Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 624 - Eat More Move More - Fixing Your Metabolism ft. Dr. Jade Teta

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Jade Teta is an integrative physician specializing in natural health, fitness and body transformation. He is the co-author of The Metabolic Effect Diet. He completed his undergraduate training at North Carolina State University, earning a bachelors of science in biochemistry. Jade's Book, "Lose Weight Here: The Metabolic Secret to Target Stubborn Fat and Fix Your Problem Areas" available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3kFpmDx Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Vertical Diet Meals: https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for free shipping and two free meals + a Kooler Sport when you order 16 meals or more! ➢Vuori Performance Apparel: Visit https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order! ➢Magic Spoon Cereal: Visit https://www.magicspoon.com/powerproject to automatically save $5 off a variety pack! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢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! ➢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 Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast 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

Hit the purple button. All right, the purple button. And then, Seema, just point it more towards your... There, you're good. Sorry, because a second ago, it was like up your nose. Okay. Is this good? Yeah, that's great.

Okay. Sorry. Why did that get weird? It's like, I don't want it. I don't want it. Yeah, get it on this cheek and on this cheek and then down the middle. What's going on with these mics? These mics...

I know, they need like a little ribbing here. I'm pretty sure I can make that happen. Whatever this extra thing is back here. Just uncircumcised mics. Yeah, right? Sir, you're going to have to grab the mic with both hands and push it down to activate when you talk.

There we go. Right there? That would be dope. Yeah, you push down the skin of the microphone. That's actually the only way to get it to hit the sound, right? Yeah, to get the sound. It's like, right now you can't hear me, but then all of a sudden it's like, hey guys, what's going on? Yeah, right?

You push it down. hear me but then all of a sudden it's like hey guys what's yeah you push it down i remember on stern one time they were like talking about how their dicks would sound if their dick could talk that was pretty damn good how would it's like your dick talking like gilbert godfrey is it like barry white or oh god hello everybody a little cold out there today like wow i wasn't expecting that voice to come out of there i think the initial sound of my dick would be kind of like a higher pitch tone and maybe a little bit like mike tyson a little bit like mike tyson and then a little angry yeah yeah and then it would get deeper after a while. When the mood's right. He's tired today, guys. He's a grower.

He's a grower. Ah, got it. So his voice would get deeper. Ah, I see. Yeah. Deeper as he goes deeper. I don't know. These are thick mics, though.

Are we on? Yeah. How y'all like the new studio? I love it. It was fun, man. Was it hard, Andrew, to set all this shit up? I'm going to say no no but not like a like a dickhead who acts like he knows what he's doing he got 10 minutes of help from me and that kind

of solved everything yeah really well i mean i don't mind dude it's one of those things like you can't like like in sema what are you gonna do like when there's like one ladder and i'm up in the ceiling like there's you just can't you know i could give you moral support i can encourage you yeah well actually i did have somebody had like you know hand me like whatever like those like pliers or whatever but no it was not too bad because i had to dismantle one studio and then just put it all in here what a powerful word that is just man it is if i if i had to start from scratch like that would have been that would have been that would have been tough you know it would have been tough just like the last one but this one like i i put like i kind of dumped everything

down like i put notes on everything so like i unplugged something i grabbed some tape i wrote down what the fuck that to and from came from and then moved it over here and just kind of did it slowly so monday i took everything down uh yeah i took everything down as far as like audio and then the next day was all video and then i put together audio and then i put together video and so by friday and sema and i were recording uh some some stuff in here so no it wasn't too bad but you know it's cool that it took a week you know it just took my time i didn't rush anything because I'm like, man, I could try to speed things up, but then I might end up with the worst headache that's going to put me back further. It looks great.

Yeah. I dig it. And guys, just wait up because there's more coming into the studio. There's going to be a bunch of stuff. So this is just stage one. I think we should get a little collage of some pictures when we were little. Put something like that together for each one of us and then just stick it somewhere on these walls or something. We'll do that.

That'd be sick. That'd be sick. So speaking of dismantling, you were dismantling some people. Dismantling some folks. You got into a jujitsu battle. Got into a little fight this past week in Vegas. That's not like you, bro. Yeah, I know, man.

Some of these motherfuckers, they just step to me too much. You're usually calmer than that. Yeah, no. The tournament went well. It was Jiu-Jitsu Con. Masters Worlds was going at the same time. Casio won Masters Worlds. Again?

Yeah. Yeah. So he's like, honestly, I think this is like, he's won over 10 or 12 or 13 Masters Worlds. He's also won the normal World Championships back in 2002 when he was just like 20-something. But then he just went, he's been wrecking Masters Worlds every year. I don't think he's ever lost a Masters Worlds. When you're at that level, I mean, is he still able to, I imagine he's going against other people that are really good. Is there still a lot of tapping out that happens?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of submissions. That's interesting. Because either people can win by submissions or, like, you know, points or whatever. I guess you're both going for it, though, right? So then you end up in a shit position sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? Yeah, and, man, Casio, it's funny because when he rolls, it's pretty much the stuff that he shows in class, I think he purposefully goes on to that. He's like, here. He, like, here. He shows. It's literally like maybe the stuff he was showing the week before. And he'll tap his opponents in that way.

Such a methodical fashion. I love when a coach shows you something, and they're kind of talking real calm. They're like, do you want to go? And you're like, what? You've never seen anybody move that fast or ever felt anything that powerful in your life? And you're like, they just completely knocked the wind out of me. I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to pretend that it didn't hurt at all.

Yeah. It's probably that kind of shit from him, especially when you were just starting out. It is. Yeah. He's really fucking good. I'm happy that I have him as a coach. But yeah, the tournament went well. I had seven matches.

I won my division ultra heavyweights. And then I also I got second in the absolute division. So seven matches. I won my division ultra heavyweights. And then I also, I got second in the absolute division. So seven matches, I submitted six of them, lost the last one by one advantage. So neither of us scored points on each other, but he had an advantage. So zero and zero, zero, zero, zero. But the cool thing, I was telling you this before the last tournament I went to, there was this guy higher in Gracie. He's out of all the purple belts. He's the top ranked purple belt. So I managed to tap him in that tournament. And in this tournament, the second-ranked purple belt out of literally all the purple

belts in IBJJF, he was in my absolute bracket. And I tapped him. And he didn't score any points. I scored like 14 points on him before I tapped him. So I'm feeling good going into next month for Worlds. I'm feeling really good. What do you think's the difference? What do you think's making everything come together?

You think it's kind of a culmination of it sounds like your training's going good. I know the implementation of the knees over toes stuff. And obviously your nutrition is always damn good. So what do you think it is? It's just everything may be kind of all melding together now. Yeah, I'm healthy. I've been able to get, like I got a competition earlier in Atlanta. So I've been able to get some dust off and things are just like clicking more. And you know, the weird thing. I used to be training jujitsu, like six days a week. Now, partially because things are a bit busier, but now I'm training three to four times a week, usually four times a week in terms of jujitsu. But it's weird because I feel like the less frequency I have, the faster I progress. And it's like it's like if I train, I've noticed that if I train too often, when I when I get stuck in like doing the same stuff.

But when I have some time in between each training session, it's like I come back and I'm doing something new. And I've like I noticed this a few years back., but I'm like, this doesn't make sense. But I've been noticing it a lot. Like now I'm doing just doing stuff that I don't usually do, thinking in different ways because I have time to think a little bit between sessions. It's weird. When you're not going to do jiu-jitsu, because I know you got banged up a couple times here or there and you had to take some small breaks. Your mind is probably still on jiu-jitsu very much, and you're probably still watching videos and paying attention to what's going on, right? Yeah, yeah.

I still watch matches and stuff from people or black belts that I guess I try to emulate. So I still watch stuff. But I do a lot of outs. I think one interesting thing is the animal flow stuff. I think that's actually helped my general movement in jujitsu. Just like just moving around. That's actually been pretty useful. I've noticed in terms of movements that I do on the mat.

So just a bunch of new stuff that we've been learning from the podcast. You know, I think it's been useful. You know what? It's I mean, having Apollo here and having him show us some of the Animal Flow stuff was amazing along with his – Hannah. Along with Hannah, his beautifully hot wife.

It was great having both of them here showing us everything. But I think what it goes to show you is, I mean, if you were to roll with someone like Paulo and he just kind of like flowed with some of that stuff he was doing you as a jujitsu practitioner especially if you're newer you're like i don't i don't really know what the fuck this guy's trying to do uh-huh and so somebody like coming at you with like a fucking cartwheel or something while it seems like the dumbest thing you could ever do yeah uh one of anderson silva's famous matches that he lost was like some dude got him in like a flying knee bar he like just jumped into some weird position and like got him in this leg lock that no one has ever really seen before very rarely have seen you know it's something that

cred and cheers people didn't think that you could uh people didn't think that you could like get somebody in that particular move like during an actual match yeah it's like one of those deals so i think the other thing too is i think that it's fun if you're having fun with it that's got to make a big difference too right yeah no man it's um i'm really happy that i started it was cool meeting some people that actually watched the show like there was a guy fuck he's been watching the Power Project for like two years. He used to be 290, and now he's 220, and the dude is jacked. And he's been watching the show for a minute. He learned about losing weight from the stuff we've mentioned. Shit, we've got to hold up on how much info we give out, right?

Because what if you're one of these guys in a match? Hey, I watch your show, and then he fucks me up. Hey, I learned about Piedmontese and everything from you guys. That's how I lost weight. That's how I did this, how I did that. Did you eat much Piedmontese out there from you guys. That's how I lost weight. That's how I did this, how I did that. Did you eat much Piedmontese out there on your vacation? Yeah, how does that work? Man, I was Piedmontese-less out there.

But there is an area in Italy called, I mean, where these actual cows come from. These jack cows come from there, yeah. I don't know what it's called. Piedmont. Belgian, but it's actually called Piedmont. Yeah, the area, area yeah the region i get always super confused on the piedmontese like origin but i think that piedmont i believe is an area in italy i could be saying that wrong it could just be piedmontese but

anyway no i i was uh enjoying all kinds of foods while i was out there but i didn't have like my normal regimen i actually kind of think that that's why I got a cold. I normally have my vitamin D and I was just like, you know what? I just want to forget about all this shit and just try to be a normal-ish person for a while. I tried that

and it didn't work very well. I'm glad to be back with a refrigerator and freezer full of Piedmontese beef. Yeah. I'm happy to be back with a refrigerator and a freezer full of Piedmontese beef. Yeah, that's, I, I'm, I'm happy because I get to eat it every day and I still do. And it's so fucking good. I gave some to a friend the other day and I think she's on prep or she's going

to be prepping, but she's actually able to use it because like even the, the sirloin filet, the flat iron, right? They're really good cuts of beef, but per serving, it's like minimal fat and a lot of protein. So she can still eat. Usually she's eating chicken and like turkey, but now she can actually have some beef on prep. Yeah.

It makes it tough for people. They sometimes some steaks and stuff are too calorically dense. Yeah. And it passes the family test. My family gets fired up whenever I'm cooking some Piedmontese. And you guys got to take advantage of this. Head over to piedmontese.com. It's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E dot com.

At checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $150 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes I'm excited for today we get to talk to Jade Tita and hopefully we can get some more great information on some things that happen to people when they're dieting you know sometimes people take it a little too far with the amount of output that they have and with the not giving themselves enough input in terms of the overall calories that they're consuming. And we've had many women on the show and we've seen many women talk about this more recently on the Internet about the difficulties of having like a menstrual cycle and some women suffering from, uh, is it PCOS or am I, it

was PS. PCOS. Yeah. I might be getting that all backwards and weird, but right. But it's something that happens, uh, fairly commonly and you're hearing more people talk about it more often. And so, uh, hopefully we can get to the bottom of some of these things today. Yeah.

When I was going through a lot of his content, cause guys, you should check out his YouTube channel. He posts some cool stuff on Instagram, but his YouTube channel is where his podcast is and all his info is. He's gotten a lot of really cool people on his show. And he tackles some really cool topics. It looks like a great resource for learning some good habits on dieting for yourself. And also, if you're a woman, a lot of his content, he's gotten a lot of women on. So he has a lot of good information for like

dealing with, you know, dieting different things. Like cause once someone lose their hair when they're dieting too hard, um, obviously there's the loss of the period, there's general fatigue. It's like, it can get pretty tough. So he has a lot of good info on that. A lot of men will have libido issues. I'm sure it's probably not great for your testosterone. I'm sure it's probably bad in general for everyone in terms of like what it does to your growth hormone. And then there's also just like a rebound effect, right? Your body, you were kind of starving your body for a long period of time. Now you are potentially lowering your metabolic rate because you are most likely losing muscle as well if you are somebody that's not eating enough and putting in a lot of exercise for too long of a period of time. And so you're kind of like making yourself a little bit of skinny fat, right? And then when you go to eat again, your body might not be able to burn off the 2,500 calories that it used to be able to burn off with no problem but you lost a little bit of muscle mass uh in your effort you know it was all it was all a uh well intended but it doesn't matter whether it's well intended or not the human body is pretty complicated and if you take away too

much from it it will make you pay the price somewhere a lot of people go through that with contest prep i've i went through like when i was dieting really hard a few years ago, 2015 or whatever. Test was low. My fats were low. I was generally fatigued. I wasn't like that's what happens when you're dieting. It can be counterbalanced though. But a lot of people that are prepping men and women, some of them just prep too hard.

You know, they don't give themselves enough time on the prep. So they crash diet. Everything goes out of whack. It's just it's not a good experience for many, so. And some think they can get past it with a hormone replacement, but you can't. You can't. The body is just, I don't know what the deal is with the damn thing, but it's the smartest thing that we've ever seen, really. Like the human body, the way that it acts and reacts to the different things that we give it and the different things that we do to it um even when i was getting

ready for my bodybuilding show even though i had a lot of testosterone in my body i didn't have any libido like i didn't have no interest in sex for like maybe a few weeks which is like just really rare for me i'm normally uh pretty excited about that kind of stuff and at that at that time like it wasn't even like it was just didn't hit me as a thought at all yeah which which actually was kind of nice because then i was able to get like more shit done rather than worrying about my dick all the time but in general you don't you don't want that shit to happen to you oh god i was explaining uh consuming enough fat per day to my nephews because my nephews are they're getting they're gonna be

jacked very soon they're gonna kick my ass um taught him some biomechanics stuff and you know my my nephew that one that like spearheaded the whole thing i i mean i don't know he kind of started back when we had lane norton on remember Remember I was asking about like him having protein. So he was like over 200 pounds and he's lost 20 pounds and he's like loving lifting, but he's like, you know, the diet's the hardest part. I'm like, well, you've come a long way because like, I barely learned that in like, like my thirties. And I was explaining like, but just make sure you're getting in enough fat, but like, you know, keep your calories at a certain level, blah, blah, all this and that. I'm explaining like but just make sure you're getting in enough fat but like you know keep your calories at a certain level blah blah all this and that I'm like but also don't worry about any of it just make sure you're getting enough fat and enough protein oh yeah everything

else will take care of itself don't worry about you know I eventually clarified I was like don't worry about the calories right now you just need to keep eating protein but make sure the fat's up and he's like oh well why and I'm like well your dick's not gonna work if you don't get enough and he's like what I heard like I heard that yeah I'm like, well, your dick's not going to work if you don't get enough. And he's like, what? I heard that. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's the last time I had to explain why. So I thought that was pretty funny. But yeah, no, he's doing great, man.

That's so cool. How old is he? I don't know, man. He's a teenager. Later-ish teens, 15, 16, 17. Not 18, I don't think. What was that hike that you went on? Oh. Was that here or was that wherever that you went on oh was that here was that uh wherever

you traveled to that was that was close to here it went through uh soper and carlos um it was to alamir falls alamir falls is i've done that hike back back in like 2017 but it's a really nice hike it's close to the bay area um fucking beautiful waterfall at the end and we got lost initially we passed it it's weird because that's weird scary yeah yeah because we didn't get lost but we just went too far down because the falls are literally like you're going down the hike and it's like this little bush opening that if you if you don't know that that's the bush opening you're going to miss the waterfall and it's like it's it's inconspicuous so you have to go through this small opening into this bush

and then it's like this dark trail covered by trees and then you open up into like a mountainside where then you go down and you see the waterfall it's dope you gotta do it the pictures look cool gotta get my ass out there i've been wanting to go on hikes but with the with the kiddo now i have to just the hikes have to be a little bit more flatter. You can't go climbing anywhere. Oh yeah, if you're trying to haul him around. I saw a lady with a baby on her back. Yeah, she had like a baby on her thing and the husband was like looking at me.

But she was like, she was trudging along with the baby. Maybe she didn't trust him with it. Oh, okay, maybe. Yeah, no, we did, I don't know. It's somewhere around here here we walked a trail and through rocks in a river american river maybe i don't know and i had him on my back and yeah

the little little guy gets pretty heavy after a couple yeah a couple of miles but it's yeah it's fun makes you start sweating oh yeah dude i had the um like this from the straps like just baked in sweat marks from there yeah by the way i mean the listeners don't know carlos he's he's uh he's this guy who came here he used to be a vegan and we got him on meat or mark got him on me but dude he was killing that hike oh that's great like he wasn't winded at all because it wasn't a super easy hike either but he was just he was he's fit yeah he was crushing it he was crushing it so remember while he was here, he was, he started getting into a little bit of lifting and he was able to knock out some pull-ups and he started getting stronger. And I'm not saying that like, I don't think a vegan diet can work because we've, I've

seen some people have it work and they compete in a hundred mile races and people lift and they do all kinds of stuff. I just think it's just challenging. That's all. And it makes it very difficult to try to figure out where to get your sources of protein from. But for a lot of people just adding in some sort of protein somewhere, uh, I think makes a lot of sense. Absolutely.

And it doesn't have to be for me. It doesn't have to be. Um, but it, if, if you get it from me, you might have a better time. It makes shit easier.

It makes it easier. How's our guest? Is he still waiting? Okay. Mr. Data. Something he mentioned that I thought was really useful. He mentions these kind of three things that he just thinks that just about anyone can incorporate, and they can have great results without having too much of an

intervention. And it's just drink more water. You hear that all the time, you know, make sure you're hydrated. I would even kind of say along with the water, just make sure you have, you know,

good electrolyte balance. So getting in some salt as well, and maybe even taking a product like element might be a great idea. Second thing is eat, eat more protein or just make sure you're eating enough protein, which would be approximately a gram per pound of body weight if you're somebody that exercises quite a bit. And then the last piece of that puzzle was fiber. And it's like, those are three things that for your average person, you know, maybe someone likes to be on a carnivore diet.

Maybe somebody's following this maniac, the liver king, and maybe they don't want to eat fibery things because maybe they have different beliefs or whatever. But for the general population, you start to incorporate more fiber, start to incorporate protein, and you drink good amount of water with every meal that you have. You're going to notice that your hunger is going to drop quite a bit, and hopefully you can stabilize some of those cravings too. No, I totally agree with him on the fiber thing. Funny thing is I don't eat barely any fiber at all anymore now. Um, but for someone who's trying to get into dieting, somebody's trying to control their hunger and their cravings, fiber is a massively helpful, massively beneficial. Um, and then when you maybe get a better understanding or maybe you get a better feel of eating. You can cut that. Whoa, this is, whoa. Who is that handsome hunk? Oh, yeah, we're both hairless now. Wait, what?

I shaved my beard for Halloween. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, wait, what are we talking about? I was like, Nseema, how'd you know? Yeah, don't worry. Well, the photoshoot. That's true.

Gotta talk about that on another day damn did these cameras just get better are they HD what's going on hey where's your face we only got a picture of you coming up hold on one sec

you guys doing good we're doing fantastic perfect got me you gotcha cool how's it going today doc what's going on boys good to see you you too yeah great to have you on the show today just to kind of uh kick things off i figured we'd just kind of uh roll right into it it seems'd just kind of roll right into it. It seems like from most of the stuff that I've seen from you, you have an approach to fitness, an approach to nutrition that's not really geared towards like a keto diet, a carnivore diet, a vegan diet. These different diets that we've seen kind of become more popular over the years. Some diets have kind of come and gone. It seems like a lot of the information you're putting forward is to just make sure people in their pursuit for having a better body, having a healthy body, that they understand that one of the key elements of nutrition or maybe the overarching

key element of nutrition is to make sure that it's nutritious. And I think that that might be a forgotten element is that if your nutrition is nutritious and it's starting to hit all these different points, such as getting in your macronutrients, getting in your micronutrients, and making sure the body is happy, satisfied, satiated, all those types of things. Maybe we don't have to be on some diet that's super restrictive. You know, there's no question. I mean, it's one of these things, right? We have a new fad diet every couple of years that we're all dealing with, all of us coaches. And to me, it's one of these things where each of us are individual. We really, the whole nutrition community has missed us. We are unique in our physiology. We are unique in our psychology. We're unique in our personal preferences and in our practical circumstances.

And therefore, really what we need to be doing in my mind is helping people understand what diet works for them. You know, one of the things I like to say is, you know, the metabolism is speaking to you all the time. The only problem is it doesn't speak English or Spanish or French, it speaks metabolism. And most people do not know how to speak that particular language. If you did, you would know and understand

what to be putting in your mouth, how to be exercising in a way that works with you rather than against you. So my approach is really one that says we need to stop being dieters, start being more like metabolic detectives, figure out what works for us. And that's going to be different for us three guys. It's going to be slightly different for each of us. Now, of course, there are things that we can teach people that kind of work for most people across the board. But there's going to be little slight tweaks here and there that make the big difference. And I think that's the way we should be approaching this. One person does keto and crashes and burns. The other person

does keto and gets fantastic results. One person does paleo, crashes and burns. Another person does it and gets fantastic results. This to me is the conversation we should be having. It's a more nuanced conversation. It's slightly more complex, this conversation, but it is the thing that works. And I think it's the only way that works. And actually, you know, one of the things that I love about Bruce Lee, the actor and the philosopher, is he has a quote that I love that I think really we should be using in nutrition. And it's, it goes like this, absorb what is useful, discard what is not add what is uniquely your own. Each human should be showing up to nutrition, health, and fitness in that way, in my opinion. Okay. So you mentioned some overarching themes when it comes

to dieting and things that work for most people, um your opinion, what would those things be to start off from there before we start getting more specific? Yeah. Well, let's talk about it, right? So from my perspective, if we talk about this idea, there's no such thing as magical fat burning foods, right? There's no such thing as a food you're going to eat that is going to magically make you burn fat. However, when we talk about metabolic foods or metabolic meals, they do have specific elements that can help you stay on a diet. Right. Because in my mind, we need two things for fat loss. We need calorie deficits and we need sustained calorie deficits. Right. So the calorie deficit part's kind of easy. Just eat less. The sustained parts are really tough. So how do we deal with that? To me, that's a hormonal conversation. So when we are eating, we should be eating foods that control hunger and cravings. So when I say hormones,

I don't mean estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. I mean things like ghrelin and leptin and insulin and cortisol and the incretins like GLP and GIP1. We need to control hunger and cravings. If we can't, we cannot sustain the calorie deficit. So to me, that's number one. So it needs to control hunger and cravings. Number two is it should be calorie sparse. Right. We want as much hunger suppression with the least amount of calories possible. suppression with the least amount of calories possible. So that's the second element. And to me, the third element is the element of we want a highly nutrient dense diet as well. So we have all the macronutrients and micronutrients so the metabolism can do its job. So from my perspective,

those are the three elements that we want. And when you look across the board, what would those foods be? Right. They would be things like what I call the five S's soups, salads, scrambles, shakes, stir fries, more specifically, low carb, low fat soups, salads, scrambles, shakes, and stir fries. Now there's nothing wrong with carbs and fat. It's just that when we start combining those, those are the ones with the most calories. So if we start with this idea of soup, salad, scramble, shakes, and stir fries, and then add enough, but not too much carbohydrates and fat based on our unique metabolic individuality, we're getting close to something that we can begin to use for most people in my mind. Instead of doing this very gimmicky in my mind, one size fits all approach, what works for me is supposed to work for everyone. And the three of us

know that's not how this works. That's why most people are failing, at least in my mind. And I would love to hear both of your take on that in terms of what you've seen throughout your career with this sort of approach? Because, yes, there are some things that work pretty well. You think about the old the old bodybuilding way we used to do this, right? It's like chicken and broccoli. Just eat chicken and broccoli. If everyone ate chicken and broccoli day in and day out, we would all be incredibly lean. The problem is that is not sustainable.

So when I say soup, salad, scramble shakes and stir fries, what I'm essentially saying is chicken and broccoli and then adding in enough but not too much of salt, sugar, starch, and alcohol to make the diet livable. And this is the way that I see it. I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think that there's a couple things there. I think when it comes to personalized diets, it does make a lot of sense because not only are we different from a standpoint of our genetics and things like that, but we're also just different with our mindset. And we're different with our palate. Our palate is way different. Somebody might eat some yogurt and they might think it's amazing, even plain yogurt. Someone might really enjoy it.

Somebody else is like, that's absolutely disgusting. I need to pour honey in there or I need a flavored one or something like that. So we're all way different when it comes to that. Where I disagree sometimes is the fact that a diet and a training protocol that's shoved upon somebody, it can work. But I like what you keep, you keep hammering home the main factor there, the sustainability. How long are you going to be able to force yourself to do it? Or how long are you going to be, how long are you going to force yourself to be doing

these things, even under the tutelage of a coach? Eventually, you're going to hate it. So you have to gravitate more towards things that you like, things that you enjoy, because I've used as reference points before, you know, think about when someone goes into the military, all the activity that they undergo and this type of diet that they have, which the diet may not, may be less than optimal, but you see everybody that comes out of bootcamp, they all lose weight. So there are a lot of people that look at stuff like that and they say that worked. And it's like, well, what happens to the guy when he twists his ankle and he's not as active anymore and now he's out of the military? What's going to happen to that guy?

What's going to happen to his health? A lot of times you see that kind of thing unfold. So I agree with a lot of the statements that you said. And I think for people that are heavy, they're trying to like leave behind this bigger body and their bigger body has a mindset that is still really attached to these cravings and still really attached to hunger. For me, it's a battle every day to still fight off some of that hunger and still fight off some of those cravings because I used to be 330 pounds and nowadays I'm 230 pounds. The way that I've been able to fend it off is through

protein leveraging through, um, in some cases, uh, I used to eat more fiber, used to eat more salads and things like that. And over time I have just learned to kind of be, I guess, be friends with, uh, hunger and recognize the hunger is actually a good thing. And actually, this is a, this is a positive. I'm not actually starving. I'm just a little bit hungry. I got plenty of food around me. I'm in no danger. And so that's been a huge lesson for me over the years is just kind of recognizing that some of this hunger that I have is probably just as healthy as me getting the nutrition that I need. Being hungry is probably a very natural process for a human being to go through. And to add on a little bit to what he mentioned there,

not going on too long, is the hunger aspect of things is the same thing that I kind of came across like a few years ago when I started doing some fasting. Because I started doing it to try to focus on work, but I also found that I'm an individual who can eat a lot of food. I'm an individual in the past, like carbohydrates for me, I still eat carbs, but not as much as I used to. I used to eat an insane amount of it. So I started doing that, started fasting to kind of learn how to deal with hunger. And it was uncomfortable for a few months, but over a period of time, hunger became something like feeling a little bit hungry was normal rather than getting my mood and getting me feeling annoyed and anxious. And like, I got to fucking eat. Like I could just go through the day for 12, 16 hours and then eat later on. So now hunger is

normal to me rather than being a sign that I'm losing muscle or, you know, just going catabolic. Yeah. I think you guys bring up a great point here. And the clarification that I would say is it's not that we don't want hunger. It's that we want to be in control of our hunger. We also have to realize that that is a process. And so one of the's that we want to be in control of our hunger. We also have to realize that that is a process. And so one of the things that you alluded to there, which I thought was great, is that when you think about it, most of the fitness industry are fit people coaching fat people. And fit people don't have the same metabolisms as fat people. We know this. In other words, we have a more flexible metabolism. Three guys like us were in the gym. We eat a particular way. We train a particular way. Our metabolism is a little bit more flexible, less rigid. Someone who is insulin resistant at the level of the levels of cortisol, lowering the motivation centers in the brain, amplifying the reward centers in the brain will have more cravings, perhaps, than people like us.

You can't take a couch potato who's been living on the couch and eating Doritos and make them a cross-fitting paleo man overnight and expect things to go well. And this is what the whole health and fitness industry does. Another thing that I love that you said there is that one of the things about, you know, boot camps, right, in the military and the way athletes train, we would all agree, and most couch potatoes would agree, and pretty much anyone in the Western world would say, hey, I want an athlete's type body. I want to look, function, and feel like an athlete. Well, no athlete in his or her right mind doesn't eat less, exercise more approach to body change. They eat more and they

exercise more. And no athlete is going to cut their calories way down and cut out carbs and cut out all this food and expect to perform well in their sport. And so what we need is a little bit more nuanced conversation in my mind. If we're talking about wanting to look, function and feel like an athlete, well then, okay, let's try to do what athletes do. What they don't do is eat less, exercise more. What they do do is eat more, exercise more. And they drive a lot of their calorie deficits through activity, not just through food, barring bodybuilders and a few others who will go on strict diets right towards the end of their competition prep. And to me, this is, in my mind, a little bit more nuanced

of a discussion that we have to have because if three guys like us come up to, you know, our brother who's basically on the couch constantly and extremely overweight and try to get him to do exactly what we do, his body is not going to respond exactly the way our bodies respond. So while we can control our hunger, because we've learned that process and through trial and error, we figured it out, leveraging protein, doing different things, controlling exercise, doing all the things that we have learned to do over time, that same person needs to walk through that process. And they're going to start in my mind a little bit differently. Here's an example of this, right? I bet you that the three of us decided,

we said, hey, you know what, guys, let's all do an intermittent fasting regime together, right? We could do that. And we would probably be fine. One or more of us might have a little bit more hunger. I might tap out before you two. But if we have our overweight bro in doing this with us, he's for sure tapping out first. And so that particular person may want to start with small frequent meals rather than jumping right into intermittent fasting. Now I'm not saying that an overweight person can't jump right to intermittent fasting. My guess is though, more times than not, they are going to crash and burn with that and they need a different approach. And we need to be aware of that in my mind. I love what you said there. Fitness people talking to fat people.

I actually think that that makes a lot of sense. I think not to be degrading towards any one particular body type or anything like that. But basically what we have is we have a lot of people that can devote a lot of time, energy, and resources to fitness and to their nutrition. And we have a subset of people that are maybe they're a construction worker. Maybe they work for UPS. And I know it's easy for us to say, hey, there's no excuses. You can always make time for things. There's no reason why you can't go to the gym even if you are a nurse and you work these really odd hours and have these late shifts. It's easy to sit here and say that, but if I had a job like that, I would be fucked. It would take me a long time to figure out how am I going to work some sort of fitness into my schedule.

And I might end up being very similar to some of these folks where I end up going to the doctor. The doctor says, hey, your blood pressure, your cholesterol is crazy. You're 40 pounds overweight. And I might need a scare in order to kind of get me going. What are you seeing? Because you're dealing with a lot of people that are running into probably medical issues. And you're probably dealing with a lot of the general population rather than just somebody that wants to have their serratus muscles pop out in a particular way. So what are you seeing the disconnect between fitness and the people that are kind of in the couch potato category? Yeah, I mean, the difference is the first thing I said is that the metabolisms are not equivalent. They are two different

realities here. And so from my perspective, when we take someone who is overweight, who doesn't kind of understand what all of us understand, we need to actually get them understanding metabolism correctly. And this is something that we'll see if you both agree with me on this or not. But here is my take on this. To me, the fitness industry utterly gets metabolism completely wrong. It sees metabolism as a calculator and a calculator only. That's one camp. The other camp is they see it as a chemistry set. So one camp says it's all about quantity, right? Quantity, quantity, quantity, count calories. The other camp says, no, it's all about quality. Well, the metabolism is both. And it's not a calculator or a chemistry set. But if we're going to give it an analogy, a simple analogy, which we probably never should for something so complex.

But if we're going to, if we're going to be forced to, it is more like a thermostat. It is adaptive and reactive or a stress barometer. at. It is adaptive and reactive or a stress barometer. What the metabolism is doing is it is sensing stress in the outside world and trying to respond to that stress to protect us and keep us alive long enough to reproduce. This is the reality of what our metabolism does. So when you push on your metabolism, it pushes back against you. And what happens is when we're talking to overweight individuals, they do not realize that when they eat less, exercise more, their metabolism, it's not broken. There's nothing wrong with it. But in fact, it's going to push back against them. And after about a week or two,

it's going to force them to have less motivation to not want to go to the gym. They're going to get hunger and cravings. And the very thing they're doing is going to push them back into the eat more exercise, less couch potato model. So what's happening is because we misunderstand metabolism, we're taking couch potatoes and making them dieters. And that dieting is making them couch potatoes again. And this is why 95% of diets fail. It's why 66% of dieters end up getting fatter. And so the idea here is, is that it's really a discussion in my mind of getting metabolism correct. What actually is going on with metabolism? If it is an adaptive reactive system, then the very wrong thing to do with a system that adapts and reacts is to do the same thing day in and day out,

week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out. That's the eat less, exercise more approach. That approach only works for two to four weeks max before it causes what I call the metabolic credit card effect. It works short term, you get some results, and then you get steep penalties later. This is the difference. Now for us, maybe it takes us three months before we get to that point. But for somebody who is an overweight couch potato, they're going to have a week to two weeks max. And so we need to start thinking about metabolism differently. So I just talked about the eat less, exercise more model, the dieter model, and the eat more, exercise less model, the couch potato model, where there's two other models. There's the eat less exercise less model, which is more like the

hunter gatherers, lots and lots of walking, low calorie intake, not a whole lot of exercise, lots of movement, right? This also would be the Parisian model. And then there's the athlete model, eat more exercise more, right? Which we just talked about. And in my mind, if we're really going to use metabolism the way it actually works, we should be toggling back and forth between these different metabolic states. individuals and not treating everyone like they're bodybuilders and athletes. They simply cannot tolerate that amount of stress. I'll just say one more thing here, just so people understand. In my mind, the way the metabolism works is it is measuring the gap between intake and output, right? So guess what eat less, exercise more does? Creates a wide calorie gap. Well, eat more, exercise less does the same thing, just in the reverse direction. All I'm really saying, it's kind of semantics, but eat more, exercise more creates a narrower

calorie gap. Eat less, exercise less, the calorie gap is a little narrow. Now, that gap between intake and output is the way that the stress barometer of the metabolism measures stress. And when that gap gets too big, what would the metabolism do to say I'm under stress? It throws what I call schmeck out of check. S-H-M-E-C. Sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings goes out of check. In other words, your stress barometer goes that calorie gap got too big. Now I'm going to let you know and tell you I'm stressed out. And it does it by fragmenting sleep, causing unpredictable moods, causing cravings, hunger, and unpredictable and unstable energy. So I oftentimes teach my overweight clients, when Schmeck goes out of check, you've just created that calorie gap, the metabolism has had enough. Now we need a diet break, or we need to narrow that calorie gap back down for a time before we can stress it out again. And this to me is, yes, it's a complicated discussion, but to me, it's the discussion we should be having. The metabolism does not work

the way most of us have been teaching our clients to work with it. Yeah. What you're saying there, I like the metabolism as barometer thing, just because I mean, we can, we talk a lot about habits on the show, right? Um, and this will happen to me all the time. If I don't get enough sleep the next day, when I typically don't have cravings, I will absolutely have massive cravings in the morning. I'll wake up. I'm like, fuck, I want to eat some, I want to eat some, I want some ice cream. I want some pancakes. It's like, like, so, so now my metabolism is like, Oh, you're stressed. Go eat. You need to eat some food so you can, you know, you can regulate that. Right. Um, oh, you're stressed. Go eat. You need to eat some food so you can regulate that, right?

It just works that way. Even nowadays, too, I don't eat the same things like I used to every single day, as in I don't track my calories anymore. Because we have built-in habits that allow on a certain day if I get some extra jujitsu and some lifting, the next morning I'll wake up and I'll feel a little bit extra drained. So I'll eat a little bit more that day. So the next day I can perform the way I need to. So it's not a, you eat the same 2,500 calories every single day, the same exact foods, because that wouldn't work. It's more of a variable deal at this point. And that's kind of where that's the ideal place where people want to get. They're not having to track their food every single day. So they know what they need to intake and they can, they can call it on each day based on how they feel if they have the habits in check. 100%. Yeah. 100%. I think that's the smart way to be doing this. Now, the nuanced discussion

then has to happen, right? Because that's hard. So how do we actually teach people to do this sort of back and forth trial and error process? Because the human brain does need some structure. So when I'm coaching this, I essentially use what I would call structured flexibility. And it basically looks like this. I can give you a structure or you can come to me and say, I just, you know, watch some documentary on vegan or vegetarianism. I don't care what the structure is. If you want to start with paleo, if you want to start with keto, if you want to start with a plant-based

diet, if you want to do intermittent fasting, I don't care what it is. But to me, the proof is in the pudding once you start the process. So you start with this structure and then we have to be flexible. We have to look and see, does Schmeck's sleep, hunger, mood, energy, and cravings stay in check or not? And or are you losing fat? And ideally, if sleep, hunger, mood, energy, and cravings are in check, that tells us we've got hormonal balance. If we're losing weight, and the only way to really know if you're in a calorie deficit to truly know is if you're losing weight. Now, if you got those two things going on for you, that's a good start. The third thing would be that your vitals and blood labs are also optimized. So from my perspective, I don't care if you're eating Twinkies all day. If Schmeck is in check, calorie, you're losing weight and your blood labs and vitals are optimizing, then that's the right diet for you. Right. And also one other thing here that frustrates the hell out of people. That's only going to be the right diet for you for a short period of time. Because just like you said, on days when you don't get sleep or you're extra stressed, that same approach that works for you on the days when you do get good sleep or don't have stress may not work for you here.

But in time, by having this structured flexibility approach, the paleo diet or the keto diet or the intermittent fasting diet gets tweaked and adjusted. And in the end, you end up with a paleo you diet, a diet that is paleo-esque maybe or keto-esque, or maybe you have to get rid of that diet altogether because it simply does not work for you. Instead of the industry trying to cram down the throat that you have to do this keto diet. And if it failed for you, you didn't have enough willpower. For me, I go, if it failed for you, maybe you didn't have enough willpower. Perhaps that's something, but more likely than not, it stressed out your metabolism and a stressed metabolism is always going to win the will of willpower,

the war of willpower, always. You cannot beat it. And so this to me is a smarter way to do it, but it does take some time. I think guys like us, we've done this for years and years and years, right? So we've gotten to a place where we can do this naturally, but most others have not. And so I think we have to have that nuanced conversation of teaching them this process. think we have to have that nuanced conversation of teaching them this process. I think the stress part of it is like, I think that people maybe just aren't recognizing how powerful it can really be. And the more that you can develop skill set to deal with stress, to be able to take on stress and have it not have a net negative impact on you is huge. You know, I know a lot of people, though, they work their nine to five job.

Maybe it's not the most ideal job position that they dreamt of when they were young. And they come home, they kind of feel the stress of the day, sometimes the stress of the week, and they eat dinner. And maybe they were well-meaning almost the whole day. Maybe they ate pretty good the whole day. Maybe they're on track to be in a caloric deficit for the day. Maybe they were on a specific plan. But once they eat their dinner, they're still hungry for something else.

And because they were deducting and taking away calories from the body that the body needs, now it's Thursday night and they want to enjoy themselves and they want to sit down and watch TV for a while. And they end up self-sabotaging their own plan when they were really doing a great job. They did a really good job for most of the week. And now the wheels are starting to fall off. And then they see Friday, like, I'm going to go have some drinks, you know, then they're just like, F it, I'm just going to go for it. And the whole week, the whole from Thursday onward kind of falls apart. How do you help people to be able to jujitsu off all the different stress that they're dealing with in a day? How do you help them to develop a skill set that allows them to take on these things so that they can have a mind that is

more in control of the circumstances that are going on every day? Yeah, well, the first discussion is to help people understand that the metabolism is a stress barometer. It is measuring and responding to stress. Once they understand that, the next discussion is, well, let's discuss what stress is because a lot of people think stress is just emotional. Stress is not just emotional. We talked about one form of powerful stress. The calorie gap is a big form of stress. Sleep deprivation is a stress. Eating too much or too little is a stress. Exercising too much or too little is a stress. And so we have once we have those conversations, then we say, what can we do to take stress off of the barometer? I call this

rest based living. It basically says we have lots of tools that will lower stress hormones and take stress off the system. Some of those would be walking. Some of those would be sauna therapy, contrast hydrotherapy, massage, physical affection, sex affection sex orgasm that kind of stuff time with pets some of those things all over the place aren't some of those things stresses aren't some of those things stresses as well though absolutely and see this is the another nuanced thing so with sauna for example right it's a you stress it gives you a little bit of a challenge to help your body adapt now if you're doing sauna every day for two hours, this is turning it back into a dieting mindset. If you're doing it enough, but not too much, that is what we're

looking at here. But we have lots and lots of tools. So you're right. Sauna while you're in the sauna raises cortisol levels. Once you get out of the sauna, you lower those cortisol levels. And by the way, how would you know if it's too much or not? Schmeck goes out of check or not. That's why I always teach this to my clients. By the way, art, we know coloring, painting, sculpting, anything you do, creative pursuit tends to lower stress hormones. And so what we want to do is put enough eustress in. This would be things like sauna, enough exercise, but not too much. These kinds of things that we want all the things in

their physical affection, creative pursuits, massage, meditation, Tai Chi, yoga, so long as it's relaxing in yoga, not super, you know, Bikram power yoga, all these things that give us a woosah effect, right? It's like woosah, relax. And we know that it's working and we're not overdoing it when the metabolism speaking to us and saying, hey, my sleep is good. It's not fragmented and difficult. My mood is stable. My energy is predictable. I am not having hunger that is out of my control. I'm also not having cravings that are out of my control. And all of these things, and there's a lot more that we can do. It's just that most people go diet or exercise, diet or exercise. And my way there's looking at this, there's three blocks we should consider with metabolism. I call it the four M's of metabolism. There's mindset slash mindfulness, right? That's all

the stress reducing stuff. There's also movement. This is walking. We're not built to run. We're built to walk. And that should be considered different than exercise. And we now know this through research that things like meat are a whole different category for us metabolic. So there's mindset, movement, meals, what we eat, and then metabolics, all the things that move the metabolism. That would include drugs, exercise, supplements, that kind of thing. What most people are missing here is they only go meals and metabolics, meals and metabolics. That's all that matters. Diet and exercise, diet and exercise. Not realizing that too much or too little of either of those stresses out the metabolism. So now what we need to do is add in the mindfulness component to take the edge off the stress barometer.

And in my opinion, plenty of walking. Even that can be too much, though, for some people. We've seen nurses, construction workers, people like that, that even walking can be a little bit too much of a stress. And the proof is in the pudding. Each person's stress barometer will respond a little bit differently based on what they're doing. But this is a more full picture, in my mind, of dealing with the stress. Instead of making it all about diet and exercise constantly, we need to add these other two buckets in there as well. And I guarantee you, if we had to triage these and say, hey, rank one to 10, where you are on mindfulness, how well you're doing with that and all those stress reducing activities, how much, how well are you on walking? How are you on meals and how are you on metabolics? What will happen

is people are going to score very low or maybe not even be aware of the movement piece and the mindfulness piece. And that tells you everything you need to know right there, in my opinion. You said 66% of people that diet get fatter. What is the cause of this? Are they maybe potentially like wrecking? We hear people say that they wreck their metabolism, which who the hell knows what that means sometimes. But is this, is this, uh, in your opinion, kind of what's happening when you say 66% of dieters get fatter? I use the term metabolic damage a lot, but I don't believe that's not actually what's happening. The

three of us know you don't damage your metabolism. Nothing breaks. It's just doing what it's doing. Naturally. I use that term because it's good marketing language. And it also is descriptive for people who don't speak the language that the three of us speak. But no, no one's breaking their metabolism. It's simply the metabolism doing what it does best. It goes, when we think about it like this, what the metabolism runs off in a sense, software programs, right? Survival programs. And so the big survival program, the big stress, whenever you're under stress, the first thing the metabolism goes is, am I starving? And if I'm starving, because that's the major historical stress that the metabolism had to deal with throughout its evolution. We have not caught up with that yet. So in my opinion,

this is what we call metabolic compensation. I call it metabolic compensation because yes, it includes some of the metabolic adaptation you see in the research, but it includes other things as well. But what's happening is when you go on a diet, when you create this calorie gap, a couple of things happen. Hunger and cravings go up, which means you're likely to intake more calories than you need. Right. So creating a calorie deficit becomes more and more difficult. Also, we know that metabolic rate begins to decline. This isn't a broken metabolism. It's just simply the metabolism doing some budgeting and saying, I don't like the fact that this calorie gap is getting so big.

And I know what that looks like and I don't want to starve. Therefore, I'm going to go ahead and start adjusting thyroid hormone and other things to ramp down my metabolic rate. And those two things combined are what's causing this. But there is one new thing. There is some new science here from, you know, Dr. Herman Ponser out of Duke University actually looking at what happens when we overexercise. One of the things he did is he went out and looked at hunter-gatherers and basically went out and studied all these hunter-gatherer tribes, three of them in particular, the Hadza, the Chumani, and another one. What he did is he said, well, obviously they move a lot more than us, they must be burning way more calories than us. Right. And he went and looked at them and compared their calorie burn, their total daily energy use compared to Westerners like us. And what he found was while they were exercising and moving a lot more than we are,

their metabolic rates were no different. And this has shocked the entire metabolic community because they're like, how can that be? Well, what happens is when the metabolism sees you putting out a lot of extra energy in exercise, it goes, well, I'm just going to make you fidget less in bed. And I'm going to ramp down non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And I'm going to adjust testosterone levels. And I'm going to lower thyroid hormones. And I'm going to do all manner of things to decrease my basal metabolic rate so that I can get back to that budget. And this is what's happening. And it's insidious. Now, it can be reversed. It's not like permanent damage, although we do have the biggest loser study, which shows for some people this lasted up to six years. The big problem with that was you have to measure this when people are in an isocaloric

state. And when we measure it in an isocaloric state, we really don't see continuous metabolic damage. But this is what is happening. Metabolic compensation, hunger and cravings go up, metabolic rate goes down, the exercise economy is changed, and the body starts to constrain its energy use the more you begin to exercise. And this, I believe, explains it. It's not broken. In fact, it's an exquisite system that works incredibly well, just the way it was designed. Quick question, Jade. Now, you mentioned that's an insidious process, but obviously for the Hadza, that's happening because it's their lifestyle. So their metabolism has to be in that way for them to hunt, for them to live in that specific way. But let's say that there's some people here, they are working out a lot. They're not taking in a crazy amount of calories. And maybe their metabolism has gotten used to that. And that's not too much of a stress for them. Do you still think that's

somewhat insidious? I know getting to that point is going to be a difficult process, but if someone has actually managed to get there, then it's not really an unhealthy thing, correct? Correct. And actually I agree with you completely. And you know, actually I think what happens is most, what happens with the, um, the lay person, like us, us three guys would look at someone who goes out and exercises every day and is doing this thing. And it looks as if they're doing an extreme eat less, exercise more approach from a layperson's perspective. But what we know is they're basically right in this range of low calorie gaps. Some days they're a little over, some days they're a little bit under. Some days they're a little over, some days they're a little bit under.

But we know with stress on the metabolism, anything that is a very gentle stress done for a prolonged time is not going to cause the metabolism to react. Also, we also know anything that's a very extreme stress for a very short period of time is not going to cause the metabolism to react. What we now know is that it's the stuff in the middle. What we now know is that it's the stuff in the middle. It's the moderate intensity, long duration dieting that causes the stress response. And so based on that, now we know, or eat more, exercise more. And that should work pretty well and should not stress out the metabolism. Or we could take very short periods of time, four days to seven days, maybe up to two weeks, where we do an extreme dieting program with exercise and then go back to isocaloric levels for a time before we repeat that. And these two approaches seem to work better clinically. Now we need to study this and more studies need to be done to see, but we do at least have a few. I mean, I know we all talk about the Matador study and other studies like that that hasn't

yet been reproduced. But clinically, I can tell you that it has worked incredibly well over 20 years in my clinical experience just understanding this. But once you understand these mechanisms, now we can have a more nuanced conversation. What have you seen with people that have a extreme rebound from potentially doing like a bodybuilding show or when somebody's like, wants to lose weight by a specific time? What's going on when these people, they kind of get off plan and they, boom, they instantly gain, you know, 20 pounds or something like that? Well, one of the first things that happens is we know a lot of this is not fat. Like

these people who are gaining five pounds of fat or six pounds of fat, they think in a weekend, a lot of this is water coming back on the system. I mean, obviously you, you go on a bodybuilding diet and then you go have cheesecake and pizza and stuff like that. You're bringing all these carbs, loading up your glycogen stores that brings three grams of water per gram of glycogen. That's part of what happens here. But then add on to that. One of the things that happens whenever you go on highly palatable diets where you're eating foods like burgers and pizza and cheesecake, these hijack the reward centers in our brain, wanting us to have more of those foods. So a cheat meal turns into a cheat week or a cheat month for some people. Add on to that, this metabolic compensation issue we just talked about, and this explains what

happens to many of these novices that go on these bodybuilding or extreme diets and then blow up like helium balloons within a few weeks. It's because of these mechanisms. We've had some women on the show and we've heard from some women via social media and things of that nature where they're having PCOS and many women are suffering from that. And we've seen that you've done a lot of research in this particular area. What are some things that would be helpful? It sounds like all the things you already mentioned, I would imagine would be immensely helpful for anyone that has any health issue to start to explore some of the things you've already mentioned. But what are maybe more specifically, what are some things that women should be aware of when they're suffering from PCOS?

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting with women, one of the ways I like to describe female metabolism, and this is something, again, that another disservice to fitness industry has done. Now, it's not on purpose. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's just the way things have have been done. We have an extrapolated female metabolism from male metabolism. Well, obviously, men have one major sex hormone. Women have two. Men go through two hormonal stages in their life. Women go through four to five. Men have static levels of testosterone and sex steroids throughout the month. Females fluctuate throughout the month.

The thing that I think women listening to this need to understand, if they don't already, I think they do. So I'm telling them nothing new, but it's more me saying I understand this because I work mainly with women. The female metabolism, the way I like to describe it is it's a little bit more refined and sensitive compared to men. And this makes sense, by the way, right? Because this is the gender of childbearing. So if you have to carry another human and bring that baby to term, it makes sense that your physiology is going to be a little bit more stress reactive and stress resilient. And not always the case,

but this is why many women don't always do as well as men on intermittent fasting regimes and keto diets and things like that. They can, but it's a little bit more of a slippery slope for them. Now, when you're dealing with things like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which again is, in my opinion, this stress barometer in women. By the way, the technical aspect of this, this is the hypothalamus mainly. It's not actually coming from the ovaries. You can kind of think of the hypothalamus as the command and control center of the metabolism. It's like an antenna that is basically sitting in the brain that's looking out into the outside world and saying, how much stress is there? How much stress is there? And if there's too much stress, stress of dieting, stress of, you know, too much exercise, and then all the other stuff like emotional stress,

it speaks downstream, hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal, hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, hypothalamus, pituitary, ovarian, right? Ovaries. All of these systems, which are our major endocrine systems, begin to become dysfunctional. And what ends up happening there, guess what else the hypothalamus controls? Temperature regulation, food intake, and hunger. It does all of this. And so once that begins to happen, schmeck goes out of check. Sleep, hunger, mood, energy, cravings, also libido, exercise performance, exercise recovery, menses, all of these things begin to change. And then you may or may not end up with a diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome or hypothyroid or some of these other things. So we've already covered the fix to this. The fix is not

exercising more and eating even less. The fix is going, okay, I need to narrow this calorie gap. And this is what a lot of coaches do wrong. In my opinion, they'll have someone on a, someone who's a female or even a man on an extreme eat less exercise, more approach, see that they're hitting a plateau or even gaining some weight. And then what they do is they say, well, you need to stop exercising and eat more. And they just move them from eat less, exercise more, which is one stressful situation to another stressful situation, which is eat more, exercise less. What they really need to do is either match exercise with intake through eat more, exercise more, or through eat less, exercise less. This is the approach. So if

you're a woman dealing with polycystic ovarian syndrome or any sort of metabolic dysfunction, the last thing you want to do is keep pushing this calorie gap. You simply want to narrow it down. And this begins to solve a lot of the issues. Now you mentioned blood work for men and women, but specifically since we're talking about women here, how often do you suggest that they get their blood work done? And what are maybe the specific labs that you think they should be paying attention to as they're going through the dieting process? Yeah, this is actually a tricky and a lot of people aren't going to like me on this one, but I like to do blood work quarterly, right? But I'll tell you something. Everyone listening to this is going to be like, I don't know that I like Jade now,

but I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of blood labs measuring estrogen and progesterone in women. And I could tell you without a doubt, this is going to be a controversial statement, but I can tell you it does not help me in my diagnosis of most of these women just measuring their blood. And the reason why is because each woman's estrogen and progesterone levels are like a fingerprint. It is very difficult for me as a clinician to say, oh, let's do your blood labs, which is a single moment in time, and understand what's going on with their estrogen and progesterone levels. Now, even if I began to do some more functional tests like Dutch tests and other

ones like that, they're still not that helpful. And so what I like to do is go back to what we talked about before, the biofeedback sensations of sleep, hunger, mood, energy, and cravings, exercise performance, exercise recovery, menses, and libido. These are the things that I'm paying far more attention to. On top of that, I'm looking at, am I getting fat loss? And then yes, I'm incorporating some of the blood work, but it's not what most women are thinking. I'm not looking at estrogen and progesterone per se. I'm looking at things like fasting blood sugars or using a continuous glucose monitor, insulin levels. I'm looking at those kinds of things. I'm looking at a liver function test and kidney function tests and looking at immune markers in the CBC to see

if the metabolism is stressed out, for lack of a better term, at the level of the blood labs. And I'm looking at those markers because we usually can't see it just through estrogen and progesterone levels. It's an incomplete measure. I will still do those things and I will give you some hints. So without leaving all the women hanging here, here's some of what you will begin to see. The first thing that you begin to see is in the menstrual cycle, usually estrogen is hanging around by itself for the first two weeks. Then after ovulation, the corpus luteum is formed and the corpus luteum becomes the source of progesterone. When a woman is under stress, what ends up happening is the

corpus luteum either does not form, there is no ovulation and or it secretes less progesterone. So one of the first things that begins to happen is that women become, for lack of a better term, not a term any of us really love, but it's a descriptive term, more estrogen dominant, right? So throughout the month, progesterone doesn't kick up. So they become more and more estrogen dominant. Now, estrogen and progesterone need to be in a back and forth. They're like two non-identical twin sisters. There's some overlap and they rely on each other. So once progesterone isn't around and estrogen is around only, guess what progesterone does? It's anxiolytic. It helps women calm down. It helps to buffer against cortisol. So once progesterone levels begin to fall, stress right around menses in

those last two weeks gets more and more and more. And they oftentimes can begin to ruin their entire calorie deficit in just that one week around menses. And so you will see that happen first. Now, if they keep pushing this, now you start moving to the female athlete triad. Well, now estrogen begins to drop as well. And you know, because sleep, hunger, mood, energy, and cravings are the first thing to go when stress is an issue in women. The next things to go are libido and menses. And the final thing to go is you'll start seeing thyroid. Remember, I talked about the hypothalamus communicating with the thyroid, the ovaries and the adrenals. The final thing to go is you'll begin to see, oh, now there's an actual diagnosis of hypothyroid or Hashimoto's thyroiditis or polycystic ovarian syndrome. And we have to

begin to walk that stuff back. So it's not simply a matter of measuring female hormones. And the only reason I bring that up is because a lot of women will be like, I need to get my hormones checked. And part of me just not rolls my eyes at it, but it's an incomplete way to look at this. You can't just measure your estrogen and progesterone levels and understand what's going on in your physiology. You're better off listening to what your metabolism is saying. It is speaking to you constantly through these biofeedback sensations. Those biofeedback sensations, along with your results in body fat and body composition, along with the blood labs is how you want to be looking at this. You're hitting a really good point because getting your blood work done is kind of showing what's

going on, you know, what's going on in the body, but it's also not giving you stuff at the level of the brain. And there's just so many other things going on in the human body that still are probably very much like unknown. You mentioned earlier about somebody having insulin resistance. Well, they could have insulin resistance more at the level of their brain. And so things get to be a little bit more complex than I think, you know, even a comprehensive amount of blood work can give you some great indications and show you, yeah, I'm a little messed up over here. I need to, you know, maybe figure out a way to take care of that in the best possible way. But a lot of times there could be things that you're not seeing there. And if you

take the blood work along with what is happening to you and how you feel, now I think you have a good recipe to go after whatever is the offending thing that you're trying to eliminate. Yeah, you're making such a good point here. And keep in mind, like, what are these blood labs for? Anyway, when I'm in the clinic, I use those for diagnostic purposes. I'm using it to spot disease, right? Most of the time, you know, you have dysfunction before you get to disease. And this is another one. This is the reason why we talk a lot about functional medicine, which is a lot of people don't like that term either. That's considered like this weird thing. But think about it. If I'm going to diagnose the two of you with diabetes,

I need to have you with a fasting blood sugar of 126 or greater on two separate occasions. Now, long before you get to that, there's going to be dysfunction in your blood sugar. So what do we call that? Right. We don't call it diabetes. We have different names for it. We can call it glycemic dysregulation. We can call it prediabetes. None of those are really diagnostic terms. Right. But we call it something and we can see this dysfunction happening. This is why for a lot of times when with hormones, we use other markers like, you know, and we have some really cool tools now. Right. We have some we have continuous markers like, you know, and we have some really cool tools now, right? We have some, we have continuous glucose monitoring, which I've been using for the last

four to five years clinically that can tell us a lot. We have things like, you know, whoop and aura ring, which can tell us a little bit about HRV. We can use menses trackers to see if you're getting the temperature spike right around ovulation if you're a woman. And that tells us something. And so we need to kind of be looking at the new tool sets and using them along with blood labs and realize that blood labs are designed for diagnosis, not for dysfunction. The other thing I'll say about labs, by the way, that drives me nuts, just a pet peeve, and we'll see what you guys think about this, is that when we look at science, it's like evidence-based medicine. It's a buzz term. We all should be doing that. Of course we should. We should be using an evidence-based process. The problem though is, is that research

is a tool for averages, not a tool for individuals. Research by its very nature oftentimes throws out outliers. So if we're in a study and my metabolism happens to function a little bit different than everyone else's, I may even get thrown out of the data set because I'm an outlier in that. And so what we need to understand is that this has always been a little bit of science and a little bit of art. And we need to use all the tools at our disposal and realize what those tools are for. Blood labs are mainly for diagnosis. They don't tell us a whole lot about dysfunction unless we're reading in them a particular way or using some of the more functional laboratory tests. And now we're all very lucky because all these other tools that we can use. seen this quite a bit. Some people are out of shape, right? They're physically not feeling that great on a day-to-day basis, but they get their lab work and their blood work done and

everything comes back fine. And then they're like, oh, I really don't need to worry about anything. Look at my blood work. You're 50 pounds overweight, but look at my blood work. So like you're saying, blood work can tell you something that's going on, but if you're ignoring your biofeedback, your joints are hurting, et cetera, just a lot of things aren't physically feeling good, but you're only paying attention to your blood work while you're putting yourself in a bad situation. Yeah, incredibly well said. And I think the more that we articulate that for individuals, the more we can begin setting them on the right track and understanding that this is a process that you have to stop outsourcing your body's expertise to people like

me and gurus and books and documentaries and podcasts, and instead become an expert in your own physiological functioning. And that means paying attention to how you look, function, and feel. And then realizing that, you know, we have this interesting thing where it's like, we need to understand that meals are not mutually exclusive. What you eat for breakfast will directly impact how much you eat, what you crave to eat at lunch, which will directly impact what you crave to eat, how much you eat at dinner. And what we don't understand is that this is how this works. If you didn't sleep, you know, you brought up the idea of sleep. You didn't sleep last night. That is going to impact.

And so this is why we have to now have the discussion of what I would call, you know, for lack of a better term, and it's a horrible term, but we don't really have a good one, metabolic hormonal balance. We need to start talking about this. Maybe we need a better term for it. But all I'm saying here is that your hormonal biochemistry matters along with calories. And in fact, you can't separate the two. We always get these arguments about quality versus quantity. Which one's more important? Calories or hormones? Both. Calories impact hormones, hormones impact calories, vice versa. It is both, all of it. And each individual needs to understand this and begin taking responsibility for deciphering the signals that their metabolism are sending.

And yes, blood labs can be a part of that. It's just, I think, frustrating for people that it's a very small part of that, unless you have an actual disease that we're going to diagnose. Power Project Familia, how's it going? This episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Merrick Health. Now Merrick Health is owned by somebody you know, Derek from More Plates, More Dates, but Merrick Health is the premium telehealth TRT and HRT clinic

where we have something called the Power Project Panel that has 26 different labs that give you all the things you need for men and women. But also, if you guys are interested in TRT or HRT, you can actually work with a doctor from Merrick Health and they'll go ahead and they'll tell you which tests you need to get along with giving you the treatment that you need. You need to check them out. Andrew, can you tell the people how to get? Yeah, absolutely. So we have links down in the YouTube description as well as the podcast show notes but you need to head over to merrickhealth.com that's m-a-r-e-k health.com and uh yeah if you are interested in trt you can actually contact them you'll hop on the phone with

them and when it comes time to actually start paying for some of these panels just let them know that you've heard it through us and you want to use promo code power project 15 and that's going to save you 15 off all the recommended labs that they give you. Again, links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Highly recommend it. They are the premium telehealth HRT clinic, TRT clinic. They're really second to none. So head over there right now.

I would imagine that you probably don't – you may recommend for people to track their calories, but I would just assume just off of this interview that you, that's probably not where you start. You know, it's an interesting thing. Remember when we talked about the idea that we're each different in our physiology, psychology, preferences, and practical circumstances. So for me, actually, some people are math people, right?

They want to count. They want to track. They want to do that. Spread do that. That's a difference in psychology. Yeah't eat right without tracking everything that you do, then I want to move you more to an intuitive approach. However, if you're also doing a more intuitive approach and you're not getting results, then you're going to need to track calories at some point. So again, I am agnostic in this. The idea is if you like to count, track and do all that stuff, great. But just realize that, A, if you're not getting results, then obviously you're doing something wrong there. And B, if you cannot eat correctly without tracking, weighing, and measuring everything, then you're kind of in trouble, right? I bet you, I oftentimes say, I bet you, us three, we could probably look at a plate.

If I gave you guys 12 ounces of chicken, I gave you a plate of chicken, broccoli, some rice, is 12 ounces of chicken. I gave you a plate of chicken, broccoli, some rice, and some juice on the side. I bet you two could look at it and go, that's about 10 ounces of chicken. That's about a cup of rice. That's about two cups of broccoli. And that's about four ounces of orange juice. And that's about this many calories. And the reason you can do that is because you've tracked, weighed, measured. There's probably been times in your life where you have tracked, weighed, and measured everything. And you earned the right not to have to track, weigh, and measure everything. So one of the things that I oftentimes say is if you're someone who wants to do intuitive eating and you're not getting results and you don't know what 12 ounces

of chicken breast looks like, and you don't know what a cup of rice looks like, that's your problem. You need to go back and track, weigh, and measure. And so I do think that both matter and it depends on the person, if that makes sense. What do you tell somebody that maybe cheated on the weekend with their diet, but they didn't track that? Do you advise for them to just track everything? Because that's one of the issues that I see sometimes with tracking is when someone does go off plan, they didn't track the Ben and Jerry's and whatever else they ate. To me, in my opinion, that would be more important to track some of those things since they're so calorically dense and it doesn't really smash your hunger. Yeah, 100%.

And actually, if we look closely at the research, I know you two know this, but I'll just share it with everyone listening. We know that when you track people over time, researchers have looked at this closely. We underestimate over a couple of weeks, we underestimate our calorie intake by about 30%. And most of it happens in those things that we're not actually tracking. So people go, I track, weigh, and measure everything, except when I don't. And that's the 30% that is keeping them in calorie excess. And so what I oftentimes say is I don't necessarily say to track that because they already know they went over, but I just go that right there is the issue. And then you have to look because sometimes the tracking during the week and all of that stress of tracking and keeping up

with everything leads to them being like, I don't want to mess with this anymore. And I'm just going to let it all go. And that's a whole discussion that you have to have where it's like, you know, sometimes holding on too tight is the whole reason that you blow up later. And so that is, it's, I love that you brought that up. Cause I know why you brought that up. Cause to me, it's not a small thing. In fact, it might be the single biggest thing that is going on with people who are not able to get results. You know, all these people who say I'm doing everything right and I'm not getting results. Well, I go, if you're doing everything right and you're not getting results, you're not doing everything right. Period. End of story. And part of what

you're not doing right is that 30% of calories you're not accounting for when you go on your burger, pizza, cheesecake, freebasing binges. As far as binges are concerned, then what are the ways that you help people to combat that habit? Because some people, you know, when certain stressors hit them, that's the thing that they turn to when they've had an argument. That's what they turn to in terms of food. So, I mean, I noticed that you have stoke tattoos around your body. Do you teach individuals different ways to interpret things and interpretations of things so that they don't have that stress response all the time? How do you go about that? Yeah, I love that you bring up the whole stoic thing. I do think it is apropos here. You know, one of the stoics, one of the stoic key insights is there's three locuses of control, right? There's the things you control completely. There's the things you don't control at all. And there's the things you only partially control. And I think this, when it comes to dieting, you only focus on what you can control.

So what I advise them mainly is two things. And I think we would probably all agree, my guess is the three of us would agree on this. If there's one hack, one shortcut that would work for the vast majority of people, it is eat your lean body mass to your full body weight in protein every day and or take advantage of protein preloads to shut down these hungers and these cravings. So to me, that's where I focus on the control. So I go two things with binges. One is always start any meal where you're super hungry with a protein preload, 40 to, you know, 30 to 40 to 50 grams of protein preload. Not because I'm saying, you know, that they have to have protein to build muscle or anything like

that. I just want that satiating potential of protein. And I focus on that one thing that they can control. I also sticking with that same theme, say, eat all your protein and fiber first before you eat any of your starch and fat. That's another thing I help them control. And the final thing I help them to understand is that as soon as they go for palatable foods for a very high percentage of people, they are going to hijack the appetite centers in the brain and want more palatable foods. And so I oftentimes plan ahead of time. I say, hey, by the way, you're doing this eat less, exercise more thing. And we can't predict when this calorie difference

is going to cause you to perhaps binge. And so when you get to the weekends in particular, and I'll even have this conversation, when do you tend to overeat? Some people in the Western world, it's going to be, I tend to eat almost all my calories at night, or I tend to overeat on the weekend. And so I say, okay, so you tend to start eating at five o'clock and not stop eating till 11 o'clock. Right. Continuous meal. The Western continuous meal. Then I'm going to give you a protein preload right at five o'clock before you do anything or at three while you're at work to stave off that hunger a little bit. And then I'm going to tell you, I want you to eat your protein and fiber first. And then I'm also going to tell you, be very, very careful with these highly

palatable foods, even foods that are low calorie, high palatable foods, because they can begin to trigger you overeating. And I tend to focus on those three things because those are things I can get them to control instead of worrying about the things that are kind of out of their control, which is what friend calls and where they end up to eat or any of these other things. So I basically just say, look, wherever you go, like there's a, there's a difference. I oftentimes teach people the difference between a choice and the decision, right? People think they're the same thing, but there's one difference. A decision has consideration attached to it. A choice is just the act of choosing.

So to me, I go, you just choose chicken and broccoli wherever you go. It doesn't matter. If you're at a Mexican place, you take the control out of it. I get chicken and broccoli. How do you do that? Well, I order a chicken fajita. I tell them, leave off the tortillas, leave off the rice and the beans. Give me extra onions and peppers. I've got a chicken salad, right? If you go to Chipotle, you get chicken and load up all the vegetables. I got a chicken salad. If I go to a burger joint, I basically strip off the buns, add extra tomato, lettuce, onion, all that kind of stuff. I've got now a burger salad. So I basically help people go. I make choices rather than decisions. It doesn't matter if you end up at the Cheese factory or a burger joint or, you know, a Mexican place or anything like that.

You make a choice for chicken and broccoli or chicken salad, if that makes sense. I love the preload of the protein. It's kind of like masturbating before going on a hot date or something like that, right? I love that. That's exactly right. That's it. Andrew, I'm sure you got some questions. What you got over there?

No, I do. I'm really digging this conversation and I really appreciate everything that you're saying. You keep saying eat more, move more. And I've been learning that from Nsema and Mark, but for an average person that's maybe not tracking, how do they even discover what eat more means? You had mentioned like the couch potato and I'm pretty sure this person wouldn't care about moving more anyways. But, um, if they, if they hear eat more, they might eat more Doritos and be like, it's not working. I'm just getting, you know, fatter or whatever it may be. But for a person that is exercising, maybe they're, they're, I don't know,

trying to get back into it. We'll just say, how do they discover what that limit is? Like what that eat more is. And then I actually have a follow-up question. So after this, I have another one for you, but yeah, how does a person find what eat more even means? What does that look like? Yeah, such a great question because this is the immediate question that people ask me and it's, it's perfect for everyone here. So there's two ways to look at it. If you're a calorie counter, to me, eating more means about 15 times body weight, or if you're a hard gainer, 20 times body weight, if you're someone that wants to count calories. If you're more intuitive, eat more means what I call the 4-2-2 approach. It's a very simple way that I teach nutrition to people. The first number is how many meals you eat. The second number is how many meals you eat without starch or fat. And the third meal is how many meals you eat. The second number is how many meals you eat without

starch or fat. And the third meal is how many meals you eat with starch and fat. So 4-2-2 means four meals per day, two without starch or fat, two with starch or fat. And these are the general ways that I do this. Now, let's all be clear here. Remember, we talked about structured flexibility. There's no magic in this, what I'm telling you right now. It's just an arbitrary place to start. Right. So I start there. If you're intuitive, I use this 4-2-2 approach. If you're a calorie counter, I use this 15 times body weight or 20 times body weight. And then the proof is in the pudding. One of the things we never mentioned in the fitness industry is that there is no way. I don't care what calculator you're using. I don't care if you went to a laboratory to get your basal metabolic rate tested. There is absolutely no way to know when you're in a calorie deficit. The only way to know is if you're

losing weight. That's the only way to know. So if you're not losing weight, you're not in a calorie deficit, period, end of story. So then once you have this structure in place, then we go back and look, is my schmeck in check? Am I losing weight? Or if I'm trying to gain muscle, am I gaining muscle? Whatever my goal set is, am I achieving that? And that is how we begin this. And then it begins to tweak. So maybe it's like, well, I'm trying to gain muscle and that 4-2-2 approach isn't working. Well, maybe you need to add a 5- two, three approach now, right? Or maybe you need to just bump up the volume of these meals and you begin to adjust it from there. Or if you're taking the calorie approach, you adjust the calories up or down from there.

So this is a nuanced answer, but it's, you can kind of see what you do is you just start with your structure. That's my starting structure for eating more. And then you see what the results are. And then you tweak based on those results. Structured flexibility. That's the only way it works. So I have another question that probably has just another nuanced answer. Is there a certain, I guess, um, qualification for needing to eat more as far as like, uh, if, if I, I work out, I don't know, two times a week, uh, my energy is just consistent,

consistently low, but this guy saying I need to eat more. So does that mean on the, the other five days of the week I need to eat more or should it be specifically for that? Um, those, those days that we're going to exercise? Yeah, that's another beautiful question. So again, I use a structure like this. To me, there's eat less, exercise less, and eat more, exercise more. Now, these are semantics in a sense, right? All we're trying to say is narrow the calorie gap. So if someone's exercising less than three times per week, I'm putting them in an eat less exercise,

less state, not an eat more exercise, more state. Okay. Cause they're not exercising that much. They don't need all those extra calories. Now we're assuming, I'm assuming this is a beginner. We'll get to someone like, you know, us guys here in just a minute. Now, if you're exercising four or more days per week, I just go ahead and cut that barometer off and say, I'm going to put them in the eat more, exercise more category. Now, again, there's no magic here. It's kind of made up in my mind. It's just a structural thing. And the proof is in the pudding. The results will tell you if you got it right and then you adjust. Now, what happens is for guys like us who've been doing this for a long time, when you hear this, you immediately go, yeah, I've just

intuitively done that pretty much my whole life. On days that I'm training hard, I eat more pretty much that day or within the 24 hours before and after that workout. And on times when I'm not, I naturally eat less. Some of us will even fast on days where we're not working out, right? And so we kind of do this intuitively. And so there's many different ways to do this. Way one is just what I describe. Another way would be, you know, you can spend two weeks and eat less, exercise less, two weeks and eat more, exercise more. And by the way, when you use these other toggles and then go back to eat less, exercise more, it works again. But you can't stay there long because it will stop working

again, right? And then you can graduate to probably what I would guess most of us do, where we don't even think about it. On the days that we train, we eat more. And then the days we don't train, we eat a lot less. And so there's a lot of nuance in this. I think we have to be careful about trying to act like we have some, you know, foolproof scientific method. It's like, you know, do it, always do it this way. All of this stuff we're talking about is just simply a beginning structure, beginning guidelines so that we can begin the process of then looking how our body's responding and adjusting in response to that. How do we get people to take the first step when it comes to exercise?

The way I look at this from my perspective is the fitness industry does a vast disservice to most overweight people by trying to get them to exercise first. You shouldn't. That should not be the first thing they do. If you have someone who's sitting on a couch all day, they need to just get out walking. We forget that you cannot take a couch potato and turn them into an exerciser. You first need to turn them into a mover and then into an exerciser. So from my perspective, the first move we make is not to get them exercising, but to get them moving. And then once we get them moving, then we can get them exercising. In other words, we need to condition the metabolism

for conditioning. It's kind of like spring training for athletes. You do not take an inflexible metabolism that looks like one of these frail, cold, little rubber bands and start doing this to it, right? You first want to get that rubber band thicker. You want to get the metabolism moving. You want to work out the cobwebs. You want to get cortisol. One of the things that's wonderful about walking, by the way, is it's the only, one of the only activities that simultaneously lowers cortisol while sensitizing the body to insulin. It basically makes the metabolism more flexible. We do not want a fast metabolism. This is the stupidest thing in my mind that the fitness industry has done do not want a fast metabolism. This is the stupidest thing in

my mind that the fitness industry has done. We want a flexible metabolism. All a fast metabolism does is speed up hunger and cravings. This is why if you put someone in cold water tanks, you'll measure, hey, their metabolism went up by 30%. And guess what else went up by 30%? Calorie intake. That's why you see all these studies where these certain things that you do to the metabolism speed it up and no one loses any weight. Because for 75% of people who try to speed up metabolism, it also speeds up hunger. Only about 25% of people respond with these kind of approaches by actually losing weight. So in my mind, and by the way, you know, a lot of people disagree with me on this, but I say one, you go from sitting to moving to you go from moving to exercising. And in my experience,

this is not my bias, not just because I like to lift weights. It's not my bias. It's literally because I've worked with tens of thousands of people on and offline. And the first move I make is not running. It is resistance training. Now I'm speaking to the choir here, but when I do get someone exercising, I want to get them resistance training first. Now, in my mind, there's nothing wrong with cardio. It's synergistic with weight training. So certainly if you want to add that on, so long as you're doing weight training, you may even get better results. It's just that cardio is a little bit more of a slippery slope. And especially for the women, you women listening here, there's a really interesting study on women that basically took women. And I'll just tell you this real quick because it'll tell you about the dangers of cardio. Took women and just basically said, hey, don't do anything with your diet. Okay, leave your diet the same. And then it had three groups of women. One group did 30 minutes of treadmill running five days per week. The other group did 45 minutes of treadmill running five days a week. And the final group did 60 minutes of treadmill running five days per week.

25% of those women lost weight, not as much as we would predict. The other 75% did not lose weight. And 25% of the whole group actually gained weight. And the reason they gained weight is because everything that we've been talking about earlier in this interview, right? They gained weight. And the reason they gained weight is because everything that we've been talking about earlier in this interview, right? They gained weight because they overcompensated with food intake enough to not just undo the calorie deficit, but actually to create calorie excess. Now think about that for a minute. That is crazy, right? You're doing 60 minutes of running on a treadmill five days per week and you end up getting fatter. And the whole fitness industry says that can't happen. Yet we have research telling it it does. And we have we all can pick out probably someone who does.

I can count on probably two hands the amount of people I've seen in my career who went from an overweight person who took up cardio only and ended up losing weight. It is very few people who get those results. So I go, if you're a cow's potato, start walking. Then we move you to resistance training. And the reason why, by the way, is simply because they're not, neither one of those are as detrimental to cravings and hunger, in my opinion. As soon as you start adding cardio, you're narrowing the Goldilocks zone. You can easily tip over. So with exercise, it's enough, but not too much. So what I would say is move as much as possible. Exercise only just enough. Make sure you're driving your calorie deficits through diet, not exercise. A lot has been made of cold therapy recently, and you kind of alluded to maybe it's not the best for weight loss, but there seems to

be some evidence that it can assist with some fat burning properties to it. But maybe what you're suggesting is maybe not necessarily in the long term. That's exactly what I am suggesting. I think what we are seeing is that if you look at what happens to metabolic rate when someone gets out of a cold pool, you're like, oh, wow, they're lipid oxidation. And remember, we have to make when we look at this research, right, we have to make a distinction between like policies, fat released from a fat cell and lipid oxidation, fat being burned in a muscle cell. Those are two different things. And most of the fitness industry gets those wrong because you could easily release fat and then have it restored. Like policies and lipid oxidation are not the same things. And

we need in this industry to start talking more about that. But just because we see lipolysis and or lipid oxidation go up briefly, acutely after a cold bath does not mean that that translates into long-term calorie deficits. And again, look what the metabolism does. It goes, oh, I just had a stress, right? And now what do I do if I'm stressed out a little bit? I want to overeat. And if there's some if there's someone who can't control hunger and cravings, then they're going to have this accidental the way of weight loss benefits for the vast majority of people. Yes, we see a metabolic boost and it does not translate into metabolic weight loss. Just like we were talking about sauna before and how it's like a beneficial stress when done in short terms. How would cold therapy be seen to like, how do you look at cold therapy? Because it seems like something like, you know, taking an ice or a going into a cold plunge, something like that.

If structured well can be a good stress, but how would you use that then? So it can be beneficial or do you not really have people or suggest people really mess with that much? I actually don't use cold therapy by itself. I use contrast therapy, hot combined with cold. And part of the reason that I do that sauna, then, you know, cold plunge is old traditional European style, you know, contrast hydrotherapy. And part of the reason I do it that way is it's exercise for the hypothalamus. Remember, we talked about this idea of the hypothalamus being this sort of antenna out there that's measuring all the stress in the environment. It also is responsible for hypothalamus. Remember, we talked about this idea of the hypothalamus being this sort of antenna out there that's measuring all the stress in the environment. It also is responsible for temperature

regulation. So we talk about a metabolism that is rigid and inflexible. Well, if we take the hypothalamus and we say, hey, we're going to expose you to temperature, these temperature changes, it's wrong to think of it as stimulating the metabolism. The reason that it could work is because it's helping the hypothalamus hear the hormonal signals again. The other thing that I like about hot better than cold is another thing I think this industry gets wrong. We know for sure, if you actually look at the research, persistent organic pollutants, pollutants of industry, are endocrine disruptors that disrupt the brain's ability to hear leptin. And so one of the only ways to get rid of this is through sweating. And so the other benefit to hot therapy

is to sweat. These persistent organic pollutants come out. So you're getting a two for one with contrast. And by the way, all these heat shock proteins and cold shock proteins and transcription factors that are generated through hot and cold therapy, there's a lot of overlap there. So you're getting all of that stuff, too. I just think we've made a mistake thinking it's about speeding metabolism. I think it's more about making the metabolism more flexible, if that makes sense. When it comes to, you know, we're seeing more and more people nowadays suffering from anxiety, depression. What have you seen? Have you been able to assist people through having better outcomes with anxiety and depression

through gaining control over their nutrition and possibly of their fitness? Yes. However, it is very, very difficult. I don't think that is the best way to inroad into anxiety and depression. If we can get them exercising. And by the way, remember, I told you cardio is not the best exercise for fat loss. It actually is in research the best exercise for depression. But to me, I think there's something else that we, again, tend to miss, myself included, by the way. So when I say we, I hope everyone hears me saying me, too.

Like, you know, I am in this industry we, I hope everyone hears me saying me too. Like, you know, I am in this industry as well. I've made all of these mistakes. I think when we're talking about mood issues, there is one thing that we don't talk about at all. That is the number one stress buffer, the number one mood enhancer, the thing that if someone had this thing, they would live a happy, fulfilled life. And it is purpose. Purpose is the thing that if someone had this thing, they would live a happy, fulfilled life. And it is purpose. Purpose is the thing that we need to be teaching people. Why are they doing this in the first place? And what we know is that having six pack abs and looking good is not a strong enough purpose to make this last.

In fact, if all you are doing is worried about vanity concerns and you're not achieving those things, then what happens? The anxiety gets worse and the depression gets worse. However, if I say, look, I want to be a great teacher so I can show up here, talk to you all and have you guys look at me and say, hey, you know, Jade walks the walk. He talks the talk. You know, I can see that he lives, eats and breathes this. Then I'm in alignment with my purpose. So in other words, what helps me be more fit and actually get into the gym is knowing I'm going to show up here for you guys and that you guys are going to have a conversation with me, and I can teach and live my purpose. What we need to do is help other people realize that purpose

is the thing that they need, And purpose is not something that you do as a career. Most people's job that they do, that they make money at, simply finances their purpose. Purpose is just simply the humble recognition that I am a unique person. There's never been anyone like me on the planet. There will never be anyone like me again. And same for you guys. And I have unique signature strengths that I can positively bring to the world. I don't need to make money at it, but I can show up and I can decide because purpose is a choice. I can decide the way I'm going to show up in the world. I can decide that I'm going to be generous and I'm going to be kind, or I'm going to

be a teacher. I'm going to be a positive influence. And to me, then I go once I get that step one, then I go, how does my fitness and health pursuits help me do that better? And all of a sudden, now I have a buffer against anxiety and depression because now I feel like my life matters and I'm making a difference. And again, we don't cover this stuff, but this is really, to me, the true, barring the fringe cases where you really have a biochemical anxiety depression that needs to be solved. For most people, that is not the case. For most people, they're missing purpose. And the gym does not give you purpose, but it can make your purpose more powerful. And so I think we come at this backwards. Like you two are living your purpose right now. I love this. I am incredibly grateful that you are giving me this platform. You educate people every day. And I guarantee you that because you do that and because you've had so much success with this and you're giving of your time and helping people, you're more likely to get to the gym.

You're more likely to want to look, function, and feel because you know that's going to inspire other people. I think we should be giving that to our clients as well. Maybe they're not us and they're not teaching this, but they can impact other people in their unique way and they're forgetting that. And I think it's crucial. You're right. This kind of stuff is pulling me rather than me trying to push myself.

I'm getting kind of pulled along with the energy of running the show and doing other various things. How do people kind of find their purpose? Like, how do you help someone find it? Because a lot of people are lost. A lot of people are seeing other people's purpose and they're thinking like, oh, maybe I should do that. Oh, look at this guy. They got a real cool car. I wonder what it'd be like to be them. We're very envious.

We're always thinking of it'd be better to be like this person or be somebody else. And so how do you help somebody get kind of grounded into not having so much anxiety and so much worry and concern about how they're not somebody else? Yeah, it's a very simple formula with purpose. The first recognition is it's not found, it's chosen. And it's chosen out of a combination of our superpowers and our pain. And people want to always talk about their superpowers, but they never want to deal

with their pain. If you want to know the most powerful purpose, I don't know about you guys, I'm a child of the 80s. I was born in 1973. When I was growing up, I would sit there and have my cereal and I would have a box, a carton of milk sitting there next to my cereal. And I'd be looking at it and there'd be these kids missing on this carton of milk. And I remember looking at that. And later on in my life, I went back and said, how did that happen? This is before the age of the internet, right? This, whoever did this had to go to the milk lobby, had to go to Congress, had to go to state legislatures to make all of this happen. Well, the story is this is a mother

who dropped her kid off to school. Kid went to school, came back, got off the school bus, got kidnapped, raped, murdered in the woods by her house. The worst thing that could ever happen to anybody in life. Now, she could have been degraded by that. She could have made that mean that she would just be a shell of her former self. Instead, she chose to do something with that pain. And now, as a result of that, she saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of kids. So purpose is chosen out of your pain. If you want a shortcut to purpose, think about this. Think about the most painful moments in your life and the things you're struggling with right now

that in your silent times when no one's watching and the show's down and the lights are out and you're sitting there struggling, you find that pain, that same pain in another human and you seek to heal it in them. And in a very roundabout sort of serendipitous way, you actually end up healing your own pain as a result. But the first thing that you have to do is realize that purpose is chosen. It's unique to me and it is a combination of my pain, which if I'm not looking at my pain, then I can't tap into purpose and my superpowers. And you put those two together because think about it. You two, right? You're incredibly unique. You have your own superpowers that are different than mine and different from each other. You also have your own pain that is

different from mine and different from each other. Now add into your unique personality, your unique passions and skill sets, and you have a unique spiritual fingerprint that allows you to show up in the world and do something no one else can do. And it's not one thing, it's multiple things. And you choose it. And you choose it in different times. You can choose a different purpose when you're at Starbucks getting a coffee versus a purpose when you're around your family versus another purpose when you're at the gym, etc. So it's not found, it's chosen, and it comes from your pain and your superpowers. How did you learn this stuff? They don't teach us at doctor school, do they?

Well, you know, I'm a student of psychology. And so and I'm actually working on my Ph.D. And I'm one of these guys probably like you, too, that I'm I'm always wanting to learn. PhD and I'm one of these guys probably like you two that I'm always wanting to learn. So I'm reading and I study philosophy and I study psychology and I'm going back to school actually to get my PhD in psychology. We'll see. I'm in the process of applying for that now and we'll see if I can handle all the school because I'm studying all the time. But the idea here is the same way the stuff comes to you all, right? When we're in our purpose, the reason I know this is because my purpose is to teach and good teachers I know have to learn. And I feel like my superpower

is my ability to explain complex things in a simplified manner. And my pain also is I'm a guy with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, autoimmune condition. I've struggled with my weight. I've had my own metabolic issues. Plus, I've had some pretty upsetting things in my personal life. I had an affair. I got a divorce. I had all these things that really forced me to look at myself and go, Jade, who do you want to be in the world? You need to choose how you're going to show up.

And that's how I now show up in the world. You need to choose how you're going to show up. And that's how I now show up in the world. And my tattoos, they're reminders of my purpose. They're my honor code, literally tattooed on my body. And some of them have to do with Stoicism. Others have to do with Taoism. But they basically keep me anchored to this. And so for me, it's really tapping into my pain and my superpowers and realizing that that then guides me to learn the things that I am now teaching you because I've either struggled with it myself and or I've had enough people come to me with that same problem for me to want to solve it. Real quick question, because I know that you've probably read a lot of books. So in terms of just individual development, what are maybe five books that you think anyone in their 20s should read or should get in there? Yeah. one of the best books. The other one would be Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. This is a book

that for those who have read it, it reads like a modern day self-development book. And it was written 2000 years ago by a guy who never thought it was going to be published. So those two are the big ones. There's some other ones that I like that are more, you know, sort of more recent. I love Mark Manson's books. Everything is Fucked and, you know, what's the other one? Yep. Atomic Habits is another great book, but books by Ryan Holiday, Jordan Peterson, Twelve Rules, all these books that, and forget what your politics are there. Just read the book. It has rules for living in there that everyone could benefit from. But I would say those would be my top books by Mark Manson, Ryan Holiday, Green, Robert Green and Marcus Aurelius, Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning. I'm a huge Brene Brown fan. That's another. And I actually think, you know, she's very popular among women. I actually think more men need to be reading Brene Brown for sure. But those would be the first ones that come to mind. And I also

write in the genre of self-development. So if you're listening to me now and you're like, I really dig Jade's self-development stuff, check out my books, Human 365, Next Level Tribe, and my book, Next Level Human, which is this entire work comes out in 2022. Did your troubles in your previous marriage, did that maybe help you kind of pry open your mind to be more open to listening to a wide variety of things and not having, not being dogmatic or was it maybe something else? You know, it happened prior to that, but a similar, I love this question because yes, I was your stereotypical, ignorant, arrogant, young male in my twenties, peacocking around, thinking I knew everything, you know, thinking

I was the strongest guy in the gym and slowly but surely you get hurt. You get people put, put you in your place. You see that that doesn't work, you know, um, romantic disappointments, um, realizing what an asshole you were to friends, you know, just taking a good look at yourself and just being like, I don't really like who I am. And then deciding that you're going to be someone who makes a difference for others. I think ultimately what it comes down to is you can take a me first approach in life. It's all about me. I call that the base level mindset. It's all about me, a chasing power and all that kind of stuff. You also could take a culture level approach, all about popularity, which you mentioned, people who are chasing status and chasing money and all you kind of mentioned, you know, people who are chasing status and chasing, you know, money and all that kind of stuff, or you can start to chase purpose.

So I started out young, chasing power. I went through this thing where I was chasing popularity and eventually I saw neither power nor popularity got me to fulfillment. Only purpose can do that. purpose can do that. And once I realized that, I doubled down on being a good human and not just worrying about Jade and getting mine, but also showing up. And I know it's the same for you too. And the reason I know is because I'll tell everyone listening to this right now, because they probably don't know this. Doing the work that you're doing, the podcast like this, is not easy. It is not easy doing this. It is not easy showing up for this. It is hard work. This is a lot of time that they put into this. And if you were doing it, you don't know because you're not doing it, but there's probably something you're doing in your life that no

one knows how difficult it is. And no one does this kind of work without a deep purpose behind it. And that's why I can recognize it now and say, thank you for doing it because it's, it is powerful and it makes a difference. And I think that's what it's about. That's what life's about. Why else are we even having this conversation? If you're not here to help, then why the hell are you here? In my opinion, you must be a spiritual person. I'm imagining. why the hell are you here, in my opinion? You must be a spiritual person, I'm imagining. I am. I wouldn't call myself a religious person, but I am a spiritual person in terms of, I believe that each human, I'm a humanist, is the way to kind of look at me. I think that each human has inherent worth. And I think that we should do our utmost. And I am committed to every human having

the ability to, I see humans as each individual purpose potentials. And I see the world as an ecosystem, not a hierarchy. You know, the lion is not the king of the jungle because without the bees and without the beavers, he can't survive. And we do not live in a hierarchy as humans. We live in an ecosystem. And if we decide to be greedy and take everything for ourselves, then other people are going to their homelessness is going to rise. Crime is going to go up and eventually we're going to destroy ourselves in the process. We humans need to be integrators in my mind. Yes, I need to take care of myself and have strong boundaries. I also need to look after you too. It's both.

It's yes, the airplane oxygen mask. You don't get on an airplane, put your oxygen mask on, then look around while everyone's passing out. You also don't try to run up and down the aisle to save everyone. You put your oxygen mask on first and you save the people in your vicinity who you can save. And if everyone did that, what an amazing world we would live in. Has your stoicism helped out a ton in the last two years?

Have you kind of been like, shit, thank God I've been studying and researching some of this. Otherwise, I might have lost my mind. Yeah, man, I don't know about how you guys have handled this, man. But it is crazy times, isn't it? I mean, it's like it really has because, you know, it just reminds me like Marcus really is, you know, has a quote that I love. He goes, you know, today you're going to encounter ignorance and evil and racism and sexism and all of these craziness out in the world. And you have to show up and be the change. Right. And he was saying

that way before Gandhi said it, way before Thoreau said it, way before Martin Luther King said it. But this is the way that I think we have to show up in the world. And so what has helped me in this process is every time I've gotten, because I'm not perfect, I get judgmental, same as everyone else. I can go base level, same as everyone else. But I ask myself, what would love do and what would courage do? And that re-centers me back to like, here's the way I want to show up. I do not want to live in a world where we're all at each other's throats. I don't want to live in a world where I have to hate someone just because they voted for a particular person. I want to stand up for everybody to have equal rights and to live out their purpose potential.

And I think we win. You know, there's an old saying, right? You win more bees with honey rather than fire. And I want to be that to the best of my ability. And one final thing I'll say here about the some of the craziness that we're seeing in the world. some of the craziness that we're seeing in the world. You do not, this is a Ben Hoffer quote. I don't know if you guys know him, but he was the Christian Catholic priest back in, in when Hitler was doing his thing. And he was one of the only people in the religious community that stood up to Hitler. He got killed for that. But one of the things he said was, the point of evil is not to hurt you.

The point of evil is to make you do more evil. And so I love that quote because I remember when all this stuff's going crazy and everyone's yelling and screaming at each other. I'm like, that's what evil would want. I need to show up and be the light as best as I can. And that's what I'm trying to do. And I'm failing at it a lot. You know, I'm not perfect at it, but the more I focus on that, the better it gets. And the more I can sit back and be like, I might not be perfect, but I am proud of myself. And in the first time in my life, I think what we all want. Right. Wouldn't in our deathbed. What would it would we want to like lay down? People think it's going to be like the notebook. Right.

We're going to be holding someone's hand. A lot of us are going to die alone. Right. And I just think about that. I go, if I die alone and I'm the only person I'm going to die with, don't I want to be proud of him? Don't I want to be proud of how he showed up? And so I keep that in mind, you know, with all these crazy times. I have one last question, because I know that people have probably been listening to you have been curious about it. You're an extremely good communicator. You're extremely good at teaching. So I'm curious what, you know, obviously you read a lot, et cetera, but for individuals who are trying to become better communicators and communicate their, whatever there is they're interested in, what are some things that helped you out? Because you're very clear in everything that we've been talking about. And like you said, you have that amazing skill, being able to take these complex systems and communicate them in ways that everybody listening can understand. Yeah. This one's hard, you guys,

because I get a lot of... And thank you. I receive that because it's a really nice thing to come from people that I admire like yourself. But I tell you, a lot of people in the industry don't like the way that I oversimplify things because they want it to be a particular way. But what I tend to do is I go like this. I go, I'm not trying to talk to you, too. I know, you know. Right. I know you could just you could have basically said what I said. What I'm trying to do is talk to people who don't know. And then I go, if you don't know, then I'm going to have to use a certain amount of language that maybe people who do know don't like. So I'm going to have to sacrifice popularity for people in my field to do my purpose. people in my field to do my purpose. And so I will use terms like metabolic damage or estrogen dominance or some things that maybe people in the field don't love. And I just have the courage to be disliked because my purpose is more important than my popularity within the field. That's the

first thing. But the other thing I would say, if you want to be a great communicator, one of the things that I learned for myself that I think has helped me is to understand to speak in story. And one of the most important ways to speak in story without telling a story is to speak in frameworks, acronyms, and metaphors. So I talked about the four M's and I talked about these four different toggles and I use terms like E-L-E-L and E-M-E-M. And I use these things because they're metaphors and they're acronyms and they're frameworks that allow me to communicate very complex biochemistry in a way that people can pick up really quickly. So I think the first thing is have the courage to be disliked for sure, because if you're speaking to your peers, you're not going to be able to get your communication across and

then learn to use metaphors, frameworks, stories, all of that kind of stuff. And I think it has helped me. Have you ever been a teacher before? You know, I haven't, but one of the strangest things, it's funny to wake up one day and, you know, I was a dumb jock coming up and all of a sudden I wake up one day and I'm like, wow, my purpose is teacher. Didn't see that coming. Never saw that coming in a million years, but now it is because now I choose teacher. So I could have chose healer, right? Could have chose teacher. Could have chose a couple other things too, but I settled on healer, teacher, healer, teacher. Then I chose teacher. And then once I chose teacher, that meant I had to, if I really wanted to do my purpose and live my purpose to the utmost, I had to learn to be a much better teacher. One of the other things I do, by the way,

to learn is instead of getting bogged down in the mechanisms of things, I ask myself as many whys as possible, right? Why? How does that work? Why? How does that work? Why? And eventually you get to a point where you can't answer any questions anymore. But then once if you do that, you start realizing like something like insulin resistance. Right. And you go, well, if you ask enough, why is you go your insulin resistant isn't all one thing. It's in all kinds of different tissues. Right. And you can cortisol makes you insulin resistant. It's not just food. You figure that out along the way. And you start realizing there's a hundred other mechanisms that we know about that influence this. So you can't just focus on insulin. And then you realize there's a hundred other mechanisms that no one even knows yet that are impacting this. And you start realizing no wonder the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis

didn't solve all the problem because you can't just chase one mechanism and think you have the right answer. That's the biggest problem in our field. People, they learn one mechanism and they will stick to that mechanism until they die. They'll just die on the sword of the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis because they refuse to evolve their thinking or ask enough wise deep. And I think once you do that, you eventually get to the point where you're like, yes, evidence-based medicine, of course. And yes, this is always art. And yes, I got to keep asking the question. And most importantly, I need to realize I'm not very smart. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. And therefore, I start with just,

I'm the dumbest person in the room. I'm not the smartest guy here. I need to learn more. And that's how I should try to show up. Today, I appreciate the two of you. I know you both are brilliant. I really appreciate you, right? There's a lot to let me have a platform to educate. You could be doing it too. But I also want to learn from as many people as possible. I don't think I'm the smartest person. I don't know it all. And I'm making a lot of mistakes. but I think the recognition of that might be my superpower because then I realized if I think I know everything, I can't learn anymore. So I just assume I'm the dumbest person in the room and keep trying to learn. What can people expect from your

book, Lose Weight Here? Oh, that book is, well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you guys, I can kind of give you the backstory. I'm disappointed in that book, not because of what's in that book. I'm disappointed along the trajectory of my purpose. Guess what we do? We oftentimes get caught in the culture level trap. That book is a book from the name to the way it was marketed and everything else that I wish wasn't that title, wish was not marketed in that particular way. But I'm proud of what's in that book. So when you get that book, while the marketing and everything else is not something

I'm proud of, everything that I talked about today, or a lot of the stuff I talked about today will be in that book. Now I have in January, I have next level metabolism coming out. And this book speaks to my purpose because you know what I did? I told my agent, I'm not publishing another book with you. I'm not going to go to a major publisher anymore. This book is going to be my book and I'm coming out with it by myself. And so next level metabolism is the book that has everything. So if you're sort of listening to my metabolism stuff and you like it, you'll find a lot of that and lose weight here. But be aware that it is one of these.

It is a diet, more dieting book. Now, it does talk about do what works for you. But I regret publishing that book in that way. And so you will get a lot of what you got here. But full disclosure, it is not my proudest moment because I went for popularity instead of purpose. And that's why Next Level Metabolism is going to be the book that would be the Jade Tita of today and the knowledge that I have today, if that makes sense. Those kinds of things are very difficult because you go to somebody and somebody is a publisher of books and you communicate with them the information that you have and the style of book that you want to write.

And then their job is to, they're like, oh, let's figure out how to make this book, you know, sell a lot of books. And so that's where their mind goes to. And you being yourself, you just like, like I would do the same thing. I'd be like, are you sure? You think that's in my best interest to go that route?

And I would trust them too. So I think those things are very common to happen. And sometimes we tend to compromise. We compromise our gut feeling. And the gut feeling and the gut instinct is always right. Somebody has that urge to wake up tomorrow morning and go for a run, but their doctor told them, you know, they need to like be more careful or more cautious. But that gut feeling is, man, I think you need to do your best to lean into it. Always want to maybe be a little bit cautious. But I think when that gut feeling hits, you got to got to really listen to it. Yeah, man, I needed you. I needed you back then, right? When I was figuring this out, you don't know until you know. And then once you know,

you're like, I'm not going to make that mistake again. And I don't want anyone hearing that it was terrible. I did make good money off of it. And I had to go through that process to know what I now know. So I wouldn't discourage anyone from publishing with a major publisher if you have the chance. It's an incredible opportunity. However, don't make the same mistake I made

and fight for the right title and fight for the way they market it. You know, I'm Jade. Look at an incredible opportunity. However, don't make the same mistake I made and fight for the right title and fight for the way they market it. You know, I'm Jade. Look at me, man. I mean, I'm like you guys. I'm a gym guy. I'm a meathead, right? You know, they marketed me like I was, you know, someone completely different. And I let them, but I had to learn that. And so I'm proud of the work that I've done, but I'm also proud that I have evolved and figured some of this out. And so, yeah, it's all, you know, life is all learning. I'm just learning. I'm just trying to learn.

Where can people find you and find out more information about you? Well, you know, it's interesting, right? We're all hanging out on social media now. I do spend quite a bit of time on Instagram mainly. So I'm at Jade Tita on Instagram. I have a website, jadetita.com. I have a podcast that now I started doing it as kind of a side project and it's growing so fast. Like you guys now I'm kind of like, now I have, that's why I know how much work this is. So now I'm like, okay, my podcast is called the Next Level Human Podcast. It does a

little bit metabolism stuff and a little bit of the self-development stuff. So, you know, I'm one of these guys that straddles physical development, personal development, physical development, personal development. So those would be the areas, jteter.com, at jteter on social media, and then my podcast, Next Level Human. Awesome, man. Great having you on the show. Thank you for your time.

Yeah, thank you. Guys, man, I so appreciate you both so much. Thank you for the work that you do in all sincerity. I feel really grateful to be here. Great. Thanks. Have a great day. Thank you.

Damn. That was good. Yeah, that was really good. He should have, he should have apologized at some point for killing the podcast, right? No,

for just, he killed it. Yeah, he killed it. He smashed it. Yeah, he killed it. He smashed it. He, like, when Eminem was on Jay-Z's album and totally killed him, just dismantled, I use that word again,

just totally crushed him on his own shit. That's what he just did. That was really good. There was a lot of really good stuff in there. And the fact that we went down the the route of talking about like stoicism and stuff was really cool and his you know when he was talking about the way he communicates because anyone who's listened this far can tell like how good his communication skills are in terms of what he's putting forward but the acronyms that he utilizes eat more exercise more eat less

exercise less like the explanations. It was very intuitive. Like it makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but the way he puts it forward is so everybody can understand. I can totally get behind. One thing that he mentioned is like a lot of people when they're explaining things, like to use a lot of big jargon. It sounds complex. It makes it harder than it needs to be.

But if you can just take these things and explain it in an easy way that anyone can do and apply right there, that's the important thing. It's not being respected by your peers in the field. It's people understanding what the fuck you're trying to say and applying it, having success with it. That's what matters. have a message like that, you sometimes feel like, I think this is too boring to just talk about this, you know, particular thing that's so simple. I recognize that like talking about walking is like not, you know, people don't really fucking care. And there are people that might watch, you know, me post something and they might then start to walk from it, but they're not going to like, it's not engaging. It's not something that like like if I, if I posted myself making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it would have way better engagement. People would say, fuck yeah, I love peanut butter and jelly. Or someone would say, I like almond and jelly or, you know, what kind of jam do you like? It would just get a crazy response just because it's, it's something easy and playful for people to get into. But when you

post something about something that's simple that can be effective hey eat more protein like you're just not going to get the same kind of engagement it's not as exciting what flavor jelly or jam uh i like great peanut butter yeah i like grape grape uh fucking kill dude that's so good peanut butter i would say i kind of like crunchy peanut butter um just the old school regular peanut butters are always amazing i go cream i like natty peanut butter though too natty peanut butter oh you mean just uh the the oily oil on the top too much work yeah that's that's too much because they're hard yeah you gotta freaking smash them yeah i'd rather have the the fake

natty from like jif or whatever it says it's natural but you open it up it looks the exact same so i don't care i'll go with that one yeah this is a great podcast though amazing you know i'm gonna go back and listen to some of this stuff and like i said guys his podcast and his youtube channel a lot of really good information on it so go check out his youtube channel um because he posts all his pods there there's a lot of good stuff the philosophy stuff i think is huge being able to being able to have a skill set to help you manage your stress is going to be the one thing that's going to allow you to make better decisions that are actually truly in your best interest rather than you just always wanting to go towards the instant gratification. You can maybe think about, hey, this doesn't really fit with my long-term goals. But only a healthy mind, only a healthy person can really think that way. And sometimes our mind is too clouded with worrying about this thing or that thing that we're overly stressed and we're just like, fuck it, I'm just going to roll through McDonald's or whatever the case may be.

I never heard anybody talk about having a formula to find your purpose. That was so good. I love that so much. That was so sick. Yeah. He was amazing with that. But I think these are the things that, these are the questions that aren't being asked when somebody says, hey, I want to, you probably don't really need to ask the question when somebody's talking about going from 15% body fat and wanting to go more down towards 12% or 10%. You probably don't really need to have this kind of conversation with somebody who is looking to do that. But somebody that has struggled their whole life with their diet and they're 50, 60 pounds overweight, a lot of times it would be useful to kind of start there.

Yeah. Like, how does your, how's your home life like? I mean, you got to kind of get in, you got to kind of jump into the, into personal stuff because that's going to be the thing that's going to ultimately be able to assist that person to continually make the right decisions. And a lot of times when you do ask that question, that person has been like dying to get that information out there. And then they tell you about how they were abused when they were a kid or something. And you're like, holy shit.

Okay. Now it makes sense that you have this eating disorder and that you're 60 pounds overweight. Let's take us on out of here, Andrew. Oh, we mentioned a lot about blood work. You might as well tell them how to get hooked up with Merrick. Yeah. that's over at merrickhealth.com. That's M-A-R-R-E-K

health.com. And, you know, they have everything you're going to ever need. If you guys don't know where to start, you can start with the Power Project panel.

That's at merrickhealth.com slash power project and use promo code power project to save $101 off of that. But you can also hit them up

for some TRT, HRT. You can chat with them if you're not sure. Again, if you're not sure where to start. And when times come to pay for whatever labs that you're going to get. My microphone is sounding weird right now. It's bothering me. Yep, it's sounding weird. Sorry.

When it comes time to pay for your labs, enter promo code PowerProject15 to save 15% off all of your labs. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes along with the PowerProject panel. You guys will find links to them down below. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Really appreciate it. If you guys did like it, make sure you guys hit that like button. Subscribe if you are not subscribed already. Let us know down in the comments what you guys thought about any aspect of today's episode you guys can check for the chapters in the either in the description or just kind of along

the little progress bar in the youtube video and follow the podcast at mark bowles power project on instagram at mb power project on tiktok and twitter my instagram and twitter is at i am andrew z at the andrew z on tiktok and sema where you be? I'm Seema Henning on Instagram and YouTube. I'm Seema Yin Yang on TikTok and Twitter. Mark? Andrew, thank you so much for setting all this up, man. It's amazing. It's great to be in this new studio.

I had fun. It was all good. And I'm really just happy with how it came out and just, you know, Power Project Studio 2.0. We're on our way, man. Fucking fantastic. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.