The Real Health Podcast

On today's episode, we talk about why your body feels different at 35 and here's what you need to pay attention to both for the male and the female. Welcome back to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. Gosh, stoked that you're listening in. We pray we add value to you as an efficient timeframe. I know for me, I can't listen to an hour podcast.

I just don't have that capacity in my life right now. So we're gonna give it to you in under fifteen minutes. We're gonna give you some practical health and life changing advice. Today we're going talk about why your body feels different after 35. We're going talk about three key areas for the female and three key areas for the male.

So at 35, I think there's a time and sometimes it's maybe closer to forty, but we start to feel different. One thing we could say, Oh, we're just aging. Or two, we could actually have some knowledge about why and what we need to do intentionally to reverse that aging process or slow it down. Inevitably, we're all gonna start somewhere and end somewhere, and there's a time in between at which how long we're gonna live. I want those years to be quality.

I want those years to be life giving, and I obviously want to live as long as I can living a healthy life. So today, this is gonna be super practical. These are areas I see every single day in the office when I run labs, when I talk to patients. This is going to add a ton of value to you. So let's dive in.

We're going talk through the mail today first. And the first thing we're going talk about is at 35, we see testosterone levels just rapidly declining. I mean, testosterone levels in the two hundreds, three hundreds, and four hundreds when they should be well over double that. And not only just total testosterone, but we see free testosterone levels really starting to decline. Free testosterone is even more important because it tells you how much your body is able to use versus total just tells us how much you have.

And there's influences to where you could have a great total testosterone of six seven hundred, maybe even more, but your free levels are 60 or 70. That's a problem. We need to increase our free testosterone. And there's another hormone that we see is impacting this, and that's called sex hormone binding globulin or SHBG. This is the guy that binds your testosterone that makes it ineffective.

And so before you just look at total and you see your number at three fifty or 400 and you decide to go on testosterone replacement and just start injecting and down regulate your body's ability to make it, here are some practical strategies for a male to optimize testosterone today. One the most important things is making sure you get enough sleep. If you're not sleeping seven to eight hours a night, we're gonna have an issue. Another thing is make sure you're consuming enough protein. If you're not consuming enough protein, don't even worry about testosterone replacement therapy.

Number three, if you're not strength training, there is no value in TRT. We need to establish these pillars first. Sleep, training, nutrition. What else could be negatively impacting? Guys, if you're consuming alcohol, are literally blowing your testosterone levels in the toilet.

Alcohol will directly interfere with your testosterone production based on your inability to get deep restorative sleep at night and have those natural testosterone rhythmic pulses. We've got to get that out of our body. We got to look at things like caloric restriction as being an issue. And if you've got those areas cleaned up, then my suggestion would be, hey, just start on a testosterone optimizer. So there's a lot of good products on the market.

I think Jocos Tea Support is a great general testosterone supportive product. And then if that doesn't work as well, then we can run labs. You can look at your sex hormone binding, figure out, hey, maybe there's too much inflammation. I need to take fish oil to reduce that and get a little bit more specific before just necessarily jumping in testosterone replacement therapy. But it is important.

Do you know your total? Do you know you're free? And do you know your sex hormone binding globulin levels? If you know those three, it's gonna help you understand what's happening in your body. If you don't, that's an issue.

And if you're not establishing those three important pillars of strength training, nutrition and sleep, then let's start there. Number two for the male, insulin resistance. It's a slow creep, right? It just slowly creeps up and we've realized, oh man, why do I have belly fat? Well, because you're insulin resistant and you're not efficiently utilizing your, sugar levels the way that you should.

Insulin resistance is something that builds over time with stress and inflammation. Obviously poor nutritional habits, but stress impacts it directly. And I feel like when we get into those 30s, mid 30s, early 40s, the stress levels definitely start to climb a little bit. We have kids, we have sports, we have events, we have all these things to do, and then we're performing for our job. That's something where we got to make sure we're dialed in.

So how do we reverse insulin resistance? Well, one, protein two, strength training three, sleep. The same things we talked about for testosterone. Before, remove the sugar, remove the snacking, okay? That is going to directly impact insulin resistance.

Remove alcohol, that's gonna directly impact insulin resistance. So making sure that we are looking at adequate fiber intake, proper plant consumption, that helps with insulin resistance. And if you need something to support your insulin resistance and help blood sugar stability, then then I would highly encourage cinnamon. Like a Ceylon cinnamon is a fantastic way to support insulin resistance, and berberine is also a great herb to help balance your blood sugar. Number three, we see this in men, but it's the recovery capacity.

Just the inability to recover at the same capacity as you did when you were 25 sleeping on five hours, right? At 25, we slept for five hours, we partied, we trained hard, and somehow we kept on moving. But by 40, that's just not the case. We can't assume what we did in our 25 is gonna work for us at 40 or at 35 years old. So you need seven to nine hours of sleep at night.

It's imperative. You need strength and zone two training. Maybe CrossFit and high intensity training is not what's best for you in this season, right? Judiciously hitting high intensity interval training every day and burning out your body, it may not work for you as much anymore. You need recovery days.

You may not be able to train in the gym every single day with the stresses of life outside the gym, and that's okay. But as long as you are strength training, you're building your zone two and doing some moderate aerobic work, you're getting quality strength training, right? Seven to nine hours of sleep, good nutrition, hydration styled in, then what we'll find is that, hey, we're recovering at a much better capacity. And it's okay if you don't feel recovered. It's okay to say, hey, I need to take a day off.

All right, like having a structured training program is so important to make sure your recovery capacity is there. So my suggestion would be that if you don't have any type of training, like a training program, training block, where you're doing progressive overload, whether it's an endurance or in strength, and you're not progressively overloading, you're just blindly training, that is one of the easiest ways to burn out. Because you know what? How are you monitoring improvement? How are you challenging the nervous system?

How are you improving recovery? Well, you gotta have a plan. Okay? Some other things to improve recovery, chiropractic care, game changer, sauna, cold plunging, awesome. Now don't cold plunge after you strength train, you'll lose your gains, but away from that, it's a great strategy to improve recovery.

That's the male. Let's talk about the female. Why is the female spotty feel different after 35 and just not recovering to the same? Well, number one, this is a nutrient and I see this very often. And this is iron, functional iron deficiency is what I'm gonna talk, what I'm gonna call it.

Because most of the time women know if they're anemic, they go to their doctor, they get routine labs, and they say, hey, you're anemic. That's red flag. That's an issue. But most women are functionally anemic don't know it. What does that mean?

It means their iron levels are normal, their ferritin levels are slowly declining. If if anything, they have completely hit rock bottom. Ferritin is your iron reserve. It's what you pull from. It's your reservoir.

It's your capacity. And we gotta make sure that, hey, your fatigue might not just be coming from being busy. Your fatigue might be become come from your iron levels and your iron storage levels. And iron deficiency can exist way before anemia actually develops. When you're anemic, we are in trouble.

This is diagnosis of functional disorder, okay? But when low in your ferritin, then you can have symptoms that indicate anemia, but they would show up normal on your blood work. So, we need to look at ferritin levels. We need also look at things like hemoglobin and iron and iron binding capacity, But most importantly, look at your ferritin levels, and they need to be higher than what I saw this morning, which is multiple patients coming in at at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty five. Your ferritin levels, when they're low and your iron level's normal, can include fatigue, reduced exercise tolerance, weakness, headaches, restless legs, hair falling out, everything you would expect from iron anemic patient, but it's not on the labs.

Look at your ferritin levels. This could be it. What do you do about it outside of testing? A lot of women need iron bisglycinate. They need beef liver.

They need more red meat. They need more stomach acid to help digest. Work with your healthcare practitioner. Make sure you're getting your proper advice but make sure number one, the reason why you may not be feeling the same and recovering at the same level could be an iron functional, deficiency. Number two, you may not feel the same because you're losing muscle mass.

You may look the same, your scale may even be the same as a number, but you're losing muscle. After 40 you lose 1% of muscle every year unless you do something about it. It's something we talk about so much. Your goal needs to shift from weighing less to be stronger. Because you need to build muscle as much as you can in your 30s and 40s so you can have the proper metabolism and body and age well in your 50s and 60s.

Instead of chasing calorie burning and high intensity training, we need to start protecting tissue by creating growth and proper changes and strength builds because that's what's actually going to sustain you and give you quality of life long term. What do you do? You have to do progressive overload resistance training two to four times a week. It is non negotiable. If you're not doing it, here's your message for the day.

Check your check your ferritin and start strength training. If you're strength training and not consuming enough protein, just like we talked about the males, you gotta have enough protein. Okay? You gotta make sure you're consuming about point seven to point eight grams per pound of ideal body weight. Number three, you gotta look at your metabolic and cardiovascular health.

Same thing we talked about with insulin resistance in males does transfer into females, but you've got to look more beyond, you've to look beyond just, what you look like, and you've got to get some labs done. And one of the big things that we see in women slowly start to creep up, mainly because of genetics, Their cholesterol profile usually looks great, but we see this marker elevated in most females and that's called APO B. And APO B and another marker called homocysteine are markers that we see elevated that will increase your cardiovascular risk. If you're not getting these levels checked, it could be that you are forming inflammation and not methylating well. And when we don't methylate well, we don't have enough B vitamins, we could be in trouble.

And this may be one of the reasons why you're not recovering and feeling like you did when you're twenties and early thirties. Make sure you look at homocysteine. It's a marker for your methylation. When methylation is high, means you got great B vitamin status and you're making sure that all the good genes are turned on, bad genes are turned off, you're synthesizing your hormones well. When homocysteine is low, methylation is high.

When homocysteine is high, then all the things we just talked about just aren't happening, and that could be a massive reason why hormonally you're not healthy, you're not healthy from an inflammation standpoint, you start getting anxiety, start feeling depressed. It could be because you're not methylating. You don't have enough methylated B vitamins like B6, B9, B12. Check your homocysteine levels. That's super practical.

Right? Iron, homocysteine levels, and obviously build that muscle for a female. It's gonna help you so much. Practical health advice for you. I hope it added a ton of value to you, and hey, if you just are doing what you need you know you need to do, strength training, sleeping, getting adjusted, hydrating, eating clean nutrition, and you're and you're you're training your body for stress resilience, you're gonna live a long, healthy life.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Real Health Podcast. Hi.