Is Personalized Health a Luxury or a Necessity? (Fishbone Diagram) | Ep 381
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We've been conditioned to think that spending money directly on coaching, guidance, accountability, and taking ownership of our own healthcare is indulgent, while spending on products, equipment, and supplements feels responsible.
The average American spends $13,000 annually treating preventable conditions, while personalizing your health might cost $2,000.
Learn how an engineering tool called the Fishbone Diagram helps you prioritize where your resources (time, money, effort) should best be spent.
Investing in your health isn't selfish. When you have more energy, you show up better for your family. When you're strong and confident, you're more effective at work. When you feel good in your body, you're more present in relationships. Taking care of yourself doesn't take away from others, it's what allows you to give more.
Main Takeaways:
5 high-ROI interventions that actually move the needle for personalized health
How to separate evidence-based health optimization from expensive wellness theater
Investing in your health isn't selfish, it's foundational for showing up for others
Episode Mentioned:
Timestamps:
0:00 - The personal spending paradox
5:13 - The privilege narrative
8:03 - Wellness "theater" vs. what works
11:50 - What personalized health actually means
17:23 - The real cost of prevention vs. treatment
22:22 - Permission to invest in yourself
23:37 - What is the Fishbone Diagram?
28:34 - 5 high-ROI health interventions
41:03 - Addressing the "selfish investment" mindset
44:29 - Accessibility doesn't mean compromise
The True Cost of Neglecting Personalized Health
People routinely spend on dinners, subscriptions, gadgets and premium groceries, yet hesitate to fund the thing that makes all of those more enjoyable and sustainable: their own health. The hesitation makes sense if you have been trained to see coaching, testing and accountability as indulgent. It also makes sense if your feed is full of wellness theater that looks futuristic but does very little. When you group those under one mental label, it is easy to conclude that personalized health is a luxury.
The truth is simpler. Personalized health is not a shopping list. It is a way of noticing, learning and adjusting that lets you put limited money and time where they have the most effect.
What Personalized Really Means
Personalized does not mean bespoke everything. It means you treat your body like a system that responds to inputs. You look at a few signals you can measure, you make a small change, then you watch what happens. You keep the pieces that move you forward and discard the rest. This is less glamorous than a new device, but it is efficient and repeatable. Most of the return you will see comes from ordinary behaviors done with intent.
The Fishbone Idea, Minus the Homework
Engineers use a simple picture called a fishbone to think about root causes. Imagine your main problem written at the head. Along the spine you sketch a few broad influences such as sleep, training, stress, nutrition, environment and hormones. That picture reminds you to stop fixating on a single fix and to look across the system.
You do not need a template to use the idea. Glance across those influences, choose the single branch that is most likely to explain your issue today, and run one small experiment there. Keep notes for a couple of weeks, then reassess. The value is not the drawing. The value is the habit of asking where the bottleneck really is before you spend more effort.
Spend Where It Counts
If you want a rule of thumb for directing resources, start with the durable basics that help almost everyone, then buy clarity only when you are stuck.
Strength training with progression pays off for decades. You can do this with simple equipment and a log. Adequate protein helps you keep and build muscle, and you can get most of it from regular food. Consistent sleep and daily movement stabilize appetite, energy and recovery. None of these require a cart full of products.
When you have done those things and still feel stuck, spend on clarity rather than novelty. A targeted lab panel timed a couple of times per year can show whether thyroid, iron status, vitamin D or inflammation are working against you. A short coaching engagement can shorten the learning curve and prevent months of trial and error. Those are not luxuries. They are maintenance for the machine you live in.
A Simple Way to Start
Pick one problem you actually feel, not a vague goal. For example, mid afternoon crashes, stubborn belly fat or stalled lifts. Look across the few big influences. Choose the branch that seems most plausible for you right now. Make one change that is small enough to execute on your hardest week. Examples include moving training earlier, adding a real pre workout meal, setting a bedtime alarm, walking after lunch, or raising daily protein to a clear target.
Track only what you will use. Jot weights and reps, rough protein totals, bed and wake times, and two or three words about energy or mood. Review once a week. If the change helps, keep it. If not, pick the next most promising branch. This is personalization without clutter.
Bottom Line
You do not need more things. You need better choices. Use the fishbone idea to stop solving the wrong problem, then direct effort and money to the lever that matters most right now. Over time, a few well chosen habits and the occasional purchase of clarity will beat an entire closet of wellness gear.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:00
You'll spend $200 on a nice dinner out without thinking twice, but you hesitate for months before hiring a trainer or coach. Or you'll drop $150 a month on organic groceries and premium supplements, but investing in yourself feels like too much of a splurge. Here's what's happening. You've been trained to think that spending money directly on guidance or accountability is indulgent or maybe unnecessary, while spending spending on products or, let's be honest, the next shiny thing feels responsible. Today, I'm showing you an engineering tool called the fishbone diagram that flips this thinking around. You'll see why the money you're already spending, the time you're investing, might be solving the wrong problem entirely, and how to redirect it toward what actually creates results.
Philip Pape: 0:59
Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're going to answer a question that comes up quite a bit. Is personalized health, that is, tracking your data, testing your blood work, measuring your progress really just for people that have a lot of money to invest this includes coaching, hiring a trainer or is it something that we all should prioritize and just find a very efficient way to do it, especially with all the technology and resources that are available. Today, we're going to explore this through the lens of a tool that I really like, called the fishbone diagram. You'll understand why it's called that in a second. It's an engineering tool that I've used in my career to solve complex problems systematically, usually to find one or more root causes or connections between different things, to find patterns, and it's something that you can do for free on a piece of paper, and it's a really helpful, mindful, intentional thing to see how to transform your health and what to focus on and where you can put your resources most efficiently so that the barrier to entry is much lower. Because the title of this episode related to personal health. Whether it's a luxury or not, it is an important question.
Philip Pape: 2:08
A lot of you are thinking I don't really need to hire a coach, I don't need to hire a trainer. I'm not here to convince you one way or the other. Obviously, I have what might seem like a conflict of interest, because I myself am a coach and we have a program. It's more of the perspective of how can you best use the resources that you do have, and that might not be hiring a coach. That's my point Now when, having said that, uh, just to get the sort of full disclosure out of the way.
Philip Pape: 2:32
We do have something called physique university where part of the process is accelerating this for you, and my hope is that you actually save money and save time longterm. And so one of the things I'm offering right now is a free custom nutrition plan. Now, normally that's included as an add on for the mastery track, but for the basic signature track I shouldn't say basic. It's full of tons of value of physique university. You're going to get it for free If you use the special link for you guys in the show notes. I have a special code. It's free plan link in the show notes. Go to witsandweightscom slash physique.
Philip Pape: 3:04
As soon as you join, you're going to go into an onboarding process that gives you the exact steps to start setting up your habit systems, learning about nutrition, learning about training, in a very accelerated way, much more accelerated than just listening to random podcast episodes. And the reason I'm throwing in the custom nutrition plan for free and telling you this early in the episode again is to make this as accessible as possible, because that's then going to give you the roadmap for your macros, your meal timing, your training, your movement, the whole philosophy of flexible eating to kind of reduce that stress and understand what my next steps are. Many people who join you know they stick around for two or three months and they get a really clear roadmap of what to do and then they'll decide. Okay, you know, do I want to keep doing this and getting the accountability and support which I know is going to keep me successful long-term, or do I want to go it on my own, because now I have a really good plan and direction and either way, it's up to you to make that decision. But I'm tying that into today's topic because I think it's really important to do things as efficiently as you can also understand when you need to invest in yourself, just like when I decided I needed to invest a little bit more in my barbell that can handle a little bit more weight, knowing that there was a safety issue, right, and we make these decisions all the time.
Philip Pape: 4:13
Now, something I hear a lot from people in the audience, from you guys as listeners, is that you think about these things a lot, right, you think about okay, should I get blood work? Should I invest in coaching? Should I go get a trainer? Should I join this gym? Should I buy a food scale Should I use macro factor right? And a lot of these things come with a price tag and I get it. And there's a whole industry out there. There's the fitness industry that is pushing these messages in your face. Now I sell as much as the next guy or man or woman. I market my services, I do, but I also feel honestly and truly, that they're aligned with what I'm telling you. You're going to get to the point where I probably don't pitch them well enough, because what happens is people will join my program, kind of hoping and praying it's going to do what they think it's going to do, because they follow the podcast and they're not quite sure because I didn't message it well. Then they join and they're like whoa, I didn't know it had all this stuff. So hopefully we've done a better job of conveying that message and showing you the whole process. And again, if you go to witsandweightscom slash physique, you'll actually see a demo video on there of exactly what's included.
Philip Pape: 5:13
But people, rightly, are asking themselves is this necessary? Is it worth the money? Does it feel a little bit indulgent? Am I being selfish? Should I be putting my physical health before a lot of other things that I think are also important in my life, especially when you might have a little bit of guilt to realize that plenty of people you know can't afford certain things. Maybe it's a privilege, right. There's all these narratives going on. You also see influencers online that are doing all these crazy things, whether it's hyperbaric chambers, all the peptides.
Philip Pape: 5:41
Now, like you can go down the peptide rabbit hole, you know. Obviously there's the GLP ones, things like that. There's concierge medicine and all the out of pocket healthcare services that not everybody can afford. And you're like, well, you know I can't do all these things. Do I need all these things? Do I need the cold plunge and the red light therapy? I heard this guy, you know, plugging some red light therapy thing that goes on your wall but that's hundreds of dollars right there, like I'm just going to spend all my money on this stuff and it's not going to do anything for me. And so you know I can't really biohack myself to health and so I'm just going to try to just do what I think I need to do listen to Philip's podcast and be done with it.
Philip Pape: 6:16
And I want to challenge all of these assumptions because I think the fundamentals of personalized health, the things that move the needle for you as an individual, understanding that there's an empirical scientific basis for what we do with training, nutrition, et cetera. But there's also a highly personalized piece to it that makes it optimal for you that these things need to be really accessible. And I don't mean in a I'm not in a, what am I trying to say? I'm not getting on a soapbox and saying, like the government has to make policy, that all this stuff is cheap and free and accessible. What I mean is I think investing in your health should be to any of us just as important as investing in just eating food, right, like investing in shelter.
Philip Pape: 6:59
And many of us think of a car as a necessity or, heck, even a smartphone today as a quote, unquote necessity. And we invest in those things. Why are we not investing in our health in the same way? And I've always wondered about that. And then I realized well, turn the mirror on yourself, buddy. Think of all the times you've said I'm not going to spend money on that, I'm not going to go hire a trainer because I can figure it out on my own. And then I, months or years later, I finally said let me pay for that trainer for an hour and I got a whole bunch of things fixed and I started lifting more safely, as, as one example, right or in my business.
Philip Pape: 7:33
You know not wanting to hire people and spend money to make money, but that's often what you have to do. It's not all about money, okay, but I think money is a source of a lot of this consternation, and we have to separate what works in the personal health space from what the quote unquote wellness industry is trying to sell you. There's a lot of junk. There's a lot of junk. And how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? All right, so let's talk about why personalized health gets this reputation in the first place.
Philip Pape: 8:03
The wellness industry is a marketing machine. They have done a great job of convincing people that, to quote unquote optimize requires you to buy lots and lots of things. Now, it may be very expensive things like an infrared sauna for $5,000. It might be the red light therapy panel I mentioned for $500, but it might just be. You know hiring coaches, spending money on programs, spending money on supplements, especially functional medicine clinics. You know hormone clinics that are questionable right Versus the ones that are legitimate, all sorts of products like fat burners and whatnot that have no, you know, efficacy or evidence-based support behind them, and pretty soon you could be spending several, at least hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month on things that are not effective or it looks like such a barrier to entry that you just don't do anything and the evidence for a vast majority of the stuff you see pushed, especially if it's an ad is weak at best in general. Right, in general, it depends on who you follow and what kind of stuff you're seeing, but a lot of the most accessible things are not the stuff that's marketed on social media, right?
Philip Pape: 9:10
Okay, let's pick a sauna, for example. There's a lot of like sauna ads and there's a lot of expensive things and you know saunas are great, but they they they're in the top, I'll say, 1% or less of things that actually move the needle. The same thing with like cold plunges and red light therapy and all this stuff with, I don't want to say quantum biology, but like there's a lot of questionable products out there and creams and food supplements, whatever. Okay, I think the reason, it the root cause of all this, is people want shortcuts, right? You see the laser surgery billboard and it says you know, drop all your belly fat literally with one procedure and then walk out the door. That is going to be a much more appealing than spend six months to I don't know three or four years working on your body composition by improving your lifestyle and your nutrition and your movement, right. And so the pattern is the industry sells these interventions because they're just easy to market and they're very appealing, and people aren't getting rich.
Philip Pape: 10:09
Telling you to track your protein or beyond, you know what's what the price is, my goal being that you have an easy entry point and then you can continue getting the support as you build this, because I know it takes time. I know it takes time, right. So there's a scale component. How can I help more and more people, how can I afford to even run that business but also make it accessible to you? And I'm talking to you guys from a business perspective in this episode. I know it's a little different than my usual usual thing, but it's kind of a behind the scenes look and I hope I haven't lost you by now because this is important. This is your wallets, right? This is your pocketbook, this is your, your checking account and this is your long-term investment. And all of this biohacking stuff is pretty cool, but you have to be able to separate the confusion out and find what works right.
Philip Pape: 11:06
And this is where I think the health as privilege narratives and some of these come up, where it's not about personalized health, it's about expensive wellness theater. It's theater that is masquerading as optimization. You know, I have on my in my notes that I want to do a whole episode just about all the junk and the traps and the nonsense in the wellness industry. Even the word wellness kind of makes me cringe a little bit, but that's beyond the scope of today. We're not going to go down that rabbit hole. I wanted to just kind of give you the layout of the issue of what's making me so heated and passionate to be able to make today's episode. So let's define what I mean by personal health so we can jump from that into using this tool to comparing things and finding what works.
Philip Pape: 11:50
Now I'm not talking about when I say personalized health. I'm not talking about the boutique wellness, the clinics, functional medicine either. You know I have nothing against some of those folks who are really good and they're kind of like play detective at helping you figure out what works, but a lot of them cost thousands per month, and I know people are spending money on, you know, chiropractic and lots of things like that. Look, I get massages every month. I do it because it feels great and there might be a little bit of a benefit beyond that for recovery. But I'm not fooling myself into thinking that if I just did massages, all my mobility and, you know, flexibility would be improved. No, I know that I need to lift weights to do that right. So I'm talking about something more simple and powerful when I say personalized health Using data, using measurement and using feedback loops to understand your body and optimize your results.
Philip Pape: 12:39
Ah, okay, simple, right. That is the essence of wits and weights. That's our philosophy, and so, at its core, personalized health is about tracking your progression, progression with whatever you're trying to improve. But specifically, that would be something like your strength, knowing whether you're actually getting stronger or just going through the motions and working out and exercising, right. That's a specific example. You know, measuring the right things. Measuring your nutrition is a very important piece, where you're measuring the protein, maybe the macros and calories, right, there's different levels of precision. Not all of them are necessary for every person.
Philip Pape: 13:14
We have lots of great technology coming out now. In fact, we are working on an app launching soon that may actually use AI based, photo based tracking of your food where you don't even have to think very much about calories or macros and I know that sounds crazy coming from me, but imagine a world where you're not stressed about this stuff. You're just kind of tracking, lightly tracking and adjusting and really thinking about the skills themselves and not so much the data, like getting obsessed with the data for its own sake, as much as we love the data, but it's really not guessing right, not hoping, but actually knowing. And that way, whatever you're doing today, you know how to nudge next week and then the week after that. It's also monitoring your body and what's going in and out and what it's doing, and that's your biofeedback, your sleep quality, recovery markers, your energy, how your body responds to training, right All those important things so that you know you're not overdoing it, that your metabolism is supported, that you can lose the fat, that you can focus on dropping belly fat if that's your goal, that you could build strength and muscle and feel great and energized.
Philip Pape: 14:20
It's also testing, actual testing with technology that we have, for example, getting blood work to understand what's happening inside your body in a more complex level than you can tell just by simple biofeedback or what you see in the mirror. And then it's using all of this data and that's just scratching the surface using this data to iterate, to self-experiment, to treat your body like the unique system. It is not a special snowflake, and I'm sorry if that's a trigger phrase for you, but there's a difference between being unique because you're complex and the way your variables interact are a little different than the next person, and being a special snowflake where somehow the principles of physics and nature don't apply to you. The principles of biology don't apply to you. No, if you're an empiricist, like I am, and you believe in the objective truth and what the science shows us, we can have a really good starting point, a premise to say it generally should work like this and now I'm gonna try it out for myself and see how I uniquely fit within that range, if that makes sense, right, and then figure out what works for you. That's what personalization means.
Philip Pape: 15:23
It doesn't mean you have to have a trainer creating some weird cockamamie program just for you that they've never written for anybody else. That's super special. No, you don't need that. I tell most people they can grab just about any decent template online for strength training and follow it and get great results and then bounce off of that. Or I should say, pivot from that into a little bit more customization for yourself. Or you know where the trainer comes in is they can help customize that for you, or start with one of their templates that they know are very effective and then say, okay, let's work around mobility issues. You know injury preferences, equipment, days, days per week, recovery. So all of this is I've used the term physique engineering in the past.
Philip Pape: 16:03
It's the scientific method Applied to your physiology, and the barrier to entry to that is just a notebook or maybe a food scale, but tends to be the less expensive tools. Maybe not always right, like if you want to have a barbell at home, you've got to make some investments. But again, this is part of living life as a human being and prioritizing your health. If you're going to prioritize your, if you're going to pay for a smartphone so that you can watch Netflix and you're going to pay for a Netflix subscription, then you have no excuses not to pay for your health. That's kind of where I'm coming from. If, if you are, if someone has lower income. If we're talking about people who are poor, right, that's a different situation. We're not really addressing that, we're not solving the problems of the world today, but I do think there's a place for trainers and coaches and you know, I hate to call myself an influencer, but people who have some, a platform right, like this podcast, to be able to help in some way for people who can't afford these things and make them more and more and more and more accessible, right, and I think that I think the future is bright there because of technology, and I think I'm I'm not a cynic, I'm more of an optimist in that respect and so if somebody doesn't have access to a coach, for example, they might be able to have access to an ai version of a human coach that does very similar things. That'll help you move the ball forward, be consistent and get a result anyway. Right, and that's you know I that that's where all this stuff starts to come together now.
Philip Pape: 17:23
Now let's talk about money, because I have done that already several times and it might sound crass Money is how we exchange value in the world. That is what it is. So this is where a lot of people get stuck and then they don't invest in the things they need and then they invest in a lot of junk that they don't. The average American spends about $13,000 per year on healthcare, and that is after insurance. So that's just out of pocket on anything related to healthcare, and the vast majority of that average spending is to treat things, to treat preventable chronic conditions diabetes, heart disease, obesity-related complications. So for sure it is biased toward the older, sicker population when we look at those averages. Right, most people in their 20s are not spending 13,000 a year on healthcare. I get it, but we are trying to save ourselves these pains into the future as we get older. Right? These are conditions that develop over years of neglecting your health and your fundamentals, and that is a true cost that also hits your money, your retirement, your, you know.
Philip Pape: 18:28
You know there's nursing care, what do you call it? Long-term care involved. Then it just goes. It's balloons. It's a burden on the rest of your family, right? Like, do you want to be a burden on your family? I don't when I get older. And compare that to investing today in something like a gym membership and tracking your nutrition and getting the occasional blood work to check your hormones, to check your other markers, maybe 2,000 to 3 to 3000 a year, maybe on the top end.
Philip Pape: 18:55
Okay, now if you have a one-on-one nutrition coach like me and you work with me for six months or a year or I have some that go longer Now you're talking anywhere between, say, 250 and 500 a month, and that is inaccessible to a lot of people. Right, it is. That's why I have physique university. It's a group program. Now it drops to as low as 27 a month. So do the math. You know. You know what it costs to have a planet fitness or whatever your gym membership is. You know what it costs generally to hire a trainer. Actually, it's usually quite expensive to hire a trainer versus doing like an online program where you can get form checks and work with, say, a coach like myself, or in a program like ours, which is again technology online scaling. A coach like myself or in a program like ours, which is again technology, online scaling the ability to do these things in the modern environment is pretty cool. It's pretty cool. It actually saves you a lot of money.
Philip Pape: 19:42
But you still have to make that choice and pick the thing that's going to actually help you and I get it because you don't want to throw money away, right? If a coach is coming to you saying join my program and pay ahead for six months or 12 months already, to me it's a red flag. It's why I do month to month only, unless somebody begs to pay me more money to get a long-term contract, I will potentially negotiate with somebody who is, you know, completely in their own volition about it and for the right reasons, but I don't offer it. I don't offer it If coaches out there are saying we only have six month packages. It's a money grab. You've got to be careful, because then what if you do pay and then it doesn't work out like you expected? Right? This is just smart managing of your money.
Philip Pape: 20:20
So maybe $2,000 to $3,000 a year for most people, and that's once you've invested in, say, a home gym, if you even need it Many of you don't you just go to the gym. But even investing in a home gym is a one-time thing and every dollar spent on prevention is probably going to save five to 10 X at least in future healthcare costs. And and it probably doesn't even cover the whole picture, to be honest, right, because what is the cost of? What is the intangible or the opportunity costs. Or if you had to convert your own life into money, what is the cost of having low energy every day, feeling like you're operating at 60% capacity? How does that affect your career, your relationships? How does that affect your ability excuse me to show up for your family? Right? When you think about health as a massive investment in you as a person, as a human, in your mental health, in your physical health and, yes, in the savings of future dollars because of the decline into rapid sickness and a long lifespan. Without a long health span, right, the math then changes completely because you're really not just spending money. You're buying back tons and tons hours, weeks, months, years of productivity, longevity and quality of life.
Philip Pape: 21:31
And here's what's important. The fundamentals that create 80% of these results are pretty close to free or highly accessible to anyone who chooses to prioritize them, and there's always a creative way to do it. There is always a creative way. I want to get to a point in my business where I'm scaled enough to be able to offer a donation type service, right, like. I don't want to say scholarships, because those have a bad rap in this industry. There's this whole scholarship bracket that people use to basically make everybody. It's kind of like a raffle system. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about legit charity, right, either nonprofit or donating to a nonprofit. But I'd rather have some control over how the money is spent to help people. I would love to get there one day, but I have to. I have to make sure the fundamentals are healthy in my business first. Anyway, enough about me.
Philip Pape: 22:22
The question I think you should be asking is not, you know, can I afford it? It's, can I afford not to prioritize this? And remember the word prioritize doesn't imply spending lots of money. It doesn't have to apply spending a lot. I'm not going to be the person that that 25 year old coach. It's like just put it on your credit card. Of course not. Please don't do that. Please don't do that. I really do care. I've been in debt in the past. I've made some terrible mistakes when I was younger. That took me a long time to claw out of and I don't want anybody to do that. Okay, so I get. I get the financial stress piece of this.
Philip Pape: 22:49
So, having said all that, the teaser, or the spoiler, of this episode was about a fishbone diagram. You're like Philip, you haven't even talked about it. Where does this come in. I'm going to show you how can you approach this systematically and make an equalizer here so that your resources go to where they need to go. So in engineering, quality control, root cause analysis, we use something called a fishbone diagram. It's also called an Ishikawa diagram. A lot of these tools come from Japan. There's a book called the Toyota Way, where you learned about Six Sigma. They had some amazingly efficient manufacturing processes that we've learned from. So it's called the Ishikawa diagram or the fishbone diagram, and it's to identify root causes of problems. Now you're like oh, philip, you've been talking a lot about constraints and root causes. It's because it's really important. All right.
Philip Pape: 23:37
Now what is a fish bone diagram? Picture a fish skeleton. All right, a big fillet of fish, an entire fish that's been filleted, and all you have left is the skeleton. Kind of like. Kind of like in cartoons, when they represent a bunch of trash and there's like a bunch of fish bones in there. Okay, you have the head, and then you have the spine. You have all the. I don't even know if it's called a spine. No, it must be, because it's vertebrate. You have all the bones sticking out of the spine, right? So the head is like the main problem or symptom that we're trying to diagnose, and then the bones branching off represent different categories of potential causes. And why I say categories is because what you're going to do we're going to talk details is each bone is a category and then off that bone you can have small labels with actual causes within that category. So the reason I like the fishbone diagram is it, instead of just treating symptoms, you're forced to think systematically about the multiple things that could be driving your issues. You know, we just talked I just did an episode on performance blood work about how the blood work itself can be analyzed in that way via patterns and correlations and relationships.
Philip Pape: 24:43
Well, you're kind of doing this yourself, manually in a simple, accessible way. So let's say, your main system is you're constantly tired, you have constant, persistent fatigue, right, and a lot of times when we do that, we say, okay, I need, I need to take a break from my training, or I need more coffee, or maybe I'm gonna start drinking more energy drinks. I mean, a lot of people will just put a bandaid on it in that way, right, it's like well, every day at 3 PM I have a crash. I'm going to go grab that diet soda or that coffee going to perk me up and you kind of suppress what's really going on. Well, that's treating the head of the fish that's the symptom right, without understanding what's feeding into it. And I say fatigue and energy because that is a problem with a lot of people, especially for those of us in our forties and fifties with the kind of lives we have, how hectic things are.
Philip Pape: 25:26
Now, if you map this out using a fishbone diagram, you're going to have the different bones coming off the center spine and you're going to write in different categories. And if you listen to Wits and Weights or you reach out to me on Instagram at Wits and Weights, I'm happy to give you a list of the big categories that we care about, but those would be nutrition, sleep training, stress, and then maybe something like hormones If that's, let's say, you're pre-menopausal woman in your 40s or 50s, maybe hormones is. If that's, let's say, you're pre-menopausal woman in your 40s or 50s, maybe hormones is a big one. But even men it could be. And maybe environment, right, those are just some examples. I'm sure you can come up with others.
Philip Pape: 26:02
And then, under or next to each bone, which is a category, you're going to list specific factors so you can draw little lines that go off of them, or you can just write them next to the bone. So maybe under the nutrition bone, you write them next to the bone. So maybe under the nutrition bone you would say protein and meal timing. And you could be very specific. You could say like insufficient protein, right, and erratic meal timing Under sleep. You might say, you know, get up three times a night and late night screen time. And then, if you had a hormone one, you might say vitamin D deficiency or low testosterone.
Philip Pape: 26:31
If you know specifically what it is, maybe you don't, maybe it's lack of blood work and you don't know. Okay, and now, granted, that's not necessarily a root cause per se, but it can help you get to the root cause. So the power here is it can help you reveal potential bottlenecks, the single immediate constraint that creates cascading improvements across the entire system. Right, and yes, there might be multiple things that seem important, but it's up to you and it's your privilege to be able to prioritize them the way you need to. And, of course, this is where tracking and measuring and data and all the things we already talked about, as well as blood work, can help you pinpoint where to start that, and so you don't need any tests to do this.
Philip Pape: 27:16
You don't need to take a DEXA or do an InBody, you don't have to take my intake assessment or anything like that, although we do have a free two-minute quiz that might help. If you go to witsandweightscom slash quiz I think it is or quizwitsandweightscom I or quizwitsandweightscom I think you could use either witsandweightscom slash quiz or you can go to witsandweightscom. Click the button in the top for metabolic quiz. That actually will help you identify some things that are important. That then can feed back to your fishbone diagram. If you just want some more ideas, it all comes to you automatically. There's a PDF report. It's like a 15-page report about all the important things you might want to do. That quizwitsandweightscom, totally free, takes two minutes.
Philip Pape: 27:54
Okay, but you don't need to spend a dime to do this exercise and start pointing yourself in the right direction. Now, most of the time, you need some time spent with some basic tracking and self-monitoring first, like you can do the fishbone. Right now. It's going to seem kind of mysterious because you'll have all these potential reasons but you have no idea where to start. I would say that's fine, but you also want to be tracking, use something like just a basic log or notebook or journal. Obviously, if you're willing to invest a little bit and you want to try Macrofactor for a couple weeks, it's free for two weeks. Use my code, wits and Weights. It's free for two weeks and then it's a paid app, but there's lots of ways you can do this without paying for things.
Philip Pape: 28:34
So that's the basic fishbone diagram, just to kind of put it on paper and help you visualize it. And the challenge here and I think also the biggest opportunity is that everyone's fishbone diagram looks different. Right, I could give you a template fishbone, but it's going to be so complicated because it's going to have 50 potential categories and 500 root causes. I mean, I have diagrams like this. You're like yeah, I know you do, philip, I know you have it. I can show you a spreadsheet I have that has this massive what would you call it Decision tree for fat loss. Right, I don't even use it anymore because it's so personalized that it makes more sense to just deal with the person individually and kind of narrow it down from there, and a fishbone is a nice tool to do that.
Philip Pape: 29:20
So what's causing my fatigue might be completely different from what's causing your fatigue, right. If I'm drinking caffeine at 6 pm every day and you're not drinking any caffeine, then caffeine is not going to be an issue for you in, you know, in terms of, let's say, disrupting your sleep and then making you tired the next day and causing your fatigue, right. But if I have an autoimmune condition and you don't right that again that's a different potential constraint that's involved there. You know, my constraint might be I'm not recovering enough between training sessions because I'm in fat loss. You just might have a micronutrient deficiency, someone else it might be chronic stress and their cortisol is always elevated.
Philip Pape: 30:00
And that is where the personalization piece comes in, not as a luxury but a necessity to be efficient. I'd rather be efficient because to me that saves more time and money down the road anyway, even if it requires a little bit of investment upfront. I can't tell you how many tools I've invested in for my business that another coach would say, oh, I can't spend 50 bucks on that. And it's like you go immediately to thinking about the cost rather than thinking about the return. Right, thinking about the return, now you have to have the money first, or the time, or the resource or whatever. So, pick the thing that you have. That's my point. Pick the thing that you do have.
Philip Pape: 30:34
Okay, now, if you don't do this, you're just guessing and you're going to spend months optimizing something that isn't the issue, if you optimize it at all, and it might actually make it worse, or it's simply just not going to produce a result and you're going to be frustrated and then think none of this stuff works. Or you do something silly like cutting carbs when you probably need more carbs. Okay, just, you know carbs are a boogeyman of mine. Cutting carbs is, I should say, just you know carbs are a boogeyman of mine. Cutting carbs is, I should say, you know you end up solving for the wrong variable, and then that wastes time and money. And now I want you to be honest with yourself right now.
Philip Pape: 31:06
Think about your history. Okay, if you're 45, if you're 40, if you're 60 right now and you're listening to the show, it's because you want to learn something and you want to get better when it comes to your health and fitness. It also probably, it's also probably true that you've struggled your whole life in some way with the health and fitness, and there's a reason for that, and usually that is because you're not sure what to do. And, of course, if you do know what to do, you're not applying it consistently right. And there's a root cause. There's a constraint somewhere. The constraint could have to do with your mindset and your system for making yourself do it and I say making normally I don't use that word, but sometimes getting a habit going does require us to put in place some mistake-proofing elements that it's inevitable that we do it right.
Philip Pape: 31:51
It kind of it forces you into it, no matter what right. And it could be a little thing like packing your gym bag before the night, before you go to the gym in the morning. So it's one less piece of friction, right? Little things like that. So it requires intentionality and attention. Not just intention, but attention. You have to pay attention to this stuff, folks. You can't just binge my podcast and move on with your day. Now. Maybe if you listen to me over and over and over and over again, it'll suck in your brain through osmosis, through your cerebral spinal fluid, and then you'll like like an automaton. You'll just start doing this and you'll get jacked and swollen. You know lean and strong, but I doubt it. It requires some volition on your part and obviously I'm being sarcastic but seriously, some people go about their life that way, thinking that just the information coming in is enough to get them going. It's not. You have to take the action, you have to be intentional.
Philip Pape: 32:40
Most people can just do that by starting tracking the basics your training performance, your nutrition intake, your subjective levels of whatever you care about energy recovery. Is your digestion not great? I tried taking fiber gummies recently. I stopped taking them and there's a reason I did because I'm tracking my digestion and how I feel and because of that alone I knew I should not be taking these gummies let's just put it that way, okay, and it's probably some other ingredient in there besides the fiber. That's not so great for me. And these things cost nothing. Tracking things cost nothing a little bit of time. But the time is going to pay back immediately because if a pattern emerges, great. If not, then great too, because you know it's not in that data. Right, that data is not going to tell you what you need to know.
Philip Pape: 33:23
And there's something else that does, and this is where you can go into higher levels of return on investment activities, like, like I mentioned, macro factor before. Right, that's a paid app. You can get very precise. You can get workout apps. You can hire a coach. You can hire a trainer. You can get targeted precise. You can get workout apps. You can hire a coach. You can hire a trainer. You can get targeted blood work any of those things.
Philip Pape: 33:41
I don't want you to do all of them right now. I want you to pick kind of narrow in with the fishbone on the thing that would make the most sense. If you're not sure, send me a message on Instagram at what's in wait, say hey, philip, I listened to your fishbone diagram is a really powerful tool. It works no matter what your budget is. It's a universal method. It's find the constraint, address it, move to the next one and what changes is just how much data you have to work with and how quickly you can identify that bottleneck.
Philip Pape: 34:14
So, given that, what are the high ROI or the high return on investment interventions that I would say constitute the real meat of personalized health? Okay, and I'm going to give you five. I'm going to give you five interventions. The first one is, of course, strength training, strength training with progressive overload, where you are tracking your lifts, you're writing them down or putting them in a log. I personally use Boost Camp right now. Obviously, we're developing an app and it may have workout tracking. I'm not 100% sure yet if it makes sense, but you're going to make sure that the weight or the reps are increasing over time primarily those two variables.
Philip Pape: 34:51
There's other, more complicated, periodized approaches to training. Don't worry about it. If you're getting started with this, it's the weight going up and or the reps. This single practice, tracking your progression in the gym, is probably more valuable than any other supplement or recovery modality and really just requires your attention. You can do this in a physical notebook and, of course, you have to go to the gym and work out. Okay, that goes without saying, but seriously, that's more accessible than ever today. That's the first one.
Philip Pape: 35:22
The second high ROI is eating plenty of protein. Now you're like oh no, philip, I know what you're doing. Now You're just going to list the normal things you talk about all the time. Yeah, you know why. Because they work, and I already said earlier that I'm not trying to sell you some amazing shiny object secret to everything you know lose 20 pounds in 20 days, cockamamie, bs. I'm just trying to sell you what actually works, based on the evidence that you can find for free, and hopefully just reinforce these things so you don't go off on a different path. Please don't do that. Don't listen to the gym bro talking about the latest and greatest weird intervention or supplement.
Philip Pape: 35:56
Okay, so protein requires that you track, measure and or weigh your food in some way, and again, we have new technology like AI doing it with a photo. That can make it super, super easy. It might not be perfectly accurate, but you know what it doesn't really have to be. It just needs to be in the ballpark. 10 to 30%, close enough is actually close enough, versus not tracking at all. And then you say, okay, this is what I am doing, this is where I'd like to be. Here's the gap. Okay, here's what I've measured as the gap. Really, the only investment is probably a food scale at that point, which is like 10 bucks, five bucks, 10 bucks. You know, lightning deal on Amazon, seven bucks, whatever. That'll last you the next five, 10 years and that's it. Okay, that's so. The second one is protein. So I think protein is super, super important, along with training.
Philip Pape: 36:42
Third is monitoring your sleep. Now here's where you're like oh, no, I need to get an aura ring or whoop or something like that. No, just track when you go to bed and wake up, on average, how long is your sleep and how do you feel, and then notice the patterns between that and stuff you're doing in your routine. And come on, you guys know some of this right. I know that when I'm watching TV before I go to sleep, I have way worse sleep than when I don't, even if the hours are the same. I mean, lately I've been doing a great job of just reading a book in bed with my blue blockers on. I naturally just get kind of you know, tired. I fall asleep and I feel great the next morning. In fact, sometimes I wake up a half hour earlier than I intended to because I'm just so well rested and it yes, it shows in my aura ring and my sleep stages. But it doesn't mean you have to track that, those levels. I'm sorry. You know wearable device makers, I love technology as much as the next person, but you don't have to do that. How long when you go to bed and wake up? How do you feel? What is the pattern? All right, number four out of five. High intervention, high ROI inventions Okay, and I'm a big fan of this right now, and that is strategic labs blood work at the appropriate intervals and the right kind of blood work for you.
Philip Pape: 37:54
This topic gets a little bit complicated. I just came out with an episode about performance blood work. Go listen to that. It's specifically on this topic. You don't need every hormone panel. You don't need every autoimmune lab marker lab. You don't need hundreds and hundreds of markers. You need the ones that are important to inform your training and nutrition decisions. So I'm not necessarily talking about your normal physical labs, although those tend to come for the ride right Blood count and lipids and things like that. I'm talking about hormones and vitamins and nutrient deficiencies. You know albumin, like. There's a whole bunch of markers. I'm not going to actually list them here, but there's some things a lot of people are just deficient in generally, like vitamin D or magnesium. Some people have thyroid dysfunction and it's just nice to know that. You know everything's pretty optimal, so I'm good, I don't have to worry about that. Or hey, you know what these things are sticking out. Let me see what the interventions are for them and, of course, full disclosure.
Philip Pape: 38:53
We offer a performance blood work analysis Now. If you go to witsandweightscom slash blood work, you can get that analysis Now. Again, I will file this under. It's going to cost more than a typical intervention because it's a performance-based lab and it's out of pocket. It's not covered by insurance. Insurance won't cover these sorts of things unless you can somehow convince your doctor that you have all these potential issues. Therefore, you need to check these exact labs. Even then, all you're going to get are the numbers. What we do is take those numbers, compare them against 20,000 plus calculations, 4,000 plus patterns to identify the relationships between them and what that means for your root causes. Those exact labels in the fish bone that are causing the head of the fish to express those blood values for you, based on performance ranges, not sickness ranges, not population or normal ranges, but performance or optimal ranges. And this could honestly be your biggest single expense this year if you do it. I'm going to be totally honest, right, but we're talking about information that could save you years and years and years of figuring it out, and you only have to do it once, or maybe twice if you want a follow-up, you know, and then it's up to you as far as you see how valuable it is to you. So go to whatsaweightscom. Slash bloodwork.
Philip Pape: 40:05
I do think bloodwork is very high ROI because of how scientific and objective it is. It's incredible to be able to do that. And then the fifth thing here is, as far as high ROI inventions. It's kind of a trick question. It's kind of a what am I trying to say? It's kind of a tricky item, and that is the feedback loop. Okay, the feedback loop itself, where you test, you measure, you iterate, self-experimentation. It costs you nothing. It does cost a little bit of discipline and intention. It does, but that is actually one of the biggest ROI interventions you can do. And notice again, it's not a cop-out, because that will then lead to all the other things that might work for you as a person. Okay, and I added up the numbers for all these things, if you do them efficiently, it costs less than what you spend for your streaming services and for your coffee at Starbucks on an annualized basis. But think about what the return is. That's all I'm going to say about that, okay.
Philip Pape: 41:03
So again, out of all these things, the one we can help with that you have to throw a little moolah at is probably the performance, blood work, analysis. And I don't get most of that money. Most of that goes toward the lab, because the lab is included and they do great work and you know I have. I had this done myself at a lab corp. Go to witsandweightscom slash blood work to find out what constraint potentially is holding you back. I want to address something directly as we close out here. Right, Maybe you're someone who can afford a lot of these things the blood work, the coaching, very high quality nutrition. Maybe you can't afford all this. Maybe you're listening You're like, yeah, phillip, why do you keep talking about money? It's fine, you know I get it, and I don't know how many of you listening are in that category versus. You know it's a tough decision that you have to figure out. Or even you know you're getting by paycheck to paycheck. I don't know, you know, I don't know.
Philip Pape: 41:50
I think health is important to everyone and everyone has to approach it from where they are today. But some of you feel like this is self-indulgent, selfish, Like why am I prioritizing all this stuff when I've got a family to take care of? And should I be going to the gym? Should I be doing all these things? I've got my kids' retirement. I'm trying to save for kids' activities throughout the week. This is my brain going ahead of myself. Maybe you are saving for retirement. Maybe you are helping other family members and you're like should I be spending this kind of money on myself for this stuff?
Philip Pape: 42:24
All right, and what I want you to understand is that investing in your health is not selfish. It's not it's in your self-interest, but it's also in the interest of everyone around you everyone you support, everyone you love for you to be the best version of yourself. Everyone around you, everyone you support, everyone you love for you to be the best version of yourself. And it could also be extremely selfless to future versions of these people who would otherwise have to take care of you and spend money on you because you've gotten very sick and diseased in old age, which you don't have to do. When you have more energy today, you show up better for your family. When you're strong and healthy, you're more productive at work and you're confident. When you feel good in your body, you're more present in your relationships.
Philip Pape: 43:03
Taking care of yourself is not taking away from others. It's what allows you to give more to others. The alternative is ignoring your health until you're forced to deal with it reactively, and that is way more expensive. You know it is. How many times have you had an issue that came up because you neglected something over the years and now it costs way more expensive to deal with it and this goes for physical things too, like not taking care of your car or your house or you know whatever and then it's far more disruptive. It's annoying at a minimum, it's highly disruptive and costly to you and other people at its worst worse sorry, not worst. So if, if you've been holding back on some of these investments that you can afford right and it feels like a luxury, you've got the permission right now to reframe it, however, you need to reframe it. That this is me maintaining myself. This has been preventing, you know, sickness in the future. It's preventative care. This is investing in the infrastructure and the system that supports everything else I want to do in life.
Philip Pape: 44:04
Now, when we talk about making personalized health accessible, I do want to be clear about something important. Accessibility does not mean compromising on quality or effectiveness. It doesn't mean cheap, cheap and ineffective. It means removing the artificial barriers that this industry fitness industry, wellness industry, whatever you want to call it has erected. They've put up these huge barriers around something that should be very straightforward.
Philip Pape: 44:29
How do I know this? Well, not only do I see it online. I talk to real people every day whose friends and family members are telling them crazy stuff. So I don't swear on this podcast. I'm sorry, guys, but just imagine what I would have said. Crazy stuff every day. They send me messages like so-and-so, said well, they're, you know, they're just going to cook carbs now and go on carnivore or whatever to get that because it's not working for them. And they're like I wish they could just listen to your show or I wish I could just connect them with you. And you know what? I'm not going to be the one to reach out to them and say hey, this, your, your friend, said they're concerned about you because you decided to cut carbs. You know how great carbs are. Of course I'm not going to do that. How do I? I'm not going to convince people right, they need to be ready to make that choice and unfortunately the wellness industry has just put out of smoke.
Philip Pape: 45:16
But the evidence-based approach to optimizing your health is naturally more accessible because it focuses on what works, per science, per cause and effect. It's not profitable, at least it's not the most profitable. It can be profitable if you're a really good provider who is helpful to people and provides value and the people get a result. Of course people are willing to pay for that. I pay really good money for the business coaches that really help me with my business and I'm happy to do it because the return is there. It's not about the cost, it's about the return right, and we can dumb this down, not dumb this down. We can reduce this down to little day to day decisions.
Philip Pape: 45:50
When someone says, oh yes, I get a lot of my protein through collagen supplements, I'm like my first question is assuming they've given me permission to ask them questions is why are you taking collagen? And they're like wondering why I asked. But I have a legitimate reason and they say, well, I'm taking it because I don't know. It's a way to get protein through supplements. Or they say I like it because of skin, hair, nails, the fact that collagen protein is very inefficient and it's expensive. So you're kind of wasting your money and you're not getting very much protein. You're better off eating food or using whey protein and those little decisions will actually save you money, even though you think you're doing something that is helping right. Or same thing with EAAs. If you're not training fasted, you don't need EAAs essential amino acids they're a waste of money. Stop taking them, right, if you're taking 20 supplements, maybe five or 10 of those are unnecessary for you right now. I don't know. We'd have to look at them.
Philip Pape: 46:47
You know people invest in like really fancy equipment and I have nothing against things like tonal or Bowflex or whatever. But I had a Bowflex years ago and I did it just because of the fancy infomercial. It really made me think, oh, this is like the easy way to get jacked, you know, in a small footprint, and it's not that money, it's only, you know, for the low, low price of whatever. But what's more important is the principle of progressive overload. Even if you have mediocre equipment and gym access, you can actually make really good progress. You know sleep, going to bed and waking up at the same time is going to matter far more than any biohacking or measurement device for sleep until you've dialed that in.
Philip Pape: 47:24
So the tools that move the needle are pretty much free Tracking measurement. Some tools are a little more expensive that also move the needle, like blood work, like certain apps that you have to pay for, like trainers and coaches. So it depends on what's within reach. But if you focus on the right thing, you can then decide what to prioritize right, and this is why structured coaching at a reasonable price point can exist right, and it's why something like the blood work service we provide I think it saves money in the long run when it comes to healthcare and lab work.
Philip Pape: 47:51
I really do, because you're able to address the things that actually matter rather than wondering, and so it's not so much a compromise or trade-off, it's focusing on the best signal right now and going after that, and whatever decisions you can make today, those are going to compound over time. Better health leads to better decisions, better decisions lead to better outcomes, and that leads to more opportunities in all these other things outside of your health as well. It's not linear, it's exponential, it's abundance, and to me that's not elitist, that is not self-indulgent, that's just very, very smart, very intelligent. So if you're intelligent, which I think you are you're listening to this podcast Go out and do the fishbone diagram To find out some of your constraints that you might focus on, to think about it, at least be intentional about it, and then take the next step and, of course, if you're ready, to start building a Very systematic data-driven approach and build that system together with help and you can afford it and it makes sense for you as an investment. Come check us out at Physique University. Don't even join until you've checked it out.
Philip Pape: 48:47
Go to winstonweightscom slash physique. We have a lot of information on there, including a demo video of me walking through the platform, which keeps getting better and better every day. I can't even keep up with it. I need to make these demos like every other week because we keep adding new features. Use my code free plan all one word free plan and you're going to get the custom nutrition plan included. So when you go to checkout, check the box that says add the nutrition plan for $97, put the code free plan and it's going to drop to zero. All right, go, take advantage of that. That structured coaching, evidence-based training, support, accountability, acceleration Very accessible, very affordable. All right, until next time. Keep using your wits while lifting those weights and remember your health isn't a luxury. It is the foundation of everything else you want to build. Talk to you next time here on Wits and Weights.
