Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex. Aubrey Marcus

you might have been wrong.

      Physicist Max Planck famously said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This theory was confirmed by the National Bureau of Economic Research when they did a meta-analysis of 452 scientists who died at the peak of their prowess. When the old guard died, there was a flood of new papers from unrelated newcomers that became more referenced (a sign of successful peer review and acceptance) than the papers of their predecessors or living associates. Sometimes it takes mighty death itself to advance the field past the gatekeepers of the accepted paradigm.

      I don’t want to wait that long. Flexibility of thought is one of the greatest attributes any human being can have, scientist or otherwise. It’s the ability to take those deeply engraved opinions, and overwrite them with new and better information. Our brains are malleable enough for that task; you just have to bring the goal into awareness.

      So you may just have to rewrite everything you know about breakfast. Wheaties as the breakfast of champions? Maybe champion of falling asleep at your desk at ten thirty in the morning. No champion I know is eating Wheaties for breakfast, or anything close.

      The peak performers I know eat a breakfast that aligns with the universal nutrition principles we’ve discussed in this chapter—more good fats, less sugar, compressed feeding windows—adapted specifically to the needs of their training or their personal goals.

      Make this change in your mind first, and then your plate second. It doesn’t have to feel like a sacrifice, not even for your taste buds. After all, I’m still telling you to eat butter and bacon, right?

      THREE POINTERS

       The abundance of sugar in our diet is arguably the worst thing ever to happen to human health. Being aware of the many forms of sugar and minimizing sugar ingestion is key to managing the blood sugar swings that will throw off your day.

       Dietary fat and cholesterol have been unfairly villainized. To restore metabolic health and optimize weight management, adding dietary fat back into the diet, starting with breakfast, is essential.

       Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. If you don’t have good fats and protein available to you, rather than eat a bunch of sugary or starchy foods, you can skip breakfast and reap the benefits of intermittent fasting for weight loss and longevity.

4

       ESSENTIAL SUPPLEMENTS

      To all my little Hulkamaniacs, say your prayers, take your vitamins and you will never go wrong.

      HULK HOGAN

      With the stress of modern life, even the best diet can use some help—and no, an adult gummy vitamin doesn’t count. Not all supplements come as a capsule, and they are certainly not all created equal. You need to have a guide. The supplements you’ll learn about here supercharge your energy and health, and come with undeniable scientific research to back them up. They represent the minimum effective dose of kicking ass. Follow these prescriptions, and you’ll have greater control of your human machine.

      Getting Owned

      Imagine yourself living ten thousand years ago. You’re sitting around a campfire with your clan. Your skin kissed from the sun. The kill from that day’s hunt is roasting on a spit, above a roaring fire. You will eat the whole animal, organs and all. In the meantime you’re gnawing on a collection of foraged roots, tart berries, and leafy vegetation you found, grown in pristine mineral-rich soil on which you and your clan cohabitate. Your water came from a nearby stream or from captured rain in a clay pot. You’re squatting on your haunches or sitting on the ground, but so is everyone else around you. You’re outside, fresh soil under your fingernails from the day’s gathering. Everyone is barefoot. The day is over, and there is nothing left to do but enjoy the company, eat your food, and gaze at the stars. You will sleep with the darkness just as you woke with the dawn, in rhythm with nature.

      Fast-forward ten thousand years. If you’re lucky, you cut up pesticide-aided vegetables and throw them into some factory-farmed eggs that are frying in butter and cheese made from cows fed a steady diet of nutrient-stripped corn. Once the food is done, you have to eat quickly, because work beckons. You’ve got to dash from your climate-controlled home to your climate-controlled office, where you’ll be hunched over a screen all day, or maybe standing in one place for eight hours answering inane questions. You check your phone to make sure you’re not already late, and a fresh set of attention-stealing alerts greet you. You finish eating and wash your hands with antibacterial soap before heading out the door.

      Whenever I bring up the topic of supplements, I ask people to imagine these two scenes—because they point to two of the biggest arguments in favor of supplementation.

      First: our stresses are more in number and different in kind from what our ancestors faced. We’ve talked about it earlier, but it’s worth repeating: we deal with more chronic stressors than our ancestors did, most of which our bodies are not designed to thwart—and it shows. Our ancestors weren’t stressed about staying up all night answering emails. They didn’t have cinnamon Pop-Tarts. They didn’t take metal-laden pharmaceuticals or put toxic chemicals under their armpits to deflorate that pesky human smell.

      Second: our environment is robbing us of a lot of the nutrients, minerals, and microbial defenses that used to come into our diets by default. Again, think about that first scene. You were eating animals that fed on wild vegetation full of nutrients. Your own plants were grown in fertile soil, packed with minerals without the need for artificial fertilizer. You ate organs and fats, and fish caught from streams. Your hands were dirty from the soil, full of probiotic bacteria and hormetic immune challenges.

      And the way we live now? We’re sterile. We’re clean. We have fruit-washing spray. It’s not bad enough that we’ve swapped out fats for sugar in the modern diet; a disturbing percentage of the food we’re eating is so processed that even insects won’t eat it. All that artificiality and hypersterility have robbed our bodies of the natural conditioning and the necessary bacteria that come from being outdoors and eating food that grew in the earth or ran, swam, or flew on it. Instead we become prey to the bacteria—ever sicker, ever more vulnerable. Add to that the problems of soil that’s been overfarmed, and animals that are undernourished, and you’ve got a recipe for a food supply and an environment that leaves our bodies wanting more. Put simply, it leaves us at a disadvantage.

      The final reason to take supplements is that even if you have a perfect diet, there are nutrients available that you can’t find in the produce section of your grocery store. Herbs, exotic vegetables, vitamins and minerals from every corner of the globe, all shown to optimize performance in clinical trial research. Why not give your body the advantage?

      Correcting Disadvantage

      Thanks to an absence of fermented foods in our diet, germophobia, and an overreliance on antibiotics in our medicine to treat mild infection, our gut biomes are a mess. This is no small matter, because the gut is our “second brain,” and it is where 80 percent of our immune system lives, controlling neurotransmitter and hormone balance and acting as the gatekeeper to inflammation response. In a way, our gut is more us than anything else, since the 100 trillion bacterial organisms in our guts far outweigh the amount of “human” cells we have in our body. When you think about the gut that way, a suboptimal gut biome is the essence of deficiency.

      Even worse, many of us may have started at a disadvantage. Thirty-two percent of kids these days are born via cesarean section. It is now commonly held that the immune-system challenge from commingling of intestinal (fecal) bacteria in the birth canal is an important initial hormetic stressor to build a healthy gut biome and kick-start infant immunity, and we’ve removed that first gut gauntlet for nearly half our children, to their detriment.

      Additionally, studies show that almost half the people living in the United