MARTIN: Greetings. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast podcast. And today with me, Nate Palmer, the man who has written a book called the “Million Dollar Body”. And you do want to hear about that. Nate Palmer, welcome to Life Enthusiast.

NATE: Thanks for having me on, Martin. I’m really excited to get a chance to chat with you about this.

MARTIN: Yeah, for sure. The thing that impresses me about you, is that you understand the principle of reciprocity. You just let people have so much value. Let’s start with that.

NATE: Thank you for saying so. I appreciate that.

MARTIN: Yeah, no, let’s start with that. The giveaway. Let’s just tell people what it is that you’re actually letting them have for free.

NATE: Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, I like, yeah, let’s kick it off with that. So my book is called the Million Dollar Body Method. I’ve been in coaching and fitness and nutrition since 2008. I basically wanted at some point to combine all of the things that I found that have been very effective in working for people from a nutrient standpoint into a one place where you could read through it, have a, not just some information that’s like, hey, now, book a sales call, but literally could pick it up and then have a 28 day plan to follow, to do a personal experiment to see how much fat you can lose and how much energy you can gain, right off the bat. Because I feel like I see a lot of coaches and people like that who write books, but they’re just a glorified sales pitch. And I didn’t want to do that because I wanted to leave something that was, even if I’m not doing this particular brand of work in the next decade or two, I want people to be able to pick something else up and have good results from it. So you mentioned the norm of reciprocity, and I think that there’s something to that for sure.

I love the idea that givers gain. But also, Martin, we’re in a serious health crisis right now. You and I, we are doing our best in the ways that we know how to help people live more enriched, fulfilled, healthier lives, which is not just a selfish pursuit of people trying to get skinny and have good muscles. It’s being leaders. It’s setting a legacy for our kids. It’s setting an example for our families, and that is so, so important. And I don’t even think I realized how important this work was until I had my own kids. So, yes, it’s great.

I would love if someone called me up and was like, hey, I want to work with you. That’d be fantastic. But I don’t care about that as much as I care about people becoming the leaders that their families need, because everyone’s always looking at you. Someone is watching you right now and seeing what you do and they are inspired by you. And so when someone could pick up from there and use some of these tools to get good results, I think the cascade effect from that is just so powerful. And that’s what I want to see in our communities, our neighborhoods, and our society as a whole.

MARTIN: Yeah. I’m well reminded as you’re speaking, of the thing that says: “Strong men tend to raise weak sons and weak sons will create a bad economy and bad economy will create hardship, and hardship will form strong men, and the strong men will raise weak sons and they will wreck the economy.” And so this is the cycles, right? And it’s interesting that multi generational wealth, for example, is pretty rare. Like, there are very, very few companies, not companies, families, names that have lasted that have made it into generation 3, 4 is rarer, and 5 is super rare. There are only very few that have actually made something of the inheritance that has been handed to them.

NATE: It’s just what you said. If it’s handed to you, it’s something you don’t value quite as much. So I think that you have to be the Rockefellers of the world who have so much money that you can’t possibly spend in five generations, or you have to raise a generation of kids who are strong, smart, wise, and are able to take what you’ve given them and build upon it in their own way. And that’s the future. I didn’t come from money. We ate mayonnaise sandwiches when I was growing up and we liked it. I didn’t know we were poor. But if I can build a little bit and then have my kids build a little bit, too, my daughter cracks me up. She’s so inspiring. I love her.

She just turned six and she got a couple bracelet-making sets for her birthday. And so she’s been just at work making bracelets and she’s learning to write, too. So she’s now making bracelets and writing signs for a bracelet stand she’s going to have. So she skipped the lemonade stand phase andshe’s now like selling bracelets and she’s like, I’m like, how much are these going to be, baby? And she sys $10.25. I was like, “That’s a good price. Lets see if the market tolerates it.

MARTIN: I’ll give you the discount. Keep the change. Okay. That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s great to see the message that I was trying to put forward with the little monologue was we need to try and figure out how we’re going to raise strong people. Because I’m now 70 something, it’s very conceivable that my last years will be less productive than up to now, and somebody’s going to have to carry the ball. So if I’ve raised successful kids who are actually able to produce, there will be an economy that can afford to float me along when I’m less productive. But if I raise unproductive, sickly people, we’re going to be in trouble. And I see that all around me. There is so much weakness, ill health that-

NATE: And entitlement.

MARTIN: Okay, that’s a different. That’s another story. Yes, there are a whole lot of people who feel that they have been victimized by society and they somehow feel that it owes them.

NATE: Yeah, but I mean, it’s a symptom of weak health, right?

MARTIN: Yeah.

NATE: I think as your health declines, like the physical and mental health are inexorably linked. And if you don’t have that physical health and like, okay, so can I share a little bit of my backstory?

MARTIN: Oh, please. Yeah, that’s what I would like to hear.

NATE: So when I, the reason I got into health and fitness back in like 2008, 2005 really was when I was 13 years old, I was at home by myself and my mom was dropping my two younger sisters off at their elementary school and someone came to my front door and knocked on it. I didn’t let him in, and he came around the back. I was like, that’s a little weird, maybe he’s a contractor or something. I don’t know. He breaks a window in my house. I was like, that’s not normal contractor behavior.

So I grab a steak knife out of the knife block and then I go into my bedroom and I hide under my bed and I lock the door and I hear this man come down my wooden hall, like the wooden floors of my hallway with his work boots on. And just like, I can still remember the noise of his feet on the floor, and then he pounds on my door. And I thought to myself like, this is, I’m about to die. And it was such a terrifying, traumatic experience for me at that age that my brain instantly shifted to, if I am bigger and I am stronger and I have a big enough beard and enough tattoos, no one’s going to ever be able to mess with me ever again. And so that’s been such a driving force for me as a young man. And I think that that idea, that philosophy is very prevalent in gyms today. You can see a lot of guys in the gym who are just completely, like, just monsters. So big, so strong. But inside, they’re hurt little boys like I was. And they had never been able to take the power that they’ve received from weight training and transmute that into something healthy. I feel like it took me years, but eventually I found that I did not like running from that fear anymore. And instead, I was able to figure out a way to move towards the positives and the benefits and the additional enthusiasm and energy and vibrancy for life that I got from training.

And the thing that I think that was the real big win. Because I was able to gain… I graduated high school at six four and 155 pounds. So I was real rail skinny. And throughout the course of the last 20 years of weight training I gained some muscle, sure. But I also started to understand that I can do anything that I set my mind to. I can do hard things. I can do hard things consistently. And if I just keep working at something long enough, I’m going to be successful. Thus the “inevitable” tattoo. It doesn’t matter how long it’s going to take me, because I’m going to be lapping the people on the couches. I’m not going to be the smartest or the sharpest or the most athletic, but I’m going to continue to do it until I succeed. And I think that mental strength that you get from understanding that you’re a person who can achieve what they set their mind to is so much better than the physical strength you get from lifting weights. And I want that for other people.

I want people to start understanding that even if you don’t love working out, even if you don’t love some of these aspects of things, if you’re a person that does what they say they’re going to do and does it for a long enough period of time, your physical strength is going to increase, for sure, but your mental strength is going to increase, and you become a person without limits. And that is such a fun place to be, I think.

MARTIN: Right. Yeah, this is really important, getting everyone to understand the value of commitment and consistency and showing up and doing it even when it’s raining and too hot and too cold and everything, just doing the work. And you hear this all over. Elon Musk will tell you that ideas are easy to come by, execution is the tough part. And developing a prototype is the easy part. Producing it at scale is the hard part. In other areas of life, that will be, is that you actually need to show up, do the work. There’s no shortcut. And if you think that somehow the world will give you for free the results, you have been seduced by the easy button. The medical system loves to tell you that there is a silver bullet, that there is the thing you can take that will take away your pain and solve your dysfunction.

NATE: Absolutely.

MARTIN: It’s a seduction, and it’s a lie.

NATE: I think a lot of marketing is like that. Food, coaching, like business coaching, fitness coaching. Like a lot of people tell you. Oh, it’s not your fault. If you just knew this one secret, you would be able to do better. Hey, it’s not your fault. It’s society’s fault. But if you take this ozempic,  you’ll do better.

MARTIN: You just put a dagger into me by saying the word. No, no, no, it’s okay. You know, this ozempic got itself such a reputation. Thank you, Oprah Winfrey, for being the advertising billboard for it. And there will be so many people with destroyed stomachs and thyroid cancers that will come at the back end of this. It’s not even funny.

NATE: But like you mentioned, it’s like the medical industry wants to tell you it’s a silver bullet, obviously, that’s false. But I think if you can transform your mentality from looking for a silver bullet to looking for thousands of brass bb’s, then you can start actually eliciting changes.

MARTIN: Yeah. When hunting, starlings come with a shotgun, not with a rifle.

NATE: I like that.

MARTIN: You want a thousand little things. Yeah. As in a journey, right? A thousand mile journey begins with the first step, and you take the steps. Or another beautiful metaphor. How do you eat a ten pound salami? One slice at a time.

NATE: 100%.

MARTIN: Right. So anyway, awesome. So there is the book “The Million Dollar Body.” You probably say all of that in that book, huh?

NATE: I talk about some of those pieces. I think I give a little bit of my background as well. But in reality, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to give people a reason to do certain things. Like, for example, an a.m. routine is one of my seven pillars, my seven daily investments in this book. I always talk about this in terms of investments, number one, because a lot of my clients end up in that business entrepreneurial space. So I feel like they like that language around money. So I want you to think about your day in terms of where are you investing? Rather than, oh, I just want to eat this food. But no, if you eat your lunch in a specific way, it’s going to be an investment in your future energy and health. How are you investing? So one of my investments is the daily a.m. routine. And there’s a million people talking about am routines. And some of them are talking about very expensive smoothies with rare ingredients that you have to do, and journaling for 90 minutes and then a red light sauna and all these different things that are fairly elusive to a lot of us who are nothing deeply embedded in the health space. So I wanted to give people very concrete, small things. My morning routine consists of two things. It is 32oz of water and 60 seconds of exercise. That’s all it is for the morning. Because I believe a morning routine has two components.

And it’s not journaling and meditation. It’s not breath work and working out. It is casting a vote for the person that you are becoming. If you want to become a more health-conscious individual, then some part of your morning needs to incorporate something healthy in it. If you want to become a better parent, some part of your morning should incorporate listening to a podcast, reading a book, being intentional about improving your parenting skills, and then eliminating decision fatigue. We make 30 plus thousand decisions every single day. From the color of the t-shirt we’re going to wear, to what we’re eating for breakfast, to whether I should say yes or no or respond to this email. And most of us have limited bandwidth for that.

It’s like a muscle, right? So you spend all your time deciding on the flavor of oatmeal in the morning. Then when it comes time to the afternoon, you have less energy around decision making. So let’s just automate the first hour of your day. You wake up, you know exactly what you’re going to eat, you know exactly what you’re going to wear. Last time, last time we talked, I was wearing this shirt. I have six of them. It’s a black shirt, I wear them all the time.

And if you have those pieces in place, then you’ve set yourself up for a much more enjoyable day. And that doesn’t mean a morning routine can’t have some of those pieces. Bruce Lee said, absorb what is useful, reject what is not, and add what is uniquely your own. So try my methodology with the water and the exercise, which are designed to get your metabolism moving quicker, giving you hydration. After you’ve not been hydrating for the last 8 hours and then just get your body moving a little bit to improve that fat metabolism and put you in a better energetic position than if you wake up and just pound a cup of coffee. So my goal is to give you, here’s a small tidbit that you can start implementing right away. And here are three really good reasons why you should be doing it. So, not making it overly scientific or complicated, but simple things that very busy people can do consistently for years.

MARTIN: Yeah. The word that has been rattling in my brain about this is activate. When you flush. When you put in that water you are activating the process. Things will move. You need to be able to move nutrients in and toxins out and if you have a dry riverbed you will not have any boats floating on it. It will just not happen. And the second thing, this energy business, when you activate your metabolism by actually physical movement, that’s a phenomenal act. You just told your body to kick in gear as opposed to conserving energy.

NATE: And it doesn’t even need to be, it doesn’t need to be a long workout. 60 seconds of jumping jacks is a great way to kick you up and get out of the bed.

MARTIN: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be the first 20 seconds. Take your time. Come up. Right? Yeah. Awesome. Yes. Raising a healthy nation. You know, just these two things alone, if they were done by millions, we would probably change the course of history.

NATE: I mean like it’s kind of, it’s cool to think about that, but it’s also slightly depressing. Think that we can’t get people to do 1 minute of something in the morning that is going to change the course of their life over years or decades. Because this is like, it’s not revolutionary, it’s not sexy, it’s not this, take this cool supplement. It’s not do this magical exercise that is going to do all these things. It’s something so small, but it really has that compound effect like investing. Right? So I think if you can just make those daily deposits, you start seeing it not today, not tomorrow, but three months from now, two years from now, everything starts feeling way, way better. And you’re like, wow, I’m so glad I started back then.

MARTIN: All right. Okay. 60 seconds. High aerobic activity. Why not?

NATE: Jumping jacks? Great. I would say you could do burpees if you’re sadistic. I don’t ever have my clients ever do burpees because that’s the worst exercise. But sometimes I’ll just do some shadow boxing. Maybe I’ll just, like, dance a little bit. That’s embarrassing. My wife catches me. But you know what? It’s all, that’s all good. Sometimes if I’m feeling kind of low or like a little bit creaky, I’ll just do band pull aparts or something. Just keep my shoulders and upper back engaged, but it doesn’t have to be anything crazy.

MARTIN: Yeah. You know what I do? What? I use a mini trampoline.

NATE: Oh, that’s the best.

MARTIN: It’s called a rebounder. And I use small weights. I use two three pound, nothing too serious and just dance and box and throw my arms around and run and do stuff. I only do really, like two minutes.

NATE: And the rebounder is so great.

MARTIN: A longer one later.

NATE: But, yeah, for flushing out all the lymph and all the stagnation that you accumulate overnight, too. So, yeah, if you have a rebounder or your kids are jumping on a trampoline at home, that’s an awesome option.

MARTIN:  Yeah. Okay, well, what else am I missing here.

NATE: Well, you want to talk a little about nutrition? Kind of like the basic framework.

MARTIN: For what I consider what you’ve learned.

NATE: Okay, so when I was working as a personal trainer, personal trainers are the worst because people are going to be like, people always ask personal trainers, what should I be eating? And they say rice and chicken. They’re like, how much? And they’re like every meal all the time. And so when I first started training, I was like, what should I be eating, you guys? And they’re like rice and chicken. So I burned myself out on chicken breast, white rice and sriracha hot sauce. I ate that stuff every meal for like a year and a half. And then by the time I was done with that, I was like. I’m done with this. I don’t ever want to see Sriracha ever again.

But the thing that kept coming up for me was, every time I would eat the rice and the chicken, I would have like a 90 minute lull in my day where I was like, I need a nap. I need to lay down. I’m tired. And as a trainer, I would work from like 06:00 a.m. to like 11:00 a.m. then have like a two or three hour window in the middle of the day with no clients. And then work from like 02:00 p.m. until 07:00 p.m.

NATE: So I had these really long days and I just, I didn’t like the fact that I was showing up to my four, 5, 6 appointments, a lot lower energy than I was for my morning appointments. So I went back to the drawing board in terms of my nutrition to figure out what can I do that’s going to actually improve my energy? How am I going to feel really good all day long? What I found was that eliminating carbohydrates, especially in the morning, the oatmeal, the bagels, the cereals, all the typical breakfast foods that we see on the supermarket shelves, was a great way to start the day. One of my key tenets, one of my investments, is a protein and fat breakfast. This can be as simple as whipping up five eggs, have a little bit of avocado, maybe some cheese on there. So very simple, nothing crazy at all. I tend to do a protein shake because I’m out of the house pretty early and it’s just fast and easy. I don’t need to turn anything on or cook anything, but I’ll do two scoops of a whey protein. I will do two tablespoons of a peanut or almond butter.

I’ll do some liquid, some ice. And then the secret for a great shake is you take some salt and you grind some salt into there. It’s much better. Plus I live in Arizona. I need all the electrolytes I can get.

MARTIN: Well, as soon as you start sweating, perspiration will be dumping sodium out of your system. So you do need to salt your food. You know what’s really interesting is you have described the ideal diet for the thyroid dominant endocrine. Okay, there are three major, thyroid, adrenal and pituitary. And you describe the thyroid diet to the T. And what’s interesting, of course, the thyroid types tend to be lean and tall. They tend to be longer rather than not. They tend to be built smaller bones, like you could usually put your hand around your wrist, whereas if you’re the adrenal dominant, you’ll be built with bigger bones, bigger ankles. I mean, the typical adrenal calf is the size of my thigh, just naturally. And they find it really easy to put on muscle mass, whereas the thyroid type, like you or me, will have to really work at it. And we never really go big. We just go okay, as opposed to mister Atlas. Doesn’t happen.

NATE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Anyway, the adrenal types are different. They like to take no breakfast at all, maybe a cup of coffee, small, light lunch, maybe a salad and just eat a big dinner. That’s their story. And interestingly enough, they gain weight with fat. Unlike the thyroid, you and I, we lose weight on fat, so we stay lean eating fat, we put on blubber eating starch. So this chicken thing that you were describing, it’s the rice that was putting the weight on and was giving you the excess energy. Here’s how it works. The energy is used up first in the circulating glucose, then in the stored glycogen, then the circulating fats, and finally then the stored fats. So if there’s always circulating glucose, you never get to using up your stored fat.

NATE: And that’s across the board, no matter what type.

MARTIN: It’s everyone. But the way you get the circulating glucose in is you put in starch in your diet, the rice, bread, potato, porridge, oatmeal, all of those are instant starch hits, which turns into blood glucose spikes. It’s great if you’re trying to outrun something, like if you need to go row 3 miles, by all means carb up.

NATE: But that’s, that’s so, so few and far between. There’s very few people that I talked to that are running ultra marathons or training for triathlons or even who are outside working with their hands physically. Most people are sitting at desks, most people work from home, they see the fridge and they don’t give their body a chance to ever rid themselves of that blood glucose. And so it’s kind of, with this strategy, it’s a sneaky way of keeping your blood sugar level so you don’t have these peaks and valleys where you’re having hunger pangs and then getting tired afterwards, as well as giving your body a chance to burn through blood glucose and then refilling those stores in the PM, which is kind of how I promote it.

MARTIN: Right on. Yes.

NATE: And so I’ve also found that,

MARTIN; Be careful about your lunch. If you spike your lunch with carbohydrates, you’re going to be falling asleep 2 hours later.

NATE: So one of our other investments is a protein and veggie lunch. So one of the easiest ways to do that, I found, is that if you make a big batch of meat or protein in the PM, then you can eat some of it for dinner and then save some of it. So you have a batch of protein, for example, everything I do is geared towards busy people. So on Monday night, we might make chicken and potatoes, we have a little more time Tuesday night, I know we don’t have time. I’m taking the kids places, we’re shuttling them around. My wife is working, so I know I need to have a faster dinner ready.

NATE: So I cook a bunch of chicken thighs. I love chicken thighs way more than chicken breasts on the grill on Monday night. And then the next night, I just chop those up and I turn them into tacos. Or I put them in a pan with some tikki masala sauce, or I put them in with some fried rice. And so now I have a couple meals that I can use based off of the previous batch of prepped protein I’ve used. So in that vein, I’ll grab two chicken thighs and then a half of a bag of baby carrots. It’s filling, it’s nutrient dense, it’s a lot of protein, and you feel great the rest of the day. You don’t feel like you’re crashing out.

And I think one of the things that I’ve learned is that when your body metabolizes carbohydrates, proteins and fats are a lot slower to be digested. Carbohydrates digest faster, which means you need more blood flow to digest them because of the oxygen requirements of digestion. So it’s gonna pull blood from your extremities, your arms, your legs, your brain, and pull it all into your gut. So these are like the rules of the human body, of human physiology. So if you know these rules, you can decide to follow them or you can decide to break them, but I don’t want people to not understand what the score is. So if you want to have pancake breakfast with your kids and you’ve got a lull in your day until noon on the weekends, by all means, enjoy that pancake breakfast, and do your thing. But because you know what’s going to happen, you’re going to be tired, you’re going to be sitting around, you’re not going to need to pop up and do something really, really active after eating a bunch of pancakes. So understanding how the body works and then putting that to use to benefit you, I think, is one of the best things you can do, and it puts you back in control.

MARTIN: Yes. Not disagreeing, but at the same time, I would say have your pancakes when you know that you’re going for a hike, because remember this, this stuff is hitting your bloodstream about 30 to 50 minutes later. So as soon as you finish eating, start putting your shoes on and go for the hike, you will burn it off.

NATE: True.

MARTIN: Which is okay, but if you’re going to sit with it, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to make a spike of glucose, followed by a spike of insulin, followed by a spike of triglycerides, and it will convert very successfully into lipids, white fat around your belly.

NATE: Yeah. I think that’s so important for people to understand. What is the score? What happens when I put this food into my body? When I put in the proteins and fats in the morning, I get energy and I don’t crash. When I put in the pancakes in the morning, I get a big spike and then I crash and I feel like I need to take a nap. So if you understand that, you can make your decisions accordingly. And I love the idea of walking or taking a hike or moving around.

There’s this ayurvedic principle called ‘shatpavali’ which just essentially means 100 steps. And their idea is that after you eat a meal, you just walk 100 steps. So for me, I think like a ten minute walk after each meal is a great way to improve digestion, improve lipid management, make sure that you’re not getting a gigantic glucose spike. Improve  your metabolism, and it’s free. You just go walk. I’m in Arizona, it’s 120 degrees right now, but I can still walk around my house.

MARTIN: All right. Yes.

NATE: No hikes in the near future for me, unfortunately. They’re always air evacuating people off mountains around here. Yeah. Like two people will come to town, stay at a resort, and then try to go hiking at noon, and then they end up getting heat stroke or whatever, and having to get air evacuated out.

MARTIN: Oh, this is actually a thing that goes on? Yeah.

NATE: Oh, yeah. It’s super frequent here.

MARTIN: My, my, yeah, of course, 120. Anything above 90 is you’re no longer able to cool yourself. So, you know, at 100, you’re as hot as your inner temperature and you’re producing energy. So if you’re doing anything moving, even digesting, you need to have some external cooling, and there isn’t any. So you’re going to overheat, your core temperature goes up and it lights out.

NATE: Yep.

MARTIN: Okay. Well, Arizona, you sure have to work hard at choosing anything less convenient for exercise outdoors.

NATE: Well, I still. I have a garage gym and so I train in the summer. Still in the garage. And what I’ve noticed from that is that it’s very uncomfortable the first couple times you do it, the first three or four times. You’re hot. You just don’t feel as good. You can’t lift as much weight, but then it feels like your body acclimates to it after a couple of workouts, and it no longer is as impactful in terms of crushing my energy and making me want to take a nap.

MARTIN: Okay.

NATE: And then when I’m going and just wandering around or walking from here to here, I don’t feel the heat takes as much out of me in real life as if I’ve been training in the heat.

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay. You’re hardening yourself.

NATE: Yeah, it feels like it. I don’t have any science to back that up, but that’s  what I’ve noticed from personal experience.

MARTIN: Right. Okay, well, very good points on the nutrition side. I already take it for granted, but it’s good that you’re remembering to just repeat it. Right?

NATE: Yeah. And then once you do it for a long time, it just becomes this lifestyle. So, I try to give people frameworks. I always think about when I go bowling with my kids, they’re not very good at bowling, so I put up the bumpers. Right. Well, a lot of us aren’t very good at nutrition, so how can we put up bumpers for ourselves and our nutrition? And I think that if you just have the idea of proteins and fat for breakfast, proteins and vegetables for lunch, protein, a carb and a veggie for dinner. Great.

Now you can go out to a restaurant, and you don’t have to worry about being on a meal plan. You can just, restaurants have a lot of food in the back. You can be like, I want a steak, I want a potato, and I want some broccoli. You just ask them for the food that you want, and they’ll make it for you. It’s a great thing about restaurants.

MARTIN: Yes. They want to serve you.

NATE: Yep.

MARTIN: All right. Okay, Nate. Let’s just tell people how they can find you. Let’s just put it out there.

NATE: Yeah. So one of the places I’m most active is on Instagram right now. If you want to find me there at ‘_milliondollarbody.’ If you just search for a million dollar body I’ll come up. I’m the best one. You can also check out my YouTube channel, which is, again, YouTube.com/milliondollarbody. And then if you wanted to check out that book, you just go to GetNatesbook.com and I’ll send you an ebook for a Kindle, or I’ll send you a PDF, whatever one you prefer. And if you like it, you want to have a hard copy, it’s on Amazon, it’s on Audible. You can listen to it, but get it for free. Check it out.

MARTIN: GetNatesbook.com. Awesome. Nate, think this was worth close to a million bucks.

NATE: I hope so. I want us to be like, fitness is fun. We get the opportunity to do fitness, right? I don’t want it to be this big thing where like, oh, my gosh, have to do another diet, have to do another exercise routine. We get to move our bodies. We don’t have to. Every time I get injured or feel like I’m laid up a little bit, it just reinforces for me how blessed I am and we are, to be able to do some of these things and move around. So I want people to understand and experience that same level of joy when it comes to the ability to feed ourselves good food and to move ourselves around and to train ourselves and to showcase what that looks like to our friends, family and community.

NATE: And so I just want this to be like a fun process. I don’t like people suffering through a fitness journey when it should be this uplifting, really just core element of personal development. You know, I think you can skip all the podcasts and all the good books and stuff like that, because fitness should really be the cornerstone. And if you can master this, then there’s nothing that you can’t do. It’s. And I think that’s a wonderful aspect of what this is like.

MARTIN: You know, these podcasts, they’re very listenable, and all you need is some sort of a headset and a device that will play it back to you and go out there and walk.

NATE: Absolutely. That’s perfect. Feed your body. Feed your mind.

MARTIN: Interestingly, I want to make one more point, which is you can start with minimal. Even if your fitness level is pretty atrocious, you start to move from. It’s hard to overcome inertia, it’s hard to overcome sitting still. So the first moves may be quite small and may feel pretty silly, but when you do them, the progression will build on itself. It’s not linear, it’s geometric. So start. If you find yourself not doing a fitness program, this should be the beginning of you doing one.

NATE: I’ve got clients who start with me and just, we just start walking. We just start walking for 30 minutes a day and it doesn’t have to be a big deal. I don’t have to get really insane with our workouts and do a bunch of hard crossfit exercises or anything like that. But you need to build that routine and build that chunk into your day where you can be like, all right, this 30 minutes belongs to me. It is an important meeting between me and me and it impacts everything else I do. And then once you have that routine built, then we can add stuff to it and mobility and core training and all sorts of cool and fun stuff. You gotta have that space really created. So if you don’t know what to do yet, just get out and walk. 30 minutes a day is all you need. 60 minutes is amazing. 30 minutes is fantastic. Start somewhere.

MARTIN: Awesome. Nate, you are such a bright light for me. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Nate Palmer. You can look at this website at Nate.fit. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast, life-enthusiast.com and by phone at 866-543-3388. Thank you.