Kansas (Fazzino et al., published in Addiction, 2023), CDC chronic disease data, NHANES survey data, USDA dietary guidelines archives, historical reporting on the RJR Nabisco and Philip Morris acquisitions, WOSCOPS and JUPITER statin trial data, British Journal of General Practice primary prevention analyses, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly quarterly earnings reports, I-MAK GLP-1 revenue projections, JAMA GLP-1 adherence data, and RAND American Life Panel survey data on GLP-1 usage.

Lose the Fat First. Then Build the Muscle. Here's Why.

You've been told you can do both at once. That's technically true — and practically terrible advice.

Let me save you months of spinning your wheels.

If you're carrying extra body fat and you want to look better, feel better, and actually build a body you're proud of — there's an order of operations that works. And no, it's not "just eat clean and lift heavy and hope for the best."

It's this: Lose the fat first. Then shift your focus to building muscle.

I know that's not the sexy "have it all" answer. But it's the one that actually gets results. Here's why.

Fat Loss Is Fast. Muscle Gain Is Painfully Slow.

This is the part nobody wants to hear.

A well-structured fat loss phase can produce visible, measurable results in weeks. Research consistently supports that a safe, sustainable rate of fat loss is about 1 to 2 pounds per week (up to about 1% of bodyweight a week) — sometimes more in the early stages for people carrying significant excess weight. That's 8 to 16 pounds in two months. You'll see it. Your clothes will fit differently. People will notice.

Now compare that to muscle gain.

Beginners — the people who build muscle the fastest — can expect roughly 1 to 2 pounds of muscle per month under ideal conditions. Intermediate lifters? Maybe half a pound to a pound. Advanced trainees with several years of lifting under their belts? They're looking at as little as a quarter pound per month.

Read that again. A quarter pound of muscle in a month.

So when someone says "I want to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time," what they're really signing up for is the slowest version of both processes happening simultaneously. You'll barely see the fat come off. You'll barely see the muscle appear. And after three months of grinding, you'll look in the mirror and wonder what you've been doing wrong.

You haven't been doing anything wrong. You've just been fighting biology.

Your Body Builds Muscle Better When You're Already Lean

This is the part most people — and a lot of trainers — completely overlook.

Your body fat percentage directly influences something called nutrient partitioning — essentially, where the calories you eat end up. Do they feed your muscles? Or do they get stored as more fat?

Here's the short version: when you're leaner, your body is more insulin sensitive. Skeletal muscle is responsible for roughly 60 to 70 percent of the body's total insulin-stimulated glucose uptake. When insulin sensitivity is high, your muscles are better at absorbing the nutrients you eat — amino acids, glucose, everything they need to grow. When it's low (which happens at higher body fat levels), more of what you eat gets shuttled into fat storage instead.

Research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism has shown that relative muscle mass is inversely associated with insulin resistance. In plain English: the leaner you are, the better your body uses what you eat to build and maintain muscle.

So when someone who's 30 percent body fat tries to "bulk" and gain muscle, they're fighting an uphill battle. A significant portion of the extra calories they eat to fuel muscle growth gets diverted to fat cells instead. They end up fatter with marginal muscle gains to show for it.

But someone who drops to a leaner starting point first? Their body is primed to build. The same surplus of calories produces a higher ratio of muscle to fat gain. It's not a small difference — it's the difference between a productive training phase and a frustrating one.

Body Recomposition Is Real — But It's Not For Everyone

Let me be fair. Losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time — called "body recomposition" — is absolutely possible. Research in the Strength and Conditioning Journal has confirmed that even trained individuals can achieve it under the right conditions.

But here's what the research also tells us: it works best for specific groups. Beginners who are new to resistance training are essentially in a state where almost any stimulus produces adaptation. Their bodies are so primed for change that they can pull stored energy from fat while simultaneously building new muscle tissue.

For everyone else? It's a grind.

Body recomposition is, by definition, a slower strategy than tackling fat loss or muscle gain individually. You're splitting your body's resources between two competing goals. And as you get more experienced with training, the window for simultaneous progress narrows dramatically.

If you've been lifting for a year or more and you're not significantly overweight, trying to recomp is like driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. You'll move, technically. But you won't like the pace.

The Psychological Advantage Nobody Talks About

Here's something that doesn't show up in the research but matters just as much: momentum.

When you commit to a focused fat loss phase first, you see results quickly. Your face changes. Your waistline shrinks. You feel lighter on your feet. Your energy improves. Your sleep gets better. People ask what you've been doing.

That feedback loop is powerful. It builds confidence and buy-in. It proves to you that what you're doing is working.

Now contrast that with a body recomposition approach where you're trying to do everything at once. The scale doesn't move. Your measurements barely change. You might look slightly different after three months, but it's subtle enough that you're not sure if it's real or just lighting.

That uncertainty kills adherence. And adherence is the single most important factor in any fitness outcome.

Get lean, feel the wins, ride the momentum — then pivot to building.

The Health Argument Is Just as Strong

This isn't only about aesthetics. Dropping body fat before focusing on muscle gain has real metabolic advantages.

Excess body fat is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation, disrupted hormone signaling, and impaired metabolic function. Research has linked higher body fat to reduced insulin sensitivity, and poor insulin sensitivity has been associated with greater risk of muscle loss over time. A longitudinal study from the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study following over 6,000 subjects found that individuals with higher insulin sensitivity had significantly lower risk of losing muscle mass — those in the highest insulin sensitivity group had roughly 35 percent lower risk of muscle loss compared to the lowest group.

By losing fat first, you're not just "looking better to bulk." You're creating a metabolic environment where muscle growth can actually happen efficiently. You're lowering inflammation, improving hormone profiles, and making your body a better machine for building lean tissue.

So What Does This Actually Look Like?

Here's the practical framework:

Phase 1 — Lose the fat. Create a moderate calorie deficit (we aim for 0.5-1.0% of body weight lost per week). Keep protein high — around .8-1.0g per pound of body weight daily. Lift weights and sleep well to preserve muscle mass. Do this for as long as you need to get to an optimal body fat percentage. For men, mid teens, woman low to mid 20s

Phase 2 — Transition. Titrate calories back up by running a reverse diet. Let your metabolism stabilize. Your hormones recalibrate. Your training energy comes back.

Phase 3 — Build the muscle. Shift to a modest calorie surplus (200 to 400 calories above maintenance). Continue high protein intake. Train with progressive overload. Now your body is lean, insulin sensitive, and primed to do exactly what you want it to — grow.

The whole process isn't complicated. But it does require patience and the willingness to focus on one goal at a time.

The Bottom Line

Trying to lose fat and build muscle simultaneously isn't wrong — it's just inefficient for most people beyond the beginner stage.

Fat loss is faster, more visible, and creates the metabolic conditions for better muscle growth down the line. Muscle gain is more successful when your body is already lean, insulin sensitive, and hormonally optimized.

Do the hard thing first. Get lean. Then build on a foundation that's actually ready for it.

Your future, more muscular self will thank you.

Tyler Nicholson is the founder of Nicholson Human Performance, a health and wellness coaching practice based in Centennial, Colorado. If you're ready to stop guessing and start seeing real results, schedule a call and let's build your plan.

The Boring Diet Secret Nobody Wants to Hear

I'm about to say something that will get me uninvited from every foodie dinner party in Colorado.

The people I coach who actually hit their nutritional goals — and keep hitting them, month after month, year after year — eat boring food. Not exclusively. Not miserably. But consistently? Their meals are simple, repetitive, and shockingly unremarkable.

And new research is finally catching up to what I've been watching play out in real time for over a decade.

The Science Just Showed Up to the Party

A study published in Health Psychology this year tracked the food logs of 112 adults enrolled in a structured weight loss program. The researchers measured how repetitive each person's eating patterns were over 12 weeks. The results weren't subtle: people who repeated the same meals lost an average of 5.9% of their body weight, compared to just 4.3% for those who ate a more varied diet. And for every 100-calorie increase in day-to-day fluctuation, weight loss dropped by about 0.6%.

Lead author Charlotte Hagerman put it plainly: routines around eating reduce the burden of constant decision-making and make healthy choices feel more automatic.

That's a researcher's way of saying what I tell my clients all the time: stop making every meal a project.

Why Boring Works (And It's Not What You Think)

Here's what I've seen over and over again with people who sustain real results.

They become ridiculously efficient. When you eat the same handful of meals, meal prep turns from a Sunday afternoon ordeal into a 30-minute autopilot session. You already know the grocery list. You already know the cook times. You're not Googling "healthy dinner ideas" at 5:47 PM with a hungry family staring at you.

They know exactly what they're eating. No guessing on calories. No eyeballing macros. When your Tuesday dinner is the same as last Tuesday's dinner, you already know what's in it. This is the unsexy foundation that makes nutrition tracking actually work — not the fancy app, not the barcode scanner, but the fact that you've already done the math.

They don't accidentally overeat. This one is backed by a well-documented phenomenon in food science called sensory-specific satiety. When you eat the same foods repeatedly, the pleasure response to those foods naturally decreases. Your body says "yep, that was good, I'm done" instead of "ooh, what's next?" Research going back to the early 1980s has shown that food variety actually drives overconsumption — in one classic study, people ate 60% more when offered a four-course meal compared to a single-course meal of the same food. The modern buffet isn't just convenient. It's an overeating machine.

This doesn't mean your food tastes bad. It means your food doesn't need to be a sensory fireworks show to be satisfying. A well-seasoned chicken thigh with roasted carrots and half an avocado is genuinely enjoyable. It's just not engineered to make you eat past the point of fullness.

What These Meals Actually Look Like

Here's the thing that surprises people: boring doesn't mean bland. The meals my most consistent clients eat are built from single-ingredient, whole foods that taste great on their own.

Chicken thighs. Flank steak. Roasted sweet potatoes. Ripe tomatoes with salt. Sautéed broccoli. Macadamia nuts. Avocado. Wild-caught salmon. Scrambled eggs.

Notice what's missing? Sauces with 14 ingredients. Complex recipes that require specialty items. Meals that took longer to cook than to eat.

These are foods that need nothing more than salt, pepper, olive oil, and maybe some garlic. They're nutritionally dense, easy to prep in bulk, and — critically — they don't trigger the kind of "just one more bite" response that hyper-palatable, multi-sensory meals do.

The Contrarian Truth

The wellness industry has an obsession with novelty. New superfoods. New recipes. New meal plans every week. Social media is flooded with "What I Eat in a Day" content that features twelve different meals, all beautifully plated, all wildly impractical for a normal human being with a job.

Meanwhile, the people getting real results are quietly eating their fourth rotisserie chicken of the week and wondering what all the fuss is about.

I'm not saying you should never try a new restaurant or cook something adventurous on a Saturday night. Variety has its place — for enjoyment, for social connection, for making sure you're covering your micronutrient bases over time.

But if you're struggling with consistency? If every week feels like you're starting over because last week's meal plan was too complicated to sustain?

Simplify. Pick five or six meals you like well enough, that are easy to make, and that you can tell me the calorie and protein count of without pulling out your phone. Rotate them. Get efficient at prepping them. Let the boredom work for you instead of fighting against it.

Your nutrition doesn't need to be exciting. It needs to be repeatable.

The Cheapest Longevity Test You'll Ever Take

Bryan Johnson spends over $2 million a year trying to reverse aging. But one of his go-to assessments costs exactly nothing — and you can do it right now in your living room.

It's the one-leg balance test.

At a recent event in San Francisco, Johnson had an entire audience close their eyes and stand on one leg while he timed them. His framework is simple: hold it for 0–7 seconds and your body is functioning like a 60–80 year old. Hit 7–15 seconds and you're in the 40–60 range. Push past 15–30 seconds and you're operating like someone in their 20s to 40s.

Is it a perfect measure of biological age? No. But here's the thing — the science behind it is remarkably strong.

Why This Actually Matters

A landmark 2022 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine followed over 1,700 adults aged 51–75 for seven years. The finding: people who couldn't hold a single-leg stance for 10 seconds had an 84% higher risk of dying from any cause within the next decade — even after adjusting for age, sex, BMI, and existing health conditions.

That's not a small signal. That's a flashing red light.

A 2024 Mayo Clinic study took it further. Researchers measured grip strength, walking gait, and balance across adults over 50 and found that single-leg balance declined faster than any other physical metric — dropping roughly 2.2 seconds per decade on your non-dominant leg. They called it the single best indicator of neuromuscular aging.

The reason balance is so telling is that it isn't just one system at work. Standing on one leg demands real-time coordination between your vision, your inner ear (vestibular system), and the proprioceptive nerve network running through your feet, ankles, and core. When any of those systems start to degrade — and they do, starting in your 50s — balance is the first thing to go. Before strength. Before walking speed. Before most people notice anything is off.

And that degradation has real-world consequences. Falls are the leading cause of injury for Americans over 65. Roughly 3 million older adults end up in the ER every year from falls, and the CDC estimates $50 billion in annual medical costs from non-fatal falls alone.

What Bryan Gets Right

Say what you will about Johnson's more extreme protocols — the guy nails the fundamentals here. Balance isn't flashy. It doesn't make for great Instagram content. But as a window into how your nervous system, musculoskeletal system, and brain are holding up over time, it's one of the most honest assessments you can take.

The research is clear: balance is an early warning system for aging. It starts declining before the things we typically measure and worry about. Training it isn't optional if you want to stay independent, active, and injury-free as you get older.

3 Ways to Start Training Balance and Stability Today

This is one of the primary reasons that at NHP, almost every athlete we program for — regardless of age or goal — gets single-leg work appropriate to their capacity. It's not an afterthought or accessory fluff. It's foundational. The result is better balance, greater stability, and long-term resiliency that carries over into everything else you do.

Here's where to start if you're training on your own:

1. Single-Leg Stands (Progress the Challenge)

Start where you are. Stand on one leg for 30 seconds with eyes open. Too easy? Close your eyes. Still easy? Stand on a pillow or folded towel to create an unstable surface. The goal is to find the version that's genuinely challenging — that slight wobble means your stabilizers are working. Do 3 sets per leg, daily. This one is non-negotiable.

2. Split Squats and Single-Leg RDLs

Balance isn't just about standing still. You need stability under load and through movement. Split squats build single-leg strength while forcing your ankle and hip stabilizers to fire. Single-leg Romanian deadlifts challenge your posterior chain and proprioception simultaneously. Start with bodyweight. Add load when the movement feels controlled. Two to three sets of 8–10 reps per leg, two to three times a week.

3. Barefoot Ground Work

This one is underrated. Spend time moving on the ground barefoot — think Turkish get-ups, crawling patterns, or even just sitting down and standing back up without using your hands (which is its own longevity test). Working barefoot wakes up the small stabilizing muscles in your feet and ankles that spend all day dormant inside shoes. These muscles are the foundation of your balance system. Even 5–10 minutes a few times a week makes a measurable difference.

Beyond dedicated ground work, consider training in barefoot-style (minimalist) shoes. Traditional cushioned shoes do a lot of the stabilizing work for your foot, which sounds nice until you realize those small intrinsic muscles are atrophying from disuse. Minimalist shoes let your foot spread, grip, and respond to the ground the way nature intended — reinforcing your balance system with every step, rep, and set.

The bottom line: You don't need a $2 million protocol to know where you stand — literally. Close your eyes, stand on one leg, and start the clock. Whatever that number is, own it. Then train to make it better

Your future self will thank you.

Want help building a program that addresses balance, strength, and overall body composition? NHP Coaching Consultation — let's talk about where you are and where you want to be.

Blood Work Series: Part 5 — OmegaCheck

The Fat That Controls Inflammation, Brain Function, and Long-Term Health

If there’s one blood test that consistently surprises people, it’s the OmegaCheck.

Most people think they’re “doing fine” because they occasionally eat salmon or take a fish oil here and there.

Then we run this test—and realize their internal environment is still heavily skewed toward inflammation.

That’s the gap OmegaCheck fills.

What the OmegaCheck Test Actually Measures

The OmegaCheck isn’t guessing based on your diet. It’s measuring what’s actually built into your cells.

Specifically, it looks at the fatty acid composition of your red blood cell membranes—giving us a long-term snapshot of your omega-3 and omega-6 status.

That includes:

• Omega-3 Index (EPA + DHA)

• EPA (Eicosapentaenoic Acid)

• DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid)

• Omega-6 to Omega-3 Ratio

• AA/EPA Ratio (inflammation balance marker)

• Total Omega-3 levels

These aren’t abstract numbers—they directly influence how your body behaves day to day.

From the data we use with clients:

• Optimal Omega-3 Index: 8–12% (ideally >10%)

• AA/EPA Ratio: ~1.5–2.5 (lower = less inflammation)

• Omega-6 : Omega-3 Ratio: ~2–3:1 (most people are 10–25:1)

That last one is where things go off the rails for most people.

The Real Problem: Omega-6 Dominance

Modern diets are flooded with omega-6 fats—primarily from seed oils and ultra-processed foods.

These fats aren’t “bad” in isolation. But in excess, they shift your body toward a pro-inflammatory state.

And here’s the key:

Your body doesn’t just react to inflammation—it builds itself out of it.

Every cell membrane, every signaling pathway, every recovery process is influenced by this balance.

If omega-6 dominates, inflammation becomes your baseline.

Why Omega-3s Matter (More Than You Think)

Omega-3s—especially EPA and DHA—are not just “healthy fats.”

They are regulators of inflammation, brain function, and cellular signaling.

DHA: Structural + Anti-Inflammatory Control

DHA is critical for:

• Brain tissue integrity

• Nervous system function

• Retinal health

• Cell membrane fluidity

It also plays a major role in resolving inflammation, not just suppressing it.

Low DHA → poorer recovery, slower healing, and reduced neurological efficiency.

EPA: Mental Health + Inflammation Modulation

EPA is where things get really interesting.

It’s strongly associated with:

• Improved mood stability

• Reduced symptoms of depression

• Better stress resilience

• Lower systemic inflammation

EPA works upstream—it helps regulate the inflammatory cascade before it gets out of control.

If DHA is structural, EPA is regulatory.

You need both.

Omega-3s and Major Diseases

This is where the conversation gets serious.

Suboptimal omega-3 status is associated with increased risk of:

• Cardiovascular disease

• Cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s

• Depression and anxiety disorders

• Autoimmune conditions

• Chronic inflammatory diseases

• Metabolic dysfunction

On the flip side, higher Omega-3 Index levels (>8–10%) are consistently linked to:

• Lower cardiovascular mortality

• Improved brain health

• Reduced inflammation markers

• Better long-term outcomes across multiple systems

This is one of the few interventions that touches every major system in the body at once.

What This Actually Feels Like (When You Fix It)

This is the part most people care about—and where things click.

When someone moves from a poor omega profile to an optimized one, they typically report:

• Less joint stiffness and nagging aches

• Faster recovery from training

• More stable energy throughout the day

• Improved mood and emotional control

• Clearer thinking and better focus

• Reduced “background inflammation” (bloating, puffiness, etc.)

It’s not a stimulant effect. It’s a removal of friction in your system.

Things just start working better.

Why We Run OmegaCheck in the Program

We don’t guess.

We measure → intervene → re-test.

The OmegaCheck gives us:

1. A baseline of your inflammatory environment

2. Objective targets to aim for

3. Proof that your protocol is working

Most people assume they’re “good enough” here.

They’re not.

And this is one of the fastest levers we can pull to improve how you feel and perform.

How We Optimize It

In practice, we’ve found a very consistent pattern:

3–4g per day of combined EPA + DHA reliably moves people into optimal ranges.

This is higher than standard recommendations—and that’s intentional.

We’re not aiming for “adequate.”

We’re aiming for optimal physiology.

Alongside that, we focus on:

• Reducing seed oil intake

• Eliminating ultra-processed foods

• Prioritizing high-quality animal protein and whole foods

• Using high-quality, properly dosed omega-3 supplements

Then we re-test and adjust.

Bottom Line

The OmegaCheck is one of the most actionable tests we run.

Because it answers a simple but critical question:

Is your body wired for inflammation—or resilience?

And once you see the data, the path forward becomes very clear.

If you’re serious about optimizing your health, performance, and long-term outcomes, this is not something to leave to chance.

Measure it. Fix it. Feel the difference.

Case Study: Leaner, Stronger, and More Balanced - An Optimization Success Story

Let me tell you about Jen.

She’s 44. Already fit. Already doing a lot of things right.

And yet—like a lot of high-performing people—I knew there was still another level available to her.

Not through more effort.
Through better systems.

The Starting Point

When Jen came in, she wasn’t someone starting from scratch.

She was already lean, active, and disciplined.

But here’s the thing most people miss:

“Fit” doesn’t mean optimized.

Her initial DEXA scan showed:

• Body fat: 18.9%

• Lean mass: 99.7 lbs

• Fat mass: 24.6 lbs

That’s already solid.

But we weren’t chasing “good.”
We were chasing better function, better balance, and better long-term outcomes.

The Goal

Not weight loss.

Not scale obsession.

The goal was simple:

👉 Improve body composition
👉 Build muscle and strength
👉 Reduce unnecessary fat
👉 Improve symmetry and distribution
👉 Do it in a way that’s sustainable

The Outcome (7 Months Later)

Here’s what actually happened:

• Weight: 130.3 → 131.6 lbs (+1.3 lbs)

• Fat mass: 24.6 → 23.7 lbs (–0.9 lbs)

• Lean mass: 99.7 → 101.8 lbs (+2.1 lbs)

• Body fat %: 18.9 → 18.0%

Let that sink in:

She gained weight… and got leaner.

That’s what actual progress looks like.

But It Gets Better (The Stuff That Actually Matters)

Most people stop at weight and body fat.

We don’t.

1. Visceral Fat: Eliminated

Jen’s visceral fat (the stuff linked to metabolic disease) dropped to:

👉 0.00 lbs

That’s as good as it gets.

2. Fat Distribution Improved (Big Time)

Her android/gynoid ratio shifted from:

• 0.45 → 0.34

Translation:

👉 Less fat stored around the abdomen
👉 More favorable (and healthier) fat distribution

This is one of the most underrated markers of long-term health.

3. Muscle Balance Fixed

She came in with noticeable asymmetry between arms.

• Before: ~0.5–0.7 lb difference

• After: ~0.1–0.2 lb difference

That’s not just aesthetic.

That’s:

• Better movement quality

• Lower injury risk

• More efficient strength output

What Did She Actually Do?

Here’s where most people expect something complicated.

It wasn’t.

1. We Built a Smart Training System

Not random workouts.

Not chasing sweat.

A structured program that:

• Progressively built muscle

• Addressed imbalances

• Fit into her life

2. We Focused on Food Quality (Not Macros)

This is the part that surprises people:

👉 She didn’t track calories
👉 She didn’t track macros

Instead, we focused on:

• High-quality, whole foods

• Consistent meal structure

• Protein-forward eating

3. We Controlled the Variables That Actually Matter

Sleep
Consistency
Meal timing
Training intent

That’s it.

No extremes. No gimmicks.

4. And Yes… She Ate Ice Cream

Almost every week.

On purpose.

Because the goal isn’t restriction.

The goal is control.

When your system is dialed in, you don’t need perfection to get results.

The Real Takeaway

Jen didn’t succeed because she worked harder.

She succeeded because:

👉 She followed a system
👉 She stayed consistent
👉 She focused on the right levers

This is what most people are missing.

They’re doing a lot of things right…

…but not the things that actually move the needle.

If You’re Already “Fit” But Not Where You Want to Be

This is your situation.

You’re not broken.
You’re just missing a few key pieces.

And once those are in place?

Progress gets a lot more predictable.

If you want help identifying what those levers are for you,
you can book a consultation here.

Blood Work Series Part 4: Testosterone

Strength. Drive. Resilience. Longevity.

When most people hear “testosterone,” they think muscles and aggression.

That’s a tiny slice of the story.

Testosterone is a foundational hormone for both men and women. It influences how you look, how you perform, how you recover, how you think, and even how you feel about your life.

Let’s break it down in plain English.

Why Testosterone Matters (Men and Women)

1. Lean Mass & Staying Lean

Testosterone:

• Increases muscle protein synthesis (your ability to build muscle tissue)

• Improves nutrient partitioning (more calories go to muscle, fewer to fat)

• Inhibits fat storage indirectly through better insulin sensitivity

More muscle = higher resting metabolic rate.
Higher metabolic rate = easier time staying lean.

Low testosterone?
Harder to build muscle. Easier to accumulate fat. Slower recovery.

2. Training Results in the Gym

Resistance training increases androgen receptor density in muscle tissue. Testosterone binds to those receptors and turns on the machinery that builds muscle.

If levels are optimal:

• Strength increases faster

• Recovery improves

• Adaptation to training is amplified

If levels are low:

• You can train hard… and spin your wheels.

3. Mood, Drive & Psychological Impact

Testosterone affects:

• Dopamine signaling (motivation and reward)

• Confidence and assertiveness

• Energy levels

• Resilience under stress

Chronically low testosterone is strongly associated with:

• Low mood

• Brain fog

• Irritability

• Reduced ambition

• Decreased libido

This applies to women as well. Women produce testosterone in smaller amounts, but it still plays a meaningful role in vitality and drive.

4. Fertility & Reproductive Health

In men:

• Necessary for sperm production (via stimulation of Sertoli cells)

• Supports libido and erectile function

In women:

• Supports ovarian function

• Plays a role in sexual desire

• Influences egg quality indirectly

Testosterone is not “just a male hormone.” It’s a human hormone.

Total Testosterone vs Free Testosterone

When we test testosterone, we usually measure:

Total Testosterone

All testosterone circulating in the bloodstream:

• Bound to SHBG (sex hormone binding globulin)

• Bound to albumin

• Unbound (free)

Free Testosterone

The small fraction not bound to proteins.

Free testosterone is what can actually:

• Enter cells

• Bind to androgen receptors

• Produce physiological effects

You can have normal total testosterone but low free testosterone if SHBG is high.

That’s why we test both.

Why We Test Testosterone in Women (Instead of Estrogen or Progesterone)

Estrogen and progesterone fluctuate dramatically across the menstrual cycle.

Testosterone fluctuates far less.

That makes it:

• Easier to interpret

• More stable

• More clinically useful as a baseline marker

For women, low testosterone can show up as:

• Low libido

• Low energy

• Reduced strength gains

• Difficulty building lean mass

And it often goes overlooked.

My Recent Results

• Total Testosterone: 783 ng/dL

• Free Testosterone: 88.7 pg/mL

That places me solidly in an optimized range for my age bracket — not by accident, but by habit design.

Let’s talk about how we influence this naturally.

How to Improve Testosterone Naturally

We always start here before discussing medical intervention.

1. Improve Sleep Quality & Duration

Mechanism:

• The majority of daily testosterone release happens during deep sleep.

• Sleep restriction can drop testosterone by 10–30% in just one week.

Less sleep → higher cortisol → suppressed gonadal signaling → lower testosterone.

Non-negotiable habit.

2. Train Intelligently

Testosterone responds best to:

• Progressive resistance training

• Large compound lifts

• Moderate training volume

• Controlled use of HIIT

Chronic excessive high-intensity training without recovery?
That can elevate cortisol and suppress testosterone.

More is not better. Better is better.

3. Lower Excess Body Fat

Fat tissue contains aromatase — an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen.

More body fat → more aromatization → lower usable testosterone.

This is one of the most overlooked drivers of suboptimal levels in men.

4. Match Nutrition to Training

Testosterone production requires:

• Adequate protein

• Sufficient dietary fat (especially cholesterol as a precursor)

• Strategic carbohydrate intake to manage cortisol and support training output

Chronic calorie deficits suppress testosterone.
Under-fueling high output training is a common mistake.

5. Optimize Vitamin D

Vitamin D acts more like a hormone than a vitamin.

Higher Vitamin D levels are correlated with:

• Higher total testosterone

• Improved androgen receptor sensitivity

Another reason we test and optimize. Check out more on Vit D here.

6. Manage Stress & Cortisol

Cortisol and testosterone have an inverse relationship.

Chronic sympathetic nervous system activation:

• Suppresses GnRH (from the brain)

• Suppresses LH (from the pituitary)

• Reduces testicular testosterone production

Translation:
Live in fight-or-flight long enough, testosterone drops.

Stress management isn’t “soft.”
It’s hormonal optimization.

When Natural Optimization Isn’t Enough

With clients, we:

1. Fix sleep

2. Fix training

3. Improve body composition

4. Optimize nutrition

5. Correct Vitamin D

6. Normalize stress response

We push levels as high as physiology will reasonably allow.

But if:

• Symptoms persist

• Labs remain suboptimal

• Lifestyle is truly dialed in

Then we guide the conversation toward testosterone replacement therapy (TRT).

For the right individual:

• It’s safe.

• It’s well-studied.

• It’s extremely effective.

The key is doing it responsibly, with proper monitoring and physician oversight.

TRT should never be the first step.

But it also shouldn’t be demonized when clinically appropriate.

The Bigger Picture

Testosterone isn’t about vanity.

It’s about:

• Strength

• Metabolic health

• Cognitive sharpness

• Drive

• Fertility

• Longevity

It’s one of the clearest reflections of whether your lifestyle supports your biology — or fights it.

And the good news?

Most of the levers that raise testosterone also improve every other major health marker.

Which is why we test it.
And why we optimize it deliberately.

Blood Work Series – Part 3: Cholesterol (And Why It’s Not What You Think)

Last week in Part 2 of the Blood Work Series, we talked about metabolic health — fasting glucose, HbA1c, and triglycerides — and how those numbers tell us whether sugar and fat are lingering in the bloodstream where they shouldn’t be.

Today we’re tackling cholesterol.

This is where things get controversial.

And confusing.

Let’s simplify it.

What Is a Standard Lipid Panel?

A standard lipid test (lipid panel) measures:

• Total Cholesterol

• HDL (High Density Lipoprotein)

• LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein)

• Triglycerides

Most doctors glance at LDL, circle it in red if it’s above 130, and start talking about statins.

But that’s an oversimplification.

Cholesterol itself is not the enemy.

It’s essential for:

• Hormone production

• Brain function

• Cell membrane integrity

• Vitamin D synthesis

If cholesterol were inherently dangerous, your body wouldn’t manufacture it.

HDL and LDL: What Are They Really?

Cholesterol doesn’t float freely in the blood. It’s transported inside lipoprotein particles.

• HDL is often labeled “good cholesterol” because higher levels are associated with lower cardiovascular risk.

• LDL is labeled “bad cholesterol,” but that framing is incomplete.

LDL’s job is to deliver cholesterol to tissues that need it.

The issue is not LDL itself.

The issue is what happens to it.

Does a Standard Lipid Panel Predict Heart Disease?

A standard lipid panel has limited predictive value on its own, especially in metabolically healthy individuals.

Many people who experience cardiac events have “normal” LDL levels.

Many people with elevated LDL never experience one.

Risk prediction improves dramatically when cholesterol numbers are combined with:

• Inflammation markers (like hs-CRP)

• Blood sugar markers

• Blood pressure

• Smoking status

• Body composition

• Family history

Cholesterol in isolation is a blunt tool.

Context matters.

The Real Problem: Small, Damaged LDL Particles

Not all LDL particles are created equal.

There are:

• Large, buoyant LDL particles (less concerning)

• Small, dense LDL particles (more atherogenic)

Small, dense LDL particles are more likely to:

• Penetrate the arterial wall

• Become oxidized

• Trigger inflammation

• Contribute to plaque formation

These particles tend to increase in the presence of:

• High sugar intake

• Insulin resistance

• Chronic inflammation

• Highly processed food intake

A standard lipid panel does not tell you particle size or particle number.

For that, you need an NMR Lipoprofile.

This test measures:

• LDL particle number (LDL-P)

• Particle size

• HDL particle count

That gives you a much clearer picture of actual cardiovascular risk than LDL-C alone.

Oxidation, Endothelial Dysfunction, and Plaque Formation

Here’s the mechanism most people never hear about.

Cholesterol does not randomly stick to arteries.

Plaque formation is typically a response to:

1. Endothelial dysfunction — damage to the inner lining of the artery

2. Oxidative stress

3. Inflammation

When the endothelial lining becomes damaged (often from high blood sugar, smoking, chronic stress, or inflammation), LDL particles can enter the arterial wall.

If those LDL particles become oxidized, the immune system responds.

That inflammatory response is what begins the atherosclerotic process.

So the issue isn’t cholesterol alone.

It’s oxidation + inflammation + vascular damage.

Fix the terrain, and the risk changes dramatically.

What About Lipoprotein(a)?

One of the most under-tested but highly predictive markers is Lipoprotein(a).

Lipoprotein(a) test, often abbreviated Lp(a), is largely genetically determined.

If elevated, it can:

• Increase clotting tendency

• Promote arterial plaque formation

• Increase lifetime cardiovascular risk

Diet and exercise have limited impact on Lp(a).

If yours is elevated, you need to know — especially if there is a strong family history of early heart disease.

Most standard labs do not include this.

It must be requested.

When LDL Really Matters: Familial Hypercholesterolemia

There is an important exception to the “LDL isn’t the whole story” conversation.

A small percentage of the population has Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH).

This is a genetic condition that causes extremely high LDL levels from a young age, often > 190–220 mg/dL consistently.

In those individuals:

• LDL levels absolutely matter

• Early plaque development is common

• Intervention is critical

This is not the majority of people.

But it’s important to acknowledge.

What About Low Cholesterol?

Chronically low total cholesterol is associated with:

• Higher all-cause mortality

• Increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke

• Depression

• Hormonal dysfunction

Many long-lived populations demonstrate cholesterol levels that would be flagged today.

This doesn’t mean “higher is always better.”

It means suppression at all costs is not the goal.

Resilience and metabolic health matter more than a single number.

What Are Ideal Cholesterol Numbers?

In a metabolically healthy individual with low inflammation:

• HDL: > 60 mg/dL

• LDL: 100–189 mg/dL

• Triglycerides: < 100 mg/dL

• Triglyceride : HDL ratio: ideally < 2

Inflammation must be low.

That’s the context piece most people miss.

High LDL + low inflammation is a very different picture than high LDL + high inflammation + high blood sugar.

My Numbers

From my most recent labs:

• Total Cholesterol: 217

• HDL: 48

• LDL: 155

By conventional standards, my LDL gets flagged.

But that’s incomplete without context:

• My triglycerides are low

• My metabolic markers are strong

• My diet is largely whole foods

• Inflammation is low

It’s also worth noting that my HDL is lower than I’d like it. Ideally as my current injuries heal I can transition back to more aerobic training, maybe tighten up my diet following the holiday season, and add a few points to my “good cholesterol.”

Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) Scan

If you want to know whether plaque is already present, one of the most useful tools available is a Coronary Artery Calcium Scan.

This low-radiation CT scan measures calcified plaque in the coronary arteries.

A score of:

• 0 → Very low near-term risk

• Higher scores → Increasing plaque burden

This does not predict future cholesterol behavior.

It tells you what’s happening right now.

For many people, a CAC scan is more actionable than obsessing over LDL alone.

How to Improve Your Lipid Profile

The same foundational habits improve nearly every marker we’ve discussed in this series:

1. Remove Processed Foods

Lower refined sugar and ultra-processed oils.
Stabilize blood sugar.
Reduce oxidative stress.

2. Increase Aerobic Conditioning

Zone 2 aerobic work improves:

• HDL

• Triglycerides

• Insulin sensitivity

• Endothelial function

3. Reduce Inflammation

Sleep.
Manage stress.
Get sunlight.
Eat micronutrient-dense whole foods.

When inflammation drops, LDL becomes less dangerous.

Final Thought

Cholesterol is not the villain.

Inflammation is.
Metabolic dysfunction is.
Oxidative stress is.

When you address root causes, cholesterol numbers often improve — and when they don’t, you dig deeper with better tools.

Blood work isn’t about fear.

It’s about clarity.

Blood Work Series, Part 2: Metabolic Health

What Your Blood Sugar and Fats Are Really Telling You

In last week’s post on Vitamin D, we talked about why blood work matters so much more than just whether something falls inside a wide “normal” reference range. We looked at how Vitamin D functions as a hormone, why deficiency is so common, and how optimizing levels can dramatically impact immune function, mood, recovery, and long‑term health.

This week, we’re continuing the Blood Work series by zooming out to something even more foundational: metabolic health.

Specifically, we’re going to look at three simple, inexpensive labs that tell an enormous story about how your body handles fuel:

• Fasting Blood Glucose

• HbA1c

• Triglycerides

Individually they’re useful. Together, they provide a powerful snapshot of how much sugar and fat are floating around in your bloodstream in a fasted state — and whether your metabolism is doing its job efficiently.

What Is Metabolic Health?

At its core, metabolic health describes how well your body can:

• Take in fuel (carbohydrate, fat, protein)

• Store it appropriately

• Access it when needed

• Keep blood sugar and blood fats tightly regulated

A metabolically healthy person can move seamlessly between fuels. A metabolically unhealthy person — often insulin resistant — cannot.

When that flexibility breaks down, fuel starts backing up into the bloodstream. Sugar stays high. Triglycerides stay elevated. Insulin stays chronically elevated. And over time, that biochemical environment drives nearly every chronic disease we care about.

The Three Core Tests

1. Fasting Blood Glucose (FBG)

What it measures:

Fasting blood glucose measures how much glucose (sugar) is in your bloodstream after an overnight fast, typically 8–12 hours without food.

In a healthy metabolic system, fasting glucose should be low and stable, because:

• You’re not actively digesting food

• The liver is releasing only small, controlled amounts of glucose

• Insulin sensitivity is high

Optimal range:

• Ideal: 75–90 mg/dL

• Needs Attention: ≥100 mg/dL

Persistently elevated fasting glucose suggests that the body is struggling to regulate baseline blood sugar — often due to insulin resistance at the liver.

2. HbA1c

What it measures:

HbA1c (hemoglobin A1c) measures the percentage of red blood cells that have glucose attached to them. Because red blood cells live ~90–120 days, HbA1c reflects your average blood sugar over the past 2–3 months.

Think of it as a long‑term exposure marker rather than a snapshot.

Optimal range:

• Ideal: ≤5.4%

• Prediabetes: 5.7–6.4%

HbA1c tends to rise when blood sugar spikes frequently, stays elevated longer than it should, or both.

3. Triglycerides

What they measure:

Triglycerides are the primary form of fat in the bloodstream. After you eat — especially carbohydrates — excess energy is packaged into triglycerides and transported through the blood.

In a fasted state, triglycerides should be low, because fat should be stored in fat tissue, not circulating aimlessly in the blood.

Optimal range:

• Ideal: <100 mg/dL

• Needs Attention <150 mg/dL

Elevated triglycerides are often a marker of carbohydrate intolerance and insulin resistance.

Why You Don’t Want Fuel in the Bloodstream

Blood is a transport system, not a storage unit.

When sugar and fat linger in the bloodstream:

• Glucose damages blood vessels via glycation

• Triglycerides promote inflammation and atherosclerosis

• Insulin remains chronically elevated

• Cells become less responsive to insulin over time

This is why insulin resistance is such a big deal. It’s not just about blood sugar — it’s about cellular energy failure.

My Numbers — And Why They’re Interesting

Here are my recent results:

• Triglycerides: 52 mg/dL (excellent)

• Fasting Blood Glucose: 107 mg/dL (not great)

• HbA1c: 5.6% (down from 5.8% last year)

On the surface, this is a mixed picture.

Triglycerides are squarely in the optimal range, which aligns with how I eat: mostly meat, fruit, vegetables, and healthy fats, with minimal processed food and only intermittent treats like dark chocolate or potato chips.

However, my fasting glucose and HbA1c remain higher than I would expect given:

• My body fat (mid‑teens even without consistent training)

• My diet quality

• My overall lifestyle

Even when I eat very clean, these numbers don’t move dramatically — though the slow improvement in HbA1c suggests something positive is happening.

So what gives?

Why These Numbers Can Be Elevated Without a Bad Diet

This is where nuance matters.

Not all metabolic markers are driven purely by food choices. Some common non‑diet contributors include:

1. Genetic Predisposition

Some people are genetically predisposed to:

• Higher baseline fasting glucose

• Greater hepatic (liver‑based) insulin resistance

• Slower glucose clearance

This is often seen in people who stay lean easily but still show mild glycemic dysregulation.

2. Stress and Cortisol

Chronic psychological or physiological stress raises cortisol, which:

• Signals the liver to release more glucose

• Elevates fasting blood sugar

• Impairs insulin sensitivity

You can eat perfectly and still wake up with elevated glucose if stress is high.

3. Sleep Quantity and Quality

Poor sleep — even for a few nights — measurably worsens insulin sensitivity.

Short sleep duration and fragmented sleep:

• Raise fasting glucose

• Increase HbA1c

• Increase hunger and carbohydrate cravings

4. Low Muscle Mass or Low Activity

Skeletal muscle is the largest glucose sink in the body.

Less muscle mass or inconsistent resistance training = fewer places for glucose to go.

5. Dawn Phenomenon

Some individuals experience a pronounced early‑morning rise in glucose due to circadian hormone release.

This can elevate fasting glucose even when overall metabolic health is decent.

The Most Powerful Interventions for Metabolic Health

While supplements and biohacks get attention, behavior still dominates. If your metabolic health needs attention, this is how to get the picture to shift in the right direction. 

1. A Whole‑Foods Diet

The foundation:

• Eliminate ultra‑processed foods

• Minimize refined carbohydrates

• Emphasize meat, fruit, vegetables, and healthy fats

This reduces glucose load and volatility and lowers triglyceride production at the liver.

2. Sleep

Improving sleep duration and quality often produces:

• Lower fasting glucose

• Improved insulin sensitivity

• Reduced cravings

Sleep is not optional for metabolic repair.

3. Regular Activity and Exercise

The most metabolically protective combination:

• Low‑intensity movement (walking, daily steps)

• Aerobic training (Zone 2 or aerobic threshold work)

• Resistance training (muscle mass acts as a powerful glucose sink)

It's worth mentioning, exercise increases insulin sensitivity independent of weight loss.

What Better Metabolic Health Feels Like

This is the big one. While you often hear metabolic health mentioned in the context of long term health and chronic disease, you can change your metabolic health meaningfully in just a matter of weeks and reap some pretty cool benefits day to day. In the short term, people often notice:

• More stable energy throughout the day meaning no mid afternoon crash

• Improved mental clarity and focus driven by better fuel delivery to the brain

• Better mood and emotional resilience 

• Easier fat loss or body recomposition

This isn’t subtle — as my clients change their habits around food and sleep they often say "I had no idea I could feel this good" or that they thought it would take longer to see changes. 

Long‑Term Consequences (and Opportunities)

Poor metabolic health is the cause of — not merely correlated with:

• Type II diabetes

• Heart disease

• Stroke

• Fatty liver disease

• Many cancers

• Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias

Emerging research increasingly frames Alzheimer’s as a metabolic disease of the brain.

Newer studies show that improving insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility can acutely improve cognitive performance and slow cognitive decline, even later in life. 

This is huge considering the pharmaceuticals we have to treat alzheimers and cognitive decline are not currently very effective. However there are plenty of examples in the literature where even severe symptoms have been reversed through big changes in diet, sleep, and exercise. 

This makes metabolic health one of the highest‑leverage targets for both longevity and quality of life.

How Often Should You Test?

One of the most common questions I get after reviewing labs is: “How long will it take for this to change?”

The answer depends on the marker.

• Fasting Blood Glucose can improve relatively quickly — sometimes within 1–3 weeks — because it’s highly sensitive to sleep, stress, and recent activity levels.

• Triglycerides are also fairly responsive and often improve within 2–6 weeks, especially when processed carbohydrates and alcohol are reduced.

• HbA1c moves the slowest by design. Because it reflects roughly 90 days of blood sugar exposure, meaningful changes typically require 8–12 weeks of consistent behavior change.

For most people, re‑testing every 3–4 months strikes the right balance: frequent enough to see progress, but long enough for real physiology to shift.

If You Only Fix One Thing

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, start here.

Eliminate processed foods.

A simple rule of thumb: if it’s something you couldn’t realistically make in your own kitchen, it probably doesn’t belong in your regular rotation.

Processed foods — especially processed carbohydrates — are uniquely disruptive because they:

• Deliver sugar and starch in forms the body absorbs extremely quickly

• Drive larger blood sugar spikes

• Increase triglyceride production at the liver

• Promote insulin resistance over time

You don’t need perfection. You don’t need macro tracking. You don’t need supplements.

Just removing foods that come from factories instead of farms or kitchens often produces outsized improvements in metabolic health all by itself.

Coming Next: Cholesterol (And Why Our View Is Different)

Next week in the Blood Work series, we’re tackling cholesterol — one of the most misunderstood and emotionally charged lab categories in medicine.

We take a more contrarian view.

You might be doing better with higher cholesterol than your doctor is willing to admit — and in some cases, aggressively lowering cholesterol can actually mask deeper metabolic problems rather than fix them.

We’ll break down:

• Why total cholesterol is often a poor standalone metric

• Which cholesterol markers actually matter

• How cholesterol, metabolic health, and inflammation are tightly linked

• And when high cholesterol may be a sign of resilience rather than risk

More to come.

Blood Work Series Part 1- Vitamin D

Why I Track Blood Work (and Why You Might Want To)

When I work with clients who are making meaningful changes to their health—fat loss, muscle gain, improving energy, fixing digestion, or reversing concerning trends—we run blood work about every six months.

That cadence gives us enough time to see real physiological change, not just day-to-day fluctuations. Once someone transitions into a more sustainable maintenance phase, we typically pull labs once per year, similar to how you’d service a well-running engine rather than constantly taking it apart.

I recently ran my own blood work—and honestly, I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Over the last year I’ve been battling a severe back injury that shut down my normal training routine. Layer on the holidays (which usually means more sweet treats and alcohol), and I fully expected to see that reflected in my labs.

Surprisingly, my results came back much better than expected.

That sparked an idea.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to share one lab marker per week from my own blood work and break down:

• What the test actually measures

• What’s considered optimal (not just “in range”)

• How behavior influences the result

• And what that marker means in real life—how you actually feel day to day

We’re starting with one of the most important and most commonly deficient markers I see:

Vitamin D: The Lowest-Hanging Fruit of Internal Health

What Vitamin D Is (and Why Almost Everyone Is Low)

Vitamin D functions more like a hormone than a traditional vitamin. Your body can synthesize it when your skin is exposed to sunlight—specifically UVB rays.

That sounds straightforward, but in practice almost no one gets enough.

If you:

• Live north of roughly Atlanta

• Work indoors

• Wear sunscreen (which you should)

• Experience winter

• Or don’t regularly spend time in direct sun

…then you are very likely deficient without supplementation.

This shows up consistently in blood work—even in people eating a very “clean” diet.

The upside is that vitamin D supplementation is safe, inexpensive, and highly effective when dosed appropriately and monitored.

My Vitamin D Result

My 25-hydroxy vitamin D level came back at:

81 ng/mL

That places me right at the top end of the optimal range, which I consider to be 60–80 ng/mL.

Given the lack of training over the past year and the time of year, this was reassuring—and it reinforces something I see often with clients: when a few key behaviors are dialed in, internal health can remain surprisingly resilient.

“Normal” vs. Optimal: Why Reference Ranges Can Be Misleading

Most standard lab reference ranges list vitamin D as “normal” somewhere between 30–100 ng/mL, with many labs flagging deficiency only below ~20 ng/mL.

The problem?

Those reference ranges are based on the general population, and the general population is already quite deficient.

So while a value of 30 ng/mL may be technically “in range,” it is rarely optimal for immune health, tissue quality, bone density, or hormonal function.

This is a theme you’ll see repeatedly throughout this blood-work series:

Normal does not necessarily mean healthy or optimal.

Why Vitamin D Matters (What This Actually Feels Like)

Immune Function (Especially in Winter)

Vitamin D plays a central role in immune regulation. Adequate levels are associated with:

• Fewer respiratory infections

• Shorter illness duration

• Better resilience during periods of stress or poor sleep

In real life, this often feels like getting sick less frequently, especially during the winter months.

Soft Tissue Health (Muscles, Tendons, and “Random Tweaks”)

This is one of the most under-recognized benefits.

Over the years, I’ve worked with several athletes who checked all the usual boxes:

• Clean diet

• Good hydration

• Intelligent training design

• Solid warm-ups and recovery

Yet they struggled with chronic muscle pulls and tweaks.

Every one of them had vitamin D levels in the low teens or even single digits.

Once supplementation brought their levels into an optimal range, the issue resolved.

In practical terms, this looks like:

• Fewer muscle strains

• More durable training

• Less of that “my body feels fragile” sensation in the gym

Bone Mineral Density (Especially for Women)

Vitamin D is critical for calcium absorption and bone remodeling. Chronic deficiency can negatively impact bone mineral density, increasing fracture risk over time.

This is especially important for women as they age.

In the real world, this translates to:

• Better bone density scores on DEXA scans

• Reduced long-term fracture risk

• More confidence staying active and lifting heavy things

Hormonal Health

Vitamin D influences several hormonal pathways, including those related to:

• Testosterone

• Estrogen balance

• Thyroid function

• Insulin sensitivity

When levels are optimal, people often report better energy, improved recovery, and more stable mood.

How to Supplement Vitamin D (What I Recommend)

For most adults, I recommend a Vitamin D3 + K2 combination.

Why D3?

D3 (cholecalciferol) is the most bioavailable form and reliably raises blood levels. If your levels are measured low by your physician you might get Vitamin D2 (Ergocalciferol), often prescribed in high-dose prescriptions (e.g. 50,000 IU weekly). We find D3 to be a better route for chronic supplementation.

Why K2?

Vitamin K2 helps direct calcium into bones and teeth, rather than allowing it to accumulate in soft tissues or arteries. Think of it as improving calcium handling and long-term safety.

General Dosing Guidelines

• Winter: ~10,000 IU per day

• Summer: ~5,000 IU per day

👉 Liquid Vit D3 + K2 from Thorne
👉 Capsule Vit D3 + K2 from DFH

When to Re-Test Vitamin D

Vitamin D levels don’t change overnight.

If you adjust your supplementation, you should expect to see meaningful changes in blood levels after approximately 8–12 weeks. That’s typically the earliest window where a follow-up test will accurately reflect your new intake.

This is why we avoid over-testing—and why timing matters.

Want to Follow Along With Your Own Blood Work?

If you want to run your own labs and interpret them alongside this series, you can start here:

👉 Complete Male Blood Panel
👉 Complete Female Blood Panel

Each week, I’ll reference markers included in these panels so you can connect the dots with your own internal health.

A Quick Disclaimer

If you are currently taking prescription medications, have a diagnosed medical condition, or are managing a chronic illness, you should consult with your health coach or healthcare provider before making significant supplementation changes.

Blood work is a powerful tool—but it’s most effective when interpreted in proper context.

Next week: we’ll shift gears and dig into metabolic health—what it really means, how it shows up in blood work, and why it affects energy, fat loss, and long-term health far more than most people realize.

The Surprising Side Effect of Eating Better: A Sharper Brain

There’s a moment I almost expect now.

About 7–14 days into the Holistic Transformation Program, a client checks in—not just lighter, not just leaner—but clearer.
More focused. More energetic. More mentally “on.”

And almost every time, they’re surprised by it.

Weight loss is expected. Better digestion makes sense.
But the sudden jump in mental clarity and energy? That catches people off guard.

Yet biologically, it’s one of the most predictable outcomes of changing how you eat.

Better Blood Sugar = Better Brain Fuel

Your brain runs almost entirely on glucose—but it needs a steady, regulated supply.

Most people come into the program riding a blood sugar rollercoaster:

• Refined carbs and sugar spikes

• Insulin overcorrections

• Reactive crashes

• Brain fog, irritability, and afternoon burnout

When we clean up food quality, prioritize protein, and reduce ultra-processed carbs, something important happens:

• Glucose delivery to the brain becomes more stable

• Insulin signaling improves

• Neurons get consistent fuel instead of chaos

Stable blood sugar = fewer cortisol spikes, less perceived stress, and noticeably better cognitive performance.

This isn’t “motivation.”
It’s metabolic physics.

The Gut–Brain Inflammation Connection

The second mechanism is just as powerful—and often overlooked.

A highly inflamed gut leaks inflammatory signaling molecules (like lipopolysaccharides) into circulation. These don’t stay in the gut. They cross the blood–brain barrier and interfere with neurotransmitter signaling, mitochondrial function, and mental stamina.

When clients remove common gut irritants and eat simpler, whole foods:

• Gut inflammation drops

• Immune signaling quiets down

• Neuroinflammation decreases

The result?
A brain that simply works better—with less friction.

Real Client Experience (And Why It Matters)

One of my clients, Seth, is three weeks into the program.

He’s already down over 8 pounds—but that wasn’t the biggest win.

What surprised him most was the change in mental performance, especially socially.

This is notable because Seth is a principal at a Silicon Valley VC firm. You don’t land in that role without already being super sharp, driven, and mentally resilient.

Here’s what he told me during a recent check in:

“I’ve also noticed good improvements in mental acuity and mental energy (including some specific increased mental energy related to powering social interactions). This has probably been the most noticeable area of change so far. Bigger change than I was expecting on that front, pretty interesting.”

That’s not placebo.
That’s an already exceptional brain finally getting clean fuel and lower inflammatory noise.

Why This Happens So Fast

Fat loss takes time.
But metabolic relief happens quickly.

Within days to weeks of:

• Stable blood sugar

• Adequate protein

• Reduced inflammatory load

The brain responds fast.

That’s why mental clarity is often the first major win clients feel—sometimes before the scale even moves.

Want to Experience This Yourself?

This is exactly why I built the free 14-Day Challenge.

It’s short. It’s structured. And for many people, it’s enough time to feel:

• Clearer thinking

• More stable energy

• Less brain fog

• Better mood and focus

Possibly even the same mental edge Seth noticed—faster than you’d expect.

👉 Start the free 14-Day Challenge Here

You don’t need perfection.
You just need two weeks of the right inputs.

Your brain will do the rest.