Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 539 - Abel James - My Diet Is Better Than Yours

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Abel James is a bestselling author, musician, radio show & podcast host, entrepreneur and health crusader. Abel and his work has been featured in WIRED magazine, Paleo Living, and hundreds of other media outlets. His podcast, “Fat Burning Man” rose to become the #1 rated health podcast within its first year. 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! ➢Eat Rite Foods: http://eatritefoods.com/ Use ode "POWERPROJECT25" for 25% off your first order, then code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off every order after! ➢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 ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

You remember the joke I made at the end of the last cast? I don't remember. Or one of the casts about how they have a new flavor coming out and Kai Green might really like it. Yeah. Okay, let's record right now. Wait, we're recording. Should I leave that in there? Yes, leave it in there.

Okay, well. Kai always makes jokes about this, man. He does? He does. Kai makes jokes about it. That's good. Because everyone knows it, you know what I mean? But yeah, it's a great flavor.

Kai Greeney likes fruit more than most people. What'd you say? Tends to. You know what I say about fruit. It's juicy? Fuck it. I like it. If y'all don't know what we're talking about, Google it.

We're talking about Elements new flavor. Great for you. Now you know. It's really good. It's really really freaking good it's shockingly good i don't like grapefruit but whatever they have in this one the flavor is actually insane i was surprised i was caught off guard put it that way yeah yeah fake flavors are pretty good sometimes right grapefruit it works yeah it watermelons good yeah i like that one a lot too it is very surprising about like the like when we first started drinking those electrolytes just like the mix of the salt and everything initially you try element you're like this is kind of weird

but it grows on you yeah it really grows on you it's really good it absolutely does and then chris bell was saying like hey if you mix the watermelon and the grapefruit together he's like you kind of get that like that that um like sour like gummy flavor and i was like dude that's taking it too far like that's bigger stronger faster status just relax like calm down but now it's the uh the new flavor is insane watermelon i think is still my number one and you can so so my wife is super patient she'll never like like hey are you gonna bring home like any more element whatever she doesn't we'll never do that but she does ask about watermelon like hey did you get any more watermelon salt and like yeah here you go no but

it's so what i'm saying is it's freaking delicious it's And I believe the, as of today on, so let's say the 22nd, 21st, 22nd of June, the free element recharge pack is back at drink lmnt.com slash power project. Don't know how long it's going to be there, but if you guys haven't dove into, um, element electrolytes, I mean, first off, we've been telling you about it long enough. You should have by now, but, um, if you want to give it a test run, you can do so for free, again, at drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Or you can buy a box or you can buy the value bundle, which is paying for three boxes, and you get a fourth one absolutely free. Get the new grapefruit flavor. Get the watermelon salt.

And then try plain because that one goes good on like food and stuff. Highly recommend it. I mean, we've been using it for years now. So, yeah, at this point, you guys really should just get up on it. Again, drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Head over there right now-ish. Yay. Goes in line with our guest today.

Our guest talks a lot about lower carbohydrate living and also talks about intermittent fasting. And we talk about that quite a bit here on this show. And we always try to recommend that you guys make sure that you get in your electrolytes because it's really important. We've all, you know, all of us have kind of bonked and not felt good during workouts. I used to wake up in the middle of night night with cramps in my calves and hamstrings, especially this time of year when it's getting hot outside. I have not had that happen in a long time, and I'm grateful for it because that sucked. It makes me kind of annoyed that I haven't used electrolytes in years.

I mean, I think every now and then I would have had a Noontab or something, just randomly. When you're a kid, you drink Gatorade, but Gatorade just doesn't have that much in it. If you look at the stats on it, it just doesn't have that much. And when you drink Element, I think you're getting a full gram of sodium each time. So it works out well. It was pretty funny. Once I started learning from Stan, from you guys about sodium intake and stuff, I would get crazy cramps.

And then I'd be like, gotta have salt and like i remember we were actually at a at a restaurant and i started cramping up my legs used to cramp up way too much but they started going and i'm just like man and i was like just pouring like regular ass table salt in like my water and like it you know taste obviously at that point you don't care but like it's hard to choke down so it is isn't it yeah so having some flavor yeah it is tough hard yeah what you're silly today i'm always silly brother But you sneezed and you had a bloody nose and now you're just being all... Yeah, man. Funny.

Who can relate? I mean, we just found something similar that we used to have. I used to have bloody noses as a kid. Non-stop. Wake up and have a bloody pillow. How about this one? This doesn't really happen to me much anymore. Because I think...

I don't know. I don't actually know why it doesn't happen anymore, but maybe just life got too serious. I used to wake up laughing all the time. Oh God, that's scary. Yeah. I used to wake up laughing. That's great. And I don't even, I mean, sometimes I was like dreaming and I would remember like a

dream. I was like, oh, that it was kind of funny. Was Andy with you at this time? Yeah. She's like, she'd be like, what is going on? Like I would just be giggling, just laughing my ass off. It's a great way to wake up. It makes you feel great.

I wouldn't wake up, but I know for sure. I don't know what it is. My brother, he talks in his sleep. I talk in my sleep, or I used to. But Stephanie would be like, yeah, you giggle all night long in your sleep. And I was like, that's funny. And then another thing, she was like, I don't know if you're dreaming that you're giving like a motivational speech or what's going on but like you are very motivational when you sleep like i think it's because like watching all like youtube videos on like lifting and stuff

like it would just be playing in my head and i would just i don't know yelling out shit yeah i've been told from the woman that i'm like, I'm not saying this in any, like, I'm okay. I've been told that like, I will like wake up and look at them and just speak like I'm awake. And, and by the way,

I remember none of this, but this is, this is multiple accounts where I just like speak to them and they'd ask me questions and I'd answer the questions. And in the morning they'd be like, do you remember? I'm like, no. And I find that problematic because I find that if you ask me something that i don't want to tell you like when i'm awake yeah you could ask me that when i'm asleep yeah i don't like that

i really don't say by the way i'm not responsible for anything i say or do in the middle of the night and they would be like what they're sleeping with one eye open the whole time i'll probably just leave right oh god yeah and stephanie she'll she'll like uh i'll be snoring and she'll kind of shake me and then we'll start talking and i'll be like nope i have no idea what you're talking about like i don't remember anything like nope i slept the whole night she's like no you were saying stuff i'm like hopefully i didn't say anything bad that's why mouth tape is so useful because this always happens i don't have mouth tape yeah right so use mouth tape taped up last night actually you guys um learn anything new from getting your body fat tested is there anything new that you're going to implement

or employ or was it kind of much of the same or what what happened for me, uh, because I was actually having this conversation with settle gate and, you know, as asked a similar question and, really it was just more eyeopening to see Ryan Soper get his body fat tested and seeing that he actually had a, just a tiny bit more body fat on his body than I did, but he looks way more jacked. He looked like before we went,

you know, I was in the gym and then he was like, you know, kind of had his shirt off. And I was just like, yeah, dude, my goal is to look more like you because like you're comfortable, you have abs, you know, you look great. And he's just like, yeah, you know, like, thanks. But he's like, I think I need to get leaner. We're all going to think that even if I did have that body, I would think that. You guys are like same height and probably similar weight, right? I think he's probably weighs a little bit more. But what it comes down to is he just has more muscle. He's been lifting longer.

He's been doing it, power lifting, lifting a lot more weights a lot longer. So seeing that and then also learning about my resting metabolic rate, all of this I would focus just on my body fat percentage or trying to keep my body fat down, not really worrying about intaking too many calories. I would only focus on taking in too many calories. So what I told Josh was I'm not really going to change anything other than my mindset. I'm not really going to change anything other than my mindset. Because mentally, I would eat more calories, and I would wake up the next day being like, oh my God, I look terrible.

I let go of everything. What the fuck was the point of eating that many calories if I look like shit? When in actuality, I probably look identical. But because I know that the scale moved up half a pound, or whatever, maybe even it didn't move, identical yeah but because i know that the scale moved up half a pound or you know whatever maybe even it didn't move i would really think that i look like crap so like being okay with like having more calories and understanding that the ultimate goal is just to build more muscle um that's definitely a different approach that i'm having now so as far as like the diet it's going to stay

the same i'm just going to be okay with eating more, but like more than just okay, like actually accepting it and welcoming, you know, being a little bit bigger. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I totally agree with that. I think it's just interesting. Your, your note, um, as far as like our resting metabolic rates being fairly like my resting metabolic rates, only 300 calories more than yours. Although I weigh a lot more. The reason why I think that is, is because number one, I am eating less calories than I have in like 2016, maybe 2017. And I think my metabolic rate could be higher if I chose to eat more calories. You chose like challenge your body more. Yeah. Not even challenge my body more physically, just chose to eat more calories, right? You chose like challenge your body more, yeah.

Yeah, not even challenge my body more physically, just chose to eat more, right? Because I eat an adequate amount of protein to maintain muscle, but I don't eat excessive amounts of food. Like I mentioned, with my activity level, I'll be eating between 2,500 and maybe 3,300 calories. And that kind of falls in line with that RMR.

But if I chose to eat an average of 3,000 calories or more, my resting metabolic rate would go up in tandem. So I think it's just because this is the amount that I'm choosing to eat for activity, which is on average, maybe 27, 2,800, which is actually accurate to what that thing said. If my resting metabolic rate is 2,387 or whatever, then for my activity,

it'd be around 2700, 3000, 3300. And it's very interesting how that works. I just sent this over to Andrew. I thought this was interesting. This is from Ted Naiman. Someone tagged me. Yeah, this is cool. Yeah, I thought that was dope.

You know, like just people are always trying to weigh less and we understand the goal. And yes, if you're, if you're very, very heavy, you probably should be losing weight and trending down that way. But, you know, this, this little meme thing,

he says, you know, don't just try to weigh less, weigh better. And it has, you know, a guy that's real dumpy and way overweight versus a guy that's real jacked with a good V taper. And then beneath that, it says, you know, eat less instead of just eating

less, you know, don't eat less, eat better. And it has a picture of a cheeseburger with French fries on one side and the other side, it looks like it's like some salmon and vegetables or chicken or something. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is cool. Like it's, it's kind of what you mentioned, you know what i mean like first off way better so over time whatever you wherever you guys are in your journey you're going to be dropping body fat or getting towards a body composition but when you get to a weight that maybe you're happy with own that weight over years because like for example i've been the same weight for the past few years but i'm substantially i look different

than i did a few years ago, better at the same weight, and my activity level's also damn good, right? So it's like you can continue to make changes while maintaining the same weight. You don't have to skyrocket yourself up or down, depending on where you currently are, of course. There are gonna be times for that, but yeah,

you can totally have a recomp at the same weight and another big advantage of that is with your training like not too many things have to change i know for you jujitsu has been a change but it you started it five years ago or something like that right yeah five and a half years ago yeah you started a while back so that so it's not really a change any longer it's just part of your your day-to-day but the point here is that like, because we don't necessarily need to, you know, hone in and focus on, I don't know, growing or getting stronger. You just need to be consistent and being consistent. You will hypertrophy the muscles. You do need to stimulate them, but you don't need to go in there and totally crush yourself. You

don't need to annihilate yourself. I think a good marker is that you should feel pretty good every day. I think when you leave the gym for the most part, in general, I think you should feel better than you did when you walked in rather than feeling way worse. Now, if we're talking about you trying to compete and get on this bodybuilding stage, or if you're trying to power lift, there might be some reasons and some, there might be some times where you want to push a little harder. And I think a lot of times that's even just more from a mental side of things than a physical, because physically I think that you still might be further ahead if you can

learn to pull back a little bit more. But from a mental perspective, I think it is important that we kind of go there every once in a while. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's really cool and we will probably talk about this on another podcast. It's it's cause we talked about this actually, but finding weaknesses in the gym, um, had a, had a new friend, Julian Baldy in the gym. And he's like this, uh, crazy football dude that is really good at back extensions, him and this other guy, Don, they're like really

strong at back extension. So do come back extension to 75 and feels like it's going to rip your hamstrings off. Right. It does feel like it's going to rip your hamstrings off. So we were doing some single leg back extensions and, and, but like when I, when I put one 35 on,

I was like, Hmm, this is actually hard for me. And this dude's just repping out one 35 on the back extension. Like it's nothing but me. I have a, I think I have a strong lower back. I was having difficulty and I was thinking, Hmm, I can strengthen this.

Think about like pulling an arm bar or how strong these positions are going to be for me from doing back extensions. Right. So that's exciting. Well, you find something new. That's a different type of challenge, right? Maybe you, maybe you can squat 600 pounds for reps, but then you find out that when you go to do a lunge, you can't even really do a lunge without getting off balance every time.

And so you find things that are maybe new and different and maybe stimulate you in a different way, and they're difficult in a different way. They're just maybe not the same old thing that you're used to doing all the time. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But I was totally thinking about for for for that specific movement how well it could like uh kind of go for go with like power lifters like think about trying to maintain your deadlift positioning a lot of people like do pause deadlifts or all that or even squat positioning if you're able to if you if you are very strong at your squat and very strong at your deadlift

but then you do back extensions and you're weak, that's a hole. Like, I feel like getting strong with that could massively help somebody maintain good positioning in either of those lifts. And it's like, I don't know why I haven't really done those over the years. I mean, I know why, but like still, I don't get why it really didn't.

They're tough to do even with no weight. They're, they're just kind of hard. Like do a couple sets of 20 or 25 and it blows you up quick. Or just do it with your arms out or a weight out in front of you or a weight behind your head. Shit, it gets to be really difficult. Were these guys doing it with the weight out in front of them?

Barbell. Dead lifting it? Barbell. So they were using a barbell. Barbell on the back. Barbell on the back. On the row back extension. Wow.

And going all the way down and all the way up. Wow. And he's done that with 275. And Adon has done it with 300. Man. Yeah. Jesus. In your powerlifting career, did you fuck with back extensions much?

Not like that. I know you did like good mornings. No, I would do some back extensions, but I would usually deadlift them. I would have a barbell in front of me and I'd pick them up. Ah, so it would be here. Yeah. And I would use like 185 pounds and I would maybe do of five, and I would try to hold it at the top. What I found, though, was that back extensions were really good for me, and the same thing was true with like any sort of sit-up.

Both of them were really good for me with weight and paused for some reason. I don't know why. me with weight and paused for some reason. I don't know why. I don't know, maybe because I just never did get into using that much weight on those exercises. But I remember when I would do sit-ups, I would just get on like a decline bench and I would hold, you know, maybe like a 50 pound dumbbell or something like that on my chest. And I would find positions that kind of sucked and I would hold it. And I would do like five sets of five. I would power lift it really. I wouldn't, I wouldn't sit there and do like 15 reps to try to like sculpt or whatever. I would do like five sets of five. I would power lift it really. I wouldn't, I wouldn't sit there and do like 15 reps to try to like sculpt or whatever. I would just do a lower rep ranges.

And then same thing with a lot of back exercises, including the back attack, which we have in there. And then also the, so I would pause some of the back attack stuff, but I'd also do that with the 45 degree back race. That back attack machine is very interesting. Someone with all the red padding,

right? Dude, the first time I went up to that thing i looked at it and i was like messing with it trying to act like i knew what i was doing like yeah i was like i don't know what the fuck to do here it's a great machine but yeah sometimes it is hard to like adjust it and stuff like that but that blows my hamstrings up more than a glue ham raise. Yeah. I mean, I feel that a lot in my hammy, so that's a good exercise. But, you know, I think also,

you know, we have some friends that move around quite a bit and they're trying to lose weight, but the movement is like part of their daily life already. And I think if you think about exercise in a similar way, your training, if you're just always doing the same training all the time, if you're just always going in same training all the time, if you're

just always going in and curling 30 pound dumbbells, I'm not saying that your body like adapts to it and it doesn't do anything for you. But what if you were to find some more challenging exercises? Maybe every time you go to the gym, you'll burn more calories. And then maybe that would be a boost that you need because maybe that would be something that would help you build muscle in an area where you don't have muscle. And maybe because of that and because you're burning more calories, maybe you would burn more body fat.

Maybe it would just be that little jolt that your training needs. I feel like you should totally try and find movements that are just like, like you're not that great at, right? Like, for example, for me, for the penalty row, I've been doing that movement for years, so I like doing it and I'm pretty damn good at it. But it's I feel like a movement like a back extension or finding some type of row that i'm fairly weak at is going to give me some type of different stimulus that allow me to really progress just like the um not just the bottoms up kettlebell carry but the bottoms up kettlebell

press i'm really liking that because you really have to grip and balance and it's so good overall for like shoulder stability i think it's amazing for people that are hurt, people that are injured because the grip that you have to have and the mobility that you have to have, it will be limiting. You won't be able to use that much weight. And so because you can't use that much weight, then it's a great rehab exercise after a while,

once you get strong. And if you have a healthy shoulder, you'll be able to use a pretty good amount of weight. But I do think exercises that are limiting on what you can use weight wise i think are really a huge advantage if you've been lifting for a couple years already yeah i was surprised i tried the uh the bottoms up kettlebell carry so right right side pretty good able to be able to keep the kettlebell steady and then on my left side it's just like whoa like it just kept wanting to slip and punch me in the face yeah i was like oh shit so on this side i kept

cheating i'd bring it really close to my body just to kind of try to counterbalance i guess yeah that that was fun it was really hard though so you're saying the kettlebell was moving around in your hand like you couldn't keep the grip yeah it was sliding so like i mean i i could like kind of like cheat it a little bit but like i literally like I used to have really good grip strength in both hands. But like over the years, my left side has got carpal tunnel or whatever. But like I can't clamp down as hard on this side now. So with this one, like the handle would literally like slide around. It wasn't like it was locked in and I didn't have enough strength to keep it balanced.

It just would. And it couldn't even get that far yeah so it's uh man yeah it was like demoralizing like oh shit like i can't do it you know it was rough but i mean yeah exactly what you guys are saying it's it's something i suck at so i can go super light and still get in like or still be challenged did your uh son get you anything for father's day? You know what? He, uh, he, he actually completely forgot that it was father's day.

Really? Yeah. He didn't even know. Wow. Yeah. I was like, dude, really?

Like you have one shot. You got one job. I got one day and he just looked at me. It was just like, Hey, um, I'm hungry. I'm like, just probably poop his pants and that's looked at me. It was just like, Hey, I'm hungry. I'm like, just probably poop his pants and that's it.

Right. Oh my God. Uh, I should have posted it, but, um, okay. So monumental dump father,

father's day. We, um, all right. We're late all the time. Like it's just pre pre newborn late, late to what parties and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. You're supposed to be. Yeahies and stuff? Yeah, yeah. All right, you're supposed to be, yeah. So, I mean, if my family has something at 12, they know I'm going to show up between 1 and 2. Good. You know, like, 1 o'clock is pretty early. So, we had, like, breakfast with my parents at, like, scheduled for 10 a.m. I'm like, this is way doable.

We're, like, we're ready to go at like 9 20 and like i i you know i look around i'm like oh shit we're gonna be on time like you know i'm even gonna go to the bathroom so that way i don't have to hold it all the way there you know because like from elk grove to woodland is like the way i drive is like 45 minutes sometimes it's like half an hour, though. I'm like, I'm going to take a leak. So by the time I come out, I hear, babe, help. I'm like, what could possibly be going wrong? Dude, Aurelius shit so much. He was already in the car seat. We were ready to go.

We were packed, and we were one foot out the door, but I'm like, hey, let me go take a leak. Thank goodness I did. Because if that happened on the road, oh, my God. But it was the shit went all the way from his back around to his front. Like it was up his armpit. And so, of course, like those clothes are torched. The car seat was just ruined. It was ruined. It was completely full of shit i why

don't you put a plastic bag underneath like on the car seat well the cool thing is uh the car seat like they expect this to happen so it actually wiped right off it was i was shocked i'm like damn that was i thought like our day was over but uh, uh, it was funny. Cause like, I just took a picture of like all this shit everywhere, like falling out of the diaper and just everything. And I'm like, uh, sorry guys, we're going to be late.

Like we were on pace to be on time for the first time all year. And just chat all over the place. He's just threw a monkey wrench in the plan. Yeah. It was definitely a two-person job but because stephanie's a savage of course she handled like everything but um yeah i know we had to throw him in the bath we had to just we just started the whole day all over again and that was father still doing that in the sauna

i've been okay lately i'm still trying to find a sauna oh you haven't had access right i haven't had access to asana yet so i'm still looking for one but yeah i took a shit in asana once on accident just in jujitsu in general like because i know you guys like you'll put knees and elbows on each other's stomachs and stuff does it i mean you're like farting and stuff here and there bro no there are times when i mean a little pop must come out here and there absolutely that that happens almost in every class not to me but like in every class you'll hear at least one person go and everyone will start laughing because like if you lay pressure on somebody no i mean it only makes sense yeah i'm just thinking like if if i get like anxious or nervous like i start getting bubble guts and stuff and i'm just like fuck so like i'm already nervous

like just the thought of going to a jujitsu class you know and i'm just like fuck so like i'm already nervous like just the thought of going to a jujitsu class you know and then to think like actually being on the mat like i'd be so nervous i know for sure i would rip ass in front of everybody bro i was rolling with this one guy i was rolling with this one dude he's this white belt who's just this big white belt and when he rolls like he gets he gets red and he's just like right so i was rolling with him and we were whatever and then he he was rolling like really aggressively so i put him in this position he hits the ground when he hits the ground he just goes huh and then he when he went like he also farted so it was like

and then everyone looked at him and then he was like it was so good because he's so large oh it's great i heard i heard uh i heard cassio will hear a fart and then like blame like a chick or something yeah does it every time every time this man's got jokes that would be so silly oh that's what i think about where's our guest at he's not here yeah so he's on a time crunch and i got confirmation last last time i checked i don't know we got the right day yeah yep oh shit wrong button but um yeah no you should be here right day wrong button yeah but yeah i'm still i'm still in search of a sauna i need i really need i'm gonna find a sauna today i'm getting tired of this this this life isn't good without sick and tired of being sick and tired yeah you usually you're using your son like every day huh oh that's what happened okay so yeah i've got the the timing off by a little bit

so he'll be he'll be here in about 15 to 20 minutes oh hey now yeah so not very yeah no no so that i got confirmation from an email that this just in but they had to move it over half an hour so yeah because we were scheduled yeah they moved it by half an hour that's what happened i'm cool with that yeah let's talk sauna real quick mark so you've been you had your your luxury sauna installed in your home how long you been using that and what have you been noticing about it personally uh well first of all i love it feels really good it gets up to about 194 degrees. It gets really, really hot in there. It has this kind of like rock thing that you can pour some water over and it can get really kind of steamy in there.

But it's really hard to breathe because it will get the temperature up closer to like 200. And I don't know, it's kind of like burning your nose hairs. I'm just sit there. I try to be calm, but it's like you start to kind of panic a little bit. I'm just sit there I try to be calm but it's like you start to kind of panic a little bit um I'll go in there for I'll go in there for almost an hour but it's not a full hour at that 194 degrees it's like I'm probably maybe it's like 20-30 minutes that it gets that hot um usually after that I take a shower and then I just I feel feel like when you're a little kid and you go and take a shower and you get in your PJs and you get ready for bed, I feel so good. You know, I feel amazing.

So it helps me calm down a lot. When I don't do that, a lot of times I'm just like going from doing something else and then I go to like lay down and then I'm like, oh, fuck. Because I don't sleep great, I know that I don't sleep great. And so if I just go into sleeping without any sort of like prep, then it's just not as good for me. So having the sauna seems to help a lot. I haven't really noticed much else from it other than just like I sometimes I'll play some music in there, but I do go in there without my phone. And so it's just nice to just be like relaxed and be detached from stuff for a bit. Yeah.

I actually been stretching in there too, a little bit. And that just kind of was working pretty good for me. So I just need to probably get a little more aggressive with, with actually like trying to stretch a little further and stretch a little more. But, um,

I've been consistent with it. It's been, and it's been feeling pretty good. Yeah. We got one of those, like, trying to stretch a little further, stretch a little more. But I've been consistent with it, and it's been feeling pretty good. Yeah. We got one of those, like, tents, like the sauna tents. You told me about that, yeah. Yeah. It's just a little cumbersome because, like, the tent falls apart. Like, it literally will collapse on itself. Did you forget deodorant?

Do you have deodorant? Yeah. Yeah. Don't you hate that? Fuck. I go through these weird spurts, like these weird periods of time where it's like, wake up, brush teeth, shower, deodorant, get to work. Sometimes I'll just be like, how did I forget to put on deodorant? Right.

Okay, no big deal. I got some here. And then the next day I'll do the same thing. And I'll do that for like a week straight i just it just gets deleted from my i don't know i need to absolutely keep deodorant here yeah yeah yeah but um yeah when when are you left let's get that soon let's get that soon for you i got a more controversial thing to bring out, which will take us time to talk about, I guess. Oh. I don't know. Have you guys heard about the transgender person that made the Olympic team?

I think it's a weightlifter. No, I have not. Yeah. We might have to look it up because I don't know, like, all the details. But I believe, and just so everyone knows, like, I don't know what I'm talking about. So don't cancel me knows I don't know what I'm talking about so don't cancel me I just know from what I heard

I think it's an athlete from Greece and I think I think I think the person was born a male and I believe they're competing as female. Yeah, that's it right there. Oh, okay.

So she's apparently from New Zealand. There you go. New Zealand. See, I don't know what I'm talking about. Laurel Hubbard. Hubbard. Hubbard. Yeah.

Just really interesting, you know. You know, I know some people get all crazy about this stuff and they, you know, get up in arms about whether, you know, transgender people should be able to compete that way or if there should be another category. There doesn't seem to be a lot of good resolutions to this. I guess, I guess in some sports, it, to me, it like just doesn't really make that big of a difference. But there would be other sports where I think it would be more problematic, you know, if you are physically, you know, you're like a contact sport or something like something like UFC, or I just think it could be it could get it could get to be dangerous but I think in this particular situation they talked about her testosterone levels and how they're not like they're not on par with like a man's and stuff

like that and so I was just like man this is really getting to be confusing because the Olympics you know that it tests for testosterone so now it just like, man, this is really getting to be confusing because the Olympics, you know, it tests for testosterone. So now it's like, I guess the males can be in this range and the female, you know, it's just, I don't know. The whole thing gets to be, it brings up just a lot of questions, I guess. And for me personally, I mean, I don't care. I think people should be able to do what they want to do. However, it sometimes can impede upon what someone else is trying to do. So if I heard Simon Sinek talk about this before, he's a great speaker. He mentioned how he was in

line for to get a bagel one time at a convention and how he cut the line. He said, excuse me, and he grabbed a bagel and no one cared. He just kind of went around everybody. So it's like there's a lot of people there, and he was going to speak and stuff. So he just kind of said, excuse me, popped in, grabbed the bagel. He said no one even barely saw him. But his whole point was if he would have taken the last bagel, that would have been a problem because he would have taken away something from someone else. So I think sometimes in this situation, I think people are thinking it might take a spot away from somebody that could otherwise, you know, have an Olympic, they could be an Olympic hopeful, which is, can be like a life altering thing. I mean, people train their whole lives for that. And then to have somebody else come in and take it from you. I actually,

personally, my, my own opinion is like, i don't really care what people do or how they do it i would just say get better you know like if your concern is about someone beating you then i would say get better also in the nature of sport and again i'm not talking about contact sports because that's just uh gets to be a little bit different ball game you know but i would say that like let's just say that it's racing. You're doing a hundred meters, right? Is your goal to do better than you've ever done before? Or is your goal to beat the next person next to you? Every, each person can determine what that means to them. To me, all I care about is getting better. So if the person next to me

is exponentially better for any reason in particular, If that raises me up, I'm good. I'm into it. But not everyone has that mindset. Some people are like first or nothing. That's all they can kind of think of. So everyone's different. Everyone's entitled to their opinion and how they feel about it, I guess. Man, it's tough because I get what you're saying about it doesn't really matter.

Just do better than what you did last about um you know it doesn't really matter just do better do better than what you did you know last time whatever but for some of these athletes like getting a medal you know it could set them up financially for life even you know it's a little bit more than you know hitting a pr on the platform this is their life and and it it's tough that is it's it's tough well either way it's their life even if you are just trying to you know because like people but i understand your point it could be uh career it could be a career yeah the only realm of ships and shit the only realm of sports that this is going to massively shift and affect if this happens more as women's sports because like apparently there's been some research done like even with testosterone treatment for transgender athletes men transitioning

to being women like the loss of lean body mass and muscles only like five percent so you've you've gone your whole life building muscle having potentially higher bone density and then you transition you lose a little bit of that, but you don't lose all of that. Right. And this, like she is going to compete in the 87 kilograms, super heavy.

She's a metal contender. She is a metal contender. Right. I mean, again, a woman transitioning to be a man trying to go into male track and field and male wet weightlifting. Like,

let's just be real. Like, I'm not saying like, there are a lot of strong strong women out there but compared to the elite of of male power athletes it's going based off of history and what has happened for years and years men are are faster and stronger than women and at the upper echelon yeah at the upper echelon of it and the olympics is the upper echelon but now you At the upper echelon of it. And the Olympics is the upper echelon. But now you have like a man representation of female sports and female scholarships to equal out, you know what they do for the men. Now,

yeah, like you're saying like that can get compromised. I don't know. I, you know, I, there's a part of me that's like too old to even like understand anything that's going on nowadays.

But there's another part of me that says, you know what? I bet you that this has been happening for years and no one's really known about it. Does every single Olympic athlete that's ever competed, does everyone know exactly their origin and where they actually, you know, what country they actually came from? Or has there been cheating going on with uh people taking um you know performance enhancing drugs have there been people that lied about their sex i'm sure like a lot of shit like that has gone down over the years um you know many times over so i i don't know sometimes it's just like put your hands up like i'm not sure it's tough because you don't want to be insensitive

you know to be like whatever your birth certificate says, that's what you, because, I mean, you know, like I say, you just don't want to be insensitive to that. But then you also, you know, don't want to just be like, all right, we're just going to get rid of all the gender divisions. Just be like, we're Olympic lifting. Let's see who lifts the most period. I think some people were proposing that there was a separate category but i'm like i don't yeah and there's there two separate categories for people that want one way versus the other people that went the other way yeah i don't know it's yeah that's uh that's tricky damn no like yeah this this this is this is gonna this is gonna go like i've already seen articles

of like female athletes in college high school being pissed like because they were there apparently some men who transitioned to being women in track and they just smoked these girls smoked them and the female athletes were pissed and i mean so you know like you know maybe that'll if i was a female athlete that i mean i'd be like yeah i want to beat him but also like get out of my category that's that's how i would feel i'm just saying that's how i would feel um so that's just a toughie it's gonna be interesting i mean it is it is similar to you know somebody, somebody, uh, I just, somebody just has, they're at a huge advantage, you know, at a huge advantage. I mean, there's not,

I think that that's pretty clear. I think that, uh, what was talked about on Joe Rogan more recently, he had a guest on Carol Hoven, I believe her name was, she talked a lot about testosterone and they started kind of getting into, uh, talking about like transgender and, and different things like that. And there's a lot of really just, I would say, go and listen to that. There's a lot of really good information in there. And there's a lot of stuff that maybe you just never even thought about before when

it comes to, you know, people transitioning and people using hormones and even like what testosterone does. I think that even just like what testosterone does, I don't think is talked about enough. You know, it can, it can make you more aggressive. It can help you to build more muscle mass. It can kind of help kind of leave you more in an anabolic state. And if you were that way for 20 plus years of your life, you could see how that could be an advantage. I remember when I was a kid and I was competing in powerlifting, they would have like drug-free and they would have, they would have,

yeah, drug-free and lifetime drug-free. And I was like, what's lifetime drug-free. And they're like, well, if you, you know,

been off stuff for like two, three years or more or whatever, had a certain amount of years associated to it. That's great. And I wonder like what the rules are in like the USAPL and IPF. I would imagine that if you were natural for five, six, seven years, I mean, I don't, they probably, I mean, they're probably just going on the honor system.

But I would imagine that like you're, even if you were off stuff for a few months, you just, none of it would register on any sort of tests that they could do. So, but, uh, yeah,

I do wonder how many years, if there is an amount of years, cause that seems kind of interesting. Like if they don't ever allow you to compete in that, cause like you're, you're banned forever because you took steroids when you were 16. Is this interesting? Right.

Absolutely. Is it silly to right? Yeah, absolutely. Is it silly to compare the transgender situation that's going on with the Olympics with somebody, say, like they're 20 years old and they identify as like a 12-year-old and they go play Pop Warner and they just start wrecking people? I think it's a little similar. Yeah, you're bigger and stronger because i mean that just to me when i look put it that way it sounds like i'm diminishing it i know we talked about this the other day but like i don't know to me it can be like that that crazy of an advantage to be like you know here's this and sema's thinking about going to play running back so what i'm getting at is and sema still has some eligibility for all winners yeah andrew there's a photo i need you um there's a photo i need you

what's the pioneer where you coached oh yeah yeah pioneer fuck you know what's funny dude so when i watched bigger stronger faster and i seen you coaching at pioneer because i didn't go to pioneer i went to woodland high when i first saw that that, I was just like, that's strange. I wonder how many Pioneers there are in the world because it didn't even hit me that you guys were in Woodland. Right, right. And it was funny. I didn't even make the connection until later, but I just thought it was crazy. Yeah, because Pioneer was kind of a new school, right?

Yeah, yeah. That was an interesting thing, being part of that. But we demolished everybody, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. That was an interesting thing being part of that. But we demolished everybody, by the way. Yeah. Because of what you just said. Because we played against other schools that were just starting up as high schools. And we were about a year ahead of most of the teams in our league. Like Inderkum and a couple other schools like that.

And the schools were way smaller so our like uh pioneer high school was on track to be really was to not to be really big was to be pretty big for this area and our players were like a year and a half older usually um the school had you know rather than having know, 300 kids that had like 900 kids, you know, stuff like that. Pull this up, please. Oh, I'll try.

Please keep going. Did you? I sent you the link. Okay. We lost him. There's this photo I saw years ago. I think I saw like last year. Please keep going.

The story. Hold on. I was going to take me a second to pull it up. You'll figure it out. There this uh rugby player her name is hannah mountsey she's six three holy fuck 250 and uh there's this photo of her because she's she's competing rugby against other women and there is this photo i saw as i was learning about her and andrew's gonna pull it up holy shit

just grabbing this giant it looks photoshopped yeah it looks like they're in horror you know oh my god so like i'm not even familiar what sport did you say this was i think this is this is rugby okay this is women's rugby so it's funny i'm just i'm just pretending right now but it looks like that that's like a full-size uh, but in her hands, it's just like the size of a softball. I'm sorry, bro. You're going to tell me that because your test is lower, that's cool? Right. Is that okay?

Jesus Christ. Oh, man. But yeah. Oh, God. That's a deep cut. How did you find this? Uh, this one,

I had to find this photo. Cause like you, you type in Hannah Mouncey on Google, you can't find that photo anymore. So I had to go into articles, but so is that person born a man, born a man, transitioned to being a woman,

did the hormone therapy, but still six, three, two 50. Yeah. Right. Right. Like I'm telling you,

man, it's, it's hard, but that that's right. You can't get rid of that type of advantage. And you know, the interesting thing, we know,

we know men that are fucking beasts that have low testosterone levels. My test is six 50. Yeah. But we know, yeah, we know men that are absolute beasts that have low testosterone levels. This is Hannah Mountie. Yeah.

Looks. Fuck. I don't want to, I can't, no, no, no, no, no, want to i can't no no no no not gonna be mean yeah but no like like there's nothing wrong you know with like if you if you feel as you're as if you're a woman and you transition there's nothing wrong with that but what do you get it's a sport man like she's a beast yeah like physically i'm not saying like physically she's like oh you know so it's

you can't get rid of those intangibles she looks like an avenger okay yeah yeah she looks jacked yeah it brings it just brings up to me it just brings up a lot of questions because like you know then you know what do those people do you know what do you have transgender people do and it's like i don't know i don't know like uh it kind of reminds me of like situations that we have here in the United States that are hard to figure out, uh, hard to figure out what to do with homeless people. You know,

like they try to build a home sometimes for homeless people. And then sometimes it turns out that some of the homeless people don't even care to have a home. Yeah. Like girls, it's like trying to hang on for dear life. Yeah. That's's that's tough. But I mean, like that's some interesting times.

Okay. Yeah, this this this statement in and of itself is going to make people say, oh, you can't say that. But what if what if LeBron James just one day was like, you know what? I'm going to WNBA. I like, I, I, that this is what I identify as.

I've actually felt this way all my life. I'm going to go through therapy and then I'm going to play in the WNBA. Yeah. Because of the times that we're in, would they just allow it? They have to. No, if we're going by these rules,

you can't tell him no. Right. I mean, yeah. If anybody opposes it, you're going to get rules you can't tell him no right i mean yeah if anybody opposes it you're gonna get canceled right right like fortunate and then i don't even know like uh like i i don't i don't have any understanding of the rules so i don't even think that you have to have a surgery no you don't have to have surgery you just have to have hormone um hormone therapy

right for a substantial amount of time to bring your levels down and to it seems pretty black and white to me you know it seems pretty black and white to me but at the same time i think that the time that we're in i think that people are just trying like all right well let's just fucking see what happens uh in this case this person and i think in in many cases so far it doesn't appear that the athletes have been that great yet though right just wait though right in the high school level you seen some already some athletes wrecking right so just wait

there we go yo great to have you on the show today I was just listening to your rap Mark it was awesome cool you found it buried on the internet somewhere that's great I was just listening to your rap, Mark. It was awesome. Oh, awesome. Cool. You found it buried on the internet somewhere. That's great.

Yeah, we like to have fun over here. First thing we got to kind of kick off here is we know your background with kind of the lower carb type of stuff, keto type of stuff. I know keto is like a weird word nowadays, but we also know that you're into some intermittent fasting and things like that. But I think kind of kick things off. We talk quite a bit on this show about calories and whether people should count them or whether they shouldn't. What are some of your thoughts on calories? Because it seems like your approach is maybe a little bit more towards food choices, like just make good food choices, and then we don't really have to worry too much about counting.

But it does look like you're not a denier of calories as well, right? Definitely not a denier of calories. It's more about the way we think about them, though. And trying to think of our bodies as a machine that burn one-to-one with calories all exactly the same way can can get us a long way and we see a lot of people make incredible progress and and get amazing results with that approach but uh the more holistic approach to all of this is definitely useful i know that that you guys talk about intermittent fasting as well, and I see that that is maybe even more important in some ways than food choice.

The choice to engage the under-eating and catabolic part of all this and also have a bit partitioning your macros for post-workout in a certain way. Most people tend to think of this one-size-fits-all, top-down approach to all of this. philosophies, principles, and kind of then you look at your daily practices and see if those align, you can better adapt if you build that compass instead of just following dogma all the time. Because dogma works for a while until it doesn't. Why the cycling of calories? What would be the advantage there? You know, and I've heard you guys talk about this. Trying to just cut calories all in exactly the same way makes me very, very hungry.

It makes a lot of people extremely hungry. And you can torpedo your metabolism to a degree if you take that approach. But once again, if you try to partition your macronutrients first, like focusing on protein and then scaling fat a little bit and then depending on your goals, also scaling those carbs mostly down for a phase, you can get incredible results without the mental work that it takes of trying to just under-eat for weeks and weeks on end because you don't want to lose your libido. You don't want to lose your personality and who you are. You don't want to lose your entire lifestyle. And I think if you approach this more in the looking at this as cycles that your body needs to go from one side to the other to get good results and also to enjoy, you can have a lot more fun with this and also keep your results too. It's not necessarily going to be single-digit body fat all the time

if you're not counting and if you're not extremely focused, but you can stay in a much more reasonable range, I think, if you practice some intermittent fasting and then you focus, for the most part, on whole, real foods. And the name of my podcast is fat burning man but a lot of people assume that i'm super keto and all into it and i actually i i don't like that word i don't like it's not even a real word to begin with and you know if you're going to practice the strict ketogenic approach to things you really need to do your homework and know what you're doing. And the way this, that keto and paleo and a lot of other terms are just slapped onto things.

It allows people to think that they're doing something that they're not because they let the marketers put the work in first. Let me ask you for your, for what you've done over the years, was there a time that you, what, what, at what time did you maybe decide to count calories or do any of that stuff? Or did you ever do that? Or have you just been going off of based off of food principles and eating whole foods? Cause for me personally, I don't count anymore. I've been counted for years.

I just focus on eating whole foods and that kind of dictates my appetite. I'm more in tune with that and I can, I can maintain or gain or lose fairly easily with that sense. But how about you? What was your journey in terms of all of that? I think you need a bit of both, right? You're able to eyeball your food now and have an intuitive approach because you built the skills to be able to look at a bit of rice or a potato or a hunk of meat and be like, I know roughly what the macros are in this, right? I know if I'm checking the box in my micronutrients for the day as well. And it's important to put that

legwork in at the beginning, but the obsessive part of calorie counting isn't where it's at. I think counting macros, it's weird how people always talk about counting calories, but they rarely talk about counting macros in the same way. But once you start spreading it out a little bit and you start, I, okay, so number one, yes, I think you do need to count for a time until you build those skills so that you can eyeball it. And then once you can eyeball it, you can take that more intuitive approach. But also programming is a real thing and you need to stick to your goals too and it's interesting how some people can kind of imagine themselves on stage two months from now and intuitively get there you know almost like magic and other people

are super regimented and need to be really strict with the way that they approach it. And it's important to recognize which personality type you are. It's like, why are you doing this to begin with? Is this to fulfill all of your life goals? Is it just to look good on stage? Are you letting it ruin the rest of your life by obsessing about every little thing? These are real questions that we should ask ourselves all the time, not just once, not just every once in a while, but really ask ourselves, why are we doing this? And if we're making ourselves too miserable, maybe there's a better way of going about it.

What kind of foods do you eat to keep yourself from getting too miserable? I love that question. Well, thankfully, I married very well and my wife, Allison, is very into food also. And so that's kind of how we got our start with making all sorts of fun, real foods on our blog. And when Instagram was still just like pictures of food, that's like how far back we go. Long predates the butt pictures and all the rest of it. You know, it was a deal at the beginning that Alice and my wife gave me. She's just like, I know that you love running marathons and you're like obsessed with eating well and doing all this stuff, but I still need my cookies.

So if we're going to do this together, then we got to find a way to eat cookies. And I was like, oh, yeah, easy sell here. And from then on, we we kind of went into my old family cookbooks. kind of went into my old family cookbooks. We published a few at family reunions over the years from decades before. And I'm just like, oh, you know, I bet we could remake this chicken parm with real food without all the nonsense and vegetable oils and extra nonsense sugars or whatever was in the pies and the cakes and the cookies and the muffins and the brownies. So we've made all permutations of these over the years. In fact, we just had banana pancakes last night where we didn't use traditional flour.

Not that I'm totally against, you know, sourdoughs and fermented grains and things like that. But we really see the desserts as kind of a food group to a degree. I mean, like you still have to be moderate and you can't take it to extreme levels and still get great results, but you can definitely, if you make your desserts at home, you can have so much more fun with it than you can

if you just go and get one of those Costco ice cream cakes for someone's birthday or other garbage from a restaurant or where you're getting fast food. If you make it at home, you know exactly what's in it. You can pump up the protein, throw some collagen in there, some weird supplements if you want to. You can bump up the fiber to make sure that it's lower glycemic if you want to.

And also you can sneak sometimes some veggies in there, which we do, like making muffins, red velvet muffins with beets was a trick I learned from my mom. And you can have a lot of fun with weird foods like that. And I don't think you have to deny yourself of all desserts forever. You know, spiking your blood sugar is great post-workout, so might as well have some fun with that. Does you and your wife have some sort of rule about this hair? Like, is your hair not allowed to, like, look better than hers? Absolutely not, but she's the one who's in charge of it and so whenever i get hate for it i tell them she's in charge and she likes it so take it up with her you look like uh and this is no

diss because i mean it's just funny i grew up in catholic school and they'd have a picture of jesus on the wall thank you jesus jesus and my name is abel as well total headshot oh man so with uh some of the foods that you guys are making and i'm a fan i do that as well like i love bringing you know a meal that i make to like a family function that tastes good and it's not bad for my family. But I mean, when I tell people like the stuff that I do, they're just like, I can't like go to Costco, get a box and then throw it in the microwave like that. That doesn't seem convenient. So like, how do you how do you keep this style of a diet or this, I guess, lifestyle of making your own stuff convenient?

And how can we teach people like, no, like it's actually not that bad. Definitely. You have to prep first. It's all about making your food decisions when you're shopping, not when you're like reaching for the Ben and Jerry's in the moment. It's all about, you know, we've, we lived on the road for a while out of a fifth wheel RV in literally a couple dozen States. And in every single place we were able to source, you know, for the most part, fresh local veg with meat that we could order in bulk, either from like a local ranch or, uh, from somewhere online and it could be delivered.

from somewhere online and it could be delivered. And so when you're looking at how hard this can be to actually do in your own life, you really need to take a couple weeks, maybe a month, and give it a good go and see how much work it actually is. Because it's a lot of work to get fast food, too. It's a lot of work to get junk out of a box cook that up clean up after that it's it's almost the same amount of work when you're dealing with these convenience foods yes throwing it into the microwave will probably be easier but you'll eat two to three times more of it because it has no flavor anymore and boring bland foods or hyped

up foods we just overeat them like crazy. So if you really care about your health and your family's health, then sneaking some real food into your food is, is the whole point, right? Like there's nothing more important than nourishing our bodies and, and making sure that, that we are in our families are healthy. So when it comes to, um, you know, how much work work it is it's more about priorities and if you go shopping and whether it's now you can order almost anything online this is much harder five or ten years ago but you can get things that align with your dietary approach probably even out of box out of a box at this point like I can get and and I've had sent to me, and I'm sure you guys have as well,

keto pizzas, paleo pizzas, cauliflower pizzas, all sorts of good and bad stuff. You might as well have some fun with it, but you don't have to make it. Is your time in the kitchen a chore, or is it time that you enjoy with people you love? If you can reframe this in a different way, even if you just yourself start building some skill in the kitchen, whipping up different things, learning how to make a chicken Parmesan

or your favorite cookies without terrible macros, you can build skills and then learn that once you reach that next plateau of mastery over whatever that craft is, you have a lot more fun and can experiment and create. And it's not the chore you thought it was. But if your vision of food is just like taking boxes and throwing them into the microwave, then I would challenge you to look at food as much more than that. And if you're not eating six, seven times a day or however many times a day people are eating, um, it's going to cut back on the amount of time you have to prep. If you're only eating a couple of times a day, one, two, three times a day, um, each time you cook might not

take that long and cooking up some like eggs or something like that. Uh, I hear a lot of times people like, I don't have time for breakfast or, you know, and then, and then they're hungry or later and then they make bad choices and so on. And I'm like, man, it takes a really short period of time to cook up some eggs. There's really not a lot of excuses. Absolutely. And it's, it's one of those things where if you do have the excuses, you're getting in your own way. It's just obvious at some point, whipping up eggs, I think is a perfect example of that. Let me ask this. What do you think is something like the top or top three or five culprits of food that maybe you'd stay away from? I know you, you mentioned, you mentioned some things about vegetable oils, you mentioned flour. So like what are common things that people buy that maybe they can replace with something

else that you would deem a bit better? Yeah, I would start there with the low quality of most fats, vegetable oils in general, seed oils, industrial oils are the majority of the oils in processed foods, restaurant foods. So as much as you may think that you're not eating vegetable oil per se, you're probably getting the majority of your fat calories from it without realizing it in one way or another. So pay attention to that and try not to eat vegetable oils if you can avoid it. Replace them with the more traditional fats, you know, like coconut, avocado, fats from pasture-raised and healthy animals, that sort of thing. And then the white powders, the fine white powders, whether it be sugar or flour, if something has been processed to that degree that once was food, it's going to very likely spike your blood sugar or just wreak some sort of metabolic havoc if you have too much of it.

for the most part, if you're talking about the flour, you can swap it for ancient grains, for some nut-based grains and flours that you can use in kind of like the paleo-baked goods and that sort of thing. And in general, if you look a few generations back, if you look at the hippy-dippy, you know, farmer's market breads and the health food store breads that have all the weird nuts and grains in there.

And it's like, what is a groat anyway? But this weird old stuff, if you dig around a little bit, you can find some fun there, too. And no, it's not going to taste the same as like a donut from Dunkin' Donuts with all of that sugary glaze and the ridiculous white powder flowers. But you'll find that once you adapt to it, there's much more subtlety in flavor. And so if you get rid of the hyperpalatable foods, then all of a sudden you have a lot more sensitivity in your palate to appreciate the weird bitter flavors that are in certain vegetables and the subtle sweetness that's in strawberries that you had never even noticed before.

And so that's really important for building your palate. So those are the first couple. And then when it comes to protein, I would say number three, protein is just so important and it's underrated by most people. And trying to source your protein as a vegetarian or as a vegan is something I tried to do years ago without success. And focusing on protein quality, not giving up meats was something that really benefited me. And I think if people are looking for results in the gym and you're not focusing on some sort of protein quality, not that it all has to come from animals, it's worth your

time and attention to not just think, oh, I'm taking soy. That's the same as collagen or the same as whey. Like really look into it and look at the source of the protein there. And then for some of the other culprits, I would just throw four and five at pretty much all of the traditional junk foods that we know are bad for us, but eat anyway. And it's more about the daily practices of not doing that or not trying to fill up and eating six or eight slices of pizza. Like you can have one or two and it's not going to be a big deal, even if it's the worst quality stuff. But if you're trying to fill up with carbs, try not to do that and see how much better you do. What are some things that you learned about intermittent fasting over the years? I know that you've been practicing it on and off for quite some time.

Intermittent fasting has been one of the best tools in my personal life. And also with a lot of the people I've worked with, mostly because it takes the hunger away for the most part. For me, I was just hungry all the time until i stopped eating all day and then i realized that that i wasn't hungry until i started eating in this weird reversal in my mind and and that just gave me so much more mojo in other areas like today and tomorrow i think i'm recording like 10 or 12 interviews over over two days because i batch them and uh i don't have i literally don't have time to eat on those days.

But at this point, like being kind of well-practiced in that and conditioned for it, it's something where you really appreciate the focus that you get of not having all your blood and energy draining down to your stomach to deal with whatever the heck you just threw in there. It's a, it's, it's really an energy management thing.

Not that there are rainbows and butterflies in a bucket of gold waiting for you once you fast for 40 days. That's also not how it works. But once again, like I was saying, engaging in those two different modes of under eating or just going into that catabolic state, focusing on the repair mode, the autophagy and allowing your body to just take a break from eating. For me, you know, a lot of people who listen to you are totally swole and really in it for, and I know your, your personal background is just crazy in terms of moving weight. But for me more as a runner, as a background, I like staying strong but light.

And so combining those two different worlds, it's important not to get too top heavy. And I'm someone who can put on fat and I can put on muscle and maybe even a little bit more than I want for my running size. Because then all of a sudden it's bad for the joints down in my knees and lower parts of the body. Because we're up here at 8,000 feet in Colorado and I like to do mostly hill training and so I'm going up into the mountains and up and down and so carrying too much weight and too much muscle is bad and and and I've learned that so trying to control for that is a lot easier when you're not eating, once again, all the time. Because when you're in that catabolic state, sometimes I really need to transition and be like,

I need to remind myself to be hungry to do that refeed afterwards. Like your body almost gets too used to it. And so going back and forth, there's that lifestyle benefit where instead of cooking, you know, and cleaning up after and sourcing three to six to eight meals a day, including one to wake up in the middle of the night and have whatever to make sure you meet your macros, instead of doing all that, no, we sit down and eat one meal a day. I might eat one and a half, start with some broth or maybe some greens or something like that that's low glycemic as my

first meal of the day, usually around 3 or 4 p.m. But really, it's just one sit-down meal. And when you only have one, it's like being out in the woods and going camping for weeks on end with no shower and then hopping into a steamy shower for the first time. It's amazing. You really appreciate your food more and your dinner more when you haven't been stuffing your face all day. your dinner more when you haven't been stuffing your face all day. You know, being a runner, a lot of runners are extremely dependent on like, you know, those whatever goo pack things and exactly. So I'm curious for you when it comes to your diet as an athlete in that sport. What, what do you tend to go towards? Cause like hearing like what you talked about from protocol,

it doesn't seem that you're super high carbohydrate. So maybe what have you noticed when you, cause there must've been a phase where you were very high carbohydrate in doing that. And then do you do that still now or how's that transition? I've definitely experienced both sides of that, the under eating and overeating and then the under eating and overeating of carbs specifically. and overeating, and then the undereating and overeating of carbs specifically. And when I first started doing marathon running, I was definitely much more carb and food dependent. I was eating a lot of calories, the most I've ever eaten in my life. I remember I sat down and I got a bunch of leftover pies. I played an open mic with a bunch of friends and there were too many pies.

And it's like I came back from my run and I ate a whole pie. Then I ate some more. And for as much as like that gave me some sort of feeling like a man feeling, you know, which it does, we have to grow up and kind of get beyond that. And so for a while there, I ran a few marathons and did not refuel afterwards.

I did not eat enough food, but I was still kind of carb-based. And so I got sick for three days, a good week after each of those. And I could tell that something was off. And so what really seemed to work for me was building that gear of intermittent fasting and then trying to get most of the carbs out and save them for post-workout and once i did that then i found that i i had more more energy before i would bonk because i didn't need to suck on goos and i wasn't really fueling mostly with carbs. And, uh, and I was saving them though for post-workout I would refuel with a fair, you know, over a hundred, maybe sometimes 200 grams of carbs, like in the post-workout window. And once I started doing that, then my hormones got

better. My results got better. But when I, when i totally dialed down the carbs and when i dialed down the food too much then my performance certainly took a hit and my my head took a hit too like i didn't spiritually and mentally feel like the same man at all when your libido goes you're like what is this all even for you know it's kind of a weird feeling so if you if you over train or you under eat and you're in that state it's really important to be honest with yourself and see, how do I get out of this? And it's not always going to be 500 grams of carbs straight up, but a lot of times it's about being more honest with where you're at. So once again, if you don't count for too long and you're like, I got this, everything's fine, but it's actually not fine, then you've got to start counting again. Not that you have to count every single calorie,

but you need to start dialing it in again and maybe adapt. When you say your hormones got better, what do you mean? I would say energy. If I'm under-eating or over-training, then the energy goes, I'll sleep more but not feel well-rested. That's a big sign to me. When you're technically putting on paper, you should be really at the top of your game, but you're feeling strung out and something's off,

then that's usually you need a solid refeed or you need to do something a little bit differently there. And for some reason, we all want to deny this because we want to think that we got it right. Yeah. I know exactly what, cause like exactly how you structure that. I think it's, it's kind of similar with me and we talk about this all the time. Like there'll be some days where I'll wake up in the morning. I'm just like, I need, I need a few extra carbs today. Cause I like, I do a lot of jujitsu, which is it's cardio based. Right. i wake up if i feel kind of like there's a there's a lag here i'll have some extra carbs that day um before i and then the next day or two days i'll wake up feeling really good i'm like okay i can taper it down so you can you can structure how that feels over time and you're

gonna get your butt whooped if you don't oh fuck yeah what about uh electrolytes have you messed around with like uh salting your food or any type of electrolyte supplement to make sure that you're not kind of crashing when you're not eating for 20 hours or so? Absolutely, yeah. And when I first started this, I would get a lot of muscle cramps, muscle twitching.

And I think another reason that it kind of, I dialed it in for me is because I just have been supplementing with electrolytes and magnesium and other sorts of cocktails in a bunch of different forms for many years now. And interestingly, before all of this and before I really cleaned up my diet, I would get kidney stones. and even if I do take a fair amount of electrolytes these days, I still don't have a problem despite there being a ton of sodium in there or me taking separately vitamin C and all the other things that are supposed to maybe contribute to that. Really haven't in my case. So for me, I err on the side of getting too many electrolytes,

especially once again living up here. It's a high desert and so it can be like 8% humidity when I go out for a run for a couple hours up to like 10,000 feet or whatever. And so if you run out of, of salt, if you're not, if you're not topped up on magnesium salt and some of those other electrolytes, um, man, you're just, you're going to be in trouble eventually. Uh, but mostly you're not going to feel that great. And so I know that we have mutual friends at Element. I think they do a great job, but there are other forms that I really like too, like deep sea electrolytes. I think trace minerals has a really good one that improves the taste of water. And so I usually use electrolytes to improve the taste of the

water that we throw through a Berkey and it doesn't really taste like anything. And then throwing a little bit of the deep sea electrolytes or sometimes element. We'll also, uh, we'll sprinkle that like yesterday. We just had that over, uh, a bunch of watermelon.

Sometimes we'll put it over like some green apples and it just, it's amazing. It tastes great. The chocolate salt over that man, chocolate salt over what chocolate Chocolate salt on watermelon. You know, the element chocolate salt flavor. Like you just put that a little bit over some,

some fruit that's sliced up and man, that stuff is good. Didn't consider that one. Yellow mustard. Not so much. That doesn't work. I tried it. It doesn't work.

Oh, the mustard. Yeah, there's, I guess there's a thing on Tik TOK, the watermelon, uh, and you put some yellow mustard

on there but i tried it didn't work not very good it's not like horrible but it just i thought it would work better but yeah some people are running raving that it's amazing it didn't work not for me anyway yeah no i know andrew over here he's uh which what did you do andrew you did the habanero yeah the the spicy flavor over um an orange and that that was like i mean come on like spicy salty on orange give me a break that shit's really good yeah i'm curious about this man because um you what what was the show that you were on on abc it's this it's a diverse show what's that called it was abc's response to the biggest loser and they called it my diet is better than yours my dad is better than yours so you you've had and you probably have continuous experience working with individuals that are very large and they're trying to drop

right so with an individual that like they have a lot of body fat and they're trying to get down say fitness isn't their thing nutrition isn't their thing. What are the initial things that you focus on? Because I'm assuming it's not having them track their calories. What are the first steps that you have somebody take to start making that progress? Eat your meat and fill yourself up works really well for the men who I've worked with. Not as well for the women, but the men seem to get that and they're like, oh, this works. Let's do it. And as soon as they start getting results, then it's smooth sailing for the most part.

But on that TV show specifically, I was working with a man named Kurt, and we're still friends to this day, out of Atlanta, Georgia. And he was, off the top of my head, 352 pounds when we started, 52% body fat, and had four pages of medical problems, most of them preventing him from doing any sort of intense or heavy workout. He was already a grandpa at that time, approaching 50. And so I was like, man, what do I do? Because big, heavy lifts would really help here, especially for a guy of his size and pretty strong too.

But without that option, a lot of walking, a lot of just really easy cardio with some simple just strength-based workout without too much weight. He liked to work on cars and lifts. So I'm just like, here's an honest squat. When you get down there, come back up and try to do it as honest as you can. And a couple of deadlifts too. And you know, good form, right? You're not going to hurt your back. Yeah. And so some amount of exercise, but really almost all of the results

came from what he was not eating that he was eating before. And I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with the approach of a protein sparing modified fast, essentially, where you're getting the protein first, but you're dialing down the calories. And over the course of a few weeks, once your body kind of builds that metabolic machinery to burn fat, then you find that you can tend to get the fat off the body and do a pretty solid recomp in a caloric deficit over the course of those weeks as long as you keep that protein high and you don't dial that down too much. And so for Kurt, man, that just worked great. And we were still enjoying, you know, we would make him pumpkin pie and brownies. We had a whole dessert party, but we were making it all ourselves, you know, like we were making it with real food. And so he was eating like a pretty

good spectrum of foods under eating for his caloric needs for sure in a caloric deficit. But over the course of 14 weeks, he lost 87 pounds. And even better than that, he went rock climbing for the first time in his life. He was above the age or excuse me, he was above the weight threshold to do that before. And so like, as soon as he dropped below that, he's just like, I want to go do this. And it was, that is the thing that really gets me more than all of the data and the metabolic health and, and that stuff is, you know, the fact that he looked like 15 years younger and could go vertical again,

even though he, and play with his grandkids, even though he thought that he would kind of just be sitting there dying slowly for the rest of his life. Like being able to get that back is something that a lot of people have just kind of let go or given up. And, uh, when you of let go or given up. And, uh, when you see someone who's given up, come back, there's just nothing like it makes me want to tear up because I just care about that guy so much.

And, and what some of these people have, have achieved is getting their life back when you really look at it. What, uh, what do you have done if, uh, that strategy didn't work? Like, let's just say that he really struggled with it. Um, let's say that he couldn't work? Like, let's just say that he really struggled with it. Let's say that he couldn't walk, his feet hurt and so on. If it wasn't something that was working out well for him, what strategy would you then maybe shift to? You know, it's interesting.

After the TV show, there were a bunch of like write ups in the media and stuff. And there's just like, man named Tommy Whitaker loses 100 pounds with no exercise. And I'm like, what? Someone sends this to me and I read closer and it's like, he watched the TV show, followed my thing and lost 100 pounds with no exercise. And he's just like, yeah. And the article, I just, I don't like exercise. I'm never going to do it. But I figured might as well try the nutrition thing.

And I lost 100 pounds in a year. I later on had him on my show and talked to him about that. But once again, there are multiple ways of going about this. And I would have preferred, honestly, if he hadn't had, you know, Kurt was in a head-on collision and had spine damage that would, he would have for the rest of his life. But I would have loved to get some heavy squats, some heavy deadlifts, some sprints, and maybe, you know, just a handful of other things in there for like a really gnarly, awesome recomp of his body. But not everyone needs that. Not everyone has that, the energy or the goals that line up with that approach. But for some people, that's what I would have done differently if it were, say, you know, a woman or a female body

that weren't responding to that same sort of approach. Sometimes you have to try something different. You know, another team on the show did have good results in terms of losing body weight, but not as good of results in terms of losing body fat by just dialing down the calories and running a lot. She was younger in her, I think, about 30 years old and kind of took that approach of running a lot, I think about 30 years old and kind of took that approach of running a lot, eating a very small amount, very light, you know, kind of the chicken and broccoli approach. And you can get great results at least temporarily that way, too. And I think it's important to recognize that different people will respond in different ways and enjoy it more or less with these different approaches. more or less with these different approaches. And I've worked with several people who got down to single digit body fat,

one of them down to like 3.5% body fat. And he's done it in multiple ways. Some of them with just the counting macros, dialing them all down and others with the more fat burning keto approach where you're just really dialing the carbs down and you're focusing more on proteins and fats as the source of your fuel. And there are tons of different ways of doing this.

You know, I'm curious, cause you mentioned like the, the, the two different approaches, like the approach that you said works a lot for men, a lot of men you work with just eat a lot of protein, right. And they get behind that. So what have you noticed? Um, like, what have you noticed in the trend with the women that you work with like i'm guessing some of them are down for that but the ones that are like i don't want to eat that much meat um how do you kind of like what what what shift do you make there well there's nothing wrong with eating veggies either yeah you know and when you have a lot more muscle just because of the way that that men are built in their size, you can get away with doing different things.

You have less wiggle room when you're a smaller size and you have fewer choices that you can make and especially when it comes to coloring outside the lines. If you know, I don't want to keep talking about calories, but if you only have 1500 calories to kind of maintain and eat compared to someone who's, you know, got to eat 3000 calories, you really do have to think about it differently. And so for, uh, a lot of women focusing on those, those fresh greens, the smoothies, the eating smaller meals more often can be a great approach that, um, that's actually what works a little bit better for my, for my wife where, excuse me, she'll start eating usually

around noon when I'm eating more at like three or four and she'll be eating smaller meals and I'll be eating giant ones for the most part and also getting away with different things. But she's been able to maintain really quite well with an approach that's just a less extreme version of what I do is what it seems like for the most part. But also I'm thinking of my mom now who's also a holistic nurse practitioner. And one of the things that she does definitely more than I do is focus on those greens. And one of the tricks there is making sure that you're not going too heavy on the fats when you are eating those salads. So for a lot of women and men, but we're talking about women here, if you're eating a salad and you want it to be healthy and you're hearing that avocado is healthy and that nuts, macadia nuts are healthy and that you know olive oil and coconut oil and all these other things are really healthy and you're just dumping in these hemp seeds you're dumping all this stuff onto your

salads you could be just polishing off a day's worth of calories in that one you know otherwise healthy salad but because it has all of these nuts and fats and rich foods on it, you're actually not serving your goals by eating that way. So being able to look really closely at what you're doing is more important when you have fewer calories to eat to maintain. What do you like in terms of lifting with your clients? Definitely the boring old squats, deadlifts, um, sprints, and also mobility in general.

And one thing that I, so breath work definitely works and is extremely powerful in certain ways, but I don't like doing it. And so the way that, that I do it is, uh, by practicing Qigong exercises, kind of like Tai Chi,

where it's built into the exercise for five or 10 minutes in the morning. I'm doing breath holds and doing other things to manipulate the breath. And so I think looking at the breath as part of conditioning is extremely important, overlooked a lot of the time, impossible to overlook when you live at elevation. So I've definitely gotten a lot more appreciation for it. Nose breathing, making sure you're regulating your breath. This is so important for even big lifts and sprints and,

and, and the big expenditures of energy. So, uh, looking at things that way, I think is, is pretty useful. Where do you want to go next?

I'm actually curious about the sprint thing, man, because like sprinting, you know, if, if you played a sport when you were younger, sprinting, you know how to sprint, right? But if you haven't sprinted in a long time, you've never really sprinted, then moving with that type of propulsion and explosion, for some people it's very unfamiliar,

and some people pull a hamstring or something. So for you, for someone who's coming into this and let's say they've never done sprints before, they've really never done stuff like before. How do you progress people into being able to sprint? That is such a great question because it's a completely different situation for an ex athlete or someone who's, who's been trained up before and gone through these exercises compared to someone who's done almost none of that. But, you know, the real circumstances where people have

never sprinted before, thankfully, there aren't that many people who just like literally never built the ability to do those things. So what's more common though, and, and almost always the case is you're carrying an extra 20, 30 pounds, a hundred pounds. And so you're not moving mechanically in the same way. And so that's, you know, all of a sudden you blow a knee or, or you tear something because you're not dealing with the same machine that you were before. It's not moving in the same way. So yeah, definitely to your point, I think you have to ease in to all of the exercises that you're doing. And a lot of people try to jump into the perfect exercise and, you know, have a lot of friends who have had great results with CrossFit and that sort of approach. But there's something to be said for starting small and then progressing.

And so for most people, I have them start with no weight. Just get down and do ass to the grass and honest squat. And get down, bend over, touch your toes. Then you can do a deadlift. Get the mechanics there first. And also understand that if you are carrying extra weight, you're going to move differently and you have to make sure you're not compensating

in a totally destructive way. Because my number one goal with training is to not get injured. And I've broken my foot before. I had basically had a whole joint of my thumb replaced on my right hand, my right hand. And it's just like, don't get injured. It's not worth it. Like, don't get injured. It's not worth it. So starting small, leaving your ego somewhere else and just going through the motions literally is going to be the best for most people who have never done that before or haven't done it in a long time.

And then these movements aren't that complicated. Like every child can do them. And if you can't bend that way right now, then know that you can progress. Like you can move better. You can become more flexible over time. Even if you are older, like these are things, these are skills you can build and you can manipulate your body over time. Most of us want quick results. We think that everything is one way and everything is now.

us want quick results. We think that everything is one way and everything is now. But when you start to appreciate the little changes that you make and just putting in a couple of minutes, few times a week, then you let the weeks add up. All of a sudden you can be a different person over the course of a few months. And then also you could sprint on maybe some cardio equipment or something like that, right? And just get used to it that way. Or maybe if you haven't even like ran a long time, maybe you work on walking uphill for a little while, build up the hamstrings. Just take your time with it, right? I would add also, try it barefoot.

Try almost all of these exercises barefoot or without shoe support. Make sure that you're safe, obviously, doing this. But as you're building these movements, make sure that you're safe, obviously, doing this. But as you're building these movements, make sure that you're building balance in the right places and not relying on too much external gear that's going to drive you in the wrong direction. There's gear, obviously, as you guys know, that will help build your form, and that's what you want to focus on. I like a lot of what you're saying because it sounds like it's overall. It's like a way to manage overall life stresses.

You know, having dessert as part of the food category kind of deflects you having to think about, you know, desserts that we see on TV. You know, you see commercials for peanut butter cups and just like whatever the hell else is out there. And if you're already having some of this stuff introduced into your day-to-day, then you don't feel like you're without. And then even you mentioning breathing, we haven't heard a lot of people talk that much about breathing. We've had a breathing expert or two come on the show. But aside from that, we haven't really heard people talk about that that much. But the breathing that you do in the morning, I'm sure, probably allows you to deal with whatever stresses come from the day. Definitely.

And when you measure heart rate variability and blood sugar, things like that, what was really interesting to me is I could see when I got pissed off or stressed better than I could see when I ate on certain days. Oh, shit. Really? As far as my blood sugar spiking to the moon when like something happened. I checked my Google calendar. I'm like, I didn't eat. I didn't work out here. Like, what happened? Oh, I got pissed.

And so it's really important to recognize that our physiology is always working and always doing stuff. We don't always know what the inputs are that are hijacking us. That's a huge – But tracking helps. I mean, like being able to wear a CGM or a ring or something else that tracks HRV can be really useful for being honest with yourself in terms of, yes, those days when I do those breathing exercises and the gentle movements and mobility in the morning, I definitely don't get those same sort of blood sugar spikes from something going sideways that day. It's really interesting to me. So let me ask you this, man. When did you start really focusing on your breathing,

nasal breathing, et cetera? Because I started paying attention to that in like 17. It's made a very big difference for me, massive. But what change did you notice for yourself? And then how uh how do you get your clients on board for that type of stuff okay yeah it's like it's like meditation some people just do it and other people really don't and breathing is one of those things where it's too obvious to work why would i put any any effort into this? So any, for me,

it was the magic was, although I did try some of the crazy yoga breathing and some early Wim Hof stuff years ago and, and a few other exercises that made me really dizzy and feel cool or weird or something. I'm just like, I don't know if I want to wake up and do this every day. There are only, there are only so many things you can wake up and do, which is important to recognize, too. A lot of these people who are into that whole biohacking field, they're just like, wake up, do a cold shower, and do the red light, and do the, and then you do like 25 different things. We don't have to do all of those every single day, but breathing is probably the most accessible thing that all of us can do that will get us a ton of benefits that all these fancy gadgets, yeah, they can get some really cool results too, but breathing is where it's at. So it was in learning some of those gentle movements for Tai Chi and Qi Gong, I met a few

people who were practitioners in that field and they just showed me some things. And I'm just like, is this, for the first few weeks, I'm like, is this doing anything like i can't tell if this is doing anything i know it takes me 10 minutes but it doesn't feel like anything but then over the course of time um i realized that even when i was playing music in a high pressure situation i had my breath when i wouldn't have before. Right. Like after a heavy sprint, I felt like, whereas I would have been too much in my head or too much in my body before, I now had some separation or something. I now had more like integration with the whole system. It sounds a little woo, a little squishy, but when you get control of your breath, and I think that's for a

lot of people, most of the benefits of meditation are really coming from that breath control and the dialing down of your physiology. Once you start to appreciate breathing through your nose and breathing less often and holding your breath, you're not just like chewing through air all day. You're not huffing through your mouth all day. And the mouth breathers that really starts to show up when you challenge yourself and you start to perform athletically or for me with music. And I grew up playing woodwinds and I've been a singer my whole life. And then I moved up to 8,000 feet. And so it became a huge problem. And you only get so much breath throughout the sentence or throughout like the singing line.

And so being able to have that practice of doing the breath holds most morning, not every single morning, but most mornings I'll be doing this. And it improved my capacity for running, for singing, for playing music at elevation, all sorts of other just hidden benefits. And then the actual movements aligned with going like this and making sure you're looking at a certain part of your body and that everything's aligned, the focus that that takes, it's a perfect example of something that seems like it's doing nothing, but over time you find that your dexterity, your focus, your attention is on point. And that part of training is really underappreciated, but I can say that I really haven't gotten a serious injury in years. And I think that's one of the biggest reasons because I got injured all the time before I started doing these exercises in the morning with the breathing and the movement. And I really haven't been injured since. And I think that's, that's a big input that might not get enough credit. How do we help people that might

not have a good idea on where to start when it comes to nutrition? I think you're on your website, you have some really helpful things where people can even like shop on your, on your website and like learn more about like what they should be eating specifically. Yeah. You're never really going to go wrong eating a balanced diet. I'm just going to say that boring piece of advice right there. Generally speaking, the Mediterranean approach, the kind of like real food,

paleo ancestral health, you can throw all sorts of different words at it if you want to, but looking at the way our grandparents and great grandparents ate, not being afraid of traditional fats and really valuing those as a source of most of the calories to improve the palatability of other foods. It's a great skill to learn how to use bacon to make your veggies taste good. great like skill to learn how to use bacon to make your veggies taste good and we don't have to go you know i've had people on my podcast who literally ate bacon for 30 days straight i've had other people who ate nothing but greens for 30 days straight and you know what you can get

great results doing all sorts of crazy stuff but you might as well just try to get a bit of common sense back to yourself under your own volition, under your own control. I think most of us have given up all of our agency to the internet to tell us what to do to different dogmatic plans or marketing. And it's really dangerous. So trying to build your own internal compass of, all right, I'm going to get my greens in today. I'm not going to overdo it on the fruit, but I'll have some because it's in season. I'm going to make sure that I get a fair amount of protein. And if I can't get it from meat today, then I'll make sure that I'll bump it up from the veggie sources. And then, you know, I'll have a little bit of cake too, but I'm not going to eat the whole pie.

I like what you're saying there because I think a lot of, if you were to ask a 10-year-old kid what they think they should eat, obviously they're going to joke around. They're going to say ice cream and pizza, but I think they actually really know, and I think that we actually really know. I think we do. I think we know what's good for us, and there's

a couple things that might be gray area like milk or something like that that you might over-consume because it does taste good. It has fat and carbohydrates in it. So you might, you know, overdo it on certain things. And then there's kind of like fake health. Like there's things that are, you know, whole grain cereals and things like that. So there's some stuff in this weird little gray area.

But for the most part, I think if you were to ask a kid, they'd probably say vegetables, fruit. They might not know the value of protein and how much protein you should eat or something like that. But in general, they're going to probably know a decent idea or have a decent idea towards what would be healthy. Yeah. I do think it's important to emphasize the meat part. That's what I've been. I've been like going on podcasts and just being like, eat more meat just because we're getting too much of the other side of that. And I think people are really losing the overall message and losing the ability to think in general. So I'm trying to just go and emphasize the other side a little bit just to make sure that, you know, looking also at feeding the world, you can't skip protein. That's so important and sourcing it from veggies is really difficult and expensive.

So we need to be honest about all this. How do you get your protein in with only one meal a day? You know, pretty simply, I'm a big fan of ruminant animals more than anything. We've been landlocked in Colorado for too long now. So we actually don't eat that much fish, not even that much poultry. Most of it comes from we order our meats in bulk from local ranches or online, and we eat a lot of lamb, beef, eggs, of course, a little bit of chicken, sometimes fish. But my wife doesn't even like fish that much either. So I know it gets a lot of raving reviews in the health food community. I think if you're on the seacoast, that's a great plan.

But red meat is actually a great source of so many nutrients. And also, don't shortchange the eating nose to tail piece. If you want to save money and get a lot of value to your dollar, then going to a ranch or an online source and getting some liver and getting maybe some ground beef that has organ meats as part of that grind, you know, like 80, 20 mix, something like that. Extremely healthful, really good bang for the buck. And a lot of people right now are trying to fill up on too many convenience foods, too many carbs. And if you try to fill up on carbs, once again, you're just going to be overeating. So if you, if you spackle the gaps in your

nutrition with a few strategic micronutrients, and then you make sure you hit your, your protein goals pretty much every day, you're going to be doing just fine. And you'll find that you don't have that crazy hunger to overeat that you would get if you're just like chowing down on the oats and the, the, you know, cereals and the bre chowing down on the oats and the the you know cereals and the breads and all the rest of that throughout the day if somebody is uh they're currently overweight and i'm just maybe i'm speaking out of uh at a turn here with this statement but if somebody's overweight they might be um kind of like far, too far over the edge, we'll say. And they're thinking, I'm probably never going to lose X amount of weight.

So I'm just going to go ahead and continue eating this comfort food or like you said, loading up on carbs and overeating. Other than weight though, because if they're not concerned about losing weight, even though they should be, what, is there like-opening side effect to overeating that you can kind of shock somebody with? And I'm not saying like, oh, you're going to, you know, your life will end early because that might be too far out of the picture. But, you know, we had talked about stress earlier. Some of the trackers that you were talking about, you can see how like the spike in insulin and that sort of thing. So is there another health marker where over consuming some of these processed foods might like actually be eyeopening to somebody to like, Hey, maybe I

actually should start paying attention. Yeah. That's, that's such a great question because I always wonder what is it that, that it takes to kind of bring people over to the other side to realize that this is worth it. For a lot of people, it's almost dying. For a lot of people, it's just like some serious health scare. I think the stat is that people have to die nearly three times. Fuck. Three times. Legitimately, I think that's the stat, man.

And I think one of the problems is, you know, what's been normalized all around us. I remember even when I was in my early 20s, just graduated from college, and I had gained 30 pounds for the first time in my life and was carrying all this extra weight and not really athletic like I always had been before that. But you know what? Looking at everyone else I was working with, I was doing pretty good. Like, I was doing a lot better than most of the other people who were desk jockeying there and looking around, you know, 70, 80, 90% of people are overweight or obese, depending on where you're at. And so we have to acknowledge that what has been normalized is not normal.

Historically speaking, it's not normal to our physiology and we need to be and act and have habits that are abnormal in order to, you know, have some sort of semblance of health anymore. So for those people who are just kind of stuck, for the most part, in my experience, it's been because they have given up. It's like they've tried a lot of things before. They didn't work and they shot themselves up with HCG and they tried eating 400 calories a day and they did the cabbage soup diet and all this stuff. And they just kind of gave up because they realized that it was not worth it. But most of them haven't really approached this kind of nutrition, which now really protein first is my message this year anyway.

It seems like most people are too afraid of red meat. Most people are too afraid of dairy and animal foods because they're supposed to be the villain now, right? And so we can't, there can't possibly be any part of the solution there, I think, is where a lot of people are at there. And so they might as well feel good eating their vegan ice cream, being like, this is good for sustainability. But that is some source of or some circumstance of self-denial to some degree. And it does take taking that leap in worldview saying, oh, maybe all those fitness bunnies aren't just doing it for vanity. Maybe there is some sort of health aspect to this. Maybe there is some sort of energy boost that you get. And when you see your friends around, you catch the health bug and then start

a whole business and start thriving. It's like, how many other people around you do you see doing that and getting healthier in the process? So it does take some sort of real focus and prioritizing it. But for anyone who's kind of stuck and settling for less energy than they deserve, and it seems like you're aging too fast. I remember I felt like I was in my forties, in my early twenties, and I had a fat face. I was inflamed and my doctor had me on a half dozen different prescription medications that I didn't need. So if you're there, just know that there's a way better place if you're willing to put in the work and do a little bit every day. And as long as you're kind of on that trajectory of progression and progress, you're going

to be doing okay and you're going to have to adapt and there are going to be a lot of curveballs, but it's definitely worth it to try to turn into a lifelong health nut. Cause look at it out there. What are the alternatives? Last, well, not last, but quick question.

So the, the wild diet, why, why was it named wild? Just curious. Yeah. So wild is a word that's, that's special to me because it hasn't so much been co-opted by all the marketers.

And it just felt to me like it probably wouldn't. Whereas paleo, keto, Atkins, vegan, all these have been taken advantage of by all these people who honestly probably don't even know what the actual dogma is of any of these diets. And they don't care because they're trying to sell products. They're trying to move inventory. They're trying to do all this stuff and when the word wild it's just too generic um to be taken advantage of like that and the word natural was already destroyed although it's kind of coming back and getting its meaning back again but but the word wild should mean from the natural world and unadulterated by man and machine but also it has a sense of counterculture and just kind of going against the grain of doing things differently and

i think that that connotation is also extremely important these days because like i said you have to be the weird one if you want to get good results now and that comes with a lot of gnarly stuff with people who are you know calling you names are coming at you because you're trying to improve yourself while everyone around you is just spiraling into the you know just spiraling down and it's important to know that you're not alone though that there are a dedicated crew of listeners of this show and mine and other people out there who are dedicated to self-improvement and a life of service, many of them as well.

And it's really important to know that it doesn't suck. It's pretty awesome to have a lot of energy, to eat well, to eat the foods that you want, to be strong and to be able to, I see it in this world that we're facing now. Fitness is a survival skill. This isn't about vanity. This isn't about something that's just like, oh, I'm going to look good on stage. Like, look around us. It is a shit storm out there. And we need to have our own lives and bodies together. We need to make sure that we are the responsible ones who are ready when things go sideways, because you're not well slept and perfectly fueled up when things go wrong in your life. It's you're underslept, things go sideways and you need to act.

And so I think that's why we really train. And I think that's a huge motivator for me to get up and do it every day. And if you're out there just kind of like on the couch eating ice cream, ice cream right now, and you want to survive and you want to be a part of the solution for yourself and your family out there it's your responsibility to get your health in order we uh know you got a split but you think you could take us out with one of those guitars or uh the keyboard there for a second i'm not really set up to play it but if you want i could definitely send you like a clip of some you could even make a request maybe we could see oh that'd be sick although i do not rap i'll rip on you for having but yeah and i i had to ask because i mean obviously you're a musician you're a singer so your voice just being really good is part of it but what microphone are

you using because i'm freaking blown away at how good this sounds just over zoom yeah and like i've heard your show and like i'm like damn this guy has it dialed it dialed in but like the fact that you sound this good right now over zoom is it's fucking blowing my mind so i'm curious what your setup is um it's uh so i have an electro voice microphone i think it's an re27 running into a universe universal audio apollo and then the real trick, though, is going deep into your Zoom settings and finding the settings that allow you to turn on original sound so that it's not over-compressing it and doing all this nonsense. So it's the whole signal chain, man.

I appreciate the compliment. Thank you so much. Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. Just help us change the game right now. Yeah. Oh, my God. Where can people find out more about you? Thanks so much for having me,

you guys. This is the best place to find me is at fat burning man.com. That's also the name of the podcast, fat burning man. And if you want to check out the music or the virtual reality tours or my other more artsy fartsy projects, it's able James.com,'s abeljames.com. A-B-E-L James.com.

Awesome. Have a great rest of your day. Catch you later. Thanks so much for having me, man. Thank you. That was good. Yeah, good stuff, man. Great, great information.

I liked what he said about being the weird one. You got to be the weird person, which hopefully we get less weird. Hopefully other people join us in our weirdness and then we don't seem weird anymore. Becomes normal. Yeah. Or accepted at least. A lot of the stuff we talk about becomes normal.

Yeah. Right? I love what he said. So, Mark, you were mentioning somebody, kind of lectured somebody about the true cost of owning a TV. And all it, I mean, Mark, you should definitely explain that here. But I think what he's talking about with like the fact that like fast food is still like, it still takes a lot of work. I think when you look at it just from like a straight one-to-one perspective, like, okay,

am I going to take the time to cook a meal or am I just going to go through the drive-thru? It's like, okay, well, that meal might cost X amount of money. It might cost X amount of time. But like when you go through the drive-thru, like you're actually, the work that you spend at your job, you're using that to pay for, you know, the food. So it's like like it's actually time

is costing more you know in the long run if you look at it that way so i think looking at it just like right here it's like yeah it might actually be more convenient it might be faster to go through the drive-thru but really what is it costing and i'm not even talking about health i'm just saying like if people want to save time and money like well shit man you're giving a lot of time and money to fast food because you are literally giving away your time and money that you've earned throughout the week but we don't have the the ability to kind of look at the long game like that it's costing you in my opinion one of the worst things ever and that's neglect you know neglect is the opposite of love, not necessarily hate.

And I think when you neglect your nutrition, you neglect your diet, you neglect your health, there will be a big price to pay. And unfortunately, a lot of people see that in the form of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and dementia, Alzheimer's. I mean, there's just the stats are overwhelming and really getting Alzheimer's. I mean, there's just, the stats are overwhelming and really getting overrun. And it's great to be part of the fitness community and to try to interject something into the whole scheme of things. But we're getting our asses kicked.

You know, we're losing. And we need more people to be weird. We need more people to start to make just healthier choices. You don't really necessarily, I mean, the truth of it is you don't necessarily need to be on a diet. However, we have gotten to a point where you do need to be on a diet because there's many people have already gotten sick. Many people have already gotten behind. Many people are already gotten sick. Many people have already gotten behind. Many people are already on medications. And so therefore they do need a nutritional intervention.

But realistically, if you start young, then you can avoid ever really feeling like you're on a diet by eating the way that Abel James just mentioned today on our show, eating whole foods, fruits, vegetables, getting in your protein, all those things. A lot of the things taste great. They taste delicious. They are extremely nutritious, and they go a long way.

We will most likely never be to a point where you're going to be able to pay a lesser amount for low-calorie, high-quality food. That's just not where we're at. We do the reverse. We pay a cheap, inexpensive amount for calorie-dense food that is low and poor quality, which doesn't even really necessarily fill you up. You roll through McDonald's, you order one, know, one, two or three or whatever number you pick. Even if you get a larger size of that, it's not going to fill you up for that long.

And you just, you just crushed a lot of calories. You might've ate 60, 70 grams of fat. You might've had along with the 60, 70 grams of fat, you may have had 60 or 70 grams of sugar. All, you know, all on top of that, you didn't probably eat that much protein. You maybe got out, you know, maybe you got, what, 25 grams of protein or something like that, if you're lucky. That's a really inadequate, really inefficient way of eating that's going to lead to you being hungry or later on and you kind of continuing to overeat day in, day out and just kind of throw your body for a loop. Anyone that's listening to this that's just looking to make a change, just maybe see if you can do it, you know, one, see if you can do it one meal at a time, you know, see if you can say,

all right, well, tonight for dinner dinner i'm just going to have steak and just eat just steak and then maybe the next day maybe try to you know make some other improvement throw in a couple vegetables here and there or something you know just small incremental progress over time we know many people that have simply gotten rid of uh some of the sugary liquid stuff that they drink every day. And they've lost weight, been healthier, felt better, energy's better, all kinds of stuff improved just from like that one change. So if you ever feel overwhelmed about any of it,

just do your best to try to make a change. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one thing is, is that there is a light at the end of the tunnel because when you get in shape, when you're able to gain more muscle, when, when you get there, right? Not that you should get away with things and you should eat bad, but if you do choose to do that,

it won't hit you as bad. Like we, there was an episode that we said money, muscle equals money because like it, like real talk. Like when you, when you have that, you're able to burn

through more you're able to enjoy i should have been wearing it what hey now is that a shirt what's this muscle is muscle is literally money peeps so like did you just print that just now i literally just did it right now when he said that i'm like i know where he's going with it and i i got a sharpie and i wrote it skills quick man looks printed yeah looks that way it's 3d true on but yeah guys so i mean even the difference he mentioned between men and women you know he tells guys like hey just you know eat meat and they tend to lose weight well they tend to lose weight because they have a higher metabolic rate. They burn men typically burn more calories than women because men are larger. Men are usually taller. Men normally have more muscle mass. Men normally, in a lot of cases, weigh more. And because they weigh more, have more muscle mass, and because

they're taller, those are all things help it to increase their metabolic rate because they have more of a body to kind of lug around every day and for the women out there that shouldn't be discouraging that should be encouraging knowing that if you currently aren't working on lifting some weights lifting some weights can really do a lot for you because the more muscle mass that you have, the higher your metabolic rate will be eating some protein to staying on that protein and try to stimulate your, your muscles every day, your protein in your body and try to consume protein every day. And you're heading in a good direction already.

But you know what I found really cool. I'm I'm, I was really psyched when I heard him talk about how he handles his, um, his nutrition around his sport, which is running miles and miles, right? He handles it the same way. It's like you wake up, you're feeling kind of lethargic, eat a little extra carbs. I'll eat like 150, 200 on a certain day. Wake up feeling

great, don't need as many. Carbs are legitimately just like an extra fuel source. If the amount of fats I'm eating, the amount of protein isn't doing it, carbs give me that little jolt and I can feel when I need more. I can feel when I'm good. So that's a cool way to look at it. I love it. Andrew, want to take us on out of here, buddy? I will.

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is very powerful uh drink lmnt.com slash power project please make sure you're following the podcast at mark bell's power project on instagram at mb power project on tiktok and twitter my instagram twitter is at i am andrew z and tiktok at the andrew z and sema what up and it's sema indian on instagram youtube and it's in a y Yang on TikTok and Twitter, Mark. I really liked that cowboy hat. Yo, there's so many more that y'all just didn't see.

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I'm at Mark Smelly Bell everywhere. Strength is never weak. This week, this is never strength. Catch you guys later.