Your Organs Don’t Care If You Look Fit

Oh hi!

Here's something I've been thinking about this week:  

In my 20s, I didn’t spend a single second wondering whether I was “healthy.”

I hiked on weekends, clung to a $22-a-month gym membership I used four times in three years (ahhh, that was money well spent), and went to yoga sometimes. But I also drank way too many nights per week, ate super burritos at 4am, and worked a desk job in Embarcadero 4, sitting for eight hours straight most days, which now feels totally absurd.

Then one night at a dinner party, a random guy introduced himself as a project manager for Stanford’s organ transplant program.

His job was to coordinate transplants the moment someone died.

He managed schedules and even scrubbed in for surgeries—and what he said next has stuck with me for years.

He told us he was stunned by how many young, outwardly “fit” people were actually skinny fat on the inside. 

Meaning:
Fat marbled in and around their organs
Thin on the outside, metabolic dysfunction on the inside

People in their 20s! 

(He also mentioned how lots of young people already had black spots on their lungs! City living? Secondhand smoke?)

After peppering him with fascinated/incredulous questions, the table moved on.

But I didn’t move on.

Because suddenly I wondered if that person was me.

Too much sitting. Too much drinking. Too much Costco-size tub of Toll House cookie dough.

Not enough physical exertion.

That conversation snapped something into focus:
You cannot judge internal health by external appearance.

Most of what matters happens beneath the surface.

To review the primary tenet of BBP: Health and progress isn’t built through comfort. It's built through adaptive stress.

Movement that forces your body to respond and rebuild. Strength, cardio, speed, coordination—your body adapts to whatever you ask of it. That's how resilience happens.

Now the good news:

There’s a statistic that says approximately 10% of your health trajectory is genetics.
The other 90%? Lifestyle. And… HABITS.

Which means the future is changeable—one small, unglamorous, doable habit at a time. At any point. Over 40. Over 50. Over 80 (tell your mom/dad/inlaws).

If you want a quick peek at your own “beneath the surface,” I made the Longevity Self-Assessment PDF. which includes 11 simple tests that give you a surprisingly decent snapshot of where your body actually is in terms of your longevity score based on your age. 

👉Did you know women in their 40s should be able to do 20+ full push-ups?! When I read that, I got to work! 

Until next time, everybody!

Love,