Barbell Shrugged - Decoding the Mystery of Your Metabolism w/ Aaron Straker, Dr. Andy Galpin, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash Barbell Shrugged #576

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

My name is Aaron Straker. Eating large quantities of quality, nutrient-dense, whole foods and lifting weights are some of my favorite things to do. The grocery store and the kitchen are some of my favorite places to be.   I have a vision that one day everyone at the gym will have the body that they work for, because they realize how they spend the other 23 hours of their day are equally as important.   I want people to see that the answers they seek aren’t found in more reps, more sets, program hopping, fat burners, pump stacks, and other workout-specific supplements that provide only marginal value.   I believe that education is ultimately the missing key for those who struggle to achieve long term success with their nutrition. For this very reason, education is the cornerstone from which I build each and every implementation. More.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   What is your metabolism The importance of meal frequency and timing Why your metabolism isn’t broken Lifestyle factors that optimize your metabolism  How macros and muscle make your metabolism   Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

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I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dr. Andy Galpin. I didn't know which way to go. And our good friend here, Aaron Straker, founder of the Metabolic Performance Protocol. Dude, we're going to talk about metabolism today. We have never done a show on what people's metabolism is specifically, how they can take control of it. And you run a program that is specifically centered around people, increasing people's metabolism.

And you wrote a Instagram post that immediately made me want to reach out to you to have you on here, in which you were talking about ways people can make their metabolism better, and kind of just debunking the entire idea that you are born with a metabolism, and you're just stuck with it for the rest of your life. And I'd love to just at the very highest level kind of like define like what I feel love to just at the very highest level kind of like define like what I feel like people talk about their metabolism all the time, but never really actually know what it is. I even me being in this industry and talking about nutrition and people losing weight. I'm not even sure I know exactly what the metabolism is. Can we just get into like the highest level of what actually does

your metabolism do for you? So, I mean, at the highest level, it's kind of like a misconception between, you know, when we talk about metabolism, we think about like, you know, energy in, energy out, fat loss, muscle building, whatever. But metabolism is really like the chemical processes through how your body, you know, metabolizes food, energy creates like all sorts of stuff and going in and out of the cell. So it's kind of used like as I want to call it a misnomer, but inappropriately in most contexts. And I'm sure like, you know, Dr. Galpin can go a little bit deeper than that. But, you know, in terms of like, what people think about what is like how your metabolic rate, okay, right? So how efficient your body is at expending calories. And from a, from a metabolic standpoint, right? And using that that term, we want to be inefficient, right? inefficient, kind of how like a opposite of what

you would want out of like energy from a car or anything like that. So the more inefficient your metabolic rate is, you know, the more flexible you can be with your caloric intake and not have to worry about like fat gain or muscle wasting or anything like that, which is a benefit, but kind of counterintuitive to how a lot of people would originally think about it. When somebody calls you and sets up a call to be a part of your program, and they just say, I think my metabolism is broken, or I just have a really bad one. Is it possible to break your metabolism? I mean, completely, probably not.

Because they think you would die, you know. I think maybe it breaks when your heart stops. Yeah, I feel like that we're a part of some of the same uh like nutrition groups and i sometimes i see the coaches come in they're like this person's complaining about having a broken metabolism i'm like i don't think it's a bone i don't think you can break it no but i mean you can you can um do a lot of repair to it and similar to how a bone would heal. So what, when someone says that they have a broken metabolism to you or they have a slow one, what in your brain, how do you start to kind of break that conversation down of like, what, what is it? What are they actually saying to you?

Well, usually what they're referring to is like, okay, I'm now, maybe I'm in my mid thirties, maybe I'm in my early to mid forties and I can't get away with the same things I could get away with when I was 24, when I was 25, when I was in college still. And what I kind of will explain to them is like, this is basically years of compounding habits that have been on a decline. And you've now moving a little bit less, you don't play intramural sports anymore you have much more demand from a you know being maybe a being provider to your family you have a couple kids running around right you don't sleep as much your weekends are spent now doing basement projects instead of like sitting on the couch watching football and like you know relaxing

in those kind of compounding decisions over the course of 12, 15 years, kind of add up to perceptions and practices that work, you know, maybe not as favorably as they used to. Yeah. So you're basically driving down a road of shitty habits and you finally got to your destination. More or less. Yeah. So how do we start? When you look at some of the bigger buckets that play into this kind of unfortunate road that people are stacking bad habits in, what are some of the bigger buckets that people are unaware of, not objectively viewing, that play into this? So the first one I'll usually start with and get by in is on sleep. not objectively viewing that play into this?

So the first one I'll usually start with and get buy-in is on sleep. People sleep five and a half hours per night and think like, oh, that's normal. Like I function fine. And what really happens is like you have this like negatively sliding perception of what fine has become. And when it happens bit by bit over years, your new level of fine is like objectively 20% worse than it used to be.

And it just happens so slowly over time that you haven't been able to pick up on the changes of that. So really convincing people and putting some of that information in front of them around their sleep. And then when they do have better sleep, we can report like, oh, I had more energy for the gym. Like my mood was better, all these things. So sleep is a big one.

Digging into caffeine intake um you find people are drinking 200 ounces of coffee a day and then wondering they're like oh i'm just not tired at night you're like well when's the last time you're having coffee and you're like we're about like i'll go in at like five on the way to the gym um in addition to like the six cups i had from 6 a.m till you know noon at work so caffeine intake is another one. They're kind of stress perceptions. It's generally people who are super high-strung. They work in a really stressful work environment. They sit in traffic a lot and all these kind of things just build up.

And then usually you'll find that these type of people are also doing crazy high-intensity stuff, CrossFit six days a week, and just Metcon you know balls to the wall type stuff so it's just a lot of things that all kind of stack up against what they want and little nothing is like too massive in its own but when you have these like five different things that all kind of point in that direction that's what kind of adds up to I really and real quick I want to dig into the sleep aspect and bring Andy into this conversation. Andy, if you're kind of chronically sleep deprived, getting five and a half hours per night like Aaron was just mentioning, like physiologically, what is happening there to affect your metabolism? Well, you have to define, going back to what Aaron was talking about, what you mean by metabolism.

So we don't really need to honestly answer that question because it's an answer people don't care about. What they really care about is how many calories is my body burning per day? And is that changing than my fat mass or my muscle mass? That's not metabolism. So we'll just go with that because that's the question people want to know. Like basically they're saying, if I'm not sleeping enough, is that going to cause me to gain fat mass? That's the real question, right? question. Exactly like Aaron said at the beginning, it's a bit pedantic. If you're super into the science part and you want to define metabolism, okay, fine, but really let's answer the question of what we were talking about. Why is sleep reduction influencing someone's ability to gain weight? So you have a whole host of factors going on. You can start off with basic definitions like basal metabolic rate, right?

The amount of energy your body is burning throughout the day. That is highly linked to things like cortisol, testosterone, growth hormone, right? So if you mess with circadian rhythms by not sleeping enough, you see changes in thyroid hormone. Those things alter then how many calories you burn throughout the day, right? Up or down. And so one of the major reasons at its most basic premise, if one were to gain fat mass, that simply means that they're bringing in more calories than they're burning. And so if you are continuing to eat the same amount of calories, but your caloric expenditure goes down because you've influenced thyroid hormone, for example, by being sleep deprived, then you're not burning as much as you're bringing in.

And all of a sudden you start adding up fat and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm not eating anymore. And you might not be, but the other side of that equation has now changed. So that's one of the things. So circadian biology is a very interesting research line that's getting very popular right now but the answer to all that again is it's highly time tied to the hormone regulation that changes energy expenditure so that would be one of them in addition to i mean you could talk about sort of the practical side of it people being less active when they're tired right so that's less energy expenditure, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's the physiology as well as, you know, again, I know stuff you're into here, and it's the behaviors, the actions, the lifestyle stuff that run downstream or secondary of that sleep deprivation. So hormones are really the big issue. It is a big issue. Again, you have, say, even if hormones weren't doing it, it could be simply the the fact that you're tired so you're not doing as much the next day so you like i won't always be careful when people say things like hormones it seemed like metabolism actually it's funny you led the conversation and that's what you did is because you're like yeah everything is because people's hormones and metabolism are broken like okay like well it's not fair to say because those two things are related

to literally everything yeah like everything so like i guess they're always the problem but it's not really always the problem either it's just the way that people present that to the nutrition person they're trying like it's broken or mine's slow i was born this way when it's broken or mine's slow. I was born this way when it's not actually the case of what's happening. Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly everyone has their own endogenous metabolic rate that they're born with. Right. And again, by that right there was sort of a misnomer, but you have a different rate that you're at. Can that be changed? Of course it is. And it absolutely is.

And the example is. And the example Aaron gave at the beginning is perfect, right? As you age is one example of things that the amount of calories you burned is sitting, go down. So yes, it's broken, but you can break it as well in terms of, can you suppress it by poor lifestyle behavior? Absolutely. And then can you return it by fixing those things? No question. Everyone sort of thinks they're like the special case. And he's like, ah, like my selenium must be off.

Maybe, but probably like big rocks first. Like most likely I've done this a lot. And Aaron's probably done a thousand times when I have, there are the occasional like, okay. Yeah. Your circuit,

your serum magnesium is a touch low, but really it's the fact that you just you know are doing all the things you talked about that's almost always the issue how does the amount of muscle mass you have play into your basal metabolic rate i'll go ahead i'll let you i'll go there okay so i mean on, on paper, it's not that massive of a difference, right? You know, like your, your lean, um, tissues more metabolically active than fat tissue, which, you know, some people say is not metabolically active at all, which is like kind of not true, but it's, people think it's like, Oh, if I put on like three pounds of muscle, like

I can now eat, you know, 500 calories more per day. And it's like, it's pretty, I don't want to say maybe not marginal, but it's not clearly to the, to the discrepancy that people think it is. Yeah. A pound of muscle is probably going to maybe buys you 20 or 30 calories a day. Exactly. And then like, once you're talking about, you know, people who are in their thirties, forties, you know, as a natural athlete, it's like, people aren't packing on slabs of muscle anymore. Like I know I've been grinding and trying i might look like a little bit better at the same weight after two years of weights now so um it's not as much but what i mean there are some things you can do that muscle does give you a little bit more flexibility with like you can store more carbohydrate as glycogen which you

know allows you to eat a higher volume of diet, which are like these little kind of tweaks you can make or things once you know you can take advantage of that allows you to eat more, maybe not so much from a caloric standpoint more, but more volume or a type of diet that may be more preferential for you. If you are an athlete lifting weights, you probably generally have a propensity to use more carbohydrate there. So there's some kind of, you know, tweaks that you can do that will be a bit more in your favor, but not generally as large of a discrepancy as people think. Yeah. Once people are, you know, maybe moving or have some of those big rocks dialed in,

they're sleeping better. Is there a benefit kind of before they head into a phase in which they're cutting or trying to cut fat, lose body fat to push their maintenance calories as high as possible to kind of like rev the engine up a little bit, so to speak, before you go and drop or before you go and cut their calories? Yeah. So, I mean, this is something that I try and do with literally all of my clients and it's not so much thinking of like revving the engine up. It's creating the optimal environment for fat loss. And one of the things there is it doesn't like, just because you've slept, you're sleeping better for like two weeks and maybe you've reduced your alcohol content and cut your caffeine in half hormones, especially like the long, like later you are into life,

like your hormones don't bounce back quite as fast as they may have if you were like 18 to 20. So you might need to, you know, increase calories and focus on those practices for like six months before you're back at like, you know, near optimal levels. And that optimal is going to be different person to person. Right. So like, I i mean there are your you know your super rad dudes who have endogenous production of um testosterone free testosterone in the 800s is that you probably not like i run my labs is that me no like my

testosterone levels are pretty damn average to be completely honest but there's we all want to think we're like 900 yeah i'm like six yeah and i haven't now over a handful of years back and like 6 6 20 was like the highest mine's ever been i'm usually i'm more of like a high mid my last test came it's 560 i was like damn i'm not even like on the high side of average. That's pretty normal for me right around that. Yep. So with that, it's, um, usually it's, you know, creating that environment and it just might take longer than people think because it's like you spent the last three years, you know, sleeping like trash, binge drinking on the weekends and, you know, running yourself into the ground. You're not going to just turn that around and, you know, eight weeks of sleeping better

and reducing your caffeine intake, or sorry, your coffee intake from 200 ounces to 100 ounces. Does stress affect your metabolism at all? Not just like physical stress, but like life stress, emotional stress, work stress, kids stress, death in the family stress, stuff like that?

Andy, do you want to jump into this one? No. Okay. Um, yeah, it does. So one thing that's really interesting is that, uh, your cortisol, right. Which is like your body's, you know, primary stress hormone, the glucocorticoids is generally worked in an inverse relationship with testosterone and with melatonin. So people who are like super stressed out, who actually exhibit a lot of these things, and that stress can come from physical, and it can come from psychological type stuff to people who are like, work themselves up over, you know, fears that are wherever they develop them from that maybe not even have a true physical representation, but

will those physiological thoughts, perceptions, whatever will manifest as physiological changes will impact that, you know, testosterone level. So in that the cortisol is definitely a big part of that. And it's one, you know, I was talking earlier about like the sleep, the caffeine intake, the, you know, high intensity training six days per week, these things all add up to that, you know, kind of total allostatic, you know, cortisol response. Does it really matter where the intensity is coming from? Like you may not be doing CrossFit anymore, but I imagine you train very intense, intensely. And intensity in like percentage of one rep max

or the amount of volume you're actually doing in your training. You know, every time someone thinks about intensity in the gym, they immediately think someone's doing CrossFit seven days a week. Does it actually matter what, if it's, if it's like a Metcon type training versus high intensity, like bodybuilding or like just hypertrophy training, it doesn't have to just be, it can just be like the total amount of training that is going on and how long you're, you're under load. Yeah. So typically when people think of like intensity, right,

it might be like relative to one percentage of one rep max. But what I was really talking about is like heart rate duration at heart rate and like repeated efforts there so whether you're doing crossfit whether you're doing like you know f45 orange theory or whether you're you know on the um hack squat doing sets of 15 like you do sets of 15 18 on the hack squat with like a heavy load and your heart rate will be up in the 160s 170s especially if you're doing it for multiple sets so it all kind of adds up to the same type of, you know, stress response perceived by the body. What is there like a sweet spot in there should, you know, for people's training, like how, when you're writing training programs

to align it with their nutrition, how are you kind of setting that up with their caloric intake and managing that? Yeah, so one big factor there is recovery capacity, right? So primary pathways for recovery capacity are going to be total calories, right, is a big one. And then sleep is really there. So depending on those are your two kind of triggers you have or switches you can flip, I guess I should say. And you know, when one comes down, the other has to kind of go up or your recovery capacity diminishes. So this is why another reason why sleep is so important for fat loss, because in order to achieve that fat loss, you need to be in that caloric deficit. So there goes, or not, I don't want to say there goes like it's gone, but one of your, you know, switches for recovery capacity is decreased. We need to rely on the other one a little bit more.

So generally like pushing volume, um, pushing intensity in terms of like, you know, uh, load with, with gym programming, when you are at a more, you know, increased capacity to recover, when calories are higher, when you're focusing on creating that optimal environment let's say someone's been sleeping better for like five or six weeks now and the caffeine content is down and all these things that is when and when biofeedback is in a really good place like maybe their hunger response is really you know picked up which is awesome their energy is super great digestion is also super great you can then push training volume and intensity higher because all these

other signals in the body are basically giving you the green light yeah it's actually super interesting talking about this because when i separated my shoulder and couldn't do anything basically for three months i got super lean for anders varner standards i got down into the 180s your boy was shredded and then as soon as I could get back to training really hard and doing things that are probably a little bit too much for what I should be and just not allowing myself to sleep without an alarm, knowing that I needed to recover and just give myself all that, like do the things exactly right so I could get healthy again, right back up to that normal 195 range.

It was very interesting though on a daily basis like the extra two plus hours stacked up over multiple months in a row of sleep going from like six hours of sleep a night to eight, eight and a half. It was like this gradual, if you saw the graph, it like dipped all the way down it's like the like 188 187 range and then once i got back to my my normal life um now i kick it at like 18 195 but it was really interesting actually seeing how important just not waking up to an alarm was i hope you enjoyed all that sleep because doug and i haven't slept in five years this uh good luck bud because it's about to go away again i am reveling in the last three months here because we're going right back to zero we're out of we're out of diapers we are completely potty trained we don't even have to worry about it at night too much and then um going right back to zero. I'm going to call you guys at 3 a.m.

I have a question for you, Aaron. I've never been able to figure this out on my own, so I assume that some comes to you and they give you the classic my metabolism is broken thing, right, which we've all got, right? Like, okay, what's going on? And then they run through, oh, you know, I swear I'm counting my calories or whatever they're doing and this used to work for me in the past it's not working anymore so my testosterone

must be low and my cortisol must be high and like blah blah so you run the panels and they come back like almost always they do which you're like you're actually look pretty okay maybe a few things are like kind of low but nothing's standing out and now they're like i swear my metabolism is broke but my labs suggest like everything's like pretty okay not amazing but it's all right what the hell do i do now like how do you how do you fix them what's the next thing you do to like because they're not hitting their goals there's kind of two pathways i'll usually go through one is getting asking much deeper questions about digestion so like you want to know when you're farting like how often you're farting what is the quality of your bowel movements like tell me more there because this is something that people say like oh you know if you don't like

really pry because like people aren't gonna be like hey you know i'm gonna tell you about my poop this week unless you're like no you need to tell me about your poop and that stuff. So digestion is usually the first thing. And I'll find out people, maybe they're bloated kind of regularly. And they think, oh, I've been like that for 10 years. That's just how it is. It's normal. I'm like, that's not normal.

It's just normal for you because that's what you've been doing. And something, there's usually someone's eating an offending food that they have have some low grade intolerance to or something like that, like broccoli, right? People will just can, they're like, when especially when you're trying to be healthy, right? They're like, Oh, you know, I'm prepping my food now, broccoli every single week, weekend and week out, they're consuming broccoli twice a day for seven days in a row. Broccoli's, you know, high in raffinose, which contains, you know, like a largely indigestible type of carbohydrate that people don't, will cause bloating. So that's like one there.

So I'll get really, really curious about that. And then another thing I might do with them is like a burp test with baking soda and see if they will burp within a minute or two and say, okay, then they're producing a sufficient amount of stomach acid. And we'll kind of go down that step down that checklist of digestion. Another thing is when you find that people generally aren't giving you the full picture. So their alcohol intake has been creeping up. Maybe like I just had a client, you know,

who I've been working with for a while. And then I'm like noticing his weights, like creeping up week over week. And I'm like digging and digging and digging. And he's like, Oh, well, you know, I did have some Taco Bell on Sunday. I couldn't resist. And he was like, also, um, I've been drinking, I've been having wine, you know, every night and it's kind of creeped up to like three glasses a night now. And I'm like, okay, like, okay okay so like we're in here looking in these you know deep level things and it's some of your habits have just gotten away from you coming out of the holiday so um it's generally like that's one way i'll go is digestion or like dig

a little bit into the habits like when you put the data in front of people and you show them and you're like okay our calories have been we've been eating isocaloric calories here for six weeks but your weight has been increasing like week over. We've done these checkdowns. There's a hole in the system somewhere. You just have to find out where the air is coming out of. What type of bowel movements should we be having? I've watched Galpin's five-minute fizz on farting, which everybody should totally go watch.

It's really good. I've watched that too. Phenomenal. I've watched it twice. I usually do it while I'm going to the bathroom which is fantastic it's all in alignment um what which um what are we learning about uh bowel movements what what should our bowel movements look like or feel like so we'll start with feel like they should be pretty easy to pass um shouldn't be like you know pooping rocks whatever it also shouldn't be like, you know, pooping rocks or whatever. It also shouldn't be like, you know, popping a balloon and everything just like, you know,

rocketing out of you when you sit down. Okay, don't forget where you're going here, but I have to interrupt. I have a two and a half year old, right? And she is obsessed with space. Astronauts, like she can tell you so much about the universe. It's ridiculous, right? So every time she poops, she'll tell us, I think that was Jupiter. That was Saturn. She knows all the moons of the different planets, so she'll be like, no.

That was Titan or whatever. I think I have a few more. What about Pluto's, I think? So she's definitely not as loose as we want to be those are planets coming out you need more of that prune puree stuff I'm sorry Aaron that's a good little aside there. So no planets in your poop cup. Yeah, no planets. Generally, like what you find is when things are operating well, you're pretty consistent. So it's like easy to pass.

It's not like, you know, a 500 wiper back there either. And it's kind of consistent. Like people's daily schedules can be different and frequency can also be kind of different. Like there's people who like normals like five times a day, but there's no digestion issues. It's just like how they kind of work to people who are less frequent. So shouldn't smell like, you know, like hell creeping out of the toilet, but it's obviously not going to be like pleasant. But as long as you're kind of consistent with that and something to look at is like when they're not consistent, when like one

day it's like one thing, one day it's the next or even throughout the day. So that's a little bit more. Does it need to be daily? Generally, yes. I could see like, let's say you're deep into a dieting phase, you know, maybe you've been dieting for 12, 16 weeks and the entire volume of food is just really low. I could see that where maybe like you don't go like maybe one day, but if it's been like maybe three or something like that, I think even a dieting phase, that's kind of not great. Yeah. How, I mean, Galpin, and you can chime in on this too, with your fighters, when you have these guys cutting down for what, eight to 12 weeks to get them to make weight. What does that do to just their,

the entire system and trying to get them back up to weight over the next eight to 12 weeks to get them healthy and back to being able to train? How does that play a role in getting somebody down that lean? And, you know, what does it do to their digestion and overall health? Yeah, so I'll leave the digestion questions and stuff for Aaron. You can read a paper we put out a couple of years ago. Jackson Pales is the first author online on intermittent dieting.

One thing that's fairly clear is when you go through real caloric restriction like that, you do have to be careful on the back end because it's not hard to regain the weight. Obviously, yo-yo dieting is something many of us are familiar with, right? So you will typically gain the weight back extremely fast. So one thing we have to be very careful of with, whether it's fighters or lifters or anything, is that we slowly increase the calories on the way back up and we don't want to just balloon right back up because that will no question cause major digestive issues

um you know doubling your calories or something like that so um in addition like you don't want to just put on all the weight back as solely fat right ideally you want to put back as much as pure lean as possible to get back and that's practically very difficult to accomplish though right because they they come out they want to eat what you think they would want to eat and so that it's very difficult but i can tell you right now the better you are at that process the better your life is going to be on the way back down again because the ones that jump right back into these into high weights and it's all coming from fat. It's like, Oh God, now we got about now. Next camp is going to be even harder because now we've gained and we've

rebounded in a big fashion. So we have to be really, really, really careful about that. So you can look at reverse dieting and things like that. I don't know what you use there and you can tell us your approach, but there's a lot of systems to use, but you do have to be very careful with the reintroduction of calories. Yeah. So the, the final phase of my coaching program, the metabolic performance protocol is all about reverse dieting. It's super detailed. I have like, have people follow a very

specific approach for it, obviously with, you know, triggers built in for biofeedback because people will, hunger will return at different rates, weight, you know, some people will continue to lose throughout a reverse, which is like really wild because, well, technically you're still in a deficit as you're coming up from the bottom of the deficit. So your rate of loss should just slow, but then you're also increasing carbohydrate, which is going to increase glycogen storage, pour water into the cell, et cetera. So some people continue to lose. Some people kind of manage that, but the people that reverse the best see the best results. They can manage it much more simply moving forward. They're in a much more beneficial position, whether they want to

diet again the next season or something like that, if they have like a vacation or anything, or if they are, you know, maybe further away from like striking distance of lean where they might need a few, like maybe two 10, 12 week diets over like two back to back years or something like that. But the more due diligence you do on the back end of a diet is always going to be more beneficial for you long term. What are some of the like negative effects to being in a deficit for too long? I mean, you see, we've all heard of people that are just constantly dieting and you find out they've been

restricting calories for six, seven months, trying to get as lean as possible. What does that do in the long-term as far as how do how do you get people out of that cycle and and actually get them to a a healthy weight so some of it is psychological right people have fears around like you know if i don't eat this low like i'll you know put fat on or something like that which can kind of be true when you now have established your new normal as like very low. Um, and some of the, the, the, you know, potential downsides or risk factors or you mean metabolic adaptation, right? So when you're consistently eating at a large deficit, your body prioritizes functions in terms of like a safety standpoint from like an

evolutionary kind of standpoint, really. It's controlled starvation. So one of the first things you notice is like your metabolic rate, right? Your thyroid production, thyroid hormone production goes down because you don't need a lot of active T3 in your thyroid to be easily burning fat when you've only been consuming 1800 calories for the past six months so that's one that will generally go down um testosterone tanks and you notice people don't have a sex drive anymore the like morning wood all that stuff is gone because again from an evolutionary standpoint creating a child to to carry the term probably isn't a great i see you guys sometimes i sleep till eight and then i have one and i'm like oh your boy is back in the game and then by like i'm super fucking tired i'm like nope not happening yeah so that's like one uh kind of like a quick aside there that's actually something that you

will generally like when you when you know you're like approaching like a surplus or eating sufficiently like those like random nighttime boners and you know morning boners and stuff will come back and you're like oh wow i forgot i haven't had one of those for like six months when i wasn't eating enough how many years have you been doing this show for i thought you're gonna ask me a question about how many bones i have i'm not sure i was like you see he throwing them that way? I've lived with you for many years. I know that answer. That's right.

We were in a hostel together one time. One time? Months. For a long time. No matter how many years you've been doing this show, there's just certain topics that cannot come up without, like you know jokes are just going to go. It just doesn't matter.

Oh, yeah. You can't get to go. Like, it just doesn't matter. Oh, yeah. We are. Morning Wood has got to be at the top. Absolutely. Although I will say over time that the jokes about the word snatch and the word jerk and whatnot, those have declined over time as we've all very obviously have matured so much in the last 10 years. Now we just feel like we need a trophy if we get morning wood

uh and he had a question about kind of more transient changes to your metabolic rate and what the what the actual research and science says from a practical perspective here um of course you know going through undergrad and graduate school learning textbook exercise science you learn about things like uh excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, EPOC, high intensity training kind of leads to like an elevated metabolism for a short period of time. And I remember people always talking about that with respect to fat loss, but thinking that it's probably kind of trivial. It's just, it's not the big picture, but what does the actual research say about that? Yeah, that's pretty much what it'll say. It doesn't, it depends. So we'll think about it this way. Let's say that high intensity intervals and CrossFit style training, just calorically alone led to an extra 35 calories of EPOC, right? And let's say 2500 calories is a total amount throughout the day. So in one case, if you were to do steady state exercise, it was 2,500 calories.

And with the high intensity stuff, it was 2,530. Now, is that 30 important or not? Well, you could argue that both ways. Some would say that's such a trivial amount, it's not important. Others could say, well, over the course of a month, that's a half a pound or, you know, whatever the math ends up being or third of a pound, right? And so over the course of a year, there's three or four or five six pounds which is true so like it depends on like how personally i think that uh application is so much more important than 30 calories so which one is more sustainable for you and there's bigger things like injury and movement patterns and muscles like

all these other things dwarf the 30 calories to me. But if somebody wanted to be very specific about it, because of the same token, we can't go back and argue things like, I'll just be careful of, you know, how much ketchup you use, because even though it's 30 calories, at the end of the year, it adds up to six pounds. We can't say that one's important and then say that the EPOC one, like, is it, right?

So we bitch about all these things one way or the other. You have to be consistent with your logic. So, like, I honestly don't worry about things like EPOC. It doesn't make a bit of difference when we're programming our stuff because I know it's not going to make that big of a change. And it's easier for me to just go from, I'd say, lathering your bread and butter to skimming your bread and butter. That's a bigger difference than EPOC would cause for the thing the thing so to me the nutrition side is way easier to manipulate if you're just

paying attention to calories um so i don't worry about that um but this is when it comes back to aaron's expertise which is okay putting it into practice with people right so i could tell you that the science that's the number you're looking for like you know 30 calories or so how you use that is it's not a practitioner question it seems like the easiest thing is to regulate your intake rather than try to to regulate your your expenditure yeah a thousand times easier yeah so to eat a thousand calories less not that i'm recommending you jump to a thousand calories less but to eat a thousand calories less is way easier than burning an extra thousand calories each day.

Orders of magnitude. Yeah. And I mean, some of that can just come from like food selection skills, right? That's a big one. So like one of the biggest ones I would say with, you know, if you're out there listening and you are going to be approaching a calorie deficit or something like that, boiled potatoes, crazy high satiety for not that much carbohydrate and other types of foods like boiled potatoes. So like your squashes,

acorn squash, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, those sorts of things. My favorite being, I can't think of, delicata squash. You can eat an exorbitant amount of those for not that much carbohydrate. So just coming down to food selection, going with leaner cuts of meat, you know, and you can save fat right there. You're still getting a volume from the protein. You're getting your protein in, of course, but you can, there's these little things that food selection really does make a massive difference when you are in a deficit. And even a surplus too, you know, when you're eating in a 10, you know, 15%, maybe surplus for a very long time, like I'm eating a lot right now know when you're eating in a 10 you know 15 maybe surplus for a very long

time like i'm eating a lot right now i'm not eating boiled potatoes because that's not going to let me hit all the numbers i need to hit yeah how are any other ones that uh you were like i know you're gonna say no food is bad and anything fits in a plan all that but are there any other ones where you're like if people are trying to lose weight this one's a boy this isn't your best option typically um i will generally have people not go with like regular pastas. I will push people towards like black bean pastas, chickpea pastas, especially because those are going to be a little bit higher in protein too. And when we're in a diet, you know, we're going to have a higher protein intake and because carbohydrates are generally down to some degree,

we need to create that deficit from somewhere. It helps with any kind of foods that you can help to get some extra protein in dried fruit get away from that stuff like 17 17 apricots and four bites all of a sudden terrifying and that gets back to the gas problem holy crap dried fruit will light you up um actually andy there's oh sorry i was gonna say andy there's many ways to to calculate your calories um do you know what the research says about which is the most accurate or does it even really matter because you're just guessing in the end anyway and food labels are all you know skewed by 20 or whatever it is and so like even if you are trying to hit the calories that you supposedly need you're not anyway like what are your thoughts on that that's so interesting because the next question i was going to ask aaron was related to that like

if you guys even take the time to measure bmr or rmr or estimate how you go about that because uh yeah i'm doug i have an hour video it's actually i think it's like an hour and a half on quantity versus quality and i go through like all the examples and rationale and you named a couple of them like simple measurement stuff is off the stuff you put into my food pyramid.gov etc is is off the food labels can be up to 20 off so you're never going to get within 10 or 15 anyways so there's certainly an argument of why even bother counting calories if you're never going to get within 10 or 15 percent anyways so there's certainly an argument of why even bother counting calories if you're not even remotely close to accurate there's a bunch of them but so that actually transitions in nicely to the question i want which is like how do you guys actually handle this aaron to like know how many calories you give people knowing the

fact that you don't have a damn clue what they're actually burning and then they're not gonna have a damn clue what they're actually eating exactly um i use generally uh the i know i'm gonna pronounce it poorly the mifflin saint saint jor as like the the bmr estimation and then i want to say it's catch mccardle is what takes the activity multiplier right yeah yeah and that is like that is a ballpark starting point for maintenance for us um and we're assuming that we can be somewhere within a few hundred calories of this is probably accurate, but it's just a, it's just, you know, data entry point zero for us. And then we assume we're going to eat roughly at that for a period of like 10 to 14 days. Is our weight slowly trending up? Is it slowly trending down? Probably lets us know

whether we're truly under, truly over. So that kind of helps with the starting point for estimating calories. Okay. Follow-up question then. Let's say 2,500 to make math easy. That's your starting point. You don't know, right? We're all guessing. And three weeks go by. The other stuff is taken care of. They're sleeping, they're drinking water, and the training's pretty consistent. And they're not moving an inch. Let's give it a month, right, so we can tease out other factors. What's the first step? Do you then start taking calories down, or do you try to start manipulating things like thermal effect

or, like, types of carbohydrates? Like, what do you do first? Yeah, so, I mean, two-part way I'll answer this. So first, I never take anyone especially a new client down first never um it's like like dieting safely and sustainably is kind of like a privilege like you need to demonstrate to me that you have the skills and perceptions in order to do this um especially because so many people have come from like coaches who have not helped them in the best way or given them the best information.

And then they're worse off than they started. And like, that is one thing I will not do. We will, you will leave me better than when you came to me in terms of information quality and stuff. So we always go up first. And the first thing kind of to circle back to the question around tracking, I generally tell people, okay, the less food labels you are tracking, the better off we will be. So using, you know, lean meats, things like rices, potatoes, you know, things that are grown, like, yes, there are going to be inaccuracies in your tracking. And I'm not overly concerned with, let's say using that same 2,500 target, you think you're tracking 2,500 calories. Realistically, you're hitting 2,700 every single day. As long as you are consistent in your inaccuracies, we use the trends to determine our rates, whether things are working, whether we need modification, et cetera. How does like the micronutrients play into this conversation?

So many people just focus on their macros, but there's a massive piece in micronutrients that rarely gets talked about just because one, there's so many of them and two, it's just confusing. Yeah. So, I mean, for me, one thing I will say is when, when with my clients, I, I wouldn't say I force anyone. I generally try and encourage everyone to use an application called chronometer specifically being, you can track your micronutrients in chronometer. So the food database is consisted of, there's basically two databases that really help with that, the USDA database and the NCCDB.

And they're basically like certified databases that have more information than just protein, fats, carbs, and fiber. So the micronutrients are super important. One, just from like a baseline, like I said before, you know, I take anyone in the diet wherever I want you to demonstrate to me that you can, you know, build a decent diet. And that's going to include covering the majority of the nutrient, you know, baselines you need.

So the one example I'll usually use when people are like, oh, well, if you're not paying attention to your micronutrients, like one, what is one of the most common things we talk about with metabolic rate thyroid, right? There are a couple, you know, micronutrients that we need specifically to make sure that we can only, we can produce enough thyroid hormone and that the conversion from, you know, T4 to T3 can take place. So those are generally going to be like iodine, selenium, and then the amino acid tyrosine. So that's usually where, like, that's an example of where if you don't pay attention to that, and maybe you were just, you know, never eating, you're like, Oh, well, my, I have these thyroid problems. But if you're

not giving your body the raw materials it needs to make for some of these conversions, and you know, enzymatic processes to take, to take occur to happen to happen happen whatever um you need to kind of fill those gaps so that you're not like oh my whatever's broken it's like no you're not giving it what it needs to do its freaking job yeah the you know i think it's really challenging for people it that let's just call it me like you're busy as hell and me sitting down and like having like the perfect meal with tons of like a big salad multiple times a day um it's just not a reality and i know there's a lot of micronutrients in in the meats that we eat but are there simpler ways that people can do it? Like if you're just, um, strapped on time and meal prep, you know, the people that struggle to just put all the pieces together and be planned out, but live a real life. Um, are, are there ways to kind of get around that

supplements or, um, that people can use? I mean, there are. It's generally like a patch band-aid solution. It will not – I don't want to say never. I don't like speaking in absolutes. It probably won't work as well as if you weren't. But, of course, like, I mean, with the example we talked with you guys, you have small children, you're short on time. There's different things. Like if you're taking like a decent multi,

and I don't even want to really go down that, that route, but, um, cause I just don't want to go down it, but, um, different things that you could get like a greens powder or something like that, which will help. It's not, but people try and use it as like a replacement thing. Like, Oh, I have this greens powder. I don't need to eat any vegetables or fruits, which is just absurd, but it's not like that. If you're eating a sufficient total amount of calories and the majority of your sources are lean meats, grains, rices, things that have been grown or harvested, fruits, vegetables, it's not like you might not be optimal, but it's not like you're going to be slowly declining over time type of deal.

I actually have a question that's super specific to you in that you have lived in like what? Nine different countries in the last two years, something insane from Vietnam to Mexico to Boulder. The country of Boulder. Yeah. It's its own little, it's its own little place in the world. So it happens when you've never lived Leafs and left San Diego, you just sort of.

The country of boulder colorado um but how how has your um i guess starting out like when you first go to a place do you notice massive changes in your gut and do you get sick every time you go somewhere? 100%. Nice. I'm trying to think. Now, we have been in Mexico. You've been in what? Vietnam, Mexico? Vietnam, Mexico, Bali, Colombia, Peru. Yeah, don't have kids, bro. Don't do it. Keep going.

A couple hundred countries you still got to go to. I did get sick here, yeah. You got sick when you came back to the states oh you're in mexico right now yeah i'm in mexico right now yeah the only country i didn't get sick in was um oh my god singapore that's because like singapore is like literally next level like you know i mean that place was crazy it was like probably throw you out if you get sick there. Right. Oh yeah. Leave the country. Probably. It's like 20, 20, 30 years in the future. It was my. Yeah. Have you, have you found it challenging to find quality food and

just get all the things that you need? Well, I changed what I need. So that's like one of the things that's been really cool about traveling is it really makes me like appreciate when we come back to the U.S. So the example I will use right now, I'm in like a lean gain period. I'm eating a lot of carbohydrate on my training day, 570 grams of carbs. I cannot wait to come back to the States and get my hands on cream of rice because it's going to make my life so much easier so you're just basically eating like tacos all day oh no i can't oh

there's a taco place right around the corner that's oh it's awesome these little street tacos the pastor oh my goodness but if you're loading up you should be just getting after it 500 calories 500 grams of carbohydrate you could substitute substitute some of that out for a couple tacos every day yeah it's like 50 cents each yeah i don't even know they're very inexpensive expensive. I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's changing each, each place we go. I change,

I adapt to what, to what we can find available. Yeah. Andy, earlier you, you briefly mentioned the thermic effect of feeding. How does that play into especially phallus in this conversation? Yeah.

So calories in calories out, right. The people that I would say have issues with that equation generally don't understand the old calories out portion very well. And so by that, I mean, calories out is the sum total of all caloric expenditure, including energy used to metabolize food. And that amount differs between food items. It even differs within food items when you change the preparation method. So Aaron was talking about boiling potatoes. Notice he said boiled potatoes. He didn't say baked potatoes. That differs, right? So if you were to take like a steak and compare that to that same steak, you know, blended up or less ridiculous, just even, you know, diced up, you know, chew your food better if you will and the amount of energy it will take you to digest and fully absorb and then pass that amount of food differs

in such that it would burn more calories you know digesting the steak than it would the previously digested stuff basically chopped up this is why things like different types of protein get into your system faster than other ones because they're pre-digested if you you will. So if you're going to compare calories, this is kind of one of the questions I was asking earlier about what's your first step? Do you take calories down or you just change food items from ground beef to a steak and keep it the same fat content? Because that alone is going to have a small change in the amount of calories you are burning. So not the in portion, but the out portion of it. So that is a big player in this. So whether you are burning so not the in portion but the the out portion of it so that is a big uh player in it so whether you are eating your things raw whether you're boiling them whether

you're baking them or even just the preparation methods of any foods matters a little bit the question is you know like how many calories different is ground beef than steak if they're you know again equated for fat content all that i don't know probably not much um probably a small amount but i don't know like there is it's technically a difference though uh regarding the the baked versus boiled potatoes comment that also changes the glycemic index and gly and or glycemic load of the potatoes is that correct i'll just go over to aaron you know what about that i mean yeah it's just coming from a there was a basically a study done uh satiety index and i mean the boiled potatoes were like i don't want

to say double but i think damn near double um but everything else was which was pretty wild yeah that's a resistant starch issue right so you can Google around a little bit on that. It's also in some of the fart videos. But yeah, so you can change, you can manipulate the type of carbohydrate in foods by the preparation methods. This is the same for all things. So if you take a fruit and you freeze it versus eating it fresh, that changes a little bit. This is why when you take a grape and you put it in the freezer and you eat it, it tastes like the most amazing thing you've ever had in your life.

Frozen blueberries, the same thing. So the monosaccharides, polysaccharides, or the type of carbohydrates are changed by preparation methods. So this is the cold pasta thing, right? So if you take pasta and eat it fresh or you eat it the next day cold, it's now been converted into a resistant starch, which basically means it's like a fiber. So you won't be able to get as much of the energy out of it,

which means if you ate the same quote-unquote amount of calories, you would actually have less weight gain with the resistant starch because you wouldn't actually be able to break down as much and absorb as many of those calories. So the boiling of it, all that stuff matters to the type of source. So nutrition can be incredibly complicated if you're trying to take it to that level. And sometimes you have to, but I would imagine, Aaron,

probably most of your people never need to get that detailed, right? Yeah, there's other triggers we'll play that are much simpler from an execution standpoint. Or, I mean, things like that. It's just your margins are small for accurately measuring it and knowing if people have different schedules or whatever gets really hard. Are there? No, no, no. Sorry.

One interesting thing I wanted to add on to what Andy was saying about different food preparation methods. Egg whites. Like if you have liquid egg whites in a carton and you just like put it in your protein shake or anything like that by the form it's egg whites like if you have liquid egg whites in a carton and you just like put it in your protein shake or anything like that by the the form it's in you'll only basically be able to i don't want to say use the word absorb but like get you know around 50 of the protein you think you do from it so that's why cooking your egg whites is important because you won't um basically pick up you only pick about half of the protein if it's when it's in its liquid form so just one of those things like denatured nature's agent or denaturation i should say um changes

with your different foods are there any wearables that exist and that you would actually be able to get an uh an accurate representation of calories out i know that the ones that are currently like purchasable by the general public are awful. And that something telling you you burn 4,500 calories on a daily basis is like not even close. It's like the easiest way to add 10 pounds is to buy a Fitbit. But do they have any in a lab or anything that is wearable to get a more accurate representation of calories out. Andy, do you know of anything?

No, they don't. Nothing is good. I mean, if you want to go into a laboratory, you can certainly get that tested in terms of a wearable. No. The, the honest answer is I think the basic equations that Aaron was talking about earlier are pretty damn close um the only people trying people get into trouble with that are the the modifiers right and so everyone thinks they're super active it's like no you probably didn't need the 1.5 multiplier you needed the 1.2 i'm always a 1.2 yeah i want to be the one like four so bad yeah then i remember when i had the gym and I was coaching four hours a day and picking up weights off the floor all day long and still walking 10,000 plus

steps. And each class is a mile and you're like, Oh yeah, it might even be like, Oh, I might just be at BMR. I might just be zeroed out in comparison to what actually active is throughout the day.

Yeah. I think the one thing I was going to say, even if there was like a super accurate wearable that told you like your expenditure, kind of what I was getting where, but Andy, you know, started with your,

your intake. Most people are wildly inaccurate with their intake anyway. So you'd still have to use that trend. Okay. I've been following this for, you know, 10 days. Am I trending up? Am I trending down? That's really most, the most beneficial way I have found, you know, thus far to accurately measure that. Yeah. I want to ask two questions, uh, totally separate, but one, I don't want to forget this one. Um, I'll throw this one to you first, but don't answer yet. Let me answer

the second one first. So the first one being frequency. So do you mess with feeding frequency, so amount of meals per day? When someone comes in, they say, I have a broken metabolism, or I need to increase my metabolism. Have you found success changing meal frequency? So don't answer that one yet. Keep that in the back pocket. The second one though, um, regarding, do you like to alter the calorie intake like day by day based on activity level? Or do you just sort of say like, Hey, 2200 calories throughout the week, kind of every day. And I know some days you're going to train some days or not, but at the end of the week, it'll sort of average out which one, which approach do you prefer? So I generally, it depends on the client. Uh, most most majority of people we have one set number all

week long um because for a lot of people just getting people to semi-accurately hit their numbers you know day to day is enough of a you know i don't want to struggle but enough of like a a sign off on right so there's there's that one. And again, using those things like, or this week, this week, and assuming that people are going to be training for roughly, you know, four times a week, maybe five times a week, having those rest days generally. So that's what I start with. And I forgot the first question. I'm sorry. So the first question was frequency. Do you, if someone specifically, if they come in thinking they have a broken or slow metabolism have you found either increasing or decreasing the the meals per day uh is helpful for getting that back up or not or what have you found in just the clients you've worked with

so generally i will lean on their hunger uh to start so what happens when you people think that we like don't have or i have a broken metabolism right their hunger response usually isn't great they probably haven't been eating breakfast or something like that for like months at a time or they have like 15 grams of whey protein for breakfast well i'm not hungry in the morning because you don't need no more you know your body's not going to continue to send you that signal when you're not listening to it for months and years on end so generally i'll try and get people starting to eat a little bit earlier. And then we'll kind of, once they start getting full from their meal sizes is generally,

I'm going to add an additional meal because the example I give is like, let's say you're doing 3000 calories per day, three meals, pretty standard BLD, thousand calories meal. There's going to be large meals, especially if you're going with a higher carbohydrate approach, lots of volume there. Generally adding a fourth meal and then going down in total caloric load for every single meal will be a little bit easier. We'll keep your digestion a little bit smoother throughout the day, especially if we have a higher carbohydrate

number, we'll help keep our blood glucose regulation a little bit more stable and less peaks and valleys there as well. Beautiful. Strager, tell people about the program and where they can find you. So Metabolic Performance Protocol, it is 22 weeks long. I launch it in iterations. So I'm sure by the time this episode releases, the next iteration will be starting somewhere in the June timeframe as of just kind of wrapping up the start of one for March. You can find me at strakernutritioncompany.com or on Instagram at Aaron underscore Straker and also on Facebook at Straker Nutrition Company. I just got off the phone with all a couple of

our bros that are in this class with you. Isn't it so rad? All of our friends just stick around. It is really cool. I got people from CrossFit PB doing Diesel Dad shit. All that tells me is they're in their garages right now wishing they were still back at crossfit pb slanging barbells with me and i love it yeah it's cool that you know as we've all kind of scattered a little bit throughout the country and the world i guess from from pb still keeping in touch with people and you know making different connections if you have any chance of making greg pitts look stronger jesus you're a miracle worker i hope he listens to this i think we'll be i think we'll be pretty uh pretty on point with that andy galpin yeah andy galpin uh actually aaron question while we're here who's like the man if you're listening like who's like that oh this is the person who

needs who who has the best response response as a result from your program? Like who is it really good at? I guess I should say, so the protocols also, I only will take males in it. I built it basically specifically off the male physiology and there's just the differences between the two. So really, if you're like a male who's been resistance training, you enjoy like eating healthy.

You don't have like a massive amount of weight to lose, like let's say, let like 3030 pounds or less or something like that. And you've really just been struggling to put all the pieces together. Because you know, this person says keto, this person says low carb, this person says, you know, plant based, whatever. And you really just want like clear direction, who from a standpoint of improving your physique, improving your health, improving your physiology, and learning a lot about it. So we have a lot of conversations. We have weekly Zoom calls with everyone in the iteration,

specifically talking about a lot of the conversation stuff we've had on this podcast here. Awesome. Thank you, Andy. Galpin, where can people find you, bud? YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, best places, Andy Galpin. Get over to the YouTube for sure. It's so much fun watching those. Yeah, real quick, Andy, tell people what you have on YouTube

because you have a lot on YouTube. Yeah. All your classes on there? Yeah. So I teach graduate and senior senior this is college level uh sports nutrition strength conditioning program design muscle physiology and um all those videos for all my classes are are up and available for anybody for for either in five minute 25 and 55 minute but it's funny because every time i post like a 55 minute if it's not exactly 55 minute people

get pissed i'm like it's like a it's like an idea 55 sometimes means like an hour and a half sometimes it's like 48 sometimes sometimes 25 by a minute is like 16 minutes like you can never please everyone on the internet you try you essentially have a a full undergraduate exercise physiology um curriculum on your YouTube. Yeah, you can basically get a degree in exercise science just on my YouTube. Yeah, that's dope. Everyone should go watch your videos for sure. Yeah.

All right. You can find me on Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. You bet. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. Get over to barbellshrugged.com forward slash DieselDad where all the dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness.

And everybody that's in Palm Springs, San Diego, L.A., and Vegas, get over to Walmart. We're in the pharmacy. Three programs on the shelves. We'll see you guys next week. That's a wrap. Make sure you get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash DieselDad where all the dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic

without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. i also want to thank our friends over at organifi organifi.com forward slash shrugged save 20 and leaky gut guardian.com forward slash shrugged that is where you get to save 10 using the code shrugged friends we'll see you on tuesday diesel dad wednesday barbell shrugged friday diesel dad smashing it peace out friends