Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  — Chapter 6  —  Abundance Survival

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

In chapter 6, we address adherence, one of the most critical, but least talked about topics in nutrition. Since many people struggle to adhere to eating plans, we focus on what it takes to actually stick to one. Kenny opens with a little reality check, then Andy explains the context for nutrition recommendations and a system for individual adherence to any plan. Enjoy! - Kenny and Andy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bok_chapter6 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: thrivemarket.com/body   How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Mike Bledsoe here, CEO of the Shrug Collective. If you haven't already noticed, we've got a lot of new cool stuff going on. You hit shrugcollective.com, you'll see some great content that you won't be catching if you're only listening to the podcast. Hit the website and see the new look and feel. This week, we get to introduce you to two new shows. Today, we bring you Body of Knowledge. This show has been created by a couple of guys you already know, Dr. Andy Galpin and Kenny Kane. They've had their own project and I love that we get to share it

with you here. As we're expanding and improving the shows, we have partnered with amazing companies that we believe in. We talk and hang out with the people who run these businesses and know why they do what they do. Not all products are created equal, even if it looks like it on the surface. We've done the research and have been in the industry long enough to see what really works and what will make the biggest difference for you long term. With that being said, one of my favorite companies, Thrive Market, has a special offer for you. You get $60 of free organic groceries plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash body. This is how it works.

Users will get $20 off their first three orders of $49 or more, plus free shipping. No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so hit up Thrive Market today. Thrivemarket.com slash body. Enjoy the show. Can we start again? Yeah. Where's the future of this understanding going?

Don't know. Why? Anyways. We are not a singular thing. We are built to change. At the most advanced levels of everything, it comes down to fundamental basics. These are general health practices

that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. I don't know where that came from. I wasn't listening. I was just thinking about that. The words nutrition and food are key concepts competing for the attention of the consumer. Here's a short list.

The RDA, Atkins, Paleo, Zone, McDougall, the China Study, Big Agra, Big Pharma, the USDA, Fitrepreneurs, Monster Energy, Ephedra. Carbs are good. Fats are bad. Carbs are bad. Fats are good. Nutritional ketosis. Gotta get that 1.3 millimole, yo.

Additionally, the food and supplement industry, as we covered in the last chapter, impact two increasingly divided populations. The nutritional, sometimes helpful, periodically confused elitists, a very small population in general, versus the massive generalists just trying to help. The problem with this gigantic sea of info is that it's easy to get rattled and people don't see results and participants on both sides get stuck in a huge maze of ideas. What we're interested in adding today is a bit of context for this bugger trying to get the cheese at the end of this confusing maze. So if you follow the first few chapters of the show, you know that we are thematically focusing on change for volume one. Assuming that most people listening are interested in improving their health or the health of others, most can agree that nothing alters physiological change like the things we let

into our body. That's why in many ways, this whole notion of food and how it affects us gets personal and fast. For me, watching my father slowly decay to diabetes was painful. Diabetic comas, infections, and a slow, slow death in a hospital after several amputations is not the way anybody wants to see their pops roll out. All of this was and continues to be preventable. The judgmental side of me is still angry with him at what I perceived to be his laziness because he's not going to meet my third child due this summer. Then last year, I got a bit off my judgmental high horse as I heard a talk by Rob Rolfe,

whom massively deepened my understanding of this rather complicated topic. Rob cited a paper by Professor, and I may be mispronouncing it, Armalagos, an anthropologist out of Emory, that helped fuel this topic. Essentially, our human brains have two somewhat competing characteristics. One is to hoard stuff and food for basic survival. The other is to seek diversity to prevent, well, palate fatigue. Enter modern cuisine and agriculture and whammy, we get for the first time in human history this combination of undernourishment and obesity. So here to lead today's convo is our boy, Andy Galpin.

To deepen our perspective, Andy, can you clarify this bigger concept that you talk of with your students about the baker, the cook, and the chef. If we look at where most people get their nutrition information, it can usually be split into two different categories. One, from places like governmental guidelines, textbooks, or corporate marketing. Or two, from thought leaders, innovators, or hackers, if you will. Now, I like you, Kenny, and Josh, I fundamentally believe most of these people that are providing nutrition information

are doing it with the best interest in mind. Everyone's trying to give all of you listeners out there the information you need so you can live a better life, reach your goals, be healthier and happier. I really honestly believe people are doing that. Where the fighting happens, for the most part part is when they disagree about what to do. And today, what we really want to do is sidestep that conversation and say, maybe we're arguing about the wrong things. We're not focusing on what's going to have the most

impact on the most people. So in today's chapter, I want to help you escape that maze. Or use this context to help others. Yeah, so you can guide other people through their own maze. Right. Okay, so let's get down to it, Kenny. What is a chef, a baker, or a cook? What the hell does that mean, and how is that going to help me with my nutrition and my food? Okay, so when I saw your lecture, it was very simply,

a baker is somebody who understands things in small little increments and pieces there's an exact recipe right to create something literally and figuratively the cook is somebody who's more sort of guideline understanding and there's some general practices at work exactly the chef is somebody who's mastered both baking and cooking, and they can masterfully integrate into and out of those other themes. The thing that was very impactful I saw with your students is that they were like, oh, okay, what kind of personality am I? Am I going to be somebody who interprets nutrition and food information,

and I need to weigh and measure stuff like a baker might, or am I going to generally feel better psychologically, emotionally, and health-wise by not spending that degree of energy on general principles? What is the difference between cooking and baking? Well, baking, you kind of rely on specific timed formulas and ingredients that are measured. Exactly. There's no fussing around, right? You can't just give you a pinch of baking soda here, a little bit of flour.

I'm very much a cook and I've tried baking. It goes really, really badly. Let me tell you, trying to bake bread off of like gut instincts, not only like when you have very poor instincts for baking bread, I'm going to use some flour and some yeast and oh God.

The eternal battle between a scientist and a practitioner is the scientist says, you practitioner don't really understand exactly what to do. The practitioner says,

well, I don't really care because you scientist don't understand how to understand exactly what to do. The practitioner says, well, I don't really care because you, scientist, don't understand how to actually get people to do it. Right. That's loosely what's happening. The same thing's happening in this discussion. If you identify what to do, and we will talk about that a little bit, very briefly, we also need to have the conversation about how to do it. We need to match these two. We need to have this bridging of what to do and how to do it. A lot less discussion goes into how to integrate this into an actual practice that people will do. common diets, and then weight loss over time with people. In those data sets, adherence is a predictor variable. It's always the strongest variable, and it's often the only significant predictor of weight loss. There's a strong relationship between do you do the diet

versus how good the actual diet was. Right. Now, there are some crazy off-the-reservation diets, but we're just talking about most of the fundamentally sound ones because most diets are doing most of the things the same. Andy, where are we getting most of our information from? Well, if we look at the basic governmental-issued guidelines, the RDA and other recommendations for what we should eat and how much we should eat, people love to bitch and complain about those in the the spaces and circles we run in right but really it's like it's a giant conspiracy yeah really i think people just don't understand their purpose and their history what what they were developed for and how they are supposed to

use and in fact i would argue if you took the time to understand that not only would you stop complaining about them but you might actually learn how to use them. The original platform was kind of some of the original hacks, right? The development of this thing. Yeah, if you're into hacking, how are you not into governmental guidelines, right? So let's go back and understand where these things came from. So all the way back to the 1750s, the government first identified,

oh my gosh, we have this terrible thing called scurvy. If we give people sufficient vitamin C, it basically goes away. Your first governmental recommendation was here's the minimum amount of vitamin C you need to consume to not get this debilitating disease. Fast forward a couple of centuries, and we've got 1924, they started adding iodine to salt to fight off goiter, which is an awesome looking disease if you want to search some Google pictures. Yeah, that's good for the eyeballs. You bet.

Same thing happened with vitamin D in fortified milk in the 1940s to battle rickets or to stop that from happening. Niacin, vitamin B3, started being put in flour in 1937 for this other skin disorder called pellagra. And basically what you had happen was the government realized in this time in the early 20th century, when we were living in this age of scarcity, like you laid out at the beginning, we need to help people with some information that says, if you are on a last choice and you have a dollar to spend on to feed your family here's what we recommend you get the baseline minimum for this is what you need to do to fight

off disease if you've got one dollar to make a nutrition choice and your family's teeth are falling out from scurvy you know you need to buy the Apple versus the bread in fact if we go all the way back to 1916 this is when the government first came out with their first nutritional guidelines there's was an awesome document called Food for Young Children. We were more concerned, of course, in keeping our kids alive. So if they're going to starve and you're going to starve, here are the basic nutrients they need to have to not die. A year later, 1917, they came out with another really cool document called How to Select Food. And we made some improvements since then. In fact, all the way up to 1940 was the first really big change in our governmental guidelines for nutrition,

which was called a guide to good eating. They recommended butter, by the way, which is an interesting side story. Yeah, that's come and gone and come and gone and come. In fact, that's a great example of our left versus right maze, right? Right. If you stuck on that high horse of butter is great or butter is terrible for you, depending on which decade you're in, you looked either really smart or really stupid. Right.

And now we know that's probably the wrong conversation. Fast forward a couple of decades, 1950 to 1970, we had a thing called a daily food guide, which was more the same of the 1940 version, but slightly updated. And really, we had no significant change in our governmental recommendations for food for about 30 years. And then things changed. In 1979, this thing called the Hassle-Free Daily Food Guide came out. And it's interesting, the title. It's a great title. Right.

So convenient for the times. And what do they recommend, or why would they title it something like that? Because it's got to be hassle-free. Time's getting tight. When we try to build things that are going to be implemented across 300 million people, or however many there were in 1979, it has to be something very simple and very achievable. And they actually just tried to make that by calling it the hassle-free guidelines.

But more importantly, at this point in time, compared relative to 1950s, certainly the 30s and 40s when we were going through world wars and other things, the economy, the agriculture you mentioned earlier, the technology had gotten to a level where, for the first time, we had to start making recommendations for intake. So prior to this, we were living in this age of scarcity, which was the model you laid out earlier, Kenny. If something's around, you have got to consume it. We don't know when it's going to come back. We are fighting off the bare minimum. Now, all of a sudden, we're transitioning into this age of abundance. And something ironic is happening in the development of food processes.

Like there's starting to be some lacks of density, nutrient density. You could say that that was a ploy to keep us unhealthy and to keep us under mind control. Or you can simply say we were starving. And in real fear of starving to death, we found this way to preserve and keep food alive to feed the masses and a growing population that we're sending off to war for months at a time without refrigerators and things like that so we kept us fed that allowed us to survive the absolute calorie scarcity that we had for our entire species history right and within a decade or two we made this massive transition to we've fixed that problem. We have food available.

And now what starts happening? Uh-oh, we start gaining weight because we're still fighting. We still have this genetic thing. But there's abundance. to point out that it's easy to look at the government as this big amorphous bureaucracy that just doles out recommendations and things that are whatever. But in a lot of cases, if you look back at the history, it's just one-off problem solving that is usually a good solution to an immediate problem that then over time becomes a less and less appropriate solution to that problem, which can then even create problems.

So, you know, rather than taking the everyone's out to get me sort of view of the world, just kind of take things with a grain of salt and acknowledge that there's a really long history that goes into some of this stuff. Yeah. So after 1979, the hassle-free food, the hassle-free daily food guide comes out. Quickly after that, 1984 came the awesome food wheel. And if you know me, you know, I love wheels way more than I love hassle-free guides. But really what's significant about this one is it provided the first recommendation for a moderate consumption of fats and sweets. The point was they were saying, hey, maybe we need to start being careful about the consumption of these treats.

And why that's really important is because we never had to deal with that in the 30s and 40s and 50s. You didn't have too many sweets on the shelf. You didn't have the money to fill yourself with candy bars every day. You didn't have stores every three feet that had cars to get around. We never had to worry about this. If there was a treat around, you could have it because there weren't that many treats around, period. It wasn't going to be around enough for it to be a problem.

Now it is. So in 1992, we get our very classic food guide pyramid and we really now have made a significant transition in what the government is doing with their food recommendations it's been bare minimums to fight off disease and now we've got our first recommendations for don't exceed these maximums because america's getting chubs at this point. We've had 10 or 15 or 20 years of abundance in economy and food. We're starting to notice from a governmental perspective, wow, we're getting very fat and we're getting out of control. We should perhaps give these people top end recommendations for not only micronutrient,

which is your vitamins and minerals, but now we need to discuss how many of these macronutrients are you consuming and how many overall K-cals and all these things, right? Problems of abundance. In 2005, they updated it and came up with the MyFood Pyramid. And the real significance here is that they finally started to realize that, okay, we tried this approach with our food pyramid of telling these people, don't go over these values and it's not working we need to be more aggressive and they started adding in the physical activity component so if you look at the classic 2005 my pyramid the side of the pyramid has a man or a woman whatever gender neutral ascending steps which is their way of saying a portion of your healthy diet is physical activity right just giving these food recommendations wasn't working.

Turns out adherence is kind of important. Right. We weren't following it. In 2011, they updated it with the My Food Plate. It was more of the same, but now they're trying to give you the same information but package it differently so that you understand what to put on your plate in portion sizes, which is actually, I think, I thought very, very helpful. It also became a much more holistic approach to eating. This became much more mainstream, specifically because, you know,

humans don't eat isolated foods in isolated environments. So the plate perspective was a lot better. You don't just do two servings of grains for breakfast and then two servings of protein. Like, that's not how we eat. So the MyFoodPlate, I thought, was an attempt to meet the people where they are at with their information. After the FoodPlate in 2015, we came out with what's now called the Dietary Guidelines for America,

and that's going to run us up through 2020. And in fact, the government has now announced that they are going to be providing updated recommendations probably every five to three years moving forward. We used to change every 20 or 15 or eight years, and now it's going to be happening much more frequently. But if you look at what they're recommending, what they're actually saying now is they're just giving you what a healthy eating pattern should include. Things like vegetables, fruits, greens. It's the same basic information that they've been saying for quite a long time.

They're just packaging it differently. And they're also giving you what healthy patterns should limit. Saturated fat, trans fats, alcohol. Saturated fat or trans fats is a good one because you may or may not have heard this, but it's actually been banned in America, and by 2018 it'll be gone. So we can take that off our list. You won't even have the option here in this country. Which is a good example of, or it is more support for the fact that they are, as a government, trying to keep pace with things when they find out. When they developed trans fat, we

didn't really necessarily understand the health implications of it. The science came out. They said, wait a minute, this is terrible. It's gone. It's off our shelves. So they are getting there. We just can't expect them to be the thought leaders. That's not the government's role in this. The government put these recommendations into place to solve big problems. In the early 20th century, they told us things like, hey, eat enough of these micronutrients to avoid scurvy and other malnutrition-induced diseases.

And now they're telling us things like, don't eat too much of these macronutrients to avoid diabetes and heart disease. What's funny about that 2011 diagram is that it's created in our circles a rather large conversation. And again, it's highly charged. one of the things that concerns me about our space, meaning that you're a scientist and I'm a leader of people intending to live healthy, is that we get a little bit, that the dogma, unfortunately, with thought leaders gets so charged that we forget the scope of what we're actually trying to do. And ironically, a lot of the people that we know and we've been supported by different opinions about like what's appropriate as far as food

and nutrition goes but there's also this you know as much as you're saying there's a well-intended government doing its best to try to integrate massive information to keep the general population mostly well. Questions that if you're listening to this podcast, I think need to be asked in general for both companies and or products that you may be supporting and also of the government. And I think when you ask these questions, the whole thing gets even more complicated. The questions to me are, does one get payment for attending a symposium? Do you get a fee for speaking on behalf of a product or to proselytize a certain opinion? Have you been employed by one of these companies or one of these groups? Now that unto itself, those questions right there to me aren't necessarily bad because again, generally there's a lot of well-intended people that are financial beneficiaries of this whole process but it isn't as we examine it closely so simple that it's the big government that's making the bad choices again and all these you know dogmatic

thought leaders that say nine scoops of butter and then three pounds of bacon in the morning not that that's necessarily bad either, but it's like, I think the conversation needs to be expanded a little bit to be more inclusive, which we will be going to in a little bit. But I just wanted to kind of speak on the ethics of our understanding,

because to me that's really significant in sort of understanding and advancing this conversation. We do need to ask of the people that we're getting our food from and the suppliers of our supplements, these questions. And those are very fair. You and I have both been financial beneficiaries of supplements. And we, as a podcast, will probably most likely be supported by a food provider at some point and i think at some point like you know we'll be asked that very critical question i think that's really fair to ask of thought leaders sorry to deal derail but i just wanted to you know

kind of point out that there's it's a murky ethics to this yeah conversation the the way i think you have to bridge that is something we've been discussing all volume which is number one of course being forthright and honest and open right your conflicts of interest need to be disclosed more importantly though if you approach it with the the non-dogmatic mindset of saying this is the product or system i believe in right now yeah but when presented or if presented with new information i am willing and happy to change my mind yeah and i'm so all i'm doing is trying to give you advice that i think can help you right now and i'm making the best decision i can with the information i have that's a hard conversation

because a lot of people have a lot to lose a nutritionist you know flipping their opinion because they are a sherpa of people trying to dial in their health if they suddenly shift opinions it may mean a loss of income i mean flat out which is why we have to be less dogmatic about the details of what to eat and spend more time talking about the bigger concepts, the approach, the system, the philosophy behind it. That way, when information changes, we have the agility to move a little bit within that same scope. This critical transition from scarcity to abundance left a huge gap in the 1980s and 90s that people came in and filled with a bunch of diets and eating plans. Yeah, the 80s were filled with fads. Growing up at

the health club that I did, the biggest and most significant one throughout the 80s, especially as primarily an endurance athlete, was carb loading. I mean, we would have, before triathlons, carb loading parties. Even when I got to the soccer team at UC Davis and transitioned in the early 90s, that's what we'd do. We'd go to a local eatery that gave us $5 all-you-can-eat pasta and before big games, we would just go and feed. Do you know why that is?

Why? It goes back to something I've talked about in another chapter. Most of the people during exercise physiology research in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, almost all of them were endurance athletes. Right. They found that when you have a super compensation of carbohydrate, once they identified that muscle glycogen is a significant predictor of endurance performance, if I super load that system, boy, you feel pretty good.

Interesting. Was it limited scope? I felt terrible on it. Really? Yeah. degree especially for soccer you're telling me science doesn't work for every person no i mean i thought it would i would get constipated you know every race day for triathlons and same for game days like there was no motility there was a lack of fiber and that was just a concentration of enriched wheat flour that was just cramming my gut and not really moving through. So I worked through some pretty significant gastrointestinal stuff through the 80s and 90s. And by the early 2000s, I'd sort of knocked my sugar requirements and carbohydrate requirements, but it took a long time to break those habits

chemically and just habitually. What's really interesting about all these diets is that 90% of 90% of diets is the same thing. Now I made that number up, but it gets to the point that he's exaggerating folks. They are far more similar than they are dissimilar and so in fact i just have a funny little saying i call which is the 90 right so 90 of diets are 90 the same and it's interesting because that 90 of what they're telling you to do is very similar to the very recent governmental guidelines interesting now for those of you that really want some actual help of what to do, I will give you these what I call seven points of the 90%. So number one, if you're trying to,

whether you're trying to gain muscle mass or lose fat, it does come down to caloric balance, right? You have got to be positive or negative. Now, a lot goes into, because it's not simply calorie counting. The conversation on thermodynamics has advanced a lot, but again, not for today. Absorption is very true. But at some point, you have to be in the right place calorically. That's all they're doing.

Right. Number two, you generally want 50% to 75% of your plate to be vegetable. Right. Now, that may be something like 40% to 50% of your plate to be vegetable, right? Now that may be something like 40 to 50% of your actual calories because vegetables are very calorically sparse, which means it can occupy a huge percentage of your plate and only be 30% of your actual calorie intake. This is one of the reasons why we talk about vegetables are so good. You can feel full all the time, but actually be hypo caloric, right? Your fats and proteins then should occupy

somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 35% each of the remaining calories. And so if you look at the basic recommendations, it's a about a third of your calories should be protein, about a third of them should be good fats, and then about a third of them should be good vegetable sources, which if you're unaware, most vegetables are mostly carbohydrate. So that puts you in a pretty good spot. Number five, focus most of the time on eating real food, which is alive, things that are healthy. Try to minimize process. That's not to say canned food or bars are totally terrible for you, but most of the time focus on real food first. Number six, when you're consuming these vegetables

and these fruits to some extent, sometimes you should eat them raw, sometimes you should eat them cooked. It goes actually back to your opener of variety. So one of the things, as a very quick example, does a microwave kill the nutrients? Who cares? Just eat the vegetable.

I don't think most people are really at the point where the loss of nutrients in the microwave is that important relative to I ate steamed vegetables that I made in a microwave versus I didn't go to Pizza Hut. That's probably a win. Take spinach. Okay, now spinach has a lot of vitamins and has a lot of minerals. And very quickly, minerals are often hard to extract. We call them low bioavailability. Iron is a great example in spinach, right? Which means if you consume a lot of spinach and you eat it raw, you will extract a bunch of the vitamins and a bunch of the antioxidants out of it. But you'll have a hard time getting and digesting the minerals because you can't really unpack them in your gut and

they're going to be low availability. If you cook the spinach, you will burn up a lot of the antioxidants, you will lose a lot of the vitamins, but you will denature or unfold a lot of those minerals, which increases their bioavailability. This leads directly into point number seven of the 90%, which is you want to maximize your variety. You should have a bunch of different foods in different colors in combinations with a variety of cooking methods. And if you do these seven things, I think you can play nicely in between those two foundations you open up the show with, which is this idea of variety or palate versus abundance and needing to consume everything.

If you eat the right foods, you should be able to eat a lot of food very often and not feel like you're restricting yourself. And if you do it with a lot of variety, you'll keep your palate fresh, you won't get bored of foods, and more importantly, you will consume a wide range of phytochemicals, nutrients, vitamins, and other small molecules that are very important for your health and well-being. You know, it's funny. You and I are both friends with Laird Hamilton. And one of the things that he's talked about before is this idea of being a liability. So Laird eats very, very well. He pays close attention, but not so much to the point where if he eats a hamburger, he's a liability to the guys

that he's going to serve an 80 or 90 foot wave with. And I think that's a really significant consideration when people are veering so hard into the conversation of biohacking and optimizing to critical performance. The downside, as we've discussed in the past, is that if you're such a specific baker, there's also something that you can dilute in your very culture in which you thrive. So loved ones may or may not appreciate when at a cultural specific dinner, you're unable to eat the food being presented and you bring out your Tupperware and start to eat from your Tupperware. For me, it's really significant when I go to Sweden, just the amount of traditions and the foods that they eat at a lot of their meals. I'm like, oh man. And it takes me, I'm hammered after five, six days of being there because I kind of

veer towards like the little nuanced, delicate little flower detail. The moment that I come off, I'm a significant liability. Like I'm not only trying to adjust to the time there, but I'm just in this food coma because I'm so specific most of the time. So Laird, baker or cook? I think he oscillates a little bit. He's a cook for sure, right? He's not counting calories. He doesn't have any, if you ask him how many grams of protein he has a day, he doesnates a little bit. He's a cook. He's a short cook, yeah. He's not counting calories.

He doesn't have any, if you ask him how many grams of protein he has a day, he doesn't have a clue. What he does is make sure I get some good fat, make sure I get some good protein. I want a boatload of vegetables. I'll eat a bunch of different ones. And that's it. And not be a liability. And not be a liability. It appears that we've actually come to a bit of a consensus on what to eat.

And there's a lot less differentiation than we actually thought the government and most well functioning healthy diets are actually saying mostly the same thing so then kenny why in the hell do we still have an obesity problem well i think uh a big part of it is like a lot of the processed foods which are generally consumed by lower income populations not the population most probably that this podcast is reaching yeah there's a chemical composition between the fat and carbohydrate responses that people have and there's habituated eating patterns with a lack of exercise patterning. So with time, you add enough salt, enough sugar, things are going to get tasty. People are going to repeat

those behaviors. Obesity is simply going to happen. Again, I noticed that with my father in his later years. So one of the things that Jack Osborne brought up is that just 10% of effort can go a long way to change things very, very dramatically. And as I look at the health and fitness industry, I kind of see three general populations. One is a population that they don't know and they don't really care. Their priorities are often more about making rent and just getting enough food in as it goes. Another part of the population is this middle chunk that is interested in actually making a change. But as they look onto the market, there's a huge number of variables to sort of seed through. And then, as mentioned, there's this sort of upper tier that I think is unintentionally confusing the rest of the market because they're offering a bunch of solutions that unintentionally get people into the weeds, unable to make significant changes as it relates to these bigger things that we're talking about, obesity and diabetes specifically.

Sorry. The advice from that top tier is either completely unmanageable for the bottom tier, or it causes the second tier to continually jump every three or four or five weeks shifting plans, and they lose that major focus. And what we're trying to argue a lot in this chapter is maybe that's the wrong message to send to the middle and bottom tier. Maybe the top 10 can fight amongst themselves. That's fine if we are trying to get that last few percentage points. But when we communicate to the second and third tier, we need to change our language because what matters to them probably doesn't matter to the top tier.

Yeah. I mean, they're coming in, they're trying to have the chef conversation with people who can barely fathom being a cook or a baker. Right. And don't have the tools to bake well. Yeah, right.

You're asking them to create a dish. Or resources. You're asking them to create a dish for a five-star restaurant, and they are still figuring out how to crack an egg and make an omelet. There's a really important point to make here, too, which is if you're in the bottom tier for nutrition, that doesn't mean you're in the bottom class of society. Or intelligence or anything. Or anything.

I know plenty of people who are very smart, very educated, make plenty of money, and they don't know anything about their health and their nutrition. Sure. It's a matter of in which domain are you which thing. Yes. And understanding that first is the first step into getting control of it. Exactly.

What we're really talking about with all of these things is coming back to adherence. So clearly the way we're delivering the information or what we're telling them to do is coming through in a manner that is not effective, which is a nice way I like to think about this is the success of a system is predicated more on the compatibility and the execution than the merit of the system itself. Right. If you put yourself on a diet plan or workout plan or any financial plan, whatever it is, and it doesn't work for your lifestyle, your taste preferences, your religious beliefs, your sleep patterns, if it's not compatible with your lifestyle, you will lose. I promise you, life will win over food. It just happens. That is more important than the actual diet itself.

So whether you picked paleo or zone or if it fits your macro, that is not even remotely as important as did you put yourself in a situation that actually works for you, that you like, that is the foods you like and the way you prepare them and you're not eating food you find disgusting and that you can execute on a day-to-day basis over the course of months, if you didn't do those two things, it doesn't matter which system you pick, it will fail. Andy, what motivated this metaphor that you use for your nutrition conversations? The chef, baker, cook thing came because I realized people are having a bigger difficulty in executing the diet plans rather than coming up with the diet plan itself. And so what I did, and this really came to pass a handful of years ago when I first started dating my current wife.

I had to realize that the way I approach nutrition, even if it was the exact same information, the way I deliver that information to her, I couldn't do it the way I delivered it to my brother because my brother thinks more like I do and she thinks much differently. Turns out she is a baker, what I call, and I am much more of a cook. So I had to learn that me as her, you know, quote unquote coach, I couldn't deliver information to her the way I like to receive it because that's arrogant and it's selfish. That's what makes a bad client relationship and it also makes it not work for her.

And it can be very testing of a relationship. Yeah, absolutely, right? Anybody that's tried that with a spouse. Well, generally working on any fitness or health things with your spouse or significant other is a bad idea. But she was very, very, very smart, actually incredibly informed of this stuff. So it wasn't that bad. But anyways, I had to say, okay, well, what are the pieces of information she needs to know? And what are the pieces of information my brother needs to know? And I'm not talking technical detail here. I'm

talking just cueing and language and how we approach the system. So let's talk execution then. We briefly opened up and mentioned what we were talking about when I say a cook or a baker. Here's a way you can identify whether you're a cook or a baker. If you like to open up your cabinet and you have everything organized and laid out by color, by spice, by condiment, you are definitely a baker. If you just like to make sure you got a couple of each, different spices, and you want to have them somewhere around, and you just like the concepts, and you want to just hit the main ideas, you're probably a cook. So with a cook, simplicity wins. So now we're talking about whether you're giving your own self-advice or you're coaching

somebody else. But if you've identified the person who needs to make the change as a cook, you need to give them very simple, very clear instructions, and give them very, very few at a time, right? So, Josh, you're up to 430 pounds now. We've got to start controlling this diet a little bit. Here's what I want you to do. Next week, I want you to make sure that you get one piece of fresh fruit every day and some lean protein source every time you eat. And that's the only advice I might give him

for a week or two. And then after two weeks go on, I might give him one or two more things, but it's very clear. I am not at all giving him instructions on volumes or calories. If you give that kind of detail where I say, Josh, I want you to set an alarm. Every three hours it goes off. I want you to eat 11 and a half almonds. Not 12, 11 and a half. I want you to eat six ounces of fresh broccoli. Not cooked. No salt.

It's going to give a cook anxiety. It's calorie counting. If your hair pulls out of the thoughts of calorie counting, you're a cook. You know exactly what I'm saying. I don't need to give you any more. Meanwhile, a baker is like, sweet. I appreciate the exactness. And a baker is like, I would have paid you $1,000 for that. Why don't need to give you any more. Meanwhile, a baker's like, sweet. I appreciate the exactness. And a baker's like, I would have paid you $1,000 for that.

Why won't you do that? Right. Is bacon lean protein? Oh, boy. Josh, no. Just Josh. No. The downside of a cook, though, or the problem with that approach, is calibration.

So if I gave you that advice, Josh, and I said one piece of fruit and uh what was that i said one good lean source of protein at every six strips of bacon right and you don't know what a lean source of protein is or you think six one piece of it could be a whole steak or under if you're not calibrated to volumes and numbers at least a little bit you could go way under or way over and you might not be hitting your fat loss goals or muscle gain goals because you're just completely miscalibrated. Now that doesn't mean we don't take that approach. But when we put somebody on a cook type of program, we have to realize the limitations, see the potential problem. And then as things are coming up, we know exactly

what to address. I might have to start transitioning Josh either into a baker mode, or I might just have to start changing the rules I give him. Now, instead of saying I want one piece of fruit every day, I might say I want one medium-sized piece of fruit, or I want one chicken breast. Well, I don't know the exact size, but that's probably close enough for him, right? We start giving him rules. If you're a baker or you're working with a baker you need to get very detailed you might consider buying a nutrition plan buying a book working with an individual coach paying that price so you have very specific details count measure and count your calories in your macros schedule eating times plan your shopping list so when you go to the store you

know exactly what to buy and how much to buy. And then you're going to adjust that prescription over time. One of the big things, Andy, is that you just talked about is calibration. Like bakers can easily calibrate. And in our spaces, I know it's frustrating for you if somebody is saying, I'm not getting the results that I want or these specific things, either an increase of lean muscle mass, a decrease in fat, whatever it may be, but they're not detail oriented enough to make those effectual changes. And you work with top UFC fighters, an Olympian, you know, so you have some great experience here. I as well through the last decade, I've worked with different people nutritionally.

And it's funny, until I had understood this concept that you had put forward, I would naturally take a novice person and put them on a baker's experience with the intent of transitioning them into a cook, which worked well and was very convenient for me and generally worked. You as the coach. Me as a coach. However, as I've had some failures with that, I realized that my own projection of what I think is needed may not always get the overall effect that we're trying to do. Kenny, what are you more of, cook or baker?

Well, I spent a lot of years as a baker tweaking things, as I sort of mentioned before, getting myself out of this need for sugar and dense carbohydrates. And that process really was about a 15-year sort of process of tinkering, experimenting, and finding a generally sweet spot for me. Now, what happens and what has happened for me personally is I spent a lot of time trying to understand the core structures of what I thought nutrition to be, trying to learn from people who were thought leaders of the time. And there's been a very natural progression to go from a baker to becoming a little bit of a cook because in many ways, I start to learn the lessons with time and I'm able to apply those with greater freedom as a cook. Something interesting that's happened for me personally is that with enough time, I've developed a strong

intuition as far as what I sense I need. So one of the things that I do in a habituated way is I go and get blood work. And then every year I'll pick one or two basic things to alter and tweak based on my blood work, just to see if there's an evolution. I don't create a giant cascade of six different things that'll integrate. I learned a great lesson from Bob Kennedy, who was the 5K American record holder in the 90s. And every season, he would simply pick one thing that he was going to work on for the entirety of the season. Now, if you stack enough seasons together and you get really good at things, you can pick very specific things to help you deepen your understanding of his case, the sport, for me,

general nutrition. Now, in my experience in working with people, I've found that historically people work really well in general with the structure of being a baker, even if it's not necessarily their personal archetype psychologically. And I say that because with some of the information that a baker uses, there's a level of specificity that if the lesson is learned well, can help the person transition into being a cook. And what's interesting is that you do enough cooking and you realize you do some blood work or you do some genetic testing. You realize, I got to go back and tweak some things. You age. You're exposed to different contaminants in your environment, whatever they may be.

Different stressors start to hit you in different ways. So tweaking not only what you're doing physically, but what you're putting in your body can make small, significant alterations. So dancing back and forth is, I find, something that is a longtime healthy habit. A chef has a master intuition. They know all the specific things that need to go into any figurative or literal meal. And they know what they're putting on the spoon, what that is. And there's like sincere mastery on that. And one of the big things that, you know, I love to see in people is psychological and emotional versatility.

So as far as coaching goes, the conversation is, hey, I'm going to present this information to you in a very structured way. Our goal, our intent is for you to develop an ability to use that information mindfully, and then ideally you develop some intuition around that now that is a that is a masterful growth arc for anybody that you're leading generally the cook approach is better for large numbers of people and it is much more sustainable over the course of a lifetime so i think you should actually have the versatility to jump back and forth.

If you notice in the mirror one day, oh my gosh, I'm not quite where I'm at, or your performance or your recovery isn't where it is, you should maybe go into a little bit of a baker mode where you get more specific, dial things in a little bit, but then be able to zoom back out once you've hit that goal or you've got to where you want to be and live more like a cook once you have the appropriate tools. When you get started, though, and this is actually fundamentally the outline that Brian McKenzie and I use in the book Unplugged, is use whatever approach fits your personality best, cook or baker, when you first get started. I generally find a cook is best for somebody at the absolute beginning.

You give them, look, I've eaten nothing but frozen pizza and chips for 30 years. I have no idea where to start. Give them some very basic guidelines. Then when you move from that rudimentary entry, now you start getting into baker, but what you're really doing is you've just taken the cook approach and you've just started adding a few more rules and details.

And you've basically transitioned them into becoming a baker then once they've moved plus that early phase i'm getting pretty good i get an idea eventually hopefully they progress back into cook yeah because now i understand the basics enough i'm calibrated right i used my fitness app or my fancy technology that weighed my calories i figured figured out what, how many grams are generally here or there. And now I can actually let go of some of that control because I have a better intuitive sense, which is what we try to get to in the book is saying, you need to go use the technology to help you learn some of these basics. But then the point is you should be able to move a situation where you can remove all that and you can intuitively feel, recognize the approach. So we've been, we've been talking a lot in metaphor, specifically a food preparation

metaphor about how to eat food. So I think it's important to step back a little bit, or maybe forward, depending on the metaphor you're using. And remind people that this is about your mindset. And it's about your approach to something that should be important to all of us, which is what are we eating? And as Kenny pointed out early, in a world of abundance, your relationship with food and nutrition and eating is extremely important because often the biggest threat to an individual in this type of a, in this type of an environment is themselves. Self-destruction is a very, very powerful force in the modern world.

And, you know, I can attest to this personally in various aspects of my life where I've gone from baking to cooking and back to baking and all sorts of things. And I've seen with tendencies to be somewhat addictive or obsessive or compulsive, if I do the baking thing and I latch onto it and I get too obsessive about it, it can lead to very dark places. And I think as we saw in some of the stories that Michael Blevins told and some stories that you'll hear on the next chapter from Brett Bartholomew, becoming very obsessive about food and prescriptions or recipes can lead down really dark paths.

And I think, Kenny, you've had some experience with some of these things personally. Yeah, I mean, I've worked with and through a handful of people with eating disorders. And myself included, there was probably some early dysmorphia as a teenager and going into my 20s. And part of that was maybe obsessing over the magazines that I would subscribe to,

Muscle and Fitness, being one of them, being raised in a health club. And, you know, and then slowly, like I mentioned before, working through my own addictions over really about 15 years. I mean that's what it took and it was a slow sort of dis's been a couple people that, you know, I've worked with who get stuck in the mindset that is so fixed on Baker specifics. Right. That there's an inability to apply the lessons to improve overall health and well-being. And it's this sort of fixed scope on what nutrition is and it's defined by. Rather than being addicted to the sugar or the carbs, you're now addicted to the program. The program.

Right. Yeah. This very specific still lacked process and um you know to the point with a couple different um athletes where we're seeing renal failure and kidneys not working and you know this is a significant issue for i think a lot of people in the coaching and training space because, you know, we live in a space and time where people have a variety of addictions that pop up in very, very deep ways. And it's hard to shake that. So you can only do so much as a coach when you're working with these populations. And it can be devastating for the individual if you're going to extract them from the very thing that they love.

But that is often what's required, meaning the training or the sport or whatever. As an athlete, I used to see a lot of addictions with gymnasts and certainly track athletes. So again, I mean, if we're dividing this conversation up into two primary sections of the Western world, we've got the people who are going to interpret this and sort of understand that. And there's a lot that we talked about that is basically obvious to our peers. Then there's a lot of this that will be transformative for several people hearing it maybe for the first time. But again, coming back to this concept of mastery,

which is evergreen in its nature. And if that framework is guided and supported well, it puts people in a better environment to understand these things. You and I differ generally in how we start with people. But we have found both plenty of success getting people to these more advanced levels of intuitive understanding

so they can manipulate these very basic things. Hopefully we've inspired you a little bit with this chapter and demystified nutrition. If we've done that, I did want to leave you with a little bit of execution. So here is a three-step system to help you integrate the new plan, whatever you put yourself on. Now, I have to give a little bit of credit. John Berardi and his company Precision Nutrition has a very similar system here. I would encourage you to check out their approach if you like this or this rings a bell with you. But basically, number one, when you first put yourself on a new plan or you decide to make a change, the first thing I think you should do is include new foods rather

than exclude things, which is basically a way of saying, fix your deficiencies first. What I have found is most people don't consume enough micronutrients, not enough good quality fats, and probably not enough protein. So step number one, identify if you are low in any of those things and then start including them. Now, that's actually contrary to what most people think because traditionally people start off diets by taking a bunch of shit away. a conversation about, is this food item bad for me? Or how bad is this food item? Versus, is this good for me? Or how good is this? I want you to do the latter. So every time you're making your choice, think about, is this the best possible option for me? Rather than, well, hey, you know, how bad is a fat-free wheat then? I don't know. We're making gradients of levels of shittiness. So it's really easy to make choices if you don't know. We're making gradients of levels of shittiness.

So it's really easy to make choices if you don't have a lot of information in this nutrition space, if you just take that approach. I'm going to make the best choice possible every time. A great example of this, I worked with a friend of mine. This is a personal friend. He's your classic mid-30s athlete in high school, gained 30 or 40 pounds, and it's been 10 years since he's tried to even do anything healthy with his food. And he came to me and he said, hey, I got to get on a diet. I got two kids. I got a full-time job running a business. And what do you think about paleo? And my initial reaction, now I don't follow paleo. I never have and never will. I don't care. But I said, absolutely. And the reason was, it's generally close enough. And he seemed to be really excited about it. From where he was, paleo was a significant upgrade. After about six months, happened was a little bit after that he called me one day and he was kind of fidgeting he's like yeah i've lost 30

pounds and he wasn't as excited as i thought he'd be and i'm like what's the deal and it basically finally came out that he was like i just like i really missed a piece of bread in the morning with with breakfast i'm like oh well then eat your bread he's like really like like shocked and he's like if i eat bread like I won't gain 40 pounds? No, one slice of bread, you'll be fine. And that alone reduced the stress in his life. And it made the biggest difference. It was now a sustainable practice because he was falling off the bandwagon, falling

back on. That was it. The one thing he could totally do the diet for infinity of now because he was extremely happy. After another six months, though, now we started making other adjustments. Okay, maybe let's loosen up our grip on this one. Let's add this back in. My point is we started off the diet. The first step was to include things, make his relationship with food positive. Step number two, once you've included all the things to make you feel really, really, really good, is to now self-test with amounts and types.

This is when you can start tracking things, making fine-tune adjustments. There is a really amazing concept out that Lewis Burke pioneered or at least popularized called periodized nutrition. So this is a concept of playing with your proportion of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins based on your goal, whether you're in season, post-season, more work. And I think it's fantastic, right? We periodize our training programs. We all realize that. But how many of us really have that kind of variety

within our nutrition? So we talked about variety earlier of our food choices, but how many of us are having variety about our meal frequency? Are you ever increasing your protein or decreasing it, going up in carb, down in fat? This is another example of variety that I think we need to start playing with. And that is something though, but that would be a second tier approach, right? Once we've included things, we move on to step two, which is we start playing with these things. Because as you mentioned earlier, Kenny, we need to be resilient. We need to be able to skip breakfast and not be ruined the rest of the day because I didn't get my oatmeal and three eggs.

That's not a good human trait. We can't be a liability. Right. So if you do that and, for example, you're interested in weight loss, a normal sustainable practice for the average person means a caloric deficit of somewhere of about 10%. For the most part, that usually ends up resulting in about a half a percent to 1% of your body weight lost per week. Anything more than that is typically unsustainable over the long term. You might lose 20 pounds the first month, but over a year, you're very, very likely to be right back where you started or not much past that 20 pounds. So small changes, not an 80% reduction in calories, don't cut your food in half, 10%, small goals, long-term practice.

If we do that, now you finally earn the right to move on to what i call step three which is your fine tuning and now you can play with maybe i should cut out gluten for a month and see how it feels maybe i should go low dairy or whatever other small adjustment you want to make uh this is where your hackers your gurus your innovators and thought leaders become actually very very helpful because they have a tremendous amount of information at this third step. The problem with them is not them. It's when we step in and try to make our first dietary change as this step three fine tuning. And so it's not the hacker's fault or the innovator, the thought leader. It's us implementing a system that we weren't ready for. Now, if you really want to get crazy about this stuff, you can look into things like nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics. There's some really exciting

things coming out that you could personalize your nutrition, get some genetic testing done, extensive blood work for a very high price point. But to me, this is all final step three fine-tuning adjustments that give you, I think, are exciting because they give you a chance, if you are that person who really wants to become a chef and really dive hard into this stuff and optimize, you have that. But if that stuff scares you or you're not ready for it, I hoped in our conversation today, we have given you a lot more clarity with, Hey, this is what I can try and it will have a big impact. And it doesn't have to be that complicated if that's not what I'm interested in. So we can all play in the same system.

One of the big things that we're trying to do today really is to talk about fundamental mindset. And this archetype that Dr. Galpin laid out, the cook, the baker, and the chef, is a mindset to basically problem solve. Now, there's a very evolutionary nature to the way that we all grow. There are some dark sides if we stay fixated, whether that's just a dogmatic opinion that you simply can't let go of, despite ever increasing information that is telling you contrary-wise and an inability to take in that information and apply it to the development of self. That being said, a lot of our people are going to be affecting different populations. And the biggest thing that we wanted to accomplish today is not so much a very specific remedy

with how to eat and how to absorb nutrients. The biggest thing that we wanted to do today is create a platform of understanding contextually so that whether it's you, the practitioner, or you as a coach, somebody who's leading others, can guide with a more appropriate, long-term, intentionally sustainable mindset. And we're going to keep hammering this idea. Our ability to change will either do one of two things far beyond what our opinions are about food. It will either help us survive as a species

or we will die. And Rob Wolf pointed this out to me. Dr. Galpin and I have talked about this off air. The biggest risk to ourselves is us. We're slowly killing ourselves. And this is something that we can absolutely do something about. For sure, it starts with the biochemical processes that happen as we put food and our brain tells us, keep eating, keep eating, bro, dude, lady, keep eating. But then there's another part of that. And that is this thing where we can dive into something that is a little bit deeper and provide a stewardship of a more conscious, mindful, aware conversation. Andy and I are not right about anything. All we're trying to do is deepen this damn dialogue so that we stop with all the unnecessary dogma, all the unnecessary gluttony, because the same people who proselytize

viewpoints I've seen fall off the wagon and overeat themselves into food comas. Periodically, maybe okay, but not a sustainable practice altogether. And this is from industry leading experts. This thing is going to take some work and y'all are going to help us lead this conversation. So if you've learned anything today, that might just be to drink your effing Ovaltine. Brush your teeth, folks. Take yourself maybe a little less seriously, unlike what I just did in the closing monologue. Next week, we've got a kick-ass guest. His name is Brett Bartholomew. He's lighting the strength and conditioning world up.

Why? Because he's got a dope-ass book called Conscious Coaching. And just like the title implies, he's affecting a lot of people super positively. So check it out next week because he's got a lot of stuff to teach, Dr. Galpin, Josh Embry, and myself. So keep it classy, rub underneath your armpits,

and occasionally poke your neighbor in the eye. Love you guys. Fucking love those. Looks like you enjoyed the show. Make sure to go over to iTunes, go over to Shrug Collective, give us a five-star review, positive comment only, and make sure to go over to ThriveMarket.com

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