Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Bite: John Berardi - Nutrition Habits and Principles

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up party people? It's Andrew, producer and co-host of Mark Bell's Power Project here with a Power Bite. A Power Bite is a highlight from a podcast in the past that you might have missed and we have a doozy for you today. We're going back to episode 251 with John Berardi where he lays out some nutritional habits and principles. Today's Power Bite is brought to you by Piedmontese Beef. You guys know we're huge fans of them. We want to make you guys huge fans of them as well. Head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout.

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Starting point is 00:00:50 You know, John, like what I really like about like first off, the approach that you have to all of this is that you mentioned that like no diet is really wrong. Like we know that a lot of different diets work for different people, but a lot of people in certain sectors are demonizing others in other sectors that it just, it's just back and forth. So I love that. Now, my question to you off of that is like, people that are listening here, Mark and I, we talk a lot about habits or nutritional habits. I used to count calories a lot, which helped me understand certain things towards my nutrition. Mark never counted calories and we kind of ended up even at the same place. So do you count them still? I don't count them anymore.

Starting point is 00:01:27 I don't count them anymore. So you sort of built the skill set and then you're able to set it down. Exactly. Like I don't need to carry around it. Like I can just eat what I want and I inherently kind of know how much I need to eat to maintain. Yeah. So you're like, that's about this amount of protein and carbs and fats. I kind of know.

Starting point is 00:01:42 Yeah. And like, there's like all like anxiety and all that type of stuff. I don't even deal with that anymore in terms of counting food and it's great. But now my question to you is, you know, someone who's listening in, in terms of nutritional habits and things you think that people should learn to be able, and I know this may be such a convoluted question because like everyone's a different, everyone's coming from a different place. But if there was like a top five or top habits that everyone should have nutritionally to be able to get, you know, from out of shape to in shape, whether it be not snacking, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think those would be?

Starting point is 00:02:14 So I can come up with them easily and I put them in two buckets. One is what we eat and two is how we eat. And I think you can't divorce the two. What you eat is the macronutrients, right? So what are the best macronutrients or what you're eating habits? Well, I mean, I would start with getting an adequate amount of protein. Inadequate amount of protein isn't going to support your training. It isn't going to support your body composition goals, none of that. So, you know, we look for, you know, enough protein and, you know, for people who are training, it's somewhere around a gram per pound of body weight. And that's probably meaningless for people who don't want

Starting point is 00:02:53 to do math. So usually what we start with is like, so hold out your hand and you look at the thickness and diameter of your palm. And that's a portion of protein. That's about 20 to 30 grams. And so then you say, okay, cool for men, uh, hard training, um, 200 pounds, let's say, uh, you want to get two of those two palm size portions of protein three times a day, and that'll, that'll meet your needs. Right. So it's a good pun intended, like rule of thumb for how to, you know, determine your protein requirement. And if you get that, you're set, you just set that, right? You want to do plant-based, you want to do, you know, meat-based, doesn't matter. So we start with protein. And then we go to vegetables and fruits, right? So, you know, very nutrient rich, not calorie dense. And so we look for, you know, here we use our fists. So we say three

Starting point is 00:03:48 fists full of vegetables and fruits a few times a day, you know, so now you've got your protein and your vegetables. Now that's essentially my diet right there, like having done this autoimmune protocol and finding some really great results with the particular disease that I have. But then you start thinking about, okay, what other macronutrients, your fats and your carbs? And there we just look at sort of an inverse relationship. So let's say you love carbs and you want to eat a bunch of them. Great. Okay. Set your protein, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Now you can throw in your carbs, but make sure your fats are low. And then if you want to eat lots of fats and you like that type of eating, cool, no problem. Set your fats high and then carbs low. And then it's just those two

Starting point is 00:04:32 have to be inverse. Unless you're like on a massive weight gain thing and then you just eat everything. You guys have probably experienced that in your life and you're like, don't think about anything. Just keep chewing. If you're not chewing, you're not growing. Right. Um, I remember when I was, when I first got introduced to, uh, bodybuilding and powerlifting and I was a natural ectomorph, I was like 135 pounds. That was my motto. So I would, I would literally walk around with a gallon jug of protein powder and, uh, a sleeve of bagels with peanut butter in it. And that was what I had to be eating between meals throughout the day. If I'm not chewing, I'm not growing. So there I wasn't thinking about proteins, carbs, fats. I got a lot of everything.

Starting point is 00:05:17 I was probably getting 8,000, 9,000 calories a day. But then I got older, my goals changed. But, you know, then I got older, my goals changed. But, you know, so we look at setting protein, fruits and vegetable intake. Now we do fats and carbs in sort of a reciprocal way. And then if body comp or weight is what you want to change, then you just have to pay attention to volume, right? How much you're eating and obviously eat less. So, I mean, that's pretty straightforward. The eating part is so easy. It's like laughably boring, you know, like you can learn that in two weeks of internet research and be done, you know. But now it's how you eat. That's the interesting part because each of us has a whole set of rituals around how we eat, you know, throughout the day. And that's what ends up governing our choices.

Starting point is 00:06:06 you know, throughout the day. And that's what ends up governing our choices. So I usually start with this idea of paying attention to what you eat. So that's sort of a how you eat, pay attention. Now, I find that it's kind of like how meditation is real popular nowadays, right? People, everyone's talking about mindfulness. But when they talk about it, it's more like finger wagging, like pay attention to your life, you know, but how if I knew how I'd be doing it, but I don't know how. It's the same with paying attention to your food. Right. So what we do is we give people practices. I have the schema. You can almost imagine it like a flow chart. And at the top, there's a box and you put your goal in it. And then underneath that goal, there's a bunch of boxes that are basically the skills required to achieve that goal and then underneath each skill you need some stuff to practice right so it's like I

Starting point is 00:06:52 want to you know be a master guitar player well there's a set of skills I need to learn to do that and then I need to practice so I need to put my fingers on the guitar every day and you know and I meet with a coach, music teacher, who every week gives me new stuff to practice until the next week. Right. So we know that with language, like you want to learn to speak a foreign language, same thing. You know that with music. But when it comes to health and fitness, we don't even apply that very basic set of learning. So that's how I think about it. If you were one of my coaching clients, I would need to give you skills, but there need to be things you need to do every day. So how do you build the skill of paying attention? One is we start by eating slowly. Okay. And you only have to do that for a short period of time. Right. And so we say, you know, how long does a typical meal take you? Let's double it for the next two weeks. Let's double it. And by slowing down, not only do you better cue into hunger and appetite signals, but you end up naturally eating less. And I even do this with weight gain chime in on this just for a second. You know, when, when it comes to sushi, people are like, man, I'm so hungry 30 minutes after I eat sushi. But if we just think about it logically, what happens when you get sushi, you eat it really fast. Like the design of it and it's delicious. It's just so easy to eat quickly.

Starting point is 00:08:20 And so I think that's why we're so hungry. Uh, you know, shortly after we have sushi. And so I think that's why we're so hungry, you know, shortly after we have sushi. Totally. Yeah. And this, I mean, this is well known, like it takes something like 20 minutes for the signal of fullness, you know, at the gut level to reach the brain and then start to change the neurotransmitter makeup to say, now, okay, I'm satisfied. So that's what we actually do. The second practice after eat slowly, once we teach people to do that, is we call it satisfied instead of stuffed.

Starting point is 00:08:50 So then we work on for two weeks eating until satisfied instead of stuffed. And, you know, if you're a numerical person, we have people rate it like 100% would be full, 110 would be stuffed, 90% would be satisfied. And so then we have people work on this skill. So now you have these practices. I eat slowly for two weeks. Most people find it quite annoying. But again, I'm like, this isn't a life practice. This is something that's going to build a skill you don't have. And then we work on eating until satisfied instead of stuffed. And then after those four weeks, we basically have people who know how to pay attention to their fullness cues, their hunger signals, and, you know, this overall idea of how they're eating.

Starting point is 00:09:31 So then we think so that so that's part one, you know, paying attention to your food. And again, I just think this model of skills, practices, goals is so critical because, you know, and I think it's what most people are missing, you know, and I always give the example, like, I'm super annoying about this, by the way. I have, we have four children, my wife and I, and so we're always going to stuff, like athletic things, you know what I mean? And so our oldest has been doing gymnastics since she was like one year old and she's nine now and very quickly I realized like I'm going to be sitting watching kids do physical activity for a really huge portion of my life unless I figure out a way to get involved so very early on I was like you know whatever gym we'd go to I'd be like hey can you teach an adult class the same time as my daughter's in class? And if other adults join, great. And if it's just me, I guess I get a private, but

Starting point is 00:10:29 I want to be doing stuff while the kids are doing stuff. Right. So fortunately at every gym, they've been cool with that. And so I'll go to a coach, a gymnastics coach and be like, Hey, all right, I set some goals for myself, you know, during this next term or semester, whatever, I'd like to figure out how to do a competent backflip and whatever walking handstands or whatever it is. Okay. So now we need to fill out this sheet. It's the goals, skills, and then practices. Cause I want to know how we're going to create a curriculum that's going to lead to that. You know what I mean? And so again, I think with any skill, like any listener can apply this to any skill they want to build. It's the first thing I do. So that's my tangent about learning, but getting back to food and fitness, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:16 we talked about the macronutrient things. Now we can talk about the how you eat stuff, you know? And so we talked about slowly, you know, until 80% full as a way to build this, build this habit of paying attention. Um, the next thing we look for is eating environment. Um, do you guys remember when Google tried to come out with Google glass? Yes. Okay. So it, for those who don't, who are younger, um, it's basically a set of glasses that Google was creating that had a built-in camera. And so you could like record your life. So we actually were part of a group that was doing technology experiments in health and fitness using Google Glass before it was available to the

Starting point is 00:11:56 public. And so what we were trying to do was figure out a way to basically use this camera to see people's lives and then correlate their actions in the world with how they would choose to eat. So, for example, some people are going to eat more when they're with people. Others are going to eat less when they're with people. So can we actually create a smart coaching program that figures out which person you are, right, and then give coaching cues around those environments. Like, hey, it looks like you're out to dinner with people. Typically you blank. So here's what you would do in this scenario. So this is kind of the next thing about how you eat, right? It's

Starting point is 00:12:36 understand who you are when you're in environments. Like do you come home from stress from work and not eat or eat, right? So this is where like hard and fast rules are meaningless because people respond so differently to their environment. So here we actually have people do like some journaling, some food related journaling. So we have them take a couple of weeks and write down not only like what they ate, but what the conditions were leading up to that. Right. Was stressed, got home from late, didn't feel like cooking dinner.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Bam, this happened. After you see that four or five times, you're like, okay, this is my limiting factor. And then we try and fix that. So it becomes not only like meal and food choice awareness, but then environmental awareness around that. And again, this is work, right? It usually happens best for the first little bit with a coach. But the idea is eventually you can sort of build your own algorithm for how to make good choices in the context of your life. And this is like P.I.'s big slogan, like good

Starting point is 00:13:38 nutritional choices in the context of a human life, rather than the context of a piece of paper where I just wrote down what I think a good diet looks like. I really, I really love what you're saying because this is like, people just need strategy, you know, people need tools. What led you to overeat? What led you to, you know, go home and just annihilate everything in your pantry and eat all your kids' cookies and stuff like that, whatever treats you have in the house. And I think that if we can find tools that allow us to avoid that, then we'll be that much closer to being healthy and having the bodies that we want.

Starting point is 00:14:17 The strategy that I've been preaching to people for quite some time is, you know, try not to shop hungry, you know, try to, you know, get Try to get something in your stomach. Maybe it's just a protein shake on your way out the door, but at least as you're shopping, that 20-minute rule that you mentioned, that protein shake will kind of hit you and you'll probably feel a little more satisfied. Maybe you don't end up with a shopping cart

Starting point is 00:14:39 full of peanut butter cups. And also, like you're mentioning, like coming home from work and getting home from work, maybe a little late, maybe you had a stressful day. Why not eat something before you leave work? If you recognize this to be a problem for yourself, you can kind of arm yourself. Another thing that I do that works really well for me, I have to figure out ways sometimes to kind of curb my appetite. Sometimes my appetite gets the best of me, but I know that about myself. So before I go out to eat, I actually eat, you know, my wife, you know, at first when we were first dating and stuff like that, she's like, we're going to eat.

Starting point is 00:15:14 What are you doing? I'm like, I just know like this restaurant takes a while and I could get frustrated, you know, waiting for the food. Fasting, by the way, has helped a lot with all this situation, but you can get to be irritable and then all you're thinking about for the food. Fasting, by the way, has helped a lot with all this situation, but you can get to be irritable and then all you're thinking about is the food. And then sure enough, you know, you're getting dessert and everything else. Maybe even stop somewhere on the way home from like a fancy restaurant and get some In-N-Out burger. I've done all these different things. So I'm like, how do I kind of slow down some of this chaotic behavior? And one way to do it is just to eat a little bit of food before I leave to go for dinner.

Starting point is 00:15:48 That's a great set of examples, actually. And the one thing I want to highlight is what we started this whole conversation with, right? There's actually two approaches here that seem completely opposite. So approach one, and this is research-based, you know, there's a whole bunch of studies showing if you feed someone an apple and then give them access to a buffet, like one hour later, they end up eating, you know, markedly less food at the buffet, right? So that's the protein shake or have a bite to eat on the way out of work before you get home or whatever the case is, right? But then you mentioned the opposite too. You're like fasting has helped with this, right? So

Starting point is 00:16:24 eating something can help with it. And so can fasting. And they're both great tools. So then we just have to figure out which one resonates with your philosophy, your life philosophy best, or how do we do them effectively, right? Because I think fasting is another great way to build a skill. So for me, I wrote a book called Experiments with Intermittent Fasting. We made it available free on the internet. Five million people downloaded it now. And it was

Starting point is 00:16:52 basically when intermittent fasting was first starting to get popular. It was like over a decade ago. I was like, cool, it's making a lot of noise. I'm going to try every type of fasting there is and document everything. Like I'm going to fill out psychometric profiles. I'm gonna try every type of fasting there is and document everything like I'm gonna fill out psychometric profiles and I do my blood work I'm gonna do performance I'm gonna tell you how I train I'm gonna show you every meal I'll show you my body calm the whole deal and so it was just a way to basically sort of document one person's n equals one experience experience with this and then talk about bigger lessons that the research kind of has shown. And so my favorite aspect of fasting was that it basically as a practice, like a thing you do for

Starting point is 00:17:33 two weeks or one day even, really helps teach you that hunger is not an emergency. And so I used to be exactly like you described, I would start to feel hungry. And like, that's just a feeling your body has, right? But I would interpret it as an emergency. And then I get angry and frustrated and impatient, right? Like everyone has had this in their life, right? But the anger, frustration, impatience, we think that's the physiological response. We're like, oh, this is just hormones and chemicals making me do this. But it's actually not true. That's our interpretation. I'm sure you've had people in the podcast who talk about like cold showers, right? And so cold showers are like, there's a physiological response, but it's probably like way too small for it to be something

Starting point is 00:18:22 you suffer through cold shower through every day of your life. But what it does is it teaches you that, oh, yeah, cold water just creates a feeling. And I can interpret that in a whole bunch of ways. One is emergency. And then I clench or just try and jump out of the shower. The other is, oh, this is what cold water feels like and breathe and relax into it. Right. So the interpretation is anger frustration and patience but hunger is just a simple feeling and I think what fasting does is it teaches you that you'll be okay I in the middle of this

Starting point is 00:18:56 experiment I did something like a 72 hour fast before flying to the UK to give a talk on intermittent fasting. And so that was the whole shtick, right? I'm going to do a talk on fasting and I'm going to be fasted for a couple of days and cross time zones and I'm going to deliver it. And if I pass out, then I showed you that fasting wasn't so good. And if I make it and do a great job, you're like, wow, this guy's meeting in days. Maybe my thoughts on fasting are all wrong. So really, as you mentioned, you know, for me, a couple of, and we do this with clients too, we'll give them a one day fast to do. And we're not, we're not like, this is a good thing you always should do. It's, but this will

Starting point is 00:19:36 build you the skill of realizing that hunger kind of ramps up after you've last eaten to a certain point and you think it's going to keep going. And that's when you start freaking out. You're like, it's only going to get worse from here, but actually it plateaus and then comes down and you're like, Whoa, look at that. I didn't eat. And I feel fine now. Oh wait, hunger isn't an emergency. So I don't have to be an asshole. You know, I can just relax into it, have some deep breaths and realize, oh, that's just the feeling of hunger and it tends to go away. So to your point, you know, there's snack before or there's fast. We have to know what situations each one would be worthwhile in. And that's where, like, I think, you know, the key to all of the nutrition stuff and actually training in a lot of respects like around recovery and adaptation is self-knowledge, right? You have to get some reps and pay close

Starting point is 00:20:30 attention to what's happening. Maybe you can keep a journal about what's happening and then you sort of discover things about yourself and then you can become your own coach and you can make better decisions rather than blindly following someone's rules that you read on the internet or in some book or something.

Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Bite: John Berardi - Nutrition Habits and Principles

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