Jim Rohn said, “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
Hi. I’m Dr. Cynthia Clark and gentlemen, I want to talk to you today. One of my favorite resources in men’s health is a book called “Countdown”. This is one of the few resources that has documented the decreasing testosterone rates that are taking place in our climate today and I’m saying climate instead of just in a gentleman because it’s actually happening across animal species.
Some of these studies are tied to – you may have heard of the famous alligator study in Lake Apopka which shows a decreasing genitalia size for alligators which is tied to lower testosterone.
So we can see that this is happening in other places in the world. It’s not just in the human species and there are other studies that support that. So OK, we got this thing going on. We’ve got this problem, lower testosterone rates.
So what’s wrong with that is that the gentleman who’s experiencing this is going to feel like he’s 90 even if he’s 20. He’s going to have things like low motivation, brain fog, lower libido, weight gain. He’s going to be slower. He might be slower to action because action is a yang exercise and yang energy is the energy of the gentleman.
So it’s the energy of cellular metabolism, of repair and rebuild and that energy is very, very necessary in a physical body. It’s also necessary in a society and a culture.
So I submit to you that male vitality is healthy not only to the gentleman and we’re going to talk about sperm motility and mobility in a moment but also to society and culture at large. We need that healthy masculine energy in our societies.
I’m very lucky. I was raised by my dad. So I had a great example of a healthy masculine energy and my dad also was a very nurturing person. So he was really balanced. He had a good feminine energy too.
Now my dad is not perfect like every parent and he has his own imbalances like we all do. But when a person is in balance, then they’re going to have the healthiest life. So what are some things that you can do gentlemen in order to raise your healthy masculine energy? Specifically this is going to translate the way that we would measure this to understand whether or not this is being effective is through sperm mobility and motility.
So this is talking about not just raising testosterone rates but specifically raising reproductive vitality because that is an excellent marker of one’s own vitality. The healthier a person is, the healthier their offspring is going to be.
So we’re going to keep it really simple. There are five things to keep in mind and they’re SWEET. That’s our acronym for this. The first one is smoking. So if you smoke, this is deleterious in many different aspects of life.
So nothing to get any junk about in your head. Just quit. The carcinogens of nicotine and cyanide and carbon monoxide that you are exposing your body to is going to make you age faster. It’s going to be hard on your heart, your lungs. It’s going to set you up for many different types of cancer and if you are looking to have children, it’s going to decrease your sperm motility and mobility. So it’s important both in the short term and in the long term.
As importantly, secondhand smoke is extremely deleterious especially to women because the female system is a bit more sensitive. One for example, benzene is a carcinogen that is off-gassing. It’s one of the toxins that’s in cigarette smoke and it’s tied to things like blood cancer.
So – and women are more susceptible to this because, you know, we have gentler bodies. We were born with a number of eggs that we have over the course of our lives.
So toxic exposures are – you know, women feel those a little bit more easily. So if you smoke, quit. If you live with a smoker, love it out of them because it’s not healthy for them. It’s not healthy for you.
OK. Number two, weight. So healthy BMI is going to be around 20. The good news is both with smoking and with obesity, if you’re overweight, the great news is that your body starts to repair itself right away the instant you stop smoking. Your body starts to repair itself right away as soon as you start losing weight.
One pound of fat carries – requires the body to make nine additional miles of capillaries from your heart in order to bring blood flow to that one pound of fat. So every pound of fat that you have is adding significantly to your cardiovascular system.
The great news is, it works exactly the same way in reverse. Every single pound of fat that you lose makes it easier on your cardiovascular system and the same way with smoking as it is with obesity. The body is very forgiving. Once you stop smoking, the health risks decrease dramatically by about 15 years. You have the same risk of disease as a nonsmoker. So it’s totally doable as it is with obesity.
As you lose weight, you have the same health risks than somebody who is never obese. So it’s worth it. It’s worth it.
E, so I said the acronym was SWEET. E is eating. Now here I’m talking about the quality of a good food. You are really worth great quality food and it’s worth it to upgrade your diet.
It’s really, really, really beneficial to know – to invest in the highest quality of food that you can. I love the saying, “If there’s a TV commercial about it, don’t eat that food.”
The food that you want to eat is on the perimeter of your grocery store. It’s in the fruits and vegetable aisle, in the produce section. It’s going to be in – if you eat, if you’re a carnivore or if you eat fish, then it’s going to be at the fish counter. It’s going to be at the butcher shop. Those are fresh foods. They have the most energy and they have the most vitality. They’re not boxed on the shelf with a lot of preservatives in them. They’re fresh. They’re simple. They’re easy.
There are great recipes online for almost anything now. Whether you like soul food or whether you like grilling, it’s all fantastic. Just get the good quality food. Invest in organic. It’s worth it.
Many people have difficulty clearing pesticides out of their body and that means that the toxins build up over time and gentlemen don’t clear toxins very well. They don’t have the mechanisms to let go of that stuff.
So it’s worth it, worth it, worth it to get the good quality food. So upgrade your diet and our next E is exercise. It’s your body’s own detoxification system. The way we get rid of toxins is we pee them out, we poop them out, we breathe them out and we sweat them out. When you exercise, that increases – you poop more when you exercise. You tend to drink water so you’re going to pee more. That’s going to flush them out. You’re going to breathe more because you’re moving and you’re definitely going to sweat it out. So it’s really, really good, really healthy for you and again, the body is so forgiving. Exercising, starting an exercise program, right at the beginning, your body starts to repair and to heal itself. It’s worth it. It’s worth it.
Even if your first exercise is, “I’m going to go for a 10-minute walk in the sunshine.” You’re going to make some vitamin D. You’re going to feel fantastic. Your skin is going to thank you. Your hormones are going to thank you. You’re going to feel good. Start there and the next day, just add in a little bit more.
You can also do resistance training or swimming or biking or running. It’s great to do what you love to do. Sometimes you got to work up to that. You might need to train, to do what you love to do. Maybe you like to go shooting. That’s fantastic. But you got to have good reflexes and you got to think quickly because if you are ever – if you ever have to use those skills in real life, you need to make sure you’re making good decisions about it.
Exercise is going to be your training for making sure that your neurological reflexes are in line and that you can do what you need to do when the moment comes. Train for life.
Then finally, turn it off. Stress is one of the hardest frequencies in our bodies. It’s one of the hardest things for us to deal with. Everybody knows it and we deal with it in all sorts of different ways, right? Like maybe – I posted this to my Facebook earlier today and asked, “What do you do when something is really hard?” and I got all sorts of great answers. Some of them were like, “Breathe,” and then “Dance,” and one of them was a TED talk on how we carry stress in our body and one of them was “Eat pizza and drink beer.”
There are all sorts of different ways to deal with stress and some of them are better than others, but whatever you have to do to turn it off. One of my friends’ husbands, his is floating in the pool. Just float in the pool. That’s how he destresses. Maybe it’s going for a walk. Maybe it’s basketball with your friends. Maybe if you’re here in Florida, it’s pickleball.
Whatever it is, make sure that you’re getting enough of it because it’s so easy for the stresses of the world to add up and there’s nothing wrong with stress. There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of stress. It’s good for you. Exercise itself is a little bit of stress. It’s just that it’s the kind of stress that’s going to bring you into your body. It’s going to clear your head. It’s going to get you focused and it’s going to move you forward in the right direction and that’s what we want from you.
Now, these are the general rules, SWEET. The general rules and they’re great. I haven’t said anything you didn’t already know. Maybe I put a little more science and information behind it.
How do you level this up? You can level this up in a couple of different ways. One is through an epigenetic test because that’s going to show you what you’re genetically inclined towards, what foods might be a better fit for you, what – how you’re wired.
Another test that might be a great fit for you is a toxicity test and this is going to show up that there’s something in your environment that’s glitching your system. I run these tests frequently nowadays and I got to tell you, I find a lot of toxins in people’s blood. From there, sometimes we need to do a toxin test in their home and then they get that stuff out of their home and they avoid the neurological or cancer issues that they might otherwise experience.
So science is how to keep it simple and do it smart. We also have things like food sensitivity test. So it’s very easy to identify what foods you might be having a reaction to. If there is a food you’re having a reaction to, then a walk can be very helpful. Just to move blood through so that your gut is getting some juice.
All right. That’s it. Keep it simple. Keep it SWEET. I’m Dr. Cynthia Clark with Longevity Wellness and that’s good medicine.