Foundational Health Protocol
The absolute basics broken down to 10 simple rules
Resolutions are just setups for failure. Systems are resiliency frameworks for success. We need to shift our approach this year.
We’ll call this the directional systems theory. It’s the idea that having clear objectives provides orientation while systematic approaches allow us to gauge & achieve progress. Direction is good, but without trackable progress it means nothing. Like having virtues without courage - we must have the courage to act upon our virtues habitually.
Extraordinary results come by doing ordinary things with extraordinary consistency. When we choose simplicity over complexity, we allow the simple to nudge us to consistency.
For most within this community, we’re not chasing record-shattering powerlifter or world-class marathon runner statuses. The objectives are quite simple for 99%: Look good. Feel young. Live well.
The point here is simple: someone in 2100 will be able to use this guide as a blueprint to long-term health success.
A few principles undergird these ironclad rules:
Shift your identity.
David Goggins refers to this as killing your former self. This is all about framing though. Instead of: “I’m going to resistance train more.” Shift to: “I am becoming someone who prioritizes resistance training.” An active state shift in identity.
Narrow your scope.
This is why we’re focused on a system as the foundation - specifically microhabits & habit-stacking. Not on goal attainment directly. Granular focus on the day level iterated 100s of times across the duration of a full year will bring results. Forget about the year. Forget about the month. Complete the day’s task.
Track your progress.
Operating within any system without some level of progress monitoring is p*ssing in the wind. Imagine your mind as a closed-loop feedback system. If you want to create sticky habits over long durations of time, you need a reason to keep coming back for more. That reason? Results.
Develop habits to create an individualized health-based system. The foundation starts here.
Rule #1: Move 8k steps daily
Movement is the ultimate medicine. One of the highest ROI levers over the past decade for my metabolic health markers: 10 - 15 min postprandial walks.
A 2023 meta-analysis of 17 studies with almost 227,000 participants showed a 1,000-step increment was associated with a 15% decreased risk of all-cause mortality. When movement exceeded ∼5,500 steps/day, the risk of all-cause mortality decreased drastically.
I’ll confess. When I first started on my health journey years ago, I thought: “I do hill sprints. Intervals on the assault bike. Hit the stair mill for a 60 min session 1x/week. I do enough cardio.”
Don’t be as arrogant as me. The S-tier form of energy expenditure = walking. Simple. Low-impact. High reward. And it’s adaptable to any lifestyle - bring your significant other + kids. Everyone wins.
Rule #2: Cook 80% of your meals at home
Let’s get the full version: Cook 80% of your meals at home with unprocessed, whole nutrient-dense foods grown from biodiverse soil
Let’s say you eat the standard 3 meals/day. That gives us 21 meals/week. That still leaves 4 meals/week for lifestyle flexible nutrition.
The primary advantage you get from cooking your own meals: knowing exactly what’s going into your body. This quality control lever is why I repeatedly say you will never hear those in an elite state of health perpetually gripe about food additives & a toxic food system derailing their metabolism. Problematic? Of course. Yet you control for those aspects tightly when you’re cooking at home for you & your family. Every oil. Every ingredient. Every cooking method.
There’s a lot of flexibility in how you do this. Whether it be a meal-prep service or you prepping your own meals, choose the system that works optimally for YOU.
“Phys, how do you do it personally?”
My load out from Costco is ~$225/week (3 people). While it may seem like a lot at first. Keep in mind this includes organic fruits & vegetables, grass-fed/finished beef, organic chicken, & wild-caught seafood. Easily equates to about 5-6 meals eating/ordering out.
Every Sunday, I prep 5 overnight whey oats for my post-training meals. For my lunch meals, I’m prepping a couple dozen hard-boiled eggs that last through most of the week & if I need the extra protein that week, a few cartons of egg whites. As for dinners, I prep a protein source, a carb, & a vegetable that will last 4 -5 days. Timing-wise - I have this meal-prep system down to just 2 hrs every 5 days. A time investment well worth it.
Rule #3: Track macro & micronutrients to meet calorie & protein targets
It’s never been easier with tools like Cronometer (many others to choose from but my personal favorite).
This goes synergistically with cooking at home. If you’re serious about your health, start tracking your energy intake. Implicit within this rule are two things: 1) hitting your calorie target & 2) hitting your protein target.
There’s going to be some nuance in how you approach this - whether you’re cutting, bulking, or recomp’ing. Here’s a step-by-step guide on determining our ideal nutritional intake (based on Alan Aragon’s model in Flexible Dieting):
Determine target bodyweight (TBW)
Calculate your lean body mass (lbs) using the following formula:
If you’re unsure of your current body fat %, use the guide below to estimate:
Choose a target lean body mass & multiply by 100. Pick a realistic adult bodyweight & body fat % where you envision your ideal physique.
Choose a target body fat %. Subtract this number from 100.
Divide the result of (b) above with (c) to calculate your TBW.
Set total calories
Multiply TBW (just calculated) by (10 + total training hrs/wk)
Multiply the result in (a) by the appropriate non-exercise thermogenesis (NEAT) factor:
Now that we’ve got our total caloric intake set. Let’s set our macronutrient percentages.
Set protein (4 kcal/gram)
Muscle-building → 30% of total calories
Fat loss → 40% of total calories
Set carbs (4 kcal/gram)
Muscle-building → 40% of total calories
Fat loss → 30% of total calories
Set remaining calories to fats (9 kcal/gram)
Calories from fat = Total calories - calories from protein - calories from carbs
Keep in mind this is a simplified 70% solution & requires more nuance as you advance in your training.
Rule #4: Avoid cheap dopamine
By far our most difficult rule to adhere to in the modern environment.
The problem we’re faced with today is one of artificial abundance within a neurohormonal framework designed for scarcity. We’ve created a toxic world of infinite pleasure and diminishing returns of fulfillment. The primary culprits: immediate connectivity, ephemeral news cycles, social media notifications & UPFs combining high sugar/fat/salt.
Our brains can’t distinguish between valuable accomplishment & artificial reward - only a deep state of consciousness can discern this. The downregulation of our dopaminergic system occurs when frequent exposure to intense, asymmetric rewards make our dopamine receptors less sensitive over time. Modern technological tools like social media have created a reward inflation flooding our brains with easily obtained dopamine eventually leading to devaluation of our biological reward system.
Some principles to navigate the modern-day abundance laden environment:
Effort - reward proportionality → Effort = time x cognitive load. The more brainpower & longer a creative task takes to complete, the more substantial the reward can be.
Create hierarchies of achievement → Synergistic with our first principle. This could be something as simple as a three-tier reward framework: small (completed a 60-min work task = 10 min of scrolling on social media) vs. medium (PR’d at the gym = “cheat” meal) vs. large reward (hit business milestone = schedule a vacation).
Digital fasting → One of the most effective tools is digital abstinence to sensitize our dopamine receptors. For digital fasts, this simply means staying disconnected from social media. No browsing on YouTube. No scrolling on X or Instagram. Scheduling work in advance with all materials pulled & laid out ensuring no internet connectivity is required. If I’m really in need of a dopamine reset, I’ll pair with a nutritional fast or a prolonged period of relatively bland food consumption.
These are great transient tools we can employ. However, our ultimate goal: build a system where real accomplishment defined by value added to the world becomes the primary source of dopamine.
Rule #5: Embrace the sun
You want to be a sun avoider? Accept the consequences this is as harmful as smoking.
10/30/10 rule = 10 min of morning sun (sunrise) + 30 min of midday sun + 10 min of evening sun (sunset)
We are diurnal creatures that evolved under the sun’s full spectrum. As a species that evolved via the sun, of our ~40 trillion cells, every cell is a clock driven predominantly by light. Now we spend less than 8% percent of our time outdoors.
Low-angle sunlight is our most powerful zeitgeber (time-giver). Morning sun synchronizes our master biological clock by acting as a reset for our daily rhythms. When early sunlight hits specialized light receptors in our retinas, it activates thousands of genes preparing our metabolism & hormonal systems for daytime activity. The first burst of morning sun is one of the most fundamental nutrients we consume.
During midday, we get exposure to UVB radiation - required for Vitamin D production via UVB photons trigger the conversion of 7-dehydrocholesterol in our skin to pre-vitamin D3. High intensity light (~100,000 lux) around solar noon also enhances mood, alertness, cognition, & mitochondrial function.
Like morning light, evening low-angle sunlight is another form of red light therapy serving as a natural signal for our circadian-driven clocks to begin winding down for sleep. The transition from the full light spectrum at midday to red-light dominance at evening facilitates the proper alignment between our internal rhythms & the solar day-night cycle needed for ideal hormone regulation & elite sleep quality.
Rule #6: Beat last week you (resistance training + HIIT)
As critical as it be to track your nutritional intake is as vital you track your resistance training & HIIT sessions. Can’t emphasize this one enough. The fundamental principle guiding this is of course progressive overload combined with consistency. The body adapts to stress over time requiring gradual increases in stimulus to continue improving. You will hit plateaus (especially if cutting down). But it’s your job to fight like hell to bring incrementally more intensity and thus weight/reps over time.
**Additional note for cutting periods: Lower the volume & rep ranges in your training sessions. And make the intensity count treating every set like a session, and every rep like a set.**
With resistance training, we beat last week through 1) reps or 2) weight. With HIIT, through 1) power (Watts), 2) calories, or 3) time to complete a distance.
Rule #7: Sleep 7 - 8 hrs on a consistent schedule
The power of sleep cannot be overstated. The body operates on circadian rhythms, and sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than sleep duration.
When individuals experienced a 5-hour shift in their typical sleep & meal times - a social jet lag simulation - they encountered several significant physiological disruptions:
Digestive processes slowed down
Blood glucose regulation became less efficient
Mental alertness decreased
Daytime sleepiness increased
In a 2023 study across ~61k subjects showed those having the most consistent sleep-wake cycles had a 30% lower risk of mortality from all causes, 38% lower risk from cardiometabolic disease, & 24% lower risk from cancer relative to the lowest quintile of sleep regularity,
In a meta-analysis conducted across 67 studies & a total of more than 3.5M participants, individuals sleeping ~7 hrs nightly were associated with the lowest health risks. For each hour less than 7 hrs, risk from any cause increased by 6%. For each hour more than 7 hrs, risk from any cause increased by 13%.
Rule #8: Filter your water
In today’s ecosystem, we are all endocrine disrupted. In a 2023 USGS report (the most comprehensive study conducted to date), more than 700 water supplies in the US were assessed for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS = “forever chemicals”). At least one PFAS was detected in 45% of the samples tested. As of November 20, 2024, the Environmental Working Group found 8,865 locations across all US states & territories with detected levels of forever chemicals.
Water quality is a critical piece of our hormonal health. Our endocrine system is particularly sensitive to tap water contaminants like xenoestrogens:
Pharmaceutical residues → Birth-control pills contribute ~10 million doses of synthetic estrogen to America’s wastewater every day, according to Seth Siegel - author of Troubled Water. Ethinylestradiol (EE2) persists in treated water due to its stable chemical structure binding to estrogen receptors with even greater affinity than natural estrogens. A 2010 study found that less than 1% of estrogen in the US water supply is attributed to birth-control pills, however local water systems didn’t assess for EE2.
Pesticides & herbicides → Atrazine, a popular herbicide found in groundwater, demonstrates increased aromatase activity - the enzyme that converts androgens to estrogens.
Disinfection byproducts → DBPs like trihalomethanes & haloacetic acids disrupt androgen signaling pathways by inhibiting the 5α-reductase enzyme responsible for converting testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT).
Heavy metals → Cadmium can bind to estrogen receptors and activate estrogen-responsive genes. Mercury is known to accumulate in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland disrupting the pulsatile release of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) - crucial for proper reproductive function.
From a treatment perspective, ongoing research still has yet to determine what brands are best. While there remains a high degree of variance across both types and brands, according to a 2020 study conducted by Duke & NCU researchers, the most effective types of filters were ranked in the following order:
Under-sink Reverse Osmosis Filter → best choice for comprehensive PFAS removal
Two-Stage Filter → similar efficiency scores to reverse osmosis filters; includes a pre-filter & carbon filter
Activated Carbon Block Fridge Filter
Single-Stage Under-sink Filter
Whole-House Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) Filter
Activated Carbon Pitcher Filter
Faucet Filter
Rule #9: Get your bloodwork
Without a baseline on your biomarkers, it’s impossible to understand where your metabolic health stands. “I feel great” is never an excuse to forgo. At a very minimum, integrate bloodwork as a part of an annual check-up. Even better if you can complete it 2-3x/year.
Pro-tip: Use your Health Savings Account (HSA) to enroll in annual subscriptions like Function Health.
Here’s an exhaustive list on biomarkers to test (***full guide on optimal biomarker ranges coming soon to subscribers of the BTP stack***):
Testing > guessing
Rule #10: Control your stress
Stress = modern manifestation of ancient survival mechanisms. Like chronic illnesses, it's a biological-cultural mismatch.
Rules 1 - 9 could be dialed in. But if you can’t get the lion out of the room during the day & the monkey out of your brain at night, rules 1 - 9 will be nullified.
Most modern-day guidance in this space are stress mitigation tactics. We want stress optimization built off of a warfare framework = mission (highest calling) > strategy > operations > tactics (daily actions).
Self-examination tools invoking the spirit connected to your mission yields resiliency. Resiliency is the antidote to a modern environment of artificial urgency & comparison-driven anxiety.
Not going to remember it in 6 months? Not worth worrying about.
No action can be taken in the next week to improve situation? Not worth worrying about.
Focus on controllable problems. Be in one place: where you are.
Let’s summarize our rules.
But is it really this simple?
Yes.
Seems boring.
Fair - but you know what’s more boring? Staying skinny fat. Not being jacked. Being hormonally disrupted. Making no progress. Far worse outcomes.
Peptides. Supplements. Biohacking gear. These are tools that have a place. But without dialing in the above, you’re stepping over Benny’s to pick up pennies. Don’t forgo the simple for the sexy.
Use a habit-driven model like this across years and I guarantee you’re going to see tremendous success in your health. Just keep repeating until people call you lucky.
System-driven> Goal-oriented
We’re more bullish than ever on the future here. For you. For your health. For your family. Your empire is depending on you. As always, stay healthy & we’ll see you next week.
Your friend,
BTP
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Such a great and simple guide with all the footnotes. Wish I had runs across this in my 20s/30s (but it’s never too late). Cheers!