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

as enzymes, antioxidants, and other beneficial stuff you’d probably never put in a salad—herbs, fruits, grasses, leaves, and maybe even a flower or two. When at all possible, I always recommend going with a quality greens mix because you can be sure the vitamins are being delivered into your system in a way similar to how they arrive in your normal food. Which is to say, they aren’t synthetic, they’re natural.

      I liken taking the greens blend to raiding the shelves at Home Depot when you’re trying to maintain your house. When the body is looking for something to repair itself, it’ll go to the shelves in search of the best tools, and if the right nutrients are available, it will make the proper repairs in the most effective manner possible. If it doesn’t, it will simply pull from the discount bin by the register and use a glue gun and duct tape and hope for the best. By taking in these greens, you’re giving your body the run of the store.

      While every greens blend is different, and therefore not a lot of studies have been done, there is no doubt that supplementing with vitamins and minerals is beneficial. If you don’t get enough of these nutrients you are more likely to be sick, violent, and all other manner of unpleasantness. As stated above, the problem with some multivitamins is that the form of the ingredient used is sometimes dissimilar to those found in food. So when it comes to a “multi,” going green is usually the way to go.

      MAGNESIUM

      Just like calcium, magnesium supplementation has been shown in clinical research to assist with facilitating healthy bone mass, the performance of athletes, supporting men and women during exercise, even improving blood sugar regulation through diminishing insulin resistance. But what you are gonna notice is less. Less stress, less static, and less antsiness throughout your body. You’re gonna notice everything relax, and get a little more quiet. It’s probably why the most popular magnesium supplement in the world is simply called Calm. Magnesium is involved in thousands of chemical reactions. In the Home Depot of nutrient supplementation, magnesium is the hardware section. There’s something there that connects to every aspect of your body temple.

      KRILL OIL: SUPPLEMENT OMEGA-3

      The reason some of your breakfast options today contain chia seeds, flax, and grass-fed beef or dairy is that those are some of the simplest nutritional sources of omega-3 fatty acids. The other, and probably the best, is oily fish. If we lived in Japan, that would be in your breakfast as well, but instead we’ll save it for lunch.

      Chia and flax are not the easiest things to find on the menu, and fresh, organic oily fish is equally difficult in many parts of the world. So in lieu of that, you can supplement your diet with fish oil or, even better, krill oil. I remember the first time I tried a higher dose of krill oil, somewhere in the 5-gram range. I took it at night, and it felt like the oil’s essential omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA), along with its intrinsic antioxidant astaxanthin and its brain-healthy nutrient phosphatidylcholine, were running through my bloodstream like a fire hose, just blasting out all the inflammation in my body. It works because these hard-to-find fatty acids balance out the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, and as a result reduce normal systemic inflammation.

      In chapter 2, we learned about inflammation, but here we’re more concerned with how it feels. Simply put, it sucks. It feels like inner heat. It can cause your joints to ache and your brain to be a little fuzzy. Why krill oil and not fish oil? Studies show that with krill oil you get the same metabolic effects at lower doses. Translation: it’s just more potent. And as a bonus, krill oil has even been shown to help the ladies out on their menstrual cycle. Since I am clearly unqualified to discuss the menstrual cycle, the abstract of the study says that krill oil is “significantly more effective for the complete management of premenstrual symptoms compared to omega-3 fish oil.”

      SUPPLEMENT VITAMIN D

      Thanks to our friend the sun and our skin’s remarkable ability to make a ton of vitamin D out of its ultraviolet B rays, vitamin D is free for all. Usually all you need is twenty to thirty minutes of direct sun exposure to your skin. Unfortunately, not all sun or all skin is created equal. Twenty minutes of sun for one person in one place can be an entirely different (and potentially worse) experience than thirty minutes of sun for another person in another place. The sun puts us in a bit of a predicament that way: too much sun is bad for the skin, but not enough sun means we don’t get adequate vitamin D.

      So how do we measure? How do we find the line? Typically, we don’t. We can’t. Even if we could, it would just confirm something we already know: more often than not we are significantly deficient in this critical vitamin that is important for over two hundred bodily processes, concerning everything from optimal mood to bone health. Vitamin D supplementation has been shown in clinical research to help reduce body fat mass, maintain muscle mass and reduce fractures, and correct mood-related issues.

      Kevin Estrada, a professional hockey player, was in a devastating water plane crash that ended his career. He lives in British Columbia—where it rains all the time and there’s a lot of cloud cover—and began to feel run down. His body was still broken, he had low energy, and his mood felt off. Vitamin D fit all the criteria of a supplement that could really help him. When he got his blood checked for vitamin D, of course Kevin was deficient.

      He started taking vitamin D supplements, along with its ride-or-die companion vitamin K₂, at 5,000 micrograms of D a day and sometimes even higher. That’s a relatively high dose, but it started to turn things around with his mood and his energy levels. It was as close to an instant fix as he’d ever thought possible, and it’s the kind of supplement most of us need if we want to consistently perform our best.

      SUPPLEMENT PROBIOTICS

      I take a lot of different probiotics for a lot of different reasons, but the one that saved my ass—literally—is a yeast-based strain called Saccharomyces boulardii. When I traveled to South America and particularly Peru, I’d spend my time in the Amazon rain forest. As much as I enjoyed those trips, there was one factor that sucked some of the joy out of it—from the back. I’d return from each trip and spend the next two weeks getting reacquainted with the finer points of porcelain toilet production as traveler’s diarrhea made its way through my system. As careful as I was with the water, inevitably I’d consume certain foods and vegetables, and some nasty bug would get into my GI tract.

      At one point, I’d had enough. I loved, and maybe even needed, those trips to the jungle, but I didn’t want to come back and have to count steps to the bathroom. I started researching probiotics to support my gut, and I came across S. boulardii. I brought some with me on my next trip to Peru—and it was miraculous. I had no issues while I was down there, and no issues upon return. The studies back it up: whether it’s Crohn’s disease, or irritable bowel, S. boulardii is the shit for problems with your shit.

      Napoleon once said, “An army marches on its stomach.” He wasn’t just talking about what went into soldiers, he was just as concerned with the amount coming out. And while we are not locked in a land war with Russia (yet), and you are probably not regularly contending with Montezuma’s revenge, we are at war against nutrient deficiency. I can assure you that you are only going to make it as far as your gut takes you. Not only is the gut largely responsible for our immune system, and perhaps even our personality, through the regulation of hormones and neurotransmitters, more simply it is responsible for digesting and disseminating our fuel source from food. A lot of weight-management issues have to do with the gut. A meta-analysis of studies showed significant improvements in obesity with probiotic supplementation. If you want to feel more like yourself again, and get that human machine humming from the inside, this supplementation regimen is essential.

      There are also important impacts on regulating mood. The burgeoning field of psychobiotics, in which targeted gut treatments are being explored to assist with all sorts of medical conditions, is one of the hottest fields in medicine. It is my personal opinion, along with that of the psychiatrist Dr. Dan Engle, that the role of gut biome transplants, in which a healthy person’s microbiome is transplanted and seeded into another person, is one of the frontiers of medicine.

      It’s why you’re seeing the increasing use of probiotics, yogurts advertising the cultures they have, the trend toward fecal transplants, and the chatter about the gut …