Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 520 - Bigger, Leaner, Stronger - Mike Matthews

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Mike Matthews is the bestselling author of the books, “Bigger, Leaner, Stronger”, “Thinner, Leaner, Stronger”, and “The Shredded Chef”, host of the Muscle For Life podcast, as well as the founder of Legion Athletics. Mike has used his simple and science based approaches to fitness and health, building muscle, losing body fat, and gaining strength, to help thousands of people across the world achieve their best bodies ever! Buy Mike's books on Amazon below! Bigger, Leaner, Stronger: https://amzn.to/3b5reAQ Thinner, Leaner, Stronger: https://amzn.to/3baQ0Q2 Beyond Bigger Leaner Stronger: https://amzn.to/3o1oZDJ Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

This episode is brought to you by Element Electrolytes in SEMA, my man. How do you drink your Element? So, I mean, I use it every morning when I do wake up because you sweat a lot during when you sleep. So when you wake up, you want to rehydrate. But the big thing is that a lot of athletes, when they sweat during their workouts, you lose a lot of sodium, you lose a lot of salt. A lot of athletes talk about cramping up or feeling fatigued when they work out, especially

if, you know, let's say that you don't always eat before you work out or you maybe are an athlete that does a little bit of fasting here and there. You will sweat a lot during a workout and you want to make sure that you're adequately hydrated while training. This doesn't mean just drinking water. This means that you want to add electrolytes to whatever you're drinking so that you can rehydrate adequately to make sure you perform at a high level. It makes a big difference. Before, when I didn't use to take electrolytes, I used to cramp up a lot during workouts and workouts were hit and miss. Some workouts I felt stronger, some workouts I felt weaker. But now, since I'm always adequately electrolyte hydrated pretty much, all my workouts feel great. I don't cramp up at all anymore and it feels pretty damn good. So for me on average, I think I'd go through about two to three element electrolytes per day on long hikes. Cause I like to take long hikes. I could go through five or six.

Does it feel like almost like a, like a secret you have against all the other again, you sweat a lot, right? So people are like, oh, why am I cramping up? Well, you're potassium deficient, right? It makes, it makes a very, very, very big difference. So even though I do a lot of fasted training, I don't feel fatigued. I don't feel tired and get through every training session feeling amazing. That's awesome. So if you guys want to get an edge on the competition, like Insima does, head over to drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Check out the value bundles. That's paying for three boxes, any flavor you guys want, and getting a fourth one free. Although we're going to tell you, you should definitely, definitely load up on the new watermelon and salt flavor. You see what I mean?

It's so good. That thing is incredible. Can't recommend it enough. Again, drinklmnt.com slash power project head over there right now what up power project crew this is josh settledge aka settlegate here to introduce you to our next guest mike matthews mike matthews is the best-selling author of the books bigger leaner stronger as well as thinner leaner stronger Shredded Chef. He is the host of the Muscle for Life podcast, as well as the founder of Legion Athletics. Mike has used his simple and science-based approaches to fitness and health, building muscle, losing body fat, and gaining strength to help thousands of people across the world achieve their best bodies ever.

Mike has been featured in magazines and publications such as Men's Health, Esquire Magazine, Women's Health, and Muscle and Strength. His mission is centered around three things. He wants to help a million people change their lives to be healthier, fitter, and to ultimately put a dent in the negative downward trends in health and performance across the general population. Secondly, he wants to fight against the BS in pseudoscience in health and fitness. And third, he wants to reform the supplement industry. In seven years, Mike took his company, Legion Athletics, from a small supplement company looking to provide others with all natural supplements to the number one best-selling brand of natural supplements in the entire world.

Legion Athletics has sold over $2 million worth of supplements, but that's a different story, one that we may or may not be able to hear on today's episode. Please enjoy this conversation with Mike Matthews. We are rolling. Oh, my God. Eating some of those carnivore crisps over there? Trying to get off mic. Away from the mic so it doesn't. Peeps that are

listening in for today, you got to try these things out. Carnivore crisps are freaking awesome. They did a great job. Great execution on a product. There's like a beef brisket. There's all kinds of different stuff. They just sent some out to us and we like it. So we're just talking about it. They got liver, they to us, and we like it, so we're just talking about it.

They've got liver. Yeah, they've got liver. They've got heart. They've got chicken skin. They've got chicken breast. They've got top sirloin. They have a ribeye. They have a ribeye.

Eye round or eye of round. That one's really good. Top sirloin. Yep. Yeah, it's fucking good. I'm going to take some drugs real quick. They're pretty low in fat for the most part, except for the... There's a ribeye one that has a little higher fat content and a brisket one that has a little higher fat content.

And the chicken skin is pretty high, but the chicken breast, which I actually prefer... The chicken skin is really high, but the chicken breast is really low. I put them out at a party. We had an Oscar party. People were like, what are these? They just started eating, and I was like, oh, it's just a meat chip.

By the way, what was that Oscar party thing? It was just for the fuck of it. Oh, okay. We just have it every year. Celebrate Oscar? My family loves movie shit, so when the Oscars are on TV, they get together, watch it, and just eat some food, and try to make predictions, and I won.

I kicked everybody's ass. I didn't know what's going on. I never saw any of those movies. That's always great. I was just like, fuck it. Just base things off of the actors that are in it. Yeah.

Like Leonardo DiCaprio's in it. Chances are it's not going to win, even though it's an amazing movie. Yeah. Yeah. My, my, uh,

style this year was just to pick. Nevermind. Yeah. I think I know where you're going there. I think I know where you're going there. I think I know where you're going there. That's not going to cancel. I was going off the rails for a second. I really calibrated.

I picked the best actors. The blessed actors. Oh my god. Anyway, we're going to be talking about some fat loss today, I think. Right? I hope so. This man's lean.

Yeah. Mr. Mike Mathews. He is. He's got a lot of, you know, I think sometimes people kind of, they'll say, they kind of make it seem like it's hopeless that you can't burn fat. They kind of make it seem like the only way to do it is to, you know, only be in like a caloric deficit and have all these specific things going on. And it sounds like it's too much sometimes for people to handle.

And obviously you do need to, you do need to figure out a way to trade out some of your food. You can't eat all day and burn fat at the same time. But I like some of the stuff that Mike is preaching. He's talking a lot about sleep, talking about supplements. And just kind of, I think when you have everything or when you have, you start to put more things in order, it gets easier and easier for your body to lose body fat. With my brother-in-law, he lost about 16 pounds so far And he was on a nutrition plan that I gave him for like a month and a half or so with no, like he just wasn't, he wasn't losing any weight.

Maybe about six weeks. What was he doing? I just had him change his food. I was like, hey, here's healthy foods as opposed to what you were doing before. Got like, you know, meat. We got eggs. We have vegetables. We got fruit, rice, potatoes,

kind of just explained a little bit of stuff to him and try to avoid, you know, over consuming sugar, try to avoid overeating, eat multiple times a day. I told him to eat like four or five times a day. I wanted him to like kind of stuff himself with these nutritious foods. And so even like week one, he's like, I gained like three pounds. I was like, good. And he's like, no, no, this is opposite of my goal. And I was like, I know, but

we need to get used to the food. First time reading food labels, first time ever on a diet in his forties. And, uh, I was like, I, it's my belief that you need to get healthy first before your body can even work properly before your body can be like, hey, I think we can get rid of some fat. I think you need kind of a bunch of checks and balances in place. Obviously, you can just start to eat a lot less and you could lose weight right away. But I don't think that's good for long term. And so anyway, he got his body headed in the right direction. He started to learn more about food labels and nutrition.

And he started to recognize, you know what? I probably don't have to eat that much. And then he started to implement exercise. The whole time we've been implementing some exercise, but he's never really exercised before. And so the exercise is now coming up more. He used to be a swimmer, so he did a lot of exercise when he was young. So now the exercise is coming up. He has a Peloton.

He's doing some of the workouts from there. But I think that's where people would look at the exercise and be like, that's the difference, because he didn't lose weight prior. Now he's exercising. Now he's losing weight. But no, it's a combination of a bunch of things going on that has him heading in the right direction. And I think our guest today is going to be able to explain a lot of this to us as well. Yeah, no, I really, I really liked the way that that was done because you kind of sometimes have to break certain habits in terms of eating, eating certain foods to be able to move forward. So like, yeah, you might be, you might gain a

little bit of weight, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're moving backwards. If your palate is changing and you're not craving all of these foods that you used to overeat. It'll take a few weeks for that to happen. But when you finally adjust to eating whole foods, healthy foods all the time, you'll start to be able to make progress again. Just like in lifting, when you have to, you're lifting with bad form, you got to change your form. You go backwards, you get weaker for a little bit and then boom, you start getting stronger over time. It's not easy changes. It's really difficult. But what we've learned is that there's a lot of options. There's so many different ways that you can go about doing this stuff.

Just the things that we've found to be effective are eating protein and figuring out ways each and every single day to not overeat. And Seema and I, and Andrew utilizes some of this too, is we utilize some intermittent fasting. It works great for me. For me, a lot of times I don't do a full-on intermittent fast. A lot of times I have a protein shake with my coffee in the morning. I just kind of like it. It's not for any particular reason.

I don't think it's harming me in any way. It's still partitioning out the calories to later in the day. Maybe I'm not getting the exact results from some of the other things that might happen during fasting. But you have to find things that you can implement into your life that you like, that you feel like you can do for a long time. When I don't have the coffee and protein shake in the morning, it's not like I'm miserable. I just enjoy it. I just like it. And there are days where I can just say, yeah, I don't feel like I need that for today. No big deal. and protein shake in the morning it's not like a miserable i just enjoy it i just like it and

there are days where i can just say yeah i don't i don't feel like i need that for today no big deal and i can just go without and i can just do like a regular fast but for me what i've been learning is you're already pretty damn disciplined why not like mix in uh a couple little things that you enjoy so that you can really do this long term i think that yeah the biggest thing is just figuring out what's the easiest way that i can gain the most control possible right the most control over my cravings the most control over like how i react to food um that's just that's just what we're trying to figure out here and for like for us fasting did help with that i do i do like how now um i don like, we don't have to fast every day. Like it's not as stringent as it used to be. Um, today, like if I want to eat breakfast and just eat through the

day, I can, but I'm still not over eating through the day, which was something that I used to do in the past. It used to be that I eat my first meal and then the day was just, let's eat, you know, let's just have a lot in every single meal that we eat. So, uh, that's everyone's trying to figure out on every type of diet that you do, no matter what it is. It's like, how can you what what in this diet is going to have you have control over the food that you're putting in your mouth and over the overall amount of food that you're putting in your mouth so you don't go crazy and overeat. So easy to lie to ourselves. so easy to lie to ourselves. How have you guys found through counting calories, flexible dieting type protocols that you may lie to yourself?

Cause I know how it happens with the low carb stuff. I don't really, I don't have as much practice as you guys with counting calories. Are you like, Oh, this is a teaspoon of peanut butter. And it's like, it's four tablespoons of peanut butter. Should I tell the story about how I almost died or do we have time?

Well, let me tell something so that way you can grand finale it with that. Yes. Yeah. So the one thing that I do not do anymore. Can I waterfall that, by the way? Waterfall that. Absolutely.

Oh, got it. Well, I was going to put the camera on me, but I'll put it on you so that way people can get a good shot. Don't go chasing those waterfalls. No, I would. Yeah, I would. good shot don't go chasing those waterfalls no i would yeah i would um i would i would search for like a certain food and then i would just conveniently select the lowest calorie version of that food and then i would track that right like or it would be um how that you know the typical like that's about a teaspoon or whatever i wouldn't weigh everything yeah versus now i do um and i know people who

don't weigh things out kind of my because i know i used to think like damn that sounds annoying but i actually really enjoy it because now i know where i'm at all the time um i'm trying to more stuff will come to my mind but i really want to hear about how you almost died so i mean first i'll i'll make this short and say that learning how to track did give me a good understanding of food labels and what's in food so that that did help but the time i almost died and i legitimately almost probably died was back in 2015 when i was contest prepping and i was extremely lean i was about 229 pounds 228 pounds um single digit body fat and i was eating 40 30 to 40 grams of fat a day to help me get leaner at the time. But what happened is I got this jerky that was super fatty from this Vietnamese lady in West Sacramento, California.

I wish she would just make it again. It's so good. But to give you a concept, the bag of jerky probably has 200-plus grams of fat in it. Okay? The bag. Well, during prep, I was, you know, I was tracking, but this day, this day I was just like, fuck, I really want to eat this jerky. Um, I I'm feeling like shit, whatever.

I'll eat it. And then I'll eat lower fat than that. The next few days, just to kind of bypass this. What kind of meat was this? It was jerky. It was beef jerky, but she made it so good. It was so thick. We got to i know man she's she she doesn't make it anymore right now because i think of like health food codes but i i mean like she'll be making it again i can't

wait so anyway i was so fucking hungry that i just had to eat the whole bag a few minutes after eating the whole bag i started to shake uncontrollably um and i didn't know what was going on and my ex-girlfriend at the time she was like and see what the fuck i was like i don't know like my whole body was shaking and then i fainted um and then i got up four minutes later she said it was about four minutes that i was kind of on the ground kind of going like this because she was scared as shit but i was like what happened like i woke up i was like what happened she's like yeah you fainted i was like what the fuck? She's like, yeah, you fainted. I was like, what the fuck? I feel so rested though. Yeah.

And I, I looked it up later. There's a, there's a shock that it's called when you go from, like, I was eating very low calories, very low fat. And literally within the span of 10, 15 minutes, I probably ate maybe 250 grams of fat and hell grams of carbs. Right. So, I mean, you can probably, you said you kind of know what happened. Yeah. Yeah.

There's, so when people used to be like starving, they would get to, I mean, you can probably, you said you kind of know what happened. Yeah. Yeah. There's, so when people used to be like starving, they would get to, you know, places where there was food and people would be like, all right, let's, you know, feed them.

And they would feed them and the people would die. It's weird. Cause you die for you. They would die from eating. Right. And I think a lot of times it was the amount of fat. I forget exactly what happens, but something similar

happens with something called rabbit starvation where you eat really really lean meats there's not enough fat and eventually you start to lose weight lose weight lose weight and then when you go and eat this thing hits you and you uh yeah that's it for you it was pretty pretty uh pretty wild yeah you could have been yeah could have been not here knocking on death's door that day who knows yeah i didn't tell alberto what happened alberto was who's coaching me i didn't tell him Pretty wild. Yeah. You could have been. Yeah. Could have been not here. Knocking on death's door that day. Who knows? Yeah. I didn't tell Alberto what happened. Alberto was the one who was coaching me.

I didn't tell him what happened. I was just like, he probably checked in and I was like, everything's good. So I think, yeah, people have a tendency to, they have a tendency to lie to ourselves a little bit about how hard our exercise is, how much energy we put out. We have a tendency to want to reward any energy, any effort. Man, today was a great day. Like, you really fucking killed it today.

That was awesome. Good, good job. Like, you want to give yourself a pat on the back. And so you're like, let me finish off this entire thing of Oreo cookies. And it's like, I think Mark Sisson worded it really well when he said that is a form of punishment. That is not really a reward. And I think that people that are already just think about it. Think about it this way.

We're all three of us. We have an issue with alcohol and we want to celebrate our sobriety by going out and having a drink. Like we deserve a reward. Like we've been working hard. Everyone would be total agreement right that that sounds like a really horrible idea yeah right so i think we need to sometimes look at our nutrition that way and it's hard because you got to eat so it's tough because i think maybe you can just overstuff yourself with foods that are healthy and try to start

making better choices but it just doesn't seem the same. Like it's not the same as being gluttonous with a pizza or being gluttonous with pasta. It's, it just is not the same when you're gluttonous with a steak. Although a steak tastes amazing. You got to, at some point, maybe retrain your mind to think or to buy into the steak is better, not only because it tastes really good, but it's just better for you. So maybe you can sell yourself on, okay, in terms of the steak versus the pasta thing that you want to eat or bread or whatever, maybe it doesn't have the same pop and flavor,

but maybe overall it's just a way better choice. And so maybe you can kind of say, okay, the steak is like a seven or eight overall. And the bread, even though taste wise, it's kind of off the charts. It's not in my best interest to eat bread with a bunch of fucking butter on it. So it gets a little bit lower rating than the steak. I mean, you got to kind of make up these stories to yourself to get you through the day and to be able to eat healthy. And the story that I made up to myself there was like, I'm going to eat all of this now, and I'm going to offset this for the next seven days. So I'll eat less carbs and less fat for the

next few days so that, you know, my total weekly caloric intake isn't totally messed up from eating this big old bag. Right. Uh, yeah, we look out bird. I'm being good. I swear. It's like in SEMA. How'd you gain four pounds? Like we were on target, man. Everything was going really good. What the fuck happened? I'm just stressed. I didn't get a lot of sleep.

It'll go away. Four pounds? Where'd that come from? Yeah. And I feel like with learning how to track macros and hit a certain caloric goal, I don't have to really focus too much on it to where I can think about whether or not I should be fasting today. You know,

I can recognize that, you know, like yesterday I had a super good chest workout this morning. I was, I had a really tough leg and shoulder day because Mark walked in and crushed me. All right, let's do 15 more sets. and so like because of that i'm not fasting today but had i still been learning how to like track or how to hit a certain goal or like no wait i'm supposed to fast like this is what i'm

supposed to do like my mind wouldn't be allowed to think outside of that you know small box of like no this is what you have to do so i think once people kind of get an idea on how to control stuff then you can kind of you have more bandwidth to think about other things like that i think that's really important at least for me that's how it's been no there's there's a lot of there's a lot of pros and cons to it but you gotta again you gotta be kind of mature with it. What I did was very immature. What you're doing currently is very adult and mature. So good thing. You could have a whole show on like diet lies,

you know, the way we lie to ourselves. I mean, you were a child, so it's okay. Yeah. We got our boy on. Hey guys. Hey.

Great to have you on the show today. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm surprised we haven't connected over the years. I mean, of course, I know about who you are and we have both of a podcast, but I'm excited to do this. I'm excited to reciprocate. Yeah, we're excited as well. And I think we might as well just dive right in since we got you.

So let's see. Here goes. I know, you know, we were just talking before you hopped in here. We were just talking about kind of the lies that we tell ourselves about our nutrition, whether we're on a keto diet or flexible dieting type of protocol. There's different varieties, different ways to kind of lie to ourselves about how much we're eating and that one of the main things to try to figure out, especially for people that are bigger, is how can they retrain themselves to get to a point where they're eating more nutritious, but they're eating less overall? What are some ways that you've found to be effective to help people that are just on a mission to really lose some serious weight, 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds? Yeah, good question. I would say just to this first point of deluding ourselves about how much we're eating, sometimes it's not as willful maybe as someone like you or me might think.

Like for example, I've seen this many times over the years. So somebody learns about energy balance. They learn about macronutrients balance, right? They learn about, oh, protein, carbs, and fat. Okay. So if I hit these certain numbers, then I can create an energy deficit and I can then lose fat. Okay. That's cool. And so they even, they get out their measuring utensils and their scale and they're trying to be conscientious. But what they don't realize is, let's say on their meal plan, it calls for a cup of dry oatmeal. Okay. And then you cook it. And so they measure, they get their cup and they fill it up with dry oatmeal and they go, cool. I stuck to my meal plan on that one there. And then maybe let's say in the oatmeal is going to go a tablespoon of nut butter as well. So that's the meal and they're going to cook it up and they're going to eat it.

And they think that they just stuck to their meal plan and they just had X number of calories of food and X number of grams of carbs and fat. But what they don't realize is the cup of dry oatmeal that is in their meal plan. Let's say it's, I don't know, off the top of my head, it'd probably be like 60 to 80 grams or something like that weight. And they, it wasn't a heaping cup, but it was a bit more than that. It was a hundred grams, let's say, which visually there's a difference, but not a huge difference, right? Not something you're going to be sensitive to if you're new to all of this. And then let's go to the tablespoon. Let's say it's even two tablespoons of nut butter, right? And a tablespoon, it's probably going to be high teens or so grams weight. Eh, theirs was 22 grams, let's say, of nut butter. Looks very similar. But when you look at the calories, they may have just accidentally eaten, let's say, 20% more calories than they meant to

eat in that meal simply because of these measuring errors. And if you repeat that a few times per day, that can wipe out your entire calorie deficit. That can, so you go into it being pretty informed actually, and understanding how things work. You've given up on magical thinking of fad diets and, oh, it's just the lectins or it's the gluten. And you've accepted reality that calories in and calories out is non-negotiable. It's not everything, but this is not something

you can get around, right? And then you try to be a good boy or a good girl and you make these mistakes and you feel now like you're on your diet because although I am an advocate of flexible dieting and that I don't forbid any foods and when I'm teaching people how to do this, eat the stuff you like. But if you're cutting and let's say you're a woman, you probably are not. Even if you're an active woman, you shouldn't be on poverty calories or macros as the body builders say. But maybe you have 1500

calories that you can eat every day. That's not that much. And so there are certain foods that just don't work well. If you were to say, all right, I have 1500 calories per day. I want to eat pizza every day. Can you make that work? Yeah. Is that going to be enjoyable? Probably not. You're probably gonna be hungry a lot because there goes like two thirds of your calories in one meal and then you're gonna have to go for a while. So they stick to the plan. They don't see results and are confused. And I've seen this again, working with many people where that can then lead them off in many squirrely directions because then they start to question energy balance and they go, well, maybe that Mike guy was wrong, or maybe you guys were wrong,

or maybe that scientist guy, maybe Eric Helms was wrong, whatever. And then they go off to Gundry and they hear about lectins and they think, oh, okay, well, maybe that's it. And so I would say that that's a good just, I think, tip to share for people who, again, have come to the conclusion that calorie counting may not work for them. Not that you have to count calories to lose weight. You don't, but you do have to understand energy balance. You do have to understand how to create a calorie deficit. Good. Now, with that being said, first off, I have done this. I've done that many times. Everyone's made that mistake.

And the funny thing is when I typically have done it in the past, I was very aware of what I was doing. Like when I was taking a tablespoon of peanut butter, that was a nice heaping tablespoon of peanut butter. You don't even want to weigh it. It's probably fine. It's close. Blissful ignorance is what we call it. But with that being said, right, you know, I think that tracking and my boy Andrew tracks over here. I used to track a lot in the past.

What are some great ways that you've seen people, you know, track, learn, and then sooner or later, hopefully get off of tracking? Do you believe that first off the goal is to get to a point where you don't have to track your meals anymore? Or there are some people that are like, this is kind of a lifestyle and this is something I'm used to doing. And this is something I'm going to probably maintain until the day I die. How do you look at that? Yeah, that's a great question for most people. And I'll say that I work mostly with, I would say the gen fit crowd. I work with kind of everyday people who they want to get into good shape and fitness is not the most important thing in their life. They have maybe three to five hours per day to give to it and they have a job and they have a family and blah, blah, blah. And so for a lot of those people, I would say, yes, absolutely.

The goal is to get away from having to track or weigh or measure. And even if you're really into fitness, like I don't track or weigh or measure anything myself. And if people look at my Instagram, like I'm in pretty good shape, I stay pretty lean and I train pretty hard. And the reason I can do that though, and I've written about this and spoken about this just to try to give people not a reality check, just give them maybe a look underneath the hood of what does it actually take to stay,

let's just say as a guy under 10% body fat indefinitely. What does that actually look like? And for example, I do follow a meal plan. I eat more or less the same foods every meal every day. And I like it. I actually enjoy the foods and it doesn't, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I don't have an eating disorder. I'm happy to go out to a restaurant if my wife wants to go to a restaurant, but most of the time I could tell you what I'm going to eat the next day and the next day and the next day. And so I've gotten to a point where I'm, I just know what the portions are. And maybe a less strict version of that would be, okay, if somebody wanted more variety in their diet, if they go through a phase of planning and tracking and weighing and measuring, and if they look at it as also an educational experience, what's going to happen is they are

naturally going to start learning again, like, oh, so a portion of this type of food I like to eat, that's about the size of it. And that's about that many calories and protein and carbs. And it's not something that I think you even have to consciously think about too much. It just, you kind of learn through osmosis of doing it enough. So then when you do transition, when you put the utensils away and the scale away, you already know now, let's say you've gone through a phase of cutting that way. Let's say you've gone through a phase of lean bulking, a phase of maintenance. And so you've now gotten a good, just intuitive understanding of approximately how much of these

different foods that you like to eat equals 2000 calories or 2,500 or three or 3,500. And so, um, yes, I think for a lot of people, if they want to move away from it and, and I would say, yeah, probably, I don't know. I can't think of anybody off the top of my head who says, oh, I just love weighing everything I eat. I love my, my, my measuring cups and my scale. No, I mean, that's usually something if people are really into this, it's usually competitors. So people who are maybe they're a strength competitor or a physique competitor, and there is a point where they have to do that. Like it's just the margins become so slim and it becomes so hard to keep driving fat

loss. But for most people, I would say, yeah, the goal is to not have to track if you don't want to. I know sometimes people get caught up in kind of the smaller stuff. But I think from some of the stuff I've seen that you talk about, you do talk about some of the smaller stuff, like how to really optimize fat loss, how to maybe expedite the whole process. So let's start off with something like fasted cardio. Like, are you a fan of fasted cardio? And if so, why? Yeah, that's something that I, it's funny. So my position when I first saw some of the research on fast, this was years ago on fast cardio and is very much a thing years ago. I thought, Oh, this is interesting. You may, you may be able to burn

a bit more fat as fuel for that workout. If you're in a fasted state, then as more research came out, it showed that it probably didn't really make a difference because then later you're just going to burn more carbs. But where I still actually am a fan of fast cardio is if you are going to combine it with your him bean in particular. And if you are going to combine it with yohimbine in particular, and if you're going to take yohimbine, you might as well take caffeine as well. And depending on your tolerance to stimulants, you may want to add something like sinephrine. But if you look at the research on yohimbine, it works. I think that's a fair statement at this point. The way of the evidence is it does work, but you do need to be in a fasted state for it to work.

And where it's particularly useful, and this is going to sound like bro science, but there's real science behind it. It's particularly useful when you're lean, wanting to get really lean because of the stubborn fat quote unquote phenomenon where the last several pounds of fat that you want to lose to go from abs to like ab veins is it's going to be this fat that is more resistant to fat loss. It has hung on this long, basically. And you know, him being by, by a, an interesting mechanism helps your body faster eliminate that quote unquote, stubborn fat. So for us guys, it's usually a lower ab. It's usually around, it's the tire area, right? Like lower abs going around the obliques, lower back for women, it's usually the hips and the thighs and the butt. And so if you're, so if you're, if you're lean and you want to get really lean, then I, I do think that it's worth considering fasted cardio plus your him being, if you drop the, him being out, there is research that shows,

for example, that, uh, blood flow, I think it was in men, blood flow is increased to the abdominal region during fasted training, which is kind of an interesting phenomenon because, of course, to If somebody, let's just say a guy is getting into this for the first time or a woman, and he just wants to lose 30 pounds to like get. There's no great reason to do fasted cardio. Sure, he could add him to it, and it probably would speed things up a little bit, but it's not that that's, that's just not very important at that point. Do you have a particular protocol with fasting? Like, do you like to see people do a certain style of cardio or it's just like 20, 30 minutes steady state cardio? I'd say whatever they want to do. Yeah. Is, is going to be it's going to be effective just for the reason that, that cardio of any type, I mean, even if you just go out for a walk, you're going to burn some calories. Probably, if you're going to take your hymn bean, there may be something to be said for a little bit higher intensity. It doesn't have to be like HIIT, but maybe a bit more than walking, like moderate intensity.

And my general position on high intensity training is that it's fine. I mean, there's no question that it's very effective for the time that you put into it. It looks like there was at one point a couple of years ago, scientists were thinking that there may be some special mechanisms whereby you can burn more fat with HIIT than LIS that is exclusive of just the additional calorie burning. But my understanding now is that it looks like those hypotheses didn't really pan out. And it looks like the main benefit of HIIT is just you burn more calories in less time. And there's also something to be said for the cardiovascular endurance aspect of it as well. If you want to, if you care about that, like if, if you're trying to optimize both your strength and your muscle, um, and your endurance capabilities, I mean, obviously

if you want to go all in on strength, you're going to have to not completely neglect, uh, cardio, but if you want to be quote unquote, well-rounded, then I think that that is, uh, it's probably smart to do one high intensity workout per week, maybe two. Uh, but, but when cutting, it's mostly a matter of what can you recover from because true hit is, is hard. Uh, what a lot of people think is, is a hit workout is not really right. It's, uh, to, to, and just to put in perspective, I know you guys know this, but for people listening. So when you get going quickly, right? So this is your sprint. We're talking about like a nine or 10 of effort out of 10. We're talking about your gasping for

air. Basically, like you couldn't even speak probably in single sentences. Maybe you could get out a word or two here and there. That's and do that over and over that's that's a hit workout it's not oh i'm pedaling kind of fast now and i'm on the phone and they can hear me breathing right that's that's that's like a six i will say too when it comes to hit people like um there are certain workouts that you can do hit with that won't fatigue you as much for the next few days like the one thing about hit is that it's great to do, but if you're doing like, if it's a sprint type hit, most people have like,

it's rough sprinting wrecks you wrecks you. But if you do a hit, if you do a hit workout on like a rowing machine, I found, or even the kettlebell swings, um, potentially a bike, but it depends on your quality.

That would be my choice per bike. Yeah. Also for people that aren't as fit maybe even like an elliptical you know like if you're not it's a lot of movement but yeah yeah it's it's gonna get your it's gonna get your heart rate up just like a rattle it's a lot less jarring and everybody makes fun of the piece of equipment but for some folks that are just heavier you know it might might be a good place to start yeah i. I think the elliptical is totally fine. Um, and, and a rower is a great option. Swimming is hard and there's no impact there. Um, so you can definitely do it if you have access to a pool and generally my

preference is a bike, but like you pointed out, you have to be aware of your quads. So I probably wouldn't do that if I was going to be, I wouldn't probably follow up like a heavy squat session with that. Or if I was going to be squatting later in the day, I wouldn't do that. Or maybe even the next day, I wouldn't do that. Yohimbine seems to be pretty hard to tolerate. What kind of recommendations do you give in terms of how much to take? Because it seems like for some people, they have a really weird reaction to it. Some people make some kind of shake and jittery and almost feel sick. Let me add into that. The reason why I never took Yohimbe after three or four years ago, I grabbed them with GNC. I was like, let me try this out. I took one pill, got a massive headache for like five hours. I was like, what the fuck?

It kind of depends on what percentage is in there and all that. Maybe you have some good insight for us on maybe how people can utilize this product safely without feeling like crap. Yeah. It also depends on what's in the product, unfortunately, because unless it's a brand that you have a good reason to trust, just, and everybody should know this about supplements, just because a supplement facts panel says something doesn't mean that any of that is in there. The FDA is not like checking all products. There's very little regulation. It's just kind of

the wild west. And if you're willing to work with some shady manufacturers, and there are many of them out there, you can say that this is a yohimbe, like bark extract or yohimbe product, and it could just be DMAA or something. You know what I mean? And so just something to keep in mind there. But yes, it's true that yohimbine is, in my experience, I'd say it's generally well-tolerated. And I'm coming from the place of I've sold a lot of it and heard from a lot of customers. And ironically, though, it's an ingredient I'm going to move away from in my supplement company, just because it's still allowed. It's okay. However, the FDA has basically made it clear they don't really like it, and they're probably going to move against it at some point.

So I'm like, all right, I'm just going to get ahead of this. And it is what it is. I removed sinephrine from a fat loss product that I have for the same reason. And that's even sillier because sinephrine, I don't know if we've ever heard from somebody saying that 50 milligrams of sinephrine caused any problems, but what does sinephrine do by the way? Because I personally do not know. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of like, think of it as an, a natural, as a natural ephedrine, like ephedrine, that molecule, uh, the sinephrine was the inspiration for it.

That molecule, the sinephrine was the inspiration for it. And so it's in citrus fruits, like we got it from a bitter orange extract. And it just increases BMR. It just increases calorie burning by, it's not a large amount. And that's the case with any fat loss product. You don't need a fat loss product. And the best fat loss product is maybe going to increase your calorie burning by, I'm going to be congenerous and say 150 to maybe 200 calories per day. Maybe.

That's solid. But yeah, exactly. For people who are in the know, you're like, well, shit, that's kind of like cardio. Or at least that's half of a cardio workout. Okay, I'll take that. Especially when you're lean. So with your him being though, yes, some people get jittery. especially when you're lean. And so, so with your him being though, yes, some people get jittery. That's that, that can be common, especially if they, if they haven't taken it before and they

just start with the full clinically effective dose. So like for a 200 pound person, that's going to be probably around 15 milligrams is, is going to be the, the, the full clinically effective dose. And you can just scale that to whatever weight you are. And so what we recommend is nausea also can is I wouldn't say it's a common side effect, but if you're going to respond negatively to your hymn bean, you're probably going to be jittery and a little maybe a little bit of anxiety. So it's not recommended for people who already have issues with anxiety. And you're probably going to be a little bit nauseous. So what we recommend is that people start with half of that clinically effective dose, which I mean, that's the dose that has been used in the studies to support its use. So start with half of that for a few days and see how you feel. If you feel totally fine, then move up to the full, see how you feel. And if it doesn't sit well with you, then don't use it. And so, you know, we'll get customers contacting us sometimes and saying,

hey, it doesn't work for us. And we have a very simple, we just give people their money back. We don't ask them to fill out forms or send anything back. We just say, okay, cool. Do you want your money back? Do you want something else? And so it happens, but I would say that it's definitely the exception more than the rule if people follow it that way. Since we're kind of like on this topic of supplements, and since we were also kind of talking about nutrition, as far as hunger is concerned, what are,

from a supplemental standpoint, let's look at that. What are some supplements that will, or have you found that help people kind of control their hunger or get in better control of it? Because there's so many things we can do in terms of nutrition that'll probably have a really big effect. But if we're going to add some supplements on top of that, what would you suggest for people to try?

Yeah. And so just to preface any supplement talk, I mean, I have a supplement company, so it may seem a little bit ironic, but supplementation is not necessary. Supplements are supplementary by definition, and that's all they will ever be. There are no magic pills, powders, or potions that can really do anything for you. Ironically, with supplementation, you can do a lot more for your health and your longevity than your body composition. Like if you're trying to get bigger, stronger, leaner, there aren't that many supplements that are going to help, but there are some. And that's even how I pitch my own stuff, saying, hey, I stand behind my stuff. You don't need any of it. If you have the budget and

inclination, here are some things you should consider. And so as far as helping with hunger, there aren't many things that I would recommend, but anything that is going to be a stimulatory is going to reduce appetite just by the nature of the fight or flight system. Right. So, uh, even something like caffeine, however, if you've, if you, we quickly become sensitized to caffeine and particularly to its stimulatory effects, we never become sensitized, fully sensitized to its sleep suppressing effects, but that stimulation is, it goes away fairly quickly. And for those of us who have been caffeine daily for a long time, if you're willing to give it up for a couple of weeks,

I'd say probably two weeks is the recommendation for resensitizing yourself. Give it up for two weeks. It has to be done though, like no caffeine for two weeks and then have it again. And maybe you'll remember why you got so into it in the first place. Uh, but, but so that can, that can help. Um, and, and again, Sinephrine would be an example that can reduce appetite just by its stimulatory nature. Um, and any of him being can as well. And outside of that, there's an edible cactus that it's actually in one of my fat loss products. I'm probably going to butcher the name because it's carolumbifimbriata, I think. I'd have to Google the pronunciation, but it's C-A-R-A-L-L-U-M-A and then F-I-M-B-R-A-T-A. So that is interesting in that it's been researched as a famine food. And there are studies that show that it reduces appetite,

it can reduce stress and cortisol levels, which of course can increase the desire to overeat. So yeah, so that's something people could look into. You can buy it as a standalone, or again, it's in a product of mine because again, it's safe and it's effective and it's not going to be as effective as a drug that could reduce your appetite. But again, that's supplements. They are almost never as effective as drugs. Like for example, sinephrine is just not as effective for burning calories or reducing appetite as ephedrine. But if you want to stick with natural stuff, then, then that, uh, is, uh, you'd go with the sinephrine knowing that maybe it's not as good. And I mean, beyond that, um, I mean, five HTP has been shown to reduce carbohydrate cravings in particular, which is interesting.

So that's something worth mentioning. And those are really the only ones that come to mind. I wish there was more because we all know that especially when you are lean, wanting to get really lean, appetite eventually gets the best of you. wanting to get really lean appetite eventually gets the best of you now. And maybe a strategy, sorry, just to say one, one more thing on that, that people should consider is, is diet breaks and letting not, not trying to stay in a deficit for months on end and taking like, for example, if someone's lean guy or girl wanting to get really lean, I don't think it's inappropriate to, to take, uh, maybe five days or so, maybe even seven days every fourth or fifth week,

and just go up to maintenance calories and just give yourself a break. Um, and then get back to it. Uh, have you ever heard, I think you would be interested in this if you haven't heard of it before. Have you ever heard of an ice slurry no but i get the idea just the volume with with you know get some flavor in it no no so what this is is uh now this is way different than what you're thinking uh ice slurry is injected ice and glycerol to get rid of body fat and they're doing studies on this and they inject it into specific areas. They'll inject it like into fat cells and it makes the fat cells disappear. There's like some of the research and information that they have. Yeah, it'll blow your mind.

There's some PubMed research. They don't know long term, you know, what this does. I'd imagine injecting ice, you know, there's going to be some sort of, you know, downside to it. And then also, you know, how is that going to look you know when your body releases fat uh it does so in a manner that doesn't leave you looking weird you can sometimes have the extra skin or whatever but uh i think that you would be fascinated by this yeah it's injected uh glycerol in just whatever area is chubby on you you can just inject in that area and it's supposed to disappear wow i just i'm googling it's like you get you do one shot and then i think like six weeks later

the fat is supposed to be like continuing to disappear at a pretty quick rate so sign me up yeah it's just i find it interesting i think a cool sculpting when i first heard about i was like no that can't that can't be a thing that can't that can't work and ironically ironically actually and with the cool sculpting and stuff like that it's i just find some of this stuff fascinating you know um there there actually is a little bit of research behind these things but it's hard to it's so hard to tell whether it actually does anything because there's so much monetization behind it you're just like i don't you're like i don't even know you know i don't know i don't know what's working yeah and i wouldn't recommend trying to DIY this kind of stuff.

Like, oh, I'm just going to biohack my fat away. I'm going to start injecting glycerol and saline and just see what happens. And you'll hand me. Throw that in there too, right? Yeah, why not? I mean, hey, Mike said it's good. What are some good ways? Maybe some bleach too.

What are some good ways that you found? Just to clean everything up. Yeah, keep it clean. What are some ways that you found to be effective for people to stay on track with their nutrition while being sometimes in these caloric deficits, while putting out, you know, a lot of energy and maybe not consuming as much energy as they used to? What are some things that you try to preach or try to instill in people to keep them on track? Yeah, I mean, this may be boring to some of the people listening, but I would start with the fundamentals here, right? Of making sure

that you are eating enough protein and that that's going to be probably 30 to 40% of daily calories for most people and making sure that you're doing that more often than not. And if you're only doing it maybe two or three days a week, and then on the other days, it's more like 20%, then that's not doing it. Again, we don't have to be perfect with any of this, but we have to be like mostly right most of the time. And so that's important. Getting the majority of your calories from relatively unprocessed nutritious foods becomes even more important when cutting. There's the nutritional aspect because calories are

restricted. So we're getting less nutrition inherently, but at this point now, appetite control is important because we know, I mean, research shows that our feeling of fullness, the satiety that comes from a meal has more to do with the volume of the meal than the calories. And so when we're cutting, what we really want to be able to do is the volume of the meal than the calories. And so when we're cutting, what we really want to be able to do is fill our stomach with food and food is better than liquid here. We can't just drink water. Anybody, you're hungry, drink some water. Ah, you're still hungry. Right. So, so we need, we need food. And, and so if we can fill our stomach with a lot of food for not a lot of calories, then we are going to feel full and we're going to feel just as full, more or less, as if we took that same amount of calories. Let's just say it's a 500 calorie meal to keep it simple.

And we condensed it into like a cheesy pile of meat or something like that that doesn't have nearly as much volume. And so that volumetric approach to eating is very useful when you are cutting. I would also not recommend going low carb at all, unless you really enjoy it or you have some very good, maybe even a medical reason to do it. But if you're like most people, especially if you're lifting weights and you're physically active, you're going to do it. But if you're like most people, especially if you're lifting weights and you're physically active, you're going to do better with more carbs, not less. And like, for example, there is a nutrition paper that Eric Helms and a few other researchers put out a couple of years ago on natural bodybuilding. And they were talking about carbohydrate and fat intake in particular. And in that paper, they were saying that, and this is more for,

again, natural bodybuilders, but when they get deeper into their prep, they may only be getting 15% of their daily calories from fat just so they can keep their carbs up to try to, I mean, I had Eric on my show to talk about that process some time ago. And he said, like, when you're in the depths of it, it's pretty bad. He said, toward the end of that prep, he said, he basically felt awful all the time. And this is natural bodybuilding, by the way, this is true natural body felt terrible all of the time. And the only time he really actually felt good, the only exception was for about an hour after he ate food. That's it. And he was saying that like there were times where he's sitting on the couch and he's debating whether he's going to get up from the couch to go drink some water or something because getting up and moving just sounds so bad.

And so that's the level it gets to. lifestyle bodybuilders, so to speak, to reduce our fat intake, to create the deficit or drive a lot of that deficit, then bring our carbs down. So instead of trying to keep fat at 40% or 30% of daily calories, and then bring the carbs down, fortunately go the other way around where you're keeping your protein up, you're keeping your carbs up and you're bringing your fat. Maybe you're starting it at 20 or 25% of daily calories and you may end your cut at 15%. And it's 15% of daily calories from fat ideal. No, it's not. And I wouldn't recommend that as like your forever thing, but is it okay to do it for your final month of cutting or so? Of course. Yeah. You're going to, your testosterone levels are going to

go down a little bit and there are going to be some negative effects, but it's not, we're not talking natural bodybuilding prep. Now we're just talking about normal getting fit. And within a couple of weeks of putting things back in place, you're going to feel fine. So, so keeping those carbs up is a, is a, is a useful tip and where those carbs come from ties into what I was saying previously. So we have fruits, we have vegetables, we have whole grains, we have legumes. And there's a large list of things you can choose from. So pick the stuff that you like. But if you can get most of those carbs from those types of foods, you're going to have

less hunger. You are going to ensure that you're providing your body with enough nutrition. And you're going to be able to help with fullness. And then if you want to allot a minority of your calories to whatever, I don't care what it is, whatever you, whatever your treats are, uh, regardless of how calorie dense they are, how little nutrition, then of course do that as well, which is actually another tip. Don't, don't forbid yourself anything simply because somebody said that the sugar is going to make you fatter. It's going to interrupt the fat loss process, or it's going to screw up

your hormones. No, it won't. So if you like, I don't care what it is. If you like some ice cream, you have some ice cream every day. If you like, I like dark chocolate. So I have some of that every day. I know that's not a very self-indulgent treat, but Hey, it's, it's, it's just some, you know, whatever, 150, 200 calories that doesn't do too much for me otherwise. And, and then, and then one other thing I'll add is it's not nutrition per se, but it's the ultimate life hack. I will say I'm not into biohacking, but here's an actual biohack is just get enough sleep. Make sure that you are getting enough sleep. And it's particularly important when you're cutting, because if you don't get enough sleep consistently, you're fucked actually.

Your appetite is going to ruin you. And none of the other things we've talked about are going to matter. And that's not because you're a weak person or it's just that's that's just reality. It'd be like trying to escape gravity. Good luck. Right. And so I think that that's that's also worth mentioning. There's some things that like are kind of hard to get through food wise when you talk about food volume. You know, you talk about like egg whites or even a mixture of, you know, a few a few extra egg whites along with a couple egg yolks. You end up with a

good volume of food with moderate to modest calories. Same thing can happen with like a chicken breast. There's a couple other things that are pretty modest in calories, low in calories that you can consume quite a bit of. I mean, I eat Jell-O here and there just to like stuff my face with something. I mean, it's not the most delicious thing, but it just it it gives me something and it helps fill up my stomach than collagen protein yeah yeah it's gelatin right um yeah i just buy those jello things from the grocery store and they have 10 calories each so if i wanted to eat 10 of them it wouldn't

be a big deal it'd be 100 hundred calories uh watermelon i love strawberries for that reason strawberries surprising low calorie for how like how much flavor they have there's a lot of pop in them uh watermelon's great uh zucchini can be really good some people make zucchini pasta uh there's noodles that are called uh shirataki noodles i don't know if you've ever seen those before or slim rice yeah these things are like, they have quarter of the calories of like regular noodles or regular rice. And some people will make like cauliflower rice. I'm not a fan of that necessarily, but there's,

there's a lot of ways to kind of get around all this. And I like what you're saying because you can, you could still fill up your plate pretty good and get yourself feeling very full and having a sense of fullness. Yeah. And with, with some simple recipes, you can turn all that stuff into something that tastes pretty good. It's not the same as going to your favorite restaurant and splurging, of course, but you can enjoy the meal.

And that's important too. It's important with your meal plans, with your training plans. I talk about that as well. If I were to give you the most scientifically optimized meal plan or training plan and you just didn't enjoy it, then that's not for you because compliance is everything and consistency is everything. So we have to make some changes there. I would rather have somebody tell me, look, I've tried this and here's specifically what does not work for me, these types of foods, maybe even the calorie deficit. We tried to go into it a little bit aggressive, a 20%, 25% deficit, and maybe we need to dial that back. So it's also something to keep in mind that I do often tell people to make sure that they're willing to find what they enjoy.

Don't try to Jedi mind trick yourself into thinking that you enjoy something that it sucks. You really don't enjoy it. Right. You know, when you were talking about Eric Helms and the prep before you got on, we were having a conversation about, um, a prep back in 2015, I was working with Alberto Nunez and we were getting ready for worlds. I'm not going to repeat that whole story but the low fat life man like the what happens when you're eating 30 to 40 grams of fat a day it's like because i was i was doing that for like maybe two months like my my libido was gone i i didn't want to have like it's not like i i it's not even i even had the urge to want to have sex. It was just gone. And that's very unusual for me. Um, and then also it's like, I really feel that not even feel, I think that especially

natural bodybuilding, I think that a lot of individuals, a lot of men, especially if their fats were a little bit higher and no, like I've been doing fasting for the past few years just trying to see like how how it would benefit me in any way um the hunger control that i was able to gain from that because i got used to the feeling of being hungry and i didn't always reach for food that became kind of like a habit shift now that when i feel hungry i'm not on my it's not uncomfortable feeling hungry necessarily right and that never used to be the case for me. I am a big eater, bro. Like I, I'm a, I'm a garbage disposer. So I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. But, but that's the thing. Like whenever I used to feel hungry, it'd be like, fuck eat, eat now, like just get that food. But with that habit, I don't necessarily feel the need to do

that. So I think it was about a year and a half back. I was just cutting a little bit to see how it would be or how I'd be able to react to getting much leaner. So I think I was about a year and a half back. I was just cutting a little bit to see how it would be or how I'd be able to react to getting much leaner. So I think I got some maybe like 7% or something from a DEXA scan. I was eating around 70 grams of fat a day. My carbs are pretty low, but the benefit that I had from the habit of fasting, meaning that I didn't necessarily need to reach for food, I was able to have a high volume of food in one part of the day, which was satisfying mentally.

And since I had higher fats, my dick still worked. Like, I think that... Small, small consolation. Right? Like, so I really do think... How small? Really tiny, actually. It's kind of unfortunate.

Hey, three inches is average. Well, also your legs are big, you know, so it's the proportion. The proportion, it looks like a peanut. Anyway, what I'm trying to say here. Yeah, just wait until we get into it. It's better than it looks. But what I'm trying to get at here is I think that if individuals, and it doesn't mean you have to fast every day or it has to be a lifestyle or whatever. fast every day or it has to be a lifestyle or whatever. But if they could get into the habit of building the ability to not have to reach for food whenever hungry, or because even when I was doing

flexible dieting, when I was hungry, I'd make a meal to fit my macros immediately, right? But if you can build that habit, it might actually make dealing with those really daunting months of prep when you're eating poverty macros, like you mentioned earlier, it might make that much, much easier because that's what I was finding when I was getting much later, a few years later versus that prep in 2015 was 40 weeks of hell, you know? So it just could be something to think about. 40 weeks, not, not 14. It was 40.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that, is a a great point and um that would be a great reason to not do what i was talking about earlier but i'll say though uh your situation though was a bit unique in that you were lean wanting to get very lean and you did understand that your your workouts might have been a bit better. You might've had a little bit better lean mass retention if you would've kept those carbs up,

but you understood that, well, I just don't like what I have to pay for. I don't like the side effects of that. So I'm gonna flip that around. And so, yeah, that does make sense. And this point that you brought up with fasting is a great point. I think that is a good reason

to at least do it for a little bit. Try intermittent fasting. I know, Mark, you had answered earlier or asked earlier. I don't think I answered. I mean, I've always been a proponent of the just simple lean gains approach, you know, the 16-8. For men, at least, women seem to have a little bit more trouble with the longer fasting periods. So they may want to turn that into like a 1410 or something like that. But that point of being able to become comfortable with at least mild hunger, I mean, there's a point when you probably should just eat. But I think of it, I liken it to like cold exposure, right? So right now I live in Northern Virginia. I'm actually moving to Florida.

But it's funny to me when people will complain about, okay, so the winters get cold enough here in the 20s or whatever. When I was going to this one gym, there was a little bit of a walk. I had to park in a parking garage and walk a little bit. We're talking about 200 yards or something. And when I would come to train in the winter, I would wear my t-shirt and I would be in shorts and not to show off, but it wasn't cold in the gym. So I'm not going to wear extra clothing that I might forget. I did that and I'm like, all right, enough of that. And so I'll walk through the cold and so many comments are like, wow, God, aren't you cold? Oh my God. Why are you not wearing a sweater? Like it's, it's 150 yards in like 20 degree

weather. I think it'll be okay. If we're talking about one and a half miles and 20 below in the middle of Wyoming, then that's, that's another thing. So, so another thing. So similarly, if you're a little bit hungry, it doesn't mean you have to run and get food. It doesn't mean that you're... I remember back when I didn't know really anything of what I was doing, I used to get angry when I would get hungry because I thought that I was losing muscle. I thought that, oh, I'm hungry. My body is going directly to my body and just like Pac-Man them away to keep me alive. Right. So I thought I had to eat protein. Now, of course, I know that's not the case. And that honestly, even learning that that's not the case, it helped me a little bit psychologically not care about hunger. But that point of like just practicing, getting used to feeling a bit hungry and then just sitting with it for a bit and controlling your eating according to a schedule like with intermittent fasting. Yes, I think that has practical value, whether you stick with it as your thing or not. When you were talking about like the having volumous meals and stuff, I instantly started thinking about some of the I was calling recipes. They're like super low calorie, but very, very volumous foods like, you know, Greg Doucette's anabolic ice cream. He does preach and like he recommends people have like fatty fish and that

sort of thing to get healthy fats. But in... Which I agree. Yeah. But in a majority of like the more popular recipes like that, or even the like the French toast, there's not a lot of real... They're not very nutrient dense. But do you see a problem with consuming those when it comes to this sort of situation? Like the micros might not be there, but the macros are perfect. And I enjoy the hell out of that anabolic ice cream. I've had one every single night this week and they're fantastic.

I fill up an entire Ninja blender to the top and it's just like this gigantic bucket of ice cream that tastes fantastic. And like I said, the macros are perfect, but I know in the back of my head, it's like, well, this isn't a steak,

but damn, I'm not hungry anymore. And this is kind of awesome. So I'm curious, uh, what your opinion on something like that might be. Yeah. First,

could you, I don't know what the recipe is. I'm sure. Oh, here we go. So check it out. So, I don't know what the recipe is. Oh, here we go. So check it out. So, uh, two servings of frozen strawberries. This is my version of it. Everybody has a different version of it, but this is how I've been able to get like the most volume. So, uh, somewhere around 300 grams of frozen strawberries, a scoop of protein, about half a

cup of almond milk, a, uh, what else? Uh uh three grams of xanthan gum and then if it doesn't like plump up enough i'll throw some more ice in there but we're talking like maybe just over oh sorry and then uh like 10 grams of sucralose so that's where the sweetness comes everything probably like just over 300 calories i can check my tracker just to make sure. But I mean, this is like a gallon of food for like 300 calories. And then like, you know, I don't know, like somewhere around 40 grams of protein with like almost no fat. And, you know, of course, high carbs from the strawberries and stuff. But this stuff is fantastic.

I highly recommend it if you haven't tried it. Yeah, it sounds tasty. I love strawberries. I mean, I would say there's a serving or it sounds like a couple of servings of fruit. So that's good. I mean, strawberries have nutritional value. So I don't think that would be a great example of something that is just like nutritionally bankrupt, but, but tasty. But to, to your question, uh, I would say that generally speaking, my, my recommendation is to get most of your daily calories from stuff. I mean, strawberries would be on the list. I wouldn't say just from strawberries, but, uh, from relatively unprocessed, highly nutritious foods and to repeats, we're talking pretty much any vegetables. We're talking pretty much any fruits. We're talking about any whole grain, seeds,

legumes, the stuff that our moms always tried to get us to eat basically. And let's include some lean protein in there as well, because of course, protein and especially animal protein is a great source of many different nutrients that we need that are actually hard to get otherwise. And so long as you're getting most of your calories from those foods, most of the time, there's, I just don't know of any good argument that, that would, that would convince me. And I've looked into this that, okay, you're doing that. And then again, let's say 20% of your calories every day truly have like no nutritional value. It's, it's just, it's just Coca-Cola or something, right? You can't say that that's not a healthy diet, quote unquote,

like that is a healthy diet. And, um, there's a lot of scientific evidence to back that up. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence. And so in the case of, of this anabolic ice cream, again, I would say that's actually good, but there, there, there are your, there are some fruits for the day that can be your day's fruits. Maybe you want to eat a little bit more. And in addition to that, I would recommend though, making sure that you're getting in some vegetables. If we wanted to get specific, I'd recommend try to get at least a serving of leafy, dark

leafy greens in something like spinach is my go-to for that. And then try to get, try to eat but like they say where they say eat the rainbow try to try to eat a variety of vegetables with color it sounds silly but the reason is different vegetables yeah eat a lot of skittles um and the the reason for that though is a lot of vegetables uh they'll have different types of nutrients different amounts of nutrients and so if you can a variety, then you're kind of covering all your bases. And then I should add though, that if you're, if there's a period where you're just not doing that, you're getting a lot of calories from things that are, are, are just don't have much nutritional value. That's okay to do for a period. You're not going to notice anything necessarily if you just do that

for a couple of weeks for example uh maybe you'll start to notice like for me it's around 10 days like i've done that before i've my wife's from germany right so i'd go over to germany with her and germany has really good bread and i don't drink so but i know it has really good beer so that'd be part of it but it has very good bread and it has very good beer, so that would be part of it. But it has very good bread, and it has very good dairy, everything. And so for the first 10 days when I'd go over there, maybe 14, my diet was retarded. It was, I would just eat meat. I would just, and hey, that word's still in the dictionary. It doesn't even say derogatory yet.

It just feels good. Yeah. I'm using it, the second definition. And so, it was like meat and protein powder to make sure that I get in enough protein and then just bread, lots of bread. Like for breakfast, I would eat, I don't know, a pile of the pretzel bread. And it was until I just basically, it was like where I'm not, I'm not in pain yet, but if I keep going, that's where it's going.

And then I, and then I wouldn't be hungry all afternoon basically. And then dinner would be at a restaurant and I don't care. I'm just ordering whatever I want to eat. Right. So that's, that's a pretty, pretty shitty diet. And so after 10 days or so, that's about as much, that's as long as I've been able to go until my body is begging. I can feel it like, please, can we just have like a vegetable or something? And, um, and I could keep at that point, uh, kind of like losing your sex drive. I lost my sex drive for the food. Like I just didn't even want to do it anymore. You know, the bread was no longer appealing. And so if you're going to do that here and there, I don't see any reason why that's a

problem so long as it's a here and there and not like a regular thing. Yeah. And I totally forgot. But the ice cream also includes at least 85 grams of fat-free Greek yogurt. So again, more good stuff. There's some extra nutrients there. And you know, you more extra nutrients there and you know you could probably i would guess you could probably throw some spinach into that and you wouldn't even know the difference it would look a little bit different of a color but it may not even mess

with the taste at all yeah i don't know i don't want to risk it you know spinach but i know but it does bring the next question because insima gives me like such a hard time with this because i said you know fat-free greek this because I said, you know, fat-free Greek yogurt. I eat quite a bit of fat-free cheese. You fucking lame. I won't touch fat-free cheese. Dude, it's not that bad, guys. Come on.

You loser. Don't talk me out of it, but what should I be worried about when it comes to this chemical that I'm consuming? Because I don't know what it's made out of. That is the question right yeah you know i actually i would say that i don't think you have anything to worry about unless you're like going through seven come on mikes a day and then judge him let's let's turn up the alarmism dial here uh You know, well, Mercola said that you, that's it. You have nine cancers and you now have 5G. So, no, I mean, I hate fat-free cheese. My mom eats it sometimes when she's like trying to make meals lower calorie.

I mean, just leave it. I don't want the taco with the shitty. It's not even worth a single calorie, dude. like nothing. I just, I'm no fan, but, but I understand if you're trying to get your fats from other things and I do understand that. So you're like, eh, I'll go with the fat free Greek yogurt. Um, I don't know if you've tried, have you tried Icelandic yogurt? Yeah, those are great. Oh yeah, my wife actually eats those. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

I gave up Greek. I broke up with Greek yogurt once I tried. Yeah, Siggy's has more protein, less carbs. It's dope. Yeah, Siggy's is a good start, but you should try, there's a company, Norr, N-O-R-R. And then there's another one icelandic provisions

i think that i mean this is a matter of personal preference i'm obviously joking but it depends i guess on i find that siggy's has more bitterness to it or sour sorry it's the sour so if you like the sour then you'll probably prefer siggy's if you prefer less sour then you might like this nor company um or or icelandic provision what's different about this yogurt i'm just curious guys it just has way more protein than even greek yeah and and and less milk what i found feels easy to digest and it has less sour yeah less less sourness than than the greek that's for me though so i I just prefer it. I got my kids eating it too, which is cool. They like it. That's awesome. So you, you research stuff quite a bit.

It's my understanding. There's not really any great information pointing. I guess, I guess there's information pointing in both directions. It seems like much with many things, but when it comes to yogurt and when it comes to probiotics, it doesn't seem like they, in some studies, it shows they have a great effect and in other studies shows they do zero. So what are you, what's your opinion? Yeah, I think it's, it's smart to eat foods. It could be, it could be from, from dairy. It could be from fermented foods. I think that there's, there's good enough evidence for, I mean,

that's one of the reasons why I include them in my diet. I'm not like concerned about it, but I just know that I'm probably benefiting from it at least a little bit. Uh, it's not as important as eating enough fiber, for example, eating enough vegetables and fruit, but if there is a small beneficial effect, then why not? And, and it's a good source of protein and it's tasty and it works right. now as far as probiotic supplements go a lot of them are garbage um and you know it's it's it's funny because i've been trying to create a probiotic supplement for some time but the strains that i've wanted to use which do have good research are patented strains and every single one of them the companies have told me to fuck off they're just like nah we sell them ourselves.

I mean, not literally, I'm joking. They're nice about it. But the thing is they're selling them and they don't want anyone else to be able to sell them. It's just, they're happy to have the market cornered on that strain. They did the research, they patented it and that's it. And so they're, and it's not just me. I have to give credit to formulations to that.

I have a scientific advisory board and consists of people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, but we've worked our way down to a more generic strain that is, there's good evidence for benefits, but it's going to be, we're going to combine it with prebiotics because I feel like it just needs to be a better product than just this generic strain of probiotics, which certainly can help people who have certain digestive issues. But if you don't have the digestive issues, it's probably not going to do that much for you. That's not a very good sales pitch if I'm just going to be honest about it. You know what I mean? And that's the case with a lot of supplements.

I take certain joint supplements that's commonly, where if you have healthy joints and you take glucosamine, it may help reduce the natural degradation that can occur over time in your cartilage a little bit, just a little bit. But I mean, the effect size is so small. Again, if I was going to promote it, honestly, that's not very appealing to people whose joints are fine. Like, yeah, this may make a tiny difference, but you're probably not going to notice it, right? So that's generally the case with probiotics. And gut health is such a thing right now. And whenever one of these fads comes along, it's always a lot of marketing sizzle and usually not a lot of steak. And it's people who don't want to hear that they just need to do a lot of the stuff we've been talking about. They need to

eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and whole grains. They need to be consistent with that. They need to get enough sleep that impacts gut health and they need to exercise regularly. And all of that is really what's going to produce 80 plus percent of their gut health or lack of it. And no amount of probiotics or any other magical things are going to make a difference. I think there's a couple of things worth pointing out here. I think number one is you wouldn't find fermented foods anywhere in nature other than if the food started to go bad. Your body will ferment foods as it is like you eat steak, it'll ferment in your stomach. Other foods will ferment in your stomach.

Fiber kind of does something similar where it will help with fermentation process of some of the foods and help break it down and so forth. But what I think is interesting is that we don't live in those times anymore. You know, we don't live in those times where you would not have found a probiotic, where you wouldn't have found anything that is fermented. I would say that it might make some sense for us to, like, I don't really think people need much fiber. make some sense for us to like i i don't really think people need much fiber um i think that we probably have gone many many months uh without hardly eating any uh throughout human history and i my own experience like i don't really eat vegetables i eat them if they get in my way here and there but i'll eat them uh same thing with fruit i'll eat them here or there but it's i don't

really need to be conquered yeah i don't go out of my way to eat a fiber. Um, but, but anyway, it makes some sense with, with the way things are in today's day and age with the convenience of food, the amount of food we've eaten in our lifetime, the amount,

the frequency at which we eat, it makes more sense. I think nowadays to probably chase after some of these fermented foods and some fibers here and there because we eat way more than we used to. So it would make some sense that the body would need a little bit more assistance in cleansing and kind of clearing things out. That's just kind of my own perspective on it because, you know, over the years when people would talk about fermented foods, I'm like, where would you get fermented foods normally? You know, you normally wouldn't ever eat fermented

food. So why would that be a thing? But I think, you know, modern technology and just how we've evolved fermented foods is something that we fermented foods so that they would last longer. So there are some reasons on why we did it years ago and there could be some reasons on why it could be beneficial and healthy. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I think that what I think of is that just to, to not fall into the, I think they call it the natural, is it naturalistic fallacy or is it just the natural fallacy? They're like, Oh, well, if it's natural, it must be good. If it, it's not quote unquote natural, it must be bad. That's not how it works. I mean, take vitamins like the natural form of vitamin C is it looks like there's really no difference in the body versus the non-natural

form that you'll find in a lot of multivitamins. And it just doesn't matter. I believe it's the same with folate and folic acid. Folic acid, actually, the artificial form actually may be even a little bit more effective. Now, in some cases of vitamins, the natural forms are more effective or better than the artificial forms. And so to your point, I think it's worth considering things on their own merits, as opposed to just assuming, oh, well, if we didn't find this thing in nature, then it must be bad. There are many things like, look at, just look in the field of medicine. There are many things that we're not going to find in nature, but they are responsible for eradicating disease. And maybe also let's not just wait around for science too. Like try to figure out ways of solving your own problems, investigate on your own and start to see, hey, you know, I heard probiotics can be effective.

I have a gut issue. I'm going to go explore. Totally. And I totally agree with that, too, because science moves very slowly. There are a lot of politics involved in science. forget there's a famous scientist who joked that it moves one funeral at a time because you have the orthodoxies that just refuse to acknowledge anything that doesn't agree with this narrative that has become entrenched. Eventually the people who are responsible for preserving that die and that allows something new to blossom. And depending on what science we're talking about, there's often a lot of money, which means a lot of corruption.

And don't think that you can't get fake research done. Don't think that you can't conduct a study in a way that will produce the outcome you want or will produce a positive outcome of some kind if that's all you need. There are so many things you can do to use science as a tool of maybe propaganda as opposed to illumination or enlightenment. So I agree that I'm not advocating for just blanket skepticism of anything scientific, but also I think it's smart to not just accept that the TV said, or a headline said, well, science says the blah, blah, blah, or this science is absolutely settled. What are you talking about? Science, it's never settled. Science doesn't prove anything. It's the investigation of truth. It's trying to get closer to the truth. And it's a constant refinement of what we can say is most likely true, given our understanding of things. And so when you look at the weight of the evidence, you look at the weight of the evidence

for energy balance, it is very, very large. There's a lot of mass there. It would take a lot of counterweight to change that, right? But that's not the case with many things. And so don't feel, and I've talked about this to people, don't feel ashamed or that you are being a science denier if like you said, hey, you know, I do have this gut issue. And apparently there's some research that shows that this supplement can help. But this guy, this doctor guy on Instagram, he says that anyone who takes a probiotic is a complete moron and is a science denier. Try the, try the supplement. So long as it's not going to harm you, it may,

it may help if there's some evidence that it can help. And so I totally agree. And if you're having untapered chits, no one can argue with you. Exactly. I mean, unless they can come check it out. Yeah, that's right. You send them some photos. Okay. This brings me to two questions. There are people who are right now, as they're listening, they're like, dude, okay, you're telling me about these probiotics. What is the strain? What are the strains that people should be looking for that are effective? Because you can look on Amazon for a bunch of probiotic supplements. Something like 10 bucks says probiotics. You're like, oh, dope. So what are the strains they should be looking for?

And I don't know if it's a conflict, but is there a certain company that sells this strain that maybe people can be like, okay, I want to find that one now. And I'll ask the second one after. Yep. Yeah, sure. So the generic, again, this is an ongoing project and it's something that I have a good working knowledge of supplementation, but early on I recruited people to work on the formulations. You guys are probably familiar with examine.com website. So right in the beginning, I uh, his name's Curtis. Most people don't know about Curtis, but he is the guy who did all of the original research and writing for, for examine. Like a lot of that technical stuff still today came from Curtis. And I mean, he knows, I'd say he's at like a pharma D level on, on this stuff. He knows more

about biology and supplementation than I will ever know. And so Curtis has been working on my formulations from the beginning. And in the beginning, he was so still associated with examine. And so he asked that, um, I just, we have, we have an NDA and, you know, he didn't want to be, not that he thought it was unethical, but just, he didn't want examine to look weird because he was making formulations for me and there was no relationship between my company and examine. It was just something that he was doing because he liked, he liked, basically, I came to him and said, Hey, I want to make real stuff and I want to spend real money to make it. And I know that's what it takes. Like when I come to you and say, I want a multivitamin,

I'm going to give you a 15 to $18 a bottle budget, not a $5 a bottle budget. And that interested him because then he was like, oh, wow, I can actually do something with that. And so to your point of probiotics, I don't know where that stands right now. I know that there were several, like there was a Japanese yogurt. I forget the name of it. He really liked that one. And it's a patented, is it Yakurt? Y-A-K-U-R-T. We've gone through like nine. That's why I can't remember it. And it was like just one bad news out. And then I finally was just, I kind of said, okay, I thought this product's never going to happen basically because every single thing that Curtis liked and then the rest of the advisory board liked, can't get it, can't get it, can't get it. However, however, I know that Curtis and several of the other people who advise and I also

stand by now foods, they're just a good company. And they, so if now foods, I'm sure they have a basic probiotic and it's going to be your, your, your two just kind of common is it's uh, lack it's the, it's the L and the B those are the L and the B strains, right? Yeah, exactly. And, and it's not going to be very expensive. And again, if you're having digestive issues, um, like, like particularly if you have like irritable IBS, irritable bowel syndrome type issues, right. And then, then that may help. And, um, that's where I would say to start is just with that company. Another good company, just to throw it out there, is Gero. I've always

stood by Gero because they're inexpensive and their products have been verified in a lot of third-party, just independent tests, similar to Optum Nutrition. Their protein has always been reliable and it's not in their interest. It would be really stupid for them to start amino spiking. I mean, they're at the top. Why would you ever do that? Right. But, but, you know, over the years, there have been people who work at labs and they'll just for fun, just grab a bunch of products and test them and see and release the results. And so, yeah, so now in Jero and it would just be your basic probiotic product, nothing, nothing special. And then I know, I do know Curtis really did want that Japanese yogurt. Now that you mentioned multivitamins, that, that was going to be the second question because you kind of have two realms of thought

when people think about multivitamins, they're the people like, uh, well, there's so many things in there that you can't absorb it. So it's not really that useful, but I take it anyway. The people that are like, this is a daily thing that you should be taking. Absolutely. So in your opinion, a multivitamin, is it like, is it just something that you want to be taking, but you're not really sure how effective it is? Or are we pretty certain that it's very effective? Yeah, that's a good question. So your basic multivitamin is going to be just vitamins and minerals. It's probably not going to have much else in the way of like special stuff that's going to do anything.

So if we assume that that's the case, this is just kind of like your basic multi. If it's a one a day, I have a hard time like thinking that's going to do very much. I mean, especially if it's like a compressed tablet, you may actually just be pooping it out or half of it. But with a one a day, it's hard to provide even enough of the basic stuff. If it's a two or three or more a day, then at least that's a green flag. At least now there's more stuff in it. And as far as whether you should take it or not, if you're doing a lot of the things we've been talking about, if you're eating a lot of nutritious foods, I don't think it's right to say it's needed. Oh, you have to do it. However, there are some,

even just vitamins and minerals that can be hard to get enough of through diet alone. Take vitamin D. I mean, if you eat a lot of fortified foods, maybe, and if you go out in the sun a lot, maybe take vitamin K. If you eat a lot of seaweed, maybe, and take something like zinc, especially if they're in iron in women, especially if they don't eat a lot of meat. And so if we're looking at filling specific nutritional gaps or little holes, I think that's where a multivitamin can be useful. I like to liken it to an insurance policy of sorts, basically. And it's not, again, this is the 20%. This is the remaining 20%. It's not the 20% that gives you the 80%. That's the eating well. And adding a

multi on top of it is really just trying to make sure that you're getting enough of some of the things I just mentioned. Vitamin B12 is another example. In that case, getting a fairly large amount of it, there's research that that can have additional benefits and you're not going to be able to do that through food. There are a couple of minerals, I believe chromium is one that you can benefit from more of, but that's going to be hard to do through diet. And so now that we're getting into more of the realm of just optimization, it doesn't make a big difference, but people who are into this stuff who care, you know, then they can add it to their, to their regimen. Um, now if a multivitamin contains more stuff than just vitamins and minerals, that's where it gets more interesting

to me. And that's what, I mean, I don't want to keep plugging my stuff, but that's what I've done with mine because I, to create a good basic vitamin and mineral product is really cheap. I mean, you don't need to spend that much money, like $5 a bottle, really. Funny, one of the manufacturers, they accidentally sent me an email that was supposed to be for a competitor, ironically, and it had all, they're talking about a multivitamin and they explicitly stated the competitor, we will only spend $5 a bottle on this. So you just tell us what's going to go in it. Basically, it's like, yep, that's that's the supplement business for you.

Who cares what's in it? Just hit the price and we'll lie in our marketing and we'll we'll buy Lambos. Cool. And and so so in the case of mine, I added stuff that is is in some cases people they supplement with separately, like CoQ10, for example, Fucazanthin, olive leaf extract, N-acetylcysteine, grapeseed extract. And again, I can't take credit for the choices of those things. But I did that because I wanted to make a stronger argument for why my multivitamin is good. And any other multivitamin that is similar to that, I'll say

I would endorse similarly if it has more than just the vitamins and minerals. And if those are well-chosen ingredients with good evidence of efficacy, and if the targets that we're going for make sense, like improving cardiovascular health, reducing stress and cortisol and things that we care about, as opposed to just maybe obscure kind of benefits that we wouldn't care about, then I think at least that's an additional reason to consider taking a multivitamin. But if you're not taking a multivitamin and you are doing a lot of the other things we talked about, I wouldn't say you're doing it wrong. I saw you did a video pertaining to women and how women should train and do fitness and things like that. What are some of the primary differences that you see between men and women when it comes to

nutrition and when it comes to training, if there are any. Yeah. Yeah. So on the nutrition side of things, uh, again, I mentioned women seem to, they don't seem to do as well with fasting as, as men, particularly those longer fasts. So if a woman wants to try to incorporate some fasting, I'd recommend, um, by trying to, you don't like, for example, don't go the full 16, maybe start at 10 to 12 and see how you feel. Maybe extend that to 14. If you can get to the 16 and you just want to follow that approach, then that's totally fine. As far as the diet goes, women are going to be, especially I did a podcast on this.

I've written about this related to menstruation in particular, where they are going to do better or worse with high carb and low carb. And so low carb in particular seems to, again, be more difficult. Yeah, really, for women than for men. That's not going to be always the case, but that's something just to just to keep in mind. Um, that's not going to be always the case, but that's something just to, just to keep in mind. And, um, and otherwise it's going to be the food choices are going to matter a little bit more for women because they just don't have as many calories to work with. So, uh, you know, my wife will joke sometimes when she'll see some of the meals that I eat and she just, she couldn't conceive of eating that much food in one meal. Like she feels like that's her entire day right there. You know what

I mean? Cause she's small and she's into horseback riding. So she's pretty active and you have to be light for that. And so, I don't know, she probably weighs a hundred pounds. I mean, she's not very tall, but, um, I mean, she's like five, three, five, four. So she doesn't have like an eating problem. She's just a small person. You know what I mean? Um, and, and so, so food choices, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about, uh, are, I would say like female nutrition is a bit more sensitive to that, uh, again, because of how quickly those calories can add up. And, um, yeah, I'd say that's probably, I don't, nothing else immediately comes to mind

on the nutrition side of things. Of course, energy balance is still what it is. And protein, high protein is still important. And most women, if they're into fitness, are probably going to do better with more carbs, not less. And so the fundamentals apply, but there can be more variation in how they respond to heavily manipulating carbs and to fasting. and to fasting. And then if we move over to the training side of things, I mean, I advocate for a lot of the same basics as I do for men, assuming that, so again, I'm used to mostly used to working with women who they just want to be, they want to look really fit. They want to look feminine, but fit. So they want to look kind of like an athlete. So they want to be pretty lean, but they don't want to be shredded. They don't want vascularity all over their body like guys do. And so maybe to put some numbers to it, average woman add 15 to 20 pounds of muscle to her frame

in the right places, bring her body fat level down to 20 to 22%. That's mostly the look that, that, that, uh, the women I speak with want, right. And to get there, I advocate for a lot of heavy weightlifting. Now, a difference though, is if we're, if I'm taking a woman who's just starting, um, I w I might not have her start on the bench press. I might have her start with dumbbells instead, because many women I've heard from over the years, I made that mistake in the beginning where like, Hey, if you know, start on the bench press, it's a good exercise. Uh, but I heard from many women who then initially struggled with the bar, um, to get, to get even sets of like six. And, and, and, and I, I recommend that women start in a little bit of a higher rep range. So guys, if you're going to get into this thing,

I don't see any reason why you can't jump into the big exercises, do your sets of fours, fives, or sixes. Not that you have to only do that, but do some strength training. And yeah, you might only squat 135 to begin with. That's fine. Just do that and get stronger and add weight to the bar every week and have fun. And so in women though, what I've found is that again, because they start off with a lot less muscle and strength than men, it's a myth that women can't gain muscle effectively. Ironically, if you look at rate of muscle gain by percentage of body weight, women can gain muscle about as effectively as men. There's a myth that, oh, because they have very little testosterone, they just can't gain muscle. Like, no, it's not true. They certainly can gain muscle. They can gain muscle again at a similar

rate as men. And what they don't have in the testosterone is made up for, for example, with a lot of estrogen. We don't know that that, that, that contributes to, uh, the muscle building process. And, and so the, the, the, the big difference between men and women is again, men are starting off with a lot more muscle and strength than women are. So I like to see women, again, start off with most women. I'm saying build your strength on your pressing with dumbbells first until you can transition over to the bench press. Start with sets of eight to ten so you can get familiar with this. And so it's it's again, I've heard from many women who tried to start with

like sets of five and, uh, they felt very awkward and it was intimidating because they had never done any strength training before. And they felt like, you know, they, they were going to fall down in their squats or they couldn't control the dumbbells. So, so let's, let's lighten the load a little bit and let's still work hard in those sets. And then once you've built that foundation of muscle or strength for most women, it's probably six months or so, six to eight months, like a good, let's just ride the newbie gains in the beginning. And then we can incorporate some heavier, some heavier stuff in, in the training. And many women, they think that, Oh, if they do that, they're going to get bulky. they think that, oh, if they do that, they're going to get bulky. And just to quickly comment on that, the bulky look is a combination of more muscle than average, but also too much body fat.

That's it. Now too much for the look and not too much in just an objective sense. Oh, you're just fat. No, it just depends on what look you want. So if a woman feels bulky after doing three months of weightlifting, um, it's only because she does this carrying around too much fat for the look she wants. And if she were to get rid of that fat, she would be very happy. And she'd be like, oh, wow. Look at my, look at my muscle definition, look at my arms and my leg and my butt looks good. And so, um, the, the, the, the general approach is about the same. And, um, ironically, again, mostly because of the hormonal environment, research shows that women generally can recover faster and better from training than men can.

So women, you know, they don't have to think of themselves as like frail, feminine, uh, little waifs that, um, you know, if they, if they, if they, if they go from the pink dumbbells to the real ones, then they might, you know, break something. No, no, no. Women can get quite strong and they're very resilient. And so, yeah, I'd say those are just a few comments. Generally, I don't recommend like huge deviations one way or another for men and women. Maybe volume, actually. I should probably mention that. Volume for major muscle groups, your average guy is going to...

Let's just say it's going to take him a lot more work to get the upper body he wants than the lower body. For most guys, it just will. For most guys, they have a lot of attention on the beach muscles. They want to have a chest that looks like this. They want to have arms that look like this. And these are small muscles. So, I mean, take the biceps, like they're not naturally a large muscle and we want them to be disproportionately large, like ridiculously large in the scheme of things, right? It takes a lot of work to do that. Even the back, I mean, back's a big muscle group,

but it takes a lot of work to build a big back. Whereas legs, it's not that doesn't take a lot of work to do that. Even the back, I mean, back's a big muscle group, but it takes a lot of work to build a big back. Whereas legs, it's not that it doesn't take a lot of work, but in my experience working with a lot of guys, I would say within their first two years, probably of proper lifting, they're pretty happy with their lower body. They have pretty big legs and they clearly don't skip legs day, but they're not happy with their chest yet. They're not happy with their shoulders as a natural weightlifter. Your shoulders are never big enough. They never look good enough. That's just reality period. And, and you know what I mean? So whereas women, it's usually the other way around in my experience where it's going to take women more time and more work to get the lower body that they want versus the upper body. And so they just have to understand

and then that needs to be reflected in their programming where, you know, a guy, he may train his lower body twice a week and let's say he's doing five days, twice a week lower, and he's doing three days upper in whatever workout split. But, um, you know, in a woman, you might flip that around. You may try to get her not necessarily right in the beginning, but once she has entered her intermediate phase, you might try to get her like up to 20 is maybe a bit much, but, but 15 to 20 hard sets per week for her lower body and, and, and maybe, maybe 10 to 12 for her upper body. And with men, it might be the other way around. Earlier, we were talking about some of the like reactions men have hormonally from going too low fat. Is it just as bad for females? And for that, like that fitness look that you're mentioning that your clients are striving for, for both men and women, like where

would you recommend that like the fat should be like as far as like the lowest that you would never want anybody to go below? Yeah, good question. Yep. It's not exactly the same in women in terms of what happens, but a low fat diet is not conducive to a good, healthy hormone profile in men and women. So in men, it's going to hit testosterone a lot. For example, you're going to see it's not

exactly the same in women, but you certainly want to make sure you get enough fat. The general rule, what you could see in the literature as far as how much is something around 30% of your calories from fat is fine. Now that would not be considered a low fat diet, like by, uh, I guess, scientific standards. I know in some, like a keto person would consider that alarmingly low. Um, but, but I, I, I'd say the literature would support that, that about, and for most people, let's just say that's probably around 0.2 to 0.3 or three, five grams per pound of body weight per day. Now, if you want to eat more than that, because you like to eat more than that, uh, sure. Do that. And will your, let's say, if you're a guy,

will your testosterone go up? If you double that, for example, yes, it will. But the caveat is the, the effect size is going to be very small, meaning that you're not going to probably notice any difference. You may be, you will notice a little bit more sex drive, but you're not going to gain more muscle because of it. For example, it's just not going to make a big enough difference. Same thing goes for any natural supplement that can affect testosterone. And there aren't many, but like take diaspartic acid, for example, which research shows, if you take this stuff, it may increase your testosterone a bit for like two or three weeks. And you may actually notice it if it has, it has enough of an effect, but then it, then it just peters out and it's nothing.

So it's not worth taking. I don't recommend it. Um, or take DHEA, which can help in middle-aged men in particular, it can raise testosterone if it's low. Uh, but, but it's only if it's low and it's more, it's more relevant to middle-aged people. And so I would say if the only reason you're doubling your fat intake from, I mean, maybe doubling is a bit excessive. Let's say you're taking it from like 30% or 25% of daily calories, which is fine to 40 or 45%. And you're thinking, oh, I'm doing that because it's anabolic and it's going to jack my testosterone up and I'm going to gain muscle faster. I wish it were true. I mean, if there were good evidence for it, I

would, I don't know if I would do it myself because I like carbs too much, but at least I could say, hey, this is pretty cool. This is one of the few things you can do naturally outside of like lifting heavy weights to actually make a difference. And so, so then to your question of the bare minimum, I would not recommend going below probably 15% ever. I mean, it's basically impossible to do anyway when you really start looking at the numbers. I mean, you had mentioned that the 40 to 50, I think, was the number or 30 to 40 grams of fat per day. When you actually look at what it takes to do that, that's not easy. You're not enjoying your diet that's where you're like you're especially if you're trying to eat carbs they're like okay so i'm eating like a loaf of bread i guess and uh you know some pasta with gross low-fat sauce it just tastes terrible

um a quick aside one of the guys who works with me he's he's in his now his mid-20s but he was in his early 20s so he's invincible, obviously, like on natural steroids, uh, essentially when you're, you know, he's 22 and at the time, and he wanted to do Greg Knuckles had put out like his, his most grueling bulking program ever. Basically. I mean, this was a two a day program. It was 20 to 25 hard sets per major muscle group per week for like everything. And that's, that's, that's including some indirect volume to like get to your biceps and stuff. But, but I mean a true, like 20 to 25, maybe even a little bit more for your legs, for example, that's, that's fucking hard. And so, and so it was that. So again, two days, my buddy was in the gym three hours a day

and he was eating and and i saw his meal plan i saw him do it every day he was actually eating like 5 000 calories a day keeping his fat at like 70 to 80 grams oh and what a thousand grams of carbs a day i mean he was eating a loaf of bread at lunch of an entire loaf he would put it in the toaster oven that's commitment that's commitment dude and no butter motherfucker would just eat bread a loaf of bread with water like just drinking but like and and and a bowl a pile of pasta with again the you know the low fat terrible sauce it doesn't taste like anything probably he's true yeah oh he grew a little bit i mean for sure i mean for he's obviously i mean he's he's natural so you can't expect oh my god results but he did over that

over that course i mean that's the life yeah that's that's reality though man probably probably his body's gonna explode in some way yeah i mean he was he was disgusted by like the the fifth or sixth week and all of his joints were hurting and and he he threw in the towel he had committed to eight weeks and he made it six or seven but um he before that he had done a lot of endurance stuff and so he knows how to suffer that's endurance sports just suffer who can suffer the most basically and so he brought it to a point where he was like, all right, if I keep going, I think something bad is going to happen. Actually, I should probably just cut this experiment off here. And anyway, so coming back to

the fat intake, I would say that if you want to go up from 25, 30 percent because the foods you like to eat, that's how it kind of plays out for you. And then you're going to enjoy your diet more. I think that's a good reason to do it. And I should also note that I still do think that, and this is just based on my understanding of the current scientific literature and other experts and the consensus on saturated fat is don't go wild on the saturated fat. I do still stand by the standard recommendation of something around probably no more than 10 to 15% of your daily calories from saturated fat is a reasonable recommendation. I know other people are going to say, I'm an idiot and I don't understand the science. Okay, fine. I can say

there are a lot of people who are smarter than me and know more than me who have no, they're not trying to sell you anything. These are just scientists. They don't have a book to sell you. They don't have a supplement to sell you. They don't have keto anything. You know what I mean? So, and they would agree with me. And so that's one caveat with raising your fat intake is if your saturated fat goes too high, it depends how your body responds to it. That may, for example, increase your LDL cholesterol levels, which is not good. You don't want high LDL for long periods of time. And so one final thing on that 15% number, again, I had mentioned it earlier. I would say if you're at the end of a cut and you really do well with carbs when you're cutting, that's me, like my body responds well to carbs

and it does not like not having carbs. And so I would be inclined if I was at the end of a cut and I'm like, all right, I need to cut another 100 calories out of this for this final four weeks. And I'm gonna take my fat down to 15% of daily calories, whereas maybe it was cruising at 20 or 25 for just the cut, that's fine. Now, if I were to try to stay

there for a long time, that's when it becomes unhealthy. I mean, it would be hard to do because again, you start to run into these issues like your dick doesn't work and you notice that and you don't like that. And now that becomes a priority of fixing the dick. But some people, I've heard from people who have made that mistake though, of like they dick. And, uh, but you know, some people I've heard from people who have made that mistake though, of like, they got really lean, which is already not good for your dick and other things. So like got really lean and then, and then just stayed there, which is not like, um, you know, get to 6% body fat as a guy and just stay there and try to stay there for as natural, right. For like eight months, bad, bad idea. And then, and then also stayed on that low fat diet. And I can remember one guy in

particular who, um, he eventually got his testosterone tested and I forget his age, but it had a two in it. So it was somewhere in his summer in his twenties. I want to say high twenties, um, late twenties. And his testosterone was like 140 NGDL or something. It was very low. I was like, dude, okay, you did it. You got shredded and you look cool. I get it. You got all your pictures.

It's time to gain some body fat back and get off this low fat, high carb thing and let's fix this. It took some time too, six, seven months of just doing what he needed to do to feel normal again. Back to me to that back in that prep, it took me about four to five months for me to start feeling normal. Even after the body weight gain, I was able to put back maybe 25 pounds, got back up to like 250 ish to 55 ish. I still wasn't feeling perfectly normal even when I was there for the next few months. It took a while. yep.

That's common. You can, you can find some case studies in the literature with natural bodybuilders, six months, eight months. Even I, I think I remember one, 12 months,

there were still hormonal disruptions. Yeah. There's a price to pay for it. You have a lot of, uh, great YouTube content. You do a great job of, I think,

you know, trying to kind of boil down these problems and then give people good solutions. What is the overall mission? Like, what's your overall mission, your overall goal? I saw that you were on Kelly and Ryan, I think is the name of the show. I saw you're on that show. And so what's your kind of overall mission with fitness? Like Like what is the main message or what is the main problem that you're trying to solve for people? Cause we, we see how heavy people are and we're, you know, the United States is a mess when it comes to that kind of thing.

And so what's your overall mission? Well, it's, uh, I mean, it, it sounds kind of cliched, right?

But, um, it really is to just try to take, so I'll say I'll first just speak to like what I would like to be able to say. I think it's pretty cool if I could if I can come out the other end of this whole thing, helping millions of people get into better shape and and feel like I really made a difference, then that means something to me in a sense of like, why am I even here? What's the purpose of life?

I don't think life has much of a purpose. Honestly, I think we have to assign it purpose. And something simple that resonates with me is to just try to leave things better than they were when you arrived. And so this is a way for me to make a difference. And it's nice to hear from people. Personally, I have probably at this point, close to 200,000 emails sent and received in my inbox. I still put time into it every single day in DMs. And it's really nice to hear the personal impact that this kind of stuff can have. And it's one of the few things, there aren't that many things that you can go back to in life and get the same level of

satisfaction or pleasure from. There really aren't many, right? You have food, you have sex, and helping other people is certainly one of them. I don't know if there are many others. Drugs just destroy you until you're not there anymore. And making money, for example, is not one of those things. Anybody who has gone through that process of making a fair amount of money, it has experienced it where you think that, well, if I just hit this certain income, things are going to be so great and not having financial problems, of course, beyond that, at least for me, I found that that's not very motivating. It's just not the idea of having bigger numbers and accounts and things is fine, but I thought it was going to be cooler than it

was. And not to say I'm rich or anything, but just I thought it was going to be cooler to hit certain financial milestones. So for me, it's really being able to make those personal connections and hearing from people who have read a book of mine or listened to a podcast or read an article of mine and then hearing how not only it changed their body. And that's cool because we all know how let's just take from a personal like self-confidence standpoint. It's nice to look in the mirror and like what you see and that that then can affect many other things. But I like hearing those details even more about the parent who now is able to actually play with their kids the way that they've wanted to, right. And how that has improved their relationship with their kids and how they've, it's kind of maybe rekindled a little bit of their romance in their, in their relationship in the, in the, maybe a husband and wife or boyfriend, girlfriend, or boyfriend and boyfriend or whatever. I want to be very diverse. wife or boyfriend, girlfriend, or boyfriend and boyfriend or whatever. I want to be very diverse.

And, and, and so, but those personal stories kind of like the, the wise behind the why are just, it's just nice. It's a nice reminder of like, this is, this is why I'm doing this. And, and then there is a part of me that is, is maybe combative. Like I. I like to fight against things I see that I think are bad and wrong. And so there's a lot of bad information in this space. And that's the angle I've decided to go at the most. I spend most of my time creating content. But that's even one of the reasons why I started the supplement company and decided to do it that way is because I thought that was an opportunity to show this is how it should be done. And not to say that's perfect and everything can be better, but at least I'm not a con artist. At least I'm trying to go about it in a way that this is how I would want to be treated as a consumer, basically. a consumer basically. And so if I can also maybe help try to raise the bar in some way, at least maybe a little bit on both the educational side of things by just doing my best to make, I try to

make, I try to make things as simple and practical as possible. I'm not, I don't try to show off or use a bunch of jargon or only try to talk to people I would consider my quote unquote peers. Like I'm trying to just, Hey, here are some simple things. They work, try them. And,

and that, that has certainly resonated. And then in the supplement side of things, hopefully show that, Hey, you can do it in a good way and still be successful. You don't have to be scum to make some money. You know what I mean?

So Mike, I, I don't want to end thisum to make some money. You know what I mean? So Mike, um, I, we, I don't want to end this podcast without us talking about this because I think, um, we've talked about,

no, we've talked about Dick a lot in other podcasts too, but I want to know every podcast, every podcast, but quite a bit on this one. What are some supplements outside of, you know, you always hear these podcast ads,

people saying, Oh, take blue chew. And you know you always hear these podcast ads people saying oh take blue chew and you know this stuff blah blah blah increased performance there but what are some actual supplements that people can take um other obviously we know if you lose some weight get healthy get sleep your sexual performance will be better right when you get healthier but are there actual supplements that don't have horrible side effects That can help people out When it comes to the bedroom Yo Han B kind of does Really?

Yeah I was going to say yeah Gives you a little extra blood flow A little extra sensation down there I need to go back That's true Like wow You're really burning some fat

Hey if you do it fasted too Yeah I was going to say That's why your head was hurting All the blood went straight to your dick Well no i think the other way around i think that's the problem is that if you were to maybe counterbalance it if you're doing you know if you use it in the bedroom then maybe you won't have the blood rush to the head but but uh yeah so so citrulline as well really anything yet because of blood flow

and you know what's what people will commonly report with citrulline as well. Really? Anything yet because of blood flow and you know, what's, what people will commonly report with citrulline is harder erections is, is the common, uh, sounds like a horrible side effect. You just feel, you just feel, you just feel kind of cool. Like, come on, I just feel, you know, and then she'll appreciate it too. And, uh, citrulline. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Citrulline and, anything so it's gonna be anything related to blood flow could help you know ironically i had spoken to curtis some time ago like hey can we make a natural dick pill i'm not sure i want to it might be a bit too much uh for the brand but i'm just curious and and yeah so so you him being citrulline, you know what, actually, um, I'm going to pull up his Slack real quick.

Cause basically it was like, no, unfortunately, uh, there there's, there's not enough stuff out there with enough good evidence that, that he felt we could honestly, uh, something that's actually worth taking. You know what I mean? But, but again, um, and the, you know, him being, it again um and the yohim bean is probably not i mean you could try it it wouldn't be well i guess i mean i guess if if depends depends how how often you are doing the thing uh but but the citrulline you could take every day and and that that there's a reason why it's in a lot of pre-workouts um it actually has some performance

benefits as long as you take enough you just have to take enough eight grams per day is the effective dose and uh let's let's see here so i'm just pulling out we need to like produce more like nitrous oxide or something but i don't think taking a supplement for that would do anything right citrulline well that's like citrulline is better for arginine uh for that purpose so citrulline malate like just straight citrulline malate correct yeah yeah eight grams a day find that on amazon today i'm not standing next to you anymore and and i could also send you some of my pre-workout if you want to try it let's go okay good i like it i like it uh but yeah those those are two things and i do i remember having this conversation with Curtis. And unfortunately, there weren't many. He did mention here L-DOPA and then Makuna for women, but he wasn't too excited about them.

So that's kind of where I left it. Got it. And lastly, also, you were mentioning earlier how supplements, like there's not many things that are going to really help with a lot of muscle gain, right? But you mentioned health and longevity. And that had me curious on the longevity aspect of things. Maybe what supplements you found that are good for longevity. I don't know where I heard this. This could be totally false.

But I heard someone talking about the link between creatine monohydrate and Alzheimer's. Was that something that was mentioned recently somewhere i don't know but yeah creatine does do quite a bit for your mind i believe so maybe it could have a link yeah correct i know there's some research that shows i think it was with vegetarians and vegans who tend to get very little obviously yeah um that it can have cognitive boosting effects, particularly in those people. And then also, yes, in the elderly, I think there's some research that it can help preserve cognition. And so creatine is one of those things that certainly if you're into weightlifting, there's

no reason not to take it, right? I mean, it's the most studied molecule in all of sports nutrition. And is it anything like steroids? No, of course. It's not a game changer, but chances are you're going to gain muscle and strength a little bit faster with it. You're going to recover a little better from your workouts. Creatine monohydrate is cheap, five grams a day done easy, mix it into a protein shake. It's kind of a no brainer. And as far as longevity goes, unfortunately,

that's one of those terms that it's kind of a buzzword these days. And it's associated a lot with it's NAD. And there's another acronym. Is it NMN? I don't remember. Two substances that are being touted by a couple of companies I won't mention. But they have a stacked scientific advisory board. So you'd think like, oh, wow, all of these people associated with all of these universities

are saying this is like the next thing. And from my understanding with my own reading and then also speaking to Curtis and some other people who I would say maybe even have an incentive to, at least for their job, quote unquote, are trying to help me out. If there was good evidence for this stuff, they would be saying, we should probably look at this. This is pretty interesting. And basically what they're saying is like, no, the weight of the evidence on this stuff is that it's completely overblown and it's probably just going to be a flop. So just keep that in mind when you hear longevity.

It's just one of those words that's thrown around because it means a lot to people, particularly in the 40 plus demographic, a 20 year old is like, what do you mean? I'm never going to die. I'm fucking invincible. Uh, but, but, but, you know, you, you says you start to get older, you become aware of your mortality. And, um, so if we look at like, okay, well, what do we actually, what are we actually trying to achieve then with longevity? look at like, okay, well, what are we actually, what are we actually trying to achieve then with longevity? We're trying to, let's just say, um, not, not have to deal with heart disease, for example, and not have to deal with, we don't want diabetes. We want to, we want to avoid disease and dysfunction as a first thing. And so for that, again, I just want to say that

they're, uh, the majority of it is going to be on all the stuff we've been talking about, but take a supplement like a fish oil supplement, right? Omega-3 fatty acids. There's no question that not getting enough of omega-3 fatty acids is not good for your overall health. It actually impacts many elements of your health. It even impacts your performance. It can impact the rate of fat loss. It can impact the rate of muscle gain. And so do you have to supplement? No, you could eat several servings of fatty fish per week, but many people don't want to do that because they just don't like fish or whatever.

And that's fine. And a fish oil supplement or real oil, if you just want to overpay, if you just want to pay more for the same results, you could do that, I guess. But a fish oil supplement is, I would say, longevity. I think it's fair to say that. Also, one interesting thing, if you're into lifting weights, like most of the people listening probably are, if you take higher doses, so let's say in the range of four to six grams of EPA and DHA per day, whereas you probably only need, I mean, bare minimum would probably be about six to 800 milligrams. I would think for like basic health at a couple of grams could be

like a really good dose for health. But if you get up to the four to six, there's some research showing that it can help reduce inflammation in the joints, which is always nice. If, uh, if you're training hard because, you know, joints are like, you know, tolls along the highway that if, if, if the, if the, if the, if you can't pass through the toll, you can't keep going, unfortunately. So so, so that's, so that's an example of something. Spirulina is is a very cool supplement. It's like Curtis, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a quirky dude. As you can imagine, he loves spirulina. He would do an entire podcast

on spirulina and how this molecule works. And it improves cholesterol profile and it can improve muscle endurance and increase strength. There's new evidence that can even improve performance. And it can help the body eliminate some heavy metals. It can lower blood pressure. It just has a lot of effects for the dose. A clinically effective dose, I believe, is about five grams per day. You can take more. And if I think you can get up, there have been extra benefits seen up to maybe 10 or 15 grams a day, but five is perfectly fine. You're going to get benefits from that. And so I'm thinking of a couple. So I have a greens product that has spirulina. It also has reishi mushroom. So this is something that mushrooms are also...

There's a lot of hype and a lot of it I think is overblown, but I believe it may actually be pronounced reishi. I think I mispronounced that, but it's R-E-I-S-H-I. And research shows that can help protect liver health. It can help protect DNA from oxidative damage. And of course, that's a major factor in aging. So if you can do something, even if it has a minor effect, what we're going for with a lot of this is additive. We're trying to add little things that that gives us 3%. That gives us 4%.

That gives us maybe even 5%. And the cumulative effect is significant, but Reishi can, it can improve brain health. It can help you sleep better. I believe it's research. I think it's that it can reduce the time to fall asleep and it can help the immune system. And there are quite a few benefits of reishi mushroom. And I mean, I could go on and just kind of ramble, but those are a few examples. CoQ10 is in my multivitamin and that's something that a lot of people supplement with separately because it's a very effective antioxidant. And yeah um, uh, yeah, I mean, I can keep going, but there are a lot of interesting things that, and this is one of the, one of the elements of supplementation that has actually appealed to me the most. It are these extra things that you're never going to eat.

You can, it doesn't matter how well you eat. You're not going to get, you're going to be chewing on reishi mushrooms, uh, but you can supplement with them. And so we have quite a few products that are again, more along these lines, because I think that that actually makes for a better argument for why you should include supplements in your regimen. Let's look for things that you can't just get from eating a little bit better. Like talk about a green supplement, your average green supplements, garbage. It's just a vegetable and fruit powders with some other random things thrown in that have some marketing momentum behind them. And it's really actually disingenuous to tell people that, oh, forget about eating fruits and vegetables. Just take this silly powder. And this has 75

servings of vegetables per scoop. This is enough vegetables for like a month in one scoop kind of thing. No, I completely disagree. You cannot replace basic nutrition with just supplementation. There are a lot of other things in foods that are lost in the process of turning it into a powder. I mean, we could talk about fiber, but there are other things as well. So long kind of tangential rambling answer to that, but I did my best. Gotcha. That's awesome. And how many grams of spirulina did you say? Five. Five per day is a clinically effective dose. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff's hard to choke down. I don't think you mentioned the name of your

supplement brand. Yeah, I stuff's hard to choke down. I don't think you mentioned the name of your supplement brand. Yeah, I haven't. Oh, Legion, L-E-G-I-O-N. Yeah, LegionAthletics.com is the... What's the website? It's LegionAthletics.com, which is unfortunate. I tried to get Legion.com, but it's owned by a very large uh it's owned by a very large software company a public software company and public companies almost never sell domains they just don't care they don't care

how much money you offer them they're just like and whatever you're you're not even worth speaking to you know even six figures purchase price like no thanks bye i'm stuck with that for now thank you so much for your time today. Where can people pick up your books as well? Yeah. I mean, so anywhere online where you like to buy books, they also are in, I think 600 Barnes and Noble stores. And, and so that's cool.

But if people want to check them out, of course, Amazon's where that's where I make the majority of my sales. They also are at legionathletics.com. If people want to just buy like if they would prefer to have an EPUB or a PDF file that they can just keep and pass around, I don't care. They can get it over there at my website. And I'm working on, well, yeah, toward the end of a book that this is going to be my first, what do they call themselves? Trade publishers, I think toward the end of a book that this is going to be my first, what do they call

themselves? Trade publishers, I think is the term they prefer. So my first, I've self-published everything up until now. And so my first traditionally published book is coming out next year. It's called Muscle for Life. And I'm excited because that one is for, specifically for the 40 plus crowd, men and women. Whereas my book, like Bigger, Leaner, for the 40 plus crowd, men and women. Whereas my book like bigger, leaner, stronger is, is obviously catered to men. And it's specifically catered to a younger crowd, probably anywhere from 20 to probably 45 is the sweet spot for that book. Not that a 55 year old dude can't do it. Uh, no, he certainly can, but it's actually not appropriate for a 55 year old dude who has never done any of this stuff. And who has 50 pounds to lose that you have to start at a very different place with that person.

And of course there are a lot more of those dudes out there than like, you know, 55 year old dudes who are in pretty good shape who just want to get jacked. Um, and, and so the, the new book is going to be for all the, the,

the larger, the larger market really. Awesome. Thank you so much for your, the larger market really. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Cool. Got some good stuff there. We got, we know how to burn fat and we know how to get a boner. Citrulline mallet. That's the, that's the big thing I got from this podcast. Citrulline mallet.

So let me find it again. Just so I don't. Citrulline mallet is supposed to help you with training, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a pre-workout. Yeah, it's a pre-workout. I used to take it a long time ago, a little bit before workouts.

It'll give you a little boost in your training or something. There's one called hard rhino. Excuse me? That's what it's called. It's like a citrulline malate supplement called hard rhino. Hard rhino L-citrulline DL malate. Is it a proprietary blend uh now you're put on some sort of list you're gonna get all sorts of boner advertisements shit that's right that's true that's so true you know what's you know what's funny um hard rhino

promo code project no it's like the even even fish oil I used to take fish oil, but I'm very on and off with supplements. When you, outside of the creatine and your typical whey protein and stuff like that, it was good to have that talk because I should be taking my fish oil. I should be taking, maybe think about taking spirulina and some of these other things that I used to take very inconsistently. But if you can get all your, you know, your lifestyle and nutrition and stuff in check, these can actually, these can boost you to a little bit of a different place. I personally underplay the benefit of supplements. Um, and it was good that we, you know, had this conversation.

I think it helps, uh, just put you on a path. path, you know, you're like, it's a full program, you know, you're, you're all, you're all in basically, you're taking these particular supplements maybe at a particular time and it keeps you regimented, it keeps you scheduled. Yeah. For me, I've always loved, you know, protein powder. Yeah. Some amino acids here and there, I go back and forth on those, I don't always take them, but every once in a while I'll have some BCAAs.

And summertime, rather than just drinking water, I'll mix some aminos and some elements together. And it's crazy sweet. I mean, I never normally want to drink something like that. But in the middle of a workout, you're sweating. Tastes good. Maybe it gives me more nutrition. I don't really know. Multivitamin, for whatever reason, reason never bothered never really messed with them yeah i think i took them when i was young

and i just peed weird colors and i was like i don't think i don't know i just peed weird i'll take a vitamin d vitamin k vitamin b12 calcium magnesium zinc i usually take these separately though like they're all they're specific ones i'd never really i took a vitamin multivitamin once but i was like i don't see how beneficial it may be but it was good to get that information from him about multivitamins like if it's a not just a one-a-day but a multi-day multi-day multi could be beneficial it's hard to tell if anything's doing anything you know because all we know is like what we feel you know uh you give somebody a cup a cup of coffee and you're like hey did you feel that like yeah i felt it or a pre-workout is another good example

um energy drink another good example but uh you can't even really tell the difference if something has fat carbs or protein i mean you just don't have any you don't really feel it you know maybe carbs i guess if it was sugar you might feel sluggish at some other point or something. But at the most point, you can't really feel much of anything. And so it's really hard to tell, hey, how's that post-workout drink working? You're like, I don't know. I don't know. Tastes good.

And so the supplement companies, you know, they're kind of aware of this. So they'll make weird stuff that like agitates your skin before you train and you'll get blotchy skin before you work you know it's like you're burning they just want you to feel it and years ago uh they used to put like ephedrine in products they just started putting more and more and more and that's when the government stepped in and was like hey we just gotta get rid of this completely just messed everything up for us yeah alan i fucking hate it i don't do not like that i don. I've never liked that feeling in pre-workouts when you start to itch.

I know some people dig it, but I never liked it. No, I don't understand why you would be into that. There is benefit. Beta-alanine does have a positive effect as performance in terms of pre-workout. Sounds like it's amino acid, right? Yeah. When we had

Rich Gasparri in-house, I telling him like, dude, I hate that feeling. Like I wish, like, cause at that time I think we had like some like BCAs that were in the house and I was just like, I want to drink something with my water, but it has that in it. Like it doesn't make sense to me. And he's like, oh, well it actually does like something like it drives like some whatever the hell, but I was like, oh, okay. So it's not just, like it drives like some whatever the hell. But I was like, oh, okay, so it's not just to make you feel like your skin's on fire. I think it's supposed to help you get a pump. Okay.

I think that's what it's for. But like I said, it's hard to tell. It's hard to feel any of these things. We don't really, I mean, you know, hembine you feel. It makes you feel kind of sick. It makes you feel kind of weird or different. Ephedrine you definitely feel. They got rid of that one.

But you can't tell the difference between a protein shake, a heavy weight gainer. It's really hard to know. And so we take vitamins. What are we expecting from them? And then taking greens. They're obsessed with it. It's billions and billions of dollars going to that. But what are you trying to do?

You know, I don't think people even think of it. They're just like, I don't really eat vegetables that much, so I'll buy this strawberry greens product. Which isn't probably all that harmful. But I like what you were saying about how you take these things on and off. I think that's actually smart, even though you're not intentionally doing that. How long are you going to take this greens product for forever? It's probably not great for you to dump that much stuff into your stomach all the time. That's from so many different vegetables and things like that.

And I, I don't know. I don't always like to go back to think about the way that we used to eat, but I think it's important to have that somewhere in our logic and say, I don't think I just, I don't think I randomly came across that much calcium. You know, I don't think I randomly came across that much calcium. You know, I don't think I randomly came across your body's going to figure shit out too. It doesn't need, it doesn't always need all that stuff.

And I, and I'm guilty. My cabinets are full of, of all kinds of different shit. I got every supplement and vitamin and mineral, but I've shifted from supplements more into vitamins and minerals, just kind of recognizing that my diet doesn't have a lot of that. You know, for example, like I don't know, like if I get, I mean, I probably get enough

magnesium, but when I'm thinking about like I train often, there's a lot of stuff I like to do. I eat a good amount of meat and there's probably some magnesium and meat but you hear all the time that athletes are deficient magnesium so i'm like i might as well cover my bases and maybe i don't know what the fuck i'm doing but again like i don't feel any difference from that and then magnesium and zinc they're supposed to help you with sleep i don't you know it's it's really it's a weird the supplement industry is a strange one. That's why, but, but that's why, you know,

I'm so like, I have supplements in my cabinet that I've had literally for like two or three years and I'll see it on, Oh, I should fucking take that. Like I haven't finished the 30 servings that you're supposed to take in a month. Right.

But that's why like I kill elements so much. Like I like it because I sweating so much doing jujitsu. I know the way I feel when I don't take it. I know like the, how tight my muscles get and how I, the fatigue I feel. And I can tell how good I feel when I do take those electrolytes before working out or before rolling. So I can legitimately understand that different feeling. And that's why I'm so consistent with it. Cause I know this actually makes a difference. And I think that more stuff outside of the regular supplement, supplement industry probably has more impact than some of the stuff that we've seen in the supplement industry, like the muscle building that those kinds of things, I don't think they do much,

but the things from the outside seem like they do. I mean, element is just a bunch of elements, a bunch of minerals, you know, and we know that we need that. I mean, you know, Gatorade has been around forever, but Gatorade has sugar in it and doesn't have nearly the amounts that you need in terms of potassium and magnesium and sodium and all that stuff. And then I think even things like when he was mentioning mushrooms, I think there's some promising effects of some of the things that are in mushrooms and even stuff that's in other plants like kratom. But kratom, you don't really I don't really view kratom as like a fitness product. It's not really, although people in the fitness industry consume it, it's more of like an outside

thing. It's not glutamine. It's not creatine. It's not in that same field. You're not going to see ads for it that say it improves your strength by 400 percent and weird shit like that right yeah oh gosh did you guys okay i love shack i love shack shack's dope but did you see that um that supplement thing that he saw it yeah it was do you know what i'm talking about all right so there's this what's it called if you go to his instagram page just look for the the the photo or video of him being he's kind of jack now right yeah and it's because of this apparent supplement that he he started taking right and the ad was just so oh no this is the thing that people talk about where they're like increases fat loss by x percent and gf9 gf9 oh no like testro testro max but if you look at the ad

honestly the ad is just supposed to have it i don't know uh not too much let me no vex screens if you just if you look at the ad for it just makes you, if you know what goes on in fitness, it's just like, oh no, no, this isn't, this is bad. Don't, don't say that, man. Like, but you know, it's a, it is what it is. Wow. Like I actually, uh, I, I like, I like the look of those bottles. Those look pharmaceutical. It's really, that's really fucking smart on their part on their part yeah yeah and the ad is that way too like the ad is very like

research pharmaceutical like that's the way it is i think it's also very debatable and this is kind of a weird statement but i think it's very debatable on whether shit like this is more harmful than steroids i mean these are like i don't i don't know what's in these things but i would imagine these are things that are't i don't know what's in these things but i would imagine these are things that are probably foreign to your body yeah see the nad plus enhancer thing that yeah so the thing is they um i think they they uh they they say that it's like your igf or whatever in your body but here's what like uh say what's in it what kind of results should i expect no two people have the exact same experience with gf9, but it's been shown in a clinical trial to boost growth hormone up to 682%.

Best of all, because GF9 is specially formulated to stimulate your body's natural GH production. Taking it doesn't create any kind of unnatural dependency. You know, that's actually a really interesting thing because like, does anybody have any idea on what increasing your growth hormone to that level does? And if it's even beneficial, what's the long-term benefit and what's the long-term side effect? You know, and also through this kind of I mean, I'm unaware of like supplements that really do that kind of thing to your growth hormone. But let's hypothetically, you know, say that it worked.

We don't even really, I think the consumer doesn't really even know what that means. They ultimately don't, they hear growth hormone and that sounds like, oh, I'm going to like grow off of it. I think people have the association with anti-aging. So the marketing is already done. So all we have to say is it spikes your growth hormone by X percent, and people are going to buy it. People are now in. And people are going to have the false hope,

thinking that's going to help them burn fat. But you can inject yourself with growth hormone. You can take legitimate human growth hormone all day long, and if you're not on a diet it it's literally not going to do i can't even really think of anything that it would do for you other than make your like hands fall asleep because it can make your make your hands fall yeah it causes some sort of uh intracellular like water retention or something weird and it can give you like almost like a form of like carpal tunnel syndrome if you take a lot of growth hormone i've heard of like uh

this could be totally mythical but i remember hearing this years ago like of an nfl player It can give you like almost like a form of like carpal tunnel syndrome. If you take a lot of growth hormone, I've heard of like, uh, this could be totally mythical, but I remember hearing this years ago, like an NFL player, by the way, he does look amazing. Awesome. I still love Shaq. It's just,

yeah. Um, I heard of like a, an NFL player or whatever it was maybe taking growth hormone and like everything gets bigger, including like your organs and stuff. Is that correct? Or is that wrong?

I don't believe so. I don't believe that that's, I mean, it it could be but i would imagine that it's to like a fairly minor level i would imagine now i think if you are producing growth hormone at a high level naturally i think that's way different as you're growing yeah yeah like you saw andre milanichev how thick his hands are his hands look like a fucking tennis racket or something, right? Yeah. He probably had a good surge of growth hormone when he was like young and it probably led to that. But yeah, I don't think when you, when you just go injecting your body with stuff, it doesn't have the same reaction, you know?

Yeah. So let's see. What's in it? Does it contain GH slash an actual hormone? Answer. No. Please be assured that GF9 does not contain any, in all caps, hormones. Instead, the GF9 formula contains a blend of amino acids specifically linked together

that have been clinically shown to increase a body's production of GH naturally. God, these people are fucking geniuses. growth hormone doesn't have hormones in it either it's amino acids fucking it's 191 amino acids fucking bonded together wow these guys are fucking smart yeah uh wow people are gonna think they're on like some shit And they're gonna get all hyped up and I bet you They will get great results because they're gonna yeah Exactly that's what supplements do especially when you're Like when I got my first supplements as a kid that made Me go to the gym bro

My first pre-workout after I Take the biggest dump ever I hit the gym So hard yeah yeah yeah Yeah without any introduction of Artificial form of growth hormone Or any hormone into the body, GF9's patented blend works by nourishing the pituitary, the gland that manufactures GH in the body. So what we're trying to say is go to gf9.com, use promo code POWERPROJECT.

That'd be sick. But honestly, man, that really is the big thing here because supplements and supplement companies you know people take the supplements they'll get the before and after pictures they'll send it to the company and they'll say this is what it does but the big thing that happened for a majority of these subs is that it increased the motivation of people to go get into the gym to exercise to work out to even fix their nutrition a bit and with all these things, they got their results, but because that motivation,

right. Right. Not because of the GF nine or Nova decks. It's so tough, man. You know, a company like that probably came to Shaq Shaq's probably, they probably,

Hey, we'll give you 25% or whatever. Maybe more. Yeah. We'll give you half the company or whatever, because it, it'll be a huge deal to be able to promote a product with you after you lost weight. You look great.

And any one of us would be susceptible to any of that. Someone comes along with a great offer, great deal. Doesn't really seem like it's causing anybody any harm, but it's not necessarily telling the truth. It's an interesting, that whole thing is very, very interesting. We hear that a lot about the supplement industry. Oh, here we go. How people are just selling bullshit. And I don't really think it's, I don't think it's that, I don't think it's as bad as people sometimes make it out to be.

But I would also say, like, just consumers should be aware that supplements aren't going to really, they're not going to necessarily give you the body that you want. It's going to take a lot of time. It's going to take a lot of effort. It's going to be a pain in the ass. It's going to feel like a full-time job, especially if you've been fat before, like then it's even harder and supplements won't necessarily do much in that case.

They, they can help with some stuff, especially like, I think a protein shake is a good example. Just, it's just a different flavor. You you just get you get to have something that yeah that uh tastes sweet under normal protein yeah it's the easy way to get more protein or with like bca is just easier way to stay hydrated with like more water or whatever absolutely yeah or using element for sure maybe it makes things just a little easier that's about

all it's going to do for you, but it's still going to be fucking hard. Yeah. Proprietary blend. And then just some amino, some like BCAs and then something called skit. So nip heat. That's a secret.

That's yeah. None of the values on any of those. So Nipita. I mean, that's yeah none of the values on any of those skits so napita i mean i don't know if you'll be able to see it from over there i think shack's gonna call up and see yeah he's gonna be like skit so napita i need you to help me promote this product that makes me scared anything that starts with a skit so sign me up andrew take us on out of here. I will. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode.

If you guys want to find more information about our guest today, I'll link down his books down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. And we got some more awesome stuff coming out to the newsletter. So please subscribe if you have not done so already links for that in the same location. Please make sure you find the podcast at Mark Biles power Project on Instagram, at MB Power Project on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter, and I guess Clubhouse, even though I think that's maybe dead already, is at IamAndrewZ.

And Seema, where are you at? At Seema Yin Yang on Instagram and YouTube. And at Seema Yinang on TikTok and Twitter. It's so confusing over there. I couldn't get my name on TikTok. What's this watch you're experimenting with over here? Oh yeah, it's called MyZone. We're seeing how it is.

Your zone? His zone. My zone, your zone, our zone. Today I wore my Encima zone today on my wrist. What does that mean? Because that's your zone. This is my zone. What does that mean? Because that's your zone. This is my zone.

Yeah, so now we called it Encema zone. The Encema zone on your wrist. Yes, that's what I wore. What's it doing? So it tracks, it's kind of like the other bands. Tracking your calories? Yeah, tracking the calorie burn during exercise and stuff like that. So I'm seeing if it's any good.

I'm excited to see how it is. And there's what, an an app on your phone or something there's an app on the phone you can wear it there's an armband for it you can there's a chest strap for it so that might be good might be interesting i wonder if that syncs up well to the chip that you got injected into your shoulder oh are you getting anxiety of this are you getting better like signal or worse on your phone all of a sudden i'm gonna send you a clip of universal are you getting better like signal or worse on your phone all of a sudden i'm gonna send you a clip of universal soldier so you can check that out i was actually getting really sick pumps after i got my vaccine like i was looking real crazy wow and um that's just because you drink element drink element t.com slash power project but i i do like how

my zone sends you an email about like the workout you just did like it shows you like your breakdown of calories and like it's like you worked out like shit yeah i didn't know it kind of does yeah um it shows you like the um like you're different uh what's it called uh oh heart rate or whatever put that somewhere for jujitsu or be in the way this is a thing so they're like i said there's an armb band i hope that maybe they can make a i hope that they can make an uh no one really makes one yet for a jujitsu makes one okay but whoop has like an arm strap thing that you can put in there it's compacted so it can you know it's not really interfering it's not interfering at all so i hope that maybe with this because it does have the capacity they can make an arm band that you

can put on your arm it'll allow for jujitsu athletes to use it, but this is pretty cool. Yeah. I do dig it. Yeah. I was in the gym for like 45 hours this morning. It was awesome. Sweet.

146 minutes. Shit. Wow. So that's all the heart rate information right there from your workout. Yeah. So there you go. So it shows a lot of plaque in your heart. I know.

Um, so it shows like how often I was in each like zone. And, you know, obviously I didn't really go that hard. Apparently. Is that your wiener? It scans all the way through to that. Yeah. Wow.

So I didn't, wasn't expecting that. For the most part, I was a little soft and then Mark walked in and it's like, got all angry and then it was pumping and then it was going and then it got tired and had to start all over again. People that are listening on audio have no idea what we're talking about. It's so weird that they wouldn't measure

my boner the whole time. You are from Congo. I guess I shouldn't have worn it around my shaft. Damn, Zaddy, calm down. God dang. I've been hanging around you way too much. Oh my god. That's amazing. I had to use the small strap.

Don't lie to the people. You're trying to be modest. There. Well, he doesn't want to beat people over the head with it. They had to send Andrew here an XL strap. Or do I? strength is never a weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later no one's ever gonna hear