Look, Feel, & Stay Young Forever: #1 Orthopedic Surgeon’s Proven Protocol

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This seriously blows my mind. 56% of you who listen to the Mel Robbins podcast all the time, haven't hit that subscribe button yet, no judgment. But if you're enjoying the show and you want to keep getting the good stuff, do me a quick favor. Tap the subscribe button. It's free. I promise to keep making the show better for you. Every single week I'm listening to your feedback, bringing on guests you actually want to hear from and making sure we're showing up for you. I love being together with you here on YouTube. Now, let's get back to the Mel Robbins podcast. Hey, it's your friend, Mel Robbins. Welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so thrilled that you're here. It's always an honor to spend time with you and to be together. And if you're a new listener, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family.

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And because you made the time to hit play and listen to this particular episode, I know that you're the kind of person who not only values your time, you value your health and the quality of your life, and you're going to love today's conversation with the extraordinary Dr. Vonda Wright. And I also want to say this, if you chose to listen to this right now because someone in your life shared this with you, I just think that's really cool that somebody sent this to you because it means that you have someone in your life that cares about you, and they want you to learn how to leverage the intelligent, miraculous design of your body and how to feel stronger and more energized in your life. And that's exactly what you're going to learn to do today as you and I spend time together with Dr.

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Vonda Wright. Now, Dr. Wright is a renowned double board certified orthopedic surgeon. She specializes in hip preservation, musculoskeletal aging, and sports medicine, and she's treated over a hundred thousand patients in her career at the University of Pittsburgh. She was the medical director of the UPMC Sports Complex and the director of many of their biggest research groups, including the performance and research initiative for masters athletes. She's also an internationally recognized researcher, and you're going to hear about some of her fascinating studies today. You're also going to learn about her pioneering work in mobility, musculoskeletal aging, and how it's changing the way we view and treat longevity, mobility and the aging process. She's also written five bestselling books, including Fitness After 40, younger in Eight Weeks, guide to Thrive, and the upcoming book, unbreakable. Aren't you so excited to learn how to unlock all of the natural strength and natural design of your body to make your life better? I know I sure am. So please help me welcome Dr. Vonda Wright to the Mel Robbins Podcast, Dr. Vonda Wright. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for hopping on a plane and coming all the way to our Boston Studios. I'm so thrilled that you're here. It's my pleasure. So I wanted to start by having you speak directly

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To the person who is listening and explain what they might experience that's going to be different about their life or a person that they love, who they share this with, if they take to heart everything that you're about to explain to us today, by the end

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:04:06):

Of the day, I hope that I have changed your whole perspective on aging to realize that you do not have to be the victim of the passage of time and become frail by the simple tools we're talking about today with mobility and all the other things that there is no age, no matter where you find yourself today. There is no age and skill level where it is too late that your body will always respond to the positive stress you place on it. I love that I can feel the fire. It's a very hopeful

Mel Robbins (00:04:42):

Message. Well, I think it's a very important one because you're going to talk to us today about your experience as an orthopedic surgeon and how movement actually is medicine.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:04:55):

Yes.

Mel Robbins (00:04:55):

And you are changing the conversation about aging in the world. You are getting women to think in particular very differently about their health and the unbelievable design of the human body and how you can leverage that in simple ways. And so I'm so excited to unpack all of this with you, and I think maybe where we should start is 

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:05:24):

There is a pervasive myth in this country that aging is an inevitable decline from the vitality of youth down some slippery slope to frailty where we spend the last 20 years of our lives dying. But the fact of the matter is we actually can be healthy, vital, act of joyful, but people think that they have to go down this slippery slope and that there's nothing they can do about it. But the fact of the matter is there's so much we can do to pre-plan our future.

Mel Robbins (00:05:59):

I am so excited for this conversation because already what you just said makes me think about getting older differently, and it makes me think about my aging parents differently because I think we've all had that experience, whether you see your grandparents or you see your parents, and you have that feeling where you're like, oh my God, they look so old. How did that happen all of sudden? How did that, they seem so frail. So I love this quote of yours. We don't get old because we age. We get old because we stop moving. What does that mean? So

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:06:34):

If we step back and look at our bodies, I think nature is very conservative. If we were designed to sit still night and day, we would not be designed with our strongest muscles below our belly buttons. We would be Cecile like a mushroom with this giant stock and all the good stuff on top. But what does Cecile mean? So job of the hut had this, do you remember from Star Wars, this guy in

Mel Robbins (00:06:59):

The bar? Of course,

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:07:00):

Yes. Had this giant blubber appendage. He kind of laid on, yes, mushrooms have this giant stock, which doesn't go anywhere, right? So if we were meant to be immobile, we would've been designed like one of those two beings. But we were designed with the strongest muscles below our belly buttons. We have two legs. What is the first independent skill we ever learned walking? It is human nature to move. So what is unnatural? Mel is not continuing to move. What is unnatural is not moving.

Mel Robbins (00:07:41):

So are you saying that one of the reasons why our parents and our grandparents and we start to age rapidly is because we're not moving?

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:07:53):

I think that when you look at the statistics in our country and somewhat around the world, that 50, 60, 70% of people do no intentional movement a day. We get up, we get dressed, we get in our car, we go sit at our desk for 8, 10, 12 hours, get in our car, sit in traffic for two hours. Then if we're lucky, we get eight hours of sleep. If you add it up, we are probably like a mushroom in one place 20 hours a day. That is not what we're designed to do. And so all of that sedentary living that we're doing, because by nature, our organs work better when we're moving, when we're flexing our muscles, when our bones are being pounded, we age

Mel Robbins (00:08:40):

Due to lack of mobility. What I'm really excited about is we have so many conversations on this podcast that I'm 56 and I'm constantly sharing to the 20 year olds in my life. I think this is one where if you're in your twenties or your thirties and you're listening to this, you're going to be sending this to your parents and to your aunts and your uncles as this gigantic shift around how to think about aging. And so Dr. Wright, that brings me to this other question that I have. How does the way that you think about aging shape the way that you age?

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:09:17):

I love that question because I think that what we do too often is, and I always look over my left shoulder when I do this and say, oh my God, 25 was so amazing. Okay, well, 25 was easy, right? But let's think about that. At 25, I don't know what you were doing, but I was still going to school. I had no money. I was still going home in summers to live with my parents and we're worshiping that. When I contend to anybody listening, and I may have come to this late, I admit, I maybe how old I'm, I'm turning 58 on Saturday.

Mel Robbins (00:09:52):

Oh, wow.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:09:52):

Yeah. So I may have come to this late, but now I would say from 48 on I am the most authentic, the most indefinable I get to choose. And that comes from the confidence of experience that I could not possibly have had at 25. So I'm not saying anything against my, I have a 17-year-old, I have all the way up to 36 year olds and children in our blended family. It's a wonderful thing to be young, but if we are so stuck on the past, we will never Mel be able to pivot, literally pivot our brain and our bodies towards the next 50 years. Because the reality is midlife for men is about 37. For women, it's about 40.

Mel Robbins (00:10:42):

Hold on a second.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:10:43):

Midlife. Midlife

Mel Robbins (00:10:44):

For men is 37.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:10:46):

The life expectancy for men in this country is 76.4. So half of that, you don't even think that you're aging yet. But if you really pay attention, and how could life possibly be over at 37? How could it possibly be over at 40? And yet if we don't pit at our mindsets, that's essentially what we're saying.

Mel Robbins (00:11:07):

Well, and there's so much that you're about to share and shift in terms of the way that we think about this. Because if I am reading between the lines, when you refer back to being 25, when you don't have everything figured out, it's a very challenging decade. We as a society obsess over youth. And now the medical industry is obsessed with for women anyway. And what we're talking about today is how do use all of the research and your experience as an orthopedic surgeon and as a doctor who has been seeing patients, you're in a clinical practice, how to actually change the way you think about aging so that it changes the way that you think about your health and what's possible in your life. And when should you start to think about this?

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:12:02):

I want to backpedal for two seconds and pick up on something you just said. For women in this country, it's all about anti-aging. If I do nothing else in the next year or so, I want us to pivot that narrative because it's part of mindset. When you think of in society, men growing older, we assign the word longevity. It's like legendary. It's about legacy building, it's about reflecting on being distinguished for women. We have assigned this word, whether it is in literature, whether it's in our conversations, whether it is in the products. We smear all over anti-aging as if Mel, it's a problem. Aging is not a problem to solve. Aging is the most natural thing we do from the moment of conception to the very last minute of our death. It is the most natural thing we do. It's how we age that matters. And so I think to circle back to your question, in my career, it has always been my goal to change the way we age in this country. And we cannot do that if we don't believe it's possible. If I am going through life thinking, oh, when's the next shoe going to drop? I'm just getting older every day. That is not a hopeful perspective. I believe there's never an age or skill level when people cannot change the trajectory of their health.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:13:38):

Yes.

Mel Robbins (00:13:38):

And in 2022, only 7.4% of orthopedic surgeons were women.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:13:46):

Oh, that's so high. When I trained it was only three. Can you

Mel Robbins (00:13:49):

Imagine? Why is that the case? I realize that there are bigger issues around sexism, but why is it that there are so few women that are practicing as orthopedic surgeons?

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:14:02):

There began this culture that you had to be strong as an ox and twice as smart, which is a joke to say that surgeons, orthopedic surgeons are just big, burly athletic men. The fact of the matter is orthopedic surgeons is one of the most competitive disciplines to get into. So it stands to reason that women would want to get into it.

Mel Robbins (00:14:22):

Yes.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:14:23):

So it has taken a long time for the culture to start accepting women into orthopedic surgery. Although we're doing a better job now, obviously than we ever have, but it's going to take us another 50 years to catch up.

Mel Robbins (00:14:36):

What made you want to become

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:14:37):

An orthopedic surgeon? I decided to go into orthopedic surgery because we get to take care of people from the moment of their births to the moment of their deaths. And it's aspirational because if I harness the power of mobility, I can save you from the ravages of chronic disease. So for me, I mean, I love the technical side of putting metal and bones and I use metal. I use needles now to do arthroscopy. I don't even have to make incisions. The technology is amazing, but that would never be enough for me because of just who I am and my mindset around taking care of the whole person. So the fact that I can help people aspire to healthy, vital, active, joyful, that

Mel Robbins (00:15:22):

Is good work. Well, what I find interesting is that you're going to teach us about aging through the lens of being an orthopedic surgeon. But I'm also curious because I know that prior to becoming an orthopedic surgeon, your first career was as a cancer nurse.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:15:42):

Yeah.

Mel Robbins (00:15:43):

So what was it about being a nurse, treating and caring for cancer patients that led you to want to go into orthopedics, and how does all of that inform the way that you think about aging?

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:16:00):

I'm a much better doctor, and I have a deep empathy and perspective on taking the whole care of the whole person and not just treating you like an ACL or treating. And I'll give you examples of these because I was a cancer nurse. So in the late eighties, early nineties when I was doing this, there was a tremendous shortage of nurses. And so you get out of college, they say, come train as a nurse. And in three years, youthful vigor. In three years, I got another bachelor's degree and a master's degree and started working on 11 Kellogg, which is a cancer floor at Rush University in Chicago. You cannot be 23 years old pushing chemo in the middle of the night to women, mostly in the struggle of their lives and not come out a changed person. At the time, most cancer care was done in the hospital. Now it's mostly outpatient. And at that time, nursing was primary nursing, meaning Mel, if you're in the hospital every month for six months, I would've been your nurse, just me and you. So in the middle of the night, chemo is given at night when I am there with you, and you can imagine you've seen hospitals, it's dark. There's a light behind the bed,

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There's IVs dripping with this beeping thing, and it's me and you there. And our tire goal was to give you this poison so that you could live another day, another years, right? The gravity of that, the hope of that was not lost on me. The view of do you know what women and I would do all night? I would come in and out and we would be shopping on the home shopping network, and I only reflected later what were we doing shopping on? We were just trying to be normal women in the grips of the most abnormal situation you could ever be. But you can imagine, Mel, how could I be 23 years old, live through the most vulnerable part of a woman's life in which she's fighting for her life and not come out a different person. But I took that six years at the bedside of strong, brilliant surviving women, and it's flavored the rest of my life. And there might not be a big correlation between pushing chemo and putting metal in bones, but what it has done is provided for me a deep empathy to the human condition.

Mel Robbins (00:18:25):

Well, it really strikes me that after six years of being bedside with women who are fighting for their lives battling cancer, that if I had had to guess, I would've thought you would've gone into oncology. I think it's fascinating that the experience of being with people who could lose their life actually led you to a medical discipline that allowed you to prolong life. And that has now led you to being a world renowned and respected voice about longevity and how you can age differently. So have you thought about how those two things connect?

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:19:22):

You know what, Mel? I don't mean to cry in public, but I am still a practicing surgeon. I have looked into the eyes of more than a hundred thousand people in my lifetime as a doctor, and I started as a cancer nurse. But I see the future of people today, every day when I take call, and this is what it is, and I have got to solve for this. You and I have got to solve for this. When your Aunt Mary breaks her hip and I'm called to the hospital bed to see her, she is laying there in excruciating pain balled up at the bottom of the bed with that horrible blue gown on that. We put people in and she doesn't want to be moved up because it hurts too much right from bones that she never even paid attention to, never knew she had because we ignored it.

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Now they're screaming. That's number one. Number two, what's happened to her is she's laying there in a pile of her own urine because she was not treated for the urinary syndrome of menopause. Her pelvic floor got weak. So many women do not talk about the fact that they become incontinent in late in life and have urinary tract infection. So she's painful, she's incontinent, which if she even realizes that she feels ashamed about that, I need to do a 45 minute surgery on where because she's broken her hip, I need to put a rod down that the size of my thumb. Actually, I cannot do that if her heart is not healthy enough to withstand anesthesia. And many times her heart is so unhealthy because she's taking care of everybody else in the world except herself that the hospitalists have a hard time clearing her heart. And do you know what else? She either has a touch of dementia or she has.

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That is the state of women that I see every time I go to fix a hip on call. And do you know, in her lucid moments what she's saying to me, she's standing there with her daughter. It's usually the eldest daughter at the bedside. She's looking at me, she's looking at her daughter. And time after time again, she'll say something like, I've not always been like this. I don't know how I got here. Don't ever let this happen to you. Don't get old. Well, I am not blaming her at all. I see the future of women, Mel, I can't not cry if we know we have within our hands to change this trajectory of our future. And if we choose to not be the victims of the passage of time, we don't have to end up like all those women. I take care of 30% of whom after they break a hip will die. We can choose another path, but it takes conscious effort and a belief that we are worth it.

Mel Robbins (00:22:21):

Dr. Wright, I am so happy that you went to the most important and profound reason why this conversation today matters. And you have this concept about health span versus lifespan that I think really encapsulates the fact that while we are all going to get older, we do not have to be frail. There is a completely different future that's available to us as we age. What is the difference between healthspan and lifespan? So when we think

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:22:55):

About living longer,

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We quantify that as how many years we're going to live the lifespan. And in the United States for women, it's about 81. For men it's 76.4. But what we know from our research is that life expectancy does not equal health span those years in our lives. When we are healthy, active, vital, joyful, what we see is people spend the last 20 years of their life going to a doctor's office three times a week in a steady decline. But listen, that is not the way it has to be. And so what I spend every day doing now, not only treating people for bones and longevity, but I am teaching them to build this unbreakable lifestyle so that they are not the of the passage of time, which we can all succumb to if we're not intentional.

Mel Robbins (00:23:50):

I would love to just stay right there because I think that is a extraordinarily powerful idea 

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:24:24):

Well, when I say things like movement is mobility is medicine, movement is medicine. It's because there is this phenomenon, and I wish I had made this up called sedentary death syndrome. It is the 33 chronic diseases that kill us in this country. It's everything you've thought of, heart disease, brain disease, stroke, it is diabetes. All of those 33 chronic diseases that people die of are directly treated by moving. Because if you have high blood pressure, you'll take a pill for that. If you have cardiac disease, you'll take a pill for that. If you have dementia, you could take a pill for that one pill. Moving your body is the medicine that positively affects them all. So if we want to cure sedentary death syndrome, it involves the medicine of mobility. Now, let's just take two steps back so that we acknowledge that we don't control everything in the future.

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There are legitimately these time bombs of aging that just happen at a cellular level. But the thing is, our lifestyle can control our mitochondria, the energy of our cells. They can control how many a bad cell circulate around they're called senescent cells or zombie cells. We can control that by the lifestyle we live. We can control inflammation in our body to a certain extent with the lifestyle we live. And so all these time bombs that age us faster, we are not the victims of the passage of time. If you want to feel better now, then that is an action step. It is not reading more about what could happen to you and putting the book back on the shelf. It is learning how to take action to change the trajectory of the future or else you are a victim of the passage of time.

Mel Robbins (00:26:15):

Well, one thing that I will say is that if you are somebody that listens to this podcast and you normally listen to it while you are sitting at work or you're sitting in your car, one change you could make is listen to this while you're walking.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:26:32):

Absolutely.

Mel Robbins (00:26:33):

And that way you're combining the advice with your interest in listening to something that's helping you improve your life. You've said that our understanding of aging is completely skewed because all of the studies that have been done on folks that are older are studies done on people who don't move much. Can you unpack this for us? Absolutely. So

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:26:56):

When we look at aging studies, you will often find things like, oh, we slow down. When we age, we lose our muscle. And some of that is true, right? It is true. I'll concede that. But in bid population studies, there's a study that was going on when I was at the University of Pittsburgh called the health A, B, C. They took a cohort, a group of 70 year olds and just followed them to see what happens. They all slowed down. They developed a lot of body fat, all the things you think about of an aging. Well, when you look at the US population, and it's not that different around the world, 70% of us don't do any form of mobility or exercise a day. It's like this thing I described to you, 20 hours sitting down. So what do we know from those population studies?

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We know how we age if we don't move. So my group and I formed this group early in my career called Prima, the Performance and Research Initiative for masters' athletes, masters just means people over 35 or 40. That doesn't sound that old. That's a category master. Okay. Yeah, it's a category. So all of my academic research has been investigating what happens if we take sedentary living out of the equation in terms of our aging. And so I was the principal investigator on a number of studies that looked at bone health, muscle health, brain health, our stem cells with aging, all looking at when do we slow down if we continue to be active our lives? And we started studying people, active people. They were not professional athletes asking the question, what are we capable of? If we take the variable of sedentary living out of the equation, can we maintain our muscle mass?

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Can we maintain our bone density? Can we maintain our brain function? When do we really slow down? And we found that in our active people, 35, 40 and up all the way. I think my oldest in these studies were 103 that yes, indeed you can maintain your bone density. Yes, indeed. You can maintain your muscle mass. Yes, indeed. You can retain the cognitive function in the front of your brain. Yes, indeed. We can stimulate the production of longevity proteins all with something as simple as moving our legs, walking around, competing in a little sports. Because remember, we are designed to move.

Mel Robbins (00:29:38):

You have with you these MRI results, and we're going to put 'em up on the screen for you if you're watching on YouTube. But I would love to have you walk us through what we're looking at here. And if you could just keep in mind that there's a person listening. So we describe it for them.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:30:00):

Yeah. So the study that you're describing has been published since 2011, and it was one of the first, really the answer to the question, can we maintain our lean muscle mass with simple daily activity? So this series of three pictures has become iconic on the internet. I should have named it because it is everywhere. Gym people put it up in their gyms. But what it shows is this, the study was looking at masters age recreational athletes. Nobody was a pro athlete in this. They were mere mortals like

Mel Robbins (00:30:33):

You and me. So we're basically saying if you do a 5K and you're over 40, you're considered a master athlete.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:30:38):

Yeah. Masters just means that you're out of the Olympic pipeline. You're just, you're a normal human being. You're a normal human being. So my patients, were all normal human beings. So in the study that we're looking at, there are three pictures. I did this study using an MRI, which if you've ever had an MRI, you just lay really still. You go into a tube and it's really loud in there. And all that clanging and banging is we're taking pictures of your body with a magnet. It's such cool technology. So in the first picture, we have slices as if you were slicing up a ham. If you see this picture or if you're imagining it, think of the Christmas ham. There's a bone in the middle, there's a layer of muscle on top, there's a layer of muscle on bottom, and there's a very, very thin rind of fat around the outside.

Mel Robbins (00:31:31):

Yeah, it look, it looks like almost like a filet. It does. If you order a filet, and I'm looking at this beautiful, almost like a solid piece of meat on a 40-year-old athlete. It looks exactly the same on the 70-year-old who's active. But talk to me about the one in the middle, which is the 74-year-old who does nothing and sits around because that looks like a bowl of cottage cheese that does not look healthy. So if you

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:32:01):

Look at the 40-year-old slice, I call that exactly what you said, the flank steak. Yep. Very lean, no marbling. Very thin fat that you don't have to do anything with. And when we tested the strength of these athletes, they were strong. Then if you sit around for 35 or 40 years, this is what happens. The cottage cheese picture, I call Kobe beef. Kobe beef, I don't even know what that is. That is that Japanese cow that they massage and all the meat has all this fat in it. So if we sit around for 30 years, we lose all of our muscle architecture, we become very weak. And you are right. It looks very disorganized. And so this person in the middle picture can't

Mel Robbins (00:32:47):

Get up from a chair. And what you are saying to us today is that you're going to teach us that aging is inevitable, but how you age is within your control. And so for somebody that's listening in their twenties to forties, this message about, look, you have got to incorporate movement because it creates a roadmap for a long, amazing life. And I think the message to anybody that's listening, that's 40, 50, 60, 70, it's not too late.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:33:21):

Exactly. So what are we doing in those last 20 years if we don't preplan that? If we don't get in front of this, I call 35 to 45 the critical decade.

Mel Robbins (00:33:33):

Why is 35 to 45 the critical decade?

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:33:36):

If I say O 25 was easy by 35, most of us have figured out a little bit to what to do in our careers. Unless you're a surgeon like me and you're still training, but figured out some things about life, sometimes by that point, people have made relationship commitments. Sometimes they've made raising other little people commitments. But you are still young enough with youthful vigor, with youngish stem cells to course correct. So if 35 to 45 is the time to develop the habits of mobility, to develop the habits of lifting weights, to look at what you're eating, your body is not a garbage can that we just shove whatever in, right?

Mel Robbins (00:34:17):

Yeah.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:34:17):

I mean, you can burn anything for fuel, but should you be burning the noxious, right? Because what happens at 45 for women, and even to some extent for men, is we start going through perimenopause and game different game. It's not a continuation of the game for women. It is a different game. So if we can in the critical decade, get these habits established,

Mel Robbins (00:34:45):

What do I do now? Well, let's start there. I want to hear you explain what are the critical habits for that decade of 35 to 45. But I want to just tell the person that's with us right now who's either taken us on a walk or you're listening at home, or we're in the car with you, because you're probably thinking, oh my God, I blew that decade. Now I'm screwed. And so we're going to get to you. And Dr. Wright has very good news because, well, I'm just going to ask that right now. What if you're over 45 like me, or your parents are over 45 and you're listening right now, and you feel like, is it too late for me to course correct? Is it too late for me to build strong muscle? Why the hell do I need strong muscle in order to have a better health span? What about the person who's listening or who got this forwarded to

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:35:36):

Them who's over 45? Yeah. Yeah. Aren't we all over for all the cool kids are? Listen, the short answer is no. There is never an age or skill level when the strategic stress you put on your body in the form of all the things, mobility, the strength training, the smart nutrition, will not dramatically change the trajectory of your health. There is

Mel Robbins (00:35:57):

Not an age. I just want to make sure the person hears this.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:36:00):

Yeah.

Mel Robbins (00:36:01):

So Dr. Wright, you're sitting here as an expert in longevity and helping us age in a way that creates a better life.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:36:11):

Yes.

Mel Robbins (00:36:12):

There is never an age. There is never an age. If you're listening to Dr. Wright right now and you're 92 years old, you can still improve your health span. You can still change the way you age.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:36:24):

You can still take steps to feel better every day, even if you're sick and you don't feel great every day, you can pick up the phone and talk to somebody in your life. I'm thinking to myself, maybe the only person I still know is the barista. If I'm 97, the only person I know is the barista at a coffee shop, then go say hi to that person every day. It's not rocket science. But the basic thing is people don't invest every day in their health and mobility. So critical decade, let's get our proverbial expletive together. I dunno if I can cuss on your show. You can say whatever you want. Yeah. Let's get our shit together people. Can we please stop taking every day for granted because it's easy and you're young, and can we please take a minute to notice ourselves? Try to figure out what your body's saying to you, because I'm going to tell you for sure your body speaks to you every day, whether you're listening or not.

(00:37:20):

Can we please stop abusing ourselves with quite so much alcohol? We can metabolize it when we're young. And so what if you've been sitting around for 30 years and you're like, is it too late for me? Am I the guy in the middle picture of that with the fat rind all over my leg? Listen, remember, your primary skill is walking. So if you're doing nothing else right now, you put on your headphones, you get up and you take Melan, I with you, and you walk around the block because I am not telling you that the first day out the door, you have to do five miles to be successful. You just need to get up from your seated position and invest in yourself. You should think of this as an investment

Mel Robbins (00:38:05):

In yourself. Well, what I also love about what you said from the very beginning is reminding us of the obvious. Our bodies are designed to move. Yes, yes. You're as an orthopedic surgeon, been repairing people's bodies and joints and bones, but your body is designed to move. And one of the things to think about when you think about wellness, and you think about your health span and you think about aging in a very different way, is that we expect to get frail because we expect to slow down and stop moving. And if you actually flip it on its head and you say, well, actually, I don't expect to stop moving. I certainly don't. I want to be hiking like the week I die, I want to be taking five mile walks every day when I'm retired. I want to be swimming in the ocean. I want to be going to yoga class. I want to be out and about. And when you realize, wait a minute, my body's actually designed in a certain way. If I just work with it, it will work with And for me,

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:39:08):

That is absolutely the truth. And if you Google, you can find all kinds of examples of people that are seeming anomalies like mistakes that they're 92 lifting weights for the first time. Oh, somebody's mother started lifting at 70 and now she's a bodybuilder. That is our true capacity to build muscle, to take more steps, to develop relationships. That is our capacity. Our capacity and our design is not sedentary living.

Mel Robbins (00:39:37):

Well, this is a really important point because I don't think I truly thought about the possibility of it looking completely different when you get old. 

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:40:46):

It's what I am. It's my lifestyle. It's not a diet. It is not a six week exercise program. It is my lifestyle because I think people can get overwhelmed with all the information that's out there. What frequency do I have to get on the vibrating plate? How many pounds in my weighted vest? I mean, can I jump? Can I jump on a trampoline? Listen, people, we get so caught up in the 99% of minutiae when we are not even taking the first step. If we focused on the 1% that we know is true, these things that I keep saying and will detail for you, if we focus on that when that is your lifestyle, then you can layer on the complicated stuff. But I really feel, Mel, that we get so caught up in the data overload that we get so

Mel Robbins (00:41:33):

Paralyzed,

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:41:34):

We do nothing.

Mel Robbins (00:41:35):

Yes. And you're basically saying, if you literally just get up out of the chair and you move the legs that you have or you wheel yourself in your wheelchair, you are doing what your body is designed to do, and your body will thank you by building muscle,

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:41:49):

Even if you're in

Mel Robbins (00:41:50):

Pain. Listen, okay, talk to me

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:41:52):

About that. Let's talk about some pain. I am an orthopedic surgeon and people come to me in pain. I get it. You don't want to get hurt by trying something new. I get that a lot,

Mel Robbins (00:42:01):

But walking is not something

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:42:03):

New. That's true. Let's be honest. Or it hurts when I walk or I don't have the time. Or listen, I've been doing this so long. I often say to people, you cannot out, excuse me, I have hurt it all. If your knees hurt when you walk on dry land, well then let's go to the local Y, which has a hot pool and a budget program, and let's get in that water and walk. Even if we have to walk around our kitchen table until we can walk outside or we have to get up and down from a chair until we can go to a gym. You just have to make the effort. Because what

Mel Robbins (00:42:40):

Happens if we don't? You will end up frail and old. You will be the statistic of somebody who breaks their bone and who dies an early death. What's coming for you? You are right. And that is what I'm saying. Since you're an orthopedic surgeon, I would love to have you educate us about joints and bones.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:43:04):

Yeah. What is a joint? Joints are the mobile parts of our body. They're comprised of at least two bones, sometimes multiple bones surrounded by a capsule, which is like an inside skin muscles attach around the joint to move it, right? So if we step back and think of the musculoskeletal system, what is that? That is muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments, fat, actually muscle stem cells, all of those tissues that we can sometimes put in little boxes they belong in their own houses are actually cousins. They are all derived from the same type of cell in the beginning. So they all speak a similar language. Bone. We think of, okay, there's on either side of a joint, we think of it as just the skeleton at Halloween, right? Yeah. Just these structural things. They're hanging out. That's all they do is structure. They're like the strong silent type.

(00:44:10):

You never know where they're there until they say something profound. In bones case, it's a fracture. The truth of the matter is bone is your body's master communicator. And think about it, if we think about how we're formed, there is bone from the top of our head to the bottom of our pinky toe. Why wouldn't we be designed? That bone is not just structural. It is releasing proteins, hormones, osteocalcin is one of them that communicate everywhere. So when bones release their hormones, I'll give you one example. It goes to the brain and it stimulates the release of something in the brain called a brain derived neurotrophic factor. Long word, an acronym, which means we build neurons after stimulation from the bone. We know that people with osteoporosis, which means bad bone, weak bone, have more dementia. There is a communication pathway going, right? It's like mind blowing bone sends out osteocalcin to muscle, it speaks back to muscle and helps it with metabolizing glucose. Bone sends out osteocalcin to our pancreas, which is where our insulin comes from. So between talking to our muscle and talking to our pancreas, that is glucose equilibrium. It helps us not be diabetic. If you're a man, osteocalcin goes to your testes and helps you make testosterone. So this communication of muscle and bone gives a whole new perspective on just this skeleton in the closet that just makes

Mel Robbins (00:45:53):

Muscle structural. Well, what's interesting about, and it's so exciting to hear how passionate you are about this, because we're obviously talking about changing the way that you think about aging and understanding that getting older is inevitable. Feeling older is actually a choice. And it is a choice that you're making every day based on how you take care of your muscles, how you take care of your body. And what I love about the way that you're explaining all this is because I don't really think much about my bones.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:46:30):

Yeah. Who does?

Mel Robbins (00:46:31):

I don't think about my joints unless they hurt. And so in addition to thinking about how you age is within your control and getting frail is not inevitable.

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:46:45):

Yes,

Mel Robbins (00:46:46):

You actually have an option to live your life in a very different way, but there's also immediate benefit because of the way the brains and bones respond and how it improves your life. Now,

Dr. Vonda Wright (00:46:57):

However, I also recognize, despite the fact, people you can't out, excuse me, I've heard 'em all. I realize that it is very difficult for people to invest in a future they can't see.

(00:47:11):

And so I learned this concept from the banking industry called temporal disconnect. The bankers in this country are trying to get us to save 10 cents a day so that we have some money to retire on. And that is difficult for them. I find the same trying to motivate people or have people motivate themselves to invest every day in their mobility. Because everything we've talked about, if you're 40, you can't imagine what you're going to be like when you're 80. And so why do you care? True. Today you're doing your thing. So how about feeling amazing today? I can tell you for sure, Mel, that when I hop off a treadmill where I have done sprint intervals and not fallen off the back of the treadmill, or I have added five more pounds to my deadlift, oh my God, I am such a badass when I do that. It's not only for my body. It rejuvenates my brain and makes me have hope for the future. I'm going to be that cranky 90-year-old lifting my own suitcase to the top of the thing. And if my old friends can't keep up with me, then I'm going to travel with some young whipper snappers who can keep up with me. But if I want to be like that, then I want to feel great today.