When it comes to fitness and health, what if all this time we should have been focusing on what we could gain rather than what we should lose?
Physician, podcaster, public speaker and social media influencer Dr. Gabrielle Lyon contends that Americans and health experts have been getting it wrong for decades. Now, she’s on a mission to change the thinking around what keeps us healthy and living longer. Lyon is convinced that building muscle mass is more important than losing fat and that strength offers protective benefits for a lengthened lifespan—so much so that she calls muscle the “organ of longevity.”
Strong for life
Lyon, who authored the New York Times bestseller Forever Strong: A New, Science-Based Strategy for Aging Well and hosts the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show podcast, makes the case that skeletal muscle is a vastly underrated organ. In addition to physical strength, she says, an increase in muscle is shown to be associated with better blood sugar regulation, metabolic health, stronger bones and increased survivability against nearly every disease.
She began to see evidence of this firsthand while working in geriatric care and nutritional science during her clinical fellowships at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, which revealed a link between poor nutrition, fitness and overall wellness, including cognitive decline and dementia. More than that, she noticed the common denominator among patients was low muscle mass.
Seeing people of all ages suffer the devastating effects of preventable health conditions crushed her, and she vowed to do something about it. She ultimately created Muscle-Centric Medicine, a health care approach that, in her own words, “shifts the focus away from reactively quantifying and treating disease to proactively quantifying and optimizing your health by focusing on the biggest organ in your body: skeletal muscle.” She also developed the Lyon Protocol, a protein-focused diet and muscle-building exercise plan designed to improve overall health.
This is the culmination of her work as a physician for nearly two decades, a career path that came sharply into focus during a single moment of crisis when she was an undergraduate nutrition student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One fateful day, a tornado warning on campus drove students and faculty to a basement shelter for safety.
“We were sitting there in the basement for two hours, and I just had this moment where I [thought], ‘I am totally useless. It’s great to be able to know what to do and how to help people eat, but in the case of a real emergency, I have no skill,’” she recalls. She remembers thinking in that instant, “Well, medicine it is.” She subsequently earned her doctorate in osteopathic medicine from the Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine and became board-certified in family medicine.
Walking the talk
If excellent muscle health is, as Lyon posits, the key to well-being, then Lyon herself is the very picture of health. Her Instagram and TikTok platforms showcase beautifully edited videos of her personal workouts, where her sculpted, tattooed muscles take center stage as she powers through massive kettlebell swings and heavy barbell lifts—often with her 3- and 5-year-old kids partaking in playful exercises nearby. That’s by design, Lyon says. “I understand that if I can set them up physically now, they’ll be physically stronger and mentally tougher,” she says.
Her own upbringing in Chicago, Illinois, included plenty of exercise, thanks to a highly athletic dad who would encourage her to get out and get moving. “By the time I was 5, I was biking 10 miles with him, and it was our way of life to be very physical,” she says. ”I grew up camping and hiking and mountaineering… boarding a canoe and figuring out on a map where we’re going to go.”
In college, she discovered Fitness America, a nationally televised bodybuilding competition she entered as a contestant. She wound up placing in the top 15 among competitors from around the world. It was an experience that hooked her on fitness for good and a reflection of her lifelong love of discipline and dedication. Today, in her day-to-day life, though, she aims for consistent, everyday habits over lofty goals.
“There are standards for myself that I set…. I’m not chasing goals,” she says. “I train four days a week. That is a standard. I will get that in. I eat a certain way.… I prioritize protein. I move during the day. And any chance I get, you will find me doing pushups.”
Lyon observes this same philosophy of steadiness among her most high-achieving patients, many of whom are executives, entrepreneurs, Navy SEALs and, in her words, “mavericks and innovators.”
“The young entrepreneur has an experience of crash and burn… go high and go low. That’s a rookie,” she says. ”The best of the best in their fields.… They’re neutral. They understand that they cannot outperform their health, and the common denominator for how high that they will go—in their business, in their relationships—is fully dependent on how solid their physical health is.”
Leading with focus
To facilitate that daily focus on health, Lyon plans to launch her own supplement soon, with a portion of the revenue going to women’s health research. She is also focused on growing her public speaking business (her TEDx Talk on “The Midlife Muscle Crisis” has over 1.8 million views), as well as the audience for her podcast, which offers a wealth of health care information shared by experts in nutrition, movement, science data and more. She relishes the opportunity to “interview world-class experts who are the best of the best at what they do, whether it is medicine or mindset,” she says.
But in all of her endeavors, and on topics from working out to nutrition to healthy habits, Lyon says her primary focus is on the durability of both the mind and body. “When we think about building functional capacity and resilience,” she says, “it’s about not only being able to withstand pressure but expecting it and using it as a nonnegotiable tool for the necessary growth. It’s not about weathering the storm—it’s about becoming the storm.”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of SUCCESS® magazine.
Photo by ©Peter Hurley