Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. In this week's vlog, I'm going to tell you all the things I am loving in "The Forever Strong Playbook." This is a new book that's out by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. I'm going to tell you how I met her and how I learned about her and what I'm getting out of this book. It's really blowing my mind, to be honest.
It all started when I was talking with my PR person, the amazing, the fabulous, Ashley Bernardi. She's been a Bright Line Eating® advocate for the whole 11 years that I've been doing this. I mean, to be honest, I knew her even before Bright Line Eating was a thing when it was just an idea in my head. We were talking about my book Maintain that is coming out in April and who we should get to endorse the book. In particular we were talking about women because I have so many staunch male doctor advocates of Bright Line Eating. And I'm like, "But our audience is mostly women. Are there any women that it would be great to have endorsed the book?" And she said, "Well, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon." And I said, "Who?" She said, "You don't know Dr. Gabrielle Lyon?" I said, "No." Now, this is not uncommon if you don't know me. This is actually a thing about me. The people on my Bright Line Eating team actually say that if 9/11 were to happen again, they'd all have to be sure to call me and let me know that it happened because I wouldn't know. I don't watch the news. I don't check updates on my phone unless it's a friend texting me or something. I don't watch shows. I don't watch movies. I don't have time for just staying connected with popular culture at all. I don't listen to podcasts. I don't ... So, me being disconnected from something that everybody else knows about is like, yeah, what else is new? So, I said, "No, I haven't heard of Dr. Gabrielle Lyon." I asked my husband that night, "Have you heard of Dr. Gabrielle Lyon?" He's like, "Oh yeah. I've heard her on a bunch of podcasts. She's the strength muscle protein woman, right?" I said, "Yeah, I think that's her."
Anyway, Ashley Bernardi was the publicist for Forever Strong, which was Dr. Gabrielle Lyon's first book. Well, she's come out with a second book, which is all about the "how to" of her approach. It's got four sections to it. It's how to think, it's how to eat, how to move and how to recover. Her genius zone is all about strength. One of the things I loved about her when she and I got to meet on Zoom was she clearly walks her talk. If you see her, she is a physical specimen of a human being. I mean, really rare air, .0000001% of people look like this. She clearly practices what she preaches, walks her talk, and what she teaches works. You could just see it in her physiology. If that's your thing and you just want to be strong, she is the embodiment of that. I love that. I sort of think of myself that way. I'm not ripped or anything, but I am the embodiment of what it means to live Bright. If you come visit me at my house, I'm up at 5:00 AM meditating for real, for real. And I'm putting my food on a digital food scale and weighing 4.0 ounces of protein, not 4.1, not 3.9. Right before bed, I am writing down exactly what I'm going to eat the next day. If you check up on me the next day, that is only and exactly what I have put into my body for food. Right before I turn off the lights, I'm writing in a five-year journal and I have a steadfast gratitude practice. I am on the phone and in connection daily with so many people who eat Bright and live Bright. I walk my talk and it shows when you meet me, you're like, "Oh, okay, this woman is living Bright." And Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is like that. You meet her and you're like, "Whoa, this woman is doing something different."
Let me just tell you, I'm just going to rattle off some of the things that are blowing my mind in this book, "The Forever Strong Playbook." First of all, in the section on thinking, how to think, the mindset stuff, I love that she starts off with, "If you're going to be scampering up a ladder, just make sure it's going to the right place." I say that a lot. I say, "Let's not climb up a ladder if we're not sure that it's leaning up against the right building, right? Let's take time before we get going to make sure that we're going in the right direction." She talks about people who are grinding out hours at the gym and just not getting the results they want. I see this in my Bright Line Eating community, people who are here grinding out hours in Bright Line Eating and is it working for them? To some degree, probably. I mean, for some people it really is. For some people, it really is. Then I think there's a lot of people for whom there's something missing. I don't know what it is. There's something missing in terms of getting the full results mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually that they're looking for. Yet there's kind of a, let's do more, let's do more, let's do more in the same groove that's happening when I think a backup and reassess would be a really good idea. I think this is true across the board in any domain. I think...go into any workplace, church, sports team, field of endeavor, and there's a lot of kind of just doing what we used to do without stepping back enough to think, are we following the right playbook here?
I love "The Forever Strong Playbook." It sort of provides an opportunity to really reassess, I think for people in the Bright Line Eating community, because it's a pretty different philosophy. What we do is food addiction treatment centric and what she's teaching is really muscle centric, strength and muscle centric, which is not what we do in Bright Line Eating typically, but it's a missing component for a lot of us. Interestingly, I would say two, three, I don't remember, two, three, four years ago, I started shifting my perspective to be more protein and muscle centric without knowing Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. I think this is probably why I'm so excited to be introduced to her work is that I think it's a missing piece for a lot of people in Bright Line Eating.
There was another line in there on the thinking aspect that really stood out to me. It's from a Navy SEAL. Now, her husband is a Navy SEAL. So, there's sort of Navy SEAL type ethos, sort of badass mindset woven all throughout the book, which I appreciate. It's not my way. I'm much more of a compassion driven person in my approach, I guess mainly just because of how badly I've just been beaten down by addiction at times. Sometimes pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is just not actually the way for me, but I appreciate this. And it's interesting. I'm shifting more in this direction as well as evidenced by this is the first year that I have a different desk calendar, daily print tear off the pages calendar on my desk. I'm not using the Hay House I Can Do It calendar this year. I've got that one still. It's just in my bedroom. But on my desk, I've got the Daily Stoic calendar, which it's a different flavor. It's way more the Navy SEAL flavor. Anyway, the Navy SEAL quote that really got me in the book was that some people find excuses and other people find solutions. Where some people are looking for excuses, other people are looking to find the solution. I find that to be really true and helpful. Section one is how to think.
Then there's how to eat. Now, of course, I'm all about how to eat. I started to become swayed a few years ago that maybe a lot more protein was needed in my diet. I think it came about because I was working out with a trainer who happens to be a power lifter and he was not pushing a lot of protein on me. He was pushing enough to meet minimal requirements, but he started to ... I started to look into, would I be getting more gains out of the effort that I was putting in at the gym if I was eating more protein and I decided to up my protein. What I noticed was my energy got way steadier, way higher, way stronger, way more consistent. My sleep improved. And what else? My energy ... Oh, my hunger. My hunger just ... I mean, I really don't have any anymore. I really don't have any hunger anymore. I've always had to eat a pretty light food plan. I don't have the world's best metabolism. So yeah, just eating a lot more protein helped in that regard. Now, I don't get a lot of calories in my food plan. I'm just light and slight and I can't eat a lot of food. So, this is around the time that I started talking about Complement protein powder and it's a plant-based protein powder that doesn't have any sweeteners at all in it and also has a very balanced essential amino acid profile, like just sort of equal amounts of all of them. It's made out of just plants. I really swear by it. I have an ounce of that pretty much every morning as part of my breakfast. So, basically what Dr. Gabrielle Lyon puts in this book, "The Forever Strong Playbook," it's in this section that I love the title of. It's called, "The Protein Problem That You Didn't Know You Had." What it says is that optimal protein amounts are way higher than people think. What you need to be eating is 0.7 grams to one, one full gram of protein per every pound of target body weight. So, if my target body weight is 115 pounds, that would mean that I need to be eating 115 grams of protein a day. When can you eat the 0.7% Well, this surprised me. This surprised me. She said, "The people who can eat on the lower side of that are under 35 years old and they're moderately active, not sedentary, not athletic, moderately active. Those are the only people who can eat the 0.7. Everybody else needs to be up at the 1.0." So, if you're over 35, and I know most of my audiences right there, you got to be eating one gram of protein per day for every pound of your target body weight, maybe not your current body weight, but your target body weight, which is probably a lot more protein than you're getting. It certainly was a lot more protein than I was getting, but I've been eating that much actually for the last year or two. If you're a woman who your target body weight is 150 pounds, that means 150 grams of protein a day. It's a lot.
Now the challenge is as we age, we need more protein, but we need fewer calories. It just gets harder and harder to make the math add up without having protein powder in the mix. This is again why I recommend a protein powder these days when I didn't used to, but she talks about protein replacement and how protein is being broken down, muscles being broken down in our body all the time and that it actually takes 250 to 300 grams of protein, replacement amino acids every day to replace it. Now some of that, the body generates by itself, but that's why you need so much protein to eat during the day. She talked about how this protein replacement process gets less and less efficient as we age, which is why you actually need to eat more of that protein out in your diet as you age. And it gets harder to do without being very conscientious about it. In the book she describes how to get it done. I remember a couple years ago when I started shifting to this way of thinking that I needed to be very conscientious, and what I did was I used a tracker. I used My Fitness Pal, not all the time, just my eating is consistent because I do Bright Line Eating. So, I'm eating pretty much the same stuff or type of stuff every day. I just had to take a couple of days of representative meals and plug them in and then just see what I was getting and then enhance it a little bit, make sure I'm getting more optimal protein choices in terms of the hard-hitting proteins, the ones that have a full amount of protein in them. Things like egg whites and edamame and not having a lot of cashews and thinking I'm getting my protein from that. You're not getting your protein from cashews. You're getting your protein from chicken breast, from shrimp, from things that have a lot of grams of protein per ounce of food weight. I loved hearing about that. Then I also loved this thing about how protein turnover happens a lot at night. She doesn't recommend fasting longer than 12 hours. That was interesting, does not recommend. She said, "Too much muscle gets broken down." She said, "Don't fast longer than 12 hours." That was so interesting. Take that intermittent fasting, folks. Okay, but 12 hours is good. She said, "But you need to make sure that you're eating a very high protein breakfast because that protein turnover, that protein breakdown is happening throughout the night and you need to make sure that the first thing you eat in the morning has lots and lots and lots of amino acids right there to flush your body to replace that protein for the protein turnover that's happening." I thought that was really interesting.
In the section on training, like how to move, there was so much in there, of course, about weight training, which I don't know how familiar you are with resistance training, but there was a lot of gentle, flexible, portable suggestions in there. It was not, I don't know, it didn't feel mean and harsh and impossible to do. It felt doable and there was a lot of encouragement around some is better than none, celebrate your wins, take baby steps, it's important to get into motion. Now, some of the things that I really liked learning about were ways to make resistance training portable when you travel with just your body weight. That was really, really helpful to me. Just exercises around air squats or side planks or pushups if you need to do them on a dresser or on your knees, just something to get a little bit of chest going, chest presses, just a lot of ways to get your workout without necessarily having any equipment or any real space or anything at all. Just so doable and gentle. I also loved her suggestion to put resistance training at the center as the focus and to have cardio be ancillary, but high intensity and short bursts. I love this because she gave these routines that are 10 minutes long and you can do them anywhere with, again, with any kind of equipment and it's 10 minutes, but like the first two minutes are warm up. I'm like, "Okay, this is my type of cardio routine. I could really do this. " I do have a wrist, or I guess it's an armband thing that I wear that'll track my heart rate and she talks about you don't even have to track your heart rate. You can just get up to the point where it's hard, you're breathing so hard that it's hard to talk That's how you know. You're breathing so hard that it's hard to talk. So, the high intensity interval stuff was helpful. I have never really ... I mean, I've heard about HIIT training for years. I used to do it in Body for Life decades ago, but I never really picked it up and incorporated it into my modern-day current lifestyle or routine, but I think I'm more likely to, now that I've read this book, I thought it was really helpful.
There was another thing that was in the move section that was kind of mind blowing and it was that the biggest research bang for your buck, like the biggest, oh my gosh, aha thing comes from something I've never heard of called VILPA, VILPA, which is vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. And it's like, you know how, I don't know, your friend's kids come over and they start roughhousing with you and before you know it, you're playing tag in the basement and you're running around chasing them and all of a sudden you can't breathe and you feel like your lungs are on fire, but it's just for a moment and then you're all like laughing and tickling each other and then you collapse in a pile. It's maybe five minutes or something and maybe a part of you thinks like, "That actually was probably some pretty good exercise." It turns out that these intermittent but very vigorous lifestyle things that we do sometimes have a whopping effect. It was something like 30 to 40% reductions in heart disease, in all-cause mortality from cancer, just from doing four to five minutes of this stuff a day. You can get it any old way. You can run up a flight of stairs instead of taking the elevator. You can power walk your groceries out to the car from the grocery store instead of wheeling that cart. You can, yeah, like roughhouse with kids, like I said, laugh until you pee and cry, which if you could find a way to do that every day, let me know your secret because that sounds very fun to me. Just ways to get to the point where you're huffing and puffing so much that it's hard to talk for four minutes a day and just any old way, just get on the phone and speed walk. My husband has been wearing a weighted vest these days. He goes out for a walk in the morning wearing a weighted vest, power walking, wearing a weighted vest would probably do it. Really interesting tips on the physical movement side.
The final section of the book is on recovery, how to recover. The big mindset shift there is she talks about recovery being an active process, not a passive process. She talks about using fire and ice, heat and cold. I talk a lot about heat and cold. I did a vlog a while back on infrared sauna use that is one of our most popular vlogs ever. We have an infrared sauna. It gets heavy use in my house. It's interesting, when I was a Bahai a bunch of years ago, Abdul Baha, who was a central figure in the Baha'i faith said, and this was a century ago, said, "In the future, healing will be accomplished through foods and waters of different temperatures." This guy said that in Persia a hundred years ago, unreal, foods and waters of different temperatures. That's exactly what Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is talking about, that the use of hot and cold water or air or exposure is one of the most restorative things we can do and use. She recommends cold in the morning, think cold shower, cold plunge if you've got one, cold bath, heat during the day, and then making sure your room is nice and chilly cold at night for sleep. There's more in the book. I mean, there's so much more. It's really an encyclopedia of the science of best practices around these topics, but she's really the go-to expert these days for strength in particular.
Our publicist put us together and I hit record and I recorded the session. We had literally never met and we were meeting for the first time and I knew you would want to experience it. It ended up being pretty sweet and pretty epic. I'll just give you a spoiler alert. By the end, she's inviting me and my husband to go visit her and her husband down in Houston. There were a lot of moments in there that I think would be fun for you to watch. Things like, she and I are both mothers of little kids and the question of how much of our stories to tell publicly, whether to hold things back, how we were both professionals engaged in our profession and then got the calling to serve people in a bigger way. How did that happen? I got to ask her specifically about her training regime, because I'm just looking at her going, "Okay, you're doing something that most of the rest of us are not doing." I was just curious, how do you train? She told me, in specific, I thought you might want to hear that conversation.
If you want access to it, all you got to do is buy the book, "The Forever Strong Playbook." There's a link down below that you can click to buy the Playbook and then the link that you click down below, it's got links to buy the book, but it's a two-step process. Go click on the link to buy the book and then go right back to that same page to enter your receipt and get access to the interview. Now, when you buy the book, be sure to notice that you're going to get access to a whole bunch of other bonuses that Dr. Gabrielle Lyon has in store for you as well, including, I believe it's a six-week challenge that I'm looking at. I think I'm going to be doing it too. So, if you're in that community, look for me. I would love to see you in there doing that six-week Forever Strong Challenge. I'm looking to uplevel. I would love to focus on being stronger going into the second half of life. I plan to live to be a hundred, God willing. I mean, who knows what my destiny has in store for me, but I'm 51 now and I definitely am thinking of moving into the second half of life. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon emphasizes that muscle is the organ of longevity. Muscle is the organ of longevity. My favorite moment, I'm not going to spoil it for you, my favorite moment in my conversation with her that you'll get access to is when she describes how she thinks of muscle. It's not the good old muscle burns more calories than fat. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. It's not that. She blew my mind with how she describes muscle and its role in our lives and in our bodies. It's worth watching, I just got to say. So, click the link below, get your copy of "The Forever Strong Playbook." It's worth it.
Just so you know, if you're questioning protein and you're plant-based or whatever, she was vegan for a lot of years. She really comes at this from a very informed, broad-minded perspective and informed on the science. I questioned her on that in our interview. You'll see that. I'm really mulling over what she had to say about it. Anyway, yes, click below, get "The Forever Strong Playbook." I'll see you in that challenge in February and I'm just excited to have a conversation in our Bright Line Eating community about upleveling when it comes to strength, upleveling when it comes to strength. You get a pass at the very beginning of Bright Line Eating. If you haven't been exercising, you don't need to start right away, but that hall pass expires pretty quickly. As soon as the food is automatic and wired in, it's time to get stronger. I'm not the person to teach you how to do it, to be honest. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is. So, click below, get your copy of the book and enjoy that interview and I'll see you in that challenge. Bye now.
