Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 583 - Astrid Naranjo Helps Us Understand Nutrition For Women

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Astrid Naranjo is a Clinician Dietitian & Nutritionist and has a Master's Degree in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice from Bond University (Australia), along with a Bachelor's Degree in Nutrition and Dietetics from the Central University of Venezuela. For more information on Astrid, you can follow her via the following channels below: @antidiet_dietitian @tucoach.nutricional Youtube channel https://youtube.com/channel/UCOdRl9pMjB4KkoW-0kPQpQA All her Links: http://tiny.cc/astridnarRD Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT15 for 15% off ALL LABS! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Eat Rite Foods: http://eatritefoods.com/ Use code "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 $150 Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb 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 ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

have you done the from frozen thing who's done the from frozen thing oh yeah i haven't done it in a while though one of y'all describe it it's like i cook i this is the only way i like cooking the ribeyes now after mckayla mentioned it i'm like let me do that more and it's like crispy yeah yeah you get the out the you get the fat kind of crispy yeah man it's like salty and like kind of uh charred and just all lumped together with the fat and the protein together. So good. It's like bite into like a potato chip or something. Delicious.

It really is. And let me give you all the formula because it's super simple because people are like, I actually posted what I ate one night because y'all told me to. So it's super simple. Like on my air fryer, literally, I just click steak and it has it at 360 for 12 minutes. Right. Okay. So I just put it in there has it at 360 for 12 minutes. Right. Okay. So I just put it in there for like 25 minutes and it ends up perfect. It's like medium rare to rare to medium rare and boom, chaka.

We're good to go. It's just done deal. Done deal. The people at, uh, the, the ninja people, right. They made you a special, uh, a special thing that has the steak button. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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it's, it's called a stake button wealth. Get that old stake button. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, remember that wrestling game when you would like hit Yokozuna and like the fish would fly out of them. Remember that one yeah yeah you punch him yeah and it big

this might be this might this may be racist i was just thinking this sounds like it's problematic but it was a uh old wwf game that was that was amazing remember that yeah that had doink the clown in it i'm just thinking in some of the video games you know also like uh in some of the games where like ghost and goblins you your guy would pick up like a big old like uh impossibly right yeah yeah it was like a thing it was like uh it was always like a like a turkey a turkey or it was like a t-bone yeah like a had big old bone going through it or whatever i gotta tell y'all something because i i saw this the other day i was like oh god damn that's actually real real andrew tell people how to get piemontese yeah yeah thank you yeah just tell people yeah it looks like asher is ready to go anyways okay cool anyway uh yeah so real quick last night um i had three ribeyes on

the air fryer one of them was still frozen because stephanie thought i wanted a leaner cut i'm like nah let's get a let's get a little bit thicker like fattier cut so i just pulled it out and put it right in and i was so upset because like i laid them out and then stephanie took the one that was frozen so she got the extra crunchy one she got the you know rare-ish one so she got the better one but whatever you know i'll try it again tonight so anyways that's what we had last night and of course everybody loved it and if you guys want to enjoy it as well please head over to piedmontese.com that's p-i-e-d-m-o-n-t-e-s-e.com at checkout enter promo code power project for 25 off your order and if your order is a hundred and fifty dollars

or more you get free two-day shipping uh really just the absolute best best beef on the planet i know when you guys look at the nutritional facts you might think it's going to taste like a shoe trust me it's the most tender beef you're ever going to have full of flavor and um just extremely high in protein can't recommend it enough links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes tell us your story real quick yeah okay andrew can you pull up n64 donkey kong country now this is the thing that i messed up with that's pretty real i like i saw this video this guy explained i'm like damn i never realized that when i played it but in the first donkey kong game in n64 um donkey kong like it's a bunch of monkeys right donkey kong it's a bunch of monkeys right it's donkey kong it's donkey kong right but when you look at like the city where they're all in it's like it you know they're they're monkeys on the side

they're playing like boom boxes and shit right there's monkeys that have braids it's like hip hip-hop monkeys hip-hop monkeys in the like and it's just like when i paid attention i'm like damn the only monkey nintendo had they kind of made them urban hip-hop monkeys i was like oh this is kind of problematic i understand it's not like the monkey was an overalls i was like oh shit and it's just funny because you mentioned the yokozuna fish thing i'm like hmm games used to really kind of be kind of fun but it was a fun game. Mario and Luigi in overalls. Yeah, you got them in overalls.

Even in like Yoshi's Island, where they're like on an island, right? It's a nice island or whatever. But when you go into this game, there is like a ghetto. Who's your favorite character, by the way? In Smash Bros. or what? All Nintendo characters? Yeah, Nintendo. It's a tough choice man that is there's

a lot uh i would princess peach she's pretty cute no no not princess peach she's annoying she's too much too needy fox yeah yeah yeah yeah fox is like star fox is dope he's really dope yeah yeah that's a tough one for me actually i can't even what about wario he's pretty dope or waluigi i was just gonna say waluigi's really fun right right the crazy laugh yeah wild man oh man games games were fun games still are fun but seeing stuff like that just makes me laugh i'm like we used to just not care and it's it was great those kind of games were a lot of fun they were dude impossibly hard too like the older games just because the controller was like well there's that but also like you know they made them a challenge these days if a game's too challenging like people get upset at it well

like the souls games are like really really hard the. The new remake one. Now they talk about gamer rage, but it just used to be like people just breaking their controllers. They didn't have a name for it back in the day. But I hear my kids and my nephews. Yeah, I keep talking about these other kids like raging on games or when they get really mad or whatever. I think it's hilarious. Yeah. There's this one kid I knew and he used to, and he used to just throw his controller at walls. I was just like, bruh, you don't have money.

That's not great for the controller. No. Like, you're not paying for this controller. What are you getting so angry for? Yeah, and it's gotten much worse now that, like, when you play online and the rankings follow you, you just, like, it was huge in, like, the Street Fighter community. Because, like, if somebody that was, like like really, really good, they start losing. It's like, oh, I lost connection. It's like, nah, bitch, like you were just about to lose and you rage quit.

Bruh. Oh, my God. Old school Call of Duty. Like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike Source. Honestly. The chats were the funnest because I think it was kind of. We would just talk so much, just really fucked up shit. And it was so fun it was there

are things that we'd say to each other that you just cannot say on this mic we'd get canceled so quick yeah but it was great it was great i only uh dove into just a tiny bit of that because i was like on my way out with video games and i just remember like little kids just kicking my ass and like john madden football or whatever. And they would use the Vikings and use Dante Culpepper and Randy Moss. And they just like, you know, run around like a crazy person, Dante Culpepper, and just heave a Hail Mary to Randy Moss and score every time. And they were like, you're a bitch. You're a little bitch. You're a cocksucker.

Yeah, they're telling me I'm a little bitch. I'm like, you're right. I'm getting smoked. I got no excuses over here oh i remember call of duty i forgot which one but it was one of the early ones like maybe modern warfare maybe the first or second one that was the first game that i ever like i gotta go to work in like four hours one more game and it's like damn two hours one more game all right i'm gonna go take a little nap but and now it's it's totally different and then like all that stuff with activision and blizzard

is terrible like their work environment and stuff but it's funny it's it's definitely not the same but man back in those days my ps5 is collecting dust yeah i mean today's podcast is gonna be really good we can finally dive in dive all the way in dive in and get some information for our ladies yeah and everyone else because this woman knows a ton is she ready to rock so i sent the email so it was my bad so i made her wait a little bit too long but no i just she'll be on with us shortly it's a really cool name astrid yeah she works with team BioLane, which is really dope. She's one of their registered dietitians. But she knows a lot about the more not just protein, but like dealing with the menstrual cycle.

That's a really difficult thing to deal with because every woman's different when it comes to training and the effect that it has on their menstrual cycle. So I think she'll have a lot of really cool insight for us on that and a lot of other stuff. I saw a female the other day on TikTok talking about menstrual cycles, and I thought it was interesting how she just said she didn't know anything about it. She's like, this is something that occurs in my body, and I just thought it just naturally happened this way once a month. And she's like, I never even looked up any information until she started to have symptoms and problems. I forget what the exact symptoms and problems were. But, yeah, I think I just think it's interesting.

Like, there are more people now talking about it. But we have a lot of male leaders when it comes to fitness and when it comes to, you know, learning more about. When it comes to fitness and when it comes to, you know, learning more about, I mean, you're hearing a lot of people talking about what you can do to get your hormones checked and how men, especially aging men, can kind of take care of that. And they can use companies like we use, like Merrick Health and things like that. But there's really not as much information swirling around for women. And so with our guests today, it'd be great to try to uncover a lot of that because there's a lot of women that have issues. They don't know anything. They don't know how to do anything about them. Like they might have low estrogen or they might have higher testosterone levels or there's stuff that women don't want to talk about. They might grow a little bit of facial hair or they're losing their hair on their head, which is actually really common. But it's it's from DHT.

And, you know, hope their guests today can help answer more questions about that. But all kinds of weird shit happens to women. And, you know, shit, they fucking produce babies and stuff. So they go through a lot. And so hopefully today's guest can help us kind of sift through some of that. Yeah, what I like about her, specifically her like Instagram page is she has just like these like infographics and stuff they're great because i'm still a child i like you know pictures and like coloring books and stuff so for her it's really with you yeah it's cool that she breaks it down really easy and it's always a um i don't know it's cool when you

can recommend somebody to like i've recommended her to wife. I'm like, yeah, go follow her because she has a lot of good info. And like I've said in the past, like I can tell her over and over and over all the benefits of protein. But it's like I'm always going to be just a dude, you know, at the end of the day. And it's like I won't be able to relate to everything. So hopefully today Astrid can kind of help us out with, you know, kind of spreading that message. Yeah, I remember for years, um, telling people in my family about like fish oil and different things and until they heard it from Oprah, it didn't mean nothing, you know? So I think sometimes just hearing from, uh, people that are, um, you know, just going through some of the same things. I think sometimes when you

hear stuff from a dude like, Hey, it's a great idea if you deadlift, cause it can help build up some strength, help build up some muscle. It's a great way to overload the body. Maybe women, for some reason, when they see a guy do that, maybe they just think like, well, I don't want to have big old thick legs. And, you know, maybe they don't want to have, you know, some of the things they see the guy have. But that's not really what we're trying to say. And when you get the message from other women, it's just different. Especially people who have the experience. i think the big thing is like

we have not experienced things on that end we have no idea what it's like you know what i mean like i think one thing that's interesting is i was having a conversation with a friend the other day and they were mentioning that like growing up their period they never felt like any pain i was like wait what really you know because like other women that i've talked to about this like some like for some of them it's like oh yeah oh there's just every single time. It's really painful. It's like an event. It takes like a week. Yeah. You know, they go through a lot in that court in that time frame. And yeah, I mean, how would you know unless you like go to a doctor or unless you ask a professional, you know, how that's supposed to unfold? Like, what's it supposed to be like, you know how that's supposed to unfold like what's it supposed to be like you know so and then couple that with the other you know the uh difficulty of like your training and your nutrition it's like okay what is maybe the best way to go about this so this is gonna be dope shifting things around a bit

she seems to be frozen yes she's connecting shifting things around a bit. She seems to be frozen. Yes. She's connecting. She should be able to hear us now. She should be popping out. There you are. Great to have you on the show today. We're doing great.

I am very, very excited to see you guys. Cool. Let's just dive right in and let's kind of kick it off with this. How did you get involved in fitness? How did you get involved in investigating nutrition and things like that? Oh, wow. Do you want the long story or the short story? Go for it.

Whatever you want to do. Okay. So I was 12 when I actually started going to the gym and basically everything started there. But a little bit before that, I was just walking on the street. I used to be just normally used to receive compliments from people when I used to walk on the street. I used to live in South America. So if you know South America, like men and people around you just likes complimenting attractive women. But when I was an adolescent, I was not as fit. An adolescent, I was not as fit.

I used to just be a teen, an adolescent, and I wasn't really paying attention to my fitness or my physique or anything like that. So one day, out of the blue, someone on the car, I don't even remember seeing his face or anything, he just said, oh, she's so pretty but a little bit fat something like that obviously in Spanish sound sounded a little bit more normal um so in that in that moment like hang on a minute and I that didn't I didn't like that so that pretty much moved me to decide well I think I need to do something about it.

And I just went to the gym, started going to the gym just for that main reason that, like, I don't know what happened, but I didn't like that compliment. But somehow it helped. And I started doing my training and I decided to go into being a fitness professional at some point. And then moving a little bit forward, I went into nutrition and dietetics. I was in between studying medicine, physiotherapy or nutrition. And at the end of the day, day decided I think nutrition is the one and yeah fast forward I'm here today I have done my bachelor's degree graduated with honors I was the first in my in my like amongst my peers with the best average and then went to the master's degree here in Australia and I moved here about eight

years ago. Obviously my English wasn't good at all when I came so I was like struggling. It has been like a very very tough journey moving to a new country, no one's knowing moving to a new country no one's knowing you at all i'm pretty much starting from very very very scratch night zero you weren't known as i used to be very well known dietitian back in venezuela and that now here is like no one knows me what's the point and i'm here now and it's been like moving forward and trying to grow as a professional as a person pretty much helped me a lot to sort of understand my own purpose and my mission and why I wanted to do things for my for for the the reasons that I started nutrition in the first place, there was to help people and really fight misconceptions in nutrition and the fitness industry.

But before when I actually started nutrition, it was more like a selfish, driven, self-driven wanting to do nutrition because I just wanted to learn how to do meal plans and how to diet to be lean for myself but not thinking that nutrition was way beyond that when you actually get into nutrition and you start learning so much more about what it's all about, and that it's just more about health and physiology and pathophysiology and how do you understand different diseases are all linked in a great degree to how you eat and the amounts you eat and the foods you eat and things like that. she eats and the food she eats and things like that. So it was a combination of different things that led me to redefine myself as me as a professional. And here I am.

That's awesome. I think, I guess, one of the things I'm curious about right now is, as far as, I guess, the nutrition research and nutrition science, as far as i guess the nutrition research and nutrition science um we've had a lot of guests on that have continued to say that there's a lot of work to do within nutrition research like there's a lot of things that are kind of just hit or miss but when it comes to women as far as the research and as far as like how much has been done is there are there a lot of studies that have been done specifically on women's like on women as far as nutrition is concerned because i feel like we know a lot and we've heard a lot about how you know things affect men fasting etc but then when we hear about certain things when it comes to women some people are like uh well we're not really sure um and since that's

you you feel that you're in is that something that you notice is that actually the case or am i wrong about that um i think the issue with the research is that nowadays is now moving more towards trying to understand women in more depth because at the beginning research was meant to just find what like people researchers thought that women are just petite men but at the end of the day when we think about the differences in physiology and women's responses hormonal responses are so different that probably in the past few years that has been that awakening on, well, we need to research women separately because they have completely different responses when it comes to looking into their physiology and their hormonal responses.

into their physiology and their hormonal responses, even psychology and behaviors sometimes seem to be different because they respond to this milieu of hormones that generally men have like flat. So we talk about the menstrual cycle, the estrogen, progesterone, so many different hormones that are related to that, that seem to have a very important impact on emotions and how you think, how you feel. Even in performance, strength, speed, so many different variables into the sports nutrition and the sports science that when we think about it nowadays research is kind of leading and leaning more towards trying to investigate them separately

but at this stage there's no many research yet on women specifically. It's now emerging. It's now a little bit more common to see, well, now there is more people and more researchers trying to understand the menstrual cycle because now they've seen that there are certain links and certain implications on how menstrual cycle can affect women, and even the nutrition behaviors in terms of why women tend to, you see women dieting and chronically dieting, you're dieting much more than men and things like that, and eating disorders, they're kind of equally. I think men have a lot of eating disorders too, and they kind of seem to not be as much understood.

So I would say in the eating disorder realm, nutrition, there's been a focus on understanding that women seem to be much more prone to certain eating disorders than men. But equally, men experience a lot of eating disorders and actually binge eating disorder seems to be very, very equally balanced between these two genders. It doesn't really make much of a difference when we think about that particular eating disorder. But when we think of anorexia nervosa or bulimia, seems to lean a little bit more towards women. So as a general overview, I think research is now getting a little bit more specific and separating the differences between men and women and how they behave and respond differently to different treatments and different stimulus. Same with nutrition and performance and sports science.

If there is a difference in the nutrition for men versus women, what should women maybe be, I guess, more concerned about or what should their focus be if there is a difference in the way that you think they should eat? I don't think there is much of a difference when we think about the main basics of what nutrition is. It is more about targeting specific strategies when it comes to adherence and compliance, more than the actual prescription that we see given to men versus women. For example, when we think about protein requirements, protein requirements actually are exactly the same for both genders.

I wouldn't tell a female client to eat less protein than uh someone who is a male client i would just say you know we have to eat high protein and i don't care if you're a female or male you have to eat enough and at least a gram per pound of body weight or looking at the amount of centimeters that is your height, that's the minimum amount of grams I would be aiming for you at least. So I'm a very important advocate for protein intake and women, like all my clients seem to for the most part be in the lower range for some reason and it is an ongoing battle an ongoing challenge for them to get to a little bit higher protein and that is a big important thing that I think I work a lot with my clients and trying to battle that as well in social media. When it comes to fats, I think the requirements are exactly the same,

probably a little bit higher in female than in male sometimes just because of the different hormonal production and the menstrual cycle involved in there. But you can go still quite low and maintain a baseline level of your hormone production regardless. So I think it comes down to preferences, mostly when it comes to prescription of fats and carbohydrates. My main non-negotiable would be protein and the calories are always adjusted to your goals and your size and your generally what what you respond to so it is not about oh females are different or special it's pretty much adjusted to your structure, your gender, your genetics,

and basically what we do when we calculate your BMR and your TDEE or your total daily energy expenditure. So it is not something that we look at, well, females are completely stranger and they need a special treatment. But it's more about, well, we need to address adherence and compliance when we're thinking about a specific nutrition strategy if they're looking at losing body fat or getting ready for a contest prep or something like that so in that moment in time that's where we actually think about what are some of the differences when it comes to behavior and especially involving that menstrual cycle.

Women seem to experience a lot more weight fluctuations during the month. That can be very challenging. A lot of women fixate a lot of their worth and a lot of their progress just on the scale and if they are dieting hard training consistently and seem to see the scale going up it's like very very disturbing for them and I have a battle every single day I can tell you how much time I spend on a daily basis explaining my clients you know what it's fine don't worry it's all good you're doing the right thing just keep going and that is one of the main things I find that is very very challenging in women men doesn't experience that fluctuation because their hormonal profile is much more stable.

Like if we compare the mesocycle or the hormones in a chart in women and male, males are like flat. And then when we see women, it's like these roller coasters of estrogen, progesterone, HL. It's so, so different. So that is one thing that I find that is mainly a difference between these two genders. And at the same time, the cravings and the hunger that women seem to experience closer to that late luteal phase so that last week of before the day one of the menstrual cycle or what we call the PMS or premenstrual cycle or premenstrual syndrome we see these changes in behaviors in how they start feeling. And most of the times that seems to affect adherence.

So if you don't have really good strategies for that particular period of time, you can just throw everything out of the window. Like we see a lot of binge eating closer to that menstrual cycle that they want if they don't have the right strategies in place or if they have a very rigid diet mindset versus a flexible dieting mindset or whether they might not be thinking about well I could potentially reduce my training volume this week because I don't feel well but at at the same time, I could, if my appetite is higher, I'd rather to increase one or 200 calories and still allow some flexibility in my diet. And that will allow me to just be more adherent. And at the end of the day,

consistency and adherence are going to win over just being perfectionist. consistency and adherence are going to win over just being perfectionist. Astrid, we're just kind of simple, like we're dumb. So if you can help us, because you mentioned some phases of the menstrual cycle, could you help us outline like the beginning to the end? And then also with what you were mentioning, as far as like how women feel through different phases of the cycle, can you help explain that to us? Um, is one thing I find interesting and we were actually talking about this during the episode is that obviously, again, we don't know much about the menstrual cycle, but you know, a few of my friends, like some, when they have their menstrual cycle, they're like, I feel nothing. Like it doesn't affect me. Even some of the female clients that I work with,

it's like their training's fine. They don't feel anything. And then other people, it's like they're just like, whoa, you know, it makes a dent in their training. It makes a dent in their cravings. So if you could just outline for us the actual menstrual cycle and then also, I guess, in general, how you see it affects nutrition, cravings, even potentially training. I know it's going to be a long one, but that helped a lot. even potentially training i know it's going to be a long one but that helped a lot okay so with the fact with the first question with mesocycle uh we can separate it in two main major phases which you can divide it within these two major phases in two more phases. So you can see within 21 to 28 days of a cycle length, we can see that is once the first 14 days being the follicular phase and the second phase, which is the next 14 days, the gluteal phase. Now within these phases, we can divide them in two again. So we can say that

follicular phase has the early phase or early follicular phase and late follicular phase. And the luteal phase has the same early and late luteal phase. And the reason being is that there are small changes in these two hormones progesterone and estrogen that will have a specific effect uh in each week as well as like the body temperature the cravings um the potentially some insulin sensitivity and insulin resistance playing along with that cycle as well. So if we look at the mayor phase, which is a follicular phase, we see that the main hormone that is dominant is estrogen. So estrogen is slowly rising until the day 14, when we see that is the middle of the cycle, which is ovulation. And then we see estrogen starts declining, and progesterone that is completely very low in the first part of the cycle

starts going up in the second phase of the cycle or on the luteal phase. So when we see that, we see that there is a component of dominance of estrogen to progesterone in the first phase, and in the second phase is more progesterone over estrogen. And these changes have an important impact on what is the purpose of these hormones in the first place fluctuating. And it's basically to prepare your body to have a baby. That's the whole purpose of the semester cycle

is that your body's always getting ready to put everything in place so your body is always getting ready to put everything in place so your body is ready to create and allow this egg to be fertilized and you can have a baby. So if everything is in place, the uterus has enough lining and has enough of irrigation, blood flow, enough lining and has enough of irrigation blood flow that is going to be the perfect environment for an egg to be fertilized and grow so doesn't mean purposes of menstrual cycle prepare women to be ready to get pregnant so if pregnancy doesn't happen then the cycle starts again

that's basically it now when we think about the hormones I was just mentioning, they have a special effect on your appetite and your energy expenditure. Sometimes when we think, especially in the late luteal phase, your temperature rises as well as your insulin sensitivity goes down a little bit versus when we think about estrogen being high versus when it's low. So estrogen seems to be promoting insulin sensitivity versus when we are closer to that on the last little phase, we see that progesterone goes down and insulin seems to have that effect as well with the drop of all the hormones. So that's why we see a little bit of extra cravings and appetite increase

because there's more insulin resistance versus the first part of the cycle when you're more insulin sensitivity. Does that make sense so far? Absolutely, yeah. What about birth control? I don't think that women, I think that many, many women, many adult women haven't had normal periods or normal cycles in years. As soon as they're sexually active, they commit to some sort of birth control protocol and they don't ever look back. And I don't really hear people talking about that often, but that's medication that people just take in perpetuity. It doesn't seem to make any sense to me. So what are some of your thoughts on that and how does that change or disrupt the cycle that you just talked about? It basically turns the, the,

the women's cycle and hormone fluctuations into something flat, similar to, to men. So basically you don't have estrogen going up or down. It's just much more stable and progesterone, same thing. And the reason being is that when they are quite stable and there is not this fluctuation throughout the cycle, there is no adequate preparation of the

uterus or like the actual ovulation because ovulation is kind of the main event for the body to be pregnant in the first place. So if ovulation is not happening because everything else is disrupted, hormones are not stimulating, the follicles, the eggs are not being released, it's a complete disruption of the actual cycle. So nothing really is happening in the actual cycle as it is. So we see that most of the times everything that women would probably report during the cycle is not reported with someone who is under birth control

because they won't experience these hormonal fluctuations. They could experience a side effect from the pills, but not from their own hormones. And nowadays, these birth control tablets have been very, very researched and improved along the way that the side effects nowadays are much more minimal versus the ones that we used to see before. And as well as the doses, the weight gained that a lot of women experience doesn't seem to be as much now. And it just depends on which sort of therapy, hormonal therapy you're using. But at the end, like when we think about the overall picture, that's what we see in the difference between women who are under birth control,

they won't experience these hormonal fluctuations, whereas the women that are just normal, you'll see these fluctuations happening along this dementia cycle over and over again. Do you think there's maybe connections with birth control and like PCOS and some of these other things that pop up that we hear so many women suffer from? And I hear a lot of women also having issues like with their thyroid and having like Hashimoto's and like, I just, I kind of think that birth control to me,

it seems like there's just something odd about it. It doesn't seem like it's natural and it doesn't seem like it's like, obviously like people have a need for it. There's a purpose for it. Right. But at the same time, I'm like, that just doesn't seem like a great idea to take that all the time forever. I would say that taking birth control is not going to necessarily cause any disease. Actually, sometimes the pills or birth control are prescribed to better manage the issues with your hormones in a period, like if we think about PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome,

we may see that sometimes the prescription of these pills might allow to help regulate the dominance of estrogen or other hormones that just might be playing a little bit of a role on acne or the testosterone production or things like that so when we think about that specifically some women might actually benefit from having a birth control treatment for a period of time depending on how this patient of this person is experiencing these hormonal dominances like there is a lot of problems sometimes that women are producing a lot of estrogen and estrogen dominance can be very impactful in the in their periods and the how much they menstruate and the how much they lose in terms of the blood they lose during the first week of the cycle.

Are they very painful periods and things like that? So managing this with a little bit of an external treatment or birth control can help somehow to regulate these hormonal variances or just getting unbalances and putting that in a little bit of a better place. When it comes to Hashimoto's, like insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, related to birth control, I don't really see that there's much connection or causative effect

from these particular medications or treatments because for the most part, the main cause seem to be either correlated to a genetic component and a lifestyle component as well. So it is a little bit of both. I wouldn't say that birth control would have a causative effect, at least not directly. It could maybe in some individuals, like everything is possible, they may see some causative effects or contributing effects to the development of these conditions, but not necessarily as direct cause. This makes me curious. I mean, you definitely know. As far as the fitness level of any woman or any individual, does an individual's fitness level have an effect on how difficult their period is? Like if someone gets in better shape, do they generally,

does that have an effect on their period or is that just the way it is, is the way it is? I think it is very individual and it's mostly a response from, it might not be necessarily related to your fitness because I've seen women that are very very lean very fit the high very high fitness level um or athletes that like elite athletes and they still struggle

with the periods and the cycle uh their cycles or just the level of blood loss they have are very, very high. So you may be able to manage the inflammation period or reduce your prostaglandins or this sort of hormonal response to the inflammation period during the cycle with a little bit of extra exercise. So exercise always helps to sort of reduce maybe the pain or how you feel, the overall feeling that you feel a little bit better. But it's not necessarily something that is correlated or directed from your fitness levels. So you can be very fit, but this is still something that is more individually and predisposed.

It's going to be happening anyways. So that is why that seems to be a very important challenge when we think about adherence, compliance, performance. And look, there are women that probably don't have any issues at all whatsoever. As you mentioned before, some women will work out every single week and they have no issues. Their strength is perfect. The performance is perfect. It's not affected. They don't have any cravingss but other women will experience a lot of a struggle in the last week of the menstrual cycle they will have much more fluctuations with their weight it is just very individual and it could just be that some women even are predisposed

like when you get education about the menstrual cycle that they say, oh, well, it's my week four. I should be experiencing and experimenting cravings. So I just give in to them. It is just like it is the norm. So, well, I should be probably having less performance this week because it is the week where I'm the weakest. But that's because you were told that this is what you should be experiencing, but it is not the norm. It is mostly trying to understand how you feel and connect with where you're at

during your menstrual cycle and what are some of the strategies you can implement and put in place to make sure you are not sort of giving in to the thought that this is the way you should be responding. It may happen, but you have the control as well, the way you respond to your cravings, to your weight fluctuations. Your mindset is really important in this particular case and how women respond to these different things that are probably out of your control in the first place. Is it problematic to not get

your period? Because my understanding, some women that start to get really lean don't experience that. So is there a drawback from that if you're kind of blocking your period from either birth control and or just getting in really good shape so i i agree with what you said about uh the girls that are fit they don't doesn't necessarily cause any issues but where i would disagree with you is i think it's if you're a lot fitter than you're than you're used to then i think it could just like with men you know when men try to really strive to be like seven percent body fat or 5% body fat, it could start to really negatively impact a lot of their hormones. But if a dude's just walking around that way normally, then their hormones are normally

a little bit more optimal. No, I completely agree with you. I think it is, I can tell from my story, I used to be, I got to a point that I was very, very lean and I didn't have my period for three years. It was a lot, a very long time. And I had no issues. I had no issues whatsoever with my training. I was actually feeling really good, but what was my own experience my own journey and I was able to train really hard I was no I had no issues with my cravings or appetite but I was very focused and I had an eating disorder in the back of my head as well so it was a lot of complicated a complicated story but moving forward obviously I was I had low libido I had I was only performance focused I had probably everything that you would see in women that won the strike they will just be their own but it doesn't mean that it's healthy

because you have low estrogen uh low progesterone and estrogen is very protect a protective hormone especially for the bone health from your bone health perspective and when we think about long-term health, low progesterone and low estrogen has a very important correlation in how well you're protected when you age, when you're aging and when you are getting older. So I completely agree that having no period or experiencing amenorrhea or HA or hypothalamic amenorrhea is something very serious. And women should try to address that much earlier. I made a mistake. I was just like very silly and I just didn't want to pay attention to it.

It was like, who wants to have a menstrual cycle? Like, I hate it. So I was feeling great, but it doesn it. But it's like, who wants to have a menstrual cycle? Like, I hate it. So I was feeling great, but it doesn't mean like it's healthy. Actually, having a really good cycle in terms of like very consistent menstrual cycle is very consistent to be a very healthy woman. So when you have absence of your menstrual cycle, that is a very important sign that something is wrong and you should be trying to address that and getting your cycle back as soon as possible.

But short-term period loss seem to be relatively safe, especially we see that in athletes and contest females that they will have a period loss for the the last few weeks when they get very very lean and it is something that completely goes along with that metabolic adaptation now when we that's why reverse siding is important to implement so women can have more energy availability and get back their menstrual cycle and everything goes back to normal. So finding that healthy body fat where they can obviously provide that extra energy availability to their body to produce these hormones and regulate the semester cycle.

This makes me really curious, Astrid. As far as amenorrhea is concerned, back in 2015, I was getting ready for a show and my fats were down to 40. I lost my libido for a hot minute because I was eating like 30 grams of fat a day. And post-contest, it took me about maybe three to four months to get my libido back. I'm surprised you are still alive. Yeah. But looking back on it now, because of the body composition I have now, I eat high fats. So that was the big thing that made the big difference for me now. Like having a good amount of fats in my diet, I'm almost as lean as I was then, but I have no hormonal drawbacks.

This makes me curious. As far as women are concerned and women getting ready for show, women in athletics, especially within like bikini and bodybuilding, when they have to get lean, typically a lot of people take away fats and maintain an individual's carbohydrates to try to maintain their in-gym performance. But do you notice anything with potentially women eating higher fat when leaner? Does that do anything to benefit their hormones, benefit maybe amenorrhea not happening? Or is that a false correlation on my part? I think it is going to be very individual, but the main driver of amenorrhea is energy availability. So you probably could be eating a very high fat diet, but if it's still very low calories and you're under eating chronically for a period of time, that is going to have the impact on your hormonal production. Plus you're getting very lean. So it is also that normal energy availability within your body. You are in a chronic deficit.

There is very low energy availability on a daily basis. Plus, obviously, the availability of your carbohydrates, protein, fats, is not to maintain what you have. It's trying to still get rid of what you have. So one of the things that your body does is like, well, if you're starving me, what's the point to recreate and have a kid and a baby? What's the point of doing this menstrual cycle on and on if i'm not going to be able to keep up with it i have no energy that's what your body tells and perceives so the main thing that the body does is kind of

get rid of another process to adapt to survive so once you bought your body starts perceiving that everything is getting back up and it is getting there is enough energy availability um there's no extra stress on the body to still get lean then that's when this kind of everything signals like oh things are getting back up let's get ready and let's start producing again. This menstrual cycle starts again a little bit more normal. But it can take six months. It can take three months for some females. It may take less than four weeks, but it just depends

on how long have you been without your period, how lean did you get. Sometimes you have to have an important treatment in terms of energy restoration, reducing the physical activity and the stress on your body. Because energy is not just energy availability on its own, just from the diet, but the amount of output and the excessive exercise you might be being required for a period of time so energy availability is how much energy your body has at the end of the day from from in total not just from what you eat but how much your output is as well. So that's why we see this very often in elite athletes or females that are competing into a very high demand sport that also required to be very lean.

And the physique is sort of kind of a very primary thing that is kind of looked at as well you're killing it with these answers by the way appreciate it uh what would you suggest a woman uh do if their estrogen was low i think when we think about that specifically we need to obviously look, the first thing, I'm not a specialist, so what I would do is I recommend to go to a gynecologist and a specialist that can see and have a look at all their hormonal profile and try to understand what are some of the potential causes of estrogen being low. causes of estrogen being low if it is about energy availability and we're talking about an athlete then we need to perhaps do what we call a reversal to get your period back if the period is absent and is because estrogen is very low then we need to start restoring that energy availability

by reducing the workout or exercise volume. Even the intensity sometimes might be playing a role as well as let's increase your calories because maybe that's what we need to do in the first place and get your body in a healthier body fat level. Maybe if it's very very low or that female is very lean for their own structure maybe you just need we need to restore that in the first place so I've worked with female that they didn't have the period and slowly we sort of reverse it

back to a better and healthier place. But I'm not necessarily a specialist when it comes to different causes, when it's not physique related or performance related, because there can be other issues that may cause the same problem. And you might try to restore energy availability, reduce exercise intensity, increase calories, restore body fat and estrogen or these hormones will not come back still where they should be. So the issue is not like hypothalamic amenorrhea, it's something else. So the main thing is referring to a doctor identifying what the real problem is and if it's something related to hypothalamic amenorrhea and performance and exercise related

maybe the the treatment is restoring body fat energy availability and managing the exercise components intelligently. You're not going to tell an athlete to stop exercising, but it's trying to find a nice middle ground that allows them to continue their training, but still managing the load and the volume of that. This makes me curious. We were just talking about fats a little bit earlier, but are still managing the load and the volume of that. This makes me curious. We were just talking about fats a little bit earlier,

but let's, because, you know, sometimes when individuals are getting ready for a show, their calories are going to get low, their energy expenditure is going to be pretty high. Both men and women, that stage sucks. But let's say an individual is just trying to diet and they're just trying to get leaner. What would be the lowest lowest fat threshold that one would want to have like what percentage of body weight or whatever as far as grams of fat that you would like this is as low as you

want to be you don't want to go any lower than this because we know that really low fat diets can really affect people's hormones but for for women specifically, is there a, is there a threshold that you generally want to stay away from? And this is outside of people trying to get ready for show because ridiculous things have to be done. Just talking about general population. Now I would say the lowest I would get a client to when it comes to fat is no less than 0.5 grams per body weight per kilogram of body weight or

0.3 grams per pound of body weight so i would just be very cautious on not being or like if you want a net number i would never put a client below 30 grams of fat a day if we wanted to see like a rounded number but again it goes back to individual so um i am someone who actually has a very high protein relatively high carbohydrate and very low fat and i'm someone who tends to be really well averaging about 30 grams of fat a day. I wouldn't eat more than that. But my protein intake is quite high. And sometimes I tend to supplement with omega-3 fatty acids. So you want to make sure you're getting the essential fatty acids as well available.

And all diets are viable as long as you kind of don't go below those thresholds. My menstrual cycle, when it came back, it has been very, very regular. So the amount of fat you eat may not necessarily be correlated so much with your menstrual cycle as such, as long as you're eating at least the minimum that your body requires as essentials because fats are essential especially the the ones that we think about omega-3s fatty acids that are required for your brain and everything else that are utilized for hormonal production so we definitely think that the number the amount amount of fats you eat, you need to hit at least a minimum. If you're eating below that minimum, probably you may start getting into

trouble. Do chicks need carbs or are they just playing us? What is that? I said, do chicks need carbs or are they just playing us? Um, I don't know. I think, you know, I hear a lot of women say that they, they're like, oh, we need carbs. Or I've, I've even heard, uh, some people that study nutrition. They were like, they claim that women need more carbohydrates. I was wondering what your thoughts are on that. Um, look, I think it is, is it comes it comes back to the individual i don't think all women need more carb because as a person it's just more like a preference

there might be women that may just lean more towards eating more carbohydrates and they find that that's a really nice diet for them. And some of the women I know, they thrive on fats. They like more fats than carbs. And I think it is finding that really good balance of what sort of carbohydrates you're actually eating. Because the type of carbohydrates for me seem to be very important when it comes to not just the quality of your diet overall, but at the same time, your long-term health. So when I think about, well, how much carbohydrates you're eating, I don't like to have women going beyond, like way too high.

I'd rather having them in a sort of a balance between, well, first of all, I prioritize protein. If we prioritize protein, then we can play with fats and carbs as you please, but protein has to be in a very good place. So when you think about that, and you prioritize already protein, there's not much room you can play with much fat or much carbohydrate if protein is already taking a big component of your calories. So I'll say, well, if you're aiming at least for 150, 180 grams of protein a day, how much carbohydrates you can actually aim for? 200 grams, 250 grams maybe, depending on what your total calorie intake is.

But from those calories coming from carbohydrates, important components should come from fibrous carbohydrates, not simple carbohydrates, and vegetables and fruit. So if you're thinking about the quality and the nutrient density of these foods, they're actually pretty important in a healthy diet. And then, well, what else you want to add on top of it is it is what is remaining from the extra calories you have left. But you have to at least prioritize five servings of vegetables a day.

How you meet that, I don't care, but you have to have that in place and perhaps one or two servings of fruit. So once we have like the minimum established, then we think about other type of carbohydrates that might be playing part of your diet. Let's say oats, rice, potatoes, things like that, that can just be part of a healthy diet. And then if your preference is just having more fats, then those extra starchy carbohydrates might not be playing an important role in your diet more than other healthy fats that you can add to your diet so to respond to your question i think it is more about the preference of each women uh and

each individual that they will decide well i want to have it more leaning towards more carbs or more fats but you don't necessarily need more carbs. I think it is just going to be depending on the preferences. I definitely feel good and prefer having more carbohydrates in my diet versus having fats, but that's my own personal preference. It's not because I need more carbs necessarily. What do you think is the biggest misconception women have when it comes to consuming more protein? And then maybe how can we dispel some of those beliefs that we can get women to eat more protein? to get bigger or grow more muscle. I don't know. That is one of those that seem to be quite often out there.

Plus the normal and general misconceptions we see overall, like, well, an excessive protein will affect your longevity. An excessive amount of protein will affect your kidneys and your bones. So you should be having a low protein diet. But when we think about the actual truth behind this myth, they all have been shown to be debunked a long time ago. So an excessive amount of protein, unless you had advanced chronic kidney disease, you wouldn't experience issues with your kidneys if you have a high protein diet. On its own, sometimes the actual overall health profile would improve if you improve and increase your protein intake and improve the quality of your diet in the first place. So sometimes increasing protein actually might change and improve some of these chronic conditions overall. Because when we think about type 2 diabetes, obesity, chronic kidney disease and other chronic conditions,

chronic kidney disease and other chronic conditions sometimes are a result of just carrying a lot of weight and energy toxicity and excessive amount of body fat. So if you can improve that by modifying the quality of your diet, increasing your protein intake, increasing your exercise, you're going to get better, not worse. So that's my point of view. It also makes me curious though, how we can, like a woman gaining muscle, like I have some friends that are younger that, you know, we talk about lifting every now and then. And some of them are like, yeah, I don't want my arms to really get big. Or, you know, I don't want my shoulders to get big. And I'm just like, okay, I get it. Maybe you don't want them to get big.

But then when we think about longevity and as people get older, you know, the risks of falling, having a weak body, being linked to just all these different issues as you get older. Like, I know people in their fifties now, just because they didn't really lift weights, their knees are in pain and their body's in pain. And it's because they didn't want to gain muscle. How can we kind of change that messaging or, or can you talk to just us about some of the benefits of women gaining muscle? Cause there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. You know, there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. No, absolutely. I think I'm one of the most, I don't know. I think I'm very hard an advocate on building muscle,

lifting heavy sheets, going heavy. If you can, if you like, obviously. You don't need to be, and it's very hard to begin with, for a female naturally to grow that much muscle like it is very hard to get to that to that place in the first place when you think about the hormonal components that differ from males males may get a little bit bigger because they have the presence of testosterone um and female could if they actually lift very heavy or even women with pcos seem to have a better hormonal profile to build more muscle even even if you don't think believe it so when we think about the hormonal components you might get very fit

very lean you may grow muscle but it's very hard to grow that much that you you look like a man or you look like bulk uh hulk uh it is yeah so you wouldn't get that to that level unless you used external steroids or something like that in the first place. But when we think about the importance of muscle, it's not just the physique and the aesthetic component of it, but the functionality and the independence and everything that muscle on its own provides you. And when we think about getting older, I work in a hospital, in a rehab hospital, and the majority of the patients in my hospital are elderly, that they have lost all the muscle they had, and they are falling and they had had different experience different accidents because of the loss of independence because they have no – you see them and they're very fragile.

They have issues with balance, with strength function. So that's one of the main things I advocate for when it comes to having muscle is that don't just think about now. when it comes to having muscle is that don't just think about now. Think about how important it is for you to be independent, being able to reach the top shelf in your home, being able to cook, being able to lift your groceries, just the basic things that you have to do as you get older, you have more independence.

You can just put your own shoes and put your own clothing. Walking upstairs. Just doing the basic things like that, just walking around and being able to get to that place on your own, that is so empowering. And that is one of the main things I why I advocate uh women to have at least a little bit of muscle in there and build that from early stages is if possible so the better you your fitness level is and the the more ingrained as a habit becomes for you to just lift weights and exercise and do doing some level of resistance training the better you're going to to go grow old and in much better conditions you

will get there because it is not something that goes or happens in one night you're getting adequate amount of muscle um the strong bonds it doesn't happen overnight. It happens from early stages in life and that you can cultivate that over the years as well. Where did you start from having that comment made about you about being a little bit heavy to be able to be in the shape that you're in now, what was the actual start? Did you, cause I know sometimes people are like, I'm just not going to eat and I'm going to run. Um, where, where did you actually start and how did you kind of get on the path where you, uh, maybe had a better understanding and, and kind of ventured into what you're doing now? So I, I started just doing like this group fitness classes, like Thai, Fit Combat, kickboxing.

That's when I get started. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just following the mass and like trying to sort of fit in and get comfortable in a different, in a new place that was for me being in a gym at 12 so like you you will see I kind of was the youngest in the gym trying to just be part of what the adulthood and life was there so I was just doing classes I I was enjoying them. I found them very, very fun. And then I met a personal trainer that he said, getting PRs and getting the weights. It was something that was very motivating for me as well. So looking at that combination, then I started thinking about my diet. I didn't even think about my diet very much when I started

because I was doing the classes two or three hours at the gym, just playing around, getting home. Mom, let's eat pizza. So I didn't have that diet mindset at all. I was just exercising because I thought exercise would just make me lose weight. But at the end of the day, you can't out-exercise a poor diet. So you have to modify your eating habits. out exercise a poor diet so you have to modify your eating habits and i've seen challenges of like well 10 000 10 000 calories and 10 000 calories in 10 000 calories out challenges

and people fail at burning that much calories and it's so easy to eat 10 000 calories in so so so short period of time so definitely it was a journey that i started realizing that i was really in love with the exercise and training component of it and that just pretty much led me to study nutrition as well. So before I even started nutrition, thinking about the importance of that, I was just exercising and lifting. And I became a personal trainer on my own. I did a hundred different styles of certifications. I became a Pilates, yoga, step, kickboxing, fit combat, like everything you can think of, of group fitness classes.

I was one. And I, and I would enjoy that very much. And then sort of kind of went into the path of functional training and like sort of being certified as a, as a personal trainer in the, in the lifting weights, lifting weights and all of that. So yeah, a combination of those.

And then dietitian was my, my main area of expertise. You know, this, this also makes me curious because we mentioned the scale earlier, right? And, uh, and you mentioned how like a lot of women have problems with the scale, especially when, you know, the fluctuations in weight. But one thing I noticed too, is like, it seems that women who do gain, like who start weight training and let's say that they're,

they have an ability to gain a good amount of muscle, or even if they don't have an ability to gain a good amount of muscle, they gain muscle over't have an ability to gain a good amount of muscle they gain muscle over time the scale goes up let's say they get leaner and now they're they're seeing 160 pounds on the scale but they're five foot four but they have a really good body composition i've seen a lot that like they're a woman in really good shape but because they see this number even though in great shape the number is too heavy um and i i could i think the kind of thing i could relate it to i don't care about the scale but with according to the uh what's that what's that scale they do in doctor's offices the bmi the bmi i'm i'd be obese at my height and

weight i'd be obese right um so how can how can you like do you see that a lot with like fit women when they look at the scale like oh i too heavy, even though they're in amazing shape. Absolutely. I see this all the time. And most of the times is, I don't think the problem seems to be the actual BMI. Sometimes I really try to get that clear that the BMI is not necessarily the best indicator if you don't see the context of what are we talking about when it comes to BMI. Like if your waist circumference, your hips in conference is small, but you're heavier, probably it is because you have more muscle. So I like to look at waist to hip ratio or waist to height ratio.

I like a lot the style of Ted Naiman that he talks a lot about waist to height ratio. So I really like to look at the full spectrum and the context of why it is important to be in a good shape more than just leading getting led by just one number for like for the BMI that is only telling you the correlation between your weight and your height but there is nothing else like body composition wise that is isn't given isn't given by this indicator on its own so the main thing that i i think the challenge seems to be is that women are fixated to be in their ideal body weight uh that is being they they've been told that like probably years ago someone told the doctor told him you should be at this weight

and if you're not at this weight according to your height then you are not in the right place you should be around this weight and this is a there are a lot of equations and i think i'm one of the dietitians that i don't calculate ideal body weight because of these issues that estimations on these equations estimate. And a weight that is probably relatively close to someone who wouldn't exercise or wouldn't resist a strain that is probably more applicable. But even then, I tell my patients, this is a theoretical number, but I want you to be where you feel more comfortable with. And probably because of your bone structure, your genetics, you're not going to get to this place ever. And this is just a theoretical number, but I always look at what what has been the

the lowest you've been ever in your life so in probably in the past five to ten years because i don't like to even go well yeah i was uh 20 years ago when i was born i was two pounds now obviously you're not gonna to weigh that anymore. So looking at the last five years, what's the lightest weight you've been? Do you think is that a first number achievable if we're looking at potentially modifying your body composition and losing body fat and losing weight? And probably that is the first step to get to before we actually think about, oh, well, we need to be in that ideal body weight. So I think that's where I come from. I really like to find the practicality and adjust it to each person and think about what is realistic for this person. I'm always bringing back that when you put on muscle, you're not going to be weighing the same that you might have weighed five years ago.

Like I used to, my leanest that I used to weight when I had no period, I was a fetus at that point in time, about 10 years ago, I was able to get to 58 kilos or 55 kilos. And that I probably would never, ever going to get there unless I lose a lot of muscle that I've put on in this past 10 years. So I probably have put easily five kilos of muscle in that amount of time. And if I got to a point that I got leaner again as I was before I could probably be probably five to seven kilos heavier and I would ever get to 58 or 55 kilos again anymore just because I put on on that muscle but if I was if I wasn't aware of that I would probably struggle and strive for that number in the first place.

So I think it is important that self-awareness and allowing yourself to be heavier if you look better than before. You mentioned earlier having an eating disorder. Could you go into depth on that? Because I know a lot of people end up falling into those traps and maybe uh some of your information could help someone recognize that they might be falling into the same trap i did experience bulimia so i i was influenced by obviously was a public figure. I was getting recognized. I had a lot of eyes on me when I used to be back home in Venezuela. So I used to be a personal trainer, but at the same time, I was a sports dietitian. It was getting a lot of attention in my country.

So if you're a dietitian and you're a personal trainer and you don't look certain way, you think you're not going to fit or be good enough because people will judge you for how you look. Oh, you're overweight. Put yourself in a diet first before you give me a diet to me, something like that. And it was that challenge for me that because I had so much pressure on me that I would just be so fixated on my diet. And if I ate something, I would try to get rid of it somehow because I felt like I wasn't allowed to have anything. I didn't have that mindset of flexible dieting. I thought there were bad foods and good foods. And I had a very poor relationship with food and with my body at that point in time. I used to train every single day, even if I was tired, at least two hours.

And I had to do cardio and I had to do weights. And when I started doing yoga, I would do three hours a day. I would do stretching, yoga, all the cardio and lifting weights. And that was even if I was completely overexhausted and overtrained, I would still show up to the gym. And if I didn't go to the gym, I was completely stressed and anxious. And like, I was not within myself. And on top of that, the food, like I wouldn't enjoy eating out, or I wouldn't eat a piece of cake or ice cream or anything like that. If I had it, I would straight away disappear from the table and throw it out

to try to get rid of it because I thought it was bad. And because I had so many restrictions on me, I was just in a place that my relationship with food was really poor and my body was just so in such a bad place so you can look good on the outside but internally your body's not good so I had no period for three years so you can say that I was physically looking good but my actual life was a mess in terms of my nutrition was terrible. I didn't have that balance with exercise. I think it was a poor relationship with exercise as well because it was way too much. It was so, so much.

I don't think it would be compatible to be something sustainable for someone who wants to achieve a good health not just in the short term but in the long term and if you do it very smartly you can be in a great shape have a great relationship with food exercise enough without doing it overdoing it resistance train enough without overdoing it, and having things that are thought as bad in your diet and still be okay with that. This makes me kind of curious too. We've had some guests come on because all of us do a little bit of intermittent fasting here and there. Right. And we've had some guests come on and say, you know, woman needs to be careful with intermittent fasting. We've also had some come on and say that it's not that big of a deal.

But I've noticed that I've gotten messages before and I even know some people who they're like women. And they're like, if I skip breakfast, I feel ravenously hungry, like ravenous. Right. And that was just skipping breakfast. So as far as maybe if a woman does want to try out doing some intermittent fasting or doing that protocol, if they want to try it out for themselves, what would your suggestion be as far as them implementing it? How should they be careful with it? How should

they start out? And how would they figure out if it's something for them or if it's something that they can't do? I agree that everyone is going to be responding different to different dieting protocols. I think intermittent fasting has its place for certain people i'm not as someone who advocates for intermittent fasting personally but i think it can help certain individuals and even women my benefits but i would generally say for women especially at the 16 8 would be the best approach I would recommend for these individuals, just because females have that relationship with the meal frequency, the hormonal response, and the amount of food they can distribute throughout the day. Probably they have a different response

neurologically and emotionally versus someone who, like males, will respond probably a little bit different. It's not something that will happen in every woman, but certain women will respond a little bit more pronounced and a little bit more accentuated in these particular cases. So on my own personal experience with the clients I had, I always, if they like or ask about advice about the intermittent fasting, I would probably recommend to do the 16-8. But I'm not very, very, I don't love very much intermittent fasting. Have you done it before?

Yes, I did. I experimented on my own. And I'm a breakfast person, so I didn't find it very helpful. And again, this is why I find that this is very individual. And if someone can have or skip breakfast, for example, and still have a really good relationship with food, there's no compensatory behaviors. Like I find the main issue is that a lot of women or even males,

they say, oh, I'm just not a breakfast person or I just skip breakfast because I want to save calories for having bigger meals at lunch and dinner or things like that. But if you lose control over your food and you start binging and your relationship with food is actually getting worse or poorer, intermittent fasting is not for you. Like if you have a really good relationship with food, you have no problems whatsoever at skipping breakfast and you can still eat your good portion at lunch and good portion at dinner and have no issues whatsoever with your relationship with food, no binge eating or compensatory behaviors, I'm all for it. I'm fine.

But my issue with intermittent fasting is that it is sometimes a cause for these people to behave and completely mess up their relationship with food in the first place and they are binging at night and they are restricting foods in some some ways that they are just not going to improve or get to their goals just because there is something off from what they're doing. So if you can't implement intermittent fasting without having any issues with eating disorders or compensatory behaviors, I have no issues with that. But if you are, it is not recommended. Do you personally utilize any fasting?

Like, do you end up not eating for 10 hours or 12 hours like do you push breakfast back a bit or do you stop eating you know before you go to bed like you know so you i mean you're sleeping i'd imagine you know six to eight hours so there's probably some fast going on i do i do somehow um like, for example, these times in the day when I have interviews in the morning or I work, I probably try to push breakfast a little bit to later just that I'm not eating. And that could be 13 hours, 14 hours without eating, but I don't do that intentionally or like on purpose of like, oh, well, I'm just going to skip breakfast to save calories for later or something like that. And I don't have like a specific prescribed number that I have, like, oh, I have to wait for 16 hours before I have my first meal. Like I'm just more intuitive about how I behave with my food. And if I'm hungry, I eat.

If I'm not as hungry, I can push it for a little bit later. Then I do that. So there is a point in life that you can get that intuitive that you're not going to affect how you behave with food as long as you're choosing to do that that way. And it is more like a response of understanding your hunger and satiety cues. And when you're hungry, then you eat. And obviously you keep a certain level of structure within your diet.

It's not like I eat three meals today two days two meals tomorrow and one meal the day i try to keep a structure but the timing seem to be rather arranged than just a specific time like i have to eat at 8 a.m if i don't have breakfast at 8 a.m is all messed up does that make sense one last thing i'm curious about in terms of this, because like, yeah, no, intermittent fasting is not for everybody. And it's something that people need to really, probably some people need to be careful just so it doesn't lead to bad eating patterns. Or like you mentioned, the relationship with food where, you know, they'll binge a lot, or they restrict too much where they don't even eat enough food when they're supposed to eat. The thing I'm curious about is, you know, growing up, I played a lot

of sports and I breakfast, lunch, dinner. I had that pattern for a majority of my life. So then when I started fasting, um, it wasn't easy. It felt really weird. Like I felt really hungry by the afternoon, skipping breakfast. And I definitely had some compensatory eating patterns for a while. I would find that in the evening, because I wasn't used to it, because I wasn't used to not eating for 16 or 20 hours, there were some days where it was a rough binge. I was like, oh, damn, I definitely overdid it, right? But it took a while of discomfort and then I ended up getting used to it and then it became comfortable. So I guess the thing I'm curious about and I'd like to get maybe your opinion and advice about is for individuals who are trying to do this, right? to eating all day long. They've done that for all their lives. So obviously, I think that it would probably be that they would feel definitely uncomfortable doing that initially. I would assume there's going to be a phase of discomfort. This isn't going to be something that would feel great for a few weeks, potentially a few months. Now, I'm curious, how long do you think a person, if they're actually interested in trying that out, how long should they even try it out? Because I feel like with it, there's going to be a period where you have to adapt where your ghrelin, your ghrelin pump is going to change a little bit. You know what I mean? Like, I don't get that in the morning anymore. I don't feel immediately hungry. Whereas in the past, I'd wake up and it'd be like, bro, put some food in your mouth. And it was aggressive. Right? So just, just, I'm curious about your thoughts on that.

I think anything you want to try, you have to try it at least for four weeks, at least for four weeks and see whether that actually works for you. Like if you're going to try any other sort of dieting style, like vegan or keto or whatever you think is going to work for you you have to try it for longer than a week because obviously when one or two weeks are going it's going to be like a adaptation period where you're sort of getting familiar your body's sort of getting used to a new eating style a new pattern so if you're going to do the same for intermittent fasting you have to really um try to really find out whether you see yourself doing that for the next 10 years five years and see whether it actually sort of adapts and relates to your personality, your lifestyle, your preferences. If it does, then you can give that a try and see how it feels. Maybe just starting with something

that doesn't feel as restrictive. Let's say, well, you are used to having breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and five meals a day or six meals a day, three meals to snacks. Maybe we just need to sort of adjust it. You're not going to start with a 24-hour fasting, for example, or something that extreme. Maybe it's like, well, let's do 12 hours first and see how it feels. Maybe once you feel comfortable with that, you can increase to 14 hours. And maybe then you can increase to 16 hours and then stay around that if you feel comfortable with that you can increase to 14 hours and maybe then you can increase to 16 hours and then stay around that if you feel comfortable but at the end of the day do you need to strictly fast for 16 hours and eight hours you don't um and it depends on what

your goal is as well like if your goal is to lose body fat, you just need to find a way to be in a calorie deficit. And if it helps you doing intermittent fasting, that's fine. But I just don't like these strict rules of like you have to fast for 16 hours and then eating eight hours. And what if one day I just eat, I fast for 15 hours or 16 hours. It's like this, I don't find to be very useful, very strict rules. I like ranges because that gives you more flexibility into what is realistic. So like, well, I'm going to fast between 14 and 16 hours. It doesn't matter what I, I stopped my fasting, but it's sort of a lifestyle. It's not like following a specific diet or a rule.

If you do and that works for your rhythm, your lifestyle, your preferences, and it runs well with who you are and what you do, then I don't see any issues whatsoever by implementing intermittent fasting as long as it doesn't sort of collapse and affect your relationship with food and you're not binging on compensating at the end of the day or at night you lose control over your food.

If that is the case, then probably you should be having a little bit of a better structure with your meals and incorporating breakfast and not skipping it on purpose because that is just triggering something else that is not healthy at the end of the day. I think when it comes to prescribing or trying something out in your case and responding to your question about intermittent fasting is all about like anything in life, when we think about a big goal and we want to get there, small steps and probably something that is not as aggressive and then you can just sort of get the get familiar with the process and how it feels to start incrementing the time you're going to be fasting and some people might find

they they feel excellent by doing that straight away some people might need a little bit more extra time so it is all very individual and the response is going to be adapted to the situation and the conditions you're looking at when we think about the prescription of these things for each individual. Don't worry, Astrid, we still have faith in you that you'll end up doing some fasting. I'm going to make a prediction right now, two, three years from now, we're going to be talking to you about fasting and you'll be like, I love fasting. I'm going to make a prediction right now, two, three years from now, we're going to be talking to you about fasting and you'll be like, I love it. I actually do think that intermittent fasting

is for everybody. It's just a matter of the degree, you know, at which people don't eat. You know, people waking up in the middle of the night is not a great idea. So if it's eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, I still think it's appropriate for people. I think it's very natural.

And so far, most of the stuff that you mentioned is very natural. You know, striving to prioritize protein, eating vegetables, eating fruit. These are all natural things that are available to us. And I would put fasting in the same category. But when you were talking earlier about some of the things that you like to prioritize, you said protein, you like one gram kind of per pound. Then you mentioned five servings of vegetables. That's a pretty hefty serving of vegetables. And you also mentioned fruit. What are some other kind of your top five, top seven strategies in your kind of nutrition planning for a person well the first of all as i said before

protein um your vegetables should be kind of the main things and starchy carbohydrates over simple carbohydrates i pretty much that's what i sort of the basic things I really prioritize and really figuring out what, what, what are your certain staples that you can choose to stick with. Um, I don't like to have like way too much variety, uh, or including too many hedonic foods in my diet because that just mess up with my structure. Can we talk more about that? I like this topic. What are like maybe the five to seven foods that you would like to stick with? For example, for the most part, I like to choose three to four lean proteins that I would stick with. That would be eggs, whole eggs or egg whites and eggs. I would choose both of them to kind of control the calorie intake.

But I never sort of throw out the joke. I keep it there. So I have the eggs, chicken, fish. Every second or every three days, I will have just like a very lean cut of meat. So stick with that. Just very basic. Most of the time, very, very like unprocessed foods for the most part, like just getting to the butcher and getting it done.

And vegetables, pretty much I stick with some of the similar similar the ones i would eat most of the time i'm very lazy as well so i try to keep it simple for myself uh so i'll have like zucchini uh cauliflower uh broccoli uh cabbage or like these bags that you buy pre-made in the supermarket that they're just ready to eat. So I'll eat that. And at the same time, for me, I would do the same with carbohydrates. So I'll have potatoes. That would be kind of my main one. I'll have sometimes pasta, but very, very rare.

And sometimes I do have my my wraps so a whole grain wrap or something like that that's my main staple carbohydrates i i generally don't eat anything else because i said again i like the consistency and the basics i could have more if i wanted to but i think having some level of a structure and some of your staples makes it easier just to play around with those and create different recipes within your own same ingredients and same staples. shape i think we all eat like not that we all eat similar stuff amongst each other but individually that we have like five to seven foods that we probably stick to pretty religiously i agree but i'm going to back to your topic of intermittent fasting fasting depending on what your concept of for you fasting is i think definitely 10 or 12 hours of not eating uh is healthy uh between the last time you eat at night until the morning and but if you consider that it's fair enough and that's fair to

say that 10 or 12 hours but not eating is healthy i do that so it's not all right well you didn't come around look at that yeah but i wouldn't go i wouldn't go like oh i have to wait 16 hours and counted by the clock and then i eat because that that never worked for me but i do like i used to have issues with um eating waking up in the middle of the night and eating and that was affecting my the quality of my sleep but it was something that I developed as a bad habit and when you realize is you train your gut to be hungry when you decide you want to be hungry so you can retrain it and this and when I was waking up at night I said I'm not very I'm not really hungry this is a habit I have to stop doing this and the moment I realized that I was doing that because I have it I really wasn't starving everything changed and I stopped eating in the middle of

the night and I was sleeping my full hours and I was not eating anymore at night. But at the same time, an issue with that was that was happening in the period I was restricting all of my calories. I had my eating disorder and I was lacking of energy. I was training three hours a day. So I wasn't getting enough and my body was like, I need food. So whatever excuse my body had to sort of recreate or add an additional opportunity to eat more calories, that would be perfectly fine to incorporate it. So it was when I started fixing my relationship with food and my nutrition overall and my exercise, when everything came to a much balanced and better place is when I

realized that eating in the middle of the night wasn't the right thing. But the cost cost apart from being a habit that I developed, it was that I was not eating enough and I was not having an adequate eating pattern that I needed to fix. So eating in the middle of the night is not just about just one thing. You have to look at the full picture again and what is happening the rest of your day. Are you restricting foods that you probably end up binging anyway? Because what I was eating in the middle of the night was everything that I would restrict during the day, especially carbohydrates. I would eat bread. I would eat things that I would just not allow myself to have. things that I would just not allow myself to have.

So at the end of the day, was that worth it? Not really, because you end up being in those at the same time. So, yeah, it is a matter of really scrutinizing and looking at your diet, your relationship with food, what is happening with your exercise and your different behaviors and thought patterns. And when you start realizing that you can fix that and improve that, then yeah, like everything else is going to fall into a better place. Yeah.

The one thing that's really interesting about all of this is like with, you know, with what you were doing or what happened in the past with you, you were coming from a place where you weren't eating enough and then you had to get yourself to a place where you were eating enough consistently. You know, um, I think both of us are coming in from a place where we were eating a lot, like all the time, too much. So we needed to train ourself not to respond to that all the time and not be absolute gluttonous pigs to every single pump of hunger. And that's how we came across this too. And I also do want to mention too, like when we talk

about a lot of fasting and stuff, we mentioned how it's beneficial, but it's not something where it has to be 20 hours. If it's not 20 hours, you didn't meet your autophagy levels and you're failing. You know what I mean? It's not like that. And even be 20 hours. If it's not 20 hours, you didn't meet your autophagy levels and you're failing. You know what I mean? It's not like that. And even like myself, I don't fast every day. I usually do that five times a week, maybe some weeks, six times. But like if somebody wants to go out and get breakfast, I have no problem not fasting on

that day and just eating my calories throughout the day. It just, I think the big thing, and when we had Alan Aragon on, we had a big talk about the behavioral benefits. It changed our behaviors as far as our responses to hunger. So we're not just like, ha, ha, ha, always responding to it. We now have some control over that. We can eat whenever we want without it affecting our mood, making me angry, making me anxious because I haven't had my meal. I think that's the big thing that we found before it.

I found that that's completely right. That's what I do now. I really honor my hunger. It's 9 a.m. and I generally haven't eaten until like 10. I don't eat until like 10 a.m. when I have sort of done the things I have to do, a few things. And then I sort of go and have some time to really relax and have my breakfast without rush. So it's not like I have to eat at a specific time.

And, yeah, it's like you might be honoring your hunger and allowing yourself to sort of respect when is the right time. Sometimes, though, because I do work in a hospital, there's no way that I will not eat something and then I starve the rest of the day in the hospital. I just won't function. And I don't eat. When I'm in my normal job in hospital, I work in, like, I would have breakfast, like, around 8, 30. I start work at 10. And then I pretty much fast because I don't eat for my whole shift. And then I eat when I come back home. So I see everyone picking and eating chocolates and everything and I just pretty much fasting and drinking water throughout my whole shift until

I get home and I have my own meal. I can't control my ingredients. I enjoy my food. So I don't know if you would call that intermittent fasting in a way, but I do have like my own shift is about six and a half hours. And in that full period, I wouldn't eat anything until I get home and I just have my food. Then I prepare. I use that as my main meal. Lunch would be like at 4, 4 PM. Then I go to the gym, do my sessions, training, and then I come back and I eat around 9 PM.

And then I don't eat anything else until the next day. So it's like, I really eat three meals a day for the most part. You know, I'm really curious about this too. As far as the supplementation, since you work with a lot of female clients, if there's anything I've found, it's I have friends and my mom was too. And it's just like, I feel like there's been a trend that I've seen like quite a few women that I know have been anemic. So either they needed to get more iron through their diet or they needed to supplement it because they got their blood work done. They found that out. Now we work with a blood work done. They found that out. Now, we work at the blood work company. That's pretty great, Merrick Health.

And we always tell our listeners to go there and get your blood work done to see if you have any deficiencies. But with working with as many women as you have worked with, have you found that there's certain supplements that they should maybe think about taking that men maybe don't need to think about taking as much? I'm not a very fan of supplements, to be honest. I think it is very individual depending on specific deficiencies or so on. So every time I get a client on board, I will have a discussion about have you had a blood work done before um is it something that you've done

recently and try to explore specific deficiencies or concerns if there is any um and i always ask about current supplementation before they were working with me for the most part generally i don't recommend uh there's nothing like as an entry level that you have to take this or these other supplements. If you don't have any deficiencies, you don't need to supplement as long as we fix your diet if your diet is actually not great. and the foods that are they eating, if we're adding adequate amount of protein, we're adding adequate amount of sources for different sources of iron and minerals, micronutrients, if we make your diet quite nutrient dense, my concerns about supplements are really low because you may be getting most of the things from your diet if you're in a dieting phase where

your calories and your energy availability is quite low uh for a specific period of time supplementing with a multivitamin omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin d might be an option something perhaps uh positive but it's going to be case by case basis. Nothing that is necessarily going to be strictly required. I am very in love is with whey protein. I find that it's a very convenient and useful supplement that I, I see it more as a food that actual supplement, to be honest. And I, I sort of use it for different recipes and to add just extra

protein I don't have much issues with getting my protein goals I actually struggle to keep it low because every time I sort of tracking my calories I go over my calories by 80 grams always under eating carbohydrates and fats, but always over eating protein. So I have no issues with that. But for my clients generally that struggle to get protein, having a whey protein supplement is a very useful tool to help them. Thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. And thanks for all those amazing infographics that you put up. We all love watching your Instagram to be able to learn a lot because we're like, and Seema pointed out earlier, we're pretty simple. And so we respond pretty good to some pictures.

So thanks for putting that together. Where can people find you? You can find me on Instagram at anti-diet underscore dietitian that's my my main place where i am um you can find me at um astreet-dietitian.com which is my website and in my youtube channel which is so small is growing is getting there uh with i have had quite a few interviews and conversations with so many great people in the fitness industry and research that i love that people can go there and have a look at all the great information i subscribe to do that oh thank you so i will continue to do that um as i as much as i can and yeah continue to fight a good fight for everyone on the nutrition realm and fitness industry so thank you so so much for having me guys what about tiktok you got any tiktok going on i do but not as often i should be doing more than more often but i do give her

the pitch on tiktok tell her what she's got to do over there at least give her something uh i'll send you a whole thing i'll send you you know it's like it's it's lit over there there's a lot of you'll grow quick oh yeah yeah i just need to do a dance yeah yeah just like hey that was good to start not bad hit them with it you know i love it i love it and then you you also have information in spanish too right because you have a whole instagram account as well how about like for youtube and stuff oh yes i do have a um an instagram page in s in spanish um it's called at to coach to coach nutritional to coach nutritional but it's in spanish yeah awesome thanks again have a great rest of your day see you later thank you

thank you so much guys thank you bye hell yeah wow that was great no we learned a lot all the way out there in australia huh yeah first time i ever heard somebody with the spanish slash australian accent i was listening to that and i was like wait is she like where's the uh like i'm hearing some aussie stuff here what's that coming from and then yeah that's the first time i've heard of spanish and australian because like certain things were like whoa that's and then she was from somewhere else too she's venezuela right so yeah the whole mix of things going on over there is that's where steph cohen's from or my way off sometimes i'm really yeah no she's from she's from venezuela i believe if not then we're thinking about a different stuff.

Most of the time, I don't know what I'm talking about. Venezuela's producing some jacked women. Yeah, no kidding, right? Yeah, that was some great information. I'm glad we could just bully her into admitting that fasting was... She's like, I better just admit that fasting is pretty dope. Otherwise, these guys are going to keep me on the line here forever. These bros are just never going to stop harassing me. me lane's gonna watch this and then call us a zealots

well we can always fast exalates always hold it over his head hey one of your coaches is fasting i i do legitimately think it's a good practice for people to spend four or five hours every single day just just not eating. Um, that might end up being like intermittent fasting and depending on how you look at it, but just a couple waking hours every day, just not eating. I love what she said about work because so many people make poor decisions at work and they're kind of picking at this and picking at that. And you get so hungry. Uh, I, you know, I don't know the exact kind of work that she does, but like and you get so hungry uh you know i don't know the exact kind of work that she does but like when you get in a work mode and you're doing a bunch of shit man you're you're not gonna you're

most likely not gonna make a good decision then that would mean that you'd have to prep your meals and you got to bring them with you you got to make sure they're fresh you got to keep them in the fridge or whatever and it's just it could just be a nightmare it's easier just not to eat so she eats in the morning before she goes to work and then she eats after her shifts over at home again. I think that's a great strategy and I wish more people would employ that. You know, so this is one thing I know. I know that not every diet is for everybody. Keto is not for everybody.

Carnivore is not for everybody. Whatever. I get that. I get that. The one thing, though, that I do think is like when you mentioned that fasting's for everybody like when you when you think about it man like the idea you know we're we're in a place where like you can get food all the time and we're used to that and that's why i think it's it's so important to realize that when you grow up eating a certain way it's going to be kind of hard to maybe potentially break out of that pattern that's why i made sure like like it wasn't easy for me to

to stop eating in that way to always respond, but it's going to take a little bit of work to do that. I think that it does bring some control and it's definitely the behavioral benefits that I like the most. I don't like, I'm not, it's, it's the behavioral benefits. I'm not always responding to hunger. I think it's a good idea just as a human being to like walk it back every once in a while and say, how do I walk myself back to being like animalistic a little bit? Like, you know, we are that way, you know, and how do we do things a little bit more naturally here and there? I'm not saying all the time because, you know, I still got a refrigerator full of food and a freezer full of food and I still love my conveniences. I still have, you know, an Apple phone and have an Apple phone and I love all the modern stuff. Is it a good idea to fast away from social media for a little while?

That sounds great to do that, to put your phone away a couple hours each day so you can concentrate on other things and be present in the moment, all those great things. I think that makes a lot of sense. Does it make sense that we have such have such a problem with food uh you know the united states was the fattest country i think uh mexico has kind of taken that rain from us hopefully we can make a comeback um congratulations andrew yeah we'll take it i'll drink all right number one. But like it's impacting the entire world now. England, like England has put taxes on certain types of food. They tried to, you know, make regulations on certain types of food. Australia is getting fat.

Like it's, you know, obesity is running rampant and it's growing more and more. And so what's a good way for people to still enjoy some of the foods that we really like uh but yet um you know be on track enough to where you're not gaining so much weight that you're um uh that you're um inviting disease and viruses and various other things a great way to ensure that those things happen less or happen to you later on in life is to, you know, maybe just fucking chill out a bit and, you know, distance yourself from eating a little bit here and there. A little social distancing from food.

Yeah. And I was just going to say, like, what you were talking about with social media, like, without being, like, malicious, like, what in our lives would it not be beneficial to fast from like i mean literally everything is like we you know like oh i got i have to work my job every day like well yeah but you work your ass off for that vacation right to fast away from it here we go the ac clicked on so the wind pushed it a A little more of an arc. Go a little higher. Let's go. I got this.

I got this. Why am I so bad at this, bro? There's like tons of stuff over there. There's nothing in there. It's becoming like, I know, but it's all on the outside. Everything around the trash can. It's like a naked gun skit or something, you know? It's like there's just tons of stuff on the...

I will say this. This is going to be risky. Okay. I'll be fine. Preface what I'm about to say with there. There is no misogyny coming from this statement. Um, just because I feel like this is an episode that there's going to be quite a

few female listeners. Um, and some that maybe haven't gotten to lifting. Like, I think that I can say this safely since I'm not married and I am single. So this is totally safe for me to say one of the muscle are attractive because like, like there, there's like,

you could see that that individual has put a lot of work into their body. I think that a lot of like a lot of people find men with some muscle or muscle attractive because it shows that they've, you know, their body is strong, their body has use. And that's the same thing with women that have muscle on their frame. That's as attractive.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that saying that at all. Uh, I think it's great too. Um, I also don't think that, you know, maybe there's some people that, uh,

love when someone's super skinny. Um, yeah, yeah. There's nothing wrong with that either. Maybe people, maybe people dig that, but,

um, you know, I personally like that but um you know i personally like uh you know like i don't i don't think anyone needs to like shoot for perfection if they're trying to be sexy and attractive and remember what she said and remember and seamus shared his story i had the same thing happen to me when i competed in bodybuilding you're trying to make yourself i think you're trying to make yourself like more attractive or have this cooler look or whatever the hell it is. Who the hell knows what we're after? This aesthetic look that everyone's going to go, oh, fuck, that's a, you know, that's a great physique, right? You think that people are going to be like sweating it or whatever, and maybe they do,

but then you can't do nothing with it. So you make yourself sexier, but yet you can't have sex and cheat and you don't even want it. It's like the last thing on your fucking list. You just want food. Yeah, it's a's a lot seriously you just want to survive you want to eat food that's it's really weird the tunnel vision that you get is kind of cool like actually part of that is kind of neat uh but you end up in a really weird spot where you just don't give a fuck about anything else i don't know and like you can even get negative and stuff.

It's a really weird and trippy place to be in, and I didn't even diet for that long. So if I would have dieted longer, I probably would have went insane. I didn't run into binging, and I didn't run into any of that, because it was short. So I was like, oh, it's only a couple weeks.

It's not going to be that bad. But anyway, I think that sometimes people are, you know, they're continually trying to lose weight, lose weight, lose weight. And I don't, I don't really always think that that needs to be the, that's a decent goal if you are heavier. And if you are, you know, kind of admitting like, oh shit, like I gained a lot of weight from, you know, from years ago from, uh, you know, my high school weight is way different than what I weigh now. And you're 50 pounds overweight. Yeah.

Probably a good idea to lose some weight, but, uh, you know, try P there's a lot of people that are just like on this mission to like get skinny. And, uh, I don't, I personally don't find it attractive. I know some people do, but I don't really care about someone getting like super skinny. I was in the hot tub the other day with my wife. Can I get a hangout? Hangout. My wife is sitting there with like her arms like back up on the like her elbows behind her resting on the I guess like the side of the hot tub, you know?

Yeah. And she's just talking and she's just talking she's just rambling on about whatever and I just started laughing she's like what the fuck are you laughing at you know sometimes I just look at her I'm just like you're hot I'm sorry I didn't hear a fucking thing you said and she gets so pissed at me

but I started laughing she's like what is it now I was like your shoulders are fucking jacked I was like cause she's like, what is it now? You know, I was like, your shoulders are fucking jacked. I was like, your shoulders, like, because she's been a swimmer her whole life. I'm like, your shoulders look crazy right now. And you're sitting there just like spouting off about something. I'm like, I didn't hear one word you said. I'm just following her shoulders, you know, bouncing everywhere.

Amen. That's awesome. That's real. Like, that's real. You know, so. Ladies, get in the gym. Eat some protein, read high five mm-hmm here we go i liked a lot of those rules though they were pretty simple grandma protein per pound of body weight she seemed to be very uh much into a lot of ted naman's work where it was like hey you know uh in terms of energy you know where do you want to have

your energy from it can just be a preference you know, in terms of energy, you know, where do you want to have your energy from? It can just be a preference. You can split the difference between the two. You can have carbs and fat if you want, but you, you know, want to make sure both of them aren't high. Or you can go the route of choosing, you know, more fat, and you can bring the fat up a bit. Or you can choose the route of going more carb, and you bring the carbs up a bit. But again, just, you know, make sure that you kind of figure out a way to kind of balance those things out. But great recommendations, great information.

Andrew, take us on out of here. I will. So our last two previous guests have been talking about all the benefits of protein. And one source of our favorite protein comes from Piedmontese beef. So make sure you guys check out the description for links to Piedmontese and use promo code PowerProject for 25% off your entire order. Follow the podcast at MarkBell's

PowerProject on Instagram at MBPowerProject on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ and Simo. Or is it JohnClaudeVanDaddy? What did our guest call him yesterday? I forget what it was. I don't know what Alan called me. A couple things. Need something or I forget what he... Daddy what did our guest call him yesterday?

Called me a couple things need something or I forget forgot damn it Something like way different. Yeah, yeah He almost called me nip. He was like nibs. Oh, yeah He called you yet. He called me Nibs EME or something like that, but I was like just call me nipsey he called you yeah he called me nibsime or something like that but i was like all right just call me nipsey because like nipsey hustle um yeah i was surprised that alan was having such problems with my name and i'm like come on alan and then he was like you're like half filipino like what's going on yeah the chinese last name thing killed me i'm

just happy he said it sema in yang on instagram youtube, YouTube, and Seema Inyang on TikTok and Twitter. And you can also call me Jean-Claude Van Daddy if you feel like it, Mark. Did you eat any vegetables yesterday, young man? Mark? Did you eat any vegetables? Are you trying to get cancer over there? What is going on? I ate none.

I'm sorry. Jesus Christ, you're a mess over there. And that is right where both sides go to if somebody is against eating me and someone's against eating just vegetables they always say have fun with that ass cancer like why do you guys go there first that's and why the ass yeah i don't know what that's all about but that's where like that's so have fun in SEMA. What's my name, Andrew?

Jean-Claude Van Daddy. There we go. My wife made some broccoli last night, and I just was looking at it, and I'm like, I should eat at least a little bit of that broccoli. And then I was like, nah. Sounds like a terrible idea. God dang it. I didn't eat it.

If it's made for me, I got some work to do i'll eat it like if somebody puts it on my plate but the thing is is like for some reason i never put it on my plate so it's just it's problematic i do eat green beans here and there at least yeah not too bad i had broccoli i think they're called sweet peas and some green something. I think they're called sweet peas. The dissonance between you and carrots. I think green beans are just like also in a you can just get them in like a can, right? You can. Yeah.

They're like stringy looking ones. They have like it's not like edamame, but it's like people are listening. Those are string beans. Those are string beans. Yeah. I remember when I used to eat? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I used to eat asparagus.

Wow. I can't believe I actually used to eat asparagus. I don't miss asparagus. It's weird, right? My wife still likes it. 2015, man. Why does it make your pee stink so bad? It's so bad.

Oh, God. Horrible. Horrible. Especially if you forget that you ate it the day before and you go pee. And you don't drink enough water. Oh, my God. If you don't drink enough water. I got a UTI or something.

What? Why does it smell so bad? Oh, oh wait that's right asparagus asparagus why so profound it's so gross joel green will tell us why he will all right strength is never weak this week this is never strength i'm at mark smelly bell catch you guys later