Barbell Shrugged - Going Wild with the Fat- Burning Man Abel James - 275

Episode Date: August 30, 2017

What’s better than peeing in a cup every two weeks? If you thought, “listening to this week’s podcast of Barbell Shrugged,” then you’re more than right. On today’s episode, we spoke with the [Fat-Burning] Man himself, Abel James (@fatburningman), about his super-successful Wild Diet, how the philosophy behind it is nothing new –– yet still absolutely revolutionary –– in terms of helping one achieve physical success, and why making the most of the food that you eat every day is so important for attaining and maintaining optimum health. Abel’s path to becoming the authority of eating right started in his early twenties when trying to do everything “right” just wasn’t… right. After experiencing the hardship of a fire that consumed everything he owned, Abel refocused his efforts, got in shape, and took on the moniker Fat-Burning Man. During this process, he realized that many of the so-called experts were hawking products and services that were more gimmick than substance, so he began thinking in terms of natural remedies to get in shape. Ultimately, he found that a diet is not about starving yourself, but instead treating health as nature intended and eating in a way that becomes a sustainable, lifelong habit. From this emerged Abel’s credo of eating RAW (Recently Alive and Well), and it’s the bedrock of the Wild Diet. He discusses how avoiding processed approximations of food and getting wild-caught, free-range food can help consumers become mindful of what is going into their bodies. Stayed tuned for a fascinating and educational conversation about eating, marketing, and other fun facts, like how Abel worked for the CIA, when he once peed into a cup every two weeks, and more! This Week on Barbell Shrugged, We Interview the Fat-Burning Man, Abel James, to Discuss: Abel’s Wild Diet and its distinction from Paleo The importance of eating foods that were Recently Alive and Well (RAW) Taking a mindfulness practice approach to eating Avoiding processed, low-quality foods

This is what I did for years and it took me my entire life to get burned by it. You know, to kind of find the top and then realize that I was following a lie and now do the exact opposite. I just know that most people will never go through that process so I feel like it's my responsibility to tell people like, whoa, this is not as hard as you think it is. I started up my podcast because I saw the people who were at the top, and it was mostly big media like Jillian Michaels, right? I remember that.

And I hated that. And I had been burned by reading some of the running magazines and got into the wrong supplements, tried, just drank the wrong Kool-Aid. And a lot of that was because of my doctor and just like conventional wisdom. And so having been burned by that, I wanted to take it down. And so that's one of the reasons, I think that passion was one of the reasons that went up so fast and kind of kicked her off the number one list. And, uh, I think the first year I had over a million downloads and I was like, Holy wow. Like that's, that's nuts. Uh, and won a bunch of

awards and all that. But what's interesting is that in the years that have followed and I don't, I don't tend to make the establishment very happy. I will like play along with it a little bit, mostly because I want to figure out how it works But in the years since zero words, but like 25 million more downloads, right? So like when you do the math and you think about that It's it's very interesting to see how all this plays out Because I know that people are still getting awards and award things are happening But it's like when you're not invited to certain things and you can see how it's – Well, you can see how it works in the music industry too

or in indie film or mainstream film or whatever. And so I think what people need to be careful of today is trusting the wrong people who have like all these perfect things in their bio, right? Because you can buy those. You can fake those. Yeah. What are some things you look like? What are some telltale signs that someone might be not legit? I think if you take a step back and think,

what is this person selling to me? Because usually if you hear someone on media, there is some sort of agenda or there's something that they're doing. Otherwise, they wouldn't be there. It could be ego, I suppose. But in a lot of cases, listen to the built-in pitch at the end. And on my podcast, on yours as well, I'm sure it's one thing to mention, yes, we have products in this area too. Like we sell meal plans, cookbooks, things that, uh, things like that. But, um, in a lot of cases it'll be like one step beyond. So the typical diet, uh, fitness model is that, or it used to be, uh, you sell a book to somebody and then in that book you sell consumables which could be supplements or

meal shakes or meal plans or something like that and that's where the real money is it's not in the book at all right so that the book is a lost leader and you're really you're selling your diet to sell your shake and to sell your oils and to sell your whatevers. It's not information. It's marketing, but it's disguised as information. As information, yeah. So if you take a step back, I think you just have to develop a sense for that because new people are popping up all the time. I agree.

I think you've got to look at it from where they're coming from. It's got to come from a place of, like, you legitimately want to help that person, not trying to sell. Like, it's fine to, like like sell your stuff and push your stuff. Like I believe like, yeah, if you put your information out there, you know, you should get a return and get that value back. But you got to look at it from what is the place where it's coming from. Yeah.

It's got to be from a good place of actually trying to help. And as humans, we can sense that. Sure. We've all got that. I just think it's been coached out of us. Like we're all kind of, we're too busy. We're too, I mean, the world is too high, high energy and buzzy. We're stressed out all the time. We all just need to take a deep breath and be like, yeah, why are we all here? I'm like, I'm curious. How did you, how did you, uh, get into

the fitness fitness space? Yeah, it was by, uh, well, I've always been competitive and, and relatively athletic, like when I was younger, but I realized I was too small, like after puberty to take it too seriously. Cause I was also doing music and other stuff like that. But, um, uh, I loved playing basketball, uh, soccer, baseball. It was really into sports as a social thing growing up. And it was always that. Um, and then I got then I got into competitively running and doing cross-country running and biking events. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was terrible at it. Yeah, because you're not supposed to be racing.

I think if you're out in the mountains, you're out in the woods. It's kind of fun to race sometimes, but it's more about connecting. And that was always the thing that i loved about it so for me when uh i tried to follow i the thing that happened is i got a great job after college because i needed to pay off my loans as quickly as possible got so i had awesome insurance and i wanted to use it so so you just get hurt as much as possible no actually i tried to squeeze it for all the juice make the most. But no, I had never had someone go over my family history and be like,

these are the things that you're probably going to be having or experiencing in the next few years. This is the way that you need to eat. You better start doing this now or else you're going to have a heart attack. What did they tell you? Well, they said, you know, stop eating red meat and go low fat, no cholesterol. Because there is heart disease in my family. There's high blood pressure. There's like every family has this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, people gaining weight as they age. That's how people die. Yeah. Every family has it. And so then, but I'm in my early 20s, right? And so I'm going in and peeing in a cup every two weeks because I could. And it was like the insurance covered it.

And I could figure out what was going up, what was going down, kind of how to read the chart. So you were really into like the measuring factor. My mom is a nurse practitioner and has been my whole life. Or at least a nurse and went to school when we were growing up. And so she was always involving me in that. And then she's also an herbalist. So instead of being treated by traditional... No.

Being treated by traditional Western medicine, we didn't have that much money. And she would literally treat us with herbs from the backyard or plants from the backyard. And she got really into that, wrote her first book about that, started speaking about it. So that was always very influential. But then, of course, you know, I thought that I was better than that. Thought that the world was cooler.

Western medicine is better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And after about a year of trying Western medicine with the best insurance that money can buy, I was, you know like 30 pounds overweight on a half dozen different prescription medications including an anti-depressant to help me sleep and uh a litany of other how old were you i was i think i was 23 or 24 years old damn right i was 12 prescriptions if you look at a half dozen like it's an interesting it's an interesting thing that happened.

Right. You were unusual. You were an unusual 23-year-old. Thank you. But most 23-year-olds are just kind of like. Drinking it in a club. They're not even trying. And it seemed like the harder you tried, the worse it got.

And that was the thing that I ultimately learned and what pissed me off so much. Because I was looking at my friends who were going and drinking beer and eating wings and like playing soccer um but still fit in their early 20s right and then i'm looking at me and i'm like trying super hard i'm running maybe 30 miles a week sometimes uh but i i know that i'm following a very specific kind of advice and i didn't know if this is just the way that i'm aging that's what my doctor said you know it's just like you know look around you this is Washington DC this is how people look this is how people age you know you get a little pooch and yeah you know you know what just go along just just go along with the crowd but anyway I was I was like keeping track of what

I was doing to some degree and um and actually it's kind of weird to talk about it now but when i first moved to austin texas it was right there it was to the the same address this was like our mail room it was a crappy apartment complex and i lived here for about eight months moved all my stuff here all my instruments the new album i was working on and recording there all the stuff i was using for working consulting at home all my notes like everything i had and then i came home on one one night on a weekend and it was up in a 30-foot wall of flames and just lost everything and uh that was the thing that totally just crushed any hope that I had of making that lifestyle work. You know what I mean?

That was the thing where it's, my life was such a mess at that point that I didn't have anything in particular to do because there was so much, it was such a crap shoot. Yeah. But I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, I gotta fix this. Yeah.

And I was, I looked like I was in my forties. So that whole thing was another play on Fat Burning Man, where Fat Burning Man came from. There's a lot of weird fire energy. That's what I was trying to get at. Like, where did Fat Burning come from? Okay.

Yeah. So, I mean, it also, I'm very careful with my words because I think of it as, like a musician, again, they're going to be three different levels to the meaning of your song. Yeah. Right? It's not just like the word as it's written. Usually there's like a meta meaning or a few of them.

There's a subtext. And so, yeah, I just liked Fat-Burning Man because it's so silly. Yeah. But actually kind of serious. Right. And you kind of play on words where you never know exactly what it means. Yeah. But you remember it.

Yeah. And it's kind of fun. And I want that to be the spirit that people come to this with, where it's not like the people who come to me and treat me as a guru, which I don't ask for and try not to encourage. But it's like, don't take your advice from a musician named Fat Burning Man. Like, don't follow that to a T. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? And that's kind of my point, too. It's a little bit making fun of gurus and satirical at the same time that it's very serious and you can learn from it. But I kind of – I see everything as a little bit like that. And it's fun. Right? You have to have fun with it. So what did you start doing?

Like what clicked and then how did that – The biggest thing was I stopped doing what I was trying to do to be healthy. Because what I thought healthy was was what I read in my dad's healthy living magazines and whatever. And what I read in the fitness magazines. And I didn't know that that's all marketing. And so I was eating low fat. And that means that you're eating higher carb and higher sugar which is um knowing what i know about my genetics now it's obvious why that didn't work but even more than

that it was um it it allowed for an encouraged processed food and low quality food and that's the biggest thing that i was just like okay that's an easy thing to subtract and it's kind of where i came from like mom told me not to trust clear or potato chips yeah you know everything in between kind of and so it's obvious right that like we should be eating vegetables and that we shouldn't be afraid of the fats that we've been eating for thousands of years or the entirety of of human existence it's just you know my on my dad's side of the family in the 1950s they were organic farmers and dairy farmers up in new hampshire and uh none of this stuff is new it's more just like we're

going back to the way that we ate a couple of generations ago so i started doing that and i lost like over uh 20 pounds in around a month and it just came off you came back your apartment's burned down yeah okay so then i was i was in the trough for a while there um this is before you lost any weight though yeah so that was kind of me at my sickest and trying to figure everything out so for a while there i was just trying to figure it out and like who do i? Where do I get my information? So it was a combination of, um, definitely my mom was a huge influence. And, uh, also my, my older brother had, uh, he's a little nuts. Like I am in the sense that you just get really into something and then you go for it. So I saw him go, um, from being 150 pounds to well over two 20 in just like six months because he watched pumping iron for the first time it happens it happens and so but but something also happens to you and your your brain and your

experience when you go through something like that because uh it changed my idea of what was possible for me yeah right and so um when i did look around when i was in my early 20s, I was I was normal. I was average for people in D.C., even for a lot of people in my family. It's just like, yeah, you got a little stomach. You're a little puffy. It's that's that's that's like the norm now, which is sad. But yeah, when I saw how easy my brother made it look and I know that he's my brother, it was like, yeah, we got this. Yeah, we can. I'm going to try this out and see what happens. And yeah, I was just, I was so impressed by my body's ability to heal itself. Once I stopped the things that I was doing because I was trying to be healthy.

And that was, I just felt like I was tricked. That was the biggest thing. That's why I had so much passion for it because shame on you. Because I was, and I'm not bragging here, or at least I'm not trying to, but I was valedictorian. I was a researcher.

This is what I did for years. And it took me my entire life to get burned by it. To kind of find the top and then realize that I was following a lie and now do the exact opposite. I just know that most people will never go through that process. So I feel like it's my responsibility to tell people like, Whoa, this is not as hard as you think it is.

There are like specific things. Yeah. Well you put your faith and trust into some people that you thought like these people should know, you know? And then it was, it was, it was the opposite. Yeah. Well, because my doctor always looked way worse than me. That's like sign number one probably.

Like if your doctor looks worse than you, man, if your doctor is sitting there smoking cigarettes, you need to quit smoking. Like hold up now. Yeah, totally. It's interesting. We live in a system that the most important part of the system is that it keeps the system alive.

Yes. So it's not put in place. It may have been put in place originally to be helpful, but when you get into things like once it gets 100 years down the road and it starts evolving, it's usually just trying to keep itself going more and more. It's protecting itself. Yeah.

Yeah. So you started your podcast to just let people know like what the situation is, what, how it was for you, share your story. Yeah. Well, not, not only that, but also, um, hopefully have something to offer that was a little bigger than me. Cause it wasn't just me talking into the microphone. Like the idea with a podcast is that I would have um the ability to interview other people who knew

more than i did because for me it was more like wow i just went through something that i didn't totally understand like it worked way better than i was expecting holy crap uh can you help me figure out how all this works and so i started with people who had lost more than 100 pounds who had kept it off for at least five years I felt like that was a metric that was that you could use to be like wow and I also looked at who is um uh very fit or looks good and shouldn't and and like old people generally yeah to be out of shape or whatever, but you look at someone like Mark Sisson, and you're like, I think that guy figured something out. And,

uh, I fortunately over the years, it's been great to, uh, become to know, like come to know Mark as a friend and as a mentor in some ways. Um, and it's been great to collaborate in,

in many ways over the years with, with different people. But that's what really, uh, I think made it grow in the same with with different people but that's what really uh i think made it grow in the same way for you guys it's if any one of you tried to sit down and do this podcast by yourself be a totally different thing than you guys creating something together all contributing and so i wanted it to be that and uh a very cool and interesting thing happens when you start doing that for a while is you meet a lot of great people like you guys of course but also some of that knowledge in this moment right now

yeah this is it doesn't get better it really doesn't get better than this Um, but over the years you, you start to, um, all evolve in your own way and contribute more and more. And you can see how your knowledge rubs off on each other and how the interactions that you have, you might, you might not think that they mean that much at the time, but then you see them later kind of like putting whatever you said, your advice or your, your feedback into either a product that they're making or a thing they're not doing anymore, or just like a change in the way that they smile because they're happier now because they let something go. Right. It's, um, that's what I really love about all of this. And so, um, I think that's why the podcast has done well. Cause I haven't been in a rush either. It's like, I'm not, it's not a sellout. I'm not trying to get the biggest people on earth on it. Like I've had my mom on.

I'm having a nine-year-old on like in a couple of weeks. So it's just like I'm trying to get anyone who has something to contribute. For sure. On there because I know that big media is not going to do it. And all those podcasts that are bought and paid for are not going to do it. Those voices will not be heard. And I think it's about time that someone takes advice from a nine-year-old who knows how to cook

and knows how to use principles of nutrition that he learned from reading my book, The Wild Diet, when he was eight, to lean down for his wrestling competition. Nine years old? Yeah. I think he was eight while he was doing it. This kid's more of an adult than some 50-year-olds. Exactly.

So when adults come to me and they're just like, I don't think I can learn how to cook. I don't like vegetables. I don't like vegetables. I just did it. Right, right, right. Puts you in your place. Yeah. So anyway, I like practicing creative freedom, too, because that's part of the fun.

And that's also the reason that we got into this at the beginning, cause it was sitting around with your friends having fun. And it's, it's sad to see that go away for a lot of people, right. Who just kind of, it's not always like they sell out, but it's like, why are they doing this anymore? Right. Like they're either retreading over the same ideas or just pimping out sponsors the whole time or they're not contributing. They're not creating anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Let's take a break real quick. When we come back, I want to figure out what exactly good music sounds like. Hey everybody, Marcus Gersey, co-host of the Barbell Business Podcast. If you're a gym owner who's looking to fix, build, or just take your gym from good to great, tune in every Tuesday to the Barbell Business Podcast.

You can find us on iTunes and anywhere else you can download a podcast, or you can watch the video version on YouTube on the Barbell Shrugged channel. Tune in to find Doug, myself, and Mike Bledsoe talking about the latest tips and tricks to take your business to the next level. We'll see you Tuesday.

Some people, they have no education on health or nutrition or whatever and that but they do watch the biggest loser yeah and they do watch reality television right or they watch you know the dr oz or whatever it is like and it's these these sources of information that do have some information but it's not quite what we would call like the best information as true professionals so like i'm wondering you know what's what what's actually put out on a show like you were on that people see versus what the people that are on the show who might be experts, maybe they're not experts,

but they're portrayed as experts. What's the reality in the background? So much more complicated and often dark than most people would know. And there is, I think just built into the business model of reality TV, exploitation involved. That's the thing that creates the drama and the funny thing that has to happen. And so I would say that would be the undercurrent of it all. And also part of that is if you're the talent

and you're the one who's in front of the television, then they want you to go off and do something crazy. That's the whole point of the show. They want you to get hurt in a lot of cases. They want to see something happen on TV, right? And it's not about like any particular TV show. Like this is the model for all of them, right? Like it should be obvious, but that's what makes TV. And so like knowing, coming into something like that, knowing that you're going to be mistreated on purpose and put into very uncomfortable situations. I just viewed it as like this is a poker match and I'm going to maintain my composure and hopefully try to do something that's a little bit unique, which is actually being educational on a reality TV show.

Because I saw it as an opportunity to not only help Kurt, who was the guy who I was coaching, who started off at 52% body fat, more than 352 pounds, with over a million dollars of medical bills from the year before. How much money and medical bills? Over a million dollars. Wow. He was in rough, rough shape. And so I saw it as an opportunity to help him, an opportunity to understand the TV landscape a little bit better to see if that might be somewhere where I would want to work in the future or get future gigs from, and we could talk more about that later. And then also hopefully show people who are on the other end, the reality TV audience,

who generally isn't a part of listening to this show or my show. We didn't have a TV. My parents didn't have a TV. My whole family had to drive to hotels in the area to watch me on TV. That's how weird it is. But I saw it more as an exercise like that where it's like I'm an outsider who maybe can come on and hopefully do some good here. And then by the end of the show, Kurt was down 87 pounds after about a little more than three and a half months, like about four months. He was off all of his prescription medications, didn't need them anymore.

And he looked like 20 years younger. He went rock climbing after that. He went from like basically being in his deathbed to rock climbing. And I was just so inspired myself and I learned a lot from him. But I think more importantly, like I said about seeing my older brother, people had never heard someone go on national television, I don't think, and talk about intermittent fasting, the importance of eating the whole animal bone broth, and talk about how to use fitness effectively to get the right kind of workout,

and all this stuff. Don't eat anything you see advertised on television was part of my message, and I would say that literally sometimes, and I couldn't believe what they let me say on air that they put on air. Yeah, because you think about it. Now that I'm thinking about it,

every commercial that... Right. Yeah. If a company can afford to advertise, it's probably not somebody that's producing kale. Right. Right. You never see broccoli or celery or kale

or anything like that advertised because there's no money. There's no margin in it. What makes money is when you can make a product that looks like something that's kind of real or looks like something that would be good but is like a fake approximation of it that you can kind of tinker with and sell for pennies on the dollar. But if you're talking about the – like my brother is an organic farmer

in upstate New York, and they're lucky to break even every year, right? They're not making money. And the money that you give them goes like 100% into broccoli and seeds for that broccoli. And just like, you know what I mean? The margins on real food is very thin. And part of the reason that I've seen is we've basically made – our industrialized food system has made food artificially cheap. Yes. So our entire culture has been conditioned to believe that they can eat a meal for $3.

Right, yeah. And in reality, like a real – like people talk about they can't believe that I spend $1,000 a month on my grocery bill or something like that and going to farmer's market and they're like fuck that's so much money sure and my wife and i were spending that much money on food when we were collectively making three thousand dollars a month yeah so a third of our income was going to that we've always prioritized our our diet yeah and and you know i've always for long time, I've been hip to how our country made some decisions around the corn industry and the subsidization of that and how that basically made food extremely cheap. It made calories cheap. It made calories cheap, not food. Right.

So it made calories really cheap. And now we have, we're probably our third generation into cheap food. Yeah. And so now when someone's cheap bad food yeah not the good food the good yeah so you go and buy like uh like a piece of steak like you can get a ribeye that's you know not grass-fed yeah you know for four dollars a pound and you can get you know basically any of the processed food in the middle of the aisles and stuff like that very very cheap people can you know, they can spend less than

a couple hundred bucks a month on food and survive. And so when they, when they have a $500 car note and you know, they're spending a couple of grand on their house a month. And the idea of, you know, that much of the, their monthly income going to food is just a mind fuck. And so, uh, I think one of the things that's going to have to happen is people are going to have to, I don't know what it's going to take, but accept that you should be spending more money, more of what you do to work on food because almost all of our money used to go to food and shelter and not much else. Right. And now we have this, we live a lifestyle where there's so

much luxury and wealth even for people who don't make a lot of money they have air conditioning and flat screen tvs things that didn't exist 50 years ago and still complain about the cost of healthy food yeah and it's a mentality that is the issue. It's not in the conditioning by the structure that is our economic system. Yeah, because 98% of the world will laugh at what you just described. Like the fact that pathetic Americans who have flat screen TVs or sneakers or a watch, all of the things of their dreams in some cases. You started to travel the world a little bit. You can appreciate very quickly how little you need to be happy not just like

yourself while you're on the trip but the people you see them living and some of the happiest people if you just judged it by the look on their faces and how they kind of live their lives when you're walking around for a couple weeks trying to place out. Yeah, I have a friend who lives a third of the year in Nepal. Yeah. And he talks about how they get rocked by earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever. Probably earthquakes. Yeah, they get rocked like way too often and people lose their homes frequently. And the saying is, at least we have our tea.

Good day. Would you like some tea? Right. And they're is, at least we have our tea. Good day. Would you like some tea? Right. They're happy. Yes. Cause that's community. That's the thing that that's like the show must go on. Someone has your back. There's a lot that that symbolizes and we don't have that anymore either. It's like, uh, I lost everything in a fire and, and who is, who has your back in society now? Right. I think a lot of us don't feel that way. But I think in times like these, it's more important than ever that we build something like that.

And I think you guys are doing that right now. I see that this is all kind of a battle or a war of attention, right? Absolutely. And if people can be listening to or watching us right now, then we are winning compared to anything else that's happening in politics or in media or in misinformation campaigns or, you know, just other people doing anything.

It's like you the way I see it now is in our lifetimes. We now have the opportunity to hang out with the people we think the most of in the world, right? Like, I feel like I'm hanging out with Bill Maher sometimes or Jerry Seinfeld when I'm watching him or listening to them. And we've never in history had anything like that. So I think what I would say, if you find people like that who just resonates, then stick with them. If you believe in what's going on and you can trust their judgment

because there are some gems. People who are doing work now who never would have been able to do it before. I never would have been able to do this probably even 10 years ago, and you guys either, right? It's like we're just talking about how cheap this production equipment is all getting so fast. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we got started, it was, you know, we didn't have,

I wasn't thinking we're going to get a million downloads. No. It was like, I think some people will listen to this, and I think that we could give them some good information. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what it has to be. It grew from there.

Yeah, that's where it's got to come from. And that's where it has to continue to come from. I think that's the hard part because at some point you get big enough where hopefully you can try to start to pay the bills. And that's where it gets really complicated, right? Because if you have the sponsorship model or a typical advertising model, I don't think you can really make it work on the Internet anymore. Not the way that it used to work on TV because they don't even make it work on TV anymore. If you look at the actual numbers, these folks are scared. And so to answer the question that I kind of brought up earlier, like would I work with mainstream big media TV movies and even book publishing and all that stuff again?

It's like, why? You know, we've already got it. Our platforms are already bigger. We can say whatever we want it's i know people who are trying to get on tv currently yeah they're they're our age or younger and they're trying to get on tv and i'm like why yeah like you could just like start your own youtube channel like exactly what why do you need to get on tv. I record my podcast right there. I've recorded it in many bathrooms and like the video looks fine. And, uh, you know, that's just the way that you have to learn how to

get scrappy and you have to learn how to not make excuses. You have to learn how to not be like, it's the same thing as being like, well, I'm not going to start up barbella shrugged until I get six investors, $1.5 million. Right. Like you guys could have easily said that if you wanted to, but you would have gotten nowhere. And if you took investors. Zero investors. But if you took it then, it would be a really different show now if it still even existed.

It wouldn't be good. It wouldn't be good. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like don't outsource your passion. Don't reserve your passion until you like get a deal or someone tells you you can be a star. Yeah, I think a lot of times people want to wait for the conditions to be right to start anything. We all do.

We all do. And it's a really great way when you're afraid to have an excuse to not do something. But it's the same thing, you know, when we were running a gym, you get on the phone with somebody who was on the website and they had some interest, and you get on the phone with them and their excuse is, well, I want to get in shape before I come in. And I'm like, this is – to anyone who has been in a gym for very long, that sounds like the most ridiculous thing ever. It's like cleaning before the maid comes over. Right?

It's like cleaning before the house cleaner type thing. My mom would do that. Yeah. She's like, I got to get – I was like – It's a human thing. As a kid, I was like, what? I know. It's so human though.

What are we paying her for? But it is like that. And we all do that in different ways. And I think that's another great point. That's true. Like I'm probably doing that in some way right now and I just can't see it. Your wife knows what it is. Yeah.

I should go ask her. She's really good at pointing that shit out. She has 18 examples right now. Shoot her a text. And so is my wife right there. What's Abel doing? He's totally screwing something up. Always working on something.

Yeah. All right. The wild diet. What inspired that? I'm assuming a lot of this is all that same single inspiration you want to show people. Right. So the wild diet at its core represents working with nature treating health and and nutrition and fitness and lifestyle and and ourselves as the way nature intended so um we all kind of know what we should be doing

every day the boring stuff it's not sexy drinking water like moving our bodies these things should be built in and the way that you actually eat clean is relatively straightforward too so i just like break it all down i have like one page where i explain everything like everything you do really need to know or the 80 20 of what you need to know if you want to start eating clean and getting results like right now very simple workouts and all the rest of that stuff. But mostly it's just like make most of the food that you eat raw is the acronym that I like to use to help people remember it. But recently alive and well is the concept. So it's like it doesn't matter if it's plant food or animal food.

It should be a combination of both. Hopefully a lot more plants but all of that if you look at it it shouldn't come out of some weird looking package it shouldn't be very manipulated and processed it should be okay this is an actual thing like this used to be a fish you know or a lamb or uh you know it came from a broccoli stock or this is a piece of green lettuce from a farm. People don't know what that is anymore. Yeah, totally. And so it's a fresh food-based diet that just kind of teaches you clean eating in a narrative, fun, story-based way with a ton of great recipes.

So that's the book and the approach is basically just like wild is supposed to mean nature. Yeah, and a lot of people don't even agree on what that is because i mean me and doug had a we and doug had a conversation i asked doug like what do you think like whole whole foods means because a lot of people will think like well i think i think your question was processed processed well processed foods or what is processed food you know you could say well oatmeal is a processed food but some people will say that's not a processed food right but i like will say that's not a processed food. But I like how you put it, though, like raw.

I like that acronym, recently alive and well. That's something new I haven't heard before, and that's really good. Thanks. And it's not perfect because it's not usually raw, literally, but that's kind of the way that you should think about it, right? It's like, okay, I'm not eating ribs. I'm eating an animal's exactly exactly we should be eating the whole animal the way that um humans always have if they're doing it the right way which most humans just kind of instinctively did through tradition through culture through mere survival mechanisms and now it's like those have

been coached out of us by marketers mostly and big media who are just kind of giving us all this schlock. You can get more nutrition in this box right here. Yeah, exactly. And that's capitalism, I guess. I mean, old school marketing, the way it worked was they created a product and then they took it to a marketing firm. If you watch – Marketers ruin everything.

Mad men. Mad men. Right. Did you watch, uh, marketing, ruin everything. Mad men, mad men. Right. Like that's that. If you, did you watch that show? Yeah. Yeah.

So fucking awesome. Yeah. It was great. But the way that old business works, so the new business doesn't work this way all the time, but there's always exceptions, right? But I see a trend in this direction where it used to be,

let's create a product cheaply, sell it for a certain price, and then pay this marketing firm to position it in a way that makes it attractive to whoever's coming in. And now the way new business is operating is, let's find what the consumer, what their problem is, the solution they need, and we'll create a product that will fill that gap. And that's a good thing. And if we can add a layer of ethical behavior in there, that'd be awesome. Where not only are we trying to solve a problem that is perceived by the customer, but we're actually trying to make the world a better place and improve their lifestyle and make them healthier in the process. So if you can run it through that filter and you're doing your market research and because that's how we do a lot of things.

We go, what is it that you would like? And now we're going to create something that we understand where you're coming from. And we're going to help you get to the next level by creating this product. And that's the way things should be going. However, the way the processed food industry basically got started was, all right, how do we transform corn into products that people want to buy get the marketing firm to get them to sell it and then if you watch madman it's just awesome uh how everything got positioned cigarettes are good holy shit they invented betty

crocker i actually have a section in my book like the the headline for it is, did Don Draper invent Betty Crocker? And the answer is yes, pretty much. Because like most of these things that we are conditioned to love as children through commercials are entirely fictitious beings that were invented in many cases by brain scientists. And I know this because I have become friends with a lot of them and that was what i studied in college but like if i had gone on and become a doctor in brain science and then farm myself out for 500 bucks an hour to these big companies that's kind of how it plays out that's how it works they hire you to get kids addicted you were actually on the dark side and then it's like you're on your way to the dark side. I was working. I think if you work in business, the dark side is all around you.

But I've also learned that heroes and villains are almost always in the same room at the same time. It's like there's no pure, perfect room hardly ever. It's like everyone's dealing with their own journey. But for me, it was like I had an option coming out of school where it's like I had a bunch of debt because I paid my own way through college, and I wanted to pay it off as quickly as possible. And so there was Wall Street. I got a job at a hedge fund. I got a job at the CIA, and I got a job doing management consulting

and then a few other random ones, one in marketing. You got some interesting employment history. Yeah. You don't get unrecruited from some of those places, if that makes sense. You're on a couple lists. But I chose the one in consulting because it's basically a research job where you get to do different things and research different areas for a few weeks or a few months at a time.

And so I worked with Fortune 500s and the federal government in energy, alternative energy, pipeline technology, future projects, kind of Tony Stark-like stuff for a few weeks. Major oil companies up in Canada got to travel all around the world. And it was pretty cool. But there was a lot of stuff ethically that i couldn't deal with so i only lasted with the first firm uh like 18 20 months something like that and then i i paid off my loans i was also gigging on the weekends and moonlighting learning how to do computer programming and i was just like broke and i didn't owe anything to anyone. And then I drove around the country in an old diesel that I ran on recycled vegetable oil, biodiesel. So it smelled like fried chicken.

And that's how I found Austin, was I drove here. That's pretty rad. I have a question. You mentioned the wild diet. And then you mentioned the main thing, the main tenet is like eat whole, you know, the raw. What are some other tenets that you have concerning like the wild diet? Yeah. Well, at the beginning of the book, I define what it means, diet.

And diet is not supposed to mean like starve yourself. No, for sure not. It's more a way that a human or an animal habitually eats sure and so eating the way that nature intended is kind of high and woo woo but i hope that that can be a a concept that people will go to the table with because it's like eating with a eating like a caveman would have eaten doesn't work like that doesn't make it like because who knows what that is who knows what that is but it's like chocolate chip cookies mostly right but if you try to think of like eat foods that were recently alive and well yeah it's something that you can apply to say you're

going out uh to a restaurant what they're going to serve you is going to be like chips first right or bread something like that which is i also worked in the restaurant business for a while to give you that because it makes you hungry. So whenever you eat a food that makes you hungry, your hunger has been hijacked. So like probably don't eat that. Yeah. That's a good indicator of that's a food that it's not like you can't eat it if you It's just really easy to eat a lot of it and it's highly palatable.

Exactly. And that's the problem. So, and they give you that stuff en masse in large quantities at restaurants because it's super cheap. And that's one of the pennies on the dollar type things. Bread is one of the cheapest foods out there, and it's also one of the most fattening foods out there. And I also just ate almost an entire loaf of it over the course of this weekend because it was the real kind. Yeah, because Joshua Weissman, who I've known for years at this point, has been learning how to make traditional sourdoughs with traditional grains, like einkorn wheat, and he was so sweet.

He showed up with this huge loaf of bread, and we ate it with my family. We brought it and gave it to some friends, and it was so freaking good. Did you save any for us? I ate it all. Oh, man. And Allison actually helps, too. It was just that good. So that's another piece.

She's responsible for some of this. A lot of people, if you're eating like the South Beach way or the Atkins way and it's like, I can never have a banana

or you can never do this one thing, it's like, where did all that stuff come from? I want, it's so stupid. Like,

paleo is the same. You see a lot of people who are just like, Abel James, you eat ice cream and bread and it's so stupid like paleo is the same you see a lot of people are just like Abel James you eat ice cream and bread and it's like I've been a human

this whole time guys have you ever listened to like a word that I've said because you can't get lost in all that I've had people give me shit about eating certain things

I thought you were paleo I was like I never said I was paleo right yeah because well anyway nothing is really paleo,

but especially not coffee and processed oils. Right, right. Most of the stuff that is has become a part of the commercialization of something that basically can't be commercialized, right? Yeah. Because the idea that if it's predicated on the fact that it would be what a caveman would do, then it's just ridiculous to try to sell anything. The one part of the raw piece I'd like to hear more about is the well part.

The well, yeah. So most of the food that we get, whether it's plants or animals, is incredibly low quality, especially in America. You go to other countries and food is food. In America, that is not usually the case. It is kind of a fake approximation, easy-bake oven version of what food used to be, of what our parents or grandparents would have eaten. So if you're talking about meat, I think most people have probably, they have some idea of what happens in a slaughterhouse. Like when you eat an animal, it's a real thing.

You just kind of killed something, right? That should be a, as a human, that should be a slightly spiritual act anytime that you eat. So there's a mindfulness practice that goes along with this as well. But if that animal was sick, then as a human to survive, don't eat it. Here's the problem. If you're eating almost any meat that you find at a restaurant or at a grocery store that's not wild-caught, pasture- pasture raised, or raised the way that nature intended, then you're getting a sick animal

that was pumped full of antibiotics or fed meat byproducts from dead animals themselves that have bacteria and their gut is full of pathogens and other things that can hurt you or get you sick and even growth hormones like the idea that women used to go through menstruation you know in their early teens and now are when they're like five six seven years old like it's no wonder why this is happening because that's exactly what we're doing to all of the animals uh and the plants for that matter that we're that that big food is trying to raise they're pumped full of all these things to to grow them not just as big and as fast as possible but as fat as possible

yeah that's exactly what's happening and then durable and yeah just so yeah exactly i think uh i think what is they get a they get um a cow on the the feedlot um they eat grass most of their life yeah because if they were fed grains like if they were fed what they're eating in the feedlot all the time they would die exactly so they do is they they they do eat grass most time and then they get them what's called a kefo and they get them there and they can keep a cow alive for about five months there and so what they do is they constantly feed them. And then they don't have any, like, have you ever seen one live? We drove by one in, was it Arizona?

Yeah. I think it was. And it was desolate. And they're just all over each other. Super crowded. They're feeding them as much fattening food as possible for five months. The thing is when they're eating the food, it causes, it weakens their immune system. Right. So they start getting sick. So what they do is they pump them full of steroids and full of antibiotics to keep them healthy long enough. So what they've done is

they've been able to, they used to be able to feed a cow, you know, grains for a month to make it bigger so they could slaughter it. Now the science has gotten to the point where they can keep the cow long uh alive for about five months which has made the window zombie cow it's a zombie cow so they've extended the lifespan of what can happen on a CAFO for 5x what it used to be maybe three decades ago and so now the cows are just what they do is they wait till they're almost dead and then they kill it and so they're just barely hanging on so if you're eating a fucking hamburger that's you're eating something that was almost dead anyway which i don't want to eat anything like that. And then the same thing happens with the plants. Right.

Not exactly, but they're doing a lot of things to grow as much as possible with the least amount of nutrients as possible. And not ever thinking about you and your health in the process. That's the thing. That would be silly. It's like the bottom line. The collateral damage. You see the way they're treating those animals and those plants.

You're eating that. You become that. And so if you're eating a sick animal, I know that that's kind of a squishy idea, but that means that you're eating tumors, right? Like you're eating stuff that you should not be eating. Pus. Yeah, pus is a certain percentage of milk. Yeah.

I learned that three years ago, and I literally almost puked. They were like, you are drinking pus. I'm like, fuck. As you're sitting there with your milk jug. Don't worry, it comes with a little bit of antibiotics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's okay. There's a standard like that for almost everything.

I was reading something the other day that was talking about how many bug parts can be found in cracked black pepper. It's too many. It's like 400 parts per 10 grams or something like that. There it goes. I'm not eating pepper anymore. Yeah, you can have like 18 earthworms or spiders and canned mushrooms or something like that. I remember we did a project on it. But it's okay.

I mean, that stuff's not going to hurt you. No, that's right. It's the antibiotics and steroids. Yeah. We're meant to eat little bugs and worms and stuff like that sometimes. There's even standards for arsenic and protein powders. It's not zero. It's obviously not very high, but it can't be zero in some respects.

Yeah, exactly. You can't say, well, it should be zero because there's so many things that could be in there. They're going to have one part per billion. It's not going to be zero. But yeah, if you actually start digging into that stuff, you find some really disturbing... It's only zero if you don't eat it. And you guys know how easy it is

to start a supplement company, even if you've got nothing upstairs. Oh, did you ever watch Bigger, Faster, Stronger? I did see a little bit of that. Yeah, they basically started one on the movie or on the documentary. Yeah, exactly. They basically started one on the movie or on the documentary. Yeah, exactly. It shouldn't work like that.

You know it's too much like I do. I know too much. A lot of people are like, why do you not do some of these things? Right. I know what's happening. Yeah. I'm not taking that and I'm not doing this. Yep.

I've learned too much. Well, going back to what we were talking about earlier about the accessibility, like what can people do to avoid? Because I mean, yeah, that food is everywhere. And it's almost like, do you know,

like you go to a restaurant, do you know where this meat came from? Probably not. But like, what do you do? Okay. So not to say that I don't go out to a restaurant and like eat a chicken or beef sometimes or fish,

obviously. But for the most part, it's not what happens when you're eating out sometimes. If you only eat out sometimes and if you're making the excuse that you don't have enough money to eat right, then you should only be eating out sometimes. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Then it's all about the mindless stuff that happens every day without you even thinking about it. Like what are you doing every morning? Are you drinking water? Yeah. Are you staying hydrated all day because if you are then you'll

probably eat literally half as much right then then your dehydrated self would right because a lot of people are constantly dehydrated and eating all the time because they just they never find that equilibrium but i learned that through running marathons because like one of the biggest things about that is you guys know in competitions is managing your biology but like managing number one and number two because if it's in competition you have to have that down you have to you have to sense what's going on and you figure out the right things you got to do so it's like the way i break it down is like get your water get your greens in every day greens sit on the plate excellent um and. And get some sort of protein, like enough, but not too much. And if I have one meal a day that's like that, then that's enough for me at this point.

It wouldn't have been when I was running a ton or doing a lot of exercise. But for me now, it's like you kind of get a feel for the nutrients that you need, and then you don't need anything else. And so if I'm in a place that's less than optimal, then you just basically do the best you can. You get some veggie, you know, like a salad. You try not to eat the oils and the sauces because almost all those have MSG, a bunch of chemicals and flavorings and whatever. So actually I usually bring some of my own like olive oil or other oils like that.

Put that over some greens. Have a little bit of meat with it. If it's not perfect, wild-caught, pasture-raised, whatever, that's totally cool. But just like don't eat too much of it and try to eat like the pure protein. Yeah, I like what you said earlier about the mindfulness. I feel like a lot of people lack. And I almost think that may be one of the first things that people need to grasp is being mindful of what you're putting in your body. Yeah.

Yeah. This is in my book, but when – He's going to give it away for free. Free. When I was in Indonesia, there was a guy who I was talking to who had grown up there, and I asked him why Americans were fat and if he could break down why he thought, because he actually cooked in America. I think he might have worked on a cruise ship or in a restaurant for a while in America and then went back over there.

He definitely knows if he was on a cruise ship. Yeah, so he's like, I don't understand. Shit. He said, like, traditionally, they'll have a meal will be, say it's like lunch or an early dinner or something like that. They'd be sitting around with their family. They would have some vegetables from the backyard behind their family house or their local village with a bit of rice from the island that they prayed over. Because rice is a sacred thing that they don't only eat pretty much every day, but they put it on their bodies.

They give it in offerings and then a bit of meat like maybe a quarter chicken or something like that that they probably butchered and raised themselves so it's not something that you eat all the time but like that quarter chicken could probably feed a small family like a mother and a father and kids and then in america you go out and you order a bucket of fried chicken yeah and then you get like a little twang in your voice when you said that fried chicken i've been stewing in the south for a while but or you get like a hamburger and fries and a soda yeah and an ice cream yeah and it's that could be more different yeah that could not be more different in so many ways. And so it's like we just – if you make your meals, like the first one that I described, it's not – like I'm not making this stuff up.

I'm not special. This isn't the wild diet. This is just like the way that humans should eat. And what you said, the comparison between the setting where the meal was the meal and the other setting was with the family sitting around engaging in this in this in this conversation being a family unit yeah and then other times you know you're just going out getting fast food driving front seat a lot yeah a lot of people one of the things too like i don't know if you mentioned this in your book but um just practicing mindful eating in a proper setting.

So like not checking your phone and watching TV. You're sitting and sharing a meal with your family, conversing, eating slowly. And that right there can make a huge difference. Yeah, and one thing that totally helps with that, and this is something we do all the time, you have to have your little splurges. You just have to know how to do them in the right way. So if we feel like pigging out, and sometimes we do all the time you have to have your little splurges you just have to know them know how to do them in the right way so if like we feel like pigging out and sometimes we do we don't we hardly ever eat in front of screens or tv yeah or anything like that but when we do

we pig out and we have a bunch of popcorn we watch like a stupid sci-fi movie yeah yeah psyched about and that like as humans i think you have to do that you have to act out and do those little things you should do but like that's such a massive difference between doing that and uh you know eating a whole thing of ice cream yourself yeah or eating uh you know doing what a lot of people do when they kind of overeat just because you're on a business trip or just it's like it's happening and so you do it yeah it. Yeah, it's mindless. It's the mindless snacking. Just before you know it, the whole tub is gone. You know, the BJ, it's gone. And that's what you want to avoid because there's no pleasure in that.

Like what I also realize, and this is very important, is that especially once you have your palate, it's always the first bite that's the most delicious. And it only goes down from there. You know, it's like the last. It's like drugs, man. Totally. It's like that first hit a crack is perfect and then after that it's just downhill after that but seriously I'm crazy 100%

Is this a voice of experience? No no no I watch a lot of TV so you know lots of the wires oh trying to get in the wire but the last the last bite of a Big Mac or like the last fry compared to the first fry never it's it's it's depressing it's depressing the last pizza pizza compared to the first piece of pizza so keep that in mind too it's like you have a a little bit and and actually there was this, I'm sure this won't be the right example, but it was one that stuck out to me because when I was writing my book, I'm a guy. I come from a guy's point of view, and I wanted to kind of understand the other way of thinking about things. And so I read books for women that were like diet books and stuff like that.

And there was one, it's called French Women Don't Get get fat and there's a lot about mindful eating it and it was like a hit like a few years ago but it's really cool and she explains a moment when she saw it while she was growing up her mother eat chocolate and she said when her mother like thinking back to charlie and the chocolate factory right when it came in this like wrapper and you looked at it was like a chocolate bar it's like you open it up and it's like it's a whole ritual where you're every little square you're opening up one piece at a time because you've been saving up for this chocolate and then you take out this one little piece of chocolate you put in your mouth and the eyes roll back in your head and like no one was allowed to talk to her for 20 seconds or whatever right right? They'd flip out.

Yeah. It's called having a moment with it. Yeah. Leslie Schilling, she brought that up on an episode of Full Depth. She was like, if you're going to have something like that, have a moment with it. That's what eating should be like. We forgot how to do that, and you just can't really do it with a Big Mac. I had a few moments last night with some barbecue.

Oh, man. You ever been to Salt Lake? You ever been to Salt Lake? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was good. night with some barbecue. Oh, man. You ever been to Salt Lake? You ever been to Salt Lake? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was good. That was good. Brisket, man.

That brisket was fire. You guys are in the right place. You're welcome anytime, by the way. Thank you. This is awesome. Yeah. We got to do it more often. We'll make it happen very frequently.

Yeah. Where can people find you and your stuff? Easiest place to find me if you're interested in the health stuff is fatburningman.com. That's also the name of my podcast if you like podcasting and video on YouTube and that sort of thing. But if you want the books and the music and that sort of thing, easiest place is abeljames.com. And you can find me under Abel James or Fat Burning Man on social media as well. Awesome. So come hang out.

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me on. Thanks for joining us. And if you want to change the landscape in your grocery store, buy the shit you want, not the shit that's easy.