From Stress To Success: The Health Secrets Every High Performer Needs with Dr. Tracy Gapin of Gapin Institute

[David] Welcome listeners to another episode of Lykken On Lending and we normally talk about finance. But as many of these are some stressful times and stress is an enemy to your body, to your mind and what's going on. So, I've invited a dear friend and my doctor to come on and talk about how he's helping me manage my stress as I work with many of you and managing your business, we're going to be talking about health. Joining me is Dr. Tracy Gapin. Doc, so good to have you on the podcast, my friend. [Tracy] Oh, thanks so much, Dave. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I'm excited. [David] You're getting to be well known. Anyone who sees reels out there, they're seeing different health providers or different supplement providers using your image and doing a lot and, talking about that. So, you're getting to be well known as a Men Health Performance Coach. And it's more than just men. I know you work with men and women at the Gapin Institute, but let's start by giving people a little insights into you, your background, and a little bit of your story, if you could do that in a condensed version, I really am interested in getting into the meat of the matter, which is talking about how to manage stress. [Tracy] Thanks Dave. Yeah. So I am, I like to say a recovering board certified urologist. I spent 25 years in traditional health care in the world of disease model medicine, so to speak and… [David] Disease model medicine. What do you mean by that? [Tracy] I was going to explain that. So disease medicine is the world that I came from the traditional healthcare world where everything I did in that career was focused on identifying your diagnosis code and that's kidney stone, prostate cancer, prostate enlargement, urinary infection, overactive bladder, and then giving you a drug. What it comes down to and what we are taught, what we're brainwashed to do very early in my medical education is diagnosis drug, diagnosis drug. And that's what traditional healthcare disease model world of medicine. We call it. Is because all we do is identify your disease and give you a drug to treat it typically. And so about halfway through that urology career, I ran into my own health issues and long story short, I found this entire world and it's this conglomerate of functional medicine of epigenetics, which is a fancy word for how your lifestyle and environment affects the way your body works. The world of peptides, the world of hormone optimization, how to actually test your hormones and fix your hormones the right way. How do we integrate all of these cutting edge longevity protocols? We're hearing about these molecules and putting it all together. What I was able to do, Dave was really transform my own health and realize how broken my practice was. Our healthcare system is, my career was, and that really made me make a dramatic change and about eight years ago, I made the massive decision to leave a seven figure career in traditional medicine, urology, and jump off this figurative cliff and I launched the Gapin Institute and you were one of my early supporters. I appreciate all your coaching, your support as I went through that transition. But what I found is that our health can be our biggest asset or ultimate liability and what a lot of high performing entrepreneurs and founders and leaders and executives and athletes and business men and women in the world are struggling and they're waiting until it's too late to get help. And so what we focus on is helping you find your blind spots. What are the health issues getting in the way and often it comes down to how stress is crushing your body. [David] Yeah. It's one of the biggest things in my life. I'm addicted to cortisol. As we talk about this regularly. I've lived on this for so many years. I think it's normal and I think so many high functioning executives, entrepreneurs have this as an issue. I think I want to just put a little note in here. I need to owe a big debt of gratitude to Jessica Peterson who introduced me to you. You're located in Sarasota, Florida. I have a lot of friends there now that live there, but Jessica says, Dave, you don't believe what doc has done and is doing for others. You need to go see him because I was complaining about some aspect of my health. And she says, who are you working with? I said, I work with functional medicine. My wife's really into health and. Making sure of that. And she says, yeah, but do you work with a guy that's really specializing on guy stuff? and then we worked out a deal where I have the honor and privilege of also being your business coach and helping and consulting in some areas. So that's a real honor. But the focus here today is focusing on the men that are listening to this and go, Dave, I'm like you. I've got stress. I don't know what it's doing to me. How can I find out? and if I do have having some symptoms, is it too late? And so, start us on this journey. If someone reaches out to you and they want to talk to you doc how do you start this? What would you be advising them? So, let's set up a free session for them to get started on this podcast. [Tracy] Sure. And I want to go back and I want to double click on something you mentioned a few minutes ago. And that's cortisol. That's a key word that I want to make sure the listener really understands what the heck that is. That's our stress hormone and a lot of high performers will thrive and live on elevated cortisol. It's our stress hormone that gets us revved up and driven to go when maybe our body is otherwise not ready. It's the stress hormone when we haven't slept well, when  we are late for a meeting, when we are panicking to reach a deadline, when we are focused on finances. What happens is over time, cortisol can be reduced. A real problem. It crushes hormone production. It crushes our gut. It crushes neurotransmitters in our brains so we can't think as clearly. It crushes our ability to burn fat and build muscle. It crushes our energy. It has all these downstream effects. And so, it's really a big point. And so, I'm glad you mentioned the word cortisol. [David]Yeah that's an important one because I think listeners, if you're listening to this, I can almost guarantee you, if you're in the mortgage industry, you've got a cortisol issue. Otherwise, I don't know how else, but a lot of people survive in the natural in this crazy stress field industry. [Tracy] Yeah and I think it's key point to bring up here that you can test for it. You can measure it. You can understand it and I work with so many high performers who will tell me I'm not stressed doc. That's not me. Yeah. I know the other guy. [David] I was one of them. [Tracy] It's all of us. And when we can measure it, we can prove it. We can see the numbers. Numbers don't lie. And that helps us understand, I call them, David, blind spots in your health. These are issues that are holding you back. You don't realize it because it's a blind spot, but it's an issue lurking under the surface and it's going to rear its ugly head when you least expect it and a lot of it comes from cortisol for the high performers I work with. [David] Yeah. And a lot of people say this isn't this normal. And that's what I've always said isn't this normal? This is normal to have this and you're going, no, you can be a high performer. And I think this was a fear I had doc. That if I get ahold of the cortisol, am I going to lose my drive to success, which has made driven me for so many decades to be the high performer that I have been is, am I giving up success in trading  off to get some health and in a calmer lifestyle? I didn't want to give it up. [Tracy] Yeah. Great point. So what I find with entrepreneurs, founders, executives is the hormones are out of balance, low testosterone, low thyroid, low growth hormone, low nitric oxide, low vitamin D, it goes on and on. Blood sugar regulation is out of whack. Blood sugar is too high. Consistently, they're eating the wrong foods for their body. They think they're eating healthy, but they're not. They're not getting enough sleep. They're not clearing toxins like they're supposed to because their body immune system's not working properly. Micronutrient levels are off. You have all these systems that are out of whack and how does your body compensate make up for that? Cortisol. And so cortisol is in fact actually a signal, a sign that there's a lot of underlying deeper problems. And so, what I like to talk about is find those blind spots and fix them. Correct the hormones. Correct the blood sugar. Correct the gut health which is driving everything. Fix sleep. Almost every leader I work with has trouble with sleep and that has a lot of downstream consequences. So, to answer your question when you're wanting better drive, when you're wanting better focus and cognitive function and mental acuity and energy and ability to make it through the day and have sex with your partner at night and be a parent and be a leader, it's fixing all those things and there's not a magic pill, there's not one magic bullet and it's not one size fits all. It's one size fails all because what each guy needs is different than the next. [David] And this is a great point to launch into epigenetics, which is really your genomes knowing how your body is designed. And I remember I want to talk about sleep and the power of the aura ring that you turned me on to, I recommend that for everybody. I'm now become a sleep addict. I'm addicted to whatever this ring tells me I did or did not get as far as sleep, but we'll talk about that in a minute. But let's start with epigenetics because when you look at the genome, you look at how each of our bodies are different there. We all have different reactions to different things. I just went through mine again, my epigenetics report with someone that you have blessed me with in my life and she went through that with me yesterday and it reminded me just how unique each one of us are. Talk about what an epigenetics report is and what you can, the knowledge you can gain from this. [Tracy] So epigenetics is simply the science of how your lifestyle and your environment, your behaviors, your exposures all affect the way your body works at the genetic level. Okay and let me give you an example of that. There's one gene called the APOE gene. For example, APO lipoprotein E. It's a gene that regulates how your body processes lipids, fats. Okay, now the APOE gene, everyone has it. Okay? You have two copies, one for your mom, one for your dad, and people who have certain variants of this gene. have a dramatically increased risk of developing cognitive decline, Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease simply because of that gene. Okay, 12 times increased risk of developing those issues if you have this variant of the APOE gene. Okay, we all have the gene, but if you have a variant that goes up 12 fold. However, what's important to understand is that if you simply made some changes in your diet, some specific changes for you, that risk goes away completely. By knowing your genetics, by understanding that you can make lifestyle changes, which will ultimately change that outcome. Another one is the Plin1 gene. This is a gene related to how your body processes carbohydrates. When you eat carbs, bread, starches, right? We're at… [David] Which I was addicted to. Yes. [Tracy] It's a problem for a lot of people, right? And so, a lot of people will go to the keto diet. They'll say, oh I hear I could lose a bunch of weight in the keto diet. Well, based on your Plin1 gene, for some people, you actually need carbs to lose weight. That sounds very counterintuitive, right? I need carbs to lose weight. That doesn't make any sense. I'm not talking about cupcakes and cookies and candies and refined processed sugar. I'm talking about the healthy complex carbs, right? Quinoa, broccoli, sweet potato, the good carbs. But these genetics help us understand how to make lifestyle changes, how to make supplementation decisions. How to make fitness programming decisions based on what's right for your body. And this is where we can really customize your stack of recommendations. Your stack of what should I be eating? What should I not be eating? How much should I be eating of the different macronutrients, carbs, proteins, and fats? What supplements do I need? How can I help my body clear toxins better? All based on a simple freaking cheek swab. It's amazing. [David] What it opened my mind to for myself, and I'm going to speak to my mortgage audience right now, doc, using some terminology when you're working with a borrower and you're looking at their credit profile, you're looking at their makeup and what they're looking to buy, there are certain programs that don't work for them. There's other programs that do loan programs that do that. They're better chances of getting qualified for, and that's what doc is talking about here. Take the time listeners to do a epigenetics panel on yourself. I think it's 120 pages and it is so stacked with it for me. It tells me what foods I should eat. I want you to talk about that. What is that report has been so fascinating. Give me so much revelation into what, how David Lukken is wired and made. And so, I can at least have a map if I want to not always want to, that's another issue to go down the right path as far as what I eat. [Tracy] I like to look at it as your blueprint for life. It's going to give you real guidance on what your body needs, what your body is doing well with and what might need extra attention and what you want to do some additional testing. I think the key here, however, is as amazing as genetics are, there are only one tool in the toolbox and what's so important is to combine, to pair that with testing to understand where you are now. And so when we work with our clients, we do a whole battery, a comprehensive panel of testing, looking at blood tests and looking at cardiovascular health and hormones and micronutrients and gut health and inflammation and blood sugar regulation and electrolytes. We look at markers of fitness level, we look at metabolic rate and we do full body imaging and we put all these pieces together, Dave and in my opinion, when you put all of that together, that's how you can start to really see the whole picture at one time and that's why I think it's so important that there are a lot of people out there doing a piecemeal doing just one part of that and I think you're missing the big picture when you do that [David] Yeah. I think a lot of people say I've got a good doctor and I think I trust my doctor. We all trust a doctor that we've been talking to, but like you said earlier, doc, the medical education that you got was down a very limited amount of knowledge of what's out there and what you were exposed to. And so again, we're not saying you got to fire your doctor and yet what I'm saying is you need to get with someone like doc, Dr. Gapin to get a full panel and what's interesting. Your doctor may give you some pushback minded and they go yeah, I know that stuff's out there, but you need to get back to common sense and it's getting back to the old medical system. Talk about that because we don't put them down, but we're trying to bring them around to realize there's more. How do you do that? [Tracy] Yeah. Great point. And when we work with clients they will typically keep their concierge doc because of those doctors are there for very different reasons than what we do. It's about treating disease, being there for the acute situation. So you develop a pneumonia, you have a heart attack, you have an issue as far as hospitalization. That's when that primary care doctor is, that's what they're there for. That's really the key point is to treat problems. What we look at is optimization. How can I help you operate at peak performance and peak performance is a phrase people throw around. It's different for everybody. That may be for me. It's how can I be the best dad to my two amazing little kids and be the best husband to my beautiful wife to other people? It may be, how can I be the best PTO leader? How can I be the best community leader? How can I be the best business owner or employer to my team? So peak performance means something different to everybody. Optimization is about how can I get your mind and body to function at that highest level? And that's very different than traditional medicine. So, when I was in my, 20 plus year career in urology, we didn't do any of the stuff we're doing now. We didn't look at the gut. We didn't look at genetics. We look at these complex blood tests. We look at this advanced imaging. We're not using wearable technology to track data real time on a daily basis that Doctors today don't even know about, understand how to interpret it. It's just an entirely different approach when it comes to health. It's treating disease versus promoting health. And it's a very big difference. And I think there's a place for traditional medicine still. I'm not here to bash them. Fire your doctor. But they serve a very different role and we are really evolving into this society, into this health paradigm of two different approaches. Disease world for when you need to go to the ER versus how do I live better, be better, be the best version of myself so to speak. [Tracy] I'm really excited about RFK Jr. Getting in and now taking over and bringing a greater awareness to it all this, but you talked about wearables right now. I've got this I'm holding in my finger in case those, they can see the video. Those that are just listening to the audio, you're not seeing this, but it's a ring. It looks like a wedding ring. I just happened to get a gold one, but it is an aura ring. And I had no concept of what that was, but the data it's a wearable. It's something that I charge every three days and the battery's getting low on this. Now I need a new one here coming up, so I'm having to charge it every other day, but it's something you wear and it's giving you metrics and data. For example, one of the things that doc made me aware of, if he asked me, how's your sleep? I said, it's great, man. I go to sleep immediately. I sleep all the way through the night. I'm strong. I wake up rested and going, I found out I'm I feel like I'm rested. I get up going because of the cortisol kicks in. I was not getting any deep sleep listeners. And that's what the value of this ring told me and you go, you doc, and you said, Hey, Do you know what goes on a deep sleep? So, let's talk about wearables and the importance of sleep doc. And this thing, we just, the purpose of us is just try to introduce as much as we can to our listeners. So they'll pick up the phone and call you. All right. Talk about a wearables. [Tracy] Yeah. I compare this to, your metrics in your business, you have KPIs, key performance indicators for how well your business is going. That's right. You need the same when it comes to your health. And I call them key health indicators. How do we know if what we're doing is working or not? And I hear that all the time. What you said, David, I hear that every day guys say, yeah, I slept fine. I slept seven, seven and a half hours. No problem. But I woke up and I still feel like shit. Let's look at the data and the data doesn't lie. And so numbers don't lie. And so when you look at the sleep data, I have my aura ring on at all times as well. You can see the different stages of sleep and it's important for the listener to understand that when you sleep, you go through different stages of sleep and each stage has a very particular purpose and function when it comes to recovery and repair and remodeling and what we know is that the most important parts of sleep, the stages that matter are deep sleep and REM sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep. And you want one hour of deep sleep and you want two hours of REM sleep and you tend to spend the first half of your night as you go through different sleep cycles getting most of your, if not all of your deep sleep. And the second half of the night, you tend to get most, if not all of your REM sleep. This is important because we find that when. You don't get good sleep quality, meaning you don't get good deep and REM sleep. You don't get the same benefits that you're supposed to be getting with sleep. So you can measure it. You can manage it. You could track. I had a client who had crummy sleep numbers every weekend. I'm like, how is that possible? and when we dove deep into his story, come to find out he had date night every Friday night with his wife, had a couple of glasses of wine and it crushed his deep sleep. And the only way he would know that is with the data because he slept seven and a half hours, said, yeah, I slept fine. But you didn't get the actual repair benefits that you need. When you're training, when you're lifting weight, when you're strength training in the gym, you're lifting all those weights, you're thinking you're building muscle, you're actually tearing down muscle so that when you're sleeping, you could build it up bigger and better and stronger. But if you don't get the quality sleep that we're talking about, you don't get any of those gains. And so this is why a lot of people will tell me I'm killing it in the gym, but nothing's happening. I don't see the results. Some of it may be because of poor sleep. So that's the value of tracking sleep. We track blood sugar. Blood sugar monitoring is not just for diabetics anymore. It's incredibly important, especially for the high performers. You talked about stress and cortisol. And we know that one of the biggest things that can affect brain function, mental acuity, focus, concentration, is blood sugar issues and we can track it. We can measure it real time, 24/7 for two weeks at a time with a simple little monitor that little patch. And it's about the size of a quarter, a thin little wafer that has a sensor that goes under the skin. And what we can do with that Dave is we can track real time changes in blood sugar. And it's amazing how things like poor sleep, stress, eating the wrong foods can affect blood sugar. We had a client She could not lose weight. She told me she had tried everything. And I love when they say everything, cause you haven't tried everything. If you did, you would have lost weight. So you think, but you have anyone who's ever tried it. You're wrong. You haven't, you have not tried everything. So come to find out when we got her blood sugar monitoring on, we found that her blood sugar was spiked for over 200. Typically you'd ever want above one 40, at least not for very long, over 200 for three hours at a time. Wow. And so we're like, Claire, what is this? What's going on? She had sushi for dinner, sushi. and for her sushi was kryptonite. However, instead, what we found with her is we made some coaching suggestions and she made some changes where she would eat the vegetables first. She then eat the fish or chicken or protein, and then have the same white rice, negligible effect on blood sugar, negligible change at all. [David] So it's just the order in which she ate it. [Tracy] The order in which you eat and the only way you're going to know these kind of things is when you're tracking data. This is why you got to know your numbers, and the only way you can get those numbers is by tracking with a wearable. The third one that I really emphasize here is you can actually measure stress. Heart rate variability, or HRV, is a metric you can measure with a simple chest strap. You put it on in the morning, you wake up in the morning, get your cup of coffee, sit on the couch, spend two and a half minutes planning, journaling for the day, while your HRV… [David] I do it every morning. [Tracy] Yes. Measurement is go. There you go. And now you can track that you can measure it from one day to the next and understand how your body is doing when it comes to stress and recovery. Is today a day to hit it hard in the gym? Or is it today a day where you have very high stress, or which equals low HRV and today's the day to take it easy and you can see how alcohol and stress and poor sleep and all these different things in your life are directly affecting your stress numbers. [David] So many factors. We’re so fearfully and wonderfully made. It's a great complex body that we have, but most of us do not have the knowledge of we're certainly not taking care of it and it's not because we don't want to doc it's because we lack the knowledge and meeting up with someone like yourself, you have turned out to be the biggest blessing in my life. Because I now for the first time, I still have to make the choices. I still have to do the things to adjust my lifestyle, but I have the tools now where I can do and I am doing so, and it is making such a difference. Let's talk about the Gapin Institute. How do people get ahold of you? If someone does get ahold of you, what are the various programs they can get on to be in there and I encourage everyone sign up and just go in and do the assessment. It is worth it. I spent a full day in there. I got treated like a king. It was wonderful, amazing staff, wonderful people there and talk about that experience that someone would have if they opted to do this. [Tracy] Thanks so much. And I want to just briefly hit on a point you made there in the beginning that I think is really a valuable point is that it's overwhelming. A lot of this is Holy shit, I don't know where to start. I don't know what to do is too much and so people throw their hands up and they do nothing, right? [David] Do nothing worse thing they could do. Yeah. [Tracy] And so what I am obsessed with is easy button. How can I make it easy for my clients? Just do this one thing we have every quarter. We focus on three core issues and your three core issues, like Steve Jobs did with when he started Apple is what are the three things we're going to focus on this quarter and that's it. Nothing else matters until we get those three things accomplished and it's going to be simple things and it's all about easy button, how can I make it simplified? And it's the concept of the Dan Sullivan, Ben Hardy book “Who Not How” You don't manage your own money. You don't change your own car. You shouldn't be trying to do your health on your own either and so work with an expert, whether it's me or someone else, find someone who can help and make help, make it easy for you, make it make sense and make it not so complex for you so that you'll actually get it done. Okay. So that's what we do. We have launch day, which is a one of our two big offers. Launch day is a one day modern day executive exam. Unlike any other, we treat you like a VIP. We literally close down the entire office for everyone except you. You come in, we take care of your hotel, we carry car service, we take care of your food, we feed you and we do every freaking test you could imagine. We're doing blood and stool and saliva and imaging and fitness and physical exam. You're meeting with the coaches, you're learning wearables and we compress time and do it all in one freaking day and we give you an amazing deliverable so that you now know what are my three core issues. What do I do next? and make it very simple and easy to understand. So that's launch day. And then Peak launches our year long program where now we help you and hold your hand through fixing all the issues that we have found. [David] At the end of the day, people say, man, this has got to be expensive. How expensive is not having good health? How expensive is not being at a top performance? I'll tell you this, the ROI, the return on the investment of this is like nothing else that you can measure in your life, not to mention the life extension, that new, the additional years you have, I'm 74 years old. I'm going stronger than I ever have as a result of what my time with Doc Gapin and I encourage our listeners to sign up for it. How can they get ahold of you, Doc? [Tracy] Thanks so much. You can go to gapininstitute.com, G A P I N institute.com is my website and I have a number of gifts for the listener. If you'll go to gapininstitute.com/launch, I'm going to give you a number of gifts. Number one, I'm gonna give you a copy of my TED talk. I'm going to give you a copy of my book, my bestselling book, mail 2.0. I'm going to give you my ultimate peptide guide. I'm going to give you my high performance health handbook. I'm going to give you my amazing peak launch masterclass and there will also be a link included if you want to jump on a call with my team to learn how we can help you. [David] Yeah, it's so important, folks. We're coming into the holidays. Are you taking care of yourself? Do you even know what you should eat? What you shouldn't eat? Do you not care? I encourage you to start caring about your body. Give yourself this Christmas, the best gift you can give yourself and that is to take an interest in your health in an intelligent new way. You may say my doctor does this. We, I've got these different people. Trust me, folks. I traveled all the way from Austin, Texas to Sarasota, Florida. There's no one I have found and I've worked with some great docs out there who've done do elements of this, but I've never found anybody that will do it as comprehensively as in, in a compressed amount of time. Time's important to us and then with a follow up program that I've now been, how long has it been? Five years, doc, four or five years I've been with you. It's just made a huge difference. It's a delight. Doc. Thanks so much for being on here. I appreciate it. And I am hoping and praying, literally praying that many of our listeners will pick up the phone and start the journey to a really optimal health and optimal performance. [Tracy] I appreciate you, David. Thank you so much. [David] Thank you.

Important Links

• Gapin Institute website
• Dr. Gapin's website
• LinkedIn - Dr. Tracy Gapin

Tracy Gapin, MD is a pioneer in men’s health and peak performance, combining his background as a board-certified urologist and advanced training in longevity medicine. His career is dedicated to transforming the lives of high-performing individuals through cutting-edge advanced diagnostics, targeted lifestyle interventions, and personalized, proactive health optimization programs.

After facing his own health challenges, Dr. Gapin shifted his approach to men’s health, focusing on epigenetics, hormones and peptides. He founded the Gapin Institute and developed personalized programs that utilize comprehensive testing including over 500 biomarkers and over 760,000 genetic markers. His programs feature continuous biometric monitoring with wearable technology to monitor outcome data and ensure rapid and sustainable transformations for top entrepreneurs, executives and athletes. 

Believing that "you can't manage what you don't measure,” Dr. Gapin’s methodology has led to remarkable success stories, including those of 3x Guinness World Record Holder Marko Radisic and Richard Behney, Founder & CEO of Million Dollar Pro. Through his work, Dr. Gapin emphasizes the critical role of proactive health management in achieving peak performance and extending longevity.

He’s a member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging, Age Management Medical Group, and the International Peptide Society.

He’s a thought leader, a TEDx speaker, and the author of the best-selling books Male 2.0 and Codes of Longevity. He’s been featured on NBC, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Dave Asprey’s Biohacking Conference.

For more insights from Dr. Gapin, visit GapinInstitute.com/launch, or text HEALTH to 26786 for free resources and to learn about his Peak Launch Program.

Vision: At the Gapin Institute, our vision is to reimagine men’s health and performance.

Mission:  At the Gapin Institute, we empower executives, entrepreneurs and athletes to optimize their health so their mind and body function at the highest level.