Jeremy Scott joins Dr. Lattanza in this episode to discuss how movement is medicine. He shares how to start moving, provides tips on nutrition, as well as how to be your own support system. Jeremy is a former collegiate athlete, author of “Make Success Mandatory” and “Get Lean Gluten Free.”  Listen in if you need that extra encouragement to just get moving.

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Fitness 101: Setting Yourself Up For Success With Jeremy Scott

We have an excellent guest for you. We have Jeremy Scott of Jeremy Scott Fitness. Jeremy is a former collegiate athlete, and cum laude graduate turned bestselling author of Make Success Mandatory and Get Lean Gluten Free. His blog has been named one of the Top 20 Fitness Blogs. He is a four-time cover model. Shape Magazine named him one of the 50 Hottest Trainers in America. He has worked in partners with some of the biggest brands in fitness, including Men’s Health Magazine, Reebok, Under Armour, The Vitamin Shoppe, BodyBuilding.com, to name a few.

He is also the host of the popular Jeremy Scott Fitness Podcast and radio show. He has a humble, no excuse, and straightforward approach to mentality and fitness. His words of inspiration can be applied to many arenas of life. He’s an all-around good guy. We are happy to have you, Jeremy. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

We are lucky to have you. We pulled thousands of our patients, email followers, and social media followers. We had a lot of interest among that demographic in fitness and nutrition. This is a good time to set some goals and know where to start. Lucky for me, I knew the man to call. We are happy to have the expert. Let’s roll right into it. I wanted to get our readers your overall view about goal-setting and fitness as a whole.

For the average person who is probably the biggest demo that we work with, we understand the normal adult has 800 things going on. When fitness professionals say, “You have to be active every day, track your macros, and do all these detailed things,” that probably falls on number 27 of the list of things they want to get done for the day. I always say shallow and deep-end, depending on where people are on their journey.

If you are a person who’s doing nothing, even walking 30 minutes a day goes a long way. If you are somebody who eats garbage seven days a week, start with one great meal or one basic day. It’s looking back on maybe the last few years since we all lived through a strange era of time. Maybe you are not where you want to be at, just auditing the things that didn’t work and assessing where you are at.

We do long-term, mid-range and short goals. I’m a huge process person. Many people focus on, “I need to lose 100 pounds.” That’s awesome. The way that we reverse engineer it is, if we lost 1/2 pound or 1 pound a week, it’s going to take us 1, 2, 3, 4 years, and so on. What are the things that you can do daily that will add up to monthly and yearly results? It’s reverse engineering from there and building the little goals into the big goals.

I like that you look at what didn’t work because it’s a process. Like medicine, it’s a practice. Do X, Y and Z. If that didn’t work, let’s try something else. A lot of it can be through elimination or so on and so forth. If it’s glaring you in the face that you drink 2 liters of Coca-Cola every single day, we know that’s a good place to start. Otherwise, you’ve got to navigate it for yourself.

Most of the people who read here probably have a career or they are good parents, graduated college or something. There’s a specific set of habits, rituals, and coursework you follow. If you are trying to save for retirement, you have these metrics you follow. Yet people try to transform their bodies and go at them with no roadmap.

Being fit and healthy is the coolest thing ever. If you’re a person who’s doing nothing, then just even walking 30 minutes a day goes a long way.

The hardest thing you can do is change your flesh. It’s a battle you have to fight every single day because you are always getting older, softer and wrinklier. It’s happening. You have to audit it and manage it as you move forward. Many of us fail to do that and think awesome things will happen. If you looked at every other area of your life with raising kids or a career, it doesn’t just happen. You are very specific with it, and your body is the same way.

We go lax on certain aspects of our life and expect that a little bit of work will do the trick. I’m sure that you find this in your day-to-day that people will put procrastinate because they overestimate the amount of time that’s necessary to make some changes.

If you look at the Western diet and how we live our life, we are as busy as we have ever been but we underestimate how much we eat almost to a person. We forget little things that we shove in our mouths throughout the day. We overestimate how hard we worked or worked out. Most people underestimate what can be done in a year or two but we overestimate what can be done in three months.

They do something for 90 days and like, “It didn’t work. This sucks. I’m going to quit.” If you go back to learning how to play piano, golf or speaking a second language, the first 90 days, you were terrible. You are completely awful. In fitness, you can make a huge dent in it in 90 days. If you have been doing something for nine years, you are not going to fix it in three short months. It’s going to take a little bit longer.

You may take some measurements. Maybe you step on the scale. Maybe you don’t. We all know that’s not the best barometer for true fitness. If you pair that with some lab work, it’s amazing what you can do in six months or a year in reversing and improving your overall health.

If you look at your life, the things you are good at, and what you do well, you tend to spend a lot of time and energy on it. The average person doesn’t get their blood work done even once a year, which is crazy but they will watch 300 hours of Netflix. I don’t want to go down a deeper rabbit hole. If you strip it down and say, “I’m investing little time into my health and fitness. That’s why it’s not where I want it to be.” I’m not saying you have to spend 70 hours a week on it but if you spent four hours a week on it, the ROI on that is bigger than anything else you are going to do.

One thing that we wanted to bring up from our survey was sustainably setting goals. It’s important that you are not going to work out at 5:30 every morning. Maybe that’s not sustainable for you. Perhaps you’ve got kids, and you’ve got to drive all over town to get them to school. What’s a good approach to a sustainable goal?

This is how we created a majority of the programs that we do. We have people who are super fit and come seven days a week. They are crazy. That’s not normal. I wouldn’t have recommended it for the average person either. It’s all-time-based. If you are neurotic like me and you map out every second of every day, how much time can you dedicate to fitness per week? We go by the 3×52, 3 workouts a week, every week for 52 weeks. If they can be 30-minute blocks, that seems sustainable for the average person. It doesn’t have to be Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

It can be any three days that work for you. You have to make that non-negotiable and carve out those times. On top of that, if you are doing anything else, if you can get 10,000 steps in or go for a walk every single day, or even do ten minutes of mobility as you watch TV, before or after bed, that’s fine. For the average Joe, 3×52 seems to be a decent mix of getting enough stimuli to the muscles. They are burning enough calories. They are getting into a routine. They are also not burning themselves out and not so sore they can’t move for three weeks either.

They don’t start to resent that schedule because it is feasible. It’s not, “I can’t believe I have to do this again. I’m so sore from yesterday.” It’s something that we can work into the schedule pretty regularly.

I look at it like how we partner with a yoga studio. Yoga is great. It’s a great supplement. By the time I would have to drive there, do the whole yoga practice, I was so sweaty. I’m disgusting. I can’t do anything else. I have to take a shower. It’s a two-hour investment in my day. Knowing that in my head makes me not want even to attempt it. If they said I could pop in and 30 minutes, I’m out the door, it’s much more sustainable for me. I’m not daunted by the time investment alone. That’s why we keep it short. If you are not BSing the workout, 30 minutes for most of you is more than enough.

It’s breaking down those barriers, so you are not going to make excuses the day of or when you are going to get there. You had mentioned mobility. Can you talk about the importance of mobility in fitness?

If you look at nursing homes, the statistic is about 75% of the people in nursing homes are there because they can’t use the toilet unassisted. What does that mean in terms of fitness? That means you can’t do 3/4 of a bodyweight squat. That’s your mobility along with grip strength. They have all the studies in terms of grip strength and how long you are going to live. Part of that is because if you were to fall, you grab something, which holds you up. If your grip is weak, you can’t. Mobility is probably the one thing all of you can hold onto for almost your entire life.

When you look at the progression from people who go from walking to a cane to a walker, to a wheelchair then to bedridden, that progression goes fast. It’s drastically quick how you go from one to the other. When we say mobility, think of it as dynamic stretching. If you are familiar with inchworms or Spiderman steps, doing toe touches, hanging from a pull-up bar, basic functional things, how you get up and off the floor, that you have to do.

If you dedicate 5 to 10 minutes a day to that, it’s going to cut down on the risk of you having noncontact injuries. If your husband tackles you, there’s nothing you can do. You are going to fall and get hurt. From you for falling downstairs, slipping or maybe catching yourself if something goes wrong, that’s where mobility is going to help you get through everything.

It allows you to have a better quality of life. If you think about it, if you can’t walk and move, your quality of life goes down drastically, everything. If you are relatively fit, it allows you to get into bigger ranges of motion. You can do all different types of exercises. You build more muscle. You lose more fat. Everybody wins. It’s the one thing that is the key to your entire fitness, whether you are young or old.

You can apply it to so many avenues of life. If you are not elderly yourself, you think about your parents, grandparents or somebody that you don’t want on their own unless they can do these certain things. When you get into a nursing home, you have to have assistance for about everything because you don’t have that quick maneuverability to catch yourself. Having balance alone is so important to overall health and improving your lifespan.

As everybody gets older, these things get harder. If you look at a twelve-year-old kid, many of them can almost do the splits. They can touch their toes. We get people to come in at 42, they move like they are 92. If you think that will naturally get better and easier as you get older without working through it, you are crazy.

The hardest thing you can do is to change your flesh.

You have to dedicate the time now. It’s never too late. It doesn’t matter if you are 55 and not super flexible. You can become more mobile. You might not become way faster at running or be able to dunk a basketball when you are 60 years old but you can still become more mobile and have a better quality of life. That’s probably the most important thing people are not doing daily.

If people are reading this like, “I’m not mobile. I’m not fit,” what’s a good way to find and stick to a fitness routine that maybe they don’t even know where to start? Do I start by going and bench pressing? Where do they start?

If you have no clue, if you can get a coach and be in a community, it’s key. I’m not trying to sell anybody anything. I have no problem with the big box gyms. They are great. The way that I look at those, it would be like if I went to my dentist’s office but there’s no dentist there, and they said, “Jeremy, do your exam and clean your teeth.” I know enough. I can floss and brush. Beyond that, I know nothing. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.

A big box gym is the same way for a novice person. You are going to walk in. You are renting equipment from them because there’s no instruction and program design. You are going to gravitate towards 2 or 3 movements that you know in avoiding all these things or imbalances you have in the body. It’s an investment in yourself. You will build the foundation of skills that you can have for the rest of your life. Having a coach or somebody guide you through it is probably the best place to start. We put out so much free content but there’s no accountability behind that.

People can turn it on and off when they want. If you look at the best athletes in the world, from Michael Jordan to Charles Barkley, when you take them out of sports, they don’t look the same anymore. Their habits change because there’s no goal, accountability and coach. If you can have those three things, you are going to be way better off. The money you spend on it is a way bigger ROI than if you are going to pay $10 a month, walk in a room, and blindly try to find it on your own. That’s the key. Once you learn the skills, you own them, and then you can play with them as you like.

You are paying for a skillset, goal accountability, and having a coach to get you there and do that ideally without getting injured.

If you don’t know anything, walk every day. It’s one of the biggest things. Do the basic stuff you know as a kid. If you can, do bodyweight squats, pushups, toe touches and jumping jacks. Moving your body through space is probably the greatest thing anybody can do in overall medicine. We say the movement is medicine. The more you move in dynamic ways, even walking backward, walking sideways, these small things we take for granted that we used to do as kids, now we don’t. If you resort back to that, that alone will put you in a better position.

Walking is an underappreciated form of movement because people will come in here, and they are like, “I don’t exercise. I walk 30 minutes a day.” I’m like, “That’s significant.” Sitting is the new smoking. That 30 minutes away from your couch is excellent. I will double down on that. If you are already doing that, find a hill. Walk up a hill instead. If you get somewhere, and then they are expecting you, you have that accountability. What if at home you don’t have a strong support system that’s encouraging you to show up and be that person every single day that you are working towards?

We have done the podcast on this. We called it Eating Healthy Despite Your Partner. You can’t change the people around you instantly. It’s tough. You have to be the person that they follow. If you are dedicated to being healthy, you can have an open conversation with them. I don’t know your relationship. It might go well. It might not. People are averse to change, especially when you are saying, “Eat this and don’t eat this, and I’m going to do this.” You have to do what’s best for you. We always say, “Put your mask on first.”

If you can do it long enough, the person you are with will gravitate towards you. They are not going to pull you down. Here’s the thing, being fit and healthy is the coolest thing ever. It’s better than being rich. If you can invest money, you can get rich. That’s fine. A lot of rich people can’t get fit. Being fit is the new status symbol, in my opinion.

There’s not a person you meet on the street you could walk up to and be like, “We could give you this amazing, powerful body that you look great. You are lean and ripped. You have abs.” No one is going to turn it down. Everybody wants it. You are presenting them something hard to do but it’s something that ultimately, they want to do deep down.

When you are with someone, you can lead by example. You keep banging on your drum. If they are doing things that are holding you back, all you can do is politely ask them. If chocolate or wine is your thing like, “Can you not keep it in the house or maybe not do it around me?” Have some healthy boundaries. You are trying to do something better for them. It’s not detrimental.

That’s tough for a lot of people. If you are willing to die on that hill, you throw the wine in the sand and be like, “I’m going to get in as many fights and arguments as I need to to be healthier,” eventually, you are going to win. It’s a painful process. I have lived through it with many couples but ultimately, they will come around.

Let’s talk about the fuel source now. We talked a little bit about goal setting and consistency. What is your approach to nutrition? Before we dive into it, let’s know your thoughts on nutrition as a whole.

Eating right is the hardest thing most people will do in their life, outside of fighting in a war or battling cancer. These are anomalies in your day-to-day life because we are not teaching people the skill of eating they know. A baby can do it. You grab food, you put it in your mouth. We are trying to change a behavior pattern. You are in a world where you can buy 5,000 calories for $5. There are all these amazing restaurants. Food is an experience. I’m not against that. We are inundated to buy it all the time. You have to win the decision of eating right 2, 3, 4 times a day, every day or however many times you eat.

It’s hard to always come out with a W. I’m a fan of eating real food. When most people eat real food, we tend to self-regulate. If you are going to eat apples, odds are you have never eaten ten apples in a row. If you look at Oreo cookies, you are probably eating a whole sleeve at once, or girls got cookies or cinnamon rolls, whatever your thing is.

We tend to do better when the food is in its most real form if that makes sense. Inside that, there are a million different protocols that work for everybody. For some people, fasting is their thing. Some people, it’s keto, paleo or gluten-free, whatever your jam is. Those are little niches inside of that. They are all based on the same principle, real food. That’s what we coach everybody.

If you want to go deeper, you can count macros and micros, and then deficits and surpluses. If you snapped a picture of what you are eating and most of it runs, flies, swims or grows from the Earth, you are going to be okay. If it’s all in a bag or a box and highly processed, those are engineered to make you want to overeat. You get this habit-forming addiction to those. I don’t think you get that with asparagus compared to Doritos or something.

As everybody gets older, some of the exercises just get harder.

If it’s got a label, you are completely out of control about what’s in it and what you are putting into your body. It’s a total guessing game. That’s why I usually tell patients, “If you can look at it and tell what it is, you are probably a little bit safer.” You are probably not going to overeat it because chemical structures are naturally occurring. It’s not going to hit your body and be this bottomless pit where you get to the bottom of the bag and whoops.

We don’t overeat on asparagus. I have never met anybody where that’s their problem. People will rag on fruit like, “Fruit has sugar in it.” I have never met a person who’s come in and said, “I’m 400 pounds because I ate too many bananas. That wasn’t the thing, you guys. If you keep it real, you will be okay.

What are your thoughts on fueling for workouts or post-workout meals? Do you think that breakfast is the most important meal of the day? What are your thoughts on that?

I might differ from a lot of people. I don’t think the timing is that important for many folks. It’s personality type. We are all a little bit different. I don’t eat breakfast personally. That works for me. I haven’t in probably fifteen years, give or take. I wake up super early. I don’t feel good when I do it. It feels it’s the last thing that I need. I wake up at 4:00 in the morning. Some of you do it a little bit later. Maybe it’s fine. I looked at it as I lay in bed all night. I didn’t create a demand for the food. Your body might be different.

If it’s pre-workout, post-workout, it depends on the individual. If you crush it and feel like the body is depleted, we give many recommendations. If it’s a 1 to 1 ratio of proteins and carbohydrates, meaning if we are talking hypertrophy, how you build muscles, you can get real complex. If you ate, say, 30 grams of protein, it may be 30 grams of carbohydrates.

For some people, that tends to be an even mix because the carbohydrates can show the protein to your muscles. They can help them repair, replacing the glycogen you lost so you have more energy. That’s fine. We tell most people in our coaching groups, and we walk them through how to eat. If you can commit to a routine in a schedule, it sounds like you are trapped in it but there’s a lot of freedom in that.

If you eat 2 or 3 times a day, and then about these times, you are going to get a routine that worked for you. Do I always eat right after a workout? No. Sometimes, it’s maybe an hour later but that works for me. It always comes back to auditing your lifestyle and what works for you, and what you feel is best. A lot of people say, “My friend does this.” That’s great, but odds are, they have different parents.

Maybe their age range training was real. They grew up doing something different than you. Their body type and hormones are different. You can take pieces from what everybody else does but ultimately, this is where you have to do the work and find out what works best. You play with it. It doesn’t happen in a week. It will evolve as you evolve, and your goals do and as your body does.

We touched on a little bit about food timing. That’s a heavy-hitting piece in fitness and nutrition, and also this idea of macros. Some people might be very well-versed and completely understand it but maybe others are not. What can you give us as an intro to macros for those that don’t know?

The term macro is becoming more popular. In our world, this has been forever. I spoke at a group at AT&T. They are diamond star people. There were 100 people in the room. I’m like, “Who here knows what macros are?” Three hands go up. We talk like we do with ten-year-olds because that’s where we are at.

When you hear the term macros, it means macronutrients. Those are the big three for most people, your proteins, carbs, and your fats for the day. Alcohol is the fourth stepchild if you want to put it in. Alcohol is not free but proteins, carbs, and fats are the big ones. When you look at your overall calorie intake for the day, everything is not equal, calories in, calories out. There’s a difference.

For example, if you are going to eat 2,000 calories a day of all Sour Patch Kids and then 2,000 calories a day of chicken, broccoli, bananas, real food broken down in these proteins, carbs, and fats to make up that 2,000, you might weigh the same at the end of three months as the other person. In terms of how you look, your body composition, how you feel, and your energy and output will be completely different because the macro breakdown was different. Instead of being all generic sugar, you have a mix here. That’s what we talk about with people. You have to have a blend that works again for you.

If you are doing something for performance, you will do an Ironman. You are going to ride a bike 100 miles. You are going to swim for 2 miles. You are going to run a marathon. Your carbohydrate intake will probably be higher because it’s an easy energy source for the body. If you are someone who wants to look good and your workouts are maybe 30, 40 minutes, your carbohydrate intake will probably be less overall because you don’t need as much to fuel what you are doing. That goes into a calorie count, too. Your micronutrients, the vitamins, and minerals that make up everything else into the body, that’s the dumb down version for sure.

Calories are not created equal. Look what your goal is. What are you fueling for? What do you want your body composition to look like? How much time would you say that people would need to dedicate to food and to pair that with some exercise? What would be a good estimate of like, “I’m feeling better. I’m feeling healthier?”

If you are 600 pounds doing anything better, things will change fast. If you are already relatively fit, it’s going to take a lot longer. The cool thing is if you are already at a certain level of fitness, the fitter you get, the harder it becomes to make changes, especially when you start to get super lean or strong. The nice thing is your body is so efficient.

It’s compound interest. The rich get richer in terms of that. For many people, we tend to say after maybe 8 to 12 weeks, you are going to start to feel this drastic change in your body. You might not look like a different human but you will be more mobile. You will be stronger. Your digestion, the way you process food, how synthesis works, everything will be more efficient.

Probably six months in, you are going to have a lot of friends and family start to notice that you are looking different, moving different, and feeling different. People don’t know this but in a legit year, it’s undeniable for most people who put the time in. We live in this microwave world but it’s more a crockpot. That’s how you have to look at it. You are putting the stuff in and letting it work overtime. If this is a lifestyle change, what is a year if you are a different human overall? There’s nothing else you can do in that quick of a timeframe.

Honestly, we have a program where it’s 50 days. It’s immersive. These people give up many old habits, and they jump in. Like anything in life, the more output you put in, the quicker things tend to be. If it’s more of a gradual change, that’s fine, too. I urge people to do whatever is easiest for a lifestyle change, meaning like, “I’m going to give up drinking, and I’m not going to do anything for three months.”

Literally just walk every day. It’s one of the biggest things.

That’s cool. At the end of the three months, how much of it is sustainable? I would rather have you take nine months, do it the right way, so it doesn’t feel like you are killing yourself and giving up everything. At least that way, you can have this, and it’s a lifestyle. It’s something you do. You don’t feel you are on a diet or a program. It becomes who you are and what you do.

It’s an overall lifestyle change overhaul, what have you. You do the 47-day challenge. Why did you choose 47 days? How does that go for the people that sign up for that?

We have done this for a long time. There are maybe 1 or 2 programs we do that are longer. We run a business. You’ve got to be able to sell it. I can’t sell a ten-year program even though it’s what it is. It’s harder for people to buy into it. It’s a long enough time where people can commit to something and also see the results from the efforts that they put in. If we do something that’s way shorter, they tend not to elicit as big of a change as we want them to see. All the things we want them to learn, it takes us about seven weeks to drill it into their head as they go.

It gives them a carrot, an external motivator. We say this throughout the program. It’s not just about making the biggest change in 47 days but it’s teaching you for 2 months. You hear me say the same thing 800 times where it becomes part of what you do. You learn these skills in 47 days that you can hopefully take with you for the next maybe 47 months. We dig down on eating type and macros. They are in a program where mobility is included, and all the workouts come to them. It’s laid out as simple and stupid as possible.

We do a huge, personal development piece in there. These are habits we have. We all have bad habits. It’s not just with our eating and drinking. It’s with a lot of things. If you look at any personal development course you have ever taken, we take a lot of the popular pieces and habits, strip it down. Looking at your life, you would be surprised how finance, fitness, eating habits, drinking habits, and sleeping habits correlate close to one another. We try to get people to do the hard work. Once we have them in the ecosystem, they are forced to do it. It works pretty well.

People are like, “Forty-seven days, I can deal with that. Ten years, I don’t know.” You equip them with the tools to get to that because it’s a mindset shift. Working in cardiology, we have a lot of patients that are somewhat hesitant to get started with exercise and some of these major changes in their life. My advice to them is to check in with your body, listen to your body.

What are some advice pieces that you might have? You train all age groups. It’s not just eighteen-year-old kids that are collegiate athletes that can do anything. You have all ages come to you and look for advice. How do you guide some of these middle-aged patients and older that are somewhat hesitant to be safe and exercise?

The oldest person we have is maybe 74, 75. I may be different than some people. I can say whatever I want. There are no rules in my world. I’m not saying I don’t care if I hurt people’s feelings but I’m not the tell you it’s okay if it’s not an okay person. The way that we phrase it to these guys is, “You are never going to have more time in your life than you do now. Tomorrow you have one day less. This is running out for all of us. The longer you put it off, the harder it becomes.

If you want a visual, I look at it as like you are standing in a 1-foot hole. If you are not happy with your body but you are still fit, you look at whatever. If you are not mobile and you don’t feel good, you are like in a 10-foot hole. It’s way harder to get out. Every day you wait, you are sinking into that quicksand over and over.

We coach a program where if you come in, you can get people who are super fit, and they can go crazy. This is how most good fitness professionals do it. You give them the keys to the car, and they floor it. When someone else comes in, it’s like they have training wheels on. We regress, and you exercise that’s needed. They can do anything. That’s why I say a coach helps because they can find your starting point. If you are like, “My knees are bothering me,” or it’s a hip or a shoulder, there’s no one exercise you have to do. Anybody tells you that they are wrong.

You don’t have to do this squat. There are 50 different squats we can do to elicit the same result. If you have risk tissues, there are a million risk placements we can do so that you can do pushups. You can get off the floor but you have to start doing something. It’s, again, a shallow and deep end. We are not going to throw you in the ocean. You will drown. We will put some floaties on you. We will walk you through it in the shallow one.

The key is starting, even with the most basic stuff. That’s what we tell everybody. We find something that works for them. They go at their speed, and you would be surprised how far they can come. We have a 60-year-old. Honestly, it’s crazy. I’m getting old, so I start to forget how old people are. We had the Sunday group, which is a bunch of killers, the hardest workouts of all time. A lot of these people are 55 years old.

I met them probably when they were in their early 40s. They looked the best they have ever looked where 100 years ago, at 55, you are dead. You get diarrhea and die. You don’t have medicine, different things like that. You look at 55 years olds and they are shredded. They look great. It’s not too late, no matter if you are 19 or 75. You have the rest of your life to grab these skills back.

Workouts are scalable, and age is relative. This is very pop culture but I saw that the Golden Girls are the same age as the new Sex and the City that came out. They portrayed them as these old women with gray hair and it’s Sex and the City characters in their cast. They are skipping around in New York City. Age is just a number. Get started so that you are not looking back like, “Fifty-five was super young. I feel I’m walking around like I’m 100 years old.” A question that I ask all of our guests is, how do you live a heart-healthy lifestyle?

I live it every day. I’m a practitioner of what I do. We run a business, and things are way different in my world than when I started. I didn’t start this to make money or to have it be a career. I sucked at everything else, so there’s that. I didn’t want to hate my life. Fitness is what I do. It will always be part of life. I was an athlete forever. I have never not been active. There has never been a time where I didn’t train and move around.

This is why we probably see older people tend to be fitter because you are doing it not just for bandy reasons. You are doing it for these internal health reasons. I do everything from the inside out. The byproduct is you start to look and move a different way. It’s everything that I consume. It’s the food that I eat. I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t do all these detrimental things unless my wife forces me to have a drink, then I will bend. I try to be mindful of everything I consume.

When I say that, it’s not just the food I eat, what I drink, and the supplements I take. It’s the things I watch, the stuff I listen to, the people I surround myself with, and the amount of stress that I’m willing to take out of my life. As a business, we could probably make $500,000 more per year if I was willing to work out less myself and do certain things for money but that would cause me a lot of stress. For me, it’s not worth it.

When I look at the overall stress of your life, all of that affects the heart. It’s not just what we eat and drink. If I mentally don’t feel good, it will tax the rest of my system. I put boundaries up. I don’t watch the news. I don’t do things that make me feel crappy. That goes for what you eat and with everything else.

Eating right is the hardest thing most people will do in their life.

Probably the biggest thing I would tell anybody is, if you are doing something and not feeling good about it, stop for a second, step back from your life, audit it, and say, “When I watch this, I don’t feel good. When I read that, it makes me feel weird. When I hang out with these people, I don’t get the best vibe.” All of that affects your body, whether you realize it or not on an internal level. That all comes down to your brain and your heart, for sure.

We digest more than our food, and we have to detox our environment. If it’s crappy food or crappy people, we’ve got to get away from them and learn what’s best for us. These different practices that you can learn, and can accumulate over time, will make dramatic shifts in your life. Get started as soon as possible.

I talk to patients all day, every day. They are like, “I’ve got off once I started this exercise regimen and started listening to what was good for me and listening to my body and feeling. I thought I could digest this. I had to cut out dairy ultimately,” or whatever that might be for you. They’ve got off of their cholesterol medication and high blood pressure medication, all of these things.

You can start to detox your medication shelves as well. Keep it simple. Keep it whole foods, things that are good for you, things that make you feel good, all good stuff. Great advice. Jeremy, thank you so much. Tell our readers where they can learn more about you and how they can continue to get inspiration from you daily.

We put out a lot of stuff more than almost anybody. All my stuff is at Jeremy Scott Fitness. We have a website, JeremyScottFitness.com. All the social media handles, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, it’s @JeremyScottFitness. We have the Jeremy Scott Fitness Podcast. We have a newsletter that comes out at least three times a week, every week. We have done that for many years. We do two podcasts episodes a week. YouTube has 1,500 videos. They are all free if you guys want them.

If you have a question, you can message us. I will reply to all of them eventually. There are many more people than there used to be but we get back to everyone. I promise you, if you have a question on anything that’s baseline health and fitness-related, we have already podcasted it, we have written about it, and we have done a blog on it. I’m happy to send you the information if it can help.

You do provide some excellent advice and insight. I would hop on, give him a follow on all avenues, get his emails, all of the different things that will help support you in making these lasting changes in your life, your body, and your goals as a 100-year heart. You can get there. You’ve got to hold yourself countable. Thank you for an awesome episode. We love having you on here, Jeremy. You all, we will be back with another episode. Have a great day.

Important Links:

• Jeremy Scott Fitness
• Make Success Mandatory
• Get Lean Gluten Free
• BodyBuilding.com
• Jeremy Scott Fitness Podcast
• Eating Healthy Despite Your Partner – Jeremy Scott Fitness Podcast Past Episode
• Facebook – Jeremy Scott Fitness
• YouTube – Jeremy Scott Fitness
• @JeremyScottFitness – Instagram
• https://Podcasts.Apple.com/us/podcast/jeremy-scott-fitness/id1358121307?i=1000544735793

About Jeremy Scott

Jeremy is a former collegiate athlete & Cum Laude graduate turned best-selling author; “Make Success Mandatory” “Get Lean Gluten Free”. His blog has been named one of the top 20 fitness blogs online by Breaking Muscle. He is a 4-x cover model; SHAPE Magazine named him one of the 50 Hottest Trainers in America.

Jeremy has worked and partnered with the biggest brands in fitness including; Men’s Health Magazine, Reebok, Under Armor, Vitamin Shoppe and Bodybuilding.com to mention a few. He is also the host of the popular Jeremy Scott Fitness Podcast & Radio Show.

You can find Jeremy most early mornings coaching at Jeremy Scott Fitness located in beautiful sunny North Scottsdale, AZ. www.jeremyscottfitness.com