Recently, this retro-grouch has gone gaga over what the tech savvy must surely see as old hat. The long-form podcast.

When I find a good one about diet or exercise, I’ll listen as I cook or clean and feel as good as man’s best friend getting a belly rub while gnawing on a steak bone. It’s like having two ever so smart dudes sit at my kitchen table and tell me more about what interests me mightily while I’m doing everyday activities.

Can the mundane get any better than that?

For this two-legged mutt, yes.

I recently discovered the podcast I enjoy most can be downloaded as a transcript. That means no more suddenly swapping spatula for pen, no more pausing and rewinding a half dozen times to take notes when I hear especially insightful information.

Especially insightful information’s aplenty in Huberman Lab Podcast No. 97 featuring Dr. Layne Norton, one Huberman calls a “master class in nutrition, metabolism, and exercise.” And since this master class supports several of my strongest health-and-fitness suspicions, it makes sense to share its highlights with you.

Next week.

The cause for the delay is that I’ve been blown away by a single observation Norton makes about one of his favorite topics: what allows people who have lost weight to keep it off. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that this one thing leads not just to long-term weight loss but can serve as your polestar on the pathway to optimal health and fitness.

That single thing is sustainability. And its adversary is restriction.

Norton believes which diet you choose to lose weight actually doesn’t matter. Because whether it features intermittent fasting, low-carb eating, low-fat eating, eating like a caveman, or tracking macros, each and every diet requires some sort of a restriction.

That it’s the restriction per se, not the diet, that leads to weight loss.

So he advises to “pick the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive to you” because for the weight lost to stay lost, the diet needs to be done forever.

“You can’t just take insulin once,” he analogizes, “and that’s it. You’ve got to take it continuously, otherwise, you’re going to have problems.”

Norton explains how sustainability trumps diet by referring to meta-analyses that show - whether it be keto, high-carb, or anything in between - all diets are “equally terrible for long-term weight loss.” But when these disappointing results are reclassified according to how well subjects adhered to the different diets, “a linear effect on weight loss” occurs across all types.

In other words, sustainability transforms diets otherwise terrible for long-term weight loss and makes them work.

Hearing that got me thinking. Is this quality of sustainability what allows some other questionable health-and-fitness practices to succeed?

In my case, I consume about two-thirds of my total calories each day after 5 o’clock and have done so since graduating from college - even though several studies over the course of that time have determined doing the former greatly increases the likelihood of encountering the latter. Yet I’ve never gained unwanted weight from it.

I attributed that in the past to expending a ton of cals exercising as well as eating so cleanly and frequently that - according to a theory held by John Parrillo, the guy I consider my dietary mentor - my body has learned to handle “healthy” calories later in the day without storing them as fat.

But I’m no longer 32, 42, or even 52. I’m 62 years old, about the time a natural decline in basal metabolic rate should combine with this overload of later-in-the-day eating to make me look like a female marsupial with twins snuggled in her abdominal pouch.

Is the fact that I don’t additional proof that sustainability can override questionable health practices?

As well as my great state of health despite my insistence on exercising seven days a week every week?

That’s something coaches and physical trainers almost always advise against since it’s been found to increase the incidence of injury and lead to a sort of burnout so incendiary that your desire to exercise can permanently go up in smoke.

Yet except for two, four-day hospital stays and two more days where a doctor explicitly stated not to do so, I’ve run, ridden, walked wearing a weighted vest, or lifted weights every day since my midway through my senior year in college. While I have had more than a few flat workouts and notched back the intensity for a day or two, I’ve never experienced serious burnout, retired from teaching with 350 unused sick days, and won more than 150 bike races.

Now I tell you this not to impress you, but to explain why I believe what Norton says about sustainability and a lack of restriction applies to more than just long-term weight loss. That it can be used as a beacon on your never-ending healthy-living odyssey.