Mark Bell's Power Project - Breaking Down Calories: Quality or Quantity? MBSS Ep. 41

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

In this edition of Mark Bell's Saturday School, Mark Bell educates us on whether or not the Calories in Calories out model works, whether or not the types of calories you eat matter, and why he's so passionate about this topic.    New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject   ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin!   ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements!   ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off!   ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order!   ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off!   ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en    Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Starving yourself and over-exercising fails in the long term. I call this calorie prison. I was probably around 4,000 to 5,000 calories for a long time. How long? Probably like three years or so. You know, you get kind of shamed for some of these things. If you increase your calories from protein, you most likely will do calories matter. Do calories matter? When I shave my head all the way and the hair comes back, it kind of looks like bluish for a minute. It's weird.

That's cool. Because it's dark, you know? Yeah. And then with this combination of like the shine, I keep forgetting that I have hair. So I don't even really comb it. And then it's just like fucking crazy looking sometimes. I'm like, oh my God. The sideburns are, I can't see them right now, but they, dude, they're pumping.

It's baseball season right now too. It reminds me of like some old 80s like pitcher for the Oakland A's. Do you remember? Eckersley. Oh yeah, Eckersley had some sick ones, yeah. That home run from Kirk Gibson, I'll never forget that. You remember that? Nope. Oh, dude.

I just remember the ball hitting Jose Canseco right in the head, and it went over the fence. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Kirk Gibson hit a home run off of eckersley in the world series and it's like the most epic or at least playoffs it's like the most epic home run of all time because uh kirk gibson had like a torn hamstring and he was just playing anyway dude and uh actually you know what now i think about it the pitcher might have been the other guy they had

stewart um the black guy they had, Stewart. The black guy, he was a really good pitcher too. But maybe, I don't know. Maybe see if we can bring it up. I was going to say, I could look it up, but this is fun. Yeah, see if you can find it. Who was the batter? Kurt Gibson.

Kurt. I think if you typed in Kurt Gibson, it would just pop up because it's just sick. And when he does his home run, he just limps around the bases because he's all fucked up oh it is eckersley okay and they talked about how eckersley they just screwed him they just talked about how he hasn't given up a home run in x amount why do they do that shit what the every time bro yeah baseball they have the guire before the non-peds oh yeah his ass is all flat just he's just standing over there like not on any gear yet. Nope. There we go. Got a hold of that one.

Damn. Dude, he lifted that thing up. Oh, that's so cool. Look at him. Look at him. Dang. La Russa. Freaking fat.

La Sorda. La Sorda. Yeah, sorry. I'm thinking Karate Kid. Yeah, yeah. La Russa. Same era. Amazing. La Sorda. Freaking fat. La Sorda. La Sorda. Yeah, sorry. I'm thinking Karate Kid. Yeah, yeah. La Russo. Same era. Amazing.

La Sorda. Anyway, I don't know how we got on this, but. Oh, we were talking about sideburns. Oh, okay. My bad. Yeah. Yeah, sideburns. Let's see if we can bring up that clip of Paul Saladino speaking of calories.

I thought that this would be a good Saturday school. So welcome in, everybody, to Saturday school. Remember, we're on page 43 because I said so. And thank you for all the fans of Saturday school. Appreciate you guys commenting and supporting. Andrew and I have a lot of fun doing this. It just gives us the opportunity to do something a little different with the show. And coming up soon, we are also kind of experimenting. So forgive us for the amount of

time it might take us but we're messing around and experimenting with doing some stuff with anabolic activities uh which will be a future podcast from us as well that we're messing around with with uh kenny williams so stay tuned for that that'll be neat it'll be a little throwbacky where we just talk flat out about like lifting and uh being jacked and being strong and all that because we don't always get an opportunity to talk about that on this show even though we love it uh we love other stuff so we wanted to talk about other stuff as well yeah so potentially saturday school might become sunday school yeah based on scheduling so yeah keep an eye out for that. Anyway, let's check out this clip. I believe calories are linear. And I think calories in calories out is misleading for

people because the quality of the calories you put in affects the calories out. And what I mean by that is that the quality of the food you eat affects your metabolism. And this is what gets lost in calories in calories out. I think that it's not controversial to say that eat less, move more is a complete failure. 96% of people on The Biggest Loser gain the weight back and more. So starving yourself and overexercising fails in the long term. I call this calorie prison. You cannot lose weight doing that sustainably long term. We were kind of talking about this before the show and I wanted to get into this. I think there are multiple ways to lose weight and there's not a lot of ways to lose weight sustainably and healthfully long-term that allows you to keep it off. So my hypothesis, my suggestion

is that the way to lose weight is to think about food quality before you think about calories. So I don't think about portion control. I don't think about calories. I don't want people to think about that. I want them to think about improving the quality of their food first and foremost, and really not to think about those other things, which means if you want to eat steak and you want to eat tallow and you want to eat raw milk and you want to eat fruit, eat as much as you want and start with that. And if it doesn't work, let's go on to step two. But I think the majority of people will lose weight effortlessly doing that and they'll feel better rather than starving yourself and over exercising. And what's step two? Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. He said a lot of great things there. And then I think he muffled up his own message, which I do that a lot myself. I will admit that. I think I think where his message went a little astray from the basis of what he was trying to say was where he brought up the biggest loser.

Just because there's some individuals that go on a show and they do some really – those people are obese and they've been obese for probably a really long time. And no matter if you're serving them up carnivore or you're trying to have them do a meat and fruit diet, a keto diet, if they're trying to count calories, it doesn't matter what you throw at those individuals. And it doesn't matter what you throw at any other individual because a lot of people have a really tough time with diet success. So to call like calories in, calories out, or to call, to say, you know, eat less, move more is a giant failure. And then to use that as an example, I think is kind of a poor example and maybe unfair. I would also say that eat less, move more, in my opinion, is a little bit dumb because if you have people that are hungry and not feeding themselves enough, it's going to be tough to have the energy output to continue onward. And I think that's ultimately what he may have been trying to convey. And I think most people would agree with that. However, sometimes when somebody is really heavy, they do need to figure out a way to maybe eat less isn't the right word.

And maybe some of his suggestions about the quality of food is really good because if let's just say someone's 300 pounds and they've been heavy for a really long time well if we start to tell them hey you get to eat two to three pounds of meat every day you get to have four to eight eggs every day you get to have a couple ounces of cheese every day you can eat your vegetables consider that to be a freebie. Eat as much vegetables as you'd like. Just make sure they're not accompanied by a bunch of other calories. In terms of berries, go ahead and go after berries. Berries are kind of low in sugar and they're higher in fiber. So blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, those are kind of all fair game and they provide a good

amount of volume. And then one step further, like the leaner the protein, the more you could eat of it. So egg whites, you know, you don't want to eat so many egg whites that you upset your stomach, but you could eat quite a bit of egg whites and get really far with it. You can eat quite a bit of chicken breast and get really far with it. But where we quite a bit of chicken breast and get really far with it. But where we fail, I think, is telling people to eat less and move more. Maybe it's going to be really difficult for somebody to have that intervention

all at one time, especially for a person that maybe isn't really moving that much already and especially for somebody that's maybe not practicing some good, healthy dietary habits. So I like some of what Paul was saying there. What he mentioned at the very end, though, about step two, it's like, well, what is step two? And step two would probably be to reduce the overall amount of energy that you're consuming,

a.k.a. pay attention to the calories that are coming in. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, you hit perfect because I was going to mention like's called these days, carnivore 2.0, sorry, my apologies, where he gave a great example of why yo-yo dieting doesn't work, right? He said people go on The Biggest Loser and they gain the weight back. And he said that that's not, I forgot how he worded it, but basically it's not a good long-term solution and so the whole eat eat less move more for right now isn't gonna work but can somebody eat a tiny bit less every day for a long

time can they move a tiny bit more for a long period of time i kind of think they do what would you say yeah i would have to go back to uh back to some of the example that I gave you off air of I was 330 pounds at one point. And while I may have registered as obese, I certainly had a lot of muscle mass back then as well. And it was for powerlifting purposes, and I was like kind of intentionally fat, almost like an actor getting ready for a specific like movie role. I was getting big on purpose. It kind of got out of hand and so it was actually kind of tough to get myself out of that spot. But just as a hypothetical, I don't have real information or evidence of this. I didn't write a lot of stuff down or didn't track things meticulously, but I did weigh 330 and nowadays I weigh 230. And to go from 330 to 230, while I was very active when I was 330, I'm way more active

now. It's not uncommon for me to run five miles. I ran over five miles for like 140 days in a row. I'm very, very active. One day after a run, I went to just look at my step count and it was like over 50,000 for the day. So I'm active. I'm lifting on top of that. I'm doing a lot of things. I'm way more active than I used to be. And let me get back to my point here. When I was 330, I'm just going to completely estimate this. I don't really know, but I think I was probably around 4,000 to 5,000 calories for a long time. I would eat pretty normal-ish during the day. Wouldn't eat a crazy amount of carbohydrates. I'd have, you know, different types of meat, eggs, things like that, things that were pretty nutrient dense.

And I didn't care about the fat calories at that time when I was powerlifting. Then when I was done with my workout, which is usually later on in the evening when I'd go home is when I would eat and eat and eat. And, uh, I would eat kind of a little bit of everything I'd eat, you know, I'd eat dinner. Then I'd usually eat something else after after that maybe it was like a leftover from the night before so i'd have kind of like a double dinner and then that's when i kind of had to assess especially when i was like 270 and 280 when i was coming up and trying to specifically gain weight i had to make a call on do i think i need more fuel and that's when i would eat like you know ben and jerry's or these different things and we could look back at it now and say, oh, maybe we could have had a different strategy.

Maybe we could have had better food choices then. But it was a lot of fun to be quite honest to do that. And it did give me the results I wanted. I did squat 1,080. I did bench over 800 pounds and accomplished a lot of the things in powerlifting that I set out to do. So it indeed worked, but I went from probably a four to 5,000 calorie a day thing, uh, with movement through powerlifting and through some bodybuilding exercises and stuff like that and not no walking. So, but as I, when I got hurt, I fell with 1,085. When I got hurt is when I realized, you know what, you got to make some changes. Let's see, let's shift gears and let's see if we can get in good shape and let's work on that. So I got in better shape. I started to lose weight

and I started to lose weight by going on a paleo style diet from Rob Wolf, the paleo solution. And what that did is that changed, obviously it changed my calories because of course it did because it changed my food choices and I ate primarily beef. I ate eggs, but I would also eat leaner cuts of meat. I would also do eggs with kind of like a, if I had six eggs, I would have three full eggs and the other three would just be the whites. Things like that, these small changes. And I started to walk. Some of the workouts were a little different. I would occasionally even just like go to the gym and just like walk on a treadmill for motivational purposes. I even went to some local gyms rather than just a super training because they just have different feels to them. And it was nice to walk into a different gym that had different options.

It gave me motivation. And so I had a lot more movement. So, yes, over time, I weighed 330 and was probably in a four or 5,000 calorie range to where I am now at two 30. And nowadays, you know, I guess on a day where I maybe eat quite a bit, I might be at like 3,500 calories or maybe, uh, yeah, or maybe somewhere between 2,500 calories and 3,500 calories. So quite a bit of difference there. Plus I move a lot more. So those things did shift, but it was over a really long period of time.

How long were you eating 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day for? Yeah, probably like three years or so. Holy shit. Yeah. So, okay, I want to get to other stuff, but like I remember you saying you'd get up in the middle of the night and you'd sneak in some food. What were some of your go-to Fat Mark Bell foods? You know what?

fat mark bell foods you know what uh when i'd wake up in the middle of the night i would i was still a meathead so a lot of times that was like a protein shake or like a protein bar while i was gaining weight i was into gaining weight but i just didn't i didn't want to be like just like way the fuck out of shape um so i i wouldn't go too crazy on that but usually the thing that i ate before i went to bed was usually like ice cream or or something like that um and that's when i would you know i would like kiss my kiss my wife good night and i would say my our bedroom was upstairs the house we lived at at the time and i said i think i need to go back downstairs and eat more. And she'd be like, what?

I'm like, yeah, I just, you know, I need to be bigger. So I would stay up, watch TV for a little bit longer, which also was a bad habit because I would go to bed kind of too late. But yeah, fish food, Ben and Jerry's, kind of like a go-to favorite of mine. Trying to think like what like what else what about like in and out or something like that no i was too lazy like getting my car and like right yeah but like during the day though like yeah yeah so so during the day um the way that i ate then is so ridiculous compared to the way i eat now, but it still wasn't as crazy as you might imagine. There was, I would go to Sonic.

I would go to In-N-Out. I would go to McDonald's. I would do those things, but it was probably like once a week. You know, it wasn't like, it wasn't like insanely frequent, although that's insanely frequent now since I probably haven't been to one of those places.

And well, I guess I've been to In-N-Out, getting some Flying Dutchman over the last year or something like that. The big thing for me was burritos. I loved burritos. I would get, there's just here in Northern California, there's a lot of great Mexican food places. And, god god damn place in woodland i forget the name of it but so there was el patio el patio there you go el patio a lot um that was that was a big one in uh get helping me become a big boy getting some big ass burritos i

would just always get like i would get a bunch of different meats in there you know i'd get like chicken and steak and pork and and then i'd say uh like double meat and it'd be like double meat of everything because they're like they take it pretty literal so they're like boom i just really just like a couple extra scoops or something but the burrito would just you know it would look like a little look like a little baby in a blanket. Yeah. That's when it's really good. So I do like how he, he, um, he worded it. He said that he called it calorie prison. Um, but I feel like he's so contradicting because he calls it calorie prison and then says that the, like the food choices are more important um i i don't track anymore but i i all i usually find something that i disagree with when people say that like tracking or calories in

calories out isn't really the uh the secret um because i i feel like it's not a secret and i feel like it does work because even you yourself you said that you were eating four or five thousand calories you were over 300 pounds you're eating 25 35 and you're almost like your high school weight so like I mean I I feel like yeah it is both right like it's you're eating better better choices although they previously weren't terrible but they're choices, but they're also just less energy. Yeah. So there's a lot of great stuff to get into within that. So here's some of my beliefs and they line up with Ted Naiman. That's where I got a lot of these beliefs from. He has this idea and concept of protein leveraging. You may have heard me talk about it on this podcast before. It's something I adopted a few years back and it's worked great for me. So

people at home, you can try this out for yourself and just do an N of one, do a little experiment, just rev up the amount of, uh, increase your protein percentage. So if you are someone that tracks your calories, you can look at like what percentage of your diet is made up of calories from protein. If you increase your calories from protein, you most likely will not gain weight. If you increase your calories from protein, you most likely will not gain weight. The average American diet, I think they say people are between like 12 and 14 percent. I don't know how they get some of these stats. So who knows how accurate that is. 12 to 14% protein. And it's my assertion and my

belief that if people simply increase the percentage of protein that they eat, that they would lose weight. Now, maybe they need to walk and do a couple other things, but if people went from, let's say, 13% to 18% protein, I think they would notice a big difference. Now, it's going to take – it would take time. And the reason why something like that could potentially work is because protein is not an efficient energy source. efficient energy source. It also takes calories. It takes energy to actually, you know, have it to break protein down basically. So protein, I think the reputation of protein having four calories per gram, I think is a little bit off. I think that, I don't think it deserves that. I think it deserves maybe two calories or maybe only one calorie. And I also kind of have a theory that's very much bro science, but I think that protein

is zero calorie because for people that lift, I think that protein ends up becoming part of you. And so people that are lifting, people that are training, that protein is just going to be something that's going to be an amplifier of your metabolism to help you burn more calories. I know. Go ahead. Shoot me. It's some wicked bro science I'm spitting over here. But I don't know. That's just kind of like I have a hunch about that.

And I think that for the people that lift, it's going to make an even bigger impact and make a bigger difference for them to consume more protein for multiple reasons. But again, protein is not a great energy source. So now we're left with two energy sources for people, which is fat and carbohydrates. Some people go with a lower carbohydrate diet and a large percentage of their calories come from fat. And some people tend to run a little bit more off carbohydrates. There's some people, our friend Chris Williamson, he hates lower carb diets. He's like, you know, he thinks it's crazy. And he's tried it before and he's just like, it feels gross.

I don't like it. I don't have good energy. And I've met other people like that before. And there's some people that really seem to just burn through carbs and burn through sugar really, really well. And they, that's how they get along. They, they, they dig it. liked fat. I've always liked to eat things that have kind of a fattier texture. It's actually really difficult for me to, it's difficult for me to diet. It's difficult for me sometimes to chop calories out because so many of the things that I eat are pretty calorically dense. The meat that I eat, fortunately for me, comes from Piedmontese, certified Piedmontese. It's a specific type of cow where the cattle is leaner than other cows. So the cut of meat that you have sometimes is even more than half the amount of fat that you might get in like a regular standard ribeye. It would be half the amount of fat from a Piedmontese steak.

And more recently, I've been getting some of their bavette steaks grass-fed grass-finished i want to say the whole thing only has like eight grams of fat and it has a hundred grams of protein yeah that is a fucking beautiful thing now picture you know somebody eating like two of those in a day, which is a giant, pretty good, not giant portion, but it's a pretty large portion of steak. If you were to eat two of those in one day, like you would be pretty damn full. I don't know if you would. You might have cravings. You might want to eat something else.

But, man, I don't know if you need to eat much else after that. And that would be an item that has a lot of density in terms of its nutrition, its macros, its micros, but also would be really low in calories. If you ate two of those, you'd only get like 16 grams of fat. So that might not be a great idea to do for very long because we know that the fat calories are too low. It can wreak havoc on your hormones. But anyway, I've learned over the years that for me to protein leverage, I have to do it in some tricky ways because of what I just mentioned. A lot of times I like to have some meals that have a pretty good amount of fat. So the Piedmontese steaks is something that's and and just the ground beef

they got 96 ground beef somebody might think like oh that's probably horrible no it's fucking delicious i don't understand how it works but andrew's shaking his head over there it works let's just tell people how they can get hooked up with some people yeah just head over to piedmontese.com it's p-i-e-d-m-o-n-t-e-s-e.com at checkout enter promo code power for 25 off your entire order and i forgot exactly i think it's 150 or more maybe it's 200 i think it's 150 or more you get free two-day shipping so the way i like to do it is i put my order in like on a saturday or sunday and it gets there by like wednesday so it's it's pretty quick and i don't i don't know what it is about the ground

beef, like especially the ground beef. Like it's, it should not taste that good, but it does. And then, um, some of them like the, um, uh, flat irons and stuff like it's almost, it's like as lean as a chicken breast, but it tastes way better. It's, it's, it's freaking wild. And what you're saying about the protein leveraging, cause I don't want to forget, It's freaking wild. And what you're saying about the protein leveraging, because I don't want to forget, I tried to debunk Mark's theory that he came up with about like you can just load up on all the protein and you won't gain weight. I was like, all right, dude. Like, okay.

You know, this was when I was like, you know, my feed was full of Greg Doucette and Lane Norton talking about the law of thermodynamics and calories in, calories out is all that matters. And so I was deep into tracking and I'm like, no, if I want to drop a little bit of weight, my calories are going to be here. If I want to maintain, they're going to be there. If I want to gain, they're going to be here. And so I thought it was complete bullshit. So for dinners, I was eating, I wasn't eating two bavettes, but whatever, like if it was a ribeye or a flank steak or a whatever, I was eating at least two steaks, sometimes even more, because like the flat irons are a little bit smaller.

So I would eat three of those, and I just did that every day. Everything I was eating, I was just loading up on protein. I was eating anywhere from 300 to 400 grams of protein every day. I could not sustain it because I was really full, but I did not gain an ounce. Like I maintained whatever I ate. I don't remember what it was, but like we had alan aragon on the podcast about me talking about that study how they he they gave a certain you know group of people extra protein or extra calories via protein and they didn't gain weight they were just like the protein just disappeared and so it's like again it sounds crazy because you're like eating more and, you know, again, the calories in, calories out.

But when it's protein, you know, it's like, you know, the fuel is burning itself as it goes in basically. And it's a really good trick. It's a good hack. It works great. And another thing to keep in mind here too, and it could be something that's at play. Like I just want to kind of point out, like I don't really fucking know. Like I don't know no. But I also would say that nobody knows.

Like nobody really knows the fuck's going on. When it comes to calories, we know that the calories are a unit of measure that could be agreed upon when it's outside the body. that could be agreed upon when it's outside the body. But once it goes inside the body, depending on where you're from, your genetics, your hormones, how well you slept, your circadian rhythm, how much sun you got, how much moonlight you got, how much blue light you've been exposed to for the day,

how much stress you had, is your cortisol high, how is your liver? Did you drink that day? Did you have any alcohol? How your liver did you drink that day did you have any alcohol how much caffeine did you consume um the human body is a giant fucking computer and it's always computing and it's always working on trying to figure out the way for it to be the most efficient and some days it's going to be less efficient than others if you you didn't sleep well, there's some research that shows that somebody with like one bad night of sleep, they can register as being like pre-diabetic when they wake up in the morning, having their first meal. So it's insane the differences that

there can be. And a calorie outside the body, yes, this thing has nine calories. This gram of fat has nine calories. This thing of carbohydrate has four calories. This thing of protein has four calories. But once it goes inside the body, once you consume it, what about digestive enzymes? What about how much saliva someone produces? What about someone's gut bacteria? What about the gut microbiome, which we don't know a ton about? What about if somebody doesn't digest legumes really well? What if someone has a gluten intolerance? What if somebody is lactose intolerant? What if somebody has a food allergy? Like what happens if someone has a food allergy to, certain type of nuts but it doesn't make them like sick and die or anything like that? But like what's the impact of that?

And that's why I say like no one – like no one actually really knows. There are certain things that we know some stuff about. stuff about. And we do, it does appear that when people do track what they eat, that they can have a really good outcome in terms of whatever their goal is. So if someone tracks what they eat, whether they're eyeballing it and just looking at it and learning, and they read a bunch of food labels, or whether somebody's weighing their food food or whether somebody is, you know, literally writing everything down or using an app. We know that that can be really beneficial. There's a lot of people like myself and there's a lot of people like Paul Saladino who will say, I don't track. But that's not true.

Everyone tracks. Paul Saladino is about as crazy as you can get. He's batshit crazy, right? when it comes to the food intake. He's not going to consume something wrapped in plastic. He's not going to consume – I mean, maybe he does if he has to. But he is really going way out of his way to try to go grass-fed, grass-finished, organic. He's not eating processed foods. He's going way out of his way to make sure that he's eating the highest quality food

that he can get his hands on. And same with myself. And so I'll be like, yeah, I don't track. But no, I'm tracking. I'm paying attention to everything. Even if I eat two tasty pastries in a day, the product from Legendary Foods, that's absolutely amazing. I'm sitting there kind of being like, man, I don't know. You probably shouldn't have eaten those tasty pastries, bro.

Like what the fuck are you doing? And it has 180 calories in it. And here I am running five miles every day. So it doesn't really matter like what person you're talking about. If they are in fitness and they're fit and they're in good shape, they're kind of tracking something and they're paying attention to it. There's a lot of bros too that will be like, no, man, I seriously, I don't track nothing. I just like look at the mirror and I flex and I'm jacked. And even those guys are like, well, yeah, you know, I make sure

I get 200 grams of protein a day. Like everyone tracks a little bit of something for myself. Yes, I like to use the mirror. That's really helpful for me. And I also use my scale. So I don't weigh my food, but I weigh myself. So I used to kind of pick on the whole thing. I used to be like, this is stupid. But what I realized is that's not helpful. And I made a mistake with it. And I'm willing to admit it. It's not helpful. Like I think that's what I'm trying to figure out as I get older is what's helpful and what's useful to people. So weighing your food and being meticulous about it, shit, it might be necessary for a lot of people. It might be, is it the answer? Well, I don't know. Is semaglutide the answer? Are some of these things that you can get from a doctor, from a pharmaceutical type of

thing? Like, are these things the answer? Well, I don't know, but I think there are tools and they can all be beneficial. Why not? Why don't we kind of come together and say, you know what? All these things are a good idea. Uh, let's try to figure out what's going to be a good idea for you. Um, Paul Saladino is crazy. I don't know if you saw the, uh, the, the reel that he put together where he took fucking coconuts through the airport because he didn't want to buy water that they had there because it was in plastic. And so he had just a sack of coconuts that he took through TSA and he's like on the plane, like eating his, all right, do we get it? But it. But how do you help somebody? Because I tell them to load up on protein and I get some responses along the lines of like, well, I thought eating too much protein was bad. My doctor says, even though they don't check with their doctor when they go have beer, you know, like you didn't check with your doctor there, but you want to check with them here. All right, cool. I get it. So yeah. How do

you, how do you put this into practice when you, or yeah, how do you have somebody put this in, into practice? I think it just, it takes time. And I think, you know, all you can do is kind of like encourage and you can ask people like, what, what are some foods that you really enjoy? Like, what are some, I guess let me change the question. What are some natural, unprocessed foods that you really enjoy? Because the first thing that people could work on is removal, right? Like, they can work on just maybe, and not complete removal, but they can work on just maybe eating a little bit less of some junky foods. If you're talking to somebody and they run down the list of stuff that they eat and they're like, yeah, I have two burritos from McDonald's, the burrito, sausage burritos.

And I have the hash browns with it and I have a coffee. And then for lunch, I eat Chipotle. And for dinner, I usually roll through some fast food type of place. Like, oh, fuck. Like, hey, with this person, you're really kind of screwed, right? But or if I get home and the family is still awake by the time I get home, we order pizza. You know, and it's like, man, like there's no, like so low protein in the diet and it's a lot of processed foods. Most people have a hard time when they come home from work.

They're usually like really, really hungry and so they smash the pantry and eat a ton of food from there. So there's all kinds of different things you run into. But the main thing is to try to get people to kind of lock in on some natural foods. And it doesn't have to necessarily be protein. I think if you start talking to someone and you realize they have what I kind of make fun of, I call gas station taste buds. If someone has gas station taste buds and they only like the flavors of shit that you would see at like 7-Eleven, then, uh,

then it's going to be a little tougher road. This is going to take a little bit longer time. And I think you need to be kind of cautious and conscious of the fact that this person's not going to love the zero fat, zero carb Greek yogurt that you recommend. They're going to taste that. It's going to be so bitter and sour to them. They're going to be like, oh my God, it's too much of a leap. Maybe down the road, maybe they'll enjoy that and think it tastes good, but not in the beginning. So you have to kind of meet them where they are.

And if they're like, man, I don't know, I don't really like a lot of that stuff. You say, well, how about some fruit? Like, it's really rare. I don't, I've never run into anybody that's like, I hate fruit. Like I won't eat it. There's usually like some piece of fruit you can find. Uh, I actually found more recently that, um, you know, oranges are awesome, but they're like kind of a pain in the ass. But then I figured out cuties, which I haven't really known about for some reason, which is kind of like a tangerine and you just can rip those things open so easy.

There's no seeds in there. It's nice little nutrition. You have to kind of work for it a little bit, at least. It slows you down a little bit. Yeah, it slows you down a tiny bit. But look, we got like apples and we have i mentioned berries earlier i think berries you can eat as many berries you want it's not always easy to manage these things and to keep them fresh in your house and stuff but there's a little learning curve to everything you know and you start to find out okay well what else do you like and they like uh some yogurt and say okay try to find a

yogurt that has the most amount of protein in it and that and that one that you like and they like uh some yogurt and say okay try to find a yogurt that has the most amount of protein in it and that and that one that you like and maybe it has some sugar in it like well that's not our fight just yet you know we can work on that some other time um but there are options out there nowadays where the things do have less sugar in them and there are so many options, as many options as we have for shitty convenient foods, which we're already all like hooked on. So it's easier to go that way. There's also an option like just because you're using DoorDash doesn't mean that you have to get Chinese food. Like you're using DoorDash, you could get anything. You can get anything.

You can get whatever you want. You can get a steak from a particular restaurant. You can get a nice want. You can get a steak from a particular restaurant. You can get a nice salad. There's a lot of different options. But back to the protein thing. Some of the easiest ways to add protein in, first of all, you've got to figure out what do you like. So if you're someone that likes cheese, you can carry around a cheese stick here and there. Fucking easy.

If you like meat, maybe you carry around some of these like Piedmontese beef sticks. There's all kinds of beef sticks and beef jerky. There's all kinds of different things. And what are, you know, just kind of walk yourself through what are some forms of protein that you like. Do you like, maybe you hate chicken breasts, but you like chicken thighs. Maybe you don't like the taste of steak, but maybe you like do you like you maybe you hate chicken breast but you like chicken thighs uh maybe maybe you don't like the taste of steak but maybe you like pork and maybe you like fish these are all things eggs a lot of people like eggs make your fucking eggs whatever way you want yeah um i don't do you think people need to also, I guess maybe think for themselves a little bit more? And this comes from me kind of taking stuff from you, taking stuff from, I guess I'll say, like, Sean Baker and even Lane Norton. Like, I take a little bit from everybody.

Like, I will eat a ton of eggs and steak, but I do it with a root beer zero or something, you know. So, like, I'll do that. But then I will only eat two meals a day, so I'll fast in between. So you can see like it's kind of like all kind of piled on itself to create a diet that works for me. Two meals a day like Mark Sisson, right? There it is, yeah, Mark Sisson. What do you think is the ultimate thing that's driving people to eat what they eat right now? And so this is what I think people are faced with.

I think people are faced with going through the day the same way that it would be if you took your glasses off and tried to go through the day. Blurry. Blurry and fucking tough. And you probably have a headache and stuff, right? People are in some difficult spots. They develop some bad habits. These foods have been around for a long time now

and they're part of our life. They're part of our society. You get kind of ridiculed if you don't eat them uh you know you kind of people think that you're stiff and you're not fun if you don't drink oh come on just have a have the cake man like it's a fucking kid's birthday man like what you know you get kind of shamed for some of these things um and it's it not, it's not an easy thing to like make the switch, but I heard this quote recently and said, everyone has two eyes. Well, not everyone, unfortunately, but everyone that has two eyes doesn't still have the same

vantage point. Like you and I could be somewhere and, uh, we could be in Bodega Bay and we could be standing in the same exact spot with a beautiful view of the ocean, and I could go and I could say, man, that is so amazing. Look at that, man. Look at the moon.

The moon looks fucking awesome. But meanwhile, you were looking at something totally different. We're standing in the fucking same spot, but we're two totally different people with two totally different interpretations, two totally different people with two totally different interpretations, two totally different backgrounds. So I think people are, they're kind of up against it. And I think a lot of people think that the hill is way too hard to climb. So they won't even, they're not encouraged. They don't feel good about taking that first step.

And the first step, in my opinion, can come from two different spots. It can come in the kitchen or it can come from doing something like a walk. Or I guess maybe there's a third option too, which is in the gym. So you got the gym, the kitchen, and your feet. Move your feet around a little bit. See if you can get into a gym. A lot of people seem to be able to, in my experience experience there's so many people that I've worked with before they don't have a problem with doing a couple 10 minute walks a day

they're like that's been great and they're like yeah I've been getting it I've been going to the gym too like okay cool how's the diet and the diet is usually the tough one the diet is usually the one where people they have to make a lot of adjustments. They, maybe they have kids and they're like, oh, you know, it's tough, you know, cook for the kids and we have lasagna and, well, there's nothing wrong with lasagna, but could you use a leaner sort like i eat all these i eat a lot of these things my wife cooks and uh she doesn't make lasagna necessarily but like we've we've had meals like that before

um but she cooks like normal shit that you would stick in the oven you know and it's none of it's complicated none of it's hard but if there is anything that's uh maybe difficult about it is just there's a little extra thought in it. Like, I don't want to make a meal for me or Mike. Like, why are your kids eating so poorly? What's going on with that? Let's have the whole family eat a little bit better. Now, is there going to be a period where your kids are like, it's a little dry?

Yes, there will be. And say, well, we're trying to use some leaner. It's going to take a little while. Figure all this out. And you're going to have to use the 96% lean ground beef and maybe the 85% too. You might have to take the two and combine them.

There might have to be like a lot of things that you do so that you can get through each and every day, still have food that tastes really good. I think most people think that they're going to try a diet that the food has to like taste like shit. They think that they have to be really restricted at calories. They think they have to be in this caloric prison. And you certainly don't, especially if you haven't really been moving around a lot. If you've already been moving around a lot, then you're going to have to figure out a way to eat less food over some

period of time. I think it's unavoidable in some ways, but that's where we go back to the food choices. There's so many different things that happen with food that it's insane. So if we got the idea of protein leveraging, we also have this idea of cooled down carbohydrates. So if you take rice and you take potatoes and you take some of these things, even if you just let them cool, they don't have to necessarily be cold. But my understanding is if they're cold, the carbohydrates are reduced even further. I don't know how true some of this stuff is. I don't know the information, but it seems to be from some of the stuff that I've seen listening to Thomas DeLauer and a bunch of other people, Joel Green, that when your carbohydrates are heated and then cooled, that there's less carbohydrates in them, that there's prebiotic

fibers in there. And prebiotic fibers, just like a lot of other fibers, don't get digested. And because it doesn't get digested, it doesn't like count as a calorie. So 100 grams of carbohydrates from a thing of rice that you may have heated up now might be 70. It's going to be these little things that will make a big difference over time. So I think to kind of go back to your question of people going around with their glasses off all day and seeing things as like being kind of blurry and being kind of confused and kind of bumping into stuff and trying to like find their way. It's going to take a long time but the only thing that you're not allowed to do is quit that's all you all you have to do is try to be in the fight every day think about it as a fight think about it as a battle and all you need to win the fight or the battle is a fucking sword and a shield and a skill set.

But it's going to take you a long time. Like maybe this sword is like 30 pounds. It's going to be hard to swing. Maybe the shield is heavy. It's going to be hard to protect yourself at all times. It's going to take a while. How long will it take you? It might take you three years.

It might take you five years. It might take you three years. It might take you five years, might take you eight years, but think about how much better off you're going to be in just a couple of days, five days, 10 days, 30 days, a hundred days. You know, you start to get into anything that starts to last about three months. You're going to have some really great progress in the course of three months. And even in the course of three months, if you made some of these efforts and rearranged your life and you didn't lose the amount of weight that you wanted, you're still getting healthier. And this kind of goes back to a theory that I've had for a long time. I don't really believe that you can lose

weight until you're actually healthy. So people want to try to lose weight to be healthy. And I think that you have to first kind of organize the foods that you're eating, organize your body, get yourself oriented towards the particular goals, start to line up some of these habits. You start to feel better about yourself. You're hitting some of your markers. The hormones in your body are changing you're starting to head in the right direction and now i think because the body keeps score your body is encouraged you're encouraged you feel good you feel different someone might say you look different and you're like oh fuck man i haven't lost a pound but okay i guess i'll take it

sometimes these changes are they're they're hard to see and they're hard to know, but as you get healthier, it'll be easier and easier to manage your body weight because for many years, you may have been eating crappy, you may have not taken your sleep seriously, and you may have been overly stressed. You may have had all these things going on. Once you get yourself healthy, which in my opinion only takes a couple of weeks, two, three weeks, you'll be healthier than you were three weeks ago if you haven't been doing anything about it. Once you get healthier from that point, it should be easier and easier to lose some weight. Power Project Family, how's it going? Now we talk about sleep all the time

on the podcast because it's one of the biggest things that helps you with your health and fitness, your recovery, your muscle gain, your fat loss, everything. That's why we've partnered with Eight Sleep for such a long time now because the technology behind the mattress allows you to track your heart rate, the amount of times it takes you to fall asleep, your tosses and turns, your heart rate variability. It changes its temperature through the night based off how you sleep, but not only yourself, but maybe your partner on the other side of the bed. It is an amazing mattress. Andrew, how can they learn more?

Yes. Head over to 8sleep.com slash power project. That's 8 spelled out E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash power project. Along with more information, you guys will actually save $150 off of your entire order automatically. Links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. We're really screwed, aren't we? Humans, that is. Everywhere we turn, there's some yummy food. Oh, yeah.

You know, looking at our schools, like, the meals. I know there's, like, memes out there that, like, compares, like, U.S. school lunches to, like, prison and shit. I don't think it's that dramatic but like my daughter's high school like feeds terror they've bad food like cinnamon rolls for breakfast and then like cheese pizza for lunch um almost no protein in anything um and it's it's hard man like this is us just kind of shooting the shit now but like when you try to tell somebody like hey like when you go to in and out don't get the fries it's like damn but those fries are really really good don't get the bun you're like well but the sugar bun is really really good too um i i don't want to compare this to lifting or anything but like what what makes you so passionate about like weight

loss and trying to help out so many people when it comes to losing weight because obviously you get fired up for lifting that's been your thing for since you were I think 12 but when it comes to this stuff I feel like you really like you pour your heart into this one specifically. So what is it about this that makes you so passionate? And there's a bunch of stuff, you know, probably number one is my mom. You know, my mother had such a hard time, you know, feeling good enough to like get the momentum and to get head in the right direction. And unfortunately, uh, we lost her a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, we lost her a couple years ago. She had diabetes.

She ended up having like a walker and stuff like that. And it was kind of the beginning of the end because then you start to lose your strength. You start to lose your muscle mass. And it's really tough from there. It makes it very difficult, especially if you're heavy. So this is what happens to a lot of people that are heavier is they lose some strength and or lose some mobility and then what then you're really screwed because you weigh a lot so it wouldn't be of any consequence if you're you know if your uncle or something that uh is 6'2 and weighs 190, you know, fucking twist his ankle, falling off a bike or something, he's going to suffer for, you know, a couple weeks.

Maybe he does gain a little bit weight during that time because he's not doing some of the activities he was doing before. But it's not going to really bother him much and he'll go back to his activities. When you're obese, if something slows you down, you're already slowed down because you're already walking around with a lot of extra weight on your frame and on your joints. And these things, you know, they'll really wear you down and just end up being like life-threatening to a certain extent. And so I'm really passionate about it because I think that nutrition holds a lot of the keys and holds a lot of the information to be able to help people with just about every single disease that there is. And I think that I don't know, you know, in particular what nutrition can do per se for something like cancer or something like that. But I think in the future, we will

continue to know more about it. And I think that when it comes to cancer and heart disease and diabetes and really any other disease, strength is never a weakness and weakness is never strength. So it always be helpful to be in better health rather than to be in worse health. And so if you are a fitnessy person in some sort of way, you run or you lift, hopefully you do some combinations of some of these things. Hopefully you get your heart rate up here and there for cardiovascular health. And hopefully you do some strength training. But along with that, if you have even just a halfway decent diet, training. But along with that, if you have even just a halfway decent diet, technically, you should be better off when something life-threatening comes your way.

We unfortunately don't have any options in terms of how we get taken out or what happens to us. A lot of times, horrible shit happens to really great people. Um, but if that day has ever come, it's nice to know like, Hey, I, I, I did a pretty good amount to, to stay in the best health that I could. And, um, your likelihood of being able to come out of that, uh, should be a lot better. But I just, there's too many people suffering. Too many people are, um, too many people are suffering in so many different ways. They're suffering just because they're unhappy because they have extra body weight, because they don't look like somebody else or because they feel that they're ugly. They feel that they're, they're fat. They feel that they're, you know, not, they're not part of, even though our society

is getting bigger and bigger, I still think that when you're fat, you feel like you're not part of the normal society. And it's, it's not a good feeling. Um, I think that, uh, people are embarrassed. They're embarrassed to be sweating when not everybody else is sweating. They're embarrassed to, um, yeah, I just think it's like, it's a thing that's been kind of shamed upon for many, many years, which that's a whole different topic. But, you know, I think of people like my buddy Russell and just so many of these people that have struggled with their weight for so long that I think it's important to grab, the only answer to this is to grab the people before they ever even get to that point or before they ever even get close to that point. So I would love to grab the person that just gained 25 pounds who's a little worried about

it. Like, man, I don't know what happened, but like over the last three years, I just all of a sudden, you know, I stopped playing tennis and like, you know, now I got a gut and I'm 42 or whatever. Like, that's the guy that I want to, those are the people that I really would love to reach because I think with some small tweaks, it's going to be easy. Now with the other guy, you know, who, somebody who's gained a hundred or 200 pounds, it's just going to take a really long time. And, and so many things are locked in. So many things are locked in, in your head to where you're, um, you don't have good clarity.

Just your whole, your, your whole world is like, you're, you're walking around when it comes to nutrition. And when it comes to exercise, you have like kind of almost like a permanent brain fog where you just, whatever the fuck reason, you can't seem to make the right decision. You are trying to make the right decision, but you keep getting pulled in in the opposite direction. And so that's, I would really love to be able to help people to kind of slay that inner dragon. And I think all it is is a skill set. I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. I think the important thing to remember is just not to quit. And by quit, I just mean completely turn your back on it and not do anything for your health. You don't stretch. You don't pay attention to your sleep. You don't do anything for your diet.

You don't go to the gym you there's so many things that you can do where i could say hey man you're still doing okay did you do a couple walks this week good you're fucking you're in don't be all upset that you went off your diet that's not a big deal you didn't quit you okay you had a day where you ate okay you got two days where you ate some all right you took the whole friday Friday to Sunday and a little bit into Monday. Oh, it's fine. You still got some walks in. You still hit the gym.

You're paying attention. Okay, you're upset. You're upset and you're mad and you're sad and you're pissed that you did that. That's great. Let's fucking take that energy and let's get you head back in the other direction again you know um something that i had said the other day because i'm having a not the exact same conversation but it's a conversation in regards to getting healthier through diet and the thing that this person kept coming back to was it was in regards to their kids um being unhealthy the the doctor had said

like oh this is hereditary but the the diagnosis was i think diabetes and then uh there was another one but i just instantly went to well the the diagnosis is not hereditary. The habits are, right? There's a lot of people that will say like, my parents were big, their parents were big, they were diabetic, I'm going to be diabetic or I'm already diabetic. I'm big because I have bigger parents and whatnot. Do you think somebody can break the cycle? You know, can they be a part of a big family but then themselves not be the big person as well yeah life you know life is just it's not always uh not always fair you know like you don't you don't get to choose your parents you don't get to choose uh for some people they got to work harder at certain things some people just um you probably

never wanted to like you probably didn't love wearing glasses you know but like you just your fucking eyes went and uh hereditary environmental nutrition like hard to pin down we don't know we don't we don't know enough information about that but what we do know is that you can control regardless of i'm sure there's some circumstances that are always like outside the box but for the most part it's managing body weight is it's it's a it's a modern it's a modern thing you know where people have a hard time managing their body weight uh diabetes is a modern thing where people have a hard time managing their body weight. Diabetes is a modern thing. Type 2 diabetes is a modern thing.

And it has to do with excessive energy, too much energy consumption. Even for someone that's thin. There's people that are thin that have just like over – they consume too much energy. They don't burn enough. So there's people like my mother-in-law who ended up with type 2 diabetes like 15 years ago. She's not even heavy. So there's a lot of people like that that also can fall into that category. But just to kind of put your hands up and say something's hereditary is completely, is ridiculous regardless of what

the disease is. Even if the disease can't be necessarily controlled by nutrition, which there's so much evidence that diabetes can be controlled by nutrition and that heart disease to some extent can be controlled by nutrition, your nutrition will always be helpful. It'll always put you in a better spot. It will always put you in a spot where you're a little bit stronger. And I think one of the things that I think kind of sucks is that we know this to be true in certain areas, like when it comes to somebody being like really intelligent or when it comes to somebody just kind of quote unquote magically being able to play the piano way different or way better than another person. We can kind of like see those things. Those are like real tangible things.

And you're like, yeah, okay, well, that kid, when he listens to music, probably hears something different. But there's probably something in his genetic makeup that allowed him to do that. And we see the same thing with obesity. I mean, sometimes somebody just has a propensity to be a lot heavier. Sometimes an entire family is pretty heavy, but there are also the habits within that household that are making those things even worse. You know, is being poor hereditary? Or is it more of like, well, I ain't ever going to make it out of here because my uncle never did. My dad never did. No one ever made it out of here.

So I'm going to be stuck here too. I think a lot of it has to do with your mindset and with dieting and controlling your body weight is, again, it's a skill set and it's something that takes time. And for some people, they never had to think about it. Some people have been really, really thin their whole life and they didn't have to think about, oh man, you know, how am I going to, how am I going to fight? And maybe their parents were in good shape too. And they never, so much of it has to do with the habits of the household. And I don't think it's just like just a genetic thing. All right, Mark. So then what the heck? Do calories matter? Like should we all start counting calories or should we just say screw it?

We're not even going to worry about whatever the caloric value of our food is. I don't think the caloric value of food really matters that much. I, no, of course it matters. And that's why you want to make a better food choice, because the calories actually are a big factor. And you want to choose leaner sources of protein, things like protein shakes, yogurt, cottage cheese, cheese itself, eggs, even bacon, you know, bacon and eggs and bacon,

eggs and cheese are all like a one-to-one. So you need to be a little careful with all of those because they have one gram of fat per every gram of protein that they have. You probably want to find things that have about two grams of protein, more like two or three grams of protein per every gram of fat that they have. But basically, going back to what Paul Saladino said, if you stick to the basics, if you stick to natural foods, it's going to be much harder to overconsume food. Processed food can still be part of someone's diet. It can still be in there. You don't have to get rid of it forever necessarily. You don't have to necessarily condemn it. But you do need to understand that when you do eat those foods, that it encourages you to do that again. So making the right decision encourages the right decision again, especially when the right decision is amplified by a

compliment. Someone's like, man, you're looking great. You're doing something different. And you're like, fuck, I'm so glad somebody fucking finally recognized i've been busting my ass over here but that that's going to encourage you you're not going to go home that night and fuck it up no you're gonna you're gonna have a day where you were you interpreted your stress as kind of being more on the negative side um maybe it's fucking raining out and a sad song came on on your way home and you're just kind of a blobbery mess and uh the house is you know you got shit all over your house and you need to clean that up and you know just a bunch of shit just kind of went sideways that day that's probably going to be the day where you're like fuck it man let's just order some pizza

it's so nice just to kick up my feet, watch my favorite show, eat some pizza and just chill the fuck out. Counting calories, I don't think that people have to count calories to be able to manage their body weight. But I think that people do need to learn about calories because I don't know any other way. Like you got to learn about it somehow or some way. My son, you know, he's been doing some bodybuilding stuff in the gym and he's been

eating pretty much as he eats like chicken breast all the time. He doesn't love steak, but he'll, he'll, well, he, he likes steak a lot, but he likes when he cooks for himself, he cooks up because we have steak all the time so he cooks up chicken breast for himself and he's he's conscious of that and my daughter's fairly conscious of the foods and stuff just because like I've been teaching both of them the whole time like this is what I know this is what I like to do I'm gonna pass this on to them and they can kind of do with it as they like I don't they both eat ice cream probably four or five nights a week, but I'm not seeing them go back for seconds. I'm not seeing some giant bowl. And then also the ice cream that

we have in the house. Um, it's not like it's gone in a day, you know, it's like it's there for the week at least. Uh, that's with two of them picking at it. and every once in a while I might stick my fingers in there have some of it too but uh yeah it's not an easy thing to figure out but uh I do think that the message there from Paul Saladino I think the main thing to take home from that rather than to get riled up about anything he said I think a good take home is that if you eat natural foods that you're going to probably be heading in the right direction. The one thing I would disagree with was where he kind of made it seem like you get to eat as much of it as possible. And some of the things he even named in, in what he was talking about, just there just have a lot of fat in them.

And so I know from experience, like don experience like don't don't uh don't threaten me with a good time basically if you say that i can't you know gain weight with natural foods like i'll be like yeah the issue is when you start to combine fat and carbohydrates so that's going to be something that people want to be mindful of. If you have some ground beef and you have some rice, that could be a really great combination. But if you have like, you know, 80% lean ground beef and rice, it's going to taste awesome. It's going to be really fucking good. But that just has a lot of calories in it. And as you're eating it, unless you wait it out, unless you paid attention to how much you're eating, you're not going to really be able to eat that much of it because it's so calorically dense.

Now, that could be taken advantage of for the guy or girl that wants to be more jacked and wants to gain some weight. So I think that the people that are going to be able to maneuver the best, I think are going to be the people that stick to whole foods, but also stick to leaner sources of protein. Yeah. And plus how much butter are you going to put in the rice? So that way it tastes even better. It makes it go through the roof in terms of flavor, right? Yeah. You got to weigh it out. But even then it's like, no, you're just going to, yeah, that's just a calorie bomb yeah that's all i got what are you eating today how about that what does that look like well i've

been cheating on my nose like actually it's bad timing yeah yeah yeah no uh it's been really good my food's been good i um last night um last night we ate a bunch of meatballs i'm not like a i'm not a nut about you know having like pot or not pasta but having uh like tomato sauce and stuff like even though i'm conscious of like carbs and sugar and stuff the sauces and different things i could eat all i eat all this stuff uh My wife made a bunch of, a shit ton of meatballs out of lamb and some Piedmontese beef. That shit was amazing.

I can't wait to go home because we got a lot more of that. Yesterday I also ate a lot of carnivore crisps like midday because we were, we did some double podcasting two days in a row and uh yeah so i ate some of that and carnivore crisps it just all it is is meat and uh salt yeah it's meat and salt just like uh it tastes amazing if you want to go check it out you can go over to i think it's carnivorecrisp.com and you can use the code mark bell if you want to

get a percentage off they just have a great product. I really, really like it a lot, and that's something that I rely on quite a bit. I'm trying to think of anything else I ate yesterday. Every morning I have coffee and I have a steak shake. I do like an iced coffee at my house. I just blend it up with some steak shake in there. So I start every morning out with some protein and some fats. And then trying to think.

Oh, at night, last night, I had my dad made a fruit salad. I ate some of that. And that's, I mean, that's a pretty typical day. And then I ended the night because I'm fat and I love like a fat in my head still. Um, I love, uh, I like chocolate. So, um, I ate, uh, from a company called Hugh, I ate some chocolate covered cashews. Those were really good. But see, again, stuff like that is just, there's a lot of calories in there. you have to kind of you know you got to kind of make yourself like a deal so what i'll do is i'll pour some of that out in like a bowl i try

to grab a smaller bowl and then i put it back in the pantry and then i might get up a second time and do that again but it's just a little block you know for me to like you know not sit there and kill calories and then this morning, just another steak shake and some, yeah, steak shake and an iced coffee. And no, I didn't eat anything else today. So I usually save most of my calories for later in the day. Nice. So when this gets published, it'll be Easter Sunday tomorrow. gets published it'll be uh easter sunday tomorrow um so let's let's say you're in the scenario where you're gonna go be with family family that's not necessarily um health well not every i think

everybody's conscious of it these days but they kind of don't give a it's easter it's a holiday we're gonna have cupcakes because it's we're to get a little Easter bunny. Candy around. And that peeps all over. So what is something that you will bring to the gathering that, one, that you can eat and have fun with it, but also that others will eat and they won't even recognize that they're eating something that's actually good for them? I think that's a great practice. for them. I think that's a, like, it's just a great practice, you know, like if you, if there are family gatherings and you're not hosting them, um, is to just tell people like, Hey, you know, I'm going to bring, you know, like you're just going to always bring something and whatever that something is that you bring could always be healthy. Um, my dad always does a fruit salad,

which I think is a really excellent choice. People always eat it. Yeah. People always like it a lot. I'm trying to think of like easier things too, but like meatballs is a great one. There's so many different ways to make meatballs where they're pretty, they're still health conscious. Like in a slow cooker or something. So you just like scoop them out.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And you, yeah, you, yeah. You can figure out a way to like, yeah, transport them and all that stuff. But a slow cooker is a, yeah, you, yeah, you can figure out a way to like, yeah, transport them and all that stuff. But a slow cooker is a great way because you just bring the whole thing with you and then

you just plug it in at the person's house. The way we made them last night is we had some pork panko in there and the pork panko adds flavor and keeps everything, you know, kind of crusted together, but you're not using like the breadcrumbs. And we made some pasta and stuff. And I think some of the kids, I think ate some pasta, but yeah, in terms of like bringing stuff and, and kind of guarding yourself at some of these family gatherings, most of the time at most family gatherings, there's some sort of like protein source of some kind. So just try to double

down on that and do your best with that. And if, And if what's being served is like fattier than you'd like and this kind of stuff and you can kind of know that and you expect that to be the case, then just always eat before you go. That's the easiest thing is to eat before you go. Bring something healthy if you can and just blend in. Like it's not hard to blend in. You're there with people for an hour or two. It's like it shouldn't be that huge of a deal for you to like just go off plan slightly. But if you are a person that's like on the heavier side and you're trying to really commit yourself to a diet, then you have to draw a line in the sand and just, you might not be able to eat what they're serving.

Cool. Yeah. All right, Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. Sure thing. All right.

And down in the comments, let us know what you guys are going to take to the Easter gathering or whatever holiday happens to be around the corner, depending on when you guys watch this. So that way we can share ideas. I'm just going to make a fruit dip and then probably get some strawberries or something. And then just so that way I have something that I know for sure that I can kind of go to town on. When you're amongst other people, right, like you don't want to be the outsider,

but you also want to have fun. So, yeah, that's what I'm going to do. So let us know what you guys are going to do. Also, check out the couple Saturday Saturday schools ago. We talked about how athletes should be eating. Did he make it? Oh, he missed it. How athletes should be eating. That'll come up on a card floating around here somewhere. That was a really

good episode. We got some really good feedback. So go check that out if you were digging this one. And make sure you guys hit the like button, subscribe, all that good stuff. Follow the podcast at mbpowerproject all over the place. My Instagram is at IamAndrewZ. Mark Bale, where are you at? I'm project all over the place my instagram is at i'm andrew z mark bale where you at i'm at mark smelly bells strength is never a weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye