Bonus: Adam Bornstein – Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

Jonathan: Welcome to the Smarter Science of Slim, the scientifically-proven program where you eat more and exercise less to burn fat and boost health.

Carrie: Eat smarter, exercise smarter, live better. I am so ready for that!

Jonathan: Hey, everyone! Jonathan Bailor here, with another bonus Smarter Science of Slim podcast. I’m going to give the dramatic intro for this podcast. Today will be a great podcast because we have an individual who has really done it all in the fitness world with us today – a gentleman who was the fitness editor at Men’s Health Magazine, has written for the New York Times, was the editorial director of LiveStrong.com, is the proprietor of BornFitness.com, and just released a brand new book called Engineering the Alpha: A Real World Guide to an Unreal Life, whose foreword is written by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is pretty freaking cool! Adam Bornstein, welcome to the show! How are you doing, brother?

Adam: I’m doing great! Thanks for having me, Jonathan. Really appreciate being on today.

Jonathan: Well, Adam, just to get the show started here – I want to dig into the book, but the first thing I want to dig into is, you’ve basically busted onto the scene here. You’ve been in the fitness world – the upper echelons of the fitness world – for many, many years. It seems just recently you yourself have become more of a public figure. What inspired this transition from behind the scenes to on the stage?

Adam: It’s interesting. I come from a teaching background, so I taught at several different levels, usually in a college capacity. The reason why I shifted into an editorial world is that I felt I would have a much bigger classroom. You could get 100, 200, 300 people into a classroom in a college setting, and then when I went into magazines, you obviously scale up the amount of people that you can reach and impact. So that was always the approach that I took. After several years went by and I got to work with a lot of people, I started wondering if my impact could be best served if I was more of a free agent, if you will, and was able to just really collaborate with a lot of the great minds because one of the biggest barriers that you really do face with health and with fitness is that there are a lot of different breaks that limit our ability to move forward and help people. I know you feel the same way. It’s really what inspires the people in this field. It’s why I’m doing this. I love what I do. I saw an opportunity to go out and be able to reach even more people if I wasn’t necessarily just working with one brand – that’s not to say that another opportunity couldn’t come along the way where that changes the scope – but the focus became ‘what can I do right now that will have the biggest impact, reach the most people, and really try and help out this industry in a way that was impactful?’ A lot of times, it means still working with the partners where I was previously employed. Those are places that produce a lot of good information and brands that I have a lot of respect for and for me, it was just a matter of spreading the love and sharing the love a little bit more.

Jonathan: Well, that’s awesome, Adam! I think that when we have individuals like you who can take these existing brands and that can get on these big stages and – for lack of better terms – describe the modern science of eating and exercise rather than the theories of 50 years ago – which are not bad, I don’t mean to demonize them – but we don’t practice heart surgery the same way we did 50 years ago, and we don’t use the same computers we used 50 years ago; however, the vast, vast, vast majority of us are still taught and still believe, because we don’t hear anything else, the fitness and eating theories of 50 years ago. So, for you to bring that modern science to those bigger stages, I salute you because I think that is exactly what we need to be doing. Kudos, sir!

Adam: Thank you. The same could be said right back at you. I think my stance in all of this is that a lot of what I do is about finding the smartest people and giving them a platform so that they can help people because there’s a lot of different things that work, but there’s so much more that doesn’t work, and that’s the presiding problem. We need to open people’s minds to know that there isn’t this ‘one size fits all’ approach, so you should feel a little bit liberated that if something doesn’t work for you, it’s not like you’re not going to find a solution to help you live a healthier life, but more importantly, it’s also that you need to direct people towards the best sources of information so they know who is credible, what is authoritative, what they can trust, and then from those authoritative incredible options, pick the one that really fits their lifestyle best because that’s what is going to create the sustainable option that really is what allows success to happen – whether it’s in diet, in exercise, or in just living a general healthy life where you feel good about yourself and feel that you are taking steps to live longer and feel better.

Jonathan: I love the point you made, Adam, about ‘there is a diversity of strategies that can work for individuals’ because we all have diverse goals and diverse backgrounds, but there is a lot that doesn’t work as well, and the irony and the thing that keeps getting me up in the morning – and I’m sure it does the same for you – is the thing that doesn’t work is the thing that is prescribed to so many of us, which is ‘take the existing diet that made you hormonally dysfunctional and just eat less of that, and then run at a slow pace on pavement as long as you possibly can’. Literally, if you go down the street and you ask 100 people what they should do to be healthier, that is what they’ll tell you they’ve been taught. Would you agree that that is the strategy that does not work?

Adam: I would 100% agree! It’s just funny to me that we can sit here – ‘we’ being the general populace – and be like, “Oh, what’s the issue with people being unhealthy or overweight or obese or issues with lifespan or cardiovascular diseases? Oh, what’s the main problem?” “Oh, we just need to move more and eat less.” If it was that simple, don’t you think we would all just be moving more and eating less?! It really underscores the complexity, I think, of why we have all these issues, and it’s really also frustrating because we send this message, so some people do move more and some people do eat less, and they don’t see the results and then it’s this form of learned helplessness – the psychological period where you do the same thing over and over again, you’re told it’s going to work, it doesn’t work, so it’s like this self-defeating principle that’s really crushing. A lot of the times, the barriers that we get to have been this psychological block that are holding us back, and it’s not even the physical part. We can’t even get to the physical part because from the psychological standpoint, we’re so beaten down that we can’t even think that we can make a change because we don’t know what the actual problem is. We’re told the problem is one thing when it’s something completely different. That was really a big driving force behind Engineering the Alpha. It was trying to find out ‘what are the real problems that are standing in the way of people’s success?’, ‘what are the real reasons why they can’t lose fat or they can’t build muscle or they’re not as healthy or they’re not as satisfied with their life?’ The tag line is The Real World Guide to an Unreal Life, and we really do believe that a lot of the problems – and we prove that with the help of some science – but a lot of the problems that you have in terms of finding happiness or finding success or satisfaction or offsetting problems of depression are often times linked to physical barriers and physical problems that are created by the psychological issues of spreading misinformation. So the book was a two-fold approach of 1, let’s bust a lot of myths and open some eyes and 2, really let people know what the problem is that stands in their way and if we can fix this underlying problem, we can start seeing a lot more results. For us and especially for the guys that this book was written for, it was addressing hormones. Those hormone issues apply to females as well, but in our stance, I think there are a lot more men who aren’t even aware that their hormones play a role in how they look and how they feel or they think they don’t have to worry about it until much further down the road. That was the motivation to put together a book that really tapped on a bigger issue so that we could move forward.

Jonathan: And moving forward, Adam, is so important, and I’m excited to jump into the details of the book because there’s a lot of really great stuff here, but just to wrap a wonderful bow around this segment of the show – because I think we’ve discussed some awesome information here – we touched on this psychological block, and you mentioned the term ‘learned helplessness’, which is just so spot-on. One of the reasons that I think work like Engineering the Alpha that focuses on the hormonal aspects of this is so important is so many of the individuals that I have the opportunity to work with are individuals who have – as I’m sure with you, because this is just the majority of the population – have done the ‘eat less, exercise more’ standard approach that has caused a psychological block; but then they gain hope because they see work like Engineering the Alpha, your work, or hopefully some of my work and they say, “Okay, this is a different approach”, which is great! To be clear, it does help them. But what is so heartbreaking is, for example, if you break your leg over and over and over again, it’s going to become harder and harder and harder to run over time. The more you break any part of your body now and even if you get the right information later on, you’ve got some baggage there. That’s the thing that just so breaks my heart, Adam, and I so hope we can change with this upcoming generation is so many of our members of society have lived through this great nutritional depression that has caused irreparable damage. It doesn’t mean they’re hopeless, but if you smoke for 20 years, your lungs will be in a different state than if you didn’t smoke for 20 years, and if you weight-cycled because you were given this bad information for 20 years and then you do get the right information, you’ve still got some lasting damage there. I think we don’t give enough credit to the permanency or severity of what this misinformation can do, and we don’t draw enough analogies to things like smoking. We think it’s just like, “Oh, you can just gain weight and lose it and it’s fine.” People don’t get the baggage there. That’s why that model is so, so important. So, assuming I didn’t go completely off the ranch there, let’s talk about how we can avoid all of that nonsense with the book Engineering the Alpha, which as you mentioned, is focused at men, but ladies, please don’t let this scare you away because I think part of the problem with this misinformation is, especially for the ladies out there, you’re told things that are just completely bogus! At least men are told to strength train, but women are told, “Oh, well, just go move little weights for long periods of time because you’re a woman.” Adam, help me out here.

Adam: Yeah. I think there are two messages that are important to take away and then we can really start digging in to the nitty-gritty that men are treated differently than women and the problem is that we need to have them be treated more similarly. What I mean by that is, it’s just like you said, we’ll tell guys that they need to lift weights and they can accept it probably because of just this societal schema, and this idea of what we link to being masculine or feminine and these misperceptions of “Well, if I’m a woman, I don’t want to look big and bulky and muscular like a man. If I do what a man does, I’m going to look like a man.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. Obviously, there’s disseminating some of that information of, while there are differences obviously between men and women, a lot of what will be good for a man will be good for women. At the same time, a lot of the messages that we will spread to women, for instance, hormonal functioning, aren’t spread to men. Men are inherently stubborn. We are the most stubborn creatures in the world, and we’re not even made aware of all the different things that we’re doing to our body that are causing problems on a foundational, physiological level, on a hormonal level to the point where if you have this hormonal disruption – and this applies to men or women – you might be taking the right steps, but you won’t be seeing any of the benefits because your body is broken. The analogy is, it’s like an engine of a car. You can go ahead and put the best fuel in a broken engine, and the car still won’t run as well as it should be, so you have to fix the engine. That’s what we tried to do with this book, which the subtitle of the book is Man 2.0: Engineering the Alpha, so you would inherently think, “Okay, it’s for men.” The big caveat that I will say about that is that the language is written for men because getting a message across to a stubborn, stubborn man is very, very difficult. If you read a lot of fitness books, some of them can be – let’s just admit it – boring. It’s just ‘let’s do this’, ‘let’s do that’. It’s very prescriptive, it’s not entertaining, and guys will read a couple of pages and then look for the workout and skip over all the important stuff; we didn’t want that to happen. So we used some strong language – I will say to any of the ladies out there – if you pick it up and you were offended by the strong language or some profanity, you should be warned about that. I won’t dance around that. At the same time, the information that’s in there, the myths that are in there, the hormonal issues, the simple lifestyle changes that are in there are applicable to both genders, and they are very, very important because the engine that runs your body does depend on these hormonal issues, and they are impacted by lifestyle decisions – whether it is how you exercise or how you sleep – and it’s important to adjust these things so that your body can function well. If you’re a woman who knows a man, it’s even more important that you give him this book and be like, “Listen, there are issues that you are not aware of.” This is a book that will speak to guys in a way that will hopefully get them to open their eyes, open their ears and take action so that we can overcome these things that you were talking about, Jonathan – the frustration that people who have smoked for 20 years because they just figure, “Oh, well, we have to put a stop to it now.” For the people who have been doing all this damage to their body, they have to realize that you can’t go back, but there is still hope. For the people who have yet to make these decisions that are going to cause a whole bunch of problems, we have to start them on the right track now.

Jonathan: Adam, how can we get started on that right track? The book is essentially a series of awesome myth-busting, and there are some specific myths I’d love to dig into, but before I do that, what would you say are the top paradigms – to use a business jargon term – that we might need to flip on their head for both men and women to start helping themselves instead of hurting themselves when they try to change their diet and exercise?

Adam: I think the big one here is that a lot of us just assume that our bodies naturally break down over time, and if we just do some things for simple maintenance, everything is going to be fine. But the reality is the lifestyle decisions that you make, starting as young as in your 20s, can have a profound impact on the way that your body functions; it can have a profound impact on your hormonal levels. What is going to make you hungrier than you should? What is going to make you want to grab the foods that you don’t want to do and it’s almost like mind control? We talk about how the amount that you sleep can make you more likely to go and grab the foods that are the worst things in the world that you don’t want, but you have no control over it because physiologically there’s a chemical reaction going there that’s making you crave and desire those foods when you normally wouldn’t. It’s understanding that if you take yourself to this point where you aren’t exercising the right way or eating the right foods or sleeping the right way, you do shift this hormonal environment in a way that makes it very, very difficult for you to see the benefits from living a healthier life. When your hormones are off, it does make it harder to build muscle for guys. If your hormones are off, it makes it a lot harder to lose fat; it makes it a lot harder to not feel hungry when you shouldn’t feel hungry. You’re eating the right things, you’re taking the right steps, and yet you’re still hungry and it’s because your hunger hormones – leptin and ghrelin – they’re completely thrown off! These control things so that the bottom line – the paradigm shift – is that you have a lot of people out there who take those steps that we were talking about – they exercise more, they eat less – and they don’t see the results. Some of it might be because they’re doing the wrong thing – they’re slogging away on a treadmill or they’re eating the wrong foods, they’re trying to avoid all fat because they think that low fat is the key to not being fat – and that’s part of the problem and that’s part of the myth-busting we do. You don’t want to fall into these traps that are inflexible and are going to ruin you. At the same time, you might be doing the right thing but because your body’s internal environment, its ecosystem, has been disrupted, you’re not going to see the same benefits that you would if you were playing on a level field and your body was healthy. If we can refresh – hit the ‘restart’ button – on your body and get you playing from a level playing field, then when you start taking those healthier steps, you’re going to start seeing the type of results that you would expect to be seeing, and that’s empowering! That’s the type of positive reinforcement people need to make these lifestyle changes, to feel better about their efforts, and to reward them because, let’s be honest, there’s hard work that goes into this. Change takes time and takes patience, but change should also be rewarded. We are creatures that when we’re rewarded, we feel good and it’s much easier to continue that behavior, and nothing is worse than for me seeing people frustrated and down and unhappy with themselves because they put in the hard work or down with themselves because they don’t like the way they look or feel and need to change that. People need to enjoy life. That’s one of the foundational messages and missions of this book.

Jonathan: Well, Adam, I love what you said about this refreshing and restarting. I use the analogy of a clogged sink; you used the analogy of a broken-down car engine. Once we can unclog that sink or fix that engine, make those foundational changes – again, if the system’s broken, it really doesn’t matter what you do with the inputs into the system; the system is broken. So, how do we fix that system? How do we refresh and restart?

Adam: There are a lot of different steps to be outlined. I would say the easiest one, the biggest one – I even knew this, but I didn’t realize the depth of it – I’d start with sleep. The amount of research that’s coming out on the importance of sleep on everything from how hungry you are to the foods that you want to weight loss, it is amazing and it is staggering! What is most staggering is how quickly a lack of sleep can play a huge impact on what it will do for your body. So a great study that I looked at in terms of man was showing that when men would sleep less than 6 hours at night, within two weeks, their testosterone levels, on a global level, could drop more than 15%. Now this is really important when you consider that men, after the age of 30, their testosterone starts dropping 1% every year. So you’re talking about within two weeks of poor sleep, having the equivalent of what happens naturally in the aging process in 15 years. That’s just crazy! It’s mind-blowing to think about! We have to start realizing that there’s a reason we sleep at night and a lot of us have this mentality that sleep is wasted time or if we don’t sleep, it won’t have that much of an impact, I’ll make it up later. It’s something that has to be prioritized because the less you sleep, the worse your workouts are going to be. The less you sleep, the more hungry you’re going to be. It’s not because you’re up for more hours, it’s because you are literally being driven towards food. The less you sleep, the research shows, you’re more likely to want to grab a cookie or a donut as opposed to some vegetables or fruit or something healthy along those lines. Again, it’s that concept of – you look at this one mechanism, it’s a daily lifestyle habit and if you just fix it, literally, you won’t be as hungry, you won’t be as inclined to grab some of the foods, not even being aware that it’s your mind that’s pushing you there. You will see better benefits from exercise, and you will start fixing the system. A lot of the tips in the book are really just that simple. It’s like ‘let’s look at the foods you eat’, ‘let’s look at the habits you have from day to day and let’s make slight adjustments to those so that you can fix that hormonal environment and then really start pushing forward’.

Jonathan: That’s so profound, Adam. There are so many elements of this hormonal equation that really don’t get any airtime. We always talk about eating and exercising; you just mentioned sleep is such a critical component. We have individuals who are not sleeping enough because they live a lifestyle that is so stressful that now they’re extremely stressed when they are awake for an extended period of time, and in fact they might be so stressed that now they’re on medication, which further screws up their hormones. It’s like this cascade of trying to do too much and not just taking a step back, refreshing the body, respecting the body, truly doing things that are healthy rather than that just further tax the body. But that just seems like a paradigm shift. We almost live in a culture which prizes you to power your way through it and work harder and harder, harder, harder. How do we shift to the smarter mindset?

Adam: I think there are two aspects to it. You touched on that and that’s really funny. One of them is the whole medical community. You are like me. I have a tremendous respect for science. It’s why we quote so much research in the book and because you want principles that have some foundation behind them. It’s really important, and it makes a big difference. But when it comes to hormones, a lot of times the medical community’s first response is ‘take this pill’, ‘take this injection’, ‘take this drug’. You see it in both genders. You see it much more in men that if there’s any hormone issue, ‘get some sort of hormone replacement therapy’; but you also see it in women. It’s almost like a knee-jerk reaction. When you start looking at why these hormonal deficiencies occur, you see that while the pharmaceutical option might have to be the only option that will work, often times, that’s not the case. You can see a lot of big changes – there was a study that we share in the book by Australian researchers that found that hormonal levels of people in their 60s were the same as people in their 30s, and the difference that saw the people in their 60s with their higher, more healthier hormonal levels, what indicated this – and this was an observational study, so you can’t do direct causation here – but it was that they have lifestyle factors like sleep, like exercise, like certain dietary habits that the researchers hypothesized allowed them to really maintain a healthier hormonal environment because it is this idea ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’. Not necessarily ‘if you don’t take this drug, you lose it’. I think that’s a cultural mindset shift that we have to get to because we are this society of instant gratification. We are the people who created the microwave because we couldn’t wait for food to be cooked quick enough and so we found a way to make it quicker. Sometimes taking a slightly more patient approach and a natural approach is going to be a lot healthier for you and it’s going to be a lot better. In terms of creating this paradigm shift of the little changes that we can do in terms of ‘I want to be successful, I want to push forward, but how do I do it without sacrificing sleep?’ It’s something else we talk about in the book where we have these alpha principles – and I should take a quick mention of, there’s a lot of misconception that goes around the name of the book of Engineering the Alpha – we wanted to take back and re-establish what ‘alpha’ meant. Alpha isn’t necessarily a male term. What we decided is the alpha, which just really comes from hierarchies of classes of animals, is the best version of yourself. We find that most people find the alpha to be a comparative nature – you want to be better than other people – and that’s really an empty drive. If you’re always comparing yourself to others, you’re never going to be satisfied or healthy or happy. So that’s what the alpha approach is. So we have these alpha principles and one of them, which links closely to this sleep issue, is about being dedicated, but not being obsessed. Dedication means that you work hard towards a goal that you have hopes, that you have dreams and that you pursue those with relentlessness that embodies the way that you want to be seen; this is a representation of you. But a lot of the times, this crosses over into obsession and what obsession is is when you have these goals or these drives and it offsets the balance of everything else in your life. So if you love your job and you love doing what you do, like both of us do, but then that overpowers the other drives and the other things that we enjoy – so we stop hanging out with friends and family or stop doing hobbies that we like – that’s obsession. We can still be dedicated to our job, but we have to have that balance. The same thing – we can be dedicated to our job; it doesn’t mean that should take away from a fundamental need, which is sleep. So it’s drawing that line that it is good to be dedicated, it’s good to have passion; sometimes you need to sprint in life and work a little bit harder, but you have to draw this line because it does become detrimental to your health and your happiness if it’s an obsession that controls all of your behaviors.

Jonathan: That reminds me, Adam, of… We’ve already used a few psychological terms, so let’s make this a little bit more psychological of a podcast, shall we? Talk about ‘learned helplessness’. What you just mentioned reminds me of the term ‘paradoxical intention’, where we want something ‘so bad’ – we want a goal so bad and we pursue that goal so hard that our pursuit actually causes us to not achieve that goal. The most common example of this is if you’re getting ready to maybe speak in public and you’re like, “I’m nervous. Don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous.” You try really hard to not be nervous and it just makes you more nervous. We see that with the traditional approach to health and fitness. “I’m going to be healthy, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to wake up at 4 a.m., I’m going to go run for 2 hours.” That will make you less healthy; not more healthy. Right?!

Adam: Right! Exactly.

Jonathan: So, not only are you not getting sleep, but then you’re just beating the hell out of your body, raising all kinds of bad hormones and lowering the good ones for the rest of the day, and you just spent time, again, that you could’ve been spent sleeping. So, don’t do that. Also, Adam, one thing you mentioned which, again, so key are these deeper lifestyle factors. One thing I’d like to point out, because you mentioned the study about these individuals who were older were getting more sleep is just to play the science card a little bit here because I know our audience are fans of science – when we’re on the subject of confounding variables, many studies will come out that will talk about, for example, individuals who eat more vegetables and less protein are healthier than those who eat more protein and less vegetables. Now, both of us are all about eating lots of vegetables and eating the correct amount of protein, so both of those things. But what’s important to keep in mind about these studies and any other study is generally, people who go out of their way to eat a lot of vegetables – you have to go out of your way in our culture to eat vegetables; you don’t have to go out of your way in our culture to eat protein; high-quality protein, yes; any protein, no. People that go out of their way to eat vegetables, I would think, do other things in their life to be healthier. So you have a group of people that are actually doing a whole slew of things to be healthier, being compared to people that aren’t doing a whole slew of things to be healthier, but the study or the news report of the study just focuses on one thing – ‘Oh, well, this group ate more protein and this group ate more vegetables, so clearly the cause of these differences is eat less protein and eat more vegetables’. Which again, those confounding, below-the-surface variables are pretty complicated. Any time you see a study which says ‘it’s because of this one thing’, you might want to run the other direction, right?

Adam: Right. But I think part of the greater message here is that you see these studies and especially when it’s observational data, you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t take something away from it and what you take away from it is that you do start looking at these lifestyle factors – of the older people who had higher levels or better hormonal levels and it’s like ‘well, they did X, Y, and Z’ – they slept more, they ate better, which means they probably were also exercising more. When you start looking from a theoretical lens, which can be dangerous, you start to realize, though, that there’s only so much coincidence involved. I talk about behavioral magnets and what I mean by that is you do one healthy behavior and it attracts another and it attracts another and…. Which actual healthy behavior is causing the desired effect? Sometimes it’s impossible to know. It would be great if we could easily just run studies on everything that we thought was cool, but as many people don’t know, research is always based on funding and a lot of the coolest stuff that we’d like to test, we just can’t because no one’s funding those studies, but what we can take away from that is if you create enough of these healthy magnets, does it really matter which one is eliciting the effect? Are you trying to pull out and cheat the system, or are you really just trying to live the best life possible? Sometimes the takeaway from research can be, “Well, let’s add these behaviors because it will help us add these other behaviors and in concert, we’re going to be healthier, we’re going to live better, we’re going to feel better, we’re going to look better. At the end of the day, a lot of times, I think we split hairs about trying to identify exactly what it is that is eliciting that response when really we should just be breaking down barriers and make it easier for people to take on habits that will get those results. If we get people to that point and stop worrying too much about details as long as we’re giving them the good information, we’re going to make it a lot easier because it just gets back to what you were talking about. You get the people who will wake up at 4 a.m. and go run for 2 hours and that’s not a good approach because it’s going to take you further away from the goal. There’s also the problem with ‘is this really the best, smartest way to do this in terms of you enjoying this process?’ Simple. We often times complicate the process so much and when there’s a simpler process, you might be able to wake up at 4 a.m. and run 2 hours every day and get in great shape, but are you really enjoying your life? Is this really a sustainable model? I think we need to get back to as well taking the science, taking this information we have, and coming up with simpler solutions. You were talking earlier about we have advancements in every single walk of life and yet, for some reason, in health and fitness, we continue to want to push ahead information that may or may not get some results – there are people who will do things that aren’t necessarily the best way but will still get you results – but they’re not an efficient way, it’s not a smart way, and it’s not a way that’s really going to allow the greatest number of people to see a difference. That, often times, is what we have to do with this science, with these great breakthroughs. How can we take this information and provide a model – provide a movement – that more people can actually do, more people can actually follow, because we’re not all robots that can wake up at 4 a.m. and do that and still be happy and still enjoy life?

Jonathan: Well, I couldn’t put it any better myself, Adam. That is some profound words. Folks, if you want more profound words – first of all, there are many, many pages of them to be found in Adam’s new book Engineering the Alpha and it’s Man 2.0, but again, not just for the men; many of the truths in there will apply to ladies just as well and certainly, if nothing else, ladies, it can empower you to maybe help the men in your life because that would be good, too! A bunch of wonderful free information can be found on Adam’s website which is BornFitness.com. Adam, what’s next for you?

Adam: Who knows at this point? There’s a lot of fun stuff happening at Born Fitness. There is the book. I will mention, we will be having a second book coming up which is geared specifically for females. So the hope is that I will be coming back and it will be language that I think will talk to the female audience, a little bit more pointed. But it’s exciting stuff with Engineering the Alpha right now and just really continuing to try and put out great content that helps people and work with people like yourself, who are doing everything they can to spread the word and bust these myths. So don’t be surprised if we’re working a little bit together, Jonathan. I really appreciate you having me on and having the opportunity to talk about the book and hopefully open some eyes and let people know that these issues, these frustrations – they can be overcome and we just have to identify the right problems and start cleaning out a lot of that junk that holds people back.

Jonathan: Well, Adam, I appreciate the kind words, and I’m delighted to hear the second book is coming out. Listeners, if nothing else, check out Adam’s work. Check out the book because I think, hopefully, you will get a glimmer of hope because Adam represents where the mainstream, I believe, will be in 20 years. This is not hopeless. I believe we are in a space with nutrition and fitness like we were with smoking 60 years ago, where there is enough science and there are enough smart people and there are enough people who are also smart about how to get that information out there, that there is hope. I think Adam is a great representation of that, so please go out there and check out his work. Adam, certainly we’d love to have you back on the show, brother! I appreciate you joining us.

Adam: Thank you so much. It was great being here.

Jonathan: Hey, everyone! Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s show as much as I did. Remember, this week and every week after – eat smarter, exercise smarter, and live better.

Jonathan: Wait, wait! Don’t stop listening yet.

Carrie: You can get fabulous free SANE recipes over at CarrieBrown.com.

Jonathan: And don’t forget, your 100% free Eating and Exercise Quick Start Program as well as free fun daily tips delivered right into your inbox at BailorGroup.com.