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May 2 - May 19, 2025
I believe good health starts with the most important muscle of all: your mind.
I also had an even bigger revelation when I discovered that the one thing that both these groups had in common wasn’t a “weight problem” but a muscle problem.
These people had one thing in common: low muscle mass or some impairment in their muscle. They all lacked the strength to perform certain basic movements (like those listed in chapter 8), and they had low physical tone along with blood markers that indicated unhealthy muscle. Their issue wasn’t body fat, I realized; it was a lack of sufficient healthy muscle tissue.
Once I added high-quality, strategically consumed protein to my diet, my suffering began to ease.
Promoting muscle health is the driving force behind the Lyon Protocol—the combination of nutrition and training instructions with operating procedures that will grant you the power to make real, lasting improvements to your body composition and overall health. Muscle-Centric Medicine® and its protein-forward, strength-training-focused lifestyle will change everything.
Once I teach you how to build a protein-forward nutrition plan, to center your training with a focus on healthy muscle tissue, and to establish mindset guidelines for execution and consistency, you will begin to feel better immediately.
once my patients prioritize skeletal muscle as an organ, they gain a whole new sense of wellness.
Pairing a growth mindset with internal discipline is crucial. I call this integration a growth-focused mental framework.
“The ultimate life hack is hard work.” —Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
if you want to change your body—inside and out—repairing damaged muscle and building new lean muscle mass form the critical first step.
The key is metabolic health. By increasing your healthy muscle mass, you not only change your body’s physical structure but also direct how your body uses both food and energy.
Multiple studies have shown that the healthier your muscles, the greater your survivability when things go wrong. In fact, a person’s ability to survive cachexia, a wasting disease often associated with cancer, is directly related to total muscle mass.
Given the power of muscle to help stave off diseases commonly attributed to aging, we should be thinking of muscle as a new health end point.
Muscle health has two major components: (1) physical and (2) metabolic. The physical involves strength and mass, while the metabolic affects insulin sensitivity, glucose regulation, fatty-acid oxidation, and mitochondria health.
To understand how muscle helps drive metabolism and why its effect is so important, it helps to grasp three core concepts: 1 Glucose becomes toxic to the body when too much remains in the bloodstream for too long, that is, more than two hours. (We call this disease state diabetes.) 2 Insulin is the body’s main mechanism for removing glucose from the bloodstream. 3 A root cause of obesity and related diseases (including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and impaired fertility, among other conditions) is decreased insulin sensitivity, also known as insulin resistance.
Muscle contraction during both aerobic and resistance training stimulates the uptake of glucose without any need for insulin’s assistance.
in response to resistance training, specifically, your body reaps the benefits of contraction-driven glucose uptake for up to two days after your workout because exercise improves insulin-stimulated glucose uptake.
there is no such thing as “healthy” inactive. What we commonly think of as diseases of aging are really diseases of impaired muscle.
Optimizing your muscle will optimize your life. FIVE WAYS TO MAKE MUSCLE MAGIC Every hour, complete 10 to 20 air squats. Stand at your desk. Get your heart rate up with a brisk walk to the bathroom or water fountain 10 times a day. Bring a resistance band to your office to get in a quick 10-rep set of bicep curls between tasks. Wear a lightly weighted vest to work to add in just a little more resistance.
well-trained muscle tissue is more efficient and effective at utilizing calories.
The more healthy muscle you have, the greater ability your body has to stay in homeostasis or balance.
research showed me how important it is to eat in a way that allows the body to store less fat while using exercise as a potent tool to elicit metabolic changes. Your quality of life correlates directly with your muscle health. If your muscles are healthy, you live better.
working out increases blood flow to the brain, promoting the development of new brain cells while helping to clear out toxins.
I tell all my patients, the first muscle you need to work on is between your ears.
This approach is concerned not with goal setting but rather with standard setting that will help you face your hidden fears and release the handcuffs preventing you from living your best life. We’ll take this same top-down approach with both your nutritional and physical training. Your increasing mental strength will help shape your growing physical strength and vice versa.
I propose that muscle mass be considered as an end-point goal of its own—a biomarker for overall health.1
My goal is nothing short of upending modern medicine with a refocus on muscle as the fountain of youth.
muscle also happens to be the only organ over which we can voluntarily exert control.
the higher your healthy muscle mass, the greater your protection against all-cause mortality and morbidity.
The science is clear that autoimmune diseases are more prevalent among people who don’t exercise. Studies also show that healthy muscle and physical activity could augment treatment by elevating regulatory T cells and inducing an anti-inflammatory response that helps regulate immune health.
the condition of your muscle tissue can heighten disease processes or correct metabolism as well as the underlying disease.
the best way to reduce your risk of these cancers is to keep a lean physique. The most effective way to accomplish this is with a protein-forward diet that allows you to control hunger and maintain muscle while improving body composition through targeted physical activity.
When it comes to cancer, our first goal is, of course, prevention through maintaining a healthy body composition. But should a diagnosis arise, optimal body composition can offer a powerful defense.
Higher muscle mass not only can support patients throughout chemotherapy and radiation, but also leads to greater survivability.
Building muscle mass before disease strikes offers our best defense against conditions such as cachexia. But even after diagnosis, targeted nutrition and exercise programs that promote and maintain skeletal muscle provide immediate interventions that can boost cachexia survival rates—and even help recovery.
The benefits of physical training as part of supportive cancer care are well established in the literature.
Dr. Emily Balcetis, author of Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World, recommends a three-part formula for making changes: (1) dream big, (2) plan concretely, and (3) foreshadow failure.40
STEP ONE: DREAM BIG Identify WHO you want to be. WHAT qualities does that person possess? Are they fit? Are they disciplined? Are they focused? Then identify an action that embodies that future self.
STEP TWO: MAKE CONCRETE PLANS Implement a protocol like the ones in this book. Break down plan execution into small steps:
STEP THREE: FORESHADOW FAILURE What energy sinks will draw your focus away from execution? Where are the daily pitfalls of focus and energy that will prevent you from achieving the standards you’ve set? This requires awareness of your personal weaknesses.
Because compromised muscle is less responsive to protein, adults older than forty require a nutrition plan that prioritizes turning on muscle-protein synthesis (MPS)—the processing of amino acids into skeletal muscle.
Recommended to nearly all patients entering the hospital, despite the results of a 1999 systematic review that found no benefits for any of the seventeen conditions studied,31 bed rest is a largely outdated practice.
After about age fifty, muscle mass decreases at an annual rate of 1 to 2 percent.
older adults need more dietary protein to support good health, promote recovery from illness, and maintain functionality.
muscle health and mobility issues underlie at least nine of the top ten “causes” of death. To put this in perspective, obesity is also not listed as a major cause of death according to the CDC.
The human tendency toward present bias prioritizes our current wants and desires over our long-term personal goals.
People often suggest that you visualize what you want and how it will feel when you get it. Here’s what I’ve found works better: do a future projection of what it will cost you if you hang on to your current bad habits.
Today’s dietitians are trained that once they’ve determined a client’s or patient’s overall energy needs, the first and most important nutrient to calculate into an individual’s diet is protein. Only after protein intake is established do they backfill the remaining calories with carbohydrates and fat.
despite the basic training that all dietitians receive, the current government guidelines first address carbohydrates and fats before allocating protein recommendations, as a percentage of energy in relation to these other macronutrients.
The fewer calories you consume, the more these calories should come in the form of dietary protein.
