10x Life, Health & Performance with Gary Brecka, Co-Founder, 10xHealth

Know someone who lacks the energy they used to have, feels tired, struggles with mood or mental clarity, or keeping a healthy weight, maintaining muscle or sleeping well? Today’s episode is for them as it’s all about thriving in life! It’s with Gary Brecka, Co-Founder of 10X Health, who has spent over 20 yrs helping people live with peak performance. In this conversation, we cover:

Resources Mentioned In The Episode:

10X Health Supplements (including the ‘daily essential’ methylated multivitamin)

Boundless by Ben Greenfield

Gary Brecka’s Instagram

DLP Capital

Impact with Don Wenner Podcast

Inrive Performance Nutrition

Episode timestamps:

[02:23] Upcoming Health & Well-being event in Puerto Rico

[03:43] Gary Brecka’s background and accomplishments

[04:35] Predicting how long you have to live to the month

[05:14] The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease

[05:52] Humans are suffering from a lack of raw materials

[07:51] Simple items to change to increase lifespan & healthspan

[09:01] How health conditions actually get passed onto the next generation

[10:29] The importance of methylation, the converting of raw materials

[12:23] Why we need to look at the root cause of health issues

[15:47] The Happiness crisis + when people can’t achieve optimal mood

[17:23] Diet is vitally important, but there’s more to it

[19:45] Targeted supplementation to avoid deficiency 

[20:22] The gene test everyone should do once in their life

[24:04] Improving life to live with vitality

[24:57] Aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort

[25:53] Your morning routine determines the trajectory of your life

[28:29] What we can for free to have the most impact on optimal health

[30:52] How to get back to the level of energy you previously had

[33:27] Vitamin D3 is the most important nutrient and most are not getting enough

[35:30] When you feel down, move. Snack on exercise.

[37:43] Authenticity: Be cautious with what you say and believe what you say.

Connect with Patrick O’Donnell

Transcript

* This transcript was mostly generated by AI, so please excuse any mistakes, and enjoy!

[00:00:00] Patrick O’Donnell: Hello and welcome to Live Fit Ignite Change, where together as a community we inspire each other to live a fit life. Ignite the change we wish to see and thrive in all areas of life. Know someone who lacks the energy they used to have, feels tired, struggles with mood or mental clarity, or keeping a healthy weight, maintaining muscle, or sleeping well.

[00:00:27] Patrick O’Donnell: Today’s episode is for them as it’s all about thriving in life. It’s with Gary Brecka of 10X Health, who has spent over 20 years helping people live with peak performance. In this conversation we cover, it’s not aging that causes these issues, but a depletion of raw materials, and we cover how that’s easy to fix.

[00:00:49] Patrick O’Donnell: Also, how the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease and what you can do to prevent disease and why vitamin D3 is the most important nutrient in the human body, [00:01:00] and how to make sure you are getting enough. And when you follow these steps, phenomenal things happen. As Gary says, 

[00:01:07] Gary Brecka: Phenomenal things happen.

[00:01:08] Gary Brecka: Brain fog goes away. Mood disorders and conditions eviscerate, sleep deepens, response to exercise, skyrockets, waking, energy soars. All of the things that we accept as a consequence of youth, and we also accept as an erosion of aging, are not in fact a consequence of aging at all. 

[00:01:26] Patrick O’Donnell: So get ready for a truly amazing episode so you can create the change you wish to see.

[00:01:33] Patrick O’Donnell: Changing our world does not happen at once. It does not happen alone. It takes a committed group to. Be the change we wish to see. So together we rise above negative influences to lead by example, making a positive impact at home and around the world. You can learn more. Join us and get show notes at live fit ignite change.com or for short live [00:02:00] f ic.com.

[00:02:02] Patrick O’Donnell: All right, here we go. I originally recorded this with Gary as a guest host on the Impact with Don Wenner Podcast, so you can hear the full conversation there. Gary’s points were so good and so aligned with what this LiFi Ignite Change podcast is all about. I had to include an episode here with snippets and commentary on what he shared as well.

[00:02:22] Patrick O’Donnell: Also, Gary will be speaking at our upcoming DLP Capital Health and Wellbeing Summit in Puerto Rico. I’ll have a small part there alongside some of the top health, fitness, and longevity minds in the world, including Dr. Harari, who wrote Lifeforce with Tony Robbins, Nick Buettner from Blue Zones, who is on the next episode of this podcast, Mark Sisson from Mark’s Daily Apple in Primal Kitchen, who was on episode 9.

[00:02:45] Patrick O’Donnell: Amanda Holmes, CEO of Chet Holmes International, who is on episode 4 and many more. So we’ll link to that event and all the resources mentioned in this episode at livefitignitechange.com/gary. And now let’s jump into the [00:03:00] conversation. 

[00:03:00] Patrick O’Donnell: Awesome. Well, hello Gary, and wonderful to see you. I’m super excited for this conversation. 

[00:03:05] Patrick O’Donnell: Personally, love all the stuff that you’re doing and really looking forward to seeing you too at our Health and Wellbeing and Longevity Summit in Puerto Rico in November. 

[00:03:12] Gary Brecka: Yeah, I’m excited about that too, man. I really am. 

[00:03:15] Patrick O’Donnell: I think we are in for a treat. Cause I, I guess when you were first introduced to DLP and met Don and Bo, was at The EXP event in Dallas.

[00:03:23] Gary Brecka: That’s right. 

[00:03:23] Patrick O’Donnell: From what I was told there, there were some amazing speakers including Tony Robbins, and you were actually voted the number one best speaker in the show. 

[00:03:31] Gary Brecka: Well, that makes me so happy, man. That’s, that’s really kind of you, you know, It’s not me, it’s the message, you know. Um, it’s really resonating. 

[00:03:38] Patrick O’Donnell: It is. I love your message and I think people already know you, but for any of the listeners that don’t, I’ll give a quick bio and then we’ll dive right in.

[00:03:45] Patrick O’Donnell: So first off, Gary is the co-founder and chief biologist of 10 X Health. Has over 20 years experience in biohacking and functional medicine. Sits on the board of the NFL Alumni Association as health service director, and his passion [00:04:00] lies in customizing peak performance protocols for individuals to achieve optimal health. Wow. I love that. That is so aligned with what I want. Fill in a little bit more . Yeah, fill in a little bit more and share what you’re up to these days. 

[00:04:16] Gary Brecka: So, you know, as, as you mentioned, you know, I’m now in the wellness space, but I, I wasn’t always in the wellness space. My, for the better part of 20 years, I was, a mortality expert for the insurance industry.

[00:04:29] Gary Brecka: People seemed to be so fascinated with that. And, so if we got five years of medical records on you and five years of demographic data, myself and my team could tell the insurance company. You know, how long you had to live to the month and, you know, it was a very, unrewarding career because we were not allowed to have any contact with a patient, not allowed to have any contact with a treating physician.

[00:04:53] Gary Brecka: You know, even if we saw life threatening drug interactions, we couldn’t have any contact with those persons. We could only access the, the [00:05:00] records and the data and the, and, and the medical information. But what we realized was were a number of things. I say this every time I speak, every time I’m on a podcast, every, every moment that I get.

[00:05:10] Gary Brecka: We realized, you know, over this 20 year period that number one, the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And I’m to elaborate on that. Um, you know, nearly every disease state and pathological state known to mankind and, and not just disease states like Alzheimer’s and diabetes and hypertension, but conditions where we accept an erosion of our baseline sense of normalcy.

[00:05:32] Gary Brecka: Just things like brain fog, poor sleep, water retention, weight gain, um, you know, poor mental clarity, lack of short term recall, ADD, ADHD, OCD. These conditions all have a major component in the absence of oxygen. And the second thing we realized was that the majority of what human beings were suffering with, were a lack of raw material.

[00:05:56] Gary Brecka: It wasn’t a disease that was happening to us, it was a condition that was happening [00:06:00] within us. You know, our physiology really determines our trajectory in our life. Your physiology will drag you back down into the state in which it most comfortably exists. Right. And there are people that are, have struggle with mood or emotional state.

[00:06:15] Gary Brecka: There are people that struggle with weight gain and water retention. There are people that struggle with getting a good night’s sleep, getting, you know, adequate delta wave sleep. There’s people that wake up every day and, and suffer from brain fog and they just accept that as a consequence of aging 

[00:06:28] Gary Brecka: And none of that has to be accepted, by human beings. You know, we were really put here to thrive and we’ve gotten so far away from the study of human beings, from mankind, basic human physiology, that when we actually go back into the human body and we look for missing raw materials, things as simple as vitamins, nutrients, amino acids, minerals, when you replace these contents, the phenomenal things.

[00:06:53] Gary Brecka: I mean, phenomenal things happen. Brain fog goes away, Mood disorders and conditions eviscerate, sleep [00:07:00] deepens, response to exercise skyrockets, waking, energy soars. All of the things that we accept as a consequence of youth, and we also accept as an erosion of aging. Are not in fact a consequence of aging at all.

[00:07:12] Gary Brecka: They’re a consequence of a continued depletion of raw materials, and it’s very easy for us to find out and ask the right questions to our body, not to our friends or our spouse or even our doctor, but to ask the right questions to our body about what is missing in my body that’s keeping me from a state of absolute optimal health 

[00:07:27] Gary Brecka: And my life’s mission now is not to predict how soon people will die, but to help people live longer, healthier, happier lives. In fact, one of the consequences of doing so much mortality research was we also realized that the greatest impacts on lifespan and health span, you know, how many healthy years you have and how many years you have left on this planet.

[00:07:48] Gary Brecka: They’re both what we, we called modifiable risk factors. Meaning these are things that are relatively easy to change in your life. That when those changes are [00:08:00] made, they have demonstrative impacts on how many years you have left on this earth and how many healthy years you have left on this earth. And that’s really the message that I want to get out to the world is that, you know, human beings were meant to thrive.

[00:08:12] Gary Brecka: And if we would just ask the right questions of our bodies, it will give us the right answer. And we can put raw materials, simple raw materials back into the human body and achieve a state of optimal health that most of us thought, you know. Was well beyond our grasp because we were either too old or too busy or too stressed, you know, or don’t have the right information to really reach that state.

[00:08:33] Patrick O’Donnell: Wow, that is awesome. And I love that you’re put here to thrive. I think that is so important to what people don’t do enough of. And I’d love for you to dive in. You mentioned you can dive in a little bit more, and I know I’ve heard you talk and other times about people talking about. Oh yeah, blood pressure, high blood pressure, it runs in my family.

[00:08:48] Patrick O’Donnell: It just passes down. And the whole idea of, well, no, that’s not really on a gene. I’d love you to, you know, share a little bit about that as well and the whole process to thriving in life. 

[00:08:56] Gary Brecka: Right? I mean, there is truth to the fact that [00:09:00] medical conditions can, you can have a predisposition to a medical condition because of your genetics.

[00:09:04] Gary Brecka: That’s very true. But, the majority of what happens when we see that a condition runs in families like hypertension, runs in families. My great-grandfather had it, my grandfather had it, my father had it, has it, and now I have it. You know, so we accept that the disease hypertension is being passed from generation to generation, or the disease of hypothyroid is being passed from generation to generation, or even things like tension deficit disorder or depression or anxiety or propensity for addiction.

[00:09:32] Gary Brecka: But what we overlook, is it very often these are not actually diseases that are being passed from generation to generation. They are genetic defects that essentially do not allow the human body to convert a raw material into its usable form. And let explain what I mean. So I always use the example that, you know, we pull crude oil out of the ground.

[00:09:57] Gary Brecka: But you can’t put crude oil into your gas [00:10:00] tank because you know, the car doesn’t understand that fuel source. Crude oil has to be refined into gasoline, and now the car understands that fuel source. Well, human beings are no different, right? We put all kinds of raw materials, and there’s not a single one known demand kind.

[00:10:14] Gary Brecka: No protein, no mineral, no men acid, no nutrient, carbohydrate, vitamin, and nothing that we put into the human body, that’s used in the format that we put it in. Everything that enters our body is converted into its usable form through a process called methylation. Refining crude oil is called refining, but converting raw materials in the human body is called methylation.

[00:10:40] Gary Brecka: And this is arguably the most important process that every human being listening to this recording goes through. So, for example, if you put folic acid, into the human body, which by the way, is an entirely manmade chemical. Folic acid doesn’t occur anywhere naturally on the surface of the earth. You cannot find [00:11:00] folic acid in nature.

[00:11:01] Gary Brecka: But when we put folic acid into the human body, it gets converted into its usable form called methylfolate. And methylfolate floods the body as a methyl group. It goes all throughout the body and it helps convert neurotransmitters, amino acids into neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters become our mood, our emotional state.

[00:11:21] Gary Brecka: It helps us to move contents through our gut. It helps us. The, degrades thought and keep our mind clear and focused so we don’t have too many windows open At the same time, it helps to regulate hormones in the human body and stop water retention from things like excess estrogen. So something as simple as a vitamin that enters the body, that gets converted into a usable form, then floods the rest of the body, it enter cells and has a really important role in human function.

[00:11:50] Gary Brecka: And if you can’t make this conversion, Then you have a deficiency, and it’s the deficiency that leads to a lot of these conditions,

[00:11:59] Patrick O’Donnell: Right. It’s [00:12:00] these deficiencies. So your body may have an issue converting a nutrient, and then that impacts mood, depression, or anxiety, or emotional state. It could be blocking the feeling of elation.

[00:12:09] Patrick O’Donnell: So people often look externally to try to figure out why they don’t feel right, or for skin issues. Again, they may look externally and add a topical cream or something like that, but the need is to look at the inside, at the root cause. 

[00:12:23] Gary Brecka: When I was in grad school, again, in my second human biology degree, I had to take a lot of plant botany courses and like harbor courses, and I didn’t really like ’em.

[00:12:33] Gary Brecka: I mean, I don’t have anything wrong with plants, but, I wanted to study the human body and not plants. But one thing that stood out to me was that without failure, a botanist. Or an arborist, Someone who is an expert in plant biology. Anytime that there is a disease or an issue in the leaves or the branches or the trunk, they always look at the soil, right?

[00:12:55] Gary Brecka: They always test the soil. So they say, You know, look at all of this decay that’s on these leaves at the top of [00:13:00] this tree, and they’ll do a core sample of the soil and say, Oh, it’s deficient in nitrogen. We add nitrogen to the soil and it fixes leaves, but we don’t think about human beings this way. Right. We start spraying the leaf with poison, or we start cutting the leaves or the branches, or we shave the trunk because we think that this is something that’s happening to this plant when it’s actually something that’s happening within us, and this is very true with human beings.

[00:13:23] Gary Brecka: I can go raw material by raw material and tell you exactly what happens if you start to deplete certain raw materials like vitamin D3, for example. One of the leading causes of mortality in COVID. In fact, the second leading cause of morbidity in COVID was a clinical deficiency. In the most important nutrient in the human body.

[00:13:40] Gary Brecka: Vitamin D3, the only vitamin that human beings can make on our own. And Vitamin D3 is very easy to supplement with. You don’t have to buy my Vitamin D3. There are plenty of great vitamin D3 manufacturers out there that compound it with K2, so that D three is effective at transporting calcium. But simple things like these depleted raw materials have [00:14:00] demonstrative effects on our lifestyle and how well we can fight off a pathogen or a bacteria or a virus.

[00:14:06] Gary Brecka: And so, When you talk about things as critical as weakening of the immune system, and we start taking, you know, any inflammatories and any histamines and cold medications and, you know, we try to avoid, you know, high pollen environments or we, we mask and quarantine and social distance to try to keep ourself away from viral pathogens instead of actually strengthening the immune system.

[00:14:31] Gary Brecka: The God-given immune system that was actually meant to fight for us. And so, most of your listeners right now would be surprised probably to know that there are some simple, raw materials that they could put back into their body and reach a state of optimal health that they probably thought was eluding them.

[00:14:51] Gary Brecka: You know, I, I think most people have have accepted such an erosion of their baseline sense of normalcy. They’re walking around at 55 or 60% and when they just go back [00:15:00] to feeling normal, they think they feel amazing. I say it to people all the time, You actually don’t feel amazing. You feel normal. That’s- 

[00:15:06] Patrick O’Donnell: People have lost that sense of normal.

[00:15:08] Patrick O’Donnell: And then once you do, you’re back to normal, but you feel like you’re thriving and it really lets you impact so much more in all aspects of life. I think when you were talking before, it reminded me of really at DLP, we talk about the four crisis we look to impact where one is the happiness crisis, people have more.

[00:15:25] Patrick O’Donnell: Opportunity right now to be happy. But studies show they just are not, and I think a lot of it falls into line with, they just don’t feel as good as they could when they are living back to the normal and looking, like you say, look at the soil, look at the root cause. So I’d love to share more like what 10 X Health and what you guys are doing to be able to get people back to that feeling of normal.

[00:15:44] Gary Brecka: Sure. I mean, you know, this happiness crisis is, it’s really a pandemic, right? When, so when people can’t achieve an optimal state of mood and emotion. So for example, if I just affected the [00:16:00] conversion of one amino acid tryptophan into one neurotransmitter – serotonin, now what happens is the peaks of mood start to escape me.

[00:16:08] Gary Brecka: Passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido. And when you’re walking around long enough unable to achieve these emotional states, you start looking to your outside environment for what is the negative impact on me that’s causing me to feel like this? And you attach to that. So you actually search for the negative input that’s causing you to have the negative feeling.

[00:16:32] Gary Brecka: And so once you find that negative input, you focus on it, you attach to it, and now you become either a part of a cause that has a very negative connotation or you develop a very negative mood towards other people or other, cultures or even other opinions. And it’s because it gives you comfort to know that there’s a reason.

[00:16:50] Gary Brecka: That you can’t reach this emotional state, and it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of somebody insulting you or somebody offending you or somebody doing something, that bothers [00:17:00] you and this is why you’re in this suppressed emotional state when the truth is, it could be as simple as a lack of raw material, simple as, raw materials – 

[00:17:08] Patrick O’Donnell: Right. It’s these raw materials, and often you’ll hear people say that it’s diet alone. And don’t get me wrong, proper nutrition. eating whole foods filled with nutrients and removing junk sugar, gluten and processed foods is vitally important. An incredibly important simple change you can make to live with vitality. Yet there’s more. 

[00:17:27] Gary Brecka: You know, I get on a lot of these podcasts and I talk to a lot of, you know, nutritional experts and like, well, you can get everything that you need from your diet. If you’re eating the right, leafy greens and fruits and grass fed meats, and that’s partially true, but our food supply is so depleted in nutrients.

[00:17:42] Gary Brecka: The last time we did a soil lineage study in the United States was 1941. So if you pick up a bag of spinach in the supermarket, what’s updated are the macros, the carbohydrates, the fats, the proteins, the amount of sugar, but the [00:18:00] nutrient content. How much calcium is in that spinach, how much iron is in that spinach?

[00:18:03] Gary Brecka: How much magnesium is in that spinach? That’s borrowed from a 1941 soil lineage study before the majority of all pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and preservatives were developed, right? And so now we preserve fruits and vegetables, for example. When – by the way, when preservatives were first discovered, they were actually called anti-digestives because the process that keeps an apple, if you slice it from turning brown – Benzoquinone – that process is called oxidation, right?

[00:18:34] Gary Brecka: So if you prevent oxidation, the process of digestion is oxidation. So if you prevent oxidation, you prevent digestion. And then some smart marketers said, Hey, we shouldn’t call this anti-digestive. Nobody’s gonna eat an anti-digestive apple or eat anti-digestive lettuce. So let’s call it a preservative. Sounds a lot better.

[00:18:55] Gary Brecka: You know, we spray our entire grain supply with a chemical made in a laboratory called [00:19:00] folic acid, and instead of saying that our grains and rice and pastas and all white flour is sprayed with folic acid, we say it’s fortified or enriched. Right. So if you spin around a box of cereal, it’ll say fortified whole grains, enriched bleached white flour.

[00:19:16] Gary Brecka: This is just a code word for sprayed with folic acid. Well, 44% of the population can’t process folic acid, so it causes all kinds of conditions when you put chemical raw materials instead of actual raw materials into the human body and expect to have the same result. 

[00:19:33] Patrick O’Donnell: Exactly. Causes those issues and not to mention all the Roundup and glyophosphate and all the other stuff that goes into that as well.

[00:19:38] Gary Brecka: Yeah. Uh, I totally agree with that. So, supplementation is important. The, the, the point is that it’s targeted supplementation, not just supplementing for the sake of supplementing, but supplementing for a deficiency in the human body. And then watch what magnificent things happen. When you give the body the raw material it needs, just like when that botanist added [00:20:00] nitrogen to the soil, it fixed the leaf.

[00:20:03] Patrick O’Donnell: That’s awesome. And that’s what your test brings out, essentially. That— 

[00:20:07] Gary Brecka: So yeah, at 10X Health, and I’ll just say that we’re not the only ones that do this test. Cause everybody gets on me for saying, you’re just out here to push your test. I’m actually not out here to push my test.

[00:20:17] Gary Brecka: I want every human being to do one test one time in their life. And it’s a genetic test. It’s a cheek swab. Take a Q-tip and you put it in your mouth and you swab your cheek. You stick it in a test tube. You send it to a lab. They pull five actionable genes. They don’t look at your heritage or whether or not you have detached to your lobes or olive skin or green eyes.

[00:20:37] Gary Brecka: They look at five actionable genes. What can my body convert and what can it not convert into the usable form? And once you have that information for the balance of your lifetime, you will never guess on what your body needs in order to function optimally, right? So if you can’t convert folic acid into methylfolate, you supplement with methyfolate.

[00:20:58] Gary Brecka: If you’re taking a [00:21:00] cyanide based form of B12 called cyanocobalamin, you switch that to something called methylcobalamine, readily available raw materials. And depending on which of these five genes is broken and where that gene is broken. You supplement for that deficiency and you fix that raw material. So now the body has the fuel that it needs to funtion optimally. 

[00:21:23] Patrick O’Donnell: So it gets fueled properly and that, yeah, that that’s awesome. And that’s what it it for. So you can then go to really perform in all aspects. 

[00:21:31] Gary Brecka: That’s what it tests for. I mean, , if you go to 10X Health test.com, which is the number 10, the letter x health test.com. Right there. You can buy the gene test. It’s $599. They’ll ship the gene test to your door. You cheek swab yourself in your home. You’ll send it back to the lab and then when the report comes back, you’ll see that these are the, these are the materials that your body can convert. This is what you can’t convert. [00:22:00] This is what your body’s deficient in, and exactly what targeted supplementation you need.

[00:22:05] Patrick O’Donnell: That is awesome. The link to that in the show notes too, so you guys have it, but yeah, that’s awesome. And I would ask, it doesn’t change over time either. Like once you’ve taken it, once you get these supplements, you’re good to go? 

[00:22:14] Gary Brecka: Yes, because remember, this is your genes. So we can’t fix the gene, but we can supplement for its function, right? So the genes you’re born with are the genes you die with. Now, there is some gene altering technology and CRISPR out there, but those are scary things. For the most part, we cannot actually fix genes in the human body. If a gene is broken in one cell, it is broken in all 32 trillion cells in the human body.

[00:22:40] Gary Brecka: Remember that our genes are the master of activity in the body. It’s the master puppeteer. It gives instructions to the body or raw materials to the body so that it can function. Dna, which is like the CEO of the human body, not only is responsible for replicating itself, [00:23:00] right, making it a perfect clone of itself.

[00:23:02] Gary Brecka: That’s called replication, but it’s also responsible for process called transcription, which is, it gives instructions to the cell. There’s 32 trillion of these cells that are taking orders from your DNA every single day on how do I eliminate waste? How do I repair, how do I detoxify, How do I regenerate?

[00:23:20] Gary Brecka: If those instructions have pages missing? Then that process is impaired. I mean, all cancer is DNA replication, run aok. Wow. Right? All cancer begins in a hypoxic environment, a oxygen deprived environment in the body, and all cancer is DNA replication. Run amok. Why would we not search for the raw material that helps our DNA replicate and DNA to communicate?

[00:23:46] Patrick O’Donnell: Yeah, absolutely should, and I think that’s what part of this, I love that you’re doing this and you’re sharing the education too. Again, it makes me think of what we do at DLP I mentioned before about how we like to live fully in all aspects of lives, and we call it the eight Fs. That’s faith, family, friends.

[00:24:00] Patrick O’Donnell: Fitness like we’re talking about here, finances, fulfillment, freedom, and fun. And so we started a program called the FitLife Challenge, where we’ve rolled out to, I actually started my, uh, CrossFit gym years ago, but brought it to DLP. Yeah, we’ve, um, rolled it out here, taking it to other organizations and.

[00:24:15] Patrick O’Donnell: It’s that whole idea where it’s not just focused on one aspect of life. You wanna improve your sleep, your mindset, your nutrition, your exercise, and, and just start educating people about where to go to get back to that level where they can really have vitality and, and live fully. And so I’d love for you to share too.

[00:24:32] Patrick O’Donnell: I mean, I heard some amazing stories about what. You’ve simply done with, with breath work and the reduction of stress, and especially as it relates to that, cuz a lot of our listeners are those high performers at these high growth organizations. And how important it really is to just take that time for yourself and so you can perform better in the midst of a, what may be a crazy work day.

[00:24:52] Gary Brecka: Yeah. There’s no question. I mean, I, I. I, I have a favorite saying. I, I, I say all the time that, uh, aging is the [00:25:00] aggressive pursuit of comfort. Hmm. Aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. We have got to stop telling grandma not to go outside. It’s too hot not to go outside. It’s too cold to just lay down, to just rest, just relax, to eat at the very first pang of hunger.

[00:25:16] Gary Brecka: Right if, if we understood that stress is actually very good for the human body, if you don’t load a bone, it will not strengthen. If you don’t actually tear a muscle, it won’t grow. If you don’t challenge the immune system, it will weaken. I’ll just lead that at that. But if you don’t challenge the immune system, it will weaken.

[00:25:38] Gary Brecka: So by actually challenging the body, we strengthen the body. By stressing the body, we strengthen the body and physical stress. Improves our resilience to mental stress. That is a biophysiologic fact, by the way. So your morning routine not only determines the trajectory of your day, it determines the trajectory of the rest of your life.

[00:25:57] Gary Brecka: And I’m not the only one that preaches this, and nor am I the [00:26:00] only one that knows this. But if every day of your life when you woke up in the morning, you breathed. You apply to physical stress and a thermal stress, you would begin to back up your biological age significantly trailing your chronological age.

[00:26:19] Gary Brecka: So you know when I say that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, nothing could be more truthful than that statement. Nothing is more impactful than that statement in terms of how many years you have left on Earth, how many healthy years you have left on earth. If you look at people that are exhausted, They actually sleep the worst.

[00:26:39] Gary Brecka: Does it really make sense because you think, Well, why are people that are the most exhausted sleeping the worst? Well, because exhaustion comes from lack of blood, Oxygen and poor sleep comes from lack of blood, oxygen. I mean, you take somebody whose blood does not carry oxygen very well. And you start to lower their respiratory rate.

[00:26:56] Gary Brecka: Like what happens when they go into a deep sleep and as their [00:27:00] respiratory rate gets lower, their oxygen level and their blood starts to drop. When the brain sees oxygen getting to critical levels, it will po pulse cortisol and wake you up. So people that are exhausted because they’re not carrying oxygen, well look like a bouncing rubber ball going down the.

[00:27:16] Gary Brecka: They actually sleep and wake up more exhausted than when they went to bed. Wow. I love personalities. Yeah. Go and take sleep medication. Right, Because sleep medication, if you actually look at the majority of sleep medication, it will actually say mechanism of action, unknown. And so the way that they work is they blindfold the brain’s view of blood oxygen.

[00:27:36] Gary Brecka: So I hear people say all the time, Man, I really don’t like taking Tylenol PM or Soaped nitrate or diazepam because. I, I, it’s still in my system. The next day I wake up groggy. That’s actually not true. That medication’s been outta your system for hours. What’s happened is you blindfolded the brain’s ability to see blood oxygen, and now your brain can’t wake you up, so it can’t save your life.

[00:27:56] Gary Brecka: And so you’re feeling the effects of having suffocated it. For [00:28:00] six hours. And so if we understand that oxygen is linked to energy and oxygen is linked to deep sleep, then it, we understand the importance of things like breath work. Right? And breath work is free. I like to give people a lot of advice that they, they don’t have to buy a fancy piece of equipment.

[00:28:14] Gary Brecka: I mean, we have a superhuman protocol that’s about $140,000. If you can afford that, you should put it in your home. But the majority of of your listeners, like, what can I do in my hotel room, in my condo, in my house, you know, on vacation to have the most. Have demonstrative impact on optimal health and, and they’re all free.

[00:28:32] Gary Brecka: Um, and you know, the first piece of advice I give every human being and come in contact with is learn how to breathe. If you just took eight minutes eight minutes and did three rounds of 30 obnoxiously deep breaths in the morning with a breath hold in between. On average, it would add seven years to your health span.

[00:28:53] Gary Brecka: I see seven years to your health span by spending eight minutes in the morning breathing. And so when, when [00:29:00] we start to think about the massive impact of something that simple, then that should be a must do. No matter what you’re doing. If you ever, sometimes, you know, when I’m traveling, I’ll do five or six cities in five or six days and I’ll, I’ll always document it and say, Guys, this is how I’m doing six cities in five days.

[00:29:15] Gary Brecka: And I’m more energized when I land from the sixth city than I was when I left on day one, and that is that I never miss a breathwork session. You know, I do these three rounds, 30 breaths. Sometimes I do it much longer with a breath hold in between. I never ever miss the opportunity to take a cold shower or a cold plunge.

[00:29:31] Gary Brecka: Um, you know, cold plunges are five or $6,000. Cold showers are free, right? Um, if you live in the Midwest, they’re, you know, like, or like the northeast or the, the northern states. Your cold showers really work well, , I mean, Florida. They only get into the seventies. 

[00:29:45] Patrick O’Donnell: They’re not quite as cold, but saying it’s so right on.

[00:29:48] Patrick O’Donnell: And I will tell you personally, gosh, it was, uh, we did a trip around the world. It was probably six or so years ago now, but that’s when I fully committed to the morning routine that you’re talking about. And I absolutely can say [00:30:00] that it is beyond a shadow of a doubt the thing that has made the biggest effect on my life. And being able to just have that breath work and do that kind of stuff. And at the risk of turning some of our DLP events into looking like Tony Robbins events, we’ve started off with some. Priming style breathing that we do. But it’s, uh, it’s been pretty amazing to see the outcome. And I think just with you through that and seeing the transformations, I’ve, I’ve heard some pretty amazing stories of transformations, what you guys have done when somebody comes to you, maybe you have a typical example of when someone comes who’s not.

[00:30:29] Patrick O’Donnell: Feeling well, and then after y’all work with them, how you can really turn their life ended up to here kinda before and after. 

[00:30:35] Gary Brecka: You know, this goes back to raw material, right? So let’s say for example, the, the largest reason, the biggest single reason that people come to us is because they say, I just don’t have the same energy level I had even a few years ago. I’m either exhausted or I’m just low on energy. I have afternoon crashes. I don’t have the waking energy that I had a few years ago. And so when. When someone tells you that [00:31:00] they don’t have, they lack energy. When you convert that to physiology, really what they’re saying is if I don’t have the same energy that I used to have, really what they’re saying is I don’t have the same oxygen level I used to have. Because if we understand that oxygen equals energy, which it does now, if that’s. The leaf of the tree, I’ll trace it right back into the root for you and show you exactly what I mean. So when someone says, I lack energy, they really mean I lack oxygen. So when you look into their blood or into their genetics, you’ll find that in almost every case, they’re low on what’s called red blood cells and low on something called hemoglobin, right? A red blood cell’s like a tennis ball, and it has a fluid inside of it called hemoglobin, and it’s inside that fluid that oxygen is. If I start depleting tennis balls from the bloodstream, and then when I’m done depleting tennis balls, I start draining fluid out of them. You can see that if it’s that fluid that holds oxygen, that it’s very important. It’s vital to the amount of oxygen our blood can transfer [00:32:00] and hold. So if you’re exhausted and you’re low on red blood cell, you’re low on hemoglobin, not even anemic, still in the normal ranges for. Indicators. Then the question is, how do I raise it? When you go to the factory that makes red blood cells in hemoglobin, it’s called a bone marrow. And once I get to the bone marrow, um, how do I get the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells in hemoglobin? You balance the hormone testosterone, and this doesn’t necessarily mean that you take testosterone. I’m gonna trace it further into the roots. But in men and women, the primary role of the hormone testosterone is actually not male characteristics. It’s not deep voice or facial hair or aggression or muscles. The primary role of that hormone is to put pressure on the bone marrow to increase its production of red blood cells. It’s called erythropoiesis. So if you are hormone deficient, you’re deficient in the boss that tells the bone marrow to produce red blood cells that carry [00:33:00] oxygen. So now if I continue going down into the soil, um, if I’m deficient in testosterone, well what’s testosterone made from? Largely, it’s made from a compound called D H E A. D H E A is in the bloodstream of every single person listening to this podcast. As you get clinically deficient in this nutrient, your hormone, your hormone levels follow well, what’s D H E A comprised of? Vitamin D3. That’s as far as you get into the soil. Vitamin D3 is the single most important nutrient in human body. It’s, it’s the only vitamin that a human being makes on our own. There are hundreds of vitamins in your bloodstream right now. You are only capable of making one. It’s vitamin D3. We make it from sunlight and cholesterol. The truth is most of us are not getting enough sun. It’s not that we’re getting too much sun. We’re actually not getting enough. So as I deplete vitamin d3, I deplete d e A as I deplete d e, my hormones follow as my hormones go down. The pressure on the bone marrow drops as the pressure on the bone marrow drops my red blood cell and [00:34:00] hemoglobin levels fall. As red blood cell and hemoglobin fall, my oxygen falls. As oxygen falls, I lose energy. So call related, it’s all related. It’s what we call the biometric chain, and it’s relatively simple in a lot of cases to fix this. I mean, Dr. Sarda, who’s our, our clinical director, I would say 70% of her hormone therapy patients are not even on hormones. They’re on the raw material to make hormones. 

[00:34:26] Patrick O’Donnell: Wow.

[00:34:26] Gary Brecka: D3s, D H E As, give the body the raw material and get out of its way. 

[00:34:31] Patrick O’Donnell: That’s the good news. You can fix it, right? Yes. That is amazing. I’ve so good. I’ve loved all of these tips. It’s uh, awesome stuff and I think as we get close to wrapping up, if you’re good for it, I actually run a health and fitness podcast separate from this one called Live Fit Ignite Change, and on that, we actually always – it close with, uh, five questions. It’s five to thrive, and I feel like you’re so aligned with, on that podcast. I thought it’d appropriate. Ask them here as so if you’re up for it. Yeah, lets for it. [00:35:00] All right. So are rapid questions. So thing that comes to mind, first off, number one, what is your morning routine?

[00:35:06] Gary Brecka: Breath work, cold shower and weight bearing exercise. 

[00:35:10] Patrick O’Donnell: Awesome. So we believe in continuous learning and igniting the change that you wanna see. And so what is one book, podcast or movie that you would recommend most above all else? 

[00:35:20] Gary Brecka: Um, Boundless by Ben Greenfield. 

[00:35:23] Patrick O’Donnell: That is a great one. I love it personally. All right. If you feel stuck or down, what do you do to make that change rapidly? 

[00:35:30] Gary Brecka: Um, the fastest way to change your state is to move. Movement even as simple as a light walk. But you know what I, I’ll give you another quick tip. I call it snacking on exercise, right? We always think that I don’t have 45 minutes to go to the gym. I don’t have 60 minutes. I don’t 90 minutes to go to the gym. You can always snack on exercise. When I take an international flight, for example, I set my timer to go off every 60 minutes and I go into the bathroom as embarrassing as it is, and I go in there and I do, um, 10 air squats and [00:36:00] 10 deep breath. God only knows what the passenger think. I’m doing , but because I’m in there. But, um, snack on exercise is one of the greatest tips, um, that if you, if you stand up from your desk and you’re, you know, you’re feeling a little tired and you do 10 air squats and 10 deep breaths and sit back down, or you do 10 pushups, or you just do 10 round, the world touches by the end of the day, the amount that that has stacked up in terms of the volume of what you’ve done. On a 10 hour flight, I’ll do 250 air squats and two 50 deep. And I’m only getting outta my seat once an hour. 

[00:36:33] Patrick O’Donnell: That is awesome. I love that. Snack on exercise. Great tip. All right, number four, let’s go back in time. Your 20 year old self, you just received funding to create a major project that will impact the world. It can be anything at all that you want it to be, as long as it impacts the world. What advice do you give to your 20 year old to implement that project? 

[00:36:53] Gary Brecka: I would start an educational project, um, for basic nutrition. I don’t think that schools and grade schools and, [00:37:00] and even kindergartens have any inkling on how important nutrition is for children, their behavior, um, their tension span, their ability to concentrate, focus and complete assignments, um, their impulses. And we, we talk about behavioral disorders, but we don’t talk about nutritional disorder. And so I would very likely like to make a bigger impact on starting earlier with children’s education and nutrition. 

[00:37:26] Patrick O’Donnell: So true, so needed. All right, now we’re number five, Last one. Now we’re going to the future. You have one piece of advice. The world is going to remember you for above all else. What is that one piece of advice you might be remembered for? 

[00:37:39] Gary Brecka: The frequency of authenticity is the most powerful frequency to leave a human being’s. It is the most impactful frequency that you can give to your surrounding environment. It’s also the most attractive frequency in the universe. If you believe in the law of attraction, then you need to understand how to get into an authentic state. Authenticity only exists in one, [00:38:00] one place when your words are truthful. And you believe what you’re saying. So be cautious what you say and believe in what you say. Wow, love that. 

[00:38:09] Patrick O’Donnell: Outstanding. So many incredible tips, words of wisdom here. I can’t thank you enough and I can’t say how much I’m looking forward to seeing you again at our wellbeing event in Puerto Rico in November. And uh, this has just been. Awesome. The new amount that you shared for our listeners –

[00:38:23] Gary Brecka: Man I’m all fired up, Dude, I’ve got energy from this podcast, I don’t even wanna sound anymore

[00:38:28] Patrick O’Donnell: That’s awesome. And we’ll link all these tips in the show notes so you can learn more about Gary, find out where the test is. Anything that I missed that I should have asked that you would like to leave listeners with or anywhere else they should go to be able to find more about you.

[00:38:40] Gary Brecka: You can go to my, Instagram. I, I usually do nothing but teach on Instagram. It’s at Gary Brecka, G A R Y B R E C K A. You can get that test, you can link up with me, you can get a private consult with me, or you can just go and look at the reels. And I go into a lot more detail than we did on this podcast for [00:39:00] each of the subjects that we touched. I believe that education is not something that we own. Education is something that flows through us, so I try as much as possible, to be free with that information. As I learn and educate myself, I try to learn and educate the environment around me. So there’s a lot of good information you can find there.

[00:39:19] Patrick O’Donnell: Awesome. We’ll check it out, put it in show notes, and I’m sure our listeners will as well. And I guess before we go, I just wanted acknowledge you too for what you’re doing. I mean, this whole idea of helping people. Live with vitality to get to peak performance, to do the things that they can. It’s, I mean, it’s within our body. We just need to take it and make that difference. And you’re doing that. So I thank you for that and, and keep doing that. Keep making a difference and I can’t wait to see where it goes. And again, can’t wait to see you in November. So thank you. 

[00:39:43] Gary Brecka: Patrick. Thank you so much man. I really enjoyed this. 

[00:39:46] Patrick O’Donnell: Awesome. 

[00:39:47] Gary Brecka: See you.

[00:39:48] Patrick O’Donnell: All right. I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did. And again, all the show notes, resources, and transcript will be at live fit ignite change.com/gary. If you resonated with us and would like [00:40:00] to live, fit and ignite change in your life, you can get started for free at livefitignitechange.com/start where you can join our community of high performers and get access to our kickstart resources for free.

[00:40:13] Patrick O’Donnell: You can choose if you’d like to start on the path to getting in the best shape of your life. And or ignite the change you’d wish to see by casting a vision and taking the steps to get there. You can get plugged in at livefitignitechange.com/start or for short livefic.com/start. Also, my family and I we’re igniting the change that we wish to see in the world by helping others live fit. We were sick of all the Inrive sugar loaded foods and drinks marketed to us, especially to our youth. So we’re developing a line of truly delicious, grain-free, sugar-free products that children and adults love as part of our Inrive performance nutrition brand. Learn more and join the Inrive Insiders for free to be the first to hear [00:41:00] about samples, launch parties, and specials at inrive.com.

[00:41:04] Patrick O’Donnell: That’s I N R I V E dot com. Thank you so much for tuning in, and please be sure to like share, rate and review this show. This is what’s needed to help reach more and serve more. So together we truly can ignite the change that we wish to see. Thank you so much for your help in making it happen, and I hope you make it an outstanding.

[00:41:28] Patrick O’Donnell: And go forth to light, love, and serve the world and live that you’ve always loved.