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The daily health habit you’ll actually stick with…

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_{*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.}

🚨 Welcome to this week’s issue of Generation Xcellent. I’m Stephen Perrine, New York Times bestselling author and former top editor at Men’s Health and Maxim. And like you, I’m doing all I can to survive the moshpit of midlife. Thanks for joining me on the journey! (And as always, our content is 100% Organic Intelligence—written by guys like us, for guys like us.)

📩 Thanks for joining the conversation!

- FITNESS -

5-Minute Muscle Hacks for Men

Stop wasting time in the gym and start getting bigger, stronger results—fast!

By Gwen Lawrence

Gwen Lawrence is the former yoga coach for the New York Giants and New York Mets.

- GEN X CULTURE -

How Judd Apatow Makes Such Funny Sh*t

The comic force behind Freaks and Geeks, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Superbad explains the value of starting off on the wrong foot.

By Bob Larkin

>There’s a photograph near the end of Judd Apatow’s new memoir Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures that hits a very Gen-X nerve. Chris Farley and Jim Carrey mug for the camera at the 1997 Kids’ Choice Awards while Apatow lurks in the right corner, easy to miss, just watching.

That’s us. Not Boomers, not Millennials, just the generation that showed up, took notes, and tried to turn obsession into something that matters.

Apatow’s 576-page tome is stuffed with photos, scripts, rejection letters, and network memos from his quarter-century run producing everything from Freaks and Geeks to Bridesmaids. It’s catnip for anyone who ever mainlined DVD commentary tracks.

Related:  The Movies that Define Generation X

The story that lands hardest comes from Freaks and Geeks, the beloved one-season wonder that launched the careers of Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Linda Cardellini. NBC gave the show a terrible time slot. Episodes aired out of order. The network asked Apatow to give the characters "more victories." He refused, insisting the entire point was showing how kids handle failure and disappointment. That network meeting, Apatow notes, “didn't go very well.”

So Apatow and co-creator Paul Feig made a radical decision. They shot the season finale several episodes early, just in case they got canceled. "That's how paranoid we were," Apatow writes. More important, they stopped playing it safe. "We knew we would get canceled, so we didn't save any of our good ideas for another season. We tried to be as bold and deep as we could, because trying to water it down for the network was not going to help us survive."

The show got axed. Three episodes burned off on a Saturday night. But 25 years later, it's a cult classic that defined an entire aesthetic of authentic, emotionally honest comedy. And for Apatow, it became a north star.

“Since the show I have always thought to myself, if [that] is the only thing I ever do, that's great,” he writes. “It's okay because at least one time we really got something exactly right. That thought gave me the courage to take risks later in my career.”

The Midlife Audit

For Gen-X men navigating career pivots, creative second acts, or just the nagging sense that we're still waiting for permission to do the thing we actually want to do, this lands like a gut punch.

Apatow's genius isn't that he never fails. The book is littered with unproduced pilots, rejected pitches, and projects that went nowhere. His genius is in treating inevitable failure as permission to stop hedging. When you know you're doomed anyway, you might as well swing for the fences.

The Hoarder's Vindication

Apatow admits he's a hoarder—400,000 photos on his computer, seven storage units crammed with scripts and memorabilia. "It feels like the reason why people hoard is it makes you immortal," says the 57-year-old filmmaker. "You can't die if you have a stack of magazines you haven't read yet." But unlike the stereotype, he's the "Felix Unger of hoarding,” he says. Everything is catalogued, preserved, and purposeful.

Comedy Nerd vindicates the obsessive collectors among us. Your archive of concert tickets, your shelves of vinyl, your boxes of zines and comic books and rejection letters aren’t clutter. They're proof you showed up, that you cared about something enough to document it. It’s a testament that your enthusiasm matters.

The book closes with that photo of Farley and Carrey, two legends who knew each other briefly before Farley's death. "Everyone who knew him feels like we want to always remind people about his greatness," Apatow writes.

That's Apatow’s bottom line: Don't wait to honor what matters. Don't save your best stuff for later. Document the moment. Tell the story. Take the risk. Because not everybody gets a season two.

—Ben Larkin writes for Men’s Health, the New York Post, and other publications.

Ask Jen: The X-Rated Files
“How Can I Make My Pad More Inviting to Women?”

>Got a question about sex, marriage, dating, or whatever’s happening in your DMs? Ask Jen X. She’ll sort it out, no judgement. (Well, maybe a little.)

Q: I’m dating again and want my house to feel comfortable for women, without turning it into a Pottery Barn catalog. What should I focus on so it doesn’t read “still in college, but with a 401(k)”? —Nate R., Denver, CO

A: “Female friendly” comes down to making your place clean, soft, and well-lit. Start with the basics that both your mom and MTV Cribs can agree on: Clean like company’s actually coming, swap out the biohazard sponge, and make the bathroom sparkle—including under the seat, champ.

 From there, upgrade whatever touches skin. That means real sheets, two decent pillows per person, and towels that match and didn’t peak during the Clinton administration. Couches and chairs should be newish and lint-free

 Then, think mood: Kill the interrogation bulb and add warm lamps or dimmers so nobody’s sprinting down a dark hallway like it’s a Quake LAN party. Give her the “I thought ahead” signals—hooks for bags, a full-length mirror, a working hair dryer, spare toothbrush, makeup wipes, and a bedside charger that isn’t wrapped in electrical tape.

Your living room needs a couch that isn’t a futon, a coffee table with coasters, and an extra chair so it feels like a conversation, not a job interview. Show a pulse with a living plant, framed art that isn’t a beer logo, and books that aren’t all “Crush Your Hustle.” Stock two wine glasses, two tumblers, new ice, and a nonalcoholic option; olives and good chocolate beat sad string cheese every time.

- HEALTH -

The Pill that Kills Your Skills

Weight gain, muscle weakness and a general loss of mojo: maybe it’s time to rethink antibiotics

By Stephen Perrine

>When was the last time you came down with a nasty cold or flu, went to the doctor, and got a prescription for antibiotics? 

A few days later, you probably experienced some relief from your symptoms. The antibiotics worked! Science is amazing!

Well, science is amazing, but so is the human body’s ability to heal itself. In fact, at least one in three prescriptions for antibiotics given to humans are entirely useless, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; they’re broad-spectrum (read: kill everything) antibiotics prescribed for colds and flus—illnesses caused by viruses and against which antibiotics have no power. But while those antibiotics don’t help us get over our colds any faster, they have a profound effect on our bodies.

“When was the last time a doctor told anyone, ‘If you take antibiotics, it could increase your risk of diabetes’?” asks Martin Blaser, MD, director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University. Yet in a Danish study of more than one million people, investigators found that people who had type 2 diabetes had used more antibiotics over the previous fifteen years than those who did not. Now consider this: Nearly 2 out of 3 Generation Xers has diabetes or prediabetes, and more than 70% don’t even know it, according the the Centers for Disease Control.

The relationship between antibiotics and weight gain was established seventy-five years ago, when farmers observed that by feeding their pigs, chickens, and cows antibiotics, the animals would grow fatter, faster. The same technique is used in just about every kind of animal husbandry today; from the turkey on your Thanksgiving plate to the lox on your bagel, most every commercial animal protein has been forced to grow fat with antibiotics.

So have we. A 2021 review of literature on antibiotics and weight gain in the journal Metabolism found that “[D]espite their undoubted usefulness, there is now a growing body of evidence that these agents may contribute to the development of obesity via alterations in the gut microbiota”—the estimated 5000 species of microbes living in your digestive system. A damaged gut microbiome leads to increased inflammation, which causes us to gain weight. Researchers at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle found in 2021 that they could predict who would successfully lose weight just by looking at the health of their gut bacteria.

Of course, we shouldn’t confuse the damage that antibiotics are capable of with the extraordinary good they can do. “My specialty is infectious diseases,” Blaser told me. “One day, I realized I had a big bull’s-eye lesion on my flank, and it was clear that I had Lyme disease. I did not hesitate to take antibiotics. They are wonderful when used for particular illnesses.”

But we need to be more skeptical, even when our docs want to prescribe them. Study after study has found that the fitter your microbiome, the higher your overall fitness level and the better your potential athletic performance. Lately, researchers have linked the overuse of antibiotics to muscle weakness, pain, and even a reduced competitive spirit. In animal studies, mice that had been bred to be elite runners were slower and less motivated to exercise after a course of antibiotics. The journal Sports Health even issued a warning to “athletes of all ages” that routine antibiotics use has been linked to a number of sports injuries, as well as “decreased performance.”

—Stephen Perrine is the author of The Full-Body Fat Fix: The Science-Based 7-Day Plan to Cool Inflammation, Health Your Gut, and Build a Leaner, Healthier You, from which this article is adapted.

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