SPI 714: My High-Risk Scare (And What I’m Doing about It)

SPI 714: My High-Risk Scare (And What I’m Doing about It)

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host. If he could do one thing every day for the rest of his life, it would be bass fishing. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Alright, so the other day I get a DEXA scan.

I didn’t know what a DEXA scan was until a mentor of mine told me he got his. And I was like, what, what is this thing? And he said, well, it was the most eye opening thing for him with regards to his body fat percentage. So this episode is going to be a little bit about that because I went in to get a DEXA scan and I got my results and I wanted to share those results with you.

Now this might be a little bit different than what we normally talk about, but every so often I talk about things like health and it’s a really important thing. If we’re not taking care of ourselves, how do we take care of others, right? Yeah, I wasn’t taking good care of myself. Over the past year, and probably more years, I mean, especially since the pandemic, I put the focus of eating well and exercise kinda to the side.

I did use the opportunity during the pandemic to build new things, I created a new Pokemon YouTube channel. It’s done really well. Since then, we’ve held an event that did really well. The channel’s approaching a million subscribers. That’s awesome, but it’s not going to be awesome when I don’t have energy, I am lethargic, I’m getting headaches, I am just a burden and a weight on other people. And weight is a keyword there because I did gain a little bit of weight. And as always, I just wanted to be honest with you, but, but also, as always, I wanted to share with you some of what I’m learning. Now, don’t take any of this as medical advice, this is just my story, and you can learn more about these things on your own and ask around.

A DEXA scan is something I had never heard of before, and when I looked it up, it was just really interesting when I found out. DEXA, or D X A, or D E X A, stands for Dual X Ray Absorbitometry. So that’s a lot. But it’s a very quick, it took me six minutes to do, it was pain free, I literally just lay down, and it was like this, this like, I felt like I was being 3D printed.

You know how a 3D printer has like that one Part that just kind of like moves slowly and it just kind of keeps going along the thing. Anyway, it was just this little scanner that was starting at my head, went all the way down to my toes, took six minutes. And what it does is instantly, it provides you with an in depth analysis of your fat tissue, your lean mass, and your bone density.

And I think it was originally created specifically for bone density purposes. A lot of people who are perhaps a little bit older or who have bone issues use this scan to check out how their bones are doing. But one of the other benefits is it provides you a very detailed analysis of your fat tissue.

There are other ways to measure your body fat percentage. You could do one of those things in a dunk tank where I had never done that, but apparently you displace water and it tells you based on that, how much within a tank, but you got to get wet. And it’s like, I don’t know. I didn’t, I never really wanted to do that.

I used those scales that you have to use. Barefoot and it puts an electrical charge through you and using some calculations of your height and your age, it tells you your body fat percentage. This however, precisely tells you your body fat percentage. Also it cost me $70, just 70 and here’s what it did. It gave me a baseline and foundation for where I’m starting because in addition to the numbers, it gave me a huge realization that I was going down the wrong path with regards to my health.

Now, I don’t smoke. I have not drank a drink for about a year. It always just gives me a headache. It makes me feel tired. So I’ve stopped doing that. But I wasn’t eating well. I was snacking a lot, snacking very late. I was not keeping track of, you know, all of a sudden I’d have a bag of chips and look at the bottom of the bag and all the chips would be gone.

I was just kind of mindlessly eating. Anyway, here’s what I found out. My body fat percentage is at high risk. 30.9% body fat, which was very surprising to me. When I look in the mirror, I know that I can see a little pudge here and there and I could squeeze it. And it’s like, you know, squeezable.

But to see the body fat percentage that high, along with a chart that says where it should be and what is high risk for a person of my age and height and, you know, ethnicity, I’m at high risk. High risk is 30% and above. And I had just crossed the 30% mark. It also told me where that fat was located, in the abdominal region, and in my middle area, a little bit in my legs, and my arms look okay, apparently.

But it also gave me some information about my resting heart rate, and also my resting respiratory count, meaning not my respiratory count, but rather how many calories I would burn if I were just to be at rest and do nothing, which was about 1700 calories, meaning that’s how many calories my body burns without any additional activity.

It’s just to be alive. 1700 calories or 1719 calories to be precise, is what I would need to just maintain specifically the weight that I have. Now, I know for a fact that some snacks and some meals that I were eating were beyond my daily intake. Just one meal or one snack was beyond that. Now, of course, I do some activity during the day and, you know, I did get my steps in and I’m moving around, but I hadn’t been doing any high intensity workouts or running or any rowing like I should have been.

We have a rower. It’s really just in the garage right now holding my fishing poles up. I’m a little disappointed in myself. And what is most scary is that of course seeing the high risk percentage and seeing me there, it makes me wonder if I had kept going down that path, what could have become of that?

Perhaps some heart risk. I’m already realizing how tired I was feeling because ever since that report came in, a week and a half ago is when I got it, I already have five times as much energy as I did because it really gave me the reality check to start eating well again. And I’m using an app, and this is again recommended by my mentor, James Schramko, the person who told me about the DEXA scan.

He got his, and when I saw him, I hadn’t actually seen him on video for a while. We’d always just been chatting, and he was in the Philippines, so we kept the video off. I saw him the other day. And I could just tell he looked good, like he looked fit, he looked strong, and so we just started talking about that as opposed to talking about business like we normally do.

And he told me about his scan, how many kilos he had lost, and his energy levels, and I was very inspired by that, so I got a DEXA scan myself, and here we are. And even just a week and a half of eating clean, and almost gamifying it, I’m using an app called My Fitness Pal, and that app is a great app. It is something that is fairly costly, but when it comes to your health, I mean, is there a cost to that?

There is a cost to not taking care of it, that’s for sure. You know, everything from medical bills to just energy loss and all that adds up, right? MyFitnessPal, I think I’m paying 80 a year to get access to the full list of everything that, that it has available. So what I’m able to do now. is I’m able to track how many calories I’m eating per day.

And I hated the idea of doing that before. It was just like, this is too much work. If I just eat clean and balanced, then I should be fine. And of course, that got away from me. So I, I need this. I need the numbers. I need the tracking. When it comes to my business, I need that. When it comes to other things in my life that are important, I need that.

What Is measured can be improved, but I wasn’t measuring before. So, the basic idea is, and again, this is not health advice, this is just kind of how I’m seeing it and how I was told to look at it, is I have in my device, inside of the MyFitnessPal app, a certain caloric intake goal, per day which is currently 1,800 calories.

Now you might be like, Pat, 1,800 calories? That’s more than your daily, sort of, calorie intake. Like, you’re going to gain weight. No, no, no. Because… We’re not including the activity on that. When it comes to the 1,719, which is the, again, at rest, if I were to do nothing, calorie burn, 600 calories additional on top of that is what I was normally doing on average with just my walking and the daily daily routines just being up and about and moving around. So let’s say that’s 2300 calories. So therefore, in order to maintain weight, maintain and just stay where I’m at, 2300 calories is where I would need to be. So by removing some of those calories, I know that I am just like money, more is well in money you want it to be that way right more coming in and more more leaving in this case I want it to be the opposite because I want to lose some weight and lose that body fat and I do have an appointment in two months to go in actually no three months excuse me after nine weeks.

No, 10 weeks. I have an appointment to check my body fat again with the DEXA scan, and we’re going to see where we’re at, but what’s really cool about this app is I can track my caloric intake and I can scan a barcode of the things that I’m eating. If I’m, if I’m cooking something, basically every food item in the world seems to be in this app, so I can just search for it really quick.

And if I’m eating at somewhere like Sweetgreen or something like that, most of the menu items are already there with not just the calorie intake, but your macronutrients, you know, your carbohydrates, fat, protein. And I have certain goals for that too. So it’s been fun to try to kind of balance all that and, and, and reach my goals every day.

And what’s really nice is in the diary, in this app, I can hit end day at the end of every day after I’ve, you know, eaten everything I want to eat. And it tells me, Hey, if you have a routine like this every single day, you will be at this many pounds in three months, or it will literally tell you how many weeks till you’re at your certain goal.

And it’s very motivating. I see it every single day now. And it’s again, only been nine days, but I have so much more energy than I’ve had in a very, very long time I find that I’m not hungry ever anymore. I am drinking lots of water that’s for sure But I feel like my brain fog that I used to have at around the 2 p m timeframe every single day and sometimes even in the morning is completely gone. And I don’t know why I do this. I, I always get on these tracks, it goes really well, and then I fall off. But this is the first time that I’ve had, I guess I could call it a scare. I’m not scared, but it is a little bit of a, of a red flag for me.

And I, and I am scared of what would have happened if I kept going. There’s a lot of things that I still have left to offer this world. And I want to be here as long as possible. And yes, of course, anything can happen at any moment, but I don’t want my reason to stop what I’m doing to be because of something that I could have prevented.

So I just wanted to share all this with you to tell you where I’m at, to tell you that I don’t have everything in my life figured out, and I’m figuring things out still, but I’m very, very glad that my mentor told me that this helped him and, and I’m passing this forward to share my story and maybe it’ll in some way, shape or form help you.

So DEXA scan, D E X A, AKA a body composition scan. Possibly could have saved my life. We shall see. Now it is an x ray, so there’s radiation, but it is very, very low radiation. You have more radiation being in a plane, essentially. But, if it’s something you’d like to explore, definitely look it up. I went to a local place 20 minutes from here.

70 bucks. Should have paid more for the double, so that I could schedule my second one. But I’m happy to pay full price for the next one because… Again, I didn’t know what I was getting into, but very happy with the result. You, you literally see a chart of your body and they color in the parts that are the extra parts and here we are.

So you might hear from me again in the future about this, maybe six months down the road or so, and we could do a, another check in and see how we’re going and hopefully, in a asynchronous way, it’s a way for me to check in with you as well. And maybe this was an eye opening episode for you too. And if not, all good.

It’ll be a nice thing to document my journey here, here on the podcast and where I’m at. And I know some of you appreciate it. You’ve been here for me, many of you have been here for me when I had my first kid way back in the day and we didn’t even have insurance when that happened. Big mistake. A lot of you were here when we had my her second kid. When I had fallen off the tracks before. When great things happen when not so great things happen I’m here to share with you and so I hope you appreciate this and I appreciate you. Cheers. Take care truly take care of yourself, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of the podcast. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!