Find Your North Star for Real Change

Hello everyone, you are listening to the Unhealthy Podcast with Uncle Marv, where we talk about the real stuff behind I'm Fine, the stress, the labs, the late night snacking, and the stories we don't tell our doctors. So today folks, we're going to take a look at something a little bit new. A lot of us out here are, you know, we're running our businesses, we're raising our families, trying to hold everything together.

In the meantime, we are quietly running our bodies into the ground. You're gaining weight, you're wiped out, sleep is trash. And of course, the answer is eat less, move more, try harder.

And why do I say that? Well, because that's what I've been talking about on the show. All the experts out there, that's what they're telling us to do. Those are things that I've tried. 

And, you know, a year ago, I had lost a bunch of weight and for some ungodly reason, a lot of that weight is back. So we're going to talk about that. We are joined by my friend, Diana Feinstein. 

Of course, she's going to join me here and call BS on a bunch of that. And Diana works with high performing women and executives, agents, business owners, who are, I think, are in the same situation, right? They think they're doing everything right, but you're there to help them get over the hump. So welcome to the show.

I'm so excited to come back. Thanks so much, Michael Marvin. Well, thanks for being back. 

And I should remind listeners that you are the reason that I started eating cauliflower pizza, which turned out to be actually pretty good. Our only issue is that we can't find the cauliflower crust all the time. So we always, we got to find a new source. 

But how are things with you? Things are going fantastic. Thanks so much for asking. All right. 

To put things in perspective, folks, Diana and I chat every now and then. And when we talked about coming on the show again, of course, she asked how I was doing. And I told her about my struggles, told her about the topics we've had on the show, how for some reason Menopause seemed to be the most listened to show in 25.

And that was just kind of weird. So in telling her all of that, we got to talking about my stuff. And she, of course, was asking me questions. 

Why aren't you doing this? What motivates you? What's your end goal? Blah, blah, blah. And I said, you know what? Why don't we just make that a show? And here's where we are. And of all the stuff that I described, Diana, in the opening, is it fair to say that that's pretty much where a lot of people start, I guess? 99.99999% of people. 

I want to normalize what you're going through is very real. Okay. It's very normal. 

And you're not alone. All right. So usually by the time people get to you, let's start with the first step.

You know, we're going through all of this stuff. We're trying to do the right things. We're eating healthy. 

We are following the food apps to find the healthy foods versus the non-healthy foods. And I can tell you this, sometimes listening to, if you just listen to people on the YouTube or whatever without fact-checking them, a lot of the stuff they're saying isn't right. And a lot of the, just because it's organic doesn't mean it's healthy.

Somebody the other day I heard on a radio show was talking about, well, just eat kosher and that'll make you healthy. And that's not even true. So there's a lot of stuff that comes into why people think they're doing the right things, but they're not. 

But let me ask you this. How do people get to you from where they are? So I meet people where it is that they are. Instead of giving people cookie cutter solutions of things that they can and cannot have, what's important is to figure out what is their starting point and what does success look like one year from today? We fall to the level of our habits 95% of the time. 

And we rise to the level of those goals 5% of the time. And when we look external to us for those solutions, we try to fit a square peg into a round hole. And so what I look for are patterns that are keeping us stuck.

So for example, there are some, I'm going to call them fitness and nutrition hygiene practices that are relevant across all humans. Now what your specific body is ready, willing, and able to do, I'm talking about emotionally, I'm talking about physically, and I'm talking about nervous system capacity, right? Is very bespoke to you. What happens during menopause and manopause, more formally known as andropause, is from my vantage point, it's a capacity shift and not a failure. 

Yes, men's hormones will change. Yes, women's hormones will change. But so does your stress tolerance. 

So does the way you're managing glucose, how your sleep architecture is managed, your emotional grains, your recovery time. Now when a system changes, but expectations don't, that's when friction becomes inevitable. And so when we engage in bad habits, there is nothing as addicting as something that almost works. 

And so when we go, you know, to grab for the thing that's supposed to be bad, my perspective is, instead of shaming it, well, why does it make so much sense? And when you approach it from a place of self-compassion, that is where we begin. Okay, sounds good. I want to refer to a PDF that you sent me.

Mm-hmm. And at first when I looked at it, I was like, oh, this is a little intense, a little too technical. But going through and looking at it, I said, okay, I think this makes sense. 

One of the first things that you talk about is starting with a diagnostic intelligence brief, which sounds a little systematic, militaristic in a sense or whatever. But can you describe what that is and why you start there? Yeah. So let's go back to the idea of habits for a second. 

Okay. You're going to have the same behaviors, right? You're going to choose not to eat breakfast. You're going to choose to prioritize work over, you know, getting exercise in. 

You're going to choose very specific things over and over and over again. Now, when I can understand how it is that you spend your time, the 168 hours in your week, I can know that that's likely how you're going to spend your time next week, the week after, right? I know that that's how you're going to continue to spend your time, which produces a very specific outcome. From a very humanistic standpoint, if your demands are greater than your resources, you're going to find a way to make things work, and you're going to try and find a sense of relief. 

And oftentimes that will be food for a lot of people because it's very easy and it's very accessible. So when I understand how you spend your time, that's where we can actually reconstruct your habits. Okay. 

So understanding where we spend our time, you're going to have to start tweaking that, right? That's right. Now, some of that is habit. Some of that is based on our jobs. 

I mean, you're talking about high-performing executives. Most of them, they can't do it just nine to five. That's right.

So taking emails at 8, 9, 10 p.m., that's probably something a lot of us have to do. As an IT professional, I've kind of made it work where I don't get a lot of those, but every now and then I do. How do you start with those types of habits and systems and kind of reining them in? Yeah. 

So I look at what people are ready, willing, and able to do, and I run what's called a cost-benefit analysis. When you choose to prioritize action A over action B, this is where your outcome is going to be. And you keep having that outcome over and over and over again.

Now, when we think about focus, right, when we think about what the purpose of sleep is, for example, answering an email at 10 o'clock at night, what is the benefit of answering that email? What is the benefit of always staying on at that time? What is the cost of that focus, you know, to your focus? What's the cost of that to your decision-making? What's the cost of that to your relationships, right? And when you see that the 10 minutes that you spend responding to that email, when you see how much that costs in you, then you tell me, is that something you're ready, willing, and able to change? I don't know. All right. And everybody has to be able to answer that for themselves.

That's right. That's right. All right. 

So in that regard, I can tell you my perspective, I was able to do that probably 90%, you know, putting the phone on a schedule so that it, you know, not only goes to voicemail, but doesn't ring, doesn't forward me a voicemail after hours. For the emails that do get through, being able to look at them and make that decision, yeah, this can wait. And having customers realize that, you know, the world is not going to end if I don't respond to that particular email. 

So I can understand that to a degree. What about the people that have a hard time making that decision? And so that's when we come up with a concept of a boundary, right? What are some of the things that I have to institute in my business to actually provide, you know, the highest level of service, you know, for a specific client? So when we think about the quality of what it is that we provide to our client, how is it that we can put ourselves in the best position to give really quality work? And oftentimes when I work with a lot of business owners, what they begin to realize is their level of reactivity leads actually to poor decision making. But no one ever came to I'm going to call them a lovingly bring this to their attention, right? And so if you don't, so if you think of it like just from an IT system, you have no quality assurance testing, right? You don't have any consistent ways to like upgrade the system. 

It becomes chaotic. What happens to your system when it's chaotic? It's not maintained properly. There's no quality assurance. 

What happens to that workflow? It's going to degrade over time. Exactly. And so then the question becomes when, at what point are you going to stop the degradation? And that's a pretty deeply personal question. 

Okay. Very interesting. All right. 

So you've gotten people to look at that. They do the diagnostic. What's the next step? So then the question becomes, now that you have this insight, if you're looking for transformation, then I have this information. 

So this is where you currently are. This is where you'd like to be a year from now. I have this information gap that is now finally closed. 

I know in order for me to increase my capacity in life, right? Increase my happiness, increase my joy, increase the way I connect with other, increase the profitability of my business. I now understand this gap. Now, once that information gap is closed, this is a function of how consistently can you put in remediation measures.

It's in the execution of closing that gap. And then it becomes, and then it comes down to the consistency of those remediation measures. Knowing you have remediation is very different from closing that remediation consistently. 

You need a plan. All right. So you've mentioned a couple of terms that I think as, if I were to put this episode out to my tech people, they're going to hear the word remediation and they understand that.

But in their minds, a lot of them, remediation starts with automation. We want to automate as much of that stuff as possible. Can we automate any of this? A thousand percent. 

And that comes down to like actually understanding your human biology as an IT system, right? And so your IT system has a very specific workflow that it runs through on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, quarterly basis, right? There are certain patterns that need to happen in order for that IT system to thrive. And so what are the broken mechanisms that need to be automated? Right? And the very first thing that I work on with people is actually what it is that they put in their mouth. If your system doesn't have the gasoline to turn on, there is no power. 

One of the most, one of the greatest leverage points that men and women can actually do during midlife is the power of protein. This actually fuels your cognitive functioning. It produces an amount of satiety and actually sharpens your cognition through something called glucose regulation. 

Now, if you can actually feed the system every two to three hours so that it stays sharp, how is the system going to perform? With increased capacity. Our human bodies, they're no different. You just need to understand the most leveraged mechanism.

Okay. Two to three hours. I don't know why that just stuck out at me because I don't think I've ever seen a plan talk about doing something every two to three hours. 

Why, why that timeframe? So there's something called glucose regulation that gets extraordinarily sensitive during midlife for, you know, men in their, men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. Now, when our glucose is erratic, right? And one of the lagging indicators of erratic glucose is actually your A1C. So if your A1C is very elevated, that means you don't have consistent glucose regulation during the day. 

And then it's actually chronic, right? That'll put you into that pre diabetic state. So when you can actually give your system a cadence, right? Anchors, scaffolding, then it allows for increased capacity. We don't necessarily need that level of scaffolding and capacity in like our twenties and thirties, but it actually becomes paramount in our fifties.

Now, is this the same for both men and women? Because, you know, based on what I've, you know, understood now about hormones and menopause and perimenopause and all of that stuff. And the fact that men actually have a pause of themselves, do these principles work the same or how different are they if they are? So women's, women's biology is significantly more complex, significantly more complex. And so while men could have, let's say, you know, they'll choose to, you know, start eating lunch at let's, you know, they'll start, you know, eating at like 11 o'clock and they'll finish at eight. 

Women may not necessarily be able to afford that, right? They may need to start eating earlier on in the day. But the core function of having consistent protein during the day is, is the one lever that actually men and women really should be focusing on to really increase their capacity. It's just the timing may be slightly different.

Okay. You said 11 to eight. So I'm giving an example of like, let's say an intermittent fasting window.

Okay. When is the first time you put food in your mouth and is it protein? Okay. I'm sure special K has some protein.

No. It's not on the box. It's not. 

Nope. Nope. Okay.

If you're really looking to like increase your metabolism, increase your energy levels, right. Decrease belly fat, all of the things. One of the most powerful things that you can do as a man and woman is actually to increase your protein requirement. 

Special K is not one of them. Okay. So you're talking about changing breakfast to start.

That's right. That starts, that starts the waterfall. Does that mean stuff like oatmeal and what else you would? Well, some people eat protein bars for breakfast. 

Is that good? So it is better than special K, right? Like I want you to think of it like a spectrum instead of like good or bad, what we're looking on is better. All right. So, you know, the way that I health coaches food falls into three categories, your green light foods, your red light, your green light foods, your yellow light foods, and like your red light foods, right? Foods, there are green light foods.

They're going to give you, they support your goals. You can eat the moderately insanely yellow light foods. They kind of support your goals. 

They, you may or may not be able to eat moderately insanely red light foods. They don't support your goals and you do not eat them moderately insanely. Okay. 

So all foods, they fall into one of three macros, a protein, a carbohydrate, and a fat. Okay. Proteins will be a thing that are like, let's say animal based straight chicken, fish, eggs, egg whites, right. 

A lot of dairy yogurt, you know, cottage cheese, um, beans, lentils, legumes, like those are actually considered proteins, right? They are going to give you the best bang for your buck. Okay. But those are things that I would eat either in the afternoon or evening. 

I'm talking about the morning breakfast. So here's, I'll be on, I don't eat special K just so you know, but here's my breakfast will either be a fruit cocktail, uh, bananas, watermelon, and some other melon. There's green and yellow, green and orange. 

It's awesome. It's what ends up in there. So that, that, that might be one day, uh, a banana and yogurt, um, a bowl of oatmeal. 

And when things are really good, I have time, uh, we can do eggs and toast and maybe a Turkey sausage. And so I'm, what I'm going to recommend is for you to start actually indexing more on the protein. And that includes the yogurt that I heard that includes the eggs, right. 

And the egg whites, right. Something that's super easy that you can add to your oatmeal is actually some protein powder or some yogurt into, into there. Okay. 

Um, so I'll be honest, I don't like the yogurt. Is there any good one or any good Is there any good, good tasting yogurt, I guess is the best way to ask. I like Oikos triple zero pro the vanilla version.

Triple zero pro. Yep. Oikos triple zero pro vanilla.

Get that into Publix. Yep. Okay. 

You sure it's good. It's I love it. So here's what I'm going to do for your listeners. 

I'm actually going to give you some protein, uh, for breakfast, um, for men and women in menopause and manopause. I'll send it across for your listeners. Okay. 

All right. So you, you, you talked about this being a thing we have to really address basically midlife, you know, forties, fifties and sixties. Now this is usually the time that most of us are really tied to productivity, whether it's in our jobs or whatever, you know, we're, we're either, you know, still working to get to the top. 

Uh, a lot of the people that I associate with, uh, own their own businesses. So of course, everything is tied to the success of the business. You know, you've always got to be growing. 

If you're not growing, you're dying sort of a thing like that. So I guess the question is if we live based on that, you know, we can't take away from that productivity. Um, you've, you've got to see a struggle in clients like that. 

And yeah, I guess the, the question is how do we deal with that struggle and flip that script? What if your body were your, your most underutilized asset, the computer that you, that was actually in the corner that you'd never turned on that had all of the answers. What if your, your, what if your physiology was the precursor to like optimal performance? If you had more energy, if you had sharper cognition, if you were able to make better decisions, what would happen to your business? I mean, it should thrive, right? Right. And so what if the position that you're putting your body in just by adding some protein powered breakfast, what was the, what if that was the very beginning to turn on next level growth? Is that something you'd be interested in? Well, we all should say yes.

And I'm curious why the resistance makes sense. Well, here's, here's the thing. We always say yes, but then the practical part of life is we don't.

And I, I'll be honest. I know. And we've had a conversation off the air and I'll, I'll let the listeners in on a little secret where there are times where I know the right answer. 

I just know I'm not going to do it. But how do you know that that's the right answer in that moment? How do you know? Because I don't want to do, Oh, you mean how do I know it's right? Well, okay. I guess that's the, that's another type of discussion then, because the way that you're asking me is maybe it's not right for you at that time.

That's right. How are you defining, how are you defining right in that moment? But we're always told to just, you know, gut it out, figure it out, make the time, you know, like I, you know, I've been saying, just, you know, figure out a way, you know, eat less, move more. And what, and at what point do you recognize that that no longer works, that approach? When I look in the scale and I'm like, how in the world am I two pounds heavier? Right, right. 

It's, you know, you posted a real, I, I was looking through your LinkedIn and there was a really great, you know, really great podcast that talked about understanding right fit. Okay. Right. 

And so what if you had to re-evaluate the client's right fit? Because if you identified the right fit, what would that actually do to your margin? It would increase it. And so the question I'm going to ask you is the thing that you think is right, the right fit client, what if it, that's actually the wrong fit client? What if you haven't found the right fit client or what if you're not optimizing for the right fit client so that you could actually increase your margin? What if your meals actually led with satisfaction and increased your capacity and performance all at the same time? What if you just never had the roadmap? And that's a pretty deeply personal thing that you're not going to find on Instagram. Right.

Okay. So you help people find their roadmap. A hundred percent.

And it might not be the same as anybody else's. Now. Yeah.

I did say in the opening, I did not, you know, I forgot, I should have written this down. I did not say the name of your company, Max Pact Health. So for listeners, of course it'll be in the show notes, but let me say it publicly here on the air.

I mentioned that you work with, you know, high performing individuals, business executives and stuff. You also do work with couples. That's right.

So let me ask, do you deal with this type of stuff with couples or is it the, the life coaching part with couples? Because I can't imagine that the couples are going to be on the same page when it comes to stuff like this. So that's why oftentimes when, you know, when couples come to work with me, they'll actually have completely separate programs. And the overlap happens when, when we recognize that a lot of the reactivity happens is because they're both not resourced enough.

And when you resource the man and the way that he needs and you resource the way that she needs, when you have both resource individuals, you can actually come together from a place of equanimity instead of reactivity. When both of you both use your physiology as a precursor to your relationship, as a precursor to your performance, that's when you unlock true change. So if you're always pissy and she's always pissy, then of course you're going to be pissy together, right? But if all of it, but if both of you are again, finding like that right fit lifestyle practice that actually fuels your desire that you are excited to do and that you want to do, no one just ever gave the space for you to show you how you're going to be a lot more clear headed and you're going to be a lot more open and receptive to the ones that you love.

All right. I'm going to sidebar here because this feels like that conversation we were having where we were talking about menopause and how men need to understand the women's side more and the women actually need to understand the men's side so that they cannot only, you know, coexist, but, you know, move forward. And which is one of the reasons I did the shows that I did was just to, you know, that's been one of those things that we just don't talk about.

And you brought up a concept where men are the type of individuals that they just, they just want to fix it. They, they're like, okay, you know, okay, I hear what you have. Take a pill, fix it.

Let's move on. Right. But in the same way that we deal with, you know, menopause, the same way we deal with our health, we have to, we have to rethink each perspective.

To maximize for the margins. Okay. Right.

Very interesting. All right. Enough of sidebar.

Back to, back to this high performance architecture here. Okay. So I think we've kind of gotten a little bit of a grip on where to start.

One of the slides talked about dirty energy versus clean energy. That's right. So did we talk about that? I mean, is that what you described earlier with the types of food, you know, protein and stuff, or is there more to that? So it's really more about like how you feel, right? About like a very specific behavior.

When you say I have to do this and I must do this and I should be doing that. That's dirty energy. When you're coming from a place of, I get to do this.

I want to do this. I'd love to do this. That's clean energy.

So forcing on lifestyle practice from a place of dirty energy, I have to do this. I should do this. I must do this.

That's why people don't actually ever stick to anything. But I want to, I get to, I'd love to. That actually emerges from experimentation.

Oh my God, when I eat this really rich protein breakfast for the next three hours, I'm sharper. I'm, you know, my energy is up. I make better decisions.

Every time I eat this really rich protein breakfast. And so the next day comes, oh, I remember I had that feeling with that one specific type of breakfast. I'm going to want to do that again.

The third day, I'm going to want to do that again. This is what we call an adaptive change process. Your clean energy is a function of experimenting with what actually works for your body.

The should, I have to, I must, that's a function of what you watched on YouTube and on Instagram about what you should be doing. I should, I get to, that's different. Okay.

I'm going to throw a wrinkle in, which I think is a wrinkle. A lot of people will make a change when they come to the realization that their doctor tells them, you're going to blank if you don't change. Right.

And that is a big motivator for a lot of people. So there are some that, you know, they're like, I have to do this. And that can be a motivator.

So what, what's different in those situations versus somebody that can really look at something and say, you know what, I get to do this. So the, so when the motivator is like very shame-based, it's very shame-based that, that the aggressive way of like, you know, attacking your goals that like are ready, that peters out. Right.

And that's why chain doesn't actually become sustainable. So what I encourage people to think about is, okay, the doctor said that I have to do X, Y, Z, X, Y, Z. Well, what if you were to really focus on focusing on that level of, you know, that part of your health, what does that open up for you in the next five years, 10 years? Right. Even one year from today, what does that open up for you? Right.

I get to finally take that vacation that I've always wanted to without pain. I get to, you know, play basketball, like with my, you know, with my kids and my grandkids, I get to. And so what I encourage people to think about is when you get that diagnosis, instead of coming from a place of fear, when I do take care of this, what is this going to allow me to do in my life? Okay.

So that's, that's still, that's still different. When you, when you talk about it from the shame perspective, I guess in a way, that's what our society has kind of done to us, right? A thousand percent. Now we're cooking.

All about the commercials and the influencers and you want to look like this, do this. And if you don't look like this, your life's, you know, not complete. Right.

Right. Which I think, go ahead. Mm-hmm.

You know, where to really work with people on is expanding like what their definition of success looks like. Instead of being told what definition of success looks like, look within, what is your personal definition of success looks like? Instead of being told, what if that's something you never recognized in yourself? That's authenticity. Okay.

Have I ever said this to you? Do you remember me ever getting to the point of saying that I never succumbed to that pressure because I, you know, I don't measure me based on other people. So for the people that, you know, make comments about, oh, you got a belly there. Yeah, whatever.

You know, I, I worked out the first half of my life. I did a lot of working out, a lot of running, a lot of ball and stuff, a lot of gym. And I'm like, I'm done.

I'm good. I'm okay. Right.

And I think one of those things that you and I talked about is, you know, even though I said I want to eat healthy, I wanted it to be something that was just a part of what I did, not a driving force. That's right. To what I do.

So is that okay? Like I said, I don't think we've dove into that. I think I've said it to you and you kind of looked at me with staring eyes as if, really? What if the way that you took care of yourself, the way that ate, the way that you exercise, what if that allowed me just to be a better version of you? Right. Why does it have to be so hard driving? Why can't it be something that actually fuels you to be the better version of you? All right.

So you're going to try to make me think of what's a better version of me? Because he's pretty good. Yeah. So why is it? So why is it important for you to lose this weight? Why it is important? What does it mean? I, so here's the thing.

I don't know outside of the fact that I thought that I would always look healthy. Right. And the fact that I had to wear a bigger size pants, that was probably.

So what does that mean? Let's go down that. When I wear up, when I wear, when I put on a bigger size pants, what does this mean about me? I don't, I never thought of that. That's what I'm asking you.

I just thought, man, that sucks. I gotta, I gotta wear big man pants. Okay.

And what does that mean about you when you wear big man pants? Yeah, I don't know. I have a dad bod without being a dad. I don't know.

Getting a little tender around here. It's cool. Of course it is.

Because like I said, I don't, I don't, I think it's all external driven. It's, it's. Right.

You know, I'm for the most part. Okay. I mean, outside of feeling a little sluggish, but I know that that's because I'm not doing all the things I used to do.

You know, I'm not playing ball three days a week. I'm not, you know, running in the mornings and stuff. And I made that decision.

Yeah. To do other things. And so what is, what is better capacity management look like for you so that you can.

So that I can what? So that you can, right. When we don't have that vision that we're working towards, that's when it, that, like, if we don't have that North star of why this is important to us, it is super hard to hit an on button. All right.

So I got to find a North star. Yes. All right.

I think we're going to end today's show here. For everybody listening with all of the stuff that we talked about, find out where you are, where you want to be and make that your North star. That's right.

All right. So I guess we had talked about this being a two or three part deal because we weren't sure how far we were going to get it. So now that we've identified that, I assume the next show is going to be focused on how do we get there? How do we walk or ride the road to get there, right? That's right.

All right. Looking forward to that. You better have your North star.

We might be barking up the wrong tree if you don't got your North star. Maybe, maybe. So let me ask you this.

Do you have anything coming up with Max Pact Health that we should know about? Yeah. So I'm running a two week couples diagnostic. If you are looking to leverage your physiology as a precursor to your performance, I would love a connection.

When I work with people, this is not a magic pill. This is not a diet. It's not a quick fix.

What I give you over the course of this two week program is a blueprint, right? It's a blueprint. So if you give me your North star, where it is that you want to be a year from now, I will give you your roadmap to get there. All right.

Thank you very much. Look forward to the next one. Sounds good.

All right, folks, that is going to do it for this episode. A big thank you to Diana Feinstein for pulling back the curtain on what's really going on and helping us figure out what to do when try harder strategy stops working. So obviously my homework is to come up with a North star.

Your homework listener would be, I guess, to figure out if you're running on dirty energy, shame, caffeine, no sleep, figure it out. And you also come up with a North star. So if this has helped you connect some of the dots, be sure to follow us and share the episode with that person who looks unstoppable on the outside but is low key exhausted on the inside.

I'm Uncle Marv. This has been The Unhealthy Podcast. Take care of your system, back up your health, and I'll see you soon.

And until then, live healthy and be happy.