4 Minute Fridays: The Worst Nutrition Advice On The Planet, A Breathing Exercise To Sleep Instantly & Your Brain On Back-To-Back Meetings
Mar 15, 2024
Read time: 3.8 minutes
Welcome to 4 Minute Fridays, my weekly newsletter where I reveal cutting-edge tips to optimize your health and body.
What's In Store For Today:
- The nutrition advice that everyone needs to avoid at all costs.
- A breathing exercise that can even put insomniacs to sleep.
- This is what happens to the brain when it's in back-to-back meetings and the results might shock you.
Today's issue is brought to you by Focus Bites from Natural Stacks.
Focus Bites contains a new compound that's been making waves in the supplement industry called Paraxanthine.
Compared to caffeine, it is less toxic, creates less anxiety, enhances physical performance, provides a similar energy boost, and may have stronger mood-boosting effects (1).
I've been using Focus Bites before my deep work sessions and workouts. I'm pleased to say that it gives me a boost in energy, focus, and performance without harming my sleep or raising my anxiety levels.
If you're looking for a safe and effective way to enhance your energy, focus, and performance I'd recommend trying them out.
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The other day I had a conversation with one of the biggest YouTube personalities on the planet.
I've been helping him with his body transformation goals and he's been helping me figure out my YouTube game.
Along the way, we've become friends and I'm even seeing him in the summer to work on a few videos.
Something that I noticed about him is that he never gets stressed. He doesn't even allow it in his reality.
I asked him what the secret was to managing stress and he answered me with this,
"Stress can be a real thing for a lot of people. The way I manage it in my life is in how I perceive the stress. By controlling what an event means to me I can control my stress response."
This reminds me that we always have a choice and the most important one is what an event means to us.
Being around my friend has taught me a lesson in that we can change how we view stress and, most importantly, how to react to it.
We always have a choice. Let's choose wisely.
That being said...
Here Is Your 4 Minute Friday:
1. The Worst Nutrition Advice On The Planet
I was talking to a dietician the other day and asked her about some of the worst diets she's seen people use.
Here's one she told me:
"He ate nothing but frozen chicken nuggets, except the odd bowl of rice krispies here and there. Someone told him that food is just calories and energy, nothing else."
And that, my friend, is the worst nutrition advice on the planet.
The food you eat has a deeper meaning than the calories you're putting into your body.
Macronutrients dictate your performance and how much muscle you build. Micronutrients have been shown to influence your mental health, focus, and energy (2).
Fiber has been shown to influence your gut microbiota (3) and we're now realizing that the gut is the control center for your brain (4).
This is why we focus on quantity AND quality foods in our Lean Body 90 nutrition plan.
Tracking your calories has its place but it must be combined with high-quality nutrients going into your body.
2. A Breathing Exercise To Sleep Instantly
One of the things many people take for granted is our ability to breathe.
Breathing is the gateway to our nervous system and the great thing is that we can use to it put ourselves to sleep.
A study (5) collected 14 self-reported insomniacs and wanted to test what would happen to their sleep when they did a breathing exercise before bed.
The results were nothing short of incredible:
After the breathing exercise, they improved their sleep quality, efficiency, and latency (ability to sleep faster) while reducing the time needed to enter slow-wave and REM sleep.
The remedy they used was paced breathing exercises (3 seconds in 7 seconds out) for 20 min before going to sleep.
This brought their bodies into a parasympathetic mode, which promotes rest, digestion, and relaxation.
Even if you don't suffer from insomnia you can use a few minutes of breathwork to calm the mind and body for a great night of rest.
Here's a thread I made on the different types of breathwork you can use depending on your situation:
The fastest way to hack your energy & stress is through your breath.
— Dan Go (@FitFounder) November 8, 2022
Here are 7 powerful ways to master your nervous system through breathing:
3. This Is Your Brain On Back-To-Back Meetings
One of the things I've realized as I've built my business online is that having too many meetings can be stressful and exhausting.
Working remotely is a blessing but it can also be a curse.
But what do they do to our brains?
Microsoft human factors lab did a study with 14 people who work remotely (6). They asked them to do video meetings while wearing an EEG cap to monitor their brain activity.
In one session, participants attended 2 hours of 4 half-hour meetings back-to-back without rest.
In the other session, the four half-hour meetings were broken up with 10-minute breaks using a meditation app.
In the back-to-back meetings, participants felt a spike in stress while the anticipation of another meeting increased this stress response.
When participants had breaks their stress response remained stable and the breaks reset their brains, which allowed them to start the meeting more relaxed.
This reminds me of lifting: After every set you need to let your body recover to get back to full strength.
The same goes for your mind. Give yourself the rest you need to try to give yourself a buffer between meetings for your best performance.
Client Of The Week - Michael Bobo, Entrepreneur
Michael is an entrepreneur who struggled with stubborn fat and eating out way too much.
He wanted to get rid of the belly, increase his energy levels, and look great with his shirt off.
The coolest thing about this transformation is that Michael only dropped a total of 3 total off his body (!)
Here's how we did it:
- We started with an initial fat loss phase where we had him drop 20 lbs of fat.
- We followed up that phase by doing a "lean bulk", which I talked about in this article over here. We wanted to add muscle to his body so we could increase his metabolism and make him look more aesthetic.
- We limited fat gain while he built muscle by eating high-quality foods along with matching his protein intake to his body weight.
Michael did the smart thing by not stopping at the fat loss phase. By adding muscle to his body we added quality years and a faster metabolism while building an amazing physique at the ripe age of 55 (woo hoo!)
One Quote To Finish Your Week Strong
“Success isn’t about the end result, it’s about what you learn along the way.”
Success is not about the money you make or the weight you drop. It's about the person you become.
As you strive to achieve your biggest goals make sure to connect your identity to the new result.
- Dan
When you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help:
1. The Lean Body 90 System: When you’re ready to get in great shape, Lean Body 90 is the obvious choice. You can get in great shape and reach your fitness goals in just 90 minutes a week. Lose weight and build muscle even without hours in the gym or highly restrictive diets. Join 1000+ students here.
2. Are you an entrepreneur who wants to get lean, boost energy, and get in your best shape? Apply for private one-on-one coaching here.
3. Promote yourself to 230,000+ subscribers by sponsoring this newsletter.
References:
- Jäger R, Purpura M, Wells SD, Liao K, Godavarthi A. Paraxanthine Supplementation Increases Muscle Mass, Strength, and Endurance in Mice. Nutrients. 2022 Feb 20;14(4):893. doi: 10.3390/nu14040893. PMID: 35215543; PMCID: PMC8875973.
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/nutritional-psychiatry-your-brain-on-food-201511168626
- Fu J, Zheng Y, Gao Y, Xu W. Dietary Fiber Intake and Gut Microbiota in Human Health. Microorganisms. 2022 Dec 18;10(12):2507. doi: 10.3390/microorganisms10122507. PMID: 36557760; PMCID: PMC9787832.
- https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/publications-archive/brain/gut-brain
- Tsai HJ, Kuo TB, Lee GS, Yang CC. Efficacy of paced breathing for insomnia: enhances vagal activity and improves sleep quality. Psychophysiology. 2015 Mar;52(3):388-96. doi: 10.1111/psyp.12333. Epub 2014 Sep 19. PMID: 25234581.
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/brain-research