2019-01-01_men_s_health 2dq36

CL E R MON T K . Y.

U. S .

WE’VE BUILT A NAME ON BOURBON AND A LEGACY ON RYE.

EVERY BIT EARNED

KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY 50% ALC./VOL. ©2018 KNOB CREEK DISTILLERY CLERMONT, KY.

TOTAL-BODY TUNE-UP : HEART • BRAIN • BALLS STRONGER, FASTER, BETTER

GET BACKIN

SHAPE! CRUSH

2019 WITH

JON BERNTHAL AND AND THE

PUNISHER WORKOUT Peak Protein + Ultimate Zen + True Grit =

BestYear Ever

Lose 10, 20, 50, 100 Pounds!

Real Guys, Real Results

KETO NATION Inside the Low-Carb Craze

97

Seriously Smart

Strategies to Recharge Your Life JANUARY• FEBRUARY 2019 MensHealth.com

GREAT TASTE. ONLY 96 CALORIES. MILLER LITE. HOLD TRUE.

01.2019 BIG STORIES

80 WHAT IT MEANS TO MAN UP

As the Punisher, Jon Bernthal wants vengeance. As a dad, he wants his sons carrying their little sister’s schoolbag...every day. BY MOLLY KNIGHT

86 HEALTHIEST YEAR EVER It’s 2019. Time to examine your health—check your poop!—and do something about the results.

“WAS IT THE SMARTEST THING TO KEEP FIGHTING WITH A BROKEN HAND? MAYBE NOT.” —JON BERNTHAL , page 80

102 THE MEN’S HEALTH GUIDE TO GURUS

We the podcasts, take the supplements, and read the books. But can a wellness “expert” really fix us?

106 THE GURU’S DILEMMA Inside the biohacking world of Dave Asprey, the man willing to do (and spend) almost anything to live to 180.

BY JESSICA MIGALA

BY RACHEL MONROE

92 TRANSFORM YOUR BODY AND MIND

112 KETO NATION

Get started! The absolute best advice to make a new you this year, featuring Rob Lowe, Rob Kardashian, and plenty of no-longer-average Joes.

The story of how a small personal experiment turned into a massive, bacon-filled diet sensation. BY MICHAEL EASTER

Wool-blend herringbone coat ($398) by Banana Republic; bananarepublic.com. Cotton T-shirt ($40) by Polo Ralph Lauren; ralphlauren.com. Cottontwill tros ($160) by Save Khaki; savekhaki.com. Suede boots ($365) by Timberland; timberland .com. Aviator sunglasses ($153) by Ray-Ban; ray-ban.com. Calfskin belt ($245) by Eleventy; eleventy.it. Watch by Emporio Armani; armani.com.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

3

LIFE

39 How to reinvent your career. 43 Your biggest

style conundrums solved, finally.

46 Give me the “Cavill”:

What’s driving the latest dermatology trend.

48 Best Foods for

Men: Redeem the breakfast burrito.

50 Hack your chicken! How to make a grocery rotisserie bird gourmet.

52 Nonalcoholic beers that (hear us out, we’re serious) don’t suck.

54 Navigating the

sugar-filled minefield of your local Starbucks.

56 How to not sleep together after you sleep together.

58 Ask Her Anything: How fast should you be thrusting??

60 Married? Just

met? We’ve got your V-Day covered.

62 Cool Dad: Novelist

Sam Lipsyte is the anti– soccer parent.

At F3, you take the stairs. Preferably before dawn (page 24).

MH WORLD

4

BODY

9 CBD madness sweeps the Internet!; how to recalibrate your BS detector; a 50-state, 50-marathon quest.

17 Got a fitness goal?

On the cover: Jon Bernthal photographed by Eric Ray Davidson exclusively for Men’s Health. Styling by Ted Stafford, grooming by Sussy Campos/Art Department, prop styling by faethgruppe, styling assistance by Madeleine Issa, tailoring by Saira Huff/ Lars Nord. Cotton T-shirt ($40) by Polo Ralph Lauren; ralphlauren.com. Cotton 511 jeans ($70) by Levi’s; levi.com. Black Bay Dark watch ($4,150) by Tudor; tudorwatch.com.

24 Trend on Trial: Crack-

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Aim high. No, higher.

22 Reset! A full-body workout to burn off your December.

it’s miserable. Can you flip the winter blahs?

MIND

28 Don’t drink

your ketones until you read this story.

32 The Health Food

Fact-Check: You’re on our list, kombucha.

of-dawn workouts just might be the best way to make friends.

34 Dr. Alexa: Putting

26 How the man who

36 Is there protein in

managed Biggie goes big in the gym.

64 Quiz! You’re cold,

AI assistants to the medical test.

this? Probably! Make sure it’s the right kind.

67 John Wayne it up

and harness grit to get through anything.

75 Make meditation a habit. It only takes a minute.

78 Can we really call Kanye crazy?

+ 116 Are you an

above-average movie watcher?

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEREMY M. LANGE

®©2017 TYSON FOODS, INC.

Hillshire farm® turkey is slow roasted for hours. And devoured in seconds.

®

At Hillshire Farm , right after we carve our deliciously seasoned turkey, we double seal every slice for freshness. Which leads to the best Turkey, Arugula & Tomato sandwich you’ve ever tasted. Visit HillshireFarm.com for more sandwich inspiration.

Richard Dorment

Jack Essig

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT/PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

Helene F. Rubinstein Executive Managing Editor Jamie Prokell Creative Director

ADVERTISING SALES NEW YORK (212) 649-2000 Caryn Kesler Executive Director, Luxury Goods John Wattiker Executive Director, Fashion & Retail Doug Zimmerman Senior Grooming Director Joe Pennacchio Eastern Automotive Sales Director Sara Schiano Integrated Director Gil Tiamsic Advertising Sales Director John Cipolla Integrated Manager, Southeast Brad Gettelfinger Sales Manager, Hearst Direct Media CHICAGO (312) 964-4900 Autumn Jenks Midwest Sales Director Emily McCoy Midwest Sales Manager LOS ANGELES (310) 664-2801 Patti Lange Western Ad Director Anne Rethmeyer Group Sales Director, Auto SAN FRANCISCO (628) 208-0648 Andrew Kramer Kramer Media DETROIT (248) 614-6120 Marisa Stutz Detroit Automotive Director

EDITORIAL Ben Court Deputy Editor Ross McCammon Special Projects Editor Marty Munson Health Director Paul Kita Senior Editor Ebenezer Samuel Fitness Director Jordyn Taylor News Editor Mark Emery Senior Editor of Content Strategy Matt Goulet Senior Associate Editor Brett Williams Associate Fitness Editor Melissa Matthews Health and Nutrition Writer Joshua St. Clair Editorial Assistant ART Leslie Xia Associate Art Director Eric Rosati Designer Sarah Leituala Design Assistant Steve Fusco Digital Imaging Specialist PHOTOGRAPHY Alix Campbell Chief Photography Director, Hearst Magazines Sally Berman Deputy Director of Photography Sinikiwe Dhliwayo Associate Photo Editor FASHION Ted Stafford Fashion Director COPY Janna Ojeda Assistant Managing Editor John Kenney Managing Copy Editor Alisa Cohen Barney Senior Copy Editor Connor Sears, David Fairhurst Assistant Copy Editors RESEARCH Robert Scheffler Research Director Jennifer Messimer Research Chief Kevin McDonnell Senior Associate Research Editor Alex Gardner Researcher Nick Pachelli Assistant Research Editor VIDEO Dorenna Newton Executive Producer Ryan Bird Video Producer Connor Reid Video Producer Angela Kim Executive Director, Business Development and Global Licensing Natanya van Heerden International Editorial & Content Analyst HEARST MEN’S FASHION GROUP Nick Sullivan Fashion Director Matthew Marden Style Director Michael Stefanov Market Editor Alfonso Fernández Navas Fashion Assistant HEARST PHOTOGRAPHY GROUP Darrick Harris, James Morris, Justin O’Neill Directors Cary Georges, Fiona Lennon Deputy Directors Lauren Hechel Senior Editor Lauren Brown Editor Cori Jayne Howarth, Ignacio Murillo Associate Editors Amy Cooper Assistant

Samantha Irwin General Manager, Hearst Men’s Group Karen Ferber Business Manager Paul Baumeister Research Director Alison Papalia Executive Director, Consumer Marketing Chris Hertwig Production Manager Madeline Bednar, Savannah Bigelow, Zoe Fritz, Shelby Iannello, Kayla Savage, Toni Starrs Sales Assistants PUBLIC RELATIONS Nathan Christopher Public Relations Executive Director Kelsey Leiter Public Relations Manager MARKETING SERVICES Cameron Connors Executive Director, Head of Brand Strategy and Marketing Stephanie Block Associate Integrated Marketing Director Alison Brown Special Events Director Jiri Seger Creative Director, Marketing PUBLISHED BY HEARST COMMUNICATIONS, INC. Steven R. Swartz President & Chief Executive Officer William R. Hearst III Chairman Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Executive Vice Chairman Catherine A. Bostron Secretary Carlton Charles Treasurer HEARST MAGAZINES DIVISION Troy Young President Michael Clinton President, Marketing and Publishing Director Kate Lewis Chief Content Officer Debi Chirichella Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer David Carey Hearst Magazines Chairman Gilbert C. Maurer, Mark F. Miller Publishing Consultants HEARST MAGAZINES INTERNATIONAL Simon Horne SVP/Managing Director Asia Pacific and Russia Richard Bean Director of International Licensing and Business Development Kim St. Clair Bodden SVP/Editorial & Brand Director Chloe O’Brien Deputy Brands Director Shelley Meeks Executive Director, Content Services

HOW TO REACH US: Customer Service: To change your address, pay a bill, renew your subscription, and more, go online to menshealth.com/customer-service, email [email protected], or write Men’s Health Customer Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500. Editorial offices: 300 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. : mhletters@hearst .com. Licensing & Reprints: Wyndell Hamilton, Wright’s Media, (281) 419-5725, ext. 152, hearst@wrightsmedia .com. Absolute satisfaction guaranteed. Scent-free subscription available on request. From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings by postal mail, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to: Men’s Health, Mail Preference Center, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-0128. Men’s Health carries the latest health, fitness, and nutrition reporting to provide you with useful information about your health. But every body is different; individual diagnoses and treatments can come only from a health care practitioner. Printed in USA.

6

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Men’s Health is a ed trademark of Hearst Magazines, Inc.

MEET THE MEN’S HEALTH ADVISORY We’d be nothing without our of experts. These are the doctors, scientists, and trainers who keep us accurate and updated on the latest in health and fitness. BRAIN HEALTH: P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D. David Perlmutter, M.D.

CARDIOLOGY: John Elefteriades, M.D.

DERMATOLOGY: Brian Capell, M.D., Ph.D. Adnan Nasir, M.D., Ph.D.

EMERGENCY MEDICINE: Jedidiah Ballard, D.O. Robert Glatter, M.D. Travis Stork, M.D.

ENDOCRINOLOGY: Sandeep Dhindsa, M.D.

EXERCISE SCIENCE: Martin Gibala, Ph.D. Mark Peterson, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., C.S.C.S

GASTROENTEROLOGY: Felice Schnoll-Sussman, M.D.

INTEGRATIVE HEALTH: Brenda Powell, M.D.

MENTAL HEALTH: Thomas er, Ph.D. Avi Klein, LCSW William Pollack, Ph.D.

Drew Ramsey, M.D.

NUTRITION: Chris Mohr, Ph.D., R.D. Mike Roussell, Ph.D. Brian St. Pierre, R.D.

PAIN MEDICINE: Paul Christo, M.D., M.B.A.

SEX & RELATIONSHIPS: Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., M.P.H. Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D.

SLEEP MEDICINE: Alon Avidan, M.D. W. Christopher Winter, M.D.

SPORTS MEDICINE: Michael Fredricson, M.D. Dan Giordano, D.P.T., C.S.C.S. Bill Hartman, P.T.

TRAINING: Mike Boyle, M.Ed., A.T.C. Ben Bruno Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S.*D David Jack David Otey, C.S.C.S. Don Saladino

UROLOGY: Elizabeth Kavaler, M.D. Larry Lipshultz, M.D.

WEIGHT LOSS: David Katz, M.D., M.P.H., FAM, F.A.C.P. Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D.

TO FIND NEW STYLES AND GREAT FITS, VISIT WRANGLER.COM

DEAR HIV, ’ WE DIDN T GIVE UP. XOXO, SCIENCE There is no cure, but science is still in the battle against HIV. Today’s HIV treatments may help you get to undetectable. That means the amount of virus is so low it can’t be measured in lab tests. Ask your healthcare provider about HIV and treatment options.

Learn about an HIV-1 treatment option at

XOXOSCIENCE.COM

XOXOSCIENCE.COM, GILEAD, and the GILEAD Logo are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. © 2018 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. UNBC5531 05/18

TM

WORLD

BEHIN D THE SCEN ES W ITH THE EX PERTS, A DV ISORS, A N D R E A DERS W HO BR ING MEN’S HEA LTH TO LIFE.

THIS MONTH ON MENSHEALTH.COM

CBD FOR EVERYONE! IT’S SHOWING UP in oils, capsules, additives to your coffee, and cocktails. But

what the hell is it? Cannabidiol is a nonpsychoactive compound found in cannabis plants, and it has swept the country for its purported health benefits. Over on MensHealth.com, we examine “CBD Madness,” a monthlong deep dive into the seemingly miraculous substance. The three biggest questions we answer:

Is it legal? Not really. CBD is still a Schedule I controlled substance in the eyes of the Drug Enforcement istration. If you’re in a state where pot is legal, though, CBD is fair game.

Can it get you high? No. CBD has no psychoactive properties, which makes it all the more attractive for its potential benefits.

Is it safe? If it’s a controlled substance, it has the potential to harm you, so you have to know what you’re putting into your body. And because its marketing isn’t regulated, you may not actually be getting CBD.

YOU TRIED IT. YOU TWEETED ABOUT IT. “It was horrible for me. I get that I’m the minority, but it doesn’t work for everyone.” —@loosehead

“It’s too expensive. You’d think it has THC in it at the price they charge. I tried it but didn’t see any change in my recovery or sleep. When the price gets realistic, I’ll give it another try.”

“It helps me with my training and recovery. I’ve been using it for years.” —@diegobressant

ERIC ROSATI

—@tylerhovda

To learn more from our CBD coverage, visit menshealth.com/cbd-cannabidiol-facts.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

9

WORLD

His best advice for not getting duped by a health fad: “To navigate the world of health claims, consider Bertrand Russell: ‘The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.’ Those who are not legitimate experts often speak in certainties. They use definite language, like ‘the way,’ ‘the cure.’ They use words like ‘guarantee.’ But if a medication or cure were so certain, the entire medical community would be in on it and there would be tons of published studies. Legitimate experts simply don’t offer guarantees. We give probabilities and caveats. It’s not sexy, and that’s why so many people want to trust these ‘experts’ who seem so certain.”

A NOTE OF THANKS

To Men’s Health Advisory nutritionist David L. Katz, M.D., M.P.H., FAM, F.A.C.P., FACLM, for assessing the claims and supplements hawked by our gallery of gurus (see page 102). Here’s how he sniffs out BS (right):

Dr. Katz’s new book, The Truth About Food, is out now. All proceeds go to the True Health Initiative.

Read Book, Burn Fat! Just in time for the new year, and fresh off all the weight-loss inspiration you’ll see on page 92, we’ve enlisted fitness and health researcher Ellington Darden to teach you how to burn fat and keep it off, thanks to thermodynamics. Darden’s program has had more than a thousand participants, who have lost on average 29.5 pounds. Killing Fat goes on sale January 22.

ARE YOU CUT, RIPPED, JACKED, OR SWOLE? Over at MensHealth.com, Associate Fitness Editor Brett Williams finally, definitively lays down the of fitness. Lest you call a cut guy jacked, go to menshealth.com/ cut-ripped-jacked-swole. 10

MUCH-APPRECIATED (AND FINANCIALLY SOUND) BIRTHDAY WISHES I’ve been reading @menshealthmag for the past 13 yrs. Such an incredible, well-written magazine. I also want to point out how in 30 yrs., the cost has only gone up by $1 and that’s pretty awesome! (I’m in .) Thank you and congratulations!!! —@rgmwolfe

WHERE TO FIND US: We’re on all the screens.

On the web menshealth.com

YouTube /menshealthmag

Pinterest /menshealthmag

Instagram @menshealthmag

Twitter @menshealthmag

Facebook /menshealth

Follow, tweet, comment, like, respond, and tag us. You could be featured in MHWorld. And send us your at MHletters@hearst .com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

CUT

RIPPED

JACKED

SWOLE

Less about size than definition—lean muscle and defined abs.

Where mass built on arms and shoulders eclipses the abs.

Pecs, arms, neck, and shoulders are all big. Protein is life.

The biggest of the big, where every muscle is huge. See also yoked.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

KYLE HILTON (Katz illustration), ERIC ROSATI (flexing illustrations)

EXPERT WISDOM!

THE FIT NUT Fuel your fitness with The W∂ nderful Nut. W ∂ nderful Pistachios are one of the highest-protein, highest-fiber nuts around. So push your health to new heights with this tasty little powerhouse of heart-healthy goodness. The Skinny Nut • The Fit Nut • The Mindful Nut • The Colorful Nut • The Happy Nut

The W∑ nderful Nut

Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces per day of most nuts, such as pistachios, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease. See nutrition information for fat content. © 2018 Wonderful Pistachios & Almonds LLC. All Rights Reserved. WONDERFUL, THE FIT NUT, the Package Design and accompanying logos are trademarks of Wonderful Pistachios & Almonds LLC or its affiliates. WP181025-08

WORLD

ASK MEN’S HEALTH You’ve got questions. We’ve got experts.

Two-minute workouts are the new 30-minute workouts, right?

ONE OF OUR OWN STARTS THE RACE OF HIS LIFE INTRODUCING YASIR SALEM, OF THE MEN’S HEALTH MARKETING TEAM, AND HIS 50-MARATHON ENDEAVOR.

YASIR SALEM is a marketing director for Men’s Health and the Hearst Men’s Group. He’s also an accomplished competitive eater— he participated in the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest six times before retiring in 2018. And he’s a speed-eating ultra-athlete, having won the Tour de Donut bicycle race several years in a row. (That’s a 36-mile road race with a doughnut-eating contest throughout.) The man is ambitious. And there to him through his zaniest competitions was his wife, Gweneviere Mann. This past summer, Gweneviere

was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer and ed away. The couple had run their first marathon together, New York’s, in 2010, a year after Gweneviere recovered from surgery to remove a meningioma tumor in her brain. In the eight years after that, Yasir and Gwen ran eight marathons together.

A NEW MISSION To honor his wife and raise awareness of the disease that took her, Yasir is traveling across the

MEN’S HEALTH TWITTER POLL

Would you drink nonalcoholic beer if only for the taste? For those of you who doubt whether tasty NA beer exists, we bet we can convince you otherwise. See page 52. Based on 1,711 Twitter responses to @MensHealthMag.

12

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

17% Yes, no hangover!

58% No, I’m here for the buzz.

25% Tasty NA beer exists?

Gweneviere and Yasir at a 5K in 2009, and Yasir and a friend at the 2018 New York Marathon (left).

country to complete 50 marathons in 50 states. The “50 in 50” is a project of the Gweneviere Mann Foundation, which he established to raise funds for early-detection programs, so more people can receive screenings for brain tumors and lung cancers sooner. Along the way, the foundation will eventually set up mobile radiology screenings at each marathon site. The “50-in-50” effort started at the 2018 New York City Marathon and will end at the 2019 race. It’s made catching up on Mondays a little more interesting at Men’s Health HQ, hearing how our marketing guy did in his recent race in Vegas or Philly or how he’s raised $40,000 for the foundation already. We couldn’t be more proud.

HOW YOU CAN HELP Donate to the Gweneviere Mann Foundation by going to gwenmann .org. There you can donate directly or sign up to a marathon with Yasir as part of the “50-in-50” team. And follow Yasir on Instagram at @gwenfoundation; #50in50.

There has been a lot of news lately about the value of extremely short workouts. And while there is interesting new research to suggest that as little as two minutes of high-intensity exercise can stimulate local changes in the metabolic function of muscle, this kind of exercise shouldn’t be confused with an alternative to regular, lengthier aerobic or anaerobic workouts. Why? Your body has both acute (short-term) and longterm responses to exercise. Acute responses are the physiological changes that happen as a result of the individual exercise. Longterm responses are a result of the body recognizing the stress associated with a single bout of exercise, by gradually increasing its ability to withstand the stress associated with that stimulus. Think about training for a marathon and slowly building up endurance. You wouldn’t get that from high-intensity interval training (HIIT). There are numerous rewards that come from HIIT, and it should certainly be a part of every person’s routine. However, that does not mean you can get away with only two minutes of exercise, even if at very high intensity, and expect to reap the same long-term performance benefits as with longer workouts. The Expert: Mark D. Peterson, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D, associate professor, Michigan-Medicine, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Courtesy Yasir Salem (Salem and friend), courtesy NYRR (Salem and Mann)

—PAUL, Oklahoma City, OK

SIXSTARPRO.COM

GREATNESS IS EARNED

ROB GRONKOWSKI – ALL-PRO TIGHT END

WORLD

THE MH WINTER GAME PLAN What we’re looking forward to in January and February.

ASK TED!

BOOKS

By Jack Riley FEBRUARY 19

This story of two men—born on opposite sides of a border and working on opposite sides of the law—is equal parts crime thriller and epic Moby Dick–style hunt. —J.S.

MOVIES Glass

JANUARY 18

TV The Titan Games JANUARY 3

It’s like the Rock and your favorite mid-’90s Nickelodeon show, Guts, went and had a TV child. This obstacle competition has athletes facing off in various feats of strength. We polled readers for their first thoughts when the trailer dropped in November. The biggest question: How do I get on the show? (The answer? Too late!) —MARK EMERY, senior editor of content strategy

I Am the Night JANUARY 28

Chris Pine and Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins team up again for a suspenseful TNT miniseries about a washed-up reporter (Pine) and a teen girl who forces to solve the mystery of her past. It’s at the top of the list for a midwinter binge. —JOSHUA ST. CLAIR, editorial assistant

FEBRUARY 8

Clever writing and Chris Pratt helped turn the first movie into a dark-Lego-horse blockbuster. Look for a (partly) animated sequel you can take your kids to and actually enjoy. —M.G.

Nike Tech Pack

JANUARY 8

JANUARY 20

14

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

STYLE

Black Monday Let’s add to the burgeoning genre of comedians taking on Wall Street types (what with Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Jonah Hill in The Wolf of Wall Street) with the Seth Rogen– produced Showtime series Black Monday, about the people behind the worst stock-market crash ever, in 1987. Come for the corporate intrigue, stay for the cocaine and shoulder pads! —MATT GOULET, senior associate editor

Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson reunite with the polarizing M. Night Shyamalan for the much-awaited sequel to the director’s (arguably) best film, Unbreakable, this time with a freshly jacked James McAvoy reprising his role from Shyamalan’s Split. —J.S.

SPORTS Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic JANUARY 1

An original-six matchup between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Boston Bruins, outside at Notre Dame Stadium, is prime lazy New Year’s Day sports viewing best seen from the warmth of your couch. —M.G.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Nike is dropping a new collection this spring that’s designed to work for running, training, and lifestyle. Look for a hybrid mix of knit materials, engineered to give you a full range of motion, regardless of weather conditions, or whether you’re hoisting weights or a beer. —TED STAFFORD, fashion director

The best tips from a recent Reddit AMA with Ted Stafford, Men’s Health fashion director.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE RELATIONSHIP, IF ANY, BETWEEN FITNESS AND FASHION? —METCARFRE

Ted: Men work out to feel good or better about themselves. They also want to feel good about themselves in the way they dress. We take a very healthy and realistic approach to servicing them in both.

ANY TIPS OR RESOURCES FOR THOSE OF US WHO ARE DADS IN OUR EARLY 40S WHO STILL WANT TO LOOK PRESENTABLE IN OUR EVERYDAY WARDROBE? —SCOTTLER

Ted: J. Crew is a good resource for men looking to find everything from a stylish suit to more workcasual wear. Banana Republic is another great resource for fashionable pieces in classic fits; additionally, today they have performance attributes that help make you feel comfortable while still being stylish. Try the rapid-movement pants, which look sharp but you feel like you could run a marathon in them.

WHAT ARE SOME TRENDS YOU SEE THAT YOU THINK WILL BE RELEVANT TO THE AVERAGE READER OF MEN’S HEALTH IN THE COMING MONTHS? —SETFIRETOFLAMES

Ted: There’s lots of cool winter wear out there—awesome winter boots from Timberland, Todd Snyder’s collaboration with Red Wing, or heavyweight parkas from Triple F.A.T. Goose and Woolrich.

Vivian Zink/NBC (the Rock), Steve Babineau/NHLI/Getty Images (Bruins vs. Blackhawks), KYLE HILTON (illustration)

Drug Warrior: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo and the Rise of America’s Opioid Crisis

®/©2019 Tyson Foods, Inc.

THE PROTEIN TO HELP POWER THROUGH A GRUELING DAY OF FANTASY COACHING.

Keep it real. Keep it Tyson.

insurance and you could save.

geico.com | 1-800-947-AUTO | Local Office

Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states, in all GEICO companies, or in all situations. Boat and PWC coverages are underwritten by GEICO Marine Insurance Company. Homeowners, renters and condo coverages are written through non-d insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. Motorcycle and ATV coverages are underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company. GEICO is a ed service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, DC 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. © 2018 GEICO

Courtesy of National Geographic Films

BODY

GO BIG This is your year to go faster, higher, stronger. Today’s top athletes help you get it done. BY AC SHILTON

22

................................... TOTA L-BODY

26

............ THE

28

................. C A N

32

...........................

T U N E-U P! 6:00 A .M. WOR KOU T

YOU DR IN K YOU R K ETON ES NOW ? (GU LP) SU PER FOODS OR “SU PER FOODS”?

Alex Honnold on El Capitan. See his tips for climbing higher on the next page.

A ROUTINE is a beautiful thing—

until it’s just the same 5K run, the same 5K race results, the same ride, the same way it checks the workout box. Time to go all-in. Commit to that thing you keep saying “someday” to. Go epic not just for the bragging rights but because scores of studies back up what you suspected: Big goals lead to bigger efforts and, when you reach them, greater feelings of self-satisfaction. Plus, you can’t hit a hairy fitness goal without getting in the best shape of your life. Ask Alex Honnold. His 2017 climb up El Capitan without ropes—featured in the recent documentary Free Solo—was basically the ultimate Big Goal (the penalty for one missed toehold is death). “I’d been thinking about free-soloing El Cap for years and waiting for it to happen, but then I realized it was never going to happen unless I put in the work.” Honnold turned a nebulous desire into an in-focus target—and then got to work. Now it’s your turn.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

17

BODY

1

Go Higher

When there are a couple thousand feet between you and the ground—or any other time you’re aiming big—you’ve got to have muscle strength and a way to manage fear. Alex Honnold, 33, one of the greatest climbers of all time, reveals what it takes to really reach.

FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY AFRAID OF “Most people aren’t afraid of heights; they’re afraid of falling and dying. I’m afraid of falling and dying; that’s totally natural and normal,” Honnold says. If you think you’re afraid of heights, reframe it as being afraid of falling, then deter-

mine why you think you might fall. “If it’s because you don’t trust your equipment, work on that.” If you don’t trust the person belaying you, find a way to build that relationship. But framing your fear as specific— and solvable—makes conquering doubt much more doable.

AIM FOR JOY, NOT EUPHORIA When Honnold reached the top of El Cap, he was surprisingly subdued. A significant part of making the attempt was working slowly through the wall’s challenges until it felt easy, so it was no major surprise when he made it. “I liken it to a slot machine: When you have a one-in-a-million chance, you know it’s so unlikely for it to work out, so it feels crazy to win. But if you have a 99 percent chance of winning, it feels good, but not like some crazy, crazy celebration.” Rock climbing, with or without ropes, is dangerous. Work with the odds in your favor, even if you don’t get that just-shot-themoon sensation after the fact.

FEELING AWFUL IS NORMAL

Honnold’s guide to beginner climbing.

STEP 1:

Get Help

STEP 2:

Focus on Your Feet First

STEP 3:

Build Your Grip

18

“When I started, classes weren’t really available. Climbing was still a fringe thing,” says the self-taught athlete. Plus, as a shy kid, he wasn’t good at asking for help. Instead, “I read a lot of books and climbing magazines,” he says. It worked for him, but for most people, a basic intro-to-climbing course makes them comfortable with the sport’s rules, jargon, and safe habits from the get-go.

As a beginner climber, you probably won’t have the grip or arm strength to pull yourself up the wall, so concentrating on how and where you place your feet will help you build a solid foundation while you work on developing your pullup prowess. Climbing a lot can get you most of the strength you need, says Honnold, but you can accelerate your gains by working your arms off a hangboard. That’s basically a pullup “bar” that’s a totally flat surface, which forces you to use finger and hand strength. Start by just hanging. Slowly extend the time you can hang, then work toward pullups.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

BREATHE HEAVILY Climbing isn’t purely about strength; you have to be aerobically fit, too. In Free Solo, you can hear Honnold’s breath quicken as he works his way up the wall. Frequent climbing is essential, but Honnold says he couldn’t have become fit enough through climbing alone. So he spent hours hiking up and down mountainsides. Choose routes with huge elevation gains to work your heart as well as your quads and glutes.

Max Whittaker

MAKE HIGH HAPPEN

“Someone recently said to me about running: ‘It never feels easier—you just go faster.’ A lot of sports always feel terrible. Climbing is always like that. You always feel weak and like you suck, but you can do harder and harder things.”

MIND YOUR MIDDLE

2

Get Stronger

You can’t bike to the top of Everest, but that’s not stopping cyclists from tackling a feat called Everesting: climbing all 29,029 feet via short laps of the same hill. JJ Zhou, 24, upped the game and did those laps on Everest itself last August. His take on what strength is about. DO A MOLEHILL FIRST Zhou Everested on a different mountain before taking on actual Everest. “It was in Nanjing [China], on the Purple Mountain, which is where I learned to ride a bike. It snowed the day before, so I had to go out with my parents and shovel a 1.2-kilometer section. They hated me by the end of that.” Everest’s grade made that climb much harder, but the fact that he’d already done the challenge elsewhere gave him the confidence he needed to attempt the tougher goal, he says.

ZHOU’S SERIOUSLY STRONG CIRCUIT To build core, leg, and back strength all at once, incorporate Zhou’s three-move circuit into your weekly schedule. He does 50 seconds of each move, with 10 seconds of rest in between. “Repeat as many times as you can stand it,” he says.

Sure, quads thicker than cordwood won’t hurt your attempt, but what you really need is a core that won’t quit. “When I was building up, I was lean and in tip-top shape, but my core stability wasn’t good. My back would get achy, which was a sign that I’d cashed out my core strength,” he says. Without a strong middle, you’ll rock back and forth as you climb. (See how he builds his with Zhou’s Seriously Strong Circuit, below.) That extra movement is wasted energy you could be using to go up.

ENLIST REINFORCEMENTS “By the time I reached 7,000 meters of elevation, I was completely fucked. Nothing in my body was functioning, and I was like, ‘I need someone to ride with me,’” he says. Zhou had started the day with four other riders, which dropped to three, then two, then one. “It wasn’t so much that they dropped out but realized they weren’t going to make it in the 40 hours we’d allowed,” he says. When Zhou asked for help, his tired teammates suited back up and took turns helping him finish. Without them, throwing in the towel may have been a more appealing option.

mathiasmagg.com (bicyclist), illustrations: +ISN

WORK YOUR GRAY MATTER

MOVE 1:

MOVE 2:

MOVE 3:

Plank with Knee to Elbow

Hex-Bar Deadlift

Turkish Getup with Kettlebell

WHY: This is great for teaching your core to stay stable as you’re moving. DO IT WELL: Start in a highplank position—basically, a pushup position. Lift your right foot off the floor and draw your knee up to your right elbow. Pause for a moment, then return to the start. Repeat on the left side. Alternate for 50 seconds.

WHY: This is more effective for your core than a deadlift with a traditional barbell. DO IT WELL: Stand in the hex bar, feet shoulder-width apart. Keep your back straight, bend your knees, push your hips back, and pick up the bar by the handles. Keeping your back flat, push up to standing. Brace your core, and slowly return the bar to the ground.

WHY: This creates wellrounded functional strength. DO IT WELL: Start by lying on the ground, kettlebell in your left hand, left knee bent. While still on the ground, press the kettlebell straight above your shoulder. Then keep reaching upward—kettlebell overhead and core strong at all times— until you’re in a standing position. Repeat on the other side.

For the first ten hours, Zhou says, his physical strength mattered. For the last 30, “everything became about what was between the ears.” On an attempt like this, you don’t have a change of scenery to distract you—it’s the same stretch of road over and over again. “Meditation has been a very big part of daily life,” he says, adding that he does meditative breath work while exercising, versus doing traditional sit-on-yourbutt meditation. “Some people would say, ‘Oh, he’s not serious about meditation,’ but it’s what works for me.”

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

19

BODY

3

Go Faster

Eliud Kipchoge, 34, didn’t “break two” in 2017, when he and Nike tested if it’s possible to run a sub-two-hour marathon. But that didn’t keep him from crushing the world record in Berlin in 2018, clocking 2:01:39. His philosophies could help even mortals hit a PR.

RUN THROUGH THE LOWS Good news: Even Kipchoge has days when he doesn’t want to run. Bad news: He gets out there anyway. So should you. “[Eventually,] if I keep on running, the body will respond,” he says. “You can’t let the bad days deter you.” A marathon is like life, he says, with the hard times making the payoff so much more worth it.

BE METICULOUS

DON’T BE AFRAID TO COME UP SHORT “The best lesson an athlete can learn from failing is that failing is not suicide,” Kipchoge says. Instead, it indicates that you’re pushing your limits. To him, failure is an integral part of running—and yes, he’s had some not-so-glorious moments of defeat, like not making Kenya’s 2012 Olympic team. “If an athlete misses a goal, never get discouraged. There’s always the next day. Wake up and move on.” 20

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

RUN FASTER AT ANY DISTANCE The elite Mammoth Track Club, in Mammoth Lakes, California, has produced greats like Meb Keflezighi and Ryan Hall. Head coach Andrew Kastor says these speedwork sets—done less than once a week—can work for regular runners, too. DISTANCE

DISTANCE

DISTANCE

DISTANCE

5K

10K

Half Marathon

Marathon

THE WORKOUT: 8x400 meters at 1-mile race pace. WHY IT WORKS: For this distance, you need to be able to perform right above your anaerobic threshold. That means you should barely be able to say more than a few words at a time. To train that system, you need short, hard efforts, like these 400meter (that’s 1 lap of the track) repeats. DO IT RIGHT: Warm up with 15 minutes of easy running, then take 1 minute of recovery (but no more) between each lap.

THE WORKOUT: 12x400 meters at 5K race pace. WHY IT WORKS: A 10K is run right at your anaerobic threshold, meaning a pace you can hold (but that’s moderately uncomfortable) for 45-ish minutes. Running at a 5K pace helps push your aerobic fitness upward; doing more repeats than the 5K runners do builds mental toughness. DO IT RIGHT: Warm up for at least 15 minutes. Between laps, rest in a 1-to-1 ratio. So if you do the lap in 90 seconds, you recover for 90 seconds.

THE WORKOUT: 8x800 meters at under 10K pace. WHY IT WORKS: “A half marathon is below anaerobic threshold pace, so it’s more comfortable and manageable but you have to go twice the distance,” Kastor says. So your speedwork needs to be slightly slower but with more overall mileage to increase endurance. DO IT RIGHT: After a 15-minute warmup, take 2 or 2″½ minutes of rest between each interval, but no more. “Otherwise, the heart slows too much.”

THE WORKOUT: 5x1 mile at 10K pace. WHY IT WORKS: “For marathons, I change the 80/20 rule to 90/10,” Kastor says— in other words, your speedwork is a relatively small part of your training. DO IT RIGHT: Warm up thoroughly and take no more than 2″½ minutes of rest between mile repeats. Also: If you just aren’t feeling the speedwork that day, you can abandon it, but you still need to get your miles in. When it comes to a marathon, “volume is what’s important.”

Courtesy of NN Running Team

Kipchoge logs every single one of his workouts in a notebook. It’s like a ledger at a bank, keeping track of everything he’s invested. “When the race is hurting, I start to think of my great workouts and training,” he says. Reflecting on the amount of cash in the bank, he always knows exactly how much he has to spend. If you do the same, he says, “all will be well—trust me.”

m

GET

RIPPED AND

BUILD MUSCLE AT 40+

You read that right. It’s not too late to:

GET SHREDDED CHANGE YOUR BODY FEEL INCREDIBLE Q

MensHealth.com/MuscleAfter40 15176

BODY

Your Total-Body Tune-up TO HELP YOU RECOVER from holiday gluttony, we turned to Sean Garner, N.S.C.A.-C.P.T., creator of

Project DadBod, for a full-body session. For the past eight years, Garner has worked with hundreds of guys to help them reclaim their best bodies without turning every workout into a suffer-fest. This program emphasizes four key ways you move: a push, a pull, a hip hinge, and a squat. You’ll also target your abs, and you will redline your heart rate with bursts of cardio. The result: awakened muscles and lubricated ts, setting you up for a great year of fitness. Let’s get started!

DIRECTIONS: Do the 3-minute warmup,

STRENGTH

workout 3 times a week for the next 4 weeks.

Do the exercises in order. Rest for 60 seconds between rounds. Each week, on all moves except the hollow body hold, reduce the reps you do for each exercise by 1 and slightly increase the weight.

THE WARMUP Do each drill for 60 seconds. Don’t count reps; focus on form and take your time. 1. T-Spine Rotation to Downward Dog

1. Dumbbell Romanian Deadlift

(a) Start in pushup position. (b) Keeping your left leg straight, place your right foot just outside your right hand. Hold. (c) Lift your right arm and reach for the ceiling. Hold, then return to pushup position. (d) Shift your feet forward slightly, then raise your hips high. Try to form a straight line from your hands through your hips while also trying to keep your legs straight. Hold, then return to the start. That’s 1 rep.

(a)

Stand holding medium-weight dumbbells at your sides, feet hipwidth apart, core braced, knees slightly bent. This is the start. Hinge at your hips and push your butt backward, lowering your torso. Hinge until you feel a slight stretch in your hamstrings. Pause, then stand up, squeezing your glutes. That’s 1 rep; do 12.

(b)

3. Sprint Buildup

(c)

Start standing. For 15 seconds, march slowly in place, lifting each knee as high as you can on each step. Then jog in place for 15 seconds. Finish by speeding up to an all-out sprint for 30 seconds, moving as quickly as you can. Aim to lift each foot up as fast as possible once it touches the floor.

(d)

2. Toe-Touch Squat

(b) 22

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Grooming: Eloise Cheung/Lab Series

(a) Start standing, feet

(c) PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALLIE HOLLOWAY

UL

EB’S ULTIMATE 10 FOR 2019

MATE T

EN

TI

10 E

N’ S HEAL

T

M

H

01

This year, Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S., Men’s Health’s fitness director, will guide you through the MH Ultimate 10, a series of monthlong training plans designed to get you the specific results we know you want, from a six-pack to arms of steel. This is the first installment—check back next month for more.

3. Side-Plank Press Start in a left-side plank, your left elbow on the floor and your torso and hips tight, a light dumbbell in front of you. Grasp the dumbbell with your right hand. Continue pressing your hips upward as you lift the dumbbell off the floor and pull it close to your right pec. Press it toward the ceiling, then return it to the floor. That’s 1 rep; do 12 per side.

EB SAYS:

2. Alternating Dumbbell Row Stand holding medium-weight dumbbells. Hinge at your hips until your torso is almost parallel to the floor. This is the start. Squeeze your shoulder blades and row the right dumbbell to your chest. Lower it and repeat with the left dumbbell. That’s 1 rep; do 12.

“This is great core work, too. Contract your abs hard on every rep and fight the urge to rotate your torso as you row the weight upward.”

5. Bulgarian Split Squat

(a)

(b)

Place your right foot on a bench or box that’s about knee height, bending your knee slightly, and step your left foot about 18 inches away. Your left leg should be almost straight. Hold medium-weight dumbbells at your shoulders. Bend your left knee, sitting back; your right knee will bend more as you do this and nearly touch the floor. Hold when your left thigh is parallel to the floor, then stand back up. That’s 1 rep; do 12 per side.

(c) EB SAYS:

4. Glute Bridge Floor Press (a) Lie on the floor holding medium-weight dumbbells, upper arms on the floor, elbows bent 90 degrees. (b) Tighten your glutes and push your hips upward. (c) Press the dumbbells upward. Pause, then lower them back to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 12.

“This move shouldn’t just build muscle; try to feel a strong stretch in your back leg’s hamstring and hip flexor.”

6. Hollow Body Hold Start lying on your back, arms and legs extended. Tighten your abs, pressing your lower back into the floor as you do so. This should lift your legs off the floor; work to keep them straight. Lift your shoulder blades off the floor as well; keep extending your arms back as you do this. Hold for 30 seconds. That’s 1 rep; do 3 to 5.

SHORTS: Rhone SNEAKERS: Under Armour

SEAN GARNER is the general manager at Anatomy Fitness, Miami. MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

23

FIT TRIBE

What the F3?! Men become fast friends in this free, early-morning, guys-only workout class that’s exploded in popularity. MATT CROSSMAN signs up to find out why.

IT’S 5:30 A .M. on a Monday in St. Louis,

the sun isn’t even a rumor yet, and I’m ing a dozen men in a free outdoor workout group called F3, gathering for what we all hope will be a glorious beatdown. In a public park, we circle Jason Grothe (F3 nickname: Ringer), who has promised to make our lives miserable for the next 45 minutes. He will grunt and groan alongside us—a core principle of F3 is that the rotating volunteer leaders running workouts also suffer. Ringer’s playlist starts with Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” and as the first notes sound, we’re doing jumping jacks. Burpee box jumps and planks follow. Sweat darkens the concrete under a 58-year-old nicknamed Honey Pot, 24

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

because he’s a beekeeper, and steam pours off a 36-year-old nicknamed Sheldon. “Don’t cheat the man in the mirror,” someone says. Sucking wind, I don’t respond. Doing so would be disingenuous: I’m thinking unkind thoughts about Ringer. Men across the country are clamoring to be this miserable, with an estimated 20,000 active participants. Think of it as a hyperpositive Fight Club and hipper YMCA. It gives you up to 15 ive guys in every workout. To “,” just log on to f3nation.com, find one of the 1,500 free F3 workouts going on in 30 states every morning, and show up ready to sweat in pursuit of conditioning and community. The workouts are usually boot-camp style (reflecting the military background of one of its

David Redding (second from right), the man who helped start F3 eight years ago, still spends plenty of mornings training with the group’s Charlotte, North Carolina, participants.

cofounders), and they happen outside, rain or shine. Occasionally, cinder blocks, kettlebells, or rucks are on the menu; most often, it’s just you versus your body weight. David Redding (a former Green Beret) and Tim Whitmire (a former journalist) created F3 eight years ago, when their group workout class became too crowded. Redding used military for exercises and hoped to see ten men on that morning, January 1, 2011. But after they’d emailed friends to them for morning burners, 35 guys showed up to the parking lot of a Charlotte, North Carolina, middle school. F3 quickly became about more than fitness—the other two F’s stand for fellowship and faith. Whitmire and Redding attended the same Episcopalian church for years but barely knew each other before they started training together. Redding, Whitmire, and other F3 men I talked to realize that having the third F stand for faith will make some skeptical. They insist that the point is not what you believe in, as long as PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY M. LANGE

BODY SIX MINUTES OF MARY

a high school tennis match. That’s how I get my nickF3’s infamous no-mercy ab burner is not for the faint of heart. Work through the name: Ralph. following circuit, spending 24 seconds on each interval. If it’s your first time, 0:00 Little Baby your straight legs the ground. Return to 2:48 Canoe: F3’s you’re what F3 vets call an Crunch: Lie on your about 6 inches off the the start. That’s 1 rep. version of a modified FNG (friendly new guy). back in situp position ground. Flutter them V-up. Start lying on 4:00 Plank Jack: and lift your chest back and forth, never your back, arms and But they quickly make you Start in a forearm just off the ground, letting them touch legs extended, all just feel like one of the guys. plank, feet touching. squeezing your abs. the ground. inches off the ground. Then leap your feet And when you’re battling That’s 1 rep. Tuck your knees and wide, then back to 1:36 Low Scissors: your arms, then return t h r o u g h pi s t o l s q u a t s Lie on your back, raise starting position. 0:24 High Slow to the start. That’s 1 rep. and pushups shoulder to your straight legs That’s 1 rep. Flutter: Lie on your 3:12 Rest about 6 inches off back, raise your shoulder with Honey Pot, 4:24 Plank: Hold the ground, then straight legs about 3:36 Heels to you can’t help but feel like a forearm plank for alternately scissor 2 feet off the ground, Heaven: F3’s version 24 seconds. you belong. one over the other. and flutter them of a straight-legged back and forth. A few times, I’m tempted 4:48 Rest reverse crunch. Lie on 2:00 Rest Take 2 seconds to your back, straight to bail, and once, I almost complete each back5:12 World War II 2:24 High Scissors: legs pointed upward relive high school tennis. and-forth flutter. Situp: F3’s version of a Lie on your back, raise (er, toward heaven). straight-legged situp. But I keep going, partly your straight legs Tighten your abs, 0:48 Rest 2 feet off the ground, pressing your legs because of someone (I’m 5:36 Oblique Crunch and alternately scissor 1:12 Low Flutter: Lie up higher and raising not sure who, because I’m on your back and raise one over the other. your lower back off 6:00 End fa cedow n g r inding out pushups) mumbling more encouragement. By the you believe in something beyond yourself. of brothers in sweat. It delivers quality guy time we reach three minutes of plank jacks, the 45-minute workout is nearly over, All men, regardless of religious beliefs, are time, letting men focus on one another. welcome. During six workouts in multiple I quickly realize these are both workouts my hair is matted, and my shirt is soaked. Every F3 workout ends with a “Circle of locations, I hear no proselytizing. and social gatherings. After my first workRedding and Whitmire discovered out, I know I’ll get my own F3 nickname. Trust” highlighting the third F of faith. ParF3 solved two problems—a lack of deep I just hope mine doesn’t suck. F3 nick- ticipants count off, saying their name, age, relationships among men and the abdi- names are uniformly silly, often either and F3 nickname. The leader notes upcomcation of leadership roles by men—that a play on your name (last name Painter, ing workouts and other community events they weren’t initially looking to solve. The nickname Drop Cloth) or something from and closes with a moment of thought— group is all men, but it does more than get your background (I meet an Ohio State typically a prayer or a quote. Today it’s about men in shape. The fact that it’s all guys fan nicknamed Schembechler, after the love, a reference to 1 Corinthians 13: Love feels like a throwback while also offering legendary coach of Ohio State’s archrival). is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, a different dynamic. (There’s also F3 for The guys in my session ask me for my it does not boast, it is not proud. And I’m no longer an FNG. Two days later women, fianation.com.) Redding believes most embarrassing life moment, then men think their relationships and friend- listen as I tell them about puking during (yes, I come back), I’m officially Ralph. ships can’t withstand deeper reflection. F3 releases them from what he calls “sadclown bondage”—a Sopranos reference to being happy on the outside, sad on the inside—giving them an instant network

BODY 6:00 A.M. W/

The Record Exec The best way for music heavyweight MARK PITTS to find his groove: bang out some heavy lifts during a morning sweat session. BY ANTHONY McCARRON

his eyes at the Charlie Brown ringtone blasting from his phone, and then just keeps doing a shoulder press. It’s 6:25 in the morning, and Mark Pitts’s day is off to a late start. The RCA executive should be close to wrapping up his workout by now, maybe already sipping his postlift shake. But this session began 25 minutes ago and he’s only halfway through his second full-body circuit at Body by Ayman, a gym in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. No sense rushing, though, since the 48-year-old president of RCA’s urban-music division and CEO of ByStorm Entertainment has his work with him. Welcome to Pitts’s lab, where music is on his brain. “When I’m working out, it opens up my creativity,” he says. “It just clears up the pathways when you’re unsure about something.” In 2017, he was waffling on Atlanta-based rapper Deante’ Hitchcock. Then came a 5:00 A.M. biceps blast. “I was listening to a couple of his ts and I was like, ‘I’m g this guy!’ ” Pitts says. “I got it so clear.” Hitchcock’s music was on BET by that summer. If Hitchcock isn’t on your Spotify, another of Pitts’s artists probably is. He began in the late ’90s, with friend Sean Combs, at Bad Boy Entertainment, guiding the careers of Faith Evans and the Notorious B.I.G. (who gave him his nickname, Gucc). He worked with CeeLo Green, Usher, and Miguel in stints at other labels. Pitts has been with RCA since 2011, on the hunt for music’s next big thing. He usually arrives at work on Madison Avenue at 7:30, and before the office is bustling, he’s got his headphones on, plowing through tracks from unknowns.

THE BREAK OF BRAWN

Having trouble training on the road? Try Pitts’s fix, a 30-minute full-body crusher that works in most hotel gyms. 26

WWW

T

HE MAN WHO managed Biggie Smalls rolls

REALLY LOVES

TOTALLY HATES

Shoulder Presses

Squats

“When your shoulders are right, it makes everything look good. You get that V. And I see the results right away.”

“I do them, though. But that’s my least favorite. When I know it’s leg day, I’ve got to get myself mentally ready.”

DIRECTIONS:

1 Dumbbell row

2 Bench press

3 Dumbbell fly

Do 2 minutes of high knees and 2 minutes of Supermans to warm up. Then do 2 sets of 8 to 12 reps for each exercise. Rest as needed between sets, especially if you’re struggling to maintain your form. But aim to keep the rest periods brief.

Hold a dumbbell in your left hand and hinge at your hips until your torso is nearly parallel to the floor; place your right hand on a bench for . Row the dumbbell upward, then return to the start. That’s 1 rep. Complete all reps with the left arm, then repeat with the right.

Lie faceup on a bench holding dumbbells directly over your shoulders. Your feet should be flat on the floor, and your core should be tight. Bend your elbows and shoulders, lowering the dumbbells until they’re an inch from your chest; pause briefly, then reverse the move. That’s 1 rep.

Lie faceup on a bench, holding dumbbells directly over your shoulders, elbows bent just slightly, feet flat on the floor, glutes and abs squeezed. Lower the dumbbells in a wide arc; pause when you feel a stretch in your chest. Reverse the move to return to the start. That’s 1 rep.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIACOMO FORTUNATO

Location: Body by Ayman, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Mark Pitts starts nearly every workout with some foam rolling, then warms up his rotator cuffs with a light dumbbell. Next, it’s on to a full-body circuit (or sometimes two!). He’s typically in and out of the gym in an hour.

It’s tunes all day, even if Pitts shifts gears in the afternoon. That’s when he’s polishing albums, sometimes hitting the piano himself to show an artist exactly how a few bars should sound. There are some late nights partying. (His annual BET Awards bash is the stuff of hip-hop legend.) But if artists want his time, they may have to wake up extra early for a day. That’s what Nick Cannon did last year. Cannon hoped to run through ideas with Pitts, but he couldn’t seem to catch him during the workday. Finally, he asked for the address of Pitts’s gym and showed up the next morning. “I love that,” Pitts says, adding that many artists are just wrapping up party-filled nights at 5:00 A.M. “Their day is ending and mine is beginning.” It’s always an intense start. On this morning, he’s gutting out pushups, situps, and his nemesis, the Bulgarian split squat. Med-ball slams and EZ-bar biceps curls follow, and then he takes a few gulps of water from a gallon jug and hits his circuit for a second round. Pitts circuit-trains everything, to keep his heart rate high. And he sometimes trains in silence, as he’s doing today, with only “Linus and Lucy” occasionally piercing the air. He doesn’t need to listen to music to hear the ideas in his head. “I listen to music all day,” Pitts says, “but I come up with my best ideas when I’m working out.”

BETWEEN SETS eat before I work out. I’m not hungry in the morning, and that’s another part of the beauty of working out early. I’ll have my water, my gallon of water, and that’s all I do.”

What’s the ultimate measure of a good workout?

“I’m up. I’m not tired. You’re supposed to work to exhaustion, but once you get to the gym and start moving, you have energy. At the end of the workout I’m, like, wired. I’m so wired. And I’m already hyper. It enhances what I already am.”

What about postworkout?

Do you eat before your workout?

“I’ll take a preworkout drink sometimes, but I don’t

“As soon as I work out, I have a protein shake with a banana, and spinach. If it’s a heavy muscle day, I’ll add oatmeal to it. That’ll get me through an hour or an hour and a half, and then I’ll have a

big breakfast. I eat a lot of egg whites. I have, depending on what body part [I’m working on], egg whites, some oatmeal, some more spinach.” Favorite cheat food?

“Cap’n Crunch cereal; that’s my cheat meal. Yesssss. I might do the whole box that one day. The regular one—I don’t need no Crunch Berries; that’s too much sugar going from different directions.”

4 Dumbbell alternating curl

5 Single-arm hammer curl

6 Triceps kickback

7 Lateral raise

8 Cooldown jog

Stand holding dumbbells at your sides. Flex at the right elbow to curl the right one upward so the weight touches your right pectoral. Squeeze your biceps for 3 seconds, then lower the dumbbell. Repeat on the left side. That’s 1 rep.

Stand with a dumbbell in your right hand, palm facing your thigh. Curl the weight upward, squeeze, then lower it. Work to keep your torso as square as possible; if you fight to not tip toward the side of the weight, you’ll activate your core. That’s 1 rep. Do all reps, then repeat on the left side.

Hold a light dumbbell in your right hand. Bend at the waist so your torso is parallel to the floor. Your upper arm should also be parallel to the floor. This is the start. Straighten your right arm, squeezing your triceps. That’s 1 rep. Do all reps, then repeat on the left side.

Stand holding light dumbbells at your sides, palms facing each other. Keep a slight bend in your elbows; this is the start. Without moving your torso or bending your elbow, raise your right arm until it’s almost parallel to the floor. Return to the start. Repeat with the left arm. That’s 1 rep.

Pitts can’t stand traditional cardio, which is why he keeps his weight-room work fast-paced. But on the road, he still hits the treill (or the great outdoors) to finish up his sessions. Once you’re done lifting, jog for 10 minutes. Keep the pace relaxed; , it’s a cooldown.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

27

BODY

A 

NY PRODUCT using the words keto and performance will turn people’s heads right now. Especially if it comes in a sleek, shotlike bottle with a chiseled cyclist on the front—at the we’re-not-just- playingaround-here price of $99 for three doses. Doesn’t hurt, either, that it’s billed as such potentially powerful fuel for your body that even NASA is exploring a similar supplement for astronauts on future missions to Mars. Which explains the chatter around HVMN Ketone, a new energy drink that aims to be the SpaceX of sports nutrition. Its 120-calorie, 65 ml vial promises to upgrade athletic performance with a dose of fuel from ketones. So your body gets a boost not from the usual nutrients—protein, carbs, and fat—but from these ketones, which are thought to be extra-powerful, long-burning sources

of energy. That’s seriously appealing to anyone who’s been on the sagging back end of a tough endurance workout. Until recently, though, the only way to get a high level of ketones in your body was to make them yourself—you produce them when you don’t have enough carbs to burn, as keto-diet followers know. Figuring out how to create a safe, effective ketone that you could swallow eluded scientists for decades. But researchers have finally been able to develop the molecular-chemistry techniques to produce them in a lab—and then market them to you.

Liqu id

Some sc ientists think

BEHIND THE BUZZ AS FU E L , ketones are efficient. They

produce more ATP—the intracellular currency that powers cell activity— per molecule than glucose does. When burned, ketones yield zero lactic acid (the compound created when glucose is used, causing the burning feeling at the end of a sprint). If they were cars, glucose would be a coal-rolling pickup, ketones an electric-powered Tesla. Proponents say that when supplemental ketones are on board, you use them as your primary fuel instead of stored glucose—which you can hold about 2,000 calories of— helping you go longer and recover better. That’s why the keto diet has been an obsession for people looking to hack time off their PR. (See “Keto Nation,” page 112, for why this diet won’t stop.) The problem is that arriving at and acclimatizing to ketosis through

l e Fu

you can drink k etones and take your performance to a new level—

no low-carb diet required.

erage? v e b t u o k r o ust-have w m t x e n e h t s Is thi MASC IA t

ried it.

Gallery Stock

KRIST EN

28

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

MENT

Ageto

perfection. At any age.

WHY AGE GRACEFULLY, WHEN YOU CAN AGE SUCCESSFULLY? Our bodies can be younger or older than our actual age depending upon diet, lifestyle choices and physical activity. This is called biological age, which could be different than the age on your driver’s license, which is called chronological age. A recent study of over 900 adults who were tracked for 12 years, from ages 26-38, showed that people who were aging faster, meaning that their biological age was higher than their chronological age, were not as healthy or physically fit. This group was also more likely to show cognitive decline and was at a greater risk for agerelated health conditions. A growing body of research demonstrates that the keys to aging successfully are a combination of exercising regularly, keeping engaged with life, and maintaining a healthy diet with nutritious foods. These three key elements could contribute to aging gracefully, and successfully, too. POM Wonderful 100% Pomegranate Juice, known for its antioxidants, is part of a healthy diet.

THE ANTIOXIDANT SUPERPOWER IN A BOTTLE. One easy way to get a head start on aging successfully is to add something like POM Wonderful 100% Pomegranate Juice to your daily routine. POM contains pomegranate polyphenols, antioxidants known to combat unstable molecules that can cause damage to your cells. These harmful molecules are called free radicals. To maximize the polyphenol antioxidant levels, every 16oz bottle of POM contains the juice from four whole-pressed pomegranates. ANTIOXIDANT Potency Index 100

96 68

38

POM Red Wine Cranberry Juice Wonderful

24

Green Tea

Contains 4x the antioxidants, on average, of green tea.

An in vitro study at UCLA found that pomegranate juice has, on average, more antioxidant capacity than red wine, cranberry juice or green tea. It’s easy to enjoy all the healthy benefits of pomegranates every day with POM Wonderful 100% Pomegranate Juice. It’s great alone or added to your favorite breakfast smoothie. So make POM part of your daily routine. Your body will thank you.

©2018 POM Wonderful LLC. All Rights Reserved. POM, POM WONDERFUL, ANTIOXIDANT SUPERPOWER, the accompanying logos and the Bubble Bottle Design are trademarks of POM Wonderful LLC or its affiliates. PJ181017-02

BODY food can take weeks, during which athletic performance suffers. (And you do too, with what’s known as the “keto flu.” Temporary Could HVMN Ketone be the next entry in this timeline? but unpleasant.) Small surprise, then, that scientists tried for years to synthe’80s ’90s 2010s size ketones to be used as an energy supplement. Mostly, they failed. Ketone salts Whey Protein Creatine Ultra-Carb Drinks BCAAs Research on Building on BCAA The public caught Top marathoners have been around since the 1960s, but branchedresearch, the on to creatine like Eliud Kipchoge they’re different—they’re dietary supplechain amino focus shifted supplements and Galen Rupp ments created with sodium, potassium, acids became to whey—a in the ’90s, have been using calcium, or magnesium, and their ability popular in this complete protein especially after a higher-carb decade. With found in milk many athletes at drink called to raise blood-ketone levels is limited. strength training that’s often used the 1996 Olympics Maurten during In 2003, the U. S. military’s secret really taking off in energy bars attributed their races. (They’re not research branch DARPA got things rolling (thanks, Arnold), and protein-drink success to sponsored by the more quickly when it wanted to develop a the promise of mixes. Today, the creatine use. A brand.) It forms fuel to keep soldiers mentally sharp and muscle growth whey-protein 2018 market report a hydrogel in the made BCAA market is worth expected the stomach, and s physically strong during long missions supplements a more than $8.2 bilindustry to grow say it causes less in extreme conditions. After 12 years and popular choice. lion globally. through 2025. digestive upset. $10 million in funding, two of the world’s foremost ketosis researchers—Kieran Clarke, Ph.D., a professor of physiological biochemistry at Oxford University, and with a different ketone, there was no such they may enhance your performance, she Richard Veech, M.D., Ph.D., of the National success. Riders performed worse than they says. But let’s face it, most athletes want Institutes of Health—created a liquid did on a placebo and reported side effects more than that. serum that seemed to do just that. Their from dry retching to nausea to prolonged ketone product, DeltaG, was cleared for use vomiting. Brianna Stubbs, Ph.D., lead IN REAL LIFE in bars, gels, and beverages in March 2015. researcher at HVMN, blamed the use of a W H I L E T H E debate rages, I have the Not long after, DeltaG caught the atten- different ketone compound for the failure. chance to make up my own mind. In San tion of HVMN cofounder Geoffrey Woo, To shut down naysayers, the brand is cur- Francisco, I meet with Woo and Stubbs a computer scientist turned biohacking rently working with elite Italian cyclist Vit- for a crash course in ketone biochemisentrepreneur fascinated by ketones. Within toria Bussi, who in September used HVMN try. At the end of our two-hour meeting, months, he secured a licensing deal whereby Ketone and broke the women’s hour-long Woo slides six bottles of ketone toward DeltaG would be available in his product cycling record—set in 2016—by 27 meters. me across the conference-room table. A alone, making it the only liqweek later, I’m prepping for a run. When I uid ketone on the market— prick my finger to measure my ketones, as WHAT THEY WHAT and raising questions about directed by Stubbs, my levels are low, hov(MIGHT) DO BEST PERFORMANCE whether it’s a useful product or ering at just about zero. I take the drink. SO COULD liquid ketones be FUEL SMELLS just a potentially lucrative idea. the biohack you’re looking It’s clear, and thick like syrup. The taste is LIKE for—a ssuming they don’t nauseating. Fruit-flavored nail polish. Some 45 minutes later, my ketone levmake you sick first? If you SCIENCE WEIGHS IN want to make your mark in els have shot up—Stubbs says that’s on RESEARCH ON THIS —as with anaerobic activities like HIIT par with what I might see after four to six any new science—has been and sprints, no. Since ketones weeks on the keto diet. I set out at a steady back and forth. A study led blunt your body’s ability to tap pace, with the intention of running for as by Clarke’s team (before the into carbohydrate reserves, long as I can, but I’m unable to discern a difHVMN licensing deal), pubthey limit access to the quick ference from my usual self, except for the lished in Cell Metabolism, Bitter and energy you need to perform at a overwhelming sensation of a burning in found that a group of elite chemical-y to the high intensity, explains Chel- my esophagus. After barely getting into a cyclists who took DeltaG along tongue, but treasea Burkart, a sports dietitian rhythm, I have to turn around—the ketone with a carb-rich drink before a cly to the nose: is burping back up, and it kind of hurts. Our staff testers at Texas State University. half-hour workout rode 2 perlikened the scent With research exploring the potential Even in endurance sports, cent farther than when they of HVMN to the effects may not guarantee of lab-made ketones to improve recovery were given only the drink. It’s cough syrup, pink you a win. “The initial goal was and enhance cognitive function, it at least a no-big-deal stat for your averStarbursts, and to help the military on multi- feels . . . exciting. If I were a pro athlete, age park cyclist or runner, but it “the raspberry Burnett’s vodka day missions, when they were I’d be watching this space. And hoping could be the difference between I threw up on in in grueling conditions without HVMN brings some flavor chemists on silver and gold for Olympians. college.” Tempted a food source,” says Burkart. board. But until I become an ultramaraYet when researchers from anyway? Three So if your objective is purely thoner (unlikely), I don’t think spending the Australian Institute of bottles for $99 at hvmn.com. distance, and not pace or time, $33 on a bottle of the stuff makes sense. Sport conducted a similar study

SPORTS-NUTRITION GAME CHANGERS

30

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

INSIDEOUT

EVENTS & PROMOTIONS

- WRANGLER - CRUNCH -

WRANGLER Take your style from work to play with the Retro Skinny Jean that looks great cuffed with boots or the slim fit Larston Jean in one of the season’s hottest colors. Shop now at

Wrangler.com

NEW YEAR, BETTER YOU WITH CRUNCH Crunch is a gym that believes in making serious exercise fun by fusing fitness & entertainment, while serving a community for all types of people, with all types of goals.

At Crunch you’ll find awesome classes, expert trainers, miles of cardio, saunas/steam rooms and more. Make a lifestyle change with Crunch and have fun while doing it!

Stop by & try a workout on us. Some restrictions may apply.

FIGHT YOUR COUGH IN 12-HOUR SHIFTS.

The liquid-strength of Robitussin ⇒ghts your cough all-day or all-night.

IT’S NEVER

JUST A COUGH

TM

Use ass di direc d rec rected ted.. © 2017 P⇒zer, Inc. ted

BODY

Superfood or Superphony? COCONUT WATER

Here’s what’s good for you and what’s just marketing hype (or both). Thanks, research community!

GREEN TEA

A high-end gym may offer you some of this stuff, but researchers found it’s no better for hydration than plain old water. Thirsty? Just drink from the tap.

Long-term consumption of the catechins in green tea fights metabolic syndrome (a forerunner of type 2 diabetes) and could reduce your risk of coronary disease. Put the kettle on.

AVOCADO Study after study has confirmed the fruit’s heart-healthy benefits. Plus, its high fiber content may help fill you up.

SPINACH In addition to the leafy greens’ muscle-helping iron content, a study found eating one portion a day reduces your heart-disease risk in just one week.

ALMOND MILK It can be comparable to dairy milk in mineral content but not in protein (which is why you drink milk anyway, right?). A glass of cow’s milk has more than five times as much protein as the kind made from almonds.

KALE Like nature’s CrossFitter, this cruciferous vegetable does it all. Rich in vitamins, it also contains sulfur compounds that may prevent the growth and spread of cancer.

ACAI BERRIES

32

CHIA SEEDS

KOMBUCHA This gut-health-promoting drink is a mainstay of the homeopathic scene, but the scientific jury is still out on its benefits. Tastes funny, too.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

QUINOA This ancient grain is a complete protein, containing essential amino acids. Try it instead of white rice to fuel your muscle growth.

Despite the label claims, these seeds lack the type of omega-3 your body actually needs. While they are a good source of fiber, you’re better off eating oily fish for your omega fix.

Illustration by INFOMEN

Not only are these fruits bursting with antioxidants, but they’re also a healthy anti-inflammatory. Incorporating them into your diet could aid exercise recovery and limit muscle damage.

ARE YOU TRULY HAPPY INSIDE? GET THE POWER OF 3-IN-1 Prebiotics, probiotics, and fiber* all in one delicious cereal to help digestive wellness.

Take the Gut Check and tell us how you feel at GetHappyInside.com

1. Launch your camera. 2. Point it at the QR code. 3. Scan and Start your Gut Check! *Contains 4-8g total fat. See nutrition information for total fat and saturated fat content. ®, TM, © 2019 Kellogg NA Co.

BODY

Alexa,

Am I Dying? Whether it’s a mark on your skin or a weird feeling in your chest, one of the most common things people want to know about their health problem is “Am I dying?” With AI seeping into health care from all directions, MATT JANCER wondered just how good tech would be at telling us what we most want to find out. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is elbowing

its way into the doctor’s office, and M.D.’s are nervous—especially since studies have found AI better than dermatologists at diagnosing skin cancer, and it boosts the fracture-diagnosing accuracy of doctors alone. It’s promising enough that the consulting firm Accenture predicts the value of AI technology will climb about 40 percent a year, turning into a $6.6 billion industry by 2021. Closer to home, people are a little more excited about AI’s role in medical care,

vated smart speaker, “Alexa, here’s what’s going on with me,” and receiving a competent response that tells them what’s wrong and what to do. I wondered how well the at-home AIs might do at that, so I decided to test them. I gave a second-generation Amazon Echo Dot and a Google Home Mini a couple of medical scenarios to see if I could trust my life to either of them. (I didn’t use Siri, which is more like a voice-activated Google search.) I ed the WebMD and Mayo Clinic First Aid skills to the Echo Dot. Google Assistant can give answers directly, so the Home Mini didn’t need apps. These devices are pretty good at giving first-aid answers, so I skipped those and started in with some tougher stuff. Right off the bat, I could tell there were going to be problems. 34

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

For the first scenario, I had gastroesophageal ref lux disease. GERD can have a lot of symptoms that don’t involve a burning gut or spicy bur ps, so I told the AIs I’d had a pain in my chest for two days, shortness of breath, and difficulty speaking. Google Assistant went straight to life-threatening heart attack and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Alexa’s Mayo Clinic app told me

sunburns. “When people interact with these AIs, they expect answers that are one, maybe two sentences. Unfortunately, things are rarely that simple in medicine,” says Christopher Kelly, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He and his colleague Marc Eisenberg, M.D., wrote Am I Dying?!, a new book about

‘chest pain,’ anyone is going to think of your heart, including any doctor,” says Dr. the doctor will ask a lot of questions to determine if that’s probable.”

I raised the degree of difficulty in the next test, so much so that I had a simulated panic attack. I was cold but also sweating, and my hands were tingling. My heart was racing so fast I thought I was going to faint. The Mayo Clinic app said only, “You may request an appointment at Mayo Clinic by phone or by using our secure online form,” but some other apps came close by landing on hyperventilation as a possibility. They also floundered around with low blood sugar and arrhythmia, because so many conditions have the same racing heartbeat and tingling hands. “Many people present with symptoms that turn out to be anxiety related,” says Dr. Kelly, “and it would be very hard for an AI, as they’re currently designed, to get at those.” After a few more tests and confusing answers, that was as clear to me as it is to Dr. Kelly, who noted that as they exist today, voice-a ct ivated A Is take an already inexact system—self-diagnosing on line—a nd ma ke it worse by speeding up the process and giving catchall answers while often obscuring or oversimplifying how they came to their conclusions. In the interest of a streamlined experience, they can leave you skeptical and burned out, he says. Someday we’ll look back on these stumbles as quaint. Companies are doubling down on improving AI so it can become a common household reference. Rumors are floating that Amazon is building a healthand-wellness team for Alexa, although the company hasn’t commented publicly. Improvements will happen. And they need to: A Northeastern University study found that when 54 people posed symptoms of common injuries and illnesses to these assistants, Alexa (equipped with the WebMD, Mayo Clinic First Aid, and American Heart Association skills) failed to provide any relevant informa-

of the questions. You could try to avoid a visit to your doctor with an AI, but you’ll likely end up with a slim portion of the iffy advice already floating around the Internet. Plus a headache. ILLUSTRATIONS BY JULIA HEFFERNAN

E AT Y O U R W AY T O A H A P P I E R , H E A LT H I E R Y O U

Change Your Life with One Pan!

the year of you This year, do it for you!

h

100+ DELICIOUS & EASY MEALS g

ON SALE NOW

A Man, A Pan, A Plan is the new must-have cookbook for anyone looking to reclaim their diet—with or without any training in the kitchen. All you need: a few tools you already own, a short list of easy-to-find ingredients, and a little bit of your time. The result: fast-as-heck, good-for-you meals that taste so great, you’ll snub the fast food drive thru every time.

MENSHEALTH.COM/MANPANPLAN 1491003

Make this the year you find your perfect balance, inside and out. visit conairscales.com

WW Logo is the trademark of WW International, Inc. and is used under license by Conair Corporation. ©2019 WW International, Inc. All rights reserved. 18PA059075

BODY

There are a lot of claims about protein out there—in the supermarket, at the fast-food place, on the back of a gigantic bottle of whey powder—but the claims you’re going to read in this story are actually true. BY OLIVER THRING AND JOSHUA ST. CLAIR

Is “protein water” pure BS?

36

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

D 

Why You Need It Protein is vital to life: It’s made from amino acids that are essential for building and maintaining muscles and bones. In addition, recent studies suggest that protein quality may become more important as you age. But beyond your infrastructure, protein also helps to regulate a host of cellular processes, affecting everything from your immune function to the transportation of oxygen through the bloodstream. Protein can even aid in weight loss: Researchers have found that consuming it stimulates the release of satiety signals in the small intestine, helping you feel full. In short, protein is a supernutrient.

Peter Crowther (bottle)

Have We Reached Peak Protein?

ESPITE WHAT bright new food packaging might lead you to believe, humans have known about the power of protein since at least the early 19th century. That’s when a Swedish chemist named the molecules using a word from the Greek, proteios, meaning “holding first place” and therefore most important. Today, if society resurrected that Swede and dumped him into an American supermarket, he might feel smugly validated. In the eyes of consumers and marketers, the nutrient is indeed the most important—ubiquitous, beneficial, desirable, and, now, lucrative. The global protein-supplements market will reach $21.5 billion by 2025, according to industry reports. You’d expect to find whey in your post-gym shakes and bars, but now protein is popping up everywhere. You can wake up and have a protein-rich bowl of cereal, grab a whey-infused Protein2o water on your way out the door, pick up a Chicken Wrap Protein Box at Starbucks for lunch, and munch on ranch-flavored Quest Nutrition protein chips as a midafternoon desk snack. Nielsen, a worldwide data-analytics company, found that 55 percent of U. S. households now regard protein as an important consideration when they purchase food. What’s more, Nielsen saw an 8 percent sales uptick for products claiming to be an “excellent” or “good” source of protein on the front of their packaging. And get this: Between 45 and 64 percent of consumers did not identify beef, pork, or chicken as being high in protein, even though all those foods are loaded with it. So why the confusion? Why the current obsession with a nutrient? And, most crucial, are all these protein-heavy foods helping or hurting your diet?

Basilios1/Getty Images (chicken), Stock Food (flank steak), Philippe Desnerck/Getty Images (cod), Stockcam/Getty Images (eggs)

 Protein  can be a misleadingly catchall term for what goes into products. Why You’re Probably Not Eating Enough The irony of the protein boom is that Americans aren’t actually ingesting any more of it today than they were 30 years ago. That might be because protein’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) is a modest 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, a number formulated by the National Academy of Sciences during World War II in order to safeguard public health during a possible shortage and ensure the nutritive value of military rations. “That RDA means roughly 8 to 10 percent of your daily intake should be protein,” says Heather Leidy, Ph.D., a protein researcher and associate professor in Purdue University’s Department of Nutrition Science. But that 8 to 10 percent is only the minimum required to prevent a protein deficiency, not what you need for protein synthesis, muscle gain, satiety, weight management, and glycemic control. While the diets of most Americans may contain between 10 and 15 percent protein, Leidy notes, research suggests that anywhere from 20 to 30 percent would be a better health goal. That’s between 1.2 and 1.6 grams of protein daily for every kilogram of your target body weight. So if you’re a 185-pound guy who wants to weigh 165, you should eat between 90 and 120 grams of protein per day. The good news is that higher amounts of protein as a result of all these snacks and shakes won’t harm the liver, kidneys, or bones of healthy people, as some once claimed; however, excess protein can mean excess calories, which may lead to weight gain, Leidy says. What kind of protein you eat does matter, though, and protein can be a misleadingly catchall term when describing what actually goes into food products. You have whey and casein, both found in milk, as well as numerous plant options, such as the protein extracted from soy, peas, and

hemp. (Some companies even extract protein from insects like crickets and grasshoppers.) Not all protein is created equal. Typically, only the animal-derived varieties found in meat and dairy products contain all the amino acids that your body needs. Whole foods with high-quality protein (beef, dairy, poultry, seafood, soy) remain your best source. Better than supplements, even. “People rely too much on the powder when they think it confers some magical benefit beyond whole foods,” notes Men’s Health nutrition advisor Mike Roussell, Ph.D., a New York nutrition consultant. Protein powder, whether it’s in a jug or dusting snack foods, isn’t bad. But it lacks the healthy fats, vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients found in whole foods. Most important, whole foods make you feel full, whereas a shake can leave you wanting more. How to Consume What You Need Can you eat that much protein per day? Doing the math might make your head (and your jaw) ache. “It’s more valuable for people to look at protein on a meal-by-meal basis,” says Roussell. “The problem is that in the U. S., our whole system is based on daily recommendations, not meal-based ones.” Depending on your body size, you should shoot for somewhere between 30 and 40 grams of protein per meal, Roussell advises, which is enough to maximize muscleprotein synthesis while also helping you feel full. Athletes should aim for that 40gram mark, depending on the intensity of their exercise. Vegans might need to rely on supplements to reach the optimum range. Leidy suggests spreading out your protein intake even more: Aim for 20 to 30 grams at each breakfast, lunch, and dinner; drink a shake after your workout to net another 20 to 30 grams; and, if needed, add 20 grams with a midmorning snack. But be careful with snacking. You’ll find some “protein” products on the market that contain a measly four grams per serving, along with an abundance of added sugars. “I find that in the snack arena, it’s generally a marketing tool, not actually a benefit,” Roussell says. It’s not that protein-centric BBQ chips are bad for you. It’s just that, for the same price, you could purchase six whole ounces of another health food that supplies 20 grams of protein along with vitamin B12, calcium, and zinc. It’s called Greek yogurt. And wouldn’t that be simpler?

THE PROTEIN SPECTRUM Not everything with a “High Protein!” label is actually stuffed with it. In fact, most of the foods highest in protein don’t carry a label at all. HIGH

(27g)

(23g)

(20g)

(19g)

(15g)

(10g)

Three eggs

Protes Protein Chips, Tangy Southern BBQ

(7g) Clif Bar, Peanut Toffee Buzz

Barbara’s Berry Burst Protein Puffins Cereal LOW MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

37

The most trusted name in cars is now the most trusted place for CAR SHOPPING.

EXPERT REVIEWS TRADE-IN VALUES CARS FOR SALE NEAR YOU

SHOP NOW

CARANDDRIVER.COM/SHOP AMERICA’S AUTHORITY ON CARS SINCE 1955

LIFE

43 50

....................... TR AV ELIN’

PA N TS!

THINGS YOU C A N DO W ITH A ROTISSER IE CHICK EN

..................

52

............

56

...................

NONA LCOHOLIC BEER S? NONA LCOHOLIC BEER S!

Y ES, YOU C A N LE AV E A FTER SE X. (C A R EF U LLY.)

Millions of Americans are watching the career path they were on slowly disappear. To carve a new one that feels urgent and monumental, you have to know the new rules of reinvention. ROSS MCCAMMON helps decode them.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY T YLER COMRIE

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

39

LIFE

U 

bought into the same idea that my parents and grandparents had about how a career should unfold: If you worked hard, you would be taken care of. You’d get to buy a house, a couple cars. You’d retire at 65-ish. The American dream. I had always been grateful to have a job— particularly the “dream job” I had throughout my 30s. I was loyal to it, and to my industry. And my job and my industry, I thought, were loyal to me. And then I was laid off. I got another job pretty quickly, and then, after two years, I was laid off again. I was the sole earner in my family. I had two young kids and a mortgage. Let me tell you: That will clear the mind. We’re being told that we’re in this amazing economic moment, but most people I know are scared. They feel anything but stable, and for good reason. We’re living through a seismic shift in American business. Connectivity has disrupted industries, as well as the lives of families and hardworking people who take pride in their work and just want work to do. My reaction? Once I truly accepted a less stable reality, I stopped trying to walk down a “path.” It was as much a mindshift as it was a career strategy. I began to feel younger and more nimble. But I got a lot of advice—from colleagues who’d moved on and from people who specialize in reinvention, like the ones I spoke with for this story. These three experts regularly work with the most reluctant reinventors—people far along on their professional journey—and help them navigate change. Here’s how they think you should approach it. 40

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

MEET THE NEW RULE INTERPRETERS Stacey Staaterman, a New York City– based career and leadership coach Dorie Clark, a marketing strategist and author of Reinventing You Bill Burnett, an adjunct professor and executive director of the Design Program at Stanford and coauthor of Design Your Life

1 

it That It Sucks, but the Time Has Come to Do Some Reinventing But not doing it is worse You can kind of hunker down and hope against hope that the storm blows over, but it’s not going to blow over. You really only have two choices. Accept the default reality: “Whatever happens, I’ll just scramble.” Do you want the default reality? Or the one you design? Because those are your only two options. —B. B.

Of course it’s scary You expected that you would surf this wave all the way to the beach and jump off and have a great retirement. But the surf changed. Now you’ve got choppy, short waves and you’re going to fall off the board. Your job now is to get back on the board and anticipate fall-offs. Today, being adaptive and flexible is critical. —S. S.

≢

≢

Delmaine Donson/Getty Images (man on computer, previous page), Kyoshino/Getty Images (paper)

NTIL A few years ago, I

2 

Treat LinkedIn as the New Headhunter (Because It Is)

You’re only what your digital profile says about you Our culture around job searching and careermanagement behaviors mirrors dating and courtship. Nobody has a blind date anymore. Nobody. Even if you have an introduction to another human being, all of the humans involved go to the Internet and scope each other out. If I had two hours to spend on doing something to help somebody’s career and job search, I would invest that time on LinkedIn. Get your profile in good shape first. —S. S. Make your profile about what you can do, not just what you did Peel back the layers of your résumé. Think about your transferable skills. I do a lot of work with transitioning of the military, and some of them come in and have skills like they’re a tank driver or they defuse bombs, and obviously that doesn’t seem remotely transferable to civilian life. So how do you take someone like that

and make their skills transferable? Understand that it’s not about your literal job description. There are meta skills that you developed along the way, like understanding how to lead a team, or learning what makes for a great story and how to capture people’s attention. Things like that could be applied to any number of different places. —D. C. Don’t paywall your email address Many people (including recruiters) use free s on LinkedIn, so they cannot access your information in the “” section. Include it in the “Summary” section instead. —S. S. You have to jump in LinkedIn is not a giant digital address book. It is a 24/7/365 networking event. Those who share, comment on, and publish content are rewarded with connections and visibility. Lack of participation negatively affects how your profile will rank in recruiter searches. —S. S.

NEW ADDICTION ALERT!

Mike Kemp/Getty Images (sign)

YOU’VE PROBABLY seen YouTube videos with imioned

speakers like entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and half of all TED Talkers gassing on about working really hard (getting up early, never quitting, generally crushing it but never saying what “it” actually is). So, what is the . . . result of all this effort? For peddlers of “hustle porn,” who revere and promote extreme effort as a virtue, the work is the result. Which is obviously weird! Kind of sick, actually! And, more important, counterproductive. Ignore those who say you should work harder than anyone else. (A) That’s impossible, because Dwayne Johnson walks the earth. (B) You deserve (and need) a personal life. (C) One man’s motivation can be another man’s self-esteem killer. Hustling nonstop, as Reddit founder and hustle-porn hater Alexis Ohanian says, “has deleterious effects not just on your business but on your well-being.” The only people seeing any benefits from this twisted philosophy are the people reaping YouTube ad dollars espousing it. —R. M.

3 

Don’t Wait Around to Get Noticed

Today, everybody’s in your network As long as you’re on the Internet, you can reach pretty much anyone who’s worth connecting with. It’s completely wide open. I’ve struck up a friendship with somebody who’s been a leader in personal development for 40 years, all because I commented on some of his content. There is so much access to people at superhigh levels—there is no reason you couldn’t create a relationship with a CEO if you wanted to. Once you’ve built that network, you’ve got to keep up with it. People often don’t do that. They ping folks once in a while or may have lunch, but that’s not enough. They don’t keep them up to speed and treat them like a board of directors. These people should be getting a twice-a-month update: “Here’s how the search is going.” Express how much you value their , and ask for specific introductions to people. —S. S.

Make yourself easy to know If you blog or are sharing relevant content on social media, then people look at you as a thoughtful curator of ideas. That can matter. Even if you’re in a company where there are constraints on what you can share publicly, you can share things in places like your company intranet. Or put in applications to speak at industry conferences. It takes extra effort, but these things ensure you’re perceived as credible. —D. C. Authenticity wins I had a client write an article about gratitude— gratitude after being laid off! The piece was vulnerable, personal, and unexpected. It raised his visibility and led to a ton of new conversations. He’s found a job since then, and he’s doing great. It actually turned up the heat on his search and pulled him out into the light. —S. S.

4 

As Long as You’re Inventing, Make Something Great

Go for the big win Get out of the false binary of “It’s either work or life.” It’s just life and life. You’re living life at home, you’re living life on the commute, you’re living life. Whenever you make things a dichotomy, you’re going, “It’s either A or B, and if I have more of A, I have less of B.” There’s no way to win that game. —B. B. MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

41

FUR NI T URE FOR T HE

CURIOUS, CONFIDENT, AND CULTURED FFDM.COM/ESQUIRE

LIFE

Q.

I’m a huge sneaker head— well over 150 pairs. I’m also a 47-year-old professional. HAVE I OUTGROWN THEM? OR IS THERE

STYLE

New Year, No Rules! The Style Lightning Round You asked, we answered. The fixes to your biggest fashion conundrums of 2019.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILIO HERNANDEZ

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

43

LIFE

Q.

I’m a worked-out, broadshouldered guy. If I buy a dress shirt that fits my arms, it’s always blousy around the waist. WHAT DO I DO? —KENNETH, @KENDORPHINS

A. The tough answer: Pay a visit to your tailor. He can take in the waist if your shirt fits in the arms and shoulders. The better answer: Find brands that make options cut for broader guys, like Hugo Boss’s “sharp fit” shirt. It shows off your work at the gym when you have to be at actual work. Cotton shirt ($125), wool tie ($148), and wool tros (part of suit, $795) by Boss; hugoboss.com. Canfield Chrono watch ($900) by Shinola; shinola.com.

This year, I’m

since it’s falling apart. SHOULD I JUST GET A REPLACEMENT? —STEVEN, @STEVEN.FRIED A. We’d suggest going instead for a hybrid. The way we move through the world now requires a durability that a leather briefcase can’t quite offer. Plus, thanks to our phones, we need both hands free most of the time. The solution: a muted backpack in strong technical nylon that can flip to briefcase mode as you glide into the office. Flight Pack 2 backpack ($160) by Aer; nordstrom.com.

44

January •

I’m trying to reduce

Styling: Ted Stafford, grooming: Ellen Guhin/See Management, tailoring: Morgan Foote/ Altered, location: Peerspace.com, Kevin Sweeney/Studio D (backpack, jacket, watches), prop styling: Claire Tedaldi/Halley Resources

Q.

NICE BRICK WALL, HUH? Peerspace hooked us up. It’s like Airbnb for meeting venues, or, you know, fashion shoots.

WHAT ELSE IS THERE BESIDES A BLAZER THAT CAN KEEP ME WARM IF I RUN OUT FOR A COFFEE?

Q.

—ZACH, Columbus, OH A. A thin wool blazer isn’t going to do much for you, warmthwise, in the winter months. And if you find yourself in a casual office, it can even look out of place. Which is why a neutral, minimalist fleece works best: It’s dressy in a best-dressed-at-a-start-up kind of way and still functions as a warm layer for coffee runs. Retro pile fleece ($139) by Fair Trade Patagonia; patagonia.com. Plaid shirt ($70) by Banana Republic; bananarepublic.com. Heritage Series watch ($850) by Movado; movado.com.

Q.

ARE THERE IDEAL PANTS FOR TRAVELING? I want to

be comfortable on the plane and still look good when I land. —TREY, @TREYGRILEY

A. Ah, the elusive dignity-maintaining travel pants. Instead of wearing sweatpants or scrunching into jeans, opt for pants with stretch and a flexible waist made for traveling with ease, like this pair from comfort king Mack Weldon. Radius tros ($98) by Mack Weldon; mackweldon.com. Herringbone blazer ($298) by Banana Republic; bananarepublic.com. Cotton shirt ($295) by Eleventy; eleventy.it. Socks ($22) by Kane 11; kane11.com. Leather-and-wool slip-ons ($169) by Greats; greats.com. Watch by Rolex; rolex.com. Wheeled carry-on ($245) by Away; awaytravel.com. Leather luggage tag ($75) by Shinola; shinola.com.

My New Year’s resolution is to start wearing a watch. WHAT’S A

Q.

GOOD STARTING POINT? —CHRIS, Windsor, Ontario A. If you’re not a regular watch wearer, you want to be sure you’re actually going to wear the thing before you put down big money for an expensive one. So grab a timepiece at an entry-level price. You’ll earn style points with a metal bracelet and bold face, and you’ll get used to regular wear without having to take out a second mortgage. From left: Preston steel watch ($195) by Coach; macys.com. Luminova watch ($295) by Boss; hugoboss.com. Steel Chandler watch ($195) by Citizen Watch; citizenwatch.com.

LIFE men. A Duke University study found that CEOs with stronger facial features were seen as more competent. Another study reported that voters preferred leaders with more masculine features in wartime. In comic books (and conference rooms and the Oval Office and, I don’t know, a Cheesecake Factory), a square jaw suggests power. And more men like me are looking for ways of getting one. Nonsurgical approaches include Botox and fillers; Ultherapy, which uses ultrasound to tighten saggy skin; CoolSculpt, which freezes and kills fat cells; and Kybella, which destroys fat cells with injectable acid. But a lot of surgery is happening, too. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 57 percent of chin-augmentation surgeries in 2017 were performed on men. I might become one of them. After years of self-consciousness and a handful of noninvasive procedures, I’m not sure anything is off-limits if it’s going to make me feel more confident. If I’m ready for the knife, the question is: What exactly does that mean? What are my options? And, most important, will it be enough?

IMPLANT? NOT THAT SIMPLE. “LOOK AT Greek and Roman art and you’ll

YOUR MUG

The More Chiseled Me Men are spending millions on jawline procedures. Our grooming guy, GARRETT MUNCE, investigates what we’re getting done—and which approach is best for him.

R 

OBIN WAS my gateway. The jaw-

line of Batman’s sidekick wasn’t the squarest, but at six years old in my bedroom in Charlotte, North Carolina, I knew something was different about him. That led me to Batman, Superman, Thor, the Human Torch. I could draw dozens of their faces from memory even before the Marvel Cinematic Universe began making gods out of guys named Chris. The one thing they all have in common? A jaw that looks like a block of granite. And I’ve wanted one ever since. I’m a 34-year-old man with the facial structure of the Gerber baby, something that was adorable when I was an actual 46

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

baby. But now that I’m an adult? It’s still adorable. I’ve struggled with my weight and body image my whole life, but my face has always been a particular problem. When I was at my heaviest, people couldn’t resist pinching my cheeks. When I was at my thinnest, and hospitalized for anorexia, another patient told me I had “chipmunk cheeks.” No matter what your body looks like under your clothes, do you know what you can’t hide? Your face. “The sharper the jaw, the stronger the man” is such a natural way to think that we don’t even question it. A study in 2013 discovered a link between a wider jaw and higher levels of circulating testosterone in

see strong chins,” says plastic surgeon Melissa Doft, M.D., in her office on New York’s Upper East Side. “Even in ancient times, this was an aesthetic ideal.” I came to her wondering about a chin implant, something she said could be performed in her office under local anesthesia. Traditionally, she might suggest one as an add-on to a rhinoplasty to balance the proportions of the face, but many of her male clients are starting to ask for it specifically. Even without the nose job, she typically pairs one with liposuction around the neck to define the jawline and adjustments under the eyes to bring out the cheekbones. For me, even that wouldn’t be enough. Dr. Doft told me I would also need to remove my buccal fat pads (the fatty areas inside the cheeks). She would make tiny incisions just above the upper molars to remove them. Then she would use a cannula, a narrow tube attached to a syringe, to remove the fat under my chin. A full surgical treatment like that would cost me around $6,000 but take only a few hours. Maybe it is just as easy as Dr. Doft made it sound. After all, she showed me that it’s more about subtle changes than a huge, sweeping redo.

THE LIMITS OF FILLERS

Travis Rathbone (bust), Kevin Mazur/Getty Images (Boseman), Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images (Cavill), Stephen Lovekin/FilmMagic (Bale), Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty Images (Downey), courtesy Male Plastic Surgery NY/LA (author)

WHAT LI SA G O O D MAN , founder of the

antiaging clinic GoodSkin Los Angeles, told me cut deep (and she’s not even a surgeon): “You don’t actually have enough cheekbone structure to handle the amount of fat that you have.” Ouch. The secret to contouring a man’s face with only injectables, she says, “is really just about straight lines,” meaning that instead of making gentle curves that would feminize the face, the goal is to create angles. It’s achieved by weightier fillers like Radiesse and Voluma, which are injected deep and can visually enhance bone structure. Layering them with a lightweight filler like Juvéderm to plump the skin can rework your face in subtle but striking ways. In my case, Goodman said my “fat was falling”—and any remaining fat would too—so filler would visually produce more bone structure to help the surrounding tissue. A full treatment with only minimally invasive methods requires a big-picture view and a lot of patience. Kybella can be used to take away pockets of fat (like my buccal pads) without surgery, but it involves three to six treatments, each a month apart. I’d already gotten Kybella and had adverse side effects—my neck was completely numb for four months. (I would rather just go under the knife.)

USING THE WHOLE TOOL KIT ONE OF THE FEW plastic surgeons in the U. S. to specialize in men, Douglas Steinbrech, M.D., told me that no matter what surgical options a patient goes for, adding fillers gets optimal results. In 2014, Dr. Steinbrech created what he calls the Male Model Makeover, which commonly includes enhancing the angles of the face. The jawline is his focus. “That a strong

THE HALL OF JAW

jaw is associated with respect back from the screen was the and authority has become ultimate selfie—a version of hardwired into our brains,” my face I was desperate for he says. “You see it more now me to have and others to see. because of the hypersexualAbout that desperation: ization of superheroes.” Just I called Roberto Olivardia, look at Michael Keaton’s 1989 Ph.D., a clinical psycholoBOSEMAN Batman next to Ben Affleck’s gist and lecturer at Harvard in 2016. Medical School, who literThe problem is trying to ally wrote the book on male go from Keaton to Affleck in body image. Since he and one procedure. “It’s a game of his coauthors published The addition and subtraction,” Dr. Adonis Complex in 2000, he’s CAVILL Steinbrech says. “The mistake noticed a dramatic increase is to put an implant deep on the in men’s preo cc upat ion bone underneath all this soft with their face. “The everytissue assuming it’s going to day person has become the make you a chiseled movie celebrity,” he says. “To have a star.” If a patient doesn’t picture taken these days, you BALE already have a clearly defined have to look good, because bone structure (as I don’t), Dr. with social media, everyone Steinbrech may advise gethas access to it. This has ting a chin, jaw, or cheekbone heightened body image in a implant but will suggest first significant way.” taking away the fat (through Photo-editing apps have procedures such as microtoo. “People can alter their DOWNEY liposuction and Kybella) or faces very easily now,” says tightening sagging skin (like Olivardia. “They can see with a face-lift or neck-lift). Fillers are what they look like with a more angular then added at the end for “refined detail.” jaw [for instance], and it’s sending peoDr. Steinbrech recommended almost ple to cosmetic surgeons’ offices quicker.” the whole menu. He noted that I had “gen- A decade ago, patients would show up to eral subcutaneous facial fat” (meaning their consultations with photos of celebmy whole face is fat, not just my cheeks), rities. Now they come with their own so even with the buccal fat pads removed, doctored photos, a phenomenon Dr. I would still need to manage my expec- Steinbrech calls “Snapchat dysmorphia.” tations. He also recommended a chin It presents new issues to plastic surgeons, implant (“no-brainer”) and cheekbone who spend more time adjusting a patient’s implants. The “frosting on the cake,” as he expectations because of things like basic put it, would be a generous helping of filler. anatomy and genetics. Facetune might be Depending on how many syringes he used, a magic wand, but surgery is not. this could run me as much as $18,000 per In the weeks after my consultation, I visit. To show me what this would all look spent so much time playing with Facetune like, Dr. Steinbrech used a computer pro- that my photos looked like they belonged gram he calls virtual surgery. in a fun house. I stared at my face in the mirror, lifting and stretching my skin like an aging starlet in an old movie. I started to realize that my expectations T H E F A C E t h at D r. Steinbrech created as were out of control. Even with extensive I watched looked as treatments, I would never look like the me if someone had built I’d been imagining. This story is not going to end with some the action-figure version of me. The goal, he body-positive realization—at least not said, was to generate one that leaves me happy with what I look a “Hollywood twin,” a like now. And is that so weird? We go to the more handsome version gym to look different. We wear clothes to of my face that retained hide our bodies. I had an epiphany, sure, what made me, well, me. but the epiphany was: If I can’t be Batman, “AFTER” Even so, the me staring I’ll still take Robin.

THE “AFTER” PICTURE

ME, BUT SUPER-ER! The author (left) and, as one doctor put it, his “Hollywood twin” in a visualization.

BEFORE

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

47

LIFE

CHEF-IFY IT!

Roland  Rubalcava, executive chef of Playa Mesa in Costa Mesa, California, gives  your  heat-and-eat  burritos  superpowers.

1. FRESHEN IT

Before the last minute of microwaving, top the burrito with a big spoonful or two of roasted tomato salsa and a small handful of Monterey Jack. Then top the hot burrito with arugula dressed with a little olive oil and Champagne vinegar.

2. SMOKE IT

After heating the burrito, cover it with warm mole (you can find the sauce in your grocery store’s Mexican section), plus some sour cream, toasted sesame seeds, and a few thinly sliced raw red onions.

M E N ’S H E A L T H B E ST

FO R MEN

3. GREEN IT

The Breakfast Burrito Wakes Up

New options now cater to people who actually like food. We taste-tested them all and declared our winners.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

For a hearty breakfast that will keep you feeling full until lunch, eat a complete meal that provides 25 to 30 grams of protein and at least 3 grams of fiber, says Valerie Goldstein, R.D., founder of the website Eating to Fuel Health. “Don’t compromise quality for quantity,” she adds. Cap total carbs at 50 grams and include a hard-boiled egg or two to round out your breakfast. Otherwise you may feel like taking a midmorning desk nap. With Goldstein’s requirements in mind, we tried more than 30 burritos. These won. 48

BEST OVERALL

In a blender or food processor, puree ¼ avocado, 2 raw husked tomatillos, 1 garlic clove, a small handful of cilantro leaves, 1 roughly chopped green onion, and ½ jalapeño with water until smooth. Season with salt, pour some over a cooked burrito, and top with crumbled queso fresco.

BEST FULLY LOADED

PJ’S ORGANICS SOUTHWESTERN STYLE CHICKEN BURRITO

SWEET EARTH FOODS BAJA BREAKFAST BURRITO

PER SERVING: 330 calories, 8g fat, 16g protein, 48g carbs (8g fiber)

PER SERVING: 360 calories, 13g fat, 20g protein, 41g carbs (3g fiber)

Many options we tried lacked a satisfying filling-to-tortilla balance. But PJ’s packs this rollup with organic white-meat chicken, black beans, Jack cheese, brown rice, corn, and red and green bell peppers (whew!). Though its protein count is lower than other winners’, the fiber fills you up. FIND IT AT: Whole Foods, Fairway

It’s vegetarian and builds a strong protein base with eggs, Monterey Jack, and pinto beans. The hearty, savory flavors come from potatoes, fire-roasted tomatoes, and chipotle seitan, a meat substitute made from wheat gluten. (It’s tastier than it sounds.) Add salsa and cilantro. FIND IT AT: Walmart, Target, Whole Foods

BEST BASIC

BEST WILD CARD

EVOL SPICY UNCURED BACON & EGG

AMY’S BREAKFAST SCRAMBLE WRAP

PER SERVING: 320 calories, 14g fat, 12g protein, 37g carbs (3g fiber) This is the burrito that most evokes your bachelor days, upgraded with cage-free eggs, quality bacon, cubed potatoes, and a hint of jalapeño. “This tastes like everything I want in a breakfast burrito,” one tester said. A little more hot sauce couldn’t hurt, though. FIND IT AT: Most grocery stores

PER SERVING: 380 calories, 19g fat, 21g protein, 30g carbs (4g fiber) This one carries a substantial amount of protein and doesn’t sit like a brick in your stomach. “Somehow it has better flavor than some of the burritos with real eggs,” one taster reported. You’ll enjoy it even more served with salsa verde and sliced avocado. FIND IT AT: Most grocery stores

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TED + CHELSEA

Food styling: Jamie Kimm, prop styling: Christina Lane

FOOD

© 2018 Tyson Foods, Inc.

LIFE

Welcome to 30/10! 30 10

HERE’S HOW IT WORKS: You

eat 30 grams of protein per meal to feel full and build muscle. Then you add ten grams of fiber to reap its digestive, heart, and satiety benefits, says Chris Mohr, Ph.D., R.D., co-owner of Mohr Results, a nutrition consulting firm. You’ll have everything you need to feed your appetite and fuel your workout recovery. This month: a grocery go-to. BY PAUL KITA

There’s a big reason lifters love chicken. One six-ounce roasted skinless breast from a broiler or fryer contains 49 grams of protein for only 323 calories. The same amount of meat from a skinless thigh has 42 grams of protein for 304 calories. So whether you pick up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store or roast your own at home, the fowl has your muscle fuel covered.

50

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Sam Kaplan

THE PROTEIN

7 Things to Do with a

SUPERMARKET ROTISSERIE CHICKEN 1.

Shred it atop tomato soup. Top with fresh cilantro, crumbled queso fresco, cubed avocado, crushed tortilla chips, and freshly squeezed lime juice.

2.

Reheat shredded chicken in a pan with butter and hot sauce. Tuck into a wrap with crumbled blue cheese, thinly sliced iceberg or romaine lettuce, and celery leaves.

3.

Throw a few leaves of chopped kale in a bowl. Add a pinch of kosher salt and a squeeze of lemon juice. Massage until the leaves are softened. Toss in shredded chicken and top with freshly grated Parmesan.

THE FIBER Serve your bird with one of these easy make-at-home side dishes. They each carry the target ten grams of gut-filling fiber. Feeling ambitious? Double the recipe. They both taste great cold as leftovers the next day.

Ted + Chelsea, food styling: Jamie Kimm, prop styling: Christina Lane

1. CHARRED BROCCOLI WITH L E M O N A N D PA R M E S A N

4.

Top a reheated chicken breast with a few spoonfuls of warmed tomato sauce, a piece of pan-crisped prosciutto, and a slice of fresh mozzarella. Broil till melted. to use a knife and fork.

5.

Reheat a shredded chicken breast in a large pan coated with olive oil over medium heat. Add a handful of grapes, a handful of pitted olives, some chopped rosemary, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper.

6.

Pile a large slice of sourdough bread with a leaf or two of romaine lettuce, shredded chicken, sliced avocado, sliced tomato, crumbled bacon, and chipotle mayo.

7.

In a pan, reheat shredded chicken with your favorite barbecue sauce. Transfer to an onion roll and top with coleslaw and hot sauce.

HOW T O PIC K A W INNER Follow the advice of Alan Morgan,

a global senior culinary director for Whole Foods Market: “I look at the legs, since they get cooked the most, to see if the meat has begun to pull away from the bone. That’s a good indicator that the bird has been overcooked and is dried out. And avoid any birds with excess juice in the container—a clear sign all of that flavor has left the chicken. A great golden-brown color and shiny and glossy skin indicate a tasty and moist rotisserie chicken.”

In a large bowl, toss the trimmed florets from 1 large head of broccoli, plus the chopped stalk, with 2 Tbsp olive oil and a big pinch each of salt and pepper. In a cast-iron pan over medium high, add the broccoli and cook, stirring occasionally, until it is well charred and al dente, 3 to 5 minutes. Top with the zest and juice of 1 lemon, plus freshly grated Parmesan to taste. Feeds 2 PER SERVING: 220 calories, 11g protein, 18g carbs (10g fiber), 15g fat

2 . C H O P P E D R E D C A B B AG E Q U I C K S L AW In a large bowl, toss ¾ of a head of red cabbage, finely chopped (you can use a food processor); 2 carrots, finely chopped; 1 apple, cored and finely chopped; 1 Tbsp distilled white vinegar; 1 tsp olive oil; and salt and pepper to taste. Feeds 2 PER SERVING: 190 calories, 5g protein, 42g carbs (11g fiber), 3g fat HUNGRY FOR MORE?

We found the recipe for the ultimate roast chicken. It’s easy. It’s delicious. MensHealth.com/roastchicken

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

51

LIFE

Beer With Us Here… . . . Because we have an important announcement: Upstart craft brewers are releasing nonalcoholic beers with actual flavor. But it’s one thing for them not to taste terrible. It’s another for them to taste good. And these actually do. BY JOY MANNING

IF YOU LOVE... SIERRA NEVADA PALE ALE

BLUE MOON

FAT TIRE AMBER ALE

GUINNESS

GOOSE ISLAND IPA

PARTAKE BREWING IPA

Citrusy and bracing, this is the ultimate low-calorie session beer—an option even if you’re following a low-carb or keto plan, for some reason. Calories per 12 ounces: 10 Buy: nearbeer .com/usa

WHY DRINK N/A BEER? 52

WELLBEING BREWING HEAVENLY BODY GOLDEN WHEAT This thirst quencher is a post-run reviver. You’ll taste grapefruit and a little spice. Plus, no regrets about slugging back a sugary sports drink. Calories per 12 ounces: 68 Buy: shop.wellbeingbrewing.com

WELLBEING BREWING HELLRAISER DARK AMBER

BRAVUS BREWING OATMEAL STOUT

ATHLETIC BREWING RUN WILD IPA

There’s a strong malt backbone, but hops balance the sweetness. Try it with an equally bold food, such as a medium-rare beef burger or spicy chorizo tacos. Calories per 12 ounces: 80 Buy: shop.wellbeingbrewing.com

Smells like a campfire, pours supersmooth: This substantial stout matches especially well with chocolate desserts, which help coax out the brew’s caramel notes. Calories per 12 ounces: 110 Buy: store.bravus.com

This one has a palatepopping bitterness. Judges at the 2018 International Beer Challenge gave it a gold medal in the specialty-beer category. You’ll like it, too. Calories per 12 ounces: 70 Buy: athleticbrewing.com

It’s loaded with polyphenols.

It’s a great post-cardio drink.

These compounds found primarily in plants may help ward off disease and protect you from free-radical damage.

A 2012 German study found marathon runners who drank N/A beer during training had less overall inflammation.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

It’s a nightcap. If you replace your boozy nightcap with a nonalcoholic beer, you can wind down without wrecking your rest.

PHOTOGRAPH BY TED + CHELSEA

Food styling: Jamie Kimm, prop styling: Christina Lane/Tricia Joyce

THEN YOU’LL LIKE (AND MAYBE EVEN LOVE!)...

MENT

Get Back In Shape

75$,1(5 6$'9,&(&$1+(/3<28'5237+$7(;75$ :(,*+7 / BY CHRIS HANSEN Being a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest . Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction. Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.” One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter

how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles. Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients. While I firmly believe that the gym is a notalk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?” Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk. I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.” Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake

called INVIGOR8. Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this—actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle. We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs. The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, nonGMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutrition you get from INVIGOR8. While there are over 500 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try. When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good. Still INVIGOR8 had to the most important test, the taste test. And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good. I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting. I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition. Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious. Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing. A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer for Men’s Health readers: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “MEN10” at checkout. If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at www.DrinkInvigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.

EASY ON THE SWEET

After gathering your postholiday gift-card spoils, avoid the siren call tempting you toward sugar and empty calories.

START WITH EGGS

CHOOSE THE BEST PROTEIN BOXES DE-ADJECTIVE YOUR COFFEE ORDER MAKE A BETTER MATCH 54

SKIP THE BAKED GOODS and instead do a double order of the Sous Vide Egg Bites: Egg White & Red Pepper. You’ll eat about 30 grams of fortifying protein and less than five grams of sugar. That’s a far better day starter than the healthy-sounding Banana Nut Bread, which has 50-plus grams of carbs, 25 of which are sugar. And that 8-Grain Roll? It houses 70 total grams of carbs, and 18 of them are the sweet stuff.

OPT FOR THE BOXES that contain a sandwich with muscle-building pro-

tein. The Chicken BLT and Smoked Turkey boxes each have 35 grams and a hearty seven grams of fiber. Beware: Not all of the protein-centric options have enough of the key nutrient. You want 30 grams per meal (see page 36). The Fruit & Cheese Protein Box? Twenty grams. The Lentils & Vegetable Protein Bowl with Brown Rice? Twenty-three. BLACK COFFEE AND NITRO are both zero-calorie, zero-sugar choices. Shake some cinnamon on top to help cut the bite of the beverage or add a little milk. The longer it takes you to say what you want, the greater your risk of ordering a caffeinated milkshake. For example, a venti Blonde Vanilla Bean Coconutmilk Latte delivers 20 grams of sugar. A grande Double Chocolaty Chip Crème Frappuccino with almond milk has a crash-inducing 49 grams.

CREATE YOUR PROTEIN -and-caffeine combo by cherry-picking from Starbucks’s menu to hit 30 grams of protein and avoid added sugar. Start with an espresso or unsweetened cold brew (neither one has sugar) and then add an Egg & Cheese Protein Box and/or milk. Yes, a Doubleshot Protein Caramel may have 20 grams of protein, but it also has the same amount of sugar. The Teavana Mango Black Tea has 22 grams of sugar.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Added sugars provide you with nothing nutritionally. They’re empty calories that can contribute to weight gain and toy with your insulin levels. Avoid these offenders:

25

GRAMS OF SUGAR

Almond Butter, Strawberries & Jam Sandwich EQUIVALENT TO:

5.5 Oreo cookies

46

GRAMS OF SUGAR

Caramelized Apple Pound Cake EQUIVALENT TO:

1.3 (12-ounce) cans of Pepsi Wild Cherry Vanilla

64

GRAMS OF SUGAR

Grande White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino Blended Coffee EQUIVALENT TO:

2.1 bags of regular M&M’s

L

LIFE

YOU GUYS

Wham, Bam, Bye Now So that was great. But as LAUREN LARSON explains, sometimes the best nights end in separate beds.

56

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

I RECENTLY SUMMONED a trusted ex to a bar. I wanted to ask

him a question, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. It took me one round of drinks to get to it. “Have I ever done anything . . . weird? Or gross? Like, in bed? But not, like, in bed,” I added. “Like, sleeping.” He pretended to think about it, but I could tell he already had something in mind. Finally, he began to speak. I drained my whiskey ginger. He told me the story of a night right out of Paranormal Activity. A story that laid bare the true evil that I’ve always suspected exists within me. I won’t repeat it here, because I am a lady/because my parents read Men’s Health. I bought the next round and tried to forget. For a few days, I’d been badgering male acquaintances about the sleep habits of the women in their lives. By the time I confronted my ex, I’d heard enough stories of drooling and sleeptalking to know that everyone does something. I have my own encyclopedia of nighttime horror stories. I once watched a man ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR

YOUR EXPERT

Kyle Hilton (Larson)

In this column, Lauren Larson writes about the evolving dynamics between men and women—from hooking up to working together to . . . everything else.

sleepwalk across my bedroom, pee in and around my wastebasket, and then sleepwalk out of the room. I was too spooked to follow him, so I don’t know where else in my home he peed that night. When I mentioned it, he laughed and said that it’s “just something that happens when I drink whiskey.” We’ve reevaluated so many things about dating. We’ve changed our tune on how we meet (Tinder!) and how we ask for consent (often!), and I move that we change the rules of sleepovers, too. Nobody sleeps well with a new partner, and some of us even have trouble sleeping with people we’ve been with for a long, long time. I used to think that if I didn’t sleep with someone after we had sex, the sex would be somehow cheapened, but curling up together for half an hour after sex can be just as pleasant a capstone as spending the night together, and you won’t spend the next day feeling destroyed, resenting your partner for disrupting your sleep cycle. But before you barrel out of your lover’s apartment under the banner of enlightenment, it can help to understand some of the anxieties at play here. I, for example, have always harbored a fear that I’ll unknowingly do something unattractive in slumber. When I’m on a date, I may appear charming and relaxed—even smooth, if I’m on my third drink—but actually every organ is engaged in an effort not to do anything ugly. When I’m lying next to someone, as much as I want to fall asleep, I’m also battling the temptation to remain awake and totally in control of my faculties. Maybe the Thanksgiving-dinner-level fatigue men get after they ejaculate overwhelms these concerns, or maybe I’m just extra self-conscious. When you regard it as a sex act, sleeping next to someone is as intimate as it gets. My body might betray me in any number of ways, or my mate might study me in the dead of night—drooling, hair akimbo—and decide that I am hideous. We like to believe in a social contract

“

Be specific, honest, and, ideally, selfdeprecating about why you don’t want to sleep over.

that prevents us from judging each other for things we do while we’re sleeping, but I did judge the sleep-pisser. And even if my ex didn’t judge me per se, the incident clearly carries an outsize weight in his memory of our time together. On the other hand, I was relieved to learn that my worst sleep infraction, horrifying as it was, was an isolated occurrence (or so I hope). A much greater fear is that I habitually do something that disrupts the sleep of my bedfellows: If my ex had told me I snored, I would have spiraled. Like many women, I often struggle to balance my own needs with my pathological courtesy. (One time on a plane, a man asked me if he could sit in my aisle seat, because his legs were “too long for the middle”—they weren’t—and I said yes, even though I’d paid extra to sit on the aisle.) The thought of someone else losing sleep on my behalf literally keeps me up at night. When I said as much to a light-sleeping friend, she nodded somberly. “I haven’t slept well in two weeks because I feel bad kicking out the guy I’m dating,” she said. “He lives an hour away, and I don’t want to inconvenience him.” A martyr for the ages: She would rather subject herself to six hours locked in sleepless torment than subject a man to one hour on public transit.

”

Especially early on, there’s a good chance that your mate will be secretly relieved if you don’t stay over, but you still have to be delicate about leaving (and even more delicate about asking someone to leave). Because of the stigma rom-com culture has placed on leaving after sex, broaching the subject deserves a larger discussion. Be specific, honest, and, ideally, self-deprecating about why you don’t want to sleep over. Saying, “I snore and I don’t want to keep you up, so I probably won’t stay over” makes you seem respectful and responsible, whereas saying, “I have to get up really early tomorrow” as you’re putting on your clothes makes you seem like a jerk. Even if you really do have to get up early tomorrow, the context makes it feel like a rejection. If there’s a window, deploy your excuse earlier, precoital, when you’re on your way up to her apartment or your apartment—when, in short, you’re sure it’s on. When you move to leave later, it won’t feel like a slap in the face. It will feel like the plan. Then, when you’re starfished in your own bed, don’t lose any sleep over it: She’s starfished in her bed, thinking not of the dumb face you make while you’re sleeping but rather of your six-pack and lumberjack arms. MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

57

LIFE

SHE’S OBSESSED WITH INSTAGRAM, AND IT’S GETTING ANNOYING. CAN I STAGE AN INTERVENTION? I’ll it, updating the feed can be addicting. If she enjoys showing off her ions, I can’t blame her. But the constant photo shoots and on-the-go editing? It can drive your partner away. An intervention might be overkill, but you need to have a conversation about how it makes you feel. You can ask her to limit her app use around you, but she doesn’t have to go cold turkey. If it’s that important to her, share the sharing experience. Ever heard of an Instagram boyfriend—where you act as her de facto photographer? If you want no part of that, maybe she’s not your match.

MY GIRLFRIEND ISN’T INTO WATCHING PORN TOGETHER, BUT I WANT TO TRY IT. ARE THERE TV ALTERNATIVES TO HELP GET HER IN THE MOOD? —JERROD, San Antonio, TX

ASK HER ANYTHING

What thrusting speed feels best for women during sex? I like to speed things up, but don’t women prefer it slower? —KEVIN, Brooklyn, NY

Don’t assume that all we want to do is “make love.” Women like hard and fast sex just as much as the slow and sensual kind. I think the stereotype stems from the fact that a majority of female orgasms come from clitoral stimulation, which, depending on your body, can be easier to do through a grinding motion. Truly it comes down to the foreplay and the context. Looking for a five-minute quickie standing up by the kitchen counter? Energizer bunnies welcome. Hoping to get it on at the end of a long workday? Ease your way in there with some oral sex and slower penetration to start. But generally, keep that jackhammering to shorter bursts. Varying the speed makes the whole—ahem—shebang more exciting, anyways. 58

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Yes! The sexiest shows on TV right now pepper in plenty of scenes that could be considered soft-core porn. And it’s definitely an easy way to dip a toe in voyeurism. Is she into period clothing and romance? Start with Outlander on Starz. Want more drama? Binge The Affair on Showtime. Simply want a lot of sex scenes? Go for She’s Gotta Have It on Netflix. There’s always Game of Thrones, if you like your sex scenes to include bloodshed and overtones of incest.

MY WIFE AND I SEEM TO BE BICKERING ABOUT IRRITATING HOUSEHOLD CHORES LATELY. HOW DO WE RISE ABOVE THIS? —PATRICK, West Jordan, UT

It’s not fair when one partner feels like they’re carrying the weight, especially with something like housework. Talking about how to split it up fairly shows some initiative, but you

know, it’s not really about the dusting. It’s more about equal contribution and appreciation. She might resent feeling like she has to play the nagging wife (or you the nagging husband). Best strategy is to get ahead of it. Be aware of her mental to-do list. That may mean asking her what’s on it. Something as simple as “Hey, what can I do for the house today?” will take you a long way.

I NEVER KNOW IF I’M OVERDOING IT WHEN TEXTING A NEW PROSPECT. ARE THERE RULES TO THIS? —JOHN, Nashville, TN

A text has no context. Without your tone of voice or body-language cues, your coy responses might not translate in a chat bubble. Not saying you shouldn’t be flirty and funny in your texts, but it’s easy for a less direct message to miss the mark. In the first few weeks, use texting to set up your IRL dates, offer some insights about your interests, and let her know you’re thinking about her. You don’t have to play games, but less is still more.

MY WIFE AND I WANT TO SCHEDULE SEX. (I KNOW, I KNOW.) DO I JUST PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR? —DERRICK, New York, NY

The scheduling isn’t just about regularly getting off (although hopefully it does that, too). It’s about creating the anticipation of sex, which can be a huge turn-on, or at least a good way to throw a little gas on long-burning embers. Don’t put too much pressure on the dates you decide on, because the last thing you want is her to be dreading it or annoyed by your persistence. Start small. Kiss her on your/ her way out the door tomorrow and say, “Are you free tonight? Let’s plan on having some fun.”

JOEL ARBAJE (Piercey), Desiree Mattsson/The Licensing Project (main image)

—RYAN, Oklahoma City, OK

A m Training Guide

GET A STRONG, LEAN, ATHLETIC BODY with The Beginner’s Guide To Strength Training

BUILD

a stronger body!

MASTER

the best exercises for strength!

TRAIN

smarter & harder for results that last!

MensHealth.com / Begin 15345

LIFE

Will you be my...wait, what are we again? Here’s how to use a Hallmark holiday to size up your relationship, no matter how long you’ve been together. BY JULIE VADNAL

ONCE YOU GET past the

YOU MET ON TINDER

LAST WEEK 60

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

THE TALK: Making V-Day plans when

THE PLAN: Go out, but keep it chill—

you’re brand-new can be a good way to see if she’s feeling you. Try this suggestion from comedian Lane Moore, author of How to Be Alone: “Hey, I know Valentine’s Day is coming up; are we in a place where we’d do the whole thing? Or are we casual and not there yet?” Whatever you do, don’t ignore the day.

somewhere nicer than Chipotle (like, nicer than Panera) but nowhere with words like emulsion on the menu. Try a quiet neighborhood bar where there’ll be other couples doing the same I-like-you-but-I’m-not-inlove-with-you dance. Or go for a daytime ice-cream date, which takes pressure off you (and your wallet). PHOTOGRAPH BY DON PENNY

Prop styling: Miako Katoh

chalky conversation hearts and sappy Instagram captions, you start to notice that Valentine’s Day is a pretty useful holiday for kicking the tires on your relationship. “Tune in to your own feelings and don’t get too pressured by all the hype,” says sex therapist Susan Block, Ph.D. Plus, research shows that couples who do regular maintenance on their relationship—aka discussing its future direction—like each other more and report more relationship satisfaction than those who tend to place greater focus on themselves. So here’s how to use February 14 to your advantage as a couple, whether that means defining a new relationship or strengthening the one you’ve already got.

YOU’RE

SIX MONTHS STRONG

THE V-DAY GIFT SPECTRUM Sometimes the best expressions of affection are as cheap as a candy bar while the lamest cost three months’ salary. THOUGHTFULINEXPENSIVE

THE TALK: By now you’ve

answered the initial “Do we like each other?” question, and the L-word is probably hovering. Should you drop it on Valentine’s Day? “Pressure is the enemy of pleasure,” says Block, so don’t feel like you have to just because Hallmark tells you to. But if you’re ready, this is one of the best times to go for it, says couples therapist and intimacy expert Kat Smith. “Women often already think of that day as super romantic, so it’ll make an impact,” she explains.

Back rub

Homecooked meal

COUPLE YEARS IN (BUT NOT MARRIED)

THE TALK: This isn’t your first rodeo, so now’s a good time to create some new memories—in the bedroom. Make sure you’ve discussed the plan first outside the covers, where there’s less pressure. “If you’ve had a conversation in the past, in a neutral location, and you’ve both expressed interest in lingerie, some light bondage, or a sex toy, then sure, definitely spring it on Valentine’s Day,” says Stubbs. Trust us, she won’t think it’s weird. “It’ll all fall in line with the whole super-romantic, lustful kind of night,” Stubbs adds. THE PLAN: Do plans even matter when you’ve just agreed to tackle a new page from the Kama Sutra? Forget leaving the house for a pricey dinner and instead cue up the SZA and set the mood with an indoor picnic in front of the fireplace, Smith suggests.

Homemade gift certificates

THE TALK: When you’ve been

YOU’RE

Picture frame (with the placeholder photo)

Lingerie

THE PLAN: Dopamine,

serotonin, and oxytocin— a cocktail of feel-good brain chemicals—are likely coursing through your veins during this phase, so you might want to go big. Before you ask John Legend to perform a private concert, check in with your partner—and yourself. “If you’re not the kind of person who’s going to stroll up with 24 long-stem red roses, then don’t,” says sexuality expert Megan Stubbs. “Do something that’s going to matter to her.” Start with a date that you two already like, but amp it up. Do you cook together? Gift her a Le Creuset and promise to make her dinner. A personalized present is worth a thousand John Legends.

YOU’RE A

Long-stem roses

Gold-flecked ice cream sundae

LAME-EXPENSIVE

...OR SCREW VALENTINE’S DAY AND CELEBRATE LUPERCALIA

MARRIED

together forever, it’s easy to think, What relationship benchmark haven’t we reached yet? It’s okay to use the day to toast each other and reflect on your successes as a couple over the past year, suggests Stubbs. ing the times you rocked it—like crushing it on the dance floor at her cousin’s wedding—makes you more likely to want to keep the good times going.

THE PLAN: Celebrating Valentine’s Day when you’re married is a built-in

date night and a welcome refuge from the kids. Give her something chic and sentimental, like a full-size bottle of the Le Labo shower gel she coveted from your last hotel stay. Then try something new. It doesn’t have to be skydiving; checking out that new cocktail spot, even if you’ve been together for years, can increase sexual desire, and in turn increase relationship satisfaction, according to new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Novel experiences with a long-term partner can help reignite ion and take you back to the puppy-love feelings you had when you first met.

On February 15, the ancient Romans didn’t give each other foil chocolates or red roses. Instead, they sacrificed goats and then priests ran around whipping women with leather thongs. (It was supposed to increase a woman’s fertility, or something.) No, you can’t smack your girlfriend’s rear in public—please never be that guy—but a little love tap on her back pocket during your walk from the parking lot to dinner is a hot way to get your Lupercalia on without earning funny looks from the restaurant hostess.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

61

LIFE

COOL DAD

Fatherhood, from the Sidelines Many parents coach their kid to athletic glory. SAM LIPSYTE’s approach? Leave that to people who know what they’re doing.

I

’M A S U B PAR soccer parent. I give

it my best. My best is maybe pretty lame. I come to my ten-year-old daughter’s games, talk to her about her practices, give her all of my love and . But other moms and dads spend hours with their kids streaming clips from the Premier League or the U. S. women’s team games, analyzing strategies, studying tactics. I would if I could. My daughter loves soccer, at least at the moment. (She seems to have a special drawer in her bureau just for her shin guards.) Sometimes she goes to her best friend’s house to watch games. There’s a soccer dad there who knows his stuff. She comes back brimming with the latest developments at Tottenham. I nod and try to keep up. My daughter’s coach forbids us parents to shout instructions from the sidelines. I’m relieved. I wouldn’t know what to yell, anyway. Vague exhortations are permitted, and I’m a master of those. When I encourage my daughter or her teammates, it’s usually some overexcited, half-garbled inanity like “Go-yeah!” or “Up-kick-now!” Thing is, I’m not some American lug who lacks experience with the beautiful game. I’m an American lug who grew up with it. 62

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

In our suburban New Jersey town in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there were these amazing soccer-mad dads, from Italy, from Ireland, from Armenia, who coached us in their beloved sport until it became ours too. I was a fullback on one of the town-league teams. And that’s really where the trauma began, because I was what you’d call a no-tool player, possessed of a stunning combination: physical slowness and zero feel for the game. Not only could I not keep up, but I was devoid of any sense of where the ball or the other players were going to be. I had no conception of space. My daughter’s coach has told her that she has good skills but needs to learn to use them in space. It’s something I’ve latched on to, and though I’d never shout it in public, in our apartment I repeat a mantra to my daughter many times a day: “Skills in space!” “Skills in space!” After a while she’ll roll her eyes, pat me on the shoulder as though to say: “Thanks for trying, kid.” At a certain point, I also felt it was import- + ant to share with her Sam Lipsyte some of my a ncient is the author of numerous novels. soccer pain. Like my His latest, Hark, is memory of one kid—let’s out January 15.

call him Diego. Diego was from Spain. I knew him a little from middle school. He was dashing and handsome in a distinctly European fashion, the kind of guy maybe destined to spend a lot of time on yachts, and he was a demon striker. I always dreaded the prospect of Diego charging down the field, weaving past everybody until it was up to me to contain him. It took all my energy just to stay in his vicinity, and once he got by me I’d be huffing and puffing behind him, whereupon he’d actually turn his head back, a gorgeous sneer on his face, and mimic my heavy breathing. Then he’d laugh, turn back toward the goal, and crank an effortless screamer into the corner of the net. After hearing this story, my daughter patted me on the shoulder as though to say: “That sucks for you.” But she didn’t roll her eyes. I’ve seen her struggle on the field, and I’ve seen her improve. I’ve also seen her go out in the rain by herself with a ball to practice, to do drills, conditioning. I never did that. So in a way, I deserved what I got from the cruel and beautiful strikers and sweepers of northern New Jersey. My daughter loves the camaraderie of her team and being out on the field. She is learning all the important lessons of our empowered soccer-girl nation about teamwork, fairness, and healthy competition. I’m learning lessons, too. I used to be much more anxious about my dearth of expertise in an activity my daughter adores. But let’s face it—I can’t make slime or a TikTok video, or do her math homework, either. I coach her every day in many aspects of her life, but for some of her endeavors, it’s best to lean out, let others lead her where she needs to go. My job in this instance is to be the moron on the edge of the pitch, full of dumb love, cheering her in victory and comforting her in defeat. Call it the goodenough sports dad. My daughter’s progress is palpable, too, thanks to excellent coaching and her own hard work. Last year she was afraid of the ball. Last week she notched her first goal of the season. It was a thrilling moment for me, watching her put the ball in the net and run back in ecstasy toward her teammates. I don’t think my squeals of “Shoot-go!” helped her score, but I hope she felt my pride radiating from the sideline. And I hope that even in her triumph she retains her empathy, that she does not become another Diego. But if she does, at least she’ll be our Diego. ILLUSTRATION BY MARK MATCHO

Financial wellness means planning for their college. And your retirement.

In 18 years, four years at a public college is expected to exceed $200,000.* At the same time, you’ll need to plan for a retirement that could last decades. Let’s make sure your biggest financial goals never have to come at the expense of one another. Connect with us online, by phone, video, or in person. You’ll be able to access our online tools and financial professionals, and take the next step to better financial wellness. We’ll help you create a personalized financial roap to meet your college and retirement goals.

Get started today at prudential.com/PlanForBoth

*

College Board, Trends in College Pricing, 2017.

The Prudential Insurance Company of America, Newark, NJ. 1007541-00001-00

LIFE WINTER SURVIVAL QUIZ

5. It’s freezing in here! Do you turn up the heat or grab a sweater?

SEE WHO WILL WIN! Take this quiz to find out if your get-through-to-spring

A

B

Crank it up

Wrap it up

Answer: B Putting on a chunky knit is a double play: You trim your heating bill and maybe your circumference, too. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University found that men who slept at 66°F had a 42 percent increase in brown-fat volume compared with when they slept at 75°F. Brown fat is a potentially “good guy” type of body fat that can help burn calories.

EDITED BY SCARLETT WRENCH 1. You’ve been rushing from house to car to office and back without seeing the sun for days, and you’re a little down. You should grab . . . A

Five cups of milk

B

15 eggs

C

A five-ounce salmon fillet

Answer: A, B, or C Each of the above will meet your daily need of vitamin D, which many of us become deficient in over the winter. Although we would advise forgoing the 15-egg omelet in favor of the salmon fillet.

2. When you have a mild cold, you go to . . . A

Bed

B

The kitchen

C

The yoga mat

Answer: C, as long as your symptoms are above the neck and you don’t have a fever. Mild exercise (on your own mat, in your own home, thanks!) can help open your nasal ages and temporarily relieve congestion.

64

A

Your 10K time gets faster Your 10K time gets slower

B

Sit next to the fire, as one does

C

Hit the gym to work out the muscles you didn’t use skiing

Answer: B Relax next to the fire— it can decrease blood pressure, according to University of Alabama researchers.

4. The best way to warm up if you feel numbness due to mild frostbite is with . . . A

A fireplace

B

A warm bath

C

A foot massage

Answer: B Hit the bath. Overstimulation of the skin—with hot water or intense rubbing—as well as exposure to direct heat can lead to tissue damage. Soak in a warmish bath (99 to 104°F) for about 30 minutes, or until your skin returns to its usual color or loses its numbness.

C

You can’t wait to get home

Answer: A Your heart rate will be lower in cooler weather than on scorching midsummer runs since your heart doesn’t have to work so hard to regulate your temperature. That means better race times.

JAN/FEB ’19 9. Where should you put the blame for how tight your pants are this month? A

The gym hip you used exactly once since October

B

Playoff wings, Super Bowl wings, Pro Bowl wings, checking-Gronk’sInstagram wings

C

Winter itself

Answer: A, B, and C Sure, winter so far has probably included more calories and less exercise. But a lack of sunlight could also be packing on pounds. A Canadian study (for winter studies, always look to the Canadians . . .) found that insufficient sunlight may inspire you to store fat. Try at least getting out at lunch.

10. A mug of mulled wine could sink your risk of a cold by . . .

Sun Lee (kettlebell), Adam Nickel/Synergy Art (man skiing), Peter Crowther/Début Art (globe)

7. If seasonal affective disorder makes you want to scarf down carbs, the best time to eat them is . . .

A

First thing in the morning

B

At dinnertime

C

All the time

Answer: B Carbs boost the activity of feel-good brain chemicals and can offset depressive symptoms. Concentrating your intake in the evening may also sleep, unless you’re getting those carbs from potpie crust or French toast or . . . potpie-crust French toast (how bad could it be?!), in which case you have a different set of problems. Keep your mood and your body feeling great at the same time by getting nighttime carbs from brown rice, sweet potatoes, and other whole foods.

8. The best thing to cover when you go to sleep on a cold night is . . . A

Your head

B

Your feet

C

Your webcam, because who knows?!

Answer: B At night, blood vessels in your extremities dilate as part of getting you ready for sleep. Socks may help your body get to its nighttime state faster: In one study, people wearing socks fell asleep 7½ minutes faster and slept 32 minutes longer than when they slept sans socks.

A

10%

B

20%

C

30%

Answer: C Consuming flavonoids, compounds found in red wine (and in many fruits and vegetables), could reduce your risk of catching a cold by about 30 percent, according to a study from New Zealand. Flavonoids are thought to boost immune function. Of course, washing your hands also helps slash the risk.

HOW MANY DID YOU GET RIGHT? 0 to 3 Let’s get you next to that fire...which we’ve set up outside in the sun...and bring some mulled wine. If your mood is as dark as the mornings, start your day with a nice, juicy orange: Its vitamin C may help alleviate the body’s response to stress.

4 to 7 Lean in to the cold. (Not too far.)

8 to 10 Can we borrow your socks?

Escape your overheated home and strap on some snowshoes. Participating in nature-focused leisure activities (hiking would work too) can enhance your psychological health and well-being.

You’re handling the big freeze, so let’s put that bravado to the test: A PLOS One study found that people who finished their showers with a blast of cold water took 29 percent fewer sick days. Deep breath.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

65

OUR VETERANS

Fast-Absorbing Whey Peptides Micro-Filtered to Remove Excess Fat & Carbs Best-In-Class Taste Profile Grab a Bottle, Experience the Results and This Important Cause!

This fall, MuscleTech® is partnering with Homes For Our Troops (www.hfotusa.org) – a nonprofit organization that builds and donates specially adapted custom homes for our nation’s most severely injured post-9/11 Veterans. In honor of this special partnership, MuscleTech® has created a Limited Edition Bonus Size, with military-themed camouflage packaging, for the top-selling Pro Series Gold 100% Whey Protein.

QUALITY

DELICIOUS TASTE

AMAZING PRICE

Find out more about Homes For Our Troops at MuscleTech® is America’s #1 Selling Bodybuilding Supplement Brand based on cumulative wholesale dollar sales 2001 to present. Facebook logo is owned by Facebook Inc. Read the entire label and follow directions. © 2018

www.hfotusa.org

MIND

75

..............................

78

.........................................

GO A HEA D A ND MEDITATE . ON LY TA K ES A MIN U TE . W E N EED TO TA LK A BOUT K A N Y E

Jim Krantz

What you need to know in order to get on, hold tight, and power through it all.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

67

What Is It and Why Do You Need It?

PEOPLE WITH GRIT

GRIT IS ALL AROUND US. At work retreats. On the basket-

WHEN WE train counselors for crisis work, one of the things we talk about often is that you need to take care of yourself if you want to be able to take care of others. If you let your own self-care become secondary, you’re not going to be able to serve people as well. The things other people bring to you are going to become too much to bear. If I’ve been working with hurricane survivors or witnesses to a shooting, at the end of my time that day, I’m going to sit down with another counselor and say, “This is what I did; this is how I’m feeling about it.” That allows another person to lay eyes on it and weigh in on whether I need to take a step back. It’s using somebody else to help me be able to myself. It also makes sure that we’re keeping an eye on what works well for the people who need our help, because that’s ultimately my focus. I want to make sure I’m bringing them the best that I have.

ball court. In your grandmother’s book club. It’s a buzzword now, the parlance of education advocates and business-school books in the past several years thanks to the work of Angela Duckworth, Ph.D.: “a combination of ion and perseverance for a singularly important goal.” Wait. That’s grit?! But that’s so . . . big and profound and lofty. We think grit is small and dirty and face-in-the-mud. It’s situational courage. When you need it, you need it right now. But how do you access it? How do the people who grit it out for a living do the things that seem undoable— too hard, too messy, too much? Here’s how.

SIX-TIME IRONMAN Triathlon world champion Mark Allen once completed a race in eight hours and seven minutes. That included 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking, and a full 26.2-mile marathon—averaging one mile every 3.5 minutes. Finishing wasn’t, it goes without saying, easy. But before he ever finished a race, he had to start training, and that can be just as difficult. Here’s how he pushed Play: ASS. IN. SEAT.

“The grit is in the very beginning. It’s in taking the first step. You need to give yourself a little block of time to dive in—to be able to say to yourself, ‘I am going to do this, I am now sitting down, I’m starting on it.’ ”

A (TRUNCATED) CULTURAL HISTORY OF GRIT 68

FACE YOUR FAULTS

“You need to have awareness of the things you draw back from—the more you’re aware of this happening, over time the less frequently you’ll draw back. Start small: the simple practice of affirming to yourself that you have the ability to do the things that are difficult.” AAAAAND REPEAT

John Henry, folk legend, outraces a drilling machine.

1870

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

GERARD LAWSON, PH.D., an associate professor in the counselor-education program at Virginia Tech (as told to Matt Goulet)

“We often resist starting something, but once you’re in and doing it, it’s almost always fulfilling. Every morning, I go exercise. My whole day has huge potential because I’ve done that. When it comes to doing things over and over, think of it this way: If you do one run in your life, you’ll feel good, but if you do a thousand runs, it’ll completely transform you.”

Valentina Tereshkova makes 48 painful orbits around Earth as the first woman in space.

Jackie Robinson makes his Major League debut.

1944

1947

1963

Blank Archives/Getty Images (Henry), Everett (Elliott, Wayne, Eastwood, Bridges), MLB Photos/Getty Images (Robinson), Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images (Tereshkova), Spencer Platt/Newsmakers/Getty Images (Blaine), Gretel Daugherty/Getty Images (Ralston)

The Crisis Counselor

SAY YOUR boss hates you.

You’ve been professionally humiliated. Or you’ve gone viral like a midmarket weatherman biffing an in-the-field report. You’ve still got to show up the next day. Or, more likely, work straight-up sucks. What do you do when you are in a crummy situation that is ultimately negative and harmful? TALK TO YOURSELF

Jim Krantz (cowboy)

Stop and ask yourself one simple question: “What do I need?” Posing the question to yourself gives you the courage to do whatever you’ve got to do next, whether that’s standing up and saying no or finding ways to get a new job. It’s part of something called self-comion, giving yourself the encouragement you’d offer a friend in a similar situation. AND BUCK UP

“WHY DID I even start this if I

The trick is to think about the best coaches you’ve had in your life or, better, Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights— the ones who build you up with a certain recognition of your limits and encourage you to work past what you perceived them to be. If you can get yourself in a conversation with your inner Coach Taylor, the setbacks will seem more like steps on the way to something better. —CHRISTOPHER GERMER, PH.D., a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Mindful Self-Comion program

wasn’t gonna finish?” I begin every single workout thinking about this. The internal voices are at their chattiest in the final minutes or reps of any workout, and it’s convenient as hell to listen to them and mail things in. So I head them off before they even get going: “I’ve started this workout, so I’m going to own the finish.” It’s when your lungs are burning and your heart’s beating out of your throat and your muscles are on fire that you’re getting the most out of the session anyway. The body needs to be challenged to adapt (and gain size,

David Blaine spends 63 hours encased in a block of ice.

strength, and endurance), and its greatest challenge is the final moments of a workout. Struggling through the end is why you’re in the gym in the first place. Grit begets more grit. Once committed to the finish, I think of “slow aggression” and keep plowing forward. Take one deep breath, then muscle out a few good reps or seconds of work. Then take another deep breath and bang out a few more. You’re pacing out the hardest part of the workout so you can do good hard work again later. That’s what keeps you in shape. —EBENEZER SAMUEL

Aron Ralston gets trapped in a Utah canyon for five days and cuts off his own right arm to escape.

Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood.

2008 MEN’S HEALTH

2010 / January • February 2019

69

PEOPLE WITH GRIT

ONE FINAL PEP TALK: To stop

QUIT LIKE YOU’D START

doing something that ultimately isn’t all that good for you, but in the moment is just amazing, sucks. And requires a form of perseverance that isn’t that different from getting through, say, a triathlon or finishing a tough workout.

Putting down the doughnuts. Dialing back on the porn. It takes mental planning. Carve out a moment to acknowledge what you’re doing. Note how it’s affecting you. (“It’s bad for me if I do this; it’s good for me that I don’t.”) And push on through.

I’VE HAD CASES with very difficult patients, unruly patients, where we had multiple security guards at the door, restraining them. I go in there with no ego and a little bit of patience, and I sit down with this particular person. First of all, I show them I understand where they’re coming from. You walk into a room where there are security guards, and some part of me says, “You know, this person is probably more scared than anything.” We learn techniques about sitting down at a patient’s eye level. I tell them, “I’m the person in charge of what happens to you today, and if I’m on your side, you’re gonna be okay.” But I only give them one chance. It’s amazing the amount of de-escalation that occurs when you give them a little bit of empowerment. And give them a sense of humanity. It’d be easier for me to just tell security to restrain them. But then I’d lose a little part of my humanity, because I know I could have done better. In order to be able to cope, you have to expend emotional energy. In the moment of a tough case, it’s understood that you’re in a difficult environment. You can’t let your ego get in the way. Patient care comes first. And it’s about not beating yourself up over the fact that you weren’t the superhero everyone wanted you to be. As much as I talk about difficult cases or patients and having to deal with them, it really is the most enjoyable part of the job. Overall, it’s much more stressful to keep up on the charting. Me taking care of a sick patient is exactly where I want to be. It’s like a professional athlete on the basketball court.

HAFEZ BAZZI, M.D., an ER doctor at Ascension St. John Hospital in Detroit (as told to Matt Goulet)

NBA All-Stars listen to Fergie’s rendition of the national anthem.

2015

2018

2018

Jim Krantz (cowboys), Everett (DiCaprio), Janette Hil/Getty Images (bear), Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images (NBA All-Stars), Len Redkoles/NHLI/Getty Images (Gritty)

The ER Doctor

Discover your personal “secret weight-loss window” and lose up to 15 pounds in just 28 days.

We’ve taken the best parts of low-carb and low-fat diet principles to create the ideal weight-loss plan. The best part: you’ll lose weight and hold on to your hard-earned muscle. It’s rapid fat loss made easy. Available everywhere books are sold.

100% AL MU

R U T A N

SCLE!

Build a medal-winning physique—or a body that looks great in a T-shirt—the safe and healthy way. World champion bodybuilder and coach Tyler English delivers the plan and insider tips you need to achieve the sculpted, fully ripped body you want.

MIND

A New Year’s Guide to Daily(ish) Meditation One minute. Most days. Big results. BY DAN HARRIS

Peshkov/Adobe Stock

T

HE NEW YEAR is upon us, a time

when many of us will inevitably go about making, and then abandoning, absurdly ambitious resolutions—to do more burpees, to homebrew kombucha, to easily reach ketosis or achieve a permanent in-box of zero. Let me instead propose an eminently doable resolution: Try meditating for one minute on most days—for j u s t one month. Forming healthy habits is hard, and there’s a reason most of our resolutions ultimately go down in flames. We may be wired to fail. Evolution has bequeathed us a brain that optimizes for survival, not long-term health planning. Natural selection primed us for detecting threats and finding food and sexual partners, not for flossing our teeth. The fact that we are up against this evolutionary challenge is why I like this modest, monthlong proposal. Two aspects make it easy to adopt: First, aiming to meditate most days, rather than every day, is a good goal. Consistency counts—the more often you meditate, the easier it gets and the deeper and more enduring the benefits— but if you miss a day, your inner critic won’t have a chance to call you a failure. I call this approach “daily-ish.” It has elasticity, or “psychological flexibility,” a key concept from behavior-change research, which can help lead to an abiding habit, be it a meditation practice, a new gym routine, or a commitment to learn Esperanto. Second, one minute is a supremely low bar. The proposition of a single minute is uniquely unintimidating. What’s more, MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

75

MIND YOUR MEDITATION MASTER

it’s scalable. After one minute of meditation, people often think to themselves: I’m already here; might as well keep going a bit. As the meditation teacher Cory Muscara explains, this is a key moment, because you’re moving from “extrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you feel like you have to) to the more powerful “intrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you want to). And the second you opt in for more meditation, you’re doing it out of actual interest, which makes it much more likely to have a lasting effect. My company, 10% Happier, has been testing an annual monthlong “Mindful Minute” challenge with employees from your friendly neighborhood trillion-dollar company, Apple. The goal is for participants to log at least one mindful minute for 25 out of the 30 days, enabling them to get a taste for how mindfulness can benefit their lives, while also giving them freedom to miss about a day a week without feeling like a failure. (You don’t have to work at Apple to participate. We’ve unlocked a bunch of oneminute meditations for you to use for free at 10percenthappier.com/menshealth.) Even with that low threshold, there are more strategic ways to make a new meditation habit stick:

One way to create that kind of ability is to a community of some sort. It can be as simple as just getting a few of your friends together and starting. Another option is to a regular sitting group at your local meditation center. Many major cities have meditation centers where you can drop in, such as MNDFL in New York City or Unplug in L. A. There are also Buddhist centers, which may be a bit scary for some, but in my experience they go light on the religion and tend to give good meditation instruction. Check it out for yourself, however. Or form your own sitting group. I’ve found that hanging out with other meditators sets up a kind of HOV-lane effect. Being around people who take the meditative principles seriously and are endeavoring to apply these concepts in their own lives can create positive peer pressure. Or as meditation teacher Jeff Warren says, “It sort of normalizes the whole weird thing.”

FOCUS ON THE BENEFITS In many ways, we are all like rats in a maze, constantly pressing the levers that deliver food pellets to us. Behavior-change science strongly suggests that the best way to ensure a consistent meditation habit is to identify where and how the practice is giving you pellets. Just like rats, we are

Dan Harris is a coanchor of ABC’s Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America. He’s the author of 10% Happier and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.

much more likely to keep doing something if it feels good and we get something out of it. There are at least two levels to this. The first level is to pay attention to how the act of meditating in itself can be pleasurable. The other level is to notice the benefits as they arise in the rest of your life, in of both inner weather and outer comportment. I’ve found meditation can make me feel better and act better. I believe that meditation is the über resolution—the healthy habit par excellence— because a regular dose of mindfulness can give you the clarity and sanity to figure out which other resolutions to pursue, and how best to do so. Give it a try. For the past few years, whenever I’ve spoken publicly about meditation, I have been issuing the following challenge: Try meditation for a month, and if it does nothing for you, hit me up on Twitter and tell me I’m a moron. During this time, lots of people have called me a moron on Twitter—but never for this.

Some people find that having a set time every day—right before bed, first thing in the morning, just after a workout—helps establish a habit. Scientists who study habit formation talk about “cue, routine, reward.” You can experiment with constructing a cue-routine-reward loop that gets you to meditate. For example, “After I park my car [cue], I will meditate for five minutes [routine], and I’ll feel a little calmer and more mindful [reward].” Repeat this loop to ingrain the habit. You can even put your daily meditation session in your calendar, which you may find helpful. That said, if, like me, you have an unpredictable schedule, thinking strategically might mean trying to fit your meditation in whenever and wherever you can.

MAKE YOURSELF ABLE Some people may not institute a healthy habit on their own, but they will do it when other people are holding them able. 76

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

WHAT HAPPENS DURING ONE MINUTE OF MEDITATION

60

A 60-SECOND reset is intended to shift your attention from your mental preoccupations to your breath. Here’s a one-minute meditation you can use anywhere, anytime—after your morning coffee, after you park your car at work, after you put your head down on the pillow. We call it Ten Breaths. Simple as it sounds. Wherever you are, in any situation or mental state, close your eyes and count ten long, slow breaths. To begin, stop, no matter where you are. Bring your attention to

breathing. Count “one” as you inhale. Imagine breathing out any tension as you exhale. Count “two” on the next inhale. See if you can make it to ten without losing your focus. Explore how fully you can feel each breath, letting the world around you fade out a bit. If you get distracted and forget where you are, start over from where you got lost, always with a sense of humor about your gnatlike attention span. That’s it. Want more? Try it again. And again . . .

Kyle Hilton (Harris)

THINK STRATEGICALLY ABOUT YOUR SCHEDULE

WEIGHT LOSS made easy through the SCIENCE of THERMODYNAMICS

FWJ[TQZYNTSFW^SJ\UWTLWFRYMFY\NQQMJQU^TZGZWSYMJKFY FSIPJJUNYTKK Available everywhere books are sold.

“Crazy” Misunderstood JOSHUA DAVID STEIN unpacks what “crazy” really means

in a world where it’s everywhere.

A

S FAR as spectacle goes, the

image of Kanye West embracing Donald Trump in the Oval Office this past October fell somewhere between the Krispy Kreme backflip Vine and the series finale of The Sopranos. It was confusing. It was compelling. It was unhinged. It was, in short, irresistible. The rapper’s widely broadcast ten-minute soliloquy was as rambling as it was enticing, touching on everything from male energy to Montessori to the 13th Amendment. West in the West Wing was the perfect storm of celebrity, power, and—for lack of a better word—content. You would not be alone if you periodically said, “Man, he’s crazy!” as you watched. 78

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

And you wouldn’t be wrong, either. In fact, you might be a little too right. West, who not too long ago discussed his diagnosis of bipolar disorder with the world, s a list of celebrities who are open about their struggles with mental health and also struggle with their mental health openly. They include SNL’s Pete Davidson, who courageously (and hilariously) mined his borderline-personality-disorder diagnosis for material before engaging in a public, brief, and somewhat torrid love affair with Ariana Grande; Tesla cofounder Elon Musk, who tweeted about the corrosive effects of stress on his mental health even as he bore those out in a series of ill-advised (and possibly illegal) tweets

about his company; and Roseanne Barr, who was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder years before she sent a racist tweet in May that scotched her comeback show. Their struggles have played out in the white water of popular culture, and it’s been a crazy ride indeed. But when used to describe a person, crazy is halfway between a common adjective and an informal diagnosis. Toss it out with little thought and it’s fun and flirty. Think about it more—what it really means, what’s really going on when we say it, and what’s going on with those we say it about—and the word becomes heavier and heavier. For the millions of Americans who, like me, live with mental illness, crazy is a heartbreaking and terrifying reality. Living in the tide pools of sanity, I can confidently say that whatever glimpse of crazy you catch in public is vastly outstripped by the private suffering you’ll never see. That’s the suffering that rends the fabric of primary relationships, that barges into the cockpit of the self and messes with the dials; it’s a suffering that doesn’t care if you’ve got a blue verified badge on

Gary Gershoff/WireImage

MIND

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Twitter, a sitcom, Yeezys, or millions in the bank. If you know what that suffering is like, there’s no way to just sit and watch a public meltdown with popcorn. But that’s not to say we should simply look away, change the channel, or fasten ourselves to a different trending hashtag. Any of these episodes can be an opportunity to spur a genuine and much-needed discussion about mental health. Granted, this is a whole lot less fun, and it pries open a can of morally slippery worms. Does the fact that Roseanne has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder absolve her of her racism? Does the fact that Kanye may be bipolar render his opinions about minorities invalid? This conversation becomes even more difficult in light of the silence of mental-health professionals, who, bound by what’s called the Goldwater rule, are barred from offering a professional opinion about the mental health of individuals they have not examined personally. Thus an illness goes unnamed and, in the silence, dangerous and dismissive confusion grows. These incidents and others like them also provide an opportunity to develop empathy. You don’t have to suffer from mental illness like I do to have comion for those who do. There’s a Buddhist practice, meant to foster loving-kindness for all creatures, in which one visualizes that all sentient beings were, at some point, your mother or will, at some point, become your mother. Now, you might have a complicated relationship with your mother—I know I do—and you might not believe in rebirth. But that way of thinking, of considering another person as a loved one, even for a second, is like catching a glimpse of a set of keys that fell into the sidewalk grate. It’s heartbreaking. It’s eye-opening. Ultimately, no one can deny the brilliance of the sparks as someone—especially a high-profile someone—runs off the rails. Such a spectacle will never be ignored and probably shouldn’t be. But try not to marvel at the sparks and then ignore the enger in danger. What’s there isn’t just a celebrity self-immolating but a person suffering, too. Take it from one who has also suffered. Crazy deserves our comion, not just our clicks, and we owe it to ourselves to see through the spectacle to the human—on both sides of the screen.

A PERSONAL MISSION TO CHANGE THE CONVERSATION In the days following the West-Trump tête-à-tête, Charlamagne Tha God, a radio host and the best-selling author of Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me, made headlines for canceling a conversation with Kanye West about mental health. CTG, as he is known, Instagrammed that the New York Times–sponsored event would be “a total distraction from the point of the convo which is to eradicate the stigma of mental health especially in the black community.” But as someone who has suffered from anxiety for years, CTG remained eager to keep the discussion alive. We spoke to him just before he boarded a flight to Los Angeles from New York. He was, perhaps understandably, anxious. —J. D. S. No matter who you are, famous or not, it seems that one of the difficulties of discussing one’s own mental health is that it makes you vulnerable to say, “Yes, I need help.” Yeah, man. I wrote a book about it and it’s not even a conversation I’m comfortable having yet. But I recognized that things could be better for me. All that talk with friends and family is cool. All the self-help books are cool. All the talk with spiritual advisors is cool. But sometimes you have to sit down and talk to a professional. One of the overall stigmas in the African-American community in particular is that therapy seems to be considered a “white-person thing.” Was that part of your experience? That’s part of it. The first time I heard the word therapy was on Frasier. I had no idea that there was someone out there who could help me organize my feelings, who I could go to and chop it up with when I was feeling overwhelmed. If I knew about black therapists, maybe I would have felt more comfortable talking to them. But then again, who wants to share their deepest, darkest secrets with a stranger, no matter what color they are?

Given your role in the hip-hop community, do you see mental-health issues rippling under the surface? Of course—we just didn’t know what it was. It was just like the Geto Boys sang: “Your mind’s playing tricks on ya.” There are a lot of guys out here struggling with depression and anxiety; we chalk it up to the lifestyle. If you’re out here doing dirt, doing things you have no business doing, whether it’s being in the streets, packing guns, or whatever, there’s danger and fear that comes with that. But what if you don’t live the lifestyle anymore and you still feel that way? What spurred you to cancel the talk with Kanye West this past October? The conversation should be that Kanye needs to deal with his mental-health issues, that he needs to sit down and figure it out. We help reinforce stigmas when we act like we don’t hear this person crying out for help. What I told Kanye is that nothing is more powerful than two brothers having a talk about mental-health issues, but I don’t think you’re ready to have that conversation if you aren’t dealing with your own mentalhealth issues.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

79

W H AT I T M E A N S TO

You ready? Because The Punisher’s Jon Bernthal is about to school you. Actually, scratch that—he’s late for his kid’s soccer game.

BY MOLLY KNIGHT PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

81

THE SUN HAS ALMOST SET on a warm

ask him if this is the only adjustment he’s had to make to fill Iacocca’s shoes. He laughs. Then he says he wanted the part badly, but he jumped into filming just two days after wrapping season 2 of The Punisher (which will be released on Netflix in mid-January) and felt like, well, a superhero out of water. “At the center of this movie is this man’s dream,” says Bernthal. “When [Iacocca] comes into an idea, it’s just like, How can we make this work? It’s so different from Frank Castle, who literally lives in darkness and is not interested in even getting through the day. He’s interested in the momentary quieting of the noise.” Bernthal says he felt intimidated and scared those first several days on the set. “One of my best friends, Sean Carrigan, came to set after my first week, and he saw how I was and he said, ‘Hey, man, don’t forget who the fuck you are. You’re Henry Bernthal’s father, you’re Billy Bernthal’s father, you’re Adeline I’ve spent the past week holed up in an underground On page 80: Bernthal’s father. You are who you are, and you’re lair with Bernthal, sort of, watching and rewatching his Denim jacket with shearling collar ($695) what you’ve been through. Do not let this fuck you devastating turn as Frank Castle, aka the Punisher—a by Coach 1941; coach .com. Cotton stretch up.’ ” He shakes his head at the memory. “I came combat-veteran action hero whose superpower is his quest back the next Monday a different man.” for justice fueled by the anguish and rage he feels after his T-shirt ($59) by Michael Kors; michaelkors.com. “A different man” is a trope of most Bernthal wife and children are slaughtered in front of him—so I Jeans ($148) by Double Eleven; doubleeleven profiles, and though he describes himself that way like my chances of being able to spot him in this traveling .co. Chronograph watch to me more than once, he insists he’s sick of his circus. I’m confident I’ve memorized each tiny jut of way- by Emporio Armani. own personal street-fighting-kid-turned-leadingward bone in his nose, which has been broken 14 times. When I don’t find Bernthal in his trailer, I walk toward the starting man narrative. Yes, he got into a lot of scraps as a teen in Washline and look for the biggest, most tatted-up loner. So I’m shocked ington, D. C., in the ’90s, and later, after he moved to L. A. “But when a reasonably sized dude with a side part and an A-list smile I’m so bored with that story of my life,” Bernthal says. “I put that waves me down; sticks his hand out; says, “Hi, I’m Jon! So happy guy to bed a long time ago. I’m a father and I’m a husband and you made it!”; and begins introducing me to half the crew. Castle is I’m an artist, and I take my work seriously.” So, back to the work. The scenes Bernthal is filming today are a man of few words and even fewer friends who communicates with his eyes and his fists. The guy who plays him responds to every one of mostly reaction shots in which he says nothing. Cars whiz by my questions with thoughtful, multiple-paragraph soliloquies and on the track, he stands against a fence watching them, and the cameras watch him. After the crew finishes with close-ups of his is bros with everyone on the set. Bernthal is a day from wrapping the three-month shoot of his face, we head 100 or so yards to his trailer. His personal effects latest movie, an epic drama about Ford’s push to build a race car are his boxing gloves and a water bowl for his pit bull Bam Bam, that could finally beat the mythic Italian automaker Ferrari at the and that’s it. His mini-fridge is stocked with LaCroix and nothLe Mans world championship in . The odds are good that the ing else. He’s hoping shooting will wrap in the next hour so that film—directed by James Mangold (Logan) and also starring Matt he can jam out of here and drive back to his home in the sleepy Damon and Christian Bale—will boost Bernthal’s profile when it hippie town of Ojai to make it to his kid’s soccer game. premieres this summer. In the film, Bernthal plays Lee Iacocca, the American auto BERNTHAL’S CR A Z Y work schedule—The Punisher’s second executive who brought sexy, fast cars like the Ford Mustang to season shot for six months in New York—means that he misses baby boomers as they came of age. It’s a huge departure from the more games than he would like. (His wife, Erin, brings the kids brass-knuckled characters the actor has typically portrayed, such to New York each summer when they’re on break.) The distance as a veteran who gets beaten to death trying to prevent his girlfriend gnaws at him. He tells me he draws on the pain of being separated from being raped (Wind River) and a rodeo cowboy grappling with from his own family to play the grieving Frank Castle. “I know early-onset Parkinson’s disease (Sweet Virginia). As I shake his there’s a ticking clock on this career, and one day the phone is hand, I notice stage makeup caked on his right wrist to cover up a gonna stop ringing,” he says. “Above all, I have a responsibility tattoo, which bears the name of his acting teacher Alma Becker. I to take care of my family, but it’s hard because it takes me away 82

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Styling: Ted Stafford, prop styling: faethgruppe, grooming: Sussy Campos/Art Department, tailoring: Saira Huff/Lars Nord, production: Barbie Duarte/MJ68

October evening, and I can’t find Jon Bernthal anywhere. I’m walking along a racetrack against an exploding lilac-andorange sky in the middle of the desert two hours outside Los Angeles. The sound of revving engines is so loud that yelling his name is futile. A few hundred people buzz about, carrying cartons of cigarettes and department-store dinner jackets and porkpie hats and scripts and lights and everything else a summer-tentpole budget can buy to transform our present-day digital hellscape into sweet, simple 1966.

from the people I love. . . . If I’m going to be away from my kids, I want one day for them to look at it and say, ‘Well, Dad was gone, but he was giving everything he had.’” He makes a fist with his right hand to emphasize that last point, and I notice a jagged scar just below his thumb. “That’s where I broke my hand on the first day of filming the first fight scene of the year for The Punisher 2,” he says. “I kept on fighting, and on day two I tore ligaments, then on day three I dislocated it and had to get emergency surgery.” He tells me he was knocked unconscious during filming, and rolls up his shirtsleeves to reveal several more scars up and down his arms. “Was it the smartest thing to keep fighting with a broken hand? Maybe not. Maybe I could have been out for a shorter time. But I look at filming a scene like that the same way I look at a boxing match. I’m not gonna be the one to say I’m gonna walk away.” THE JOURNEY toward becoming Henry’s and Billy’s

and Adeline’s father and ing who the fuck he is almost didn’t happen. After leaving Skidmore College in 1999, Bernthal took Becker’s advice and ed the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia. While there, he boxed, took ballet, and played catcher on a pro baseball team. He lived in squalor and listened to a lot of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. On the night he returned to D. C., the following year, his friends threw him a welcome-home party at a local bar. He noticed one of his buddies talking to two women, so he went over to josh him. “I came over and was just rudely messing around, and I know this is the corniest thing in the world, but when I actually saw Erin, it was literally like angels were singing,” he says. “I had never seen anyone so beautiful.” He wound up talking to the young Shirt ($385) by Eleventy; Bernthal as a one-note tough-guy performer. eleventy.it. Jeans ($675) Georgetown University Hospital trauma nurse for by Dolce & Gabbana; He’s best when he’s at his most vulnerable: ner45 minutes. They started dating, but he was only in dolcegabbana.it. Suede vous about being around a woman he might like, boots ($395) by Allen his early 20s and had no idea where it would go. When scared he’s going to screw up as a surrogate dad Edmonds; allenedmonds Bernthal moved to Boston to study acting at Harvard, .com. Heritage Series to a boy mourning the loss of his father, flashing Erin followed him, taking a job as a nurse at Mass Gen- watch ($850) by Movado; back to the horrifying carnage he’s witnessed. movado.com. eral. After they moved to L. A., there was a brief break in Bernthal says he has a collection of music related their relationship when Bernthal “did a bunch of dumb to his wife and kids, and listening to it gets him stuff” and Erin dumped him and moved to San Francisco. into that dark Frank Castle headspace. He uses it selectively Whenever he didn’t have auditions, the devastated actor would and says even talking about it makes him want to throw up— drive up to the Bay Area and put flowers and poems on her car. Then like this second. To burrow into Castle’s psyche, Bernthal has one day when he thought she might be softening, he was able to also become close with a number of tip-of-the-spear Special rustle up two tickets to see Willie Nelson at the Fillmore. “I snuck Forces veterans who have shared what it’s like to live with PTSD backstage. I found this beautiful postcard and wrote Willie this and what it really means to come home. “I know how much this long letter and rolled him a beautiful t and told him the situ- character means to people,” he says. “The fact that people in the ation with me and my woman,” says Bernthal. “I told him she’s a military have worn that skull into battle and fought and died for good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin’ man, and I asked this country really means a lot to me.” him to play this one song ‘Always on My Mind’ for us, and he did.” The Punisher, of course, operates under a strict moral code. That night they got back together for good. But Bernthal understands how imperative it is in American A superhero in the Marvel universe is the role of a lifetime for society right now to separate fact from fiction, and it’s part of any actor, especially for a man like Bernthal, who in a different why he’s reluctant to glorify the street fights he got into when life might have been a professional boxer. But the thing I like best he was younger. “Our country is being inundated by this false about The Punisher is that it’s a searing meditation on loss; each machismo and people who talk tough and have never actually episode goes deeper than the one before it in exploring the trouble fought for anything in their life,” he says. “I’m afraid patriothat humans, particularly men, have in accessing their emotions tism and masculinity are being confused and bastardized in and cauterizing their wounds. It would be a mistake to dismiss a way where it’s just become bravado and bluster. I’ve boxed MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

83

Rapid Fire in gyms all over this country and the world. And through that journey, I learned the loudest guy in the gym is always the one you don’t have to worry about.” When I ask him how he and his wife are raising their seven- and five-year-old sons in a culture currently reckoning with masculinity, he says the role of father is the most important job he’ll ever have. Henry and Billy, he says, walk three-year-old Adeline to school every day and carry her bag. They’ve also been doing jujitsu since they were two, because Bernthal wants his boys to be able to handle themselves, to protect their own families and anyone else who might need to be defended from bad guys. “By the way, I want them to learn how to play piano and do their schoolwork with the exact same level of fierceness,” he adds. “Whatever they do in this world, I’m okay with it, as long as they go full bore. That’s the real challenge of fatherhood, to try to divorce yourself from your own bullshit and to realize I want these kids to be better than me. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes I did.” During the weekend he took to sort himself out after that rough first week of filming the Fordversus-Ferrari movie, he realized Iacocca wasn’t alien to him. “I see a lot of my old man in him,” says Bernthal. “He’s just as strong and tough as any soldier or cop that I would have played, but his strength comes from his integrity and his honesty and the fact that he can be counted on and his unwillingness to give up.”

FAVORITE EXERCISE?

“pouring love into our Thermal crew-neck daughter every step of shirt ($30) by Levi’s; levi.com. Jeans ($675) the way.” She has since by Dolce & Gabbana; made a full recovery. dolcegabbana.it. Suede boots ($365) “People t a l k ab out by Timberland; bravery like fake macho timberland.com. WORKOUT ANTHEMS? bravery, but my wife Canfield Chrono watch “Podcasts and Howard ($900) by Shinola; didn’t flinch,” he says. shinola.com. Stern. I like listening to a good story.” “What I saw in my wife was courage and beauty unlike I’d ever seen.” HERO? After we’ve talked for an hour, Bernthal’s “My wife.” friend (he hates the word assistant) Lauren tells him he’s done filming for the day. The PARTY FUEL? “Marijuana. I don’t sun has long set, so making it back to Ojai for drink. After I got into soccer is not possible. He excuses himself to some trouble in 2009, change out of his dress pants and shoes I stopped drinking. and into sweats and combat boots he might Now I’m to a point where I can handle it, have borrowed from Frank Castle. Walking but I don’t like the way in Castle’s boots has taught Bernthal how it makes me feel.” precious time is, he says, and nearly losing Adeline cemented his ethos of not wasting KARAOKE SONG? too many moments. He’s been thinking a lot “Has to be Waylon Jennings’s ‘Lonesome, about how to best squeeze the marrow out On’ry and Mean.’ ” of 2019. In January, he’ll go to Romania to film the dark cowboy shoot-’em-up comedy THE MEAL YOU COOK Snow Ponies. He’ll likely do another movie FOR YOUR FAMILY? “I can crush this old and then start season 3 of The Punisher. He’s family pasta recipe also spent six years researching and writing with a light cream a true-crime story about cops and gangs in sauce, peas, and Shreveport, Louisiana. But he says he has prosciutto. I made it only two goals for the new year: to make it for my kids and they hated it! I loved it to as many of his kids’ games and spend as when I was a kid.” many nights in his own bed next to his wife as possible. On the night before the photo shoot for this T FAMOU ple are reluctant to talk heir fam reporters, but Bernthal tells me he’s grateful story, Bernthal was at a Willie Nelson concert at the Hollywood ’ rested, b e a lot has happened in the past year and he’s Bowl with his family and friends when his children started runo ow ready t uss it. In November 2017, the day after the first ning amok. “I turned to them and said, ‘Hey, guys, this is Willie sea The P i er debuted, Bernthal was supposed to begin Nelson, and he’s real important to your mama.’” The trio of tykes film ng his rol tronaut Dave Scott alongside Ryan Gosling settled down, and the music washed over them all. In the past, in Fir t Man. But out of nowhere, his daughter, then two, had a sei- he’s been frustrated with profiles written about him that ask the zure and fell into a coma. He dropped out of the film and raced to be question “Will the Punisher ever find peace?” “I’m sitting there by her side. Diagnosed with encephalitis—a potentially fatal viral at the show with my kids and thinking, This is the best moment infection that causes swelling of the brain—Adeline remained in of my life. This is peace.” a coma for three days, and when she awoke she did not recognize her family. While Bernthal was, understandably, a panicky mess, MOLLY KNIGHT is the author of The Best Team Money Can Buy and he says his trauma-nurse wife helped Adeline by staying calm and writes for ESPN the Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. “Right now, I’m into doing burpee pullups with my five-year-old. We do about ten reps of burpee pullups.”

PUNCH UP YOUR STRENGTH Long before Jon Bernthal was Frank Castle, he started training with his friend Sean Carrigan, a former pro boxer. The Punisher star dropped 20 pounds for the series, in part by boxing daily. It’s the backbone of his fitness routine. 84

1

Fight Your Shadow

Early on in every workout, Bernthal shadowboxes: Throw various combos (think: jab-jabcross) at the air. “Concentrate on technique,” says Carrigan.

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

The secret to Jon Bernthal’s Punisher physique. BY EBENEZER SAMUEL, C.S.C.S.

2

Punch First, Ask Questions Later

“Jon wasn’t a guy who asked lots of questions,” Carrigan says. Save analysis for the boardroom. Learn a punch, then start trying to throw it.

3

End with Body Weight

Bernthal’s workouts end with this finisher: 50 to 100 pushups, 200 to 300 crunches, and 30 to 50 leg lifts. “It builds strength and stamina,” says Carrigan.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

MATT NEEDLE

YOUR

HEALTHIEST

YEAR

EVER Sagging energy, climbing cholesterol, mounting worries, and gut trouble are so 2018. This is the year to turn your health around. While your friends will be eating overpriced salads and working out for three hours a day, you’ll be taking the smarter, easier route to total wellness. This is how to get there, no DNA test or whole-body scan required.

BY

JESSICA MIGALA

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

87

YOUR BRAIN

SUPERCHARGE YOUR FOCUS TEST YOURSELF

HOW DID YOU DO?

Go somewhere you can talk out loud. Then read the words in color twice:

Compare your two times. If there’s little difference between them, you can focus well and think quickly. Your attention, processing speed, and flexibility are all high. If you stumbled over the second reading and it took a lot longer than the first, your overtaxed brain may just need some tweaking.

First Read: Say the names of the colors aloud (so you’d say the word red as “red”) and record your time.

Second Read: Read the list aloud again, but this time say the color each word is printed in. So if the word red is printed in green, you’d say “green,” not “red.”

88

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

THE TUNE-UP Flex your concentration muscles with brain-training games like those from Lumosity and other sites, says Sanam Hafeez, Psy.D., a neuropsychologist at Columbia University. Or try giving a conversation all of your attention, says Chris Bailey, author of Hyperfocus. That means focusing less on what you’re going to say and more on what the other person is trying to express.

YOUR HEAD

LIGHTEN YOUR MOOD TEST YOURSELF

HOW DID YOU DO?

Ask yourself this: Over the past two weeks, how often have I had the following problems?

An answer of several days or more on both items means you may be experiencing clinical depression, as nearly 9 million men in the U. S. do each year. Depression can be sneaky. It can lie to you and tell you that your boss’s bad management style or your partner’s mood is causing what you’re feeling. (Anger and disorganiza-

1. Had little interest or pleasure in doing things ❑ Not at all

tion can be signs of depression in guys.) When men think there’s something else to blame, they “feel like they only need to endure or compensate, which explains why they’re less likely than women to seek help,” says psychiatrist John Sharp, M.D., of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and author of The Insight Cure.

THE TUNE-UP

❑ Several days ❑ More than half the days ❑ Nearly every day

2. Felt down or hopeless ❑ Not at all ❑ Several days ❑ More than half the days ❑ Nearly every day

We won’t sugarcoat it: You may need to talk to a therapist or other professional. Depression is a treatable medical problem, and like a leaky pipe, the earlier you address it, the easier it is to manage. You’re not always in for meds or years of therapy—some forms of counseling involve only several weeks of concentrated work. But for a lot of men, “that first step into therapy is kind of a doozy,” Dr. Sharp says.

If it’s easier to talk yourself out of it than to go, try the gym: Exercise can help lift mood. If that’s not going to happen, either (not easy, we know), the digital world may offer some reprieve via apps like MoodMission (moodmission.com) or This Way Up (thiswayup.org.au). Or search for others on Psyberguide.org, a nonprofit d with Northwestern University that reviews mental-health apps.

YOUR BLOODSTREAM

STEADY YOUR BLOOD SUGAR TEST YOURSELF

THE TUNE-UP

Check the box next to each item you consume in a given day and add up the points.

Nix the sugary drinks first. “These are the number-one source of added sugar in the American diet,” says White. Soda is a prime target, of course; a single can contains 89 percent of a day’s sugar. But there are so many other ways you may be downing sugar, like in sweetened coffee (eight grams in two teaspoons of sugar) and bottled Frappuccinos (as many as 32 grams per bottle). You don’t have to go into taste-bud deprivation and shift straight to tap water. Flavored waters have really upped their game, says White. Get a sweet taste with zero sugar from bottles like Hal’s Seltzer Water, Bubly, Waterloo, and Hint.

T 1 2-ounce (nondiet) soda (+10 points)

TP acket of instant flavored oatmeal (+3 points)

TE nergy drink (even an organic one) (+9 points)

T6 -ounce container of flavored yogurt (+3 points)

T 1 /2 cup of ice cream (+3.5 points)

TT ablespoon of ketchup (+1 point)

TT hree cookies like Oreos (+3.5 points)

TP acket of sugar in coffee (+0.75 points)

TF lavored latte (+4 points)

TT wo tablespoons of bottled salad dressing (+0.5 points) T Energy bar (+5 points)

HOW DID YOU DO? If you scored: 0–9 points: Nice. That’s where you’re supposed to be. 10+ points: Overload! But you probably knew that already.

Each point represents about one teaspoon of sugar, and the upper limit of added sugar for guys is nine teaspoons a day. (That’s 36 grams of added sugar, or 144 calories. So, not a lot.) Our quiz may not substitute for a blood-sugar test at the doctor’s office, but can be a major eye-opener.

Even when you’re generally eating what you think you should, too much sugar may still affect your body, says exercise physiologist Jim White, R.D.N., A.C.S.M. Beyond adding pounds, sugar overload can devastate your insides, raising heart disease and diabetes risk.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

89

YOUR HEART

BUILD A HEALTHIER HEART TEST YOURSELF

Grab a tape measure and locate your waist. (It’s at belly-button height, not the undergut spot your belt may have migrated to.) Pull the tape measure around you, exhale, and get the digits. HOW DID YOU DO? There’s only one right answer: less than 40 inches. No matter how tall you are. “More than 40 inches is associated with a whole bunch of problems, like diabetes or high blood pressure or cholesterol—if you don’t already have those,” says John Higgins, M.D., a sports cardiologist with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston.

YOUR BLOOD VESSELS

TUNE UP YOUR ARTERIES

THE TUNE-UP

TEST YOURSELF

Don’t just reflexively reach for a baby aspirin. If you don’t already have heart disease, says Dr. Higgins, its benefits likely won’t outweigh the risks. Of course, your waist (and risks) shrink when you eat well and exercise, but try sleep, too. People who went from six to between seven and eight hours a night gained less abdominal fat over six years than short sleepers, says a study in Obesity.

Sit on the floor with your back flat against a wall, legs straight out in front of you. Place your hands on top of your legs and slide your fingertips toward your toes. (Bending your knees is cheating.)

BONUS TUNE-UP: L E N G T H E N YO U R L I F E Sit on the floor, then get back up. People ages 51 to 80 who could do this without using their hands or knees for help, without having to place their hands on their knees, and without losing their balance had lower death rates over an average of six years than people who had to give themselves help. Practice!

90

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

❑ I can touch my ankles and/or toes ❑ My ankles are too far away

HOW DID YOU DO?

THE TUNE-UP

If you can reach your ankles or beyond, it means good things for your arteries. People with more flexible bodies likely have more flexible arteries, according to a 2017 research review in The Journal of Physical Fitness and Sports Medicine. “This test might uncover someone who has untreated cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure,” says Dr. Higgins, as stiff arteries are related to both issues.

The test is the cure. The act of stretching may actually help your arteries become more elastic, Dr. Higgins explains. If you want to do more than just reach for your ankles, you can reliably increase flexibility with a couple minutes of foam rolling before and after a workout, says Michael Conlon, P.T., owner of Finish Line Physical Therapy in New York City. But there’s more to it than simply rolling up and down on a muscle a few times. Ideally, you should roll in two different directions. For instance, if you’re working on your quads, don’t just move the roller up and down them; move your quads side-to-side on the roller, too.

YOUR INTESTINES

SOOTHE A GRUMPY GUT TEST YOURSELF

HOW DID YOU DO?

THE TUNE-UP

Do the turn-around test—look before you flush. Where would your poop land on this chart? (Not literally.)

The “type” you fall into “is a reasonably accurate predictor of colonic transit rate,” says Michael D. Brown, M.D., director of the GI/Hepatology Fellowship Program at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center. That’s the time it takes for food to move from bite through bowel, and it’s an indicator of your gut’s health. The longer it takes, the more time bacteria has to feed and create harmful byproducts, says researcher Tine Rask Licht of the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark. And those by-products, she says, may be associated with colon cancer.

Eat more fiber. Most guys consume less than half their quota of 38 grams a day. Getting fiber from foods like whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables is preferable to taking supplements, says Dr. Brown, as real foods contain a host of vitamins and phytonutrients that are also good for you. To hit your daily mark, you’ll probably need to work for it. A cup of oatmeal has three grams; an apple has five— but that gets you only about a fifth of the way there. To pile it on, turn to legumes for help. For instance, a salad bowl from Chipotle with black beans, fajita veggies, guac, and fresh salsa delivers 16 grams.

Types 1, 2: Separate,

That means:

hard lumps, like nuts or sausages.

Constipation. (Transit time: 55 hours or more.)

Types 3, 4, 5: Sausageshaped, but with cracks on the surface (3); sausage- or snakelike, smooth surface (4); soft blobs with clearcut edges (5).

That means: It’s all good—any of these is ideal. (Transit time: about 24 hours or less.)

Types 6, 7: Fluffy with ragged edges or mushy (6); entirely liquid (7).

That means: Diarrhea. (Transit time: about two hours or less.)

YOUR GOODS

PROTECT YOUR PENIS TEST YOURSELF

Sit on the couch. Open up the browser on your phone. Order an STD kit. Pee, drip some blood from your fingertip, or swab. Send in the sample. Wait for the results. HOW DID YOU DO?

THE TUNE-UP

The year 2016 was a record breaker for all the wrong reasons: Rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis were at all-time highs, with more than 2 million cases, according to figures from the CDC. “If you’re sexually active, you should get an STD test once a year,” says Jamin Brahmbhatt, M.D., a urologist at Orlando Health. (Testing after every partner is even better.) “Don’t assume you’re fine if you don’t have signs. Not every guy will have symptoms like burning with urination, discharge, or pain.” With at-home STD testing kits like myLAB ($189; mylabbox.com), there’s no excuse not to check. “You may not like spending a couple hundred now,” says Dr. Brahmbhatt, “but you’re avoiding problems like scarring in your urethra, chronic pain, and fertility issues.”

Glove up. Cool condom companies are changing the game with nicely packaged products you can order from your sofa. Some to try: • The LELO Hex has a vodka-style logo and a superthin feel ($35 for 36 at lelo.com). • My One is available in 60 different sizes (starting at $10 for six; myonecondoms.com). • Sustain Condoms are fair trade and vegan. Honestly, the company markets its condoms to women—but they’re vagina-friendly, and you get bonus points for being vagina-focused ($14 for 10 Ultra Thin or Large Comfort Fit; sustainnatural.com).

BONUS AT- H O M E C H E C K : D O YO U G E T M O R N I N G WO O D ? Yes? Good. Start your day. No? Well . . . something’s going on. This is one of the first questions urologists ask guys with erectile dysfunction, says Dr. Brahmbhatt. If you’re hard upon waking, everything’s working under the hood. If not, there may be a lifestyle problem—”things like stress, anxiety, lack of sleep, and relationship issues factor in,” he explains—or a medical problem. “Even if you have the biggest penis, it still has some of the smallest blood vessels in the body.” Heart disease can affect blood-vessel function all over your body. If there’s not enough blood flow, you’ll be limp. “We found early heart disease on a couple guys this year because they came in with erectile dysfunction,” Dr. Brahmbhatt says.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

91

TRANSFORM

BODY MIND YOUR

AND

THE STORIES OF TEN PEOPLE (YOU MAY RECOGNIZE A FEW) WHO’VE COMPLETED EPIC FITNESS JOURNEYS, BATTLING OBESITY AND DEPRESSION AND OFTEN BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. HERE’S WHAT THEY’VE LEARNED BY LEAVING THEIR OWN LIVES—AND ABOUT A BILLION POUNDS—BEHIND. (PLUS: ROB FREAKIN’ LOWE!)

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

STEVEN LIPPMAN

LIFT YOUR SPIRITS

WHAT (EVER) IT TAKES

How DAN REYNOLDS, frontman of Imagine Dragons, uses exercise, diet, and therapy to battle an inflammatory disease and depression.

I

BY WILL COCKRELL

T SHOULD HAVE been one

of the happiest years of Dan Reynolds’s life. In 2012, his band Imagine Dragons inked a deal with Interscope Records and his wife gave birth to their first child. Soon the band would release the single “Radioactive,” the moody rock anthem that would be ed more than six million times. Yet a painful reality almost paralyzed Reynolds. For years, the lead singer had been living with a rare autoimmune disease called ankylosing spondylitis (AS), which causes inflammation in the spine and can lead to pain in different parts of the body. It had become so painful that he was having trouble lifting his newborn daughter and could barely perform live. “I’d hobble onstage and just stand perfectly still,” says Reynolds. And AS wasn’t his only health issue—Reynolds had already been dealing with ulcerative colitis for several years and had faced periods of depression since his teens. But instead of derailing his dreams, the pain ignited a top-to-bottom transformation that has left him ache-free and happier than ever, and turned him into a rock star

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

93

INSTAGRAM = INSTAFIT

known for energetic—and shirtless—performances. Indeed, when Reynolds, 31, walks into Gold’s Gym in Glendale, California, for his MH photo shoot, the first thing someone asks him is whether he wants his shirt on or off. “Off,” he fires back (with unusual vigor for a celebrity). “This has been my healthiest year yet,” he says. “It’s also been my hardest year.” But it’s been a long journey. His transformation began slowly, as he first sought to learn as much as he could about his diseases. He addressed his depression first. The Las Vegas native has been open about how growing up Mormon forced him to conceal his most basic impulses, everything 94

from his sexuality to his creativity. Reynolds spent two years on a Mormon mission, was kicked out of Brigham Young University for having sex with his girlfriend, and had to write songs in metaphor to hide things from his parents. “The reason I started writing in the first place was for refuge,” he explains. Reynolds found a therapist who, he says, helped him realize that the root of his depression was the fact that he’d spent much of his life living for others—for the Mormon church and anyone else who had an opinion. He had lost sight of his own needs. “That’s when everything changed for me,” he says. “I decided with every decision I made from that point on I would ask

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Tap into the ive side of social media and it can make a difference. It helped one attorney lose the 60 pounds he gained during three intense years in law school. “Instagram is my secret weapon,” he says. “My goal was to post a picture every time I did something positive— and if I had nothing to post, then I realized I needed to accomplish something that day.” —Kevin Conner, 31, lawyer, Gainesville, Florida

myself, Is this my truth? ” It had almost a domino effect. He started reexamining everything. In April 2018, he announced that he would be divorcing his wife of seven years, with whom he has three daughters. Another thing he learned along the way was that he wanted to beat back both his physical and mental ailments without the help of drugs. “Pain medication ruins your vocal cords, and immunosuppressants made me get sinus infections all the time,” he says. “I really had no other option than to completely clean up my diet and exercise every day.” In early 2017, Reynolds met trainer Brad Feinberg, a guy who he said looked like a Viking and a badass. Using Feinberg’s program, Reynolds eventually reached an intense level, working out for one to three hours seven days a week. Workouts during the tour usually included squats, deadlifts, and lunges, as well as Turkish getups and jump variations. But Feinberg says Reynolds also wanted to look like a superhero, which meant high-volume upper-body drills, kettlebell swings, pullups, and curls. Plus, every workout had 20 minutes of cardio—low intensity (same speed), medium (four minute-runs with one minute of recovery), and high (one-minute sprints, with one minute of rest).

Grooming by Sunnie Brook/TMG, overleaf: Janette Pellegrini/WireImage (Reynolds before)

YO U C A N D O I T

TRANSFORM YOUR

BODY & MIND

Recovery was just as important, adds Feinberg. “Touring is extremely stressful—the performances, the emotional stress— so we also emphasized deep breathing and mobility.” Touring plays a huge role, too, in dictating Reynolds’s diet, which basically requires constant eating. Couple the training with epic two-hour live shows and Reynolds sometimes needs to down 6,000 calories a day just to maintain his weight. His body fat hovers around 6 percent. His meal plan: oatmeal, berries, bananas, salads, sweet potatoes, brown rice, chicken, lamb, and lots of olive oil. It took Reynolds more than a year to go from skinny-fat to shredded. When I point out that six-pack abs and Thor-like biceps seem like overkill for battling AS, he says, “It’s a statement. It embraces the spirit of rock ’n’ roll. I grew up loving Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, Freddie [Mercury]—showmen.” Somehow,

BELLY OFF!

he can embrace excess and clean living without either seeming inauthentic. At one point, Reynolds mentions he’s “straight edge,” referring to the ’80s punk ethos that celebrated sobriety. And when I press him to clarify whether he is completely sober—whether paparazzi might ever catch him drinking a postshow beer—his answer is refreshing. “Oh, it could happen,” he says with a smirk. “They might even catch me doing worse than that—I believe in living in the moment.” Reynolds says he owes his newfound calm to being more honest with himself, and that’s evident in the songs on the band’s new album, Origins. “I’ve finally resolved a lot of these issues in my life,” he says. “This has been the first time in ten years that I can say I have no depression. Sadness? Hell yeah—it’s included some of the saddest times in my life—but no depression. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.”

THE THUNDER-AND-LIGHTNING FINISHER Dan Reynolds’s trainer, Brad Feinberg (bradfeinberg88 on Instagram), recommends this total-body burner as a finisher or as a short workout (as long as you do 3 to 5 rounds).

Al Bello/Getty Images for IRONMAN (Cook after)

Choose weights that are heavy enough that fatigue sets in after around 1 minute but not so heavy that you compromise form. Do each move for 60 seconds. Rest 3 minutes and repeat up to 5 times. KETTLEBELL (OR DUMBBELL) SWING

DUMBBELL OVERHEAD PRESS

DUMBBELL GOBLET SQUAT

Hike the kettlebell and swing to chest height. Do single-arm swings on rounds 2 and 3 if you get bored easily.

Start with the dumbbells at shoulder height. Press straight up.

Aim to get your thighs just below parallel to the ground and push up rapidly.

DUMBBELL ALTERNATE RENEGADE ROW

PLANK JACKS

Do a pushup with your hands on dumbbells. Raise one dumbbell, then the other.

If it’s too difficult, switch to a standard plank. Doing multiple rounds, alternate star planks.

METHOD:

Had Gastric-By Surgery MARCUS COOK 46, BUSINESS-DEVELOPMENT VP, HOUSTON BEFORE 489 LBS CURRENT 225 LBS LOST 264 LBS

THE WAKE-UP CALL I had a mentor at

work. One day he pulled me into his office and said, “I’m dying because I have cancer; you’re dying because it’s your choice. I would give anything to be you. You have to promise to live for your family and employees.” A few months later, in September 2015, I had gastric-by surgery. THE BIG STEP People tell me I took the easy way out with gastric by. But there’s nothing easy about having your intestines rerouted. I overhauled my diet. I started exercising, walking 20 minutes a day—uh, night, because I didn’t want anyone to see me. Before long, I was up to 40 minutes. Once I could run, I signed up for races and eventually a half Ironman [1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, 13.1-mile run]. I trained for that for about half a year. Last October, I completed the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. It felt incredible to do what I never thought was possible. THE NEXT LEVEL Once I changed my life, I changed other people’s lives too. After the half Ironman, Hurricane Harvey hit. I went out with a buddy in his johnboat and helped a family who had been stranded for two days; water was starting to creep into the house. I’m so grateful I lost weight and was able to help these people.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

95

BELLY OFF!

TRANSFORM YOUR

BODY & MIND

METHOD:

Learned to Cook FITZROY POWELL JR. 23, STUDENT, MATTHEWS, NORTH CAROLINA BEFORE 348 LBS CURRENT 215 LBS LOST 133 LBS

THE WAKE-UP CALL I’ve always been

THE BIG STEP The first thing I did was cut out soda and other sugary drinks and replace them with water. Then I tried staying away from the drive-through and cooking my own meals. Cooking is a lot simpler than people who don’t cook make it out to be, because there are no rules! You’re making food for yourself, and as long as you don’t burn the house down, you can do anything—you’re free to have it taste how you like. I usually take a day to meal-prep for the week, and it saves me money and time. I now find joy in cooking, because I know it’s helping me in my journey. There are so many quick and easy recipes out there that make cooking simpler. My current go-to: ground-turkey-stuffed peppers with a little bit of cheese on top. Healthy, easy, filling!

96

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE

THE ‘MINI’ MOGUL

Hip-hop CEO CHARLIE JABALEY—aka Charlie Rocket—hit it big running a multimilliondollar management company at age 22. When his weight climbed and his mood dipped, this 30-year-old took charge. See how he shed 130 pounds. AS TOLD TO MARISSA STEPHENSON

2011: 

“I HIT 300-PLUS POUNDS.” Busi-

ness was two things: celebrations that revolved around food and stress that revolved around food. I was gaining weight, but I was also always on a diet. I’d wake up and say, “Today’s the day; I’m gonna do this.” Then by the end of the day, I’d mess up, eat a ton of fast food, and it was “Tomorrow’s the day.” I got so big I didn’t want to leave the house. I became severely depressed, insecure, and mentally was in a really, really bad place. 2012: STARVED MYSELF TO LOSE 100 POUNDS.

I was only eating like 500 calories a day. I couldn’t exercise, because I didn’t have the energy to move. Then I started binge eating, and all the weight came back. 2015: BEST FRIEND CHALLENGED ME TO A MARATHON. Scott Cameron said, “No more diets.”

I wasn’t a runner. When you’re 300 pounds, you can hardly walk a mile. We trained

Jennifer Rocholl (Jabaley after)

heavy, but in college, I felt directionless, so I sought comfort at the dining hall. I ate everything: pizza, chicken, burgers, cakes. In the next two years, I put on another 30 pounds. Halfway through college, in the spring of 2017, I stopped at Taco Bell on the way home and ordered almost everything on the menu. I ate most of it on the ride home and polished off the leftovers later that night. A few hours later, I ate again. I felt sick and thinking, Why am I doing this to myself? Finally, I thought, Enough is enough.

BELLY OFF!

running soon after that, and the weight just fell off. It motivated me to start working out too.

BEFORE RAY: 240 LBS STEPH: 220 LBS CURRENT RAY: 195 LBS STEPH: 160 LBS

RAY: I started running just a mile around the block. In a few months, I could run three miles, and after a year, I’d lost about 40 pounds.

LOST RAY: 45 LBS STEPH: 60 LBS

METHOD:

Helped Each Other RAY (40) AND STEPH (35) DOMINGUE IT (RAY), WOMEN’S-SHOP OWNER (STEPH), THIBODAUX, LOUISIANA

hard, but I also kept eating—way too much. I did three marathons but gained ten extra pounds for each one. There would be nights where I’d eat thousands and thousands of calories, insane binge eating. You just can’t outrun that. 2016: HIT ROCK BOTTOM—OR SO I THOUGHT. I was at 2 Chainz’s house

in late 2016. When I woke up one morning, I reached for a pair of socks and fell down and ed out. I knew something was really wrong. A brain tumor I had since childhood—it’s in my pituitary gland [and probably always will be]—had started growing. I thought about why this was happening, and I figured tumors came from an imbalance in the body. My gut was telling me that the imbalance was the way I was eating all these years, all the processed foods, the meat from the ketogenic diets I’d put myself on. That’s when I decided to go vegan. Believe it or not, I gained 20 more pounds. I didn’t know how to do it right. I was eating fries and packaged goods—vegan junk food. JANUARY 2017: MADE A CONTRACT WITH MYSELF. I picked the most difficult

thing in the world I could imagine, something so big and so bold that when I told people I was gonna do

RAY: Living in New Orleans, I

RAY: Once the twins were

saw plenty of buffets—and worked a desk job. But it wasn’t until we had kids—a daughter, then twins 13 months later—that my waistline really ballooned.

about a year old, things settled down a bit. Even so, I kept buying bigger jeans every six months. Once I reached a size 42 waist, I knew I had to make a change.

STEPH: I gained about 40 pounds with the twins. Caring for two newborns and a toddler and starting my boutique was exhausting. Exercise wasn’t on my radar.

STEPH: Around that time, I weighed myself. When Ray saw the number, he said, “Oh, look, we’re almost the same weight!” I was like, “Thanks, honey.” He took up

it, I was forced to follow through: an Ironman triathlon. Setting a goal like “I’m going to run every day” wouldn’t work for me. There’s no ability. ALSO 2017: BECAME CHARLIE ROCKET.

I retired, left Atlanta, and moved to Santa Monica, California. I wanted to reinvent my life, eat better, become an athlete, and learn how to help people. I embraced the concept of “living food.” I had never really heard anybody put it that way and ask, “Is that food dead or alive?” But it made perfect sense to me. I ate heaps of vegetables—living. I got rid of a lot of oil—which is, to me, dead—and salt, dead. I ate lots of fruit, and I stopped binge eating sugary cookies, pastries, doughnuts. STILL 2017: TRAINED FOR AN IRONMAN LIKE AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD. I woke up

every day with the outlook that “I’m going to have fun and play.” I trained that way for ten months, gradually going farther, playing more. There were times it was intense. But eating and exercising this way, I lost 130 pounds. MARCH 2018: COMPLETED AN IRONMAN IN TAUPO, NEW ZEALAND (16:41:01).

Crossing that finish line felt good. After the race, I was like, “Okay!

YO U C A N D O I T

BUILD AN OUTDOOR GYM “After being overweight for decades, I finally decided to make a change at age 51. I had two rules: I wasn’t going to run, and I wasn’t going to exercise indoors. So I created an outdoor home gym with dumbbells, a yoga mat, and a Pilates machine. I also work out at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in nearby Morrison, where I run stairs and do leg lifts off the bleachers—one rep for each of my 57 years! Six years later, I’m 59 pounds lighter.” —Scott Deuty, 57, power-electronics engineer, Denver

STEPH: I’m not a runner, but I started lifting weights at a small gym. I do a typical bro split—legs one day, back and arms the next. RAY: When she’s at the gym, I stay with the kids, and when I’m running, she watches the girls. Then we’ll play outside with the kids or walk the dog or go for a bike ride. Now we cook dinner together, too, and we eat a lot more healthfully than we used to.

What’s next?” That’s when I started thinking about helping other people’s dreams come true. [His cross-country cycling Dream Machine Tour gave financial help to a preschool aide in Arizona, which paid for cancer treatment, and a homeless high school honors student in Houston.] SUMMER 2018: “RUNNING GIVES ME A WAY TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.” I’m

still about 30 pounds overweight. But now I know running can be my medication. It’s my prescription for my anxiety, my depression, which I still fight. I can push the limits; I can go farther than I did last time. That brings me so much confidence, so much good energy, so much joy. And I believe it’s helped my tumor, which is shrinking. FALL 2018: RELATE TO THE ROCKET.

When rockets first take off, they use up more fuel than the entire rest of the journey. Once they’re up there, though, there’s no more pressure; they can go faster than ever with less energy. Think about the rocket when you’re in mile one of anything, when it’s hard and it doesn’t feel like you’re going anywhere. Know that if you just push, push, push, push, eventually it’s gonna get easier. MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

97

TRANSFORM YOUR

BODY & MIND

PRIORITIZE YOUR HEALTH

What we can learn from ROB KARDASHIAN’s public struggle to reach a healthy weight.

C 

best known for her preposterous glutes, the 11-year-old E! series Keeping Up with the Kardashians has always been a show about bodies. But in recent years, the hard physical effort required to stay perpetually camera-ready has become more central to the show. Someone is always sculpting a “revenge body” or shedding baby weight, and for every exposition-heavy conversation that takes place over a meal, there’s a punishing workout session that doubles as a chance for a sisterly heart-to-heart. And then there’s Rob Kardashian, 31, whose relationship with his body has pushed him into one of the strangest spaces in American pop culture. No matter how you felt about Kim, Kourtney, and Khloé as they ascended from pseudocelebrity to actual fame, you at least had to ire their hustle. Rob doesn’t even meet that baseline of respectability. In the beginning, he was the Kardashian who lacked basic 98

YO U C A N D O I T

EAT THE HEALTHIEST STUFF FIRST “At restaurants, I eat the vegetables from my entrée first to help fill me up. Usually, I end up with a to-go box of leftovers—most often a cut of meat.” —Nick Wolny, 31, marketing strategist, Houston

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Kardashian skills—he was bad at pretending that his fake job (the hosiery company Arthur George) was actually difficult, and he was bad at breaking up in public. The other Kardashians tended to rise like toned, confident phoenixes from the ashes of their doomed relationships; Rob lashed out at his ex Rita Ora (without naming her specifically) by posting accusations of infidelity online, and last year he leaked revenge porn of his daughter’s mother, Blac Chyna. But beginning in 2013, Rob’s struggle to keep his weight down became a long-running and sometimes humiliating Keeping Up story arc. We witnessed him hiding candy wrappers and bingeing on takeout. When the family traveled to Florence in 2014 for Kim’s wedding to Kanye West, Rob became ashamed of his weight after feeling uncomfortable in his threads and skipped the ceremony.

We watched Rob—who was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at the end of 2015—try to change his diet and exercise more, and we saw him fall off those wagons, distance himself from his family, and grow depressed. It all came to a head on 2016’s Rob & Chyna. Rob, who weighed in at 263 pounds in the first episode, clearly wanted to be anywhere but in front of a camera. There are Leonard Cohen albums less depressing than Rob & Chyna. It lasted one season and ended with Rob relating his myriad issues to a mental-health professional, who responded, “That sounds like a mess.” Rob and Chyna have since split up, and after that, Rob went into hiding. He’s all but dropped out of Keeping Up and exists in its narrative as a cautionary tale; during season 15, when Kendall shared Kourtney’s plans to miss Christmas with their family, Kim asked if

Getty Images (Kardashians)

BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS

BELLY OFF!

Kourtney was “the new Rob.” The social-media s Rob once used to publicize his drama appear carefully managed these days. By Kardashian standards, he’s practically gone black-ops. He’s become the rarest type of celebrity bigfoot— the one member of a family of omnipresent public figures who does not want to be seen. Reportedly, Rob turned to food for comfort, and his weight ed 300 pounds. Lately, though, something strange has happened. According to one report, he has taken huge steps to improve his health both physically and mentally, dropping 30 to 50 pounds. He has a daughter he needs to be there for, and he’s recalibrated his priorities around diet and exercise. Rob’s mother, Kris Jenner, told Us Weekly last August that we may see more of Rob in Keeping Up’s 16th season. All this sounds positive, except the last part. Because the show focuses on the perspectives of Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, and momager Kris, Rob’s weight problem has mostly been presented as a heartbreak for his mother to endure or a problem for his sisters to solve. And because family and work are so hopelessly and problematically intertwined in the Kardashiverse, Rob’s choice to distance himself from the family business—because he didn’t want to be fat on camera, which is totally understandable— is a professional decision with personal consequences, a betrayal. What no one ever talks about— for obvious reasons, since it would call the whole enterprise of Keeping Up into question—is the possibility that leaving the show is the healthiest thing Rob could possibly do. It makes perfect sense that he had to step outside the narrative flow of reality TV in order to meaningfully change his way of living. Whether you’re lifting logs alone on a mountaintop or hashtagging every #LegDay on Instagram, everyone’s fitness and mental-health journeys are ultimately personal. In order to see himself clearly, Rob Kardashian had to disappear.  

THE WAKE-UP CALL I weighed in at about 260 pounds in high school. I knew I was bigger than other people, but I just didn’t realize how much bigger. What got me there wasn’t really food—it was video games. In middle school, I’d run upstairs when I got home, playing until 1:00 or 2:00 A.M. I ate snacks that wouldn’t get my controller too dirty: cookies, cans of Pringles. I could kill an entire box of Sprite every night, easy. In June 2017, I visited a walk-in clinic for a rash on my leg. Turns out, the skin infection was no big deal—the weight was. I’d climbed to 315 pounds. I was shocked. That’s when I knew that I was addicted to gaming.

METHOD:

Quit Gaming and Started Moving FRANCISCO MEDEIROS 25, BEST BUY ASSOCIATE, EAST PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND BEFORE 315 LBS CURRENT 186 LBS LOST 129 LBS

THE BIG STEP The next day, I listed my Xbox on Craigslist. I researched diets online and stumbled across Reddit’s “loseit” channel, where I heard about CICO: calories in, calories out. You try to eat less than your body naturally burns at your current weight. I tracked calories on the My Fitness Pal app. At first, I ate the amount to lose one pound a week, then the two-pound-aweek option. I’m still counting! I’ve been using the app for 495 days in a row, and I’m the most fit I’ve been since grade school.

THE WAKE-UP CALL After graduating from the academy, Lohman settled into his job as a New York City cop— and packed on 140 pounds in nine tough years. But a nightmare about being thrown off a rooftop and the realization that his daughter would grow up fatherless if it happened made him go on a weight-loss program the next day. THE BIG STEPS

METHOD:

Created ability AARON LOHMAN 36, POLICE OFFICER, NEW YORK CITY BEFORE 425 LBS CURRENT 277 LBS LOST 148 LBS

He held himself able: Lohman started tracking calories and eventually began weighing his food. He also packs his lunch daily. “I’m fine with boring,” he says. “I’ll eat eight ounces of chicken and six ounces of a sweet potato every day.” Lohman turned negativity into a positive: Not long after he started working out, a coworker mentioned the 40-mile NYC Five Boro Bike Tour. When the other cops overheard them, he says, “they were like, ‘Yeah, right, Aaron’s going to do a bike tour.’ It made me so mad I thought, I really am going to do it.” He tracked his progress: Lohman posts how he’s doing on Instagram under huge_fat_loser. (He has 18,000 followers.) “Everyone should try it,” he says. “The idea of failing in public keeps you motivated.”

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

99

It might seem like ROB LOWE represents the anti-transformation. But his consistent look is due to an evolution in his diet and exercise plans. BY ALEX BHATTACHARJI

W 

HEN ROB LOWE looks

in the mirror, he expects to find the same person looking back at him every day: a lean, toned, fresh-faced man in peak physical condition—himself at 28, the age when he had already gotten sober and married Sheryl Berkoff. “I feel exactly like that guy,” Lowe says. “And I see him.” It’s not that Lowe, 54, is oblivious to the age of time—he’s just made himself impervious to it. “I’m fitter than I’ve ever been. More experienced. Smarter,” says the actor, who landed his first major TV role in 1979 and whose breakthrough came in the 1983 film The Outsiders. “I’m not looking at a 20-year-old kid in a cape as my due north,” he adds. “I’m looking at a guy like Springsteen.”

100 January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

YO U C A N D O I T

DOG IT “Along with setting a calorie limit for myself in 2016, I started taking my dogs, Major and Frank, for a walk every day. Within a year, I had lost 102 pounds, Major had lost eight, and Frank had lost four. We still walk or run every day. When we come home, we all eat popcorn; they’ve gotten pretty good at catching kernels out of the air.” —Patrick Stokes, 49, financial advisor, Tyler, Texas

Lowe’s man in the mirror is familiar to anyone who’s watched him. As his Parks and Recreation alter ego, Chris Traeger, would say, he looks li-trilly unchanged. Consider the meme “Incredible timelapse gif showing Rob Lowe ageing [sic] over the last 30 years,” which is, in fact, a recent still image of him—psych. “I treat it as a compliment,” Lowe says, but he chafes at any suggestion that making time stand still is a ive endeavor. Lowe’s status as a real-life Dorian Gray is based on a rigorous exercise regimen, a dedication to a low-carb diet (last year he became a spokesman for Atkins, the eating plan that emphasizes protein and healthy fats), and a love of outdoor sports. It doesn’t hurt that he is, by both profession and personal inclination, invested in self-care. PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN LIPPMAN

Grooming by Jason Schneidemann/Solo Artists/The Perfect Paste by the Men’s Groomer

LOWECARB LIFER

STAY THE COURSE

Getty Images (Lowe), Everett Collection (1983 Lowe)

TRANSFORM YOUR

(He launched Profile, a skin-care line including an under-eye serum, moisturizer, sunscreen, and shaving gel, in 2015.) Or that he’s open about his desire to look good. “Men deny having vanity—that’s the greatest vanity,” Lowe says. “Not me. I’m vain as fuck.” Lowe re getting his first real taste of working out as a teenager while filming The Outsiders: He ed costars Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise, who would drive 45 minutes to the one health club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Nautilus machines. “They were animals about it,” he recalls. “I was just kind of doing it because they were doing it.” His fascination with fitness took hold a few years later while he prepared to play a hungry hockey prospect in Youngblood. The role required him to bulk up, Lowe recalls: “It was the first time I ever had a trainer and did proper weight work.” He also skated and practiced hockey, leaning over the boards to vomit. “It was brutal,” he says.

After reaching idol status, he went through a speedfreak phase, when he trained with the UCLA track team. As his penchant for partying grew, Lowe, one of the ’80s Brat Pack, would use fitness to plaster over his alcohol abuse, working out like a demon to reassure himself he didn’t have a problem. In his mind, no matter what wild stuff he did, if he could still run a 60-second quarter mile, he was fine. Inevitably, he could—and he still can today. At 26, in 1990, Lowe managed to get sober, and exercise played a new role in his life. “It became an outlet for all of the tension, stresses, compulsivity,” he says. “I funneled the addiction, frankly, into that.” Today, after 28 years of sobriety, Lowe’s devotion to fitness qualifies as a dependency in its own right. A typical day starts with a 45minute Peloton bike ride or a run. He follows that with traditional lifting and circuit training. He prefers to exercise alone: “I don’t want to have the smoothie stand. I don’t want to look at beautiful women when I work out.” He also never wears earbuds. “I like the forced mental solitude of it,” he says. “Inevitably, it will force you to start working through things you’re not going to if you’re listening to Jay-Z.”

NO WRINKLES IN TIME Four decades of Rob Lowe.

1 97 9

1983

1986

1 9 87

1999

2012

BODY & MIND

For a long time, Lowe felt this routine meant he could eat whatever he wanted. As he approached 40, that started to change. He was aware of Robert Atkins, M.D., “from the beginning,” he says. He became a convert to the highprotein, low-carb plan. He scoffs at the thought that it’s a license to eat two In-N-Out burgers without buns, because as he practices it, Atkins is a program built to maintain, not yo-yo. He’s also experimenting with intermittent fasting, and often skips breakfast. His typical menu on no-breakfast days: Greek yogurt, berries, and nuts for a snack at 11:30 A.M., chopped-chicken salad for lunch, and steak and vegetables for dinner. He’ll allow himself rare cheat meals (pizza and a chocolate milkshake). When we meet, he has just come from a fitting for his new show, Wild Bill. Normally a nerve-racking affair, it was no problem for Lowe, who has had the same measurements for 20 years. In his lighter moments, Lowe its he’s been scared skinny, driven by fear of a dad bod. Yet thanks to fatherhood, he’s found his way of combating it: surfing. Although Lowe grew up in Malibu, he only took up the sport at age 40 after his sons, Matthew and John Owen, did. “They got me into that, and I’ve gotten them back into the gym,” he says. At this point, Lowe’s surfing skills have far sured those of his sons, who are 25 and 23, respectively. Surfing has offered Lowe proof that the immutable man is changing. “I had the best surf day of my life three days ago,” he says, describing his last session at a Santa Barbara break known as Little Rincon. “Set waves. Double overhead. Not a drop of wind. Seventy-five degrees. Pumping. Guys were getting barreled.” He pauses to ponder the sport’s particular appeal to him as someone in recovery and obsessed with continuity. “You’re always chasing a high that you’re probably not going to ever repeat,” he says. “Conditions change, so no waves ever just stay the same. Nothing can ever stay the same. Nothing.”

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019 101

THE MEN’S HEALTH GUIDE TO

GURUS

Muscle. Fat loss. Enlightenment. Whatever you’re searching for, there’s a person with an arsenal of hashtags and inspirational quotes, plus a sprinkle of science, to help you find it. But how much can you really trust them? ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE GUY

WHAT ARE WE EVEN LOOKING FOR? Confessions of a guru junkie. BY NATE GREEN

I when I found the bodybuilding website Testosterone Nation. I was a 17-year-old skinny kid with shitty grades and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I devoured every article from every fitness expert on the site. They told me to train hard, eat big, and try to make something of myself. I got to work. That was 16 years ago. In that time, I gained 30 pounds of muscle, became a personal trainer, started a popular blog, and scored a book deal to write a workout guide called Built for Show. I began receiving thousands of emails from men around the world asking for my advice. One was from a guy who wanted to know if having sex with his girlfriend would reduce his testosterone levels and wreck his ability to gain muscle. I told him no, it wouldn’t—I’d Googled research that said as much. Even if

it did, having sex was way better than having big biceps. I still stand by that. I soon found myself uncomfortably straddling two worlds—those of the seeker and the sought-after. Just like my idols, I had become a fitness guru. Guru. Everyone I know—including me—hates that word. And yet there’s truth to it. When you witness the influence of some bloggers and podcasters, it can feel like a kind of religion. Call it the Church of Self-Improvement. We are all disciples and we worship daily: two-hour podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram stories. What are we looking for? Salvation, of course. But we’re also looking for meaning. We know we’re going to die, and, dammit, we want to live our #bestlife before we do. MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019 103

THE GALLERY OF GURUS TIM FERRISS

ROBB WOLF

MARK SISSON

JOSEPH MERCOLA, D.O.

Known as: Early

Known as: Former

investor, author, self-experimenter.

research biochemist, author.

Known as: Triathlete, the Google of ancestral health.

Known as: Osteopathic physician, natural-health expert, debunker.

The reach: 300 million s of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show; five New York Times best sellers.

The reach: Two NYT best sellers, including The Paleo Solution.

The message: Adopt the strategies of the world’s most successful people and maximize your time, output, fitness, life.

The solid advice: “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”

The reach: 600,000 monthly visitors to his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple (self-reported).

The message: Take your cue from evolutionary biology and anthropology and eat and move the way humans were supposed to.

The message: Follow the guidance of this ripped 65-yearold to return your health to its genetic roots (by buying his products).

The solid advice:

The solid advice:

Emphasize unprocessed foods in your diet and get lots of varied exercise.

Along with Wolf, Sisson helped popularize paleo eating plans, which reject processed anything, especially fast food and soda.

The suspect: His

YOU CAN GURU, TOO! Just about anybody can do it. Here’s how: ❑ 1) Find a podcast studio. Or at least set up a microphone in your bathroom. ❑ 2) Spout platitudes and speak in Instagram quotes, like “We’re all human beings; we’re all just trying to figure it out” and “Find something you love and chase it,“ from the podcast Live Life Better with Scott Eastwood (son of Clint). ❑ 3) Get an Instagram following. Post photos of yourself, in your glory, working out, hawking products. ❑ 4) Take ideas from studied-onlyin-animals science and posit their application to listeners. ❑ 5) Have other gurus, experts, “experts,” and authors on the show, whether highly qualified medical researchers or self-appointed sex-and-relationship authorities.

104 January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

The suspect: Ferriss has touted metformin for glucose control. According to Dr. Katz, metformin is effective for treating diabetes, but it has no benefit in healthy people and can injure the kidneys.

The reach: 25 million monthly page views (self-reported).

claim that the paleo diet is the best way to be healthy remains scientifically unfounded, says Dr. Katz.

The message: Take on Big Pharma and target the causes rather than the symptoms of ailments, often via alternative medicine.

The solid advice: He’s been ahead of the medical community in touting the benefits of nutrients like omega-3’s and CoQ10.

The suspect: He’s selling paleo in a box, including ingredients like coconut oil, despite limited evidence of its long-term health benefits, says Dr. Katz.

The suspect: Dr.

Aimed at: Those

Aimed at: Protein-

Aimed at: Health-

looking for an extra hour in the day.

forward-diet junkies who can’t cook.

conscious conspiracy theorists.

Aimed at: Protein-forwarddiet junkies.

Mercola has also been ordered by the FDA to cease making false claims regarding his own products, sold on his website.

THE PAYOFF EQUATION Is following a guru’s advice worth it? Do the math to find out!

( )+ TIME SPENT LISTENING OR READING PERCEIVED BENEFITS

ACTUAL PHYSICAL BENEFITS

-

MONEY SPENT

PSYCHIC ENERGY EXPENDED

=

WORTHINESS SCORE

Phillip Faraone/Getty Images (Ferriss), Johnstone Studios (Wolf), courtesy Mark Sisson (Sisson), Taylor Castle (Mercola)

So we wake up early, put butter in our coffee, meditate, do burpees, and dream of starting a travel blog while drinking ayahuasca and living in a refurbished van in Peru. Or whatever. We live in a time when anyone can get into the business of giving advice. Following that advice could change your life. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is who’s worth listening to. There are a lot of people doing good work out there. But there are also a lot of frauds. I don’t much give straight-up advice anymore. It’s presumptuous, and we’re different people with different histories. I can’t tell you what to do. But I can share my experience. And that’s this: The people I’ve found who are worth listening to are the ones who’ve had success in some part of their life but who don’t perpetuate the idea that every part of their life is amazing. Yes, the gurus can help us change our lives. Sometimes we simply need a shot of inspiration and someone to show us the path. But we also need to be willing to pause the podcast and start walking on our own.

Courtesy Josh Axe (Axe), Michael Stewart/WireImage (Rogan), Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images (Chopra), Ian Gavan/Getty Images (Paltrow), courtesy Onnit (Marcus), Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images (Howes)

JOSH AXE, JOE D.N.M., D.C., C.N.S. ROGAN

DEEPAK CHOPRA, M.D.

GWYNETH PALTROW

AUBREY MARCUS

LEWIS HOWES

Known as: Doctor

Known as: Come-

Known as: CEO

Known as: Pod-

dian, UFC commentator, podcaster.

Known as: Physician, integrativemedicine expert.

Known as: Actress,

of natural medicine, clinical nutritionist, health nut.

entrepreneur, founder of Goop.

and founder of Onnit, psychedelicmedicine advocate.

caster, author, mentor, former pro athlete.

The reach: 30 million+ monthly s of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

The reach: 3.28 million Twitter followers; more than 85 books authored or coauthored.

The reach: 2.4 million visitors per month to Goop.com (valued at $250 million).

The reach: 80 mil-

The message:

The message: The

The message: Let

The reach: 10 million+ podcast s (self-reported); the NYT best seller Own the Day, Own Your Life.

Listen to mindexpanding conversations with guests like climber Alex Honnold and a stoned Elon Musk, covering topics from supplements to space-time.

OG of alternative medicine and the new age fuses mind and body, Vedic science and Western medicine, to reduce stress and improve diet.

a beautiful movie star share her unbiased travel, shopping, and health advice while giving a platform to her own cadre of mentors and experts.

The reach: 1.4 million subscribers to a YouTube channel featuring Dr. Chelsea, his wife; authored the best seller Eat Dirt.

The message: Whole foods and natural remedies, like essential oils and herbs, can make you healthier and happier.

The solid advice:

The solid advice:

Natural before artificial. Organic before modified.

“Be nice to people. And do what you really want to do in this life.”

The suspect: Dr. Katz notes that Axe is perhaps overly reliant on supplements and trendy foods like broth. “There’s no evidence of the health benefits of bone broth,” he says. Aimed at: The

Aimed at: Enlight-

family that ketos together.

ened sports-radio listeners.

With the right training and supplements, a regular person can do everything better.

The message: If a small-town boy can make it big and achieve his dreams, then so can you. Listen to inspiring authors, athletes, and influencers to start believing in yourself, champ.

The solid advice: The solid advice:

The solid advice:

Dr. Chopra was an early proponent of mindfulness as a salve for everything from stress to sleep to eating.

High-quality aromatherapy products and sex toys are self-care, too.

The suspect: Rogan doesn’t sell his own line of supplements, but he’s endorsed ones from other guru types, like Aubrey Marcus (see right).

The message:

lion podcast s (self-reported).

The suspect: Suggesting that some of the supplements associated with him can help with mindfulness “hints at an effort to ‘cash in,’ ” says Dr. Katz.

Aimed at: The spiritually minded. Book readers.

The Onnit Gym is a leader in functional training, emphasizing fun, safe ways to build muscle and boost mobility.

Aimed at: Those with disposable income looking to buy a gift for a girlfriend.

The actionable motivational talk will get you taking on new goals.

The suspect:

The suspect: The site recently settled a consumer lawsuit over the veracity of health claims about its vaginal jade eggs.

The solid advice:

The suspect: Taking pills to be your “best” is a worrisome concept, according to Dr. Katz. Many formulations offer vague promises like “boost athletic performance.”

Sometimes he’ll host questionable health and dietary authorities, including Goop’s Steven Gundry, M.D., whose claims about lectin have been derided.

Aimed at: Those Aimed at: Fitness buffs with a newage bent.

who wish Tony Robbins were more affable.

THE MOST BATS#%T THINGS SAID ON THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE PODCAST “You can eat human meat—it doesn’t do anything. It’s human brains that is the real issue.” “Stilettos . . . I see women walking in them, and this is so crazy that this is a choice. I can’t imagine wearing something that would physically compromise me to the point where I literally can’t run away.” “There’s an equal number of things that people would say that are like the harmonica. Like you should be able to do slam poetry. . . . I can feed myself; I can house myself. I can do slam poetry.” “I struggle on the toilet. I’m not judgmental. I eat a lot, man. I take some horrific shits.” “I’ve shaved my butt. . . . I just had this conversation about this with someone the other day. . . . It changes the sound of your farts; they become more ducklike.” “ ‘I want you to spank me because I want you to spank me.’ ‘I don’t want you to spank me because you want to spank me.’ Big difference.”

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019 105

BIOHACKER DAVE ASPREY BUILT HIS MULTIMILLIONDOLLAR BRAND BULLETPROOF AROUND HIS OWN NOBLE QUEST TO LIVE TO 180.

BUT WHAT IF IT’S ALL JUST SMOKE AND SUNGLASSES?

106 January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

BY

RACHEL MONROE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

IAN ALLEN

THE GURU’S DILEMMA

T

TEN DAYS BEFORE I met him at his home in

British Columbia, Dave Asprey went to a clinic in Park City, Utah, where a surgeon harvested half a liter of bone marrow from his hips, filtered out the stem cells, and injected them into every t in his body. He then threaded a cannula along Asprey’s spinal column and injected stem cells inside his spinal cord and into his cerebral fluid. “And then they did all the cosmetic stuff,” Asprey told me. “Hey, I’m unconscious, you’ve got extra stem cells—put ’e m eve r y wh e re!” Eve r y whe re m e a nin g h i s s c alp, to m a ke h i s h air m ore a b u n d a nt a n d lu st rou s; h i s fa c e, to s m o ot h o u t wrin kle s; a n d h i s “m ale o rg a n s,” fo r—we ll, I’ll le ave t h at pa r t u p to you r im a g in atio n . According to Asprey, what he’d just endured was “the most extensive stemcell treatment that’s ever been done on a person at one time.” All told, it was an expensive and invasive procedure, which is particularly striking considering that there’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing wrong, that is, other than regular old human aging, which is not part of Asprey’s plan. As he’s fond of saying, he has no interest in being average. Asprey, who is 45, has made the widely publicized claim that he expects to live to 180. To that end, he plans to get his own stem cells injected into him every six months, take 100 supplements a day, follow a strict diet, bathe in infrared light, hang out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wear goofy yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane. So far, Asprey says he’s spent at least a million dollars hacking his own biology, and making it to 2153 will certainly take several million more. Currently, Asprey is best known as the founder of Bulletproof Coffee; he’s the reason everyone started slipping a pat of butter into their coffee a few years back. At least one of the Kardashians is a fan, and Jimmy Fallon has extolled the virtues of the high-fat beverage on The Tonight Show: “It’s the most delicious thing ever. But it’s actually good for you. It’s good for your brain.” Asprey estimates that people have drunk more than 150 million cups of the stuff since he first posted the recipe online in 2009. Various bottled versions are now the three highest-selling ready-to-drink coffees at Whole Foods. But while the coffee is what put Asprey on the map, his aspirations are much bigger than that—and having the longest human life span ever recorded is just one part of his plan. Asprey has parlayed the success of the coffee into one of the most coveted roles in 21st-century America: He has become a lifestyle guru. Over the past decade, he’s published five books on subjects ranging from fertility to “how to kick more ass at life,” including Game Changers, which came out in December. His podcast, Bulletproof Radio, has been ed more than 75 million times. He tweets inspirational messages, tagged #BeBulletproof, to his 332,000 Twitter followers. Asprey happily shares his opinion on how often men should ejaculate (once a week, but have sex more often) and how 108 January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

A

long they should sleep (six hours is good; eight hours is too much). He thinks you should go to Burning Man (because it’ll activate your creativity) and stop eating kale (because it contains trace amounts of oxalic acid). This eclectic advice all falls under the general umbrella of biohacking, which Asprey defines as the use of “science, biology, and self-experimentation to take control of and upgrade your body, your mind and your life,” or “the art and science of becoming superhuman.” At a period of American history when mistrust of institutions seems endemic, Asprey is a man suited to his times. He has no medical degree or nutritional training. Depending on whom you ask, this makes him either a visionary willing to explore bold new frontiers or a huckster who overstates the results of mouse studies. Where the gurus of the 1960s promised access to arcane spiritual secrets, Asprey cites research and sells supplements. But the underlying appeal is not so different: Your life needs to transform, and this guy is the one who can tell you how to do it.

+ + + + + + + + + A FEW YEARS AGO, Asprey and his wife, a physician

he met at an antiaging conference, concluded that the Bay Area wasn’t the best place to raise kids, so they relocated to Canada, where they live in bucolic splendor (and where Asprey can take a short flight to the Bulletproof offices in Seattle). The property features an extensive vegetable garden, a small flock of sheep, and two charming pigs—Brussel Snout and Sven— whom I tried not to get too attached to, seeing as they were due to be butchered in the near future. His home office, which he’s nicknamed Alpha Labs, features a number of gadgets and gizmos that he uses regularly: a cryotherapy chamber, a bed of infrared lights, a platform that vibrates 30 times per second, an atmospheric cell trainer that virtually transports you from the top of Mount Everest back to sea level within a few minutes. Alpha Labs also has high-tech versions of exercise machines, including a recumbent device fitted with cooling compression cuffs that leads you through a high-intensity interval circuit and promises to deliver two and a half hours of exercise in 21 minutes. In person, Asprey is a dimpled, affable guy with an undercurrent of intensity, like a dad you might meet at a PTA meeting who’d casually mention that he runs ultramarathons. (Not that Asprey would run an ultramarathon; it’s an inefficient use of time. Plus, as one of his podcast episodes warns, “Aerobic Exercise May Be Destroying Your Body.”) He speaks with an unflappable confidence born of years of self-study.

Courtesy of Upgrade Labs

To hear him tell it, he’s been adjacent to many major developments of the Internet era. In college, he was “the first guy to sell anything over the Internet,” he told me. (It was a T-shirt that said CA FFEINE IS M Y DRUG OF CHOICE, which he listed for sale over Usenet; buyers faxed him checks.) He says he “taught working engineers how to build the Internet” via a teaching job at the University of California-Santa Cruz’s Silicon Valley extension. He worked for the company that hosted Google’s first server. He did ayahuasca “20-something years ago, before it was cool.” (It was actually in 2003.) At the same time, Asprey didn’t feel like his best self. Over the years, he’d been variously diagnosed or self-diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, arthritis, fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s disease, chronic Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic strep throat. At his heaviest, in college, he says he weighed 300 pounds. At first, Asprey followed the standard medical advice for losing weight— restrict calories, exercise—but even when he was working out for 90 minutes and eating 1,500 to 1,800 calories a day, he wasn’t dropping pounds. “I got healthier, I was probably stronger, I could max out every machine but two at the gym,” he said. “But I still weighed the same amount.” Doctors were no help; they took one look at him and assumed he was sneaking Snickers bars. Asprey comes from a family of experimenters—his grandmother was a nuclear engineer who worked at Los Alamos. “There seems to be strange inventor genes on that side of the family,” he said. “The other side’s from Roswell. So I’ve got aliens and radiation. That explains a lot of it.” Fed up with his conventional options, Asprey decided to experiment on himself. He tried out a low-carb diet he’d read about in a bodybuilding magazine and lost 50 pounds. “That taught me that what I eat matters more than how much I exercise,” he said. “And from there I started learning.” He ordered $1,200 worth of smart drugs from Europe, which pepped him up just as he had hoped they would. He promised himself that he would learn more about these miracle medications: “Every night after I finish work, I’m going to go home and just read about this stuff and study. I’m going to troubleshoot this myself, because I am not getting help from the medical establishment. And I did that for four years. Every night, I would just study.” Eventually, Asprey’s roving curiosity about how to optimize his body and mind led him to the Silicon Valley Health Institute, a collection of Bay Area residents who met to discuss health, nutrition, and longevity. By the time Asprey came on the scene, most were decades older than him, but they found common ground nonetheless. As Asprey continued to experiment on his body, downing a daily cocktail of supplements bolstered by modafinil (a so-called smart drug for “wakefulness” that was originally developed to address narcolepsy) and testosterone, he was also experimenting on his mind. He took personal-development workshops, explored his traumatic birth (his umbilical cord had

Bulletproof Coffee (left) in Santa Monica is the brick-andmortar extension of Asprey’s butter-coffee empire. Next door to the cafe is Bulletproof Labs (center and right), what the company calls “the world’s first human upgrade center,” where you can test-drive the very biohacking technology Asprey has installed in his own home.

been wrapped around his neck), and used an EEG machine to train his brain to be less reactive. In the mid-2000s, Asprey was still working for various tech companies; in his spare time, he began putting some of the information from the health institute online. Many of Asprey’s preoccupations—bio, the dangers of fluoride in drinking water—were familiar, fringy New Age ideas. His genius was adapting them for a tech-obsessed world. After feeling like an outsider for much of his life, Asprey was thrilled to discover that the rest of the world was beginning to catch up with him. In the hypercompetitive environment of Silicon Valley, people were looking for whatever edge they could get. Tech executives began touting the benefits of meditating: It improved productivity! It boosted creative problem solving! Psychedelics and pills were no longer the domain of hippie losers. Now start-up guys were flying shamans in from Peru on private jets for personal ayahuasca ceremonies. Suddenly everyone was talking about nootropics and microdosing. Jeff Bezos got swole. Mark Zuckerberg started training for a triathlon. Everyone was desperate to upgrade. Biohacking was the perfect ethos for the moment. It took Silicon Valley’s obsessive preoccupation with productivity and disruptive technology and added a dash of L. A. in the form of herbal supplements, vague spirituality, and self-help. Finally the time was ripe for Asprey, a guy who had been tweaking his own internal systems for years; who knew how to help you get a better return on your meditation investment; who claimed he could feel when his mitochondria were underperforming; who promised strategies for turning humans into superhumans. Bulletproof initially launched as a food and beverage company, selling coffee, collagen, and supplements. Asprey also opened a flagship coffee shop in MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019 109

Dave Asprey estimates he’s spent about $700,000 on Alpha Labs, his home “gym,” which includes an atmospheric cell trainer.

Santa Monica where the baristas are called coffee hackers. The products took off, and Bulletproof was soon doing a brisk online business. Even so, Asprey never expected to get venture-capital funding—“we’re in too many categories, we’re not a fit”—but it turned out that the VCs disagreed. “We think lifestyle brands are important,” Asprey said his eventual funder told him. In 2015, Bulletproof got $9 million in initial funding from Trinity Ventures, an early investor in Starbucks and Jamba Juice. Another $43 million from other investors followed in the next few years. Asprey’s biohacking empire was on its way to greatness.

B

+ + + + + + + + + BEYOND HIS OWN goal of life extension, Asprey speaks of biohacking as

empowerment. As wearable devices become increasingly sophisticated, even those of us who aren’t wealthy and who aren’t scientists have the ability to turn our bodies’ confusing signals into clean, personalized data. Asprey dreams of a world where, instead of deferring to medical experts and profit-driven drug companies, we become experts in our own systems and experiment on them at will. Unsurprisingly, this has made Asprey suspicious of regulation. “Regulation got us the food pyramid that causes heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in unprecedented numbers of people,” he told me. “It got us an incredibly slow-to-innovate medical system that’s now being disrupted. It is antihuman to tell someone that they do not have the choice to put whatever they want into their bodies. It’s a basic human freedom. I think it’s unethical that I need to 110 January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

spend $150 and an hour of my life to get a permission slip to take a substance. There is no, no reason for that.” (Asprey’s wife disagrees.) All this self-experimentation is not without risk. Asprey once took a nap surrounded by ice packs, since cold exposure has been said to correlate with increased resilience; he woke up with first-degree burns over 15 percent of his body. Another time, he zapped himself with infrared light to test the assumption that it would help him learn faster; instead, his speech was garbled for hours. Some of Asprey’s more extreme interventions, such as the stem cells he gets injected into his brain, are not yet ed by studies in healthy humans. Two weeks after my visit, some of the most widely celebrated evidence of stem cells’ effectiveness in treating heart failure turned out to be a large-scale fraud. Most of Asprey’s acolytes aren’t likely to take things as far as he does, but even low-key biohacking has potential problems. The Bulletproof Diet advises getting 50 to 70 percent of your calories from fats, compared with the 20 to 35 percent that the USDA recommends. While nutritionists have begun to back away from the 1970s-era assertion that saturated fats are harmful to the heart, that doesn’t mean that going to the opposite extreme is necessarily a good idea. For every online anecdote about a devotee who lost 50 pounds on the Bulletproof Diet, there seems to be someone else who received alarming results on their lipid s after they began putting two tablespoons of butter in their coffee every morning. In any case, there’s a lack of large-scale, long-term research in humans to back up Asprey’s more grandiose claims about his diet. Fad diets tend to succeed based on black-and-white, anxiety-stoking pronouncements, and Asprey’s is no different: He asserts, for example, that olive oil is a suspect food, that kale can be toxic, that legumes are inflammatory, that gluten should be avoided by everyone, not just those with celiac disease—ideas that are disputed by mainstream dietitians. “This follows the same pattern as every fad diet. They all say the same thing: oversimplifying the situation, promising a life-changing experience, making unrealistic weightloss claims,” says Abby Langer, a ed dietitian based in Toronto. “Part of the appeal is psychological. People like to feel like they belong to a group with access to secret knowledge.” If you follow Asprey’s advice to a T, you’ll be spending a hefty amount on dietary supplements with names like NeuroMaster and Unfair Advantage. The evidence for their ability to “provide brain-enhancing energy” or make you “feel cognitively sharper” is not as clearcut or definitive as Asprey makes it sound. (Some also have the unfortunate side effect of causing what he

Whether the science is robust or reproducible matters less than whether a product delivers results. “The bottom line,” he says, “is if the risk-reward ratio is pretty good, why not try it?”

refers to as “disaster pants.”) The nootropic smart drugs that Asprey touts aren’t problem-free, either; some s report jitteriness, difficulty sleeping, and addiction issues. “Cognitive enhancement is most likely a zerosum game,” says P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., a brain scientist and physician at Duke University Health System and a member of Men’s Health’s advisory board. “When you enhance certain cognitive functions, it usually comes at the expense of others.” Langer points out that Asprey’s lack of official credentials benefits him in two ways. “There’s a huge distrust of mainstream medicine now, so not being a doctor probably actually does him favors,” she says. “Also, it’s hard to make false claims when you have a licensing body overseeing you. If I said some of these things, I’d be investigated.” To critics like Langer, Asprey points to his track record: “Whether or not you have a piece of paper isn’t a great indication of whether you’ll help hundreds of thousands of people.” Whether the science is robust or reproducible matters less than whether any given product or strategy delivers results. “The bottom line,” he says, “is if the risk-reward ratio is pretty good and you want to be in control of your own biology, why not try it?” Asprey’s enthusiasm can make it difficult to determine where his desire to educate ends and the sales pitch begins. In his books, podcasts, and blog posts, he is a proponent of several companies he either owns or has a stake in: the one that sells yellow-tinted glasses that protect you from “junk light”; the one that sells stickers you put over your devices’ lights; the one that sells five-day, $15,000 brain-training retreats that promise to raise your IQ and put your mind in the same state as that of a Zen monk who’s been meditating for 40 years. He insists that most coffee beans are tainted with toxic mold—a claim that even Joe Rogan rolls his eyes at—and also happens to sell mold-free coffee beans that cost $20 a pound. It’s not always easy to parse which of the many biohacks Asprey touts are scammy or overstated, which are plain old common sense, and which are poised to become the hot new thing. Back in my hotel room that evening, I sipped on a Bulletproof Fatwater and tried to determine whether my mitochondria felt any perkier. It was hard to say. Here’s the thing: A lot of what Asprey says makes sense. So many of us have lifestyles that could use a little hacking. We’re tethered to our electronics, anxious and overworked and not sleeping enough; we self-soothe with the very processed foods that are likely to end up making us feel worse. If we’re fortunate enough to have insurance, we’re treated by a health-care system that often acts as though it doesn’t have our best interests at heart. It’s not so wild to feel that something is wrong with the way we’ve been incentivized to live our lives. At the same time, we’re unhelpfully inundated with information about what that wrong might be. The Internet is chock-full of studies and articles and dubious Facebook posts: Did you hear that aerobic exercise is actually bad for you? Did you hear that kale has arsenic in it? Did you hear that putting collagen in your coffee will make your hair glossy? The process of sorting out what’s bullshit from what’s legitimate is, frankly, exhausting. If you opt into the current trend—intermittent fasting or krill oil or cryo—are you a sucker? If you opt out, will you be left behind, foggy brained and unvital, as everyone else goes on to conquer the world? I’ve felt it myself, the desperate desire to have someone just tell me what to do. Doctors hem and haw; they speak in hedged probabilities and avoid making bold claims. Asprey, in contrast, is happy to tell me that there are “absolutely” several ways to reverse Alzheimer’s, that he can more than double the average life span, and that we are all able take control of our own biology and make our bodies do exactly what we want them to.

I

+ + + + + + + + + I N 2 0 1 7, Asprey opened Bulletproof Labs (now

expanding as Upgrade Labs), a gymlike facility in Santa Monica where you can play around with his favorite biohacking tools. I went a day after meeting Asprey. I got cryogenically frozen for two minutes. I climbed inside a float tank that was supposed to help me meditate faster through a combo of high-frequency sound waves and strobing lights, but that mostly just stressed me out. I was zapped with electromagnetic pulses by a PEMF machine that was supposed to activate my cell regeneration, improve my circulation, promote bone healing, and relieve the symptoms of depression. The coffee shop next door to Bulletproof Labs serves only Bulletproof-approved food and drink, and there’s a vibrational platform you can stand on while you wait for the grass-fed butter to get mixed into your coffee. A sign on the wall reads WAKE UP. CRUSH IT. REPEAT. I spoke to a bald, affable man there who assured me that he’d been into biohacking since the late 1990s, way before Asprey made it trendy. He went to the conferences, read the research papers, swallowed the supplements. So when he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer in 2016, he developed a plan that incorporated both conventional and alternative treatments. He went into remission, started a website, and began to be featured on blogs and podcasts: “How Eric Remensperger Cured His Own Cancer.”He started writing a book; maybe he, too, could be a lifestyle guru. But then a few months ago, the cancer came back— in his bladder this time. He had a new treatment protocol and was feeling optimistic. Still, it had been a humbling journey. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, your biology won’t behave. Sometimes the superhumans turn out to be humans, too. I spoke to Asprey one last time, a few days after his forty-fifth birthday. He was choosing to look at aging in the most positive way possible. “I think of it as, I’m now 25 percent of the way to my minimum goal [of living to 180],” he said. “So I’m officially a young adult. Is living a long time a kind of superpower? Yes. Although I might die trying.”

RACHEL MONROE is a writer based in Marfa, Texas. Her book Savage Appetites will be published later this year. MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019

111

KETO NATION

How b o d y b u i l d e r s , b i o h a c ke r s , s c i e n t i s t s , n u t r i t i o n n e r d s , a n d h u c ks t e r s helped an extreme die t g o ma i n s t r e am. BY MICHAEL EASTER

GREYSON LOPEZ’S

friend was about to be kicked out of the military for being too chubby. It was late 2017, and Lopez noticed his friend started losing weight—fast. “He’d lost 20 pounds in 20 days,” says Lopez, 23, who works in IT for the Navy. “So I asked, ‘How’d you do it?’ ” Searching for a lose-it-quick plan, the rapidly becoming-less-fat guy explained, he’d gone to Reddit, where he glommed on to a thread on the “ketogenic diet.” People in the 870,000-strong /r/keto subreddit posted about losing 52 pounds in as many days, not feeling hungry, and even being able to focus better. However, the diet was, to put it mildly, contrarian in the same way you might say American politics is “divided.” First, you eat very limited carbs. Low-carb isn’t radical, but ketogenic is ultralow: less than 50 grams a day. (The average American hits that at breakfast.) Fruit is mostly a no, and you strictly cap vegetables. Yes, vegetables. 112

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE VOORHES

Next, you’re limited to 100 grams a day, at most, of protein, that muscle-building nutrient embraced by nearly every other diet. What’s left? Fat. Lots of it: marbled steak, oily fish, yolky eggs, and streaky bacon. Top it all with butter, olive oil, and lard. A classic keto diet consists of 90 percent of calories from fat, 6 percent from protein, and 4 percent from carbs. The diet is, indeed, a giant F-U to the food pyramid. But Lopez’s friend said the crazy diet was science-based: The absence of carbs and abundance of fat pushes your body into a biological state called ketosis, during which you burn fat instead of glucose. Lopez—who was five foot nine, 200 pounds, and “a bit portly”—was intrigued. His online digging led to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Rogan, a college dropout and self-described “silly bitch,” unpacks complex topics with no pretense. He was interviewing the top keto researcher, Dom D’Agostino, Ph.D.,

a professor of physiology at the University of South Florida. “It was interesting to hear a scientist talk about what he eats and why,” says Lopez. D’Agostino is not a salesman, and he did not create the diet. Which raises the question: Who did? That’s when things get weird, involving a two-time felon, medical misconduct, and multiple deaths. But Lopez didn’t know about keto’s history. He just wanted to find out if the hype could be real. “I threw out all my carb-heavy foods, like ramen and Hot Pockets,” he says. “Then I grabbed as much bacon, grass-fed butter, and steak as I could find.”

WHAT MAKES A fad diet tip? That’s a question Adrienne Rose Bitar, Ph.D., a nutrition historian at Cornell University, has spent her career answering. “Most diets start with some unhappiness we have with our lives and bodies,” she says.

MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019 113

Then you need a simple, counterintuitive message that resonates at the right time and place and blames a single culprit for your dissatisfaction. Low-fat diet: Fat is bad; don’t eat fat. Paleo: Processed foods are bad; eat only preindustrial foods like a caveman. With keto, you just do what your doctor (and mom) told you not to: Eat fat and skip the veggies. While this partly explains keto’s rise, it overlooks a critical aspect. The keto diet, it turns out, wasn’t engineered for weight loss. Fasting has been used as a treatment for epilepsy since 500 B.C. Your body usually runs on sugars harvested from the carbs you eat. You store around 2,000 calories’ worth of sugars in your liver and muscles. Your body burns through that in about 48 hours, which is when an evolutionary survival mechanism kicks in. Your body switches to its stored fat, some of which is converted to a fuel called ketones. This state is called ketosis (defined as ing 0.5 to 5 millimoles of ketones per liter of blood). In the early 1920s, Mayo Clinic doctor Russell Wilder, M.D., started tinkering with a fat-centric diet that mimicked the effects of fasting by depleting the body of sugar. He tested his “ketogenic” diet on people with epilepsy, and ever since, it’s been an effective treatment for seizures. Weight loss entered the fold in 1972, when Robert Atkins, M.D., published his first diet book. The first weeks of his eponymous diet centered on eating fat and very little carbs to induce ketosis, a “happy state . . . [in which] your fat is being burned off with maximum efficiency and minimum deprivation.” That was how keto blipped on the radar of Stephen Phinney, Ph.D., an MIT–trained nutritional biochemist, who began researching this way of eating for endurance sports. Then, in 1976, a ketosis-leveraging method called the Last Chance Diet took off. Its rule: You drink a fat- and protein-rich concoction until you lose your desired amount of weight. The diet’s creator, osteopath Robert Linn, D.O., sold $40 million worth of his elixir. But you were also supposed to have a physician’s supervision to ensure you were getting the necessary vitamins and minerals, says Phinney. Few people did. Robbed of minerals, your body can’t perform certain functions, like sending electrical impulses to your heart. As a result, the Last Chance Diet contributed to the deaths of at least 60 people. The fallout included new regula114

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

tions, a negligence lawsuit for Dr. Linn, and Phinney and his research on ketosis being banished to academic Siberia. Still, Phinney forged on, conducting studies that, for example, showed that liquid ketogenic diets with adequate minerals don’t cause heart problems. In 1988, Optifast emerged. Like the Last Chance Diet, it was a liquid diet, but with sufficient vitamins and minerals, plus a celebrity endorser: Oprah Winfrey. “She did it for four months,” says Phinney. “One day she opened her show pulling a red wagon that contained 67 pounds of pig and beef fat. And she points to it and says, ‘That’s how much weight I’ve lost.’ ” The Oprah Effect was soon in full effect: Optifast immediately received more than 200,000 inquiries, and keto research surged in the early ’90s. That’s when the diet was adopted by the hard-core bodybuilding underground. “I first heard about keto from this guy named Dan Duchaine,” says D’Agostino, as did a handful of other key nutrition researchers interviewed for this story. Duchaine, who ed away in 2000, was a two-time felon credited with promoting the steroid movement of the ’90s and, yeah, reviving keto as a way for bodybuilders to drop fat quickly for competition. And with the rediscovery of the Atkins diet in the 2000s, new generations of Americans warmed to the idea that low-carb could be a safe diet tool.

THE SCALING UP of keto starts with a study published in Science in January 2013. Scientists at the Gladstone Institute, a San Francisco–based research center, found that powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory genes are activated by beta-hydroxybutyrate, a ketone body produced when you limit calories or carbs. The keto diet could, as the press release put it, “slow the aging process and may one day allow scientists to better treat or prevent age-related disease, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many forms of cancer.” Nutritionally woke biohack-

ers—interested in keto for fat loss, athletic performance, productivity, and longevity in equal parts—began to self-experiment. Among them was Tim Ferriss, the Princeton-educated, Silicon Valley– based podcaster and author of The 4-Hour Work Week. He’d dabbled in keto—writing that it’s “incredible for simultaneous fat loss and lean muscle gain, though perhaps needlessly complicated for non-athletes.” In 2013, he posted to his blog a video of Peter Attia, M.D., a longevity expert. Dr. Attia talked about his battle with metabolic syndrome and how keto changed his body and health in ways exercise and vegetables could not. He revealed graph after graph plotting keto’s positive impact on his triglycerides, cholesterol, and blood glucose levels. Ferriss’s one million monthly followers, people obsessed with data and anything that would give them a quantifiable edge, tested out the keto eating plan. Traditionally, diets were religious: halal, kosher, Lent. “Many diets were actually plans to purify the soul—and an impure soul meant you could go to hell,” says Bitar. “But recently diet has become a means to creating an optimized self.” In place of dogma, you have data. The number of people searching for the keto diet immediately doubled and continued to trend upward as other lifestyle gurus, like Dave Asprey and Mark Sisson, jumped aboard. As keto’s popularity increases, the medical establishment cautions that although the diet is considered safe when done right, the emphasis on saturated fat and the lack of nutrients may affect heart health over time. “We still don’t have enough long-term evidence on what happens to your body after ten years of ketosis,” says Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., a nutrition researcher and author of The Hungry Brain. Keto’s other benefits—reduced hunger and increased focus—stoked the biohacker bros. “Keto does control hunger,” says Guyenet. The driver, he says, may be the extreme nature of the diet. “Carbs and fat together stimulate dopamine release and

T h e KETO DIET , i t t u r n s out, wasn’t engineered for weight loss.

activate motivational circuits in the brain that drive us to eat,” he says. Consider ice cream: It’s only so appetizing because it’s both sweet and fatty. As for the mental clarity that many advocates swear by? Controversial. Any effect is probably due to eating less junk food, which can cause a blood-sugar roller-coaster effect and impact mood, says Nicole Avena, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai in New York City. However, there are people for whom keto does deliver unique benefits: type 2 diabetics. Recent research by Phinney showed that those who followed a ketogenic diet and received diet counseling for a year significantly decreased diabetes-medication usage and lost an average of 30 pounds. Thanks to the Internet telephone effect, the claims for keto became grander. Then something happened that pushed the diet to the top of Google News. On November 3, 2015, Ferriss aired a podcast with D’Agostino. “That is the tipping point of when the diet comes into the vernacular and zeitgeist of the country,” says Andy Galpin, Ph.D., a humanperformance researcher at California State University, Fullerton. The episode’s title: “Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer.” Ferriss told the story of a friend with testicular cancer who would fast for three days, entering into ketosis, before chemotherapy. D’Agostino noted that anyone with cancer needs medical supervision of their diet, but also said: “If you put your physiology into a state of fasting ketosis, that puts tremendous metabolic stress on cancer cells that are highly dependent for survival and growth on high levels of glucose and insulin. By subtracting them of those growth needs, they can [die], and you could potentially purge yourself of some precancerous cells.” When asked about that quote, D’Agostino says, “The episode’s title is unfortunate,” but he points out that his research does suggest keto can help slow the progression of some cancers, though it speeds up others. “It’s much more complicated than ‘starve your cancer of sugar,’” he says. (Ferriss declined to be interviewed for this article.) The Ferriss podcast was a gateway to The Joe Rogan Experience, and soon Rogan’s 30 million monthly listeners were hearing from keto experts, including D’Agostino in November 2017. As keto spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, the emphasis shifted from self-optimization to the concerns of the everyman still working 40-hour weeks: weight loss.

KETO THRIVES IN the vortex of social media. It’s highly viral because it’s photogenic, offering swift results and dramatic befores and afters on Instagram. “Short-term carbohydrate restriction can cause 5 to 10 pounds of almost immediate water loss,” says Galpin. And you have lots of data. Ketosis is a moving target: Some people lapse into it when they eat less than 20 grams of carbs a day, while others can eat up to 50. So you need to collect data and check your levels with a device. And because a single carrot can toss you out of ketosis, you need to quantify each meal, weighing your food and using a nutrition app to calculate the exact ratio of fats to proteins to carbs. Within a year of the Rogan podcast, keto cookbooks flooded the market, searches for keto hit 17 million per month, and Orian Research estimated keto is a $5 billion industry. A modified version, with 80 percent fat, 15 percent protein, and 5 percent carbs, has emerged as the most popular, and keto cycling (doing one week of keto per month) became a thing. And because people on keto often lack nutrients like vitamin C, magnesium, and fiber, there’s been a supplement gold rush for brands behind products that make staying on the diet easier. Which brings us back to Lopez and the question: Does keto work for weight loss?

In the short term, yes. “But the weightloss effects are primarily driven by the suppression of appetite, which in turn regulates calorie intake,” says D’Agostino. In other words: When you limit what you eat, you...limit what you eat. Weight-loss diets usually come down to eating less. Consider the results of an influential 2018 study in JAMA. It found no significant difference in the amount of weight loss at one year between people who ate a low-fat diet and those on a low-carb diet. But the study’s results suggest an important factor about diets: individual preference. Some people lost 65 pounds; others on the same diet gained 20. Greyson Lopez is now 12 months into his keto journey. “I’m down 50 pounds,” he says. His friend, meanwhile, bailed after three months, when a cross-country move made it hard to stay on keto. “The thing is, you can’t cheat, or it knocks you out of ketosis,” says Lopez. He prepares all his meals at home. A go-to is steak topped with butter and asparagus spears. Lopez plans on sticking to the diet, even though it makes him “that picky asshole” in social settings. “I recently listened to this debate on Rogan with D’Agostino and Layne Norton [Ph.D.], an expert who was more moderate,” he says. “And the conclusion was that the best diet is whatever diet works for you. Keto works for me.” MEN’S HEALTH

/ January • February 2019 115

THE (Above) AVERAGE GUY THIS MONTH

MOVIE TIME

9 P.M. to 10 P.M.

MEN’S FAVORITE MOVIES BY GENRE (in descending order)

When men most often stream a movie on Hulu Action

THE MOVIES MOST OFTEN STREAMED BY MEN ON HULU IN 2018

90%

Baywatch Transformers: The Last Knight The Magnificent Seven

OF MOVIES WATCHED BY MEN ARE SCREENED AT HOME. 10% of movies watched by men are screened at theaters.

AVERAGE TIME MEN SPEND WATCHING TV AND MOVIES AT HOME

2.59

Hours per

3.79

Hours per weekend day

44

The average age of Best Actor Oscar winners

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

3.7

Men made up 60% of the audience.

Adventure

OF ALL MOVIE-THEATER AUDIENCES ARE MEN.

Sci-fi

How much a movie may decrease in revenue when the male lead is over the age of 42

THAT’S WITHOUT BUTTER

Average number of movie screenings a man attends per year

movie overall in 2017

the Beast of the audience.

Thriller

$10,000,000

50%

The highest-grossing movie overall in 2017

Comedy

1,090

Calories in a large 190 oz tub of movie popcorn

MEN PREFER TO WATCH AN ACTION MOVIE OR A COMEDY TWICE AS MUCH AS A ROMANCE OR A WESTERN.

Men’s Health (ISSN 1054-4836) Vol. 34, No. 1 is published 10 times per year, monthly except combined issues in January/February and July/August and when future combined issues are published that count as two issues as indicated on the issue’s cover, by Hearst Magazines, Inc., at 300 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hearst Communications, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and at additional mailing offices. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division: David Carey, Chairman; Troy Young, President; John A. Rohan Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance. Copyright 2019 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved. Men’s Health is a ed trademark of Hearst Magazines, Inc. Postmaster: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address changes to Men’s Health Customer Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500. IN CANADA: Postage paid at Gateway, Mississauga, Ontario; Canada Post International Publication Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40012499. Postmaster (Canada): Send returns and address changes to Men’s Health magazine, P.O. Box 927, Stn Main, Markham ON L3P 9Z9 (GST# R122988611). Mailing Lists: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings by postal mail, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to: Men’s Health, Mail Preference Center, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA, 51593. You can also visit preferences.hearstmags.com to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing offers by email. Customer Service: Visit service.menshealth.com or write to Men’s Health Customer Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500.

116

January • February 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH

Dziggyfoto/Getty Images (man on couch), Scott Olson/Getty Images (Oscar), Laurie Sparham/© Walt Disney Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection (Beauty and the Beast), Jonathan Olley/© Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), VirtuStudio/Getty Images (popcorn), Frank Masi/© Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection (Baywatch), Claire Folger/© Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection (Central Intelligence), Jasin Boland/© Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection (San Andreas), Frank Masi/© Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), © Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection (Rampage)

HOW DO YOU RATE?