Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 165 - Paul Saladino

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

Dr. Paul Saladino is a medical doctor specializing in functional medicine and psychiatry and has a lot to say about the carnivore diet. He obtained his M.D. at the University of Arizona with a focus on Integrative Medicine. He most recently completed his training through the Institute for Functional Medicine and is a certified functional medicine practitioner (IFMCP). He is passionate about correcting the roots of disease and exploring WHY such systems are out of balance, often focusing on the gut, chronic inflammation, and nutritional biochemistry. Find Paul on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulsaladinomd/?hl=en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgBg0LcHfnJDPmFTTf677Pw Twitter: https://twitter.com/MdSaladino ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

All right, Mark, we're rolling. Welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project, everybody. I am your host. I have been a competitive power lifter for 20 plus years, and I've retired many times, but I keep coming out of retirement for more and more punishment. Got a great training session in today and hit up a 385 pound incline press. Not that that's monumental, but that's some progress for me. I haven't been that strong in a while, and uh i can get that up to about 405 before i hit the st classic which

is coming up here in sacramento which if you haven't signed up for that you need to sign up because i want you guys to join me on the platform february 9th and 10th i'll be competing we got some other great guests that are coming in charity wit will beitt will be there. Jason Kalipa, Jay Cutler. Jay Cutler is not competing. He's just kind of showing up. But all the other people will be competing. And it'd be great for you guys to join us on the platform. Had this podcast for many years.

And I really love sharing this information with people. Something that is happening from this podcast is I feel like even though I'm 42 years old, I feel like I'm just finally hitting my stride. I feel like I'm finally gaining the momentum that's necessary for me to find my niche, for me to find like my, you know, people say, follow your passion. And that is a, that, that is a great thing to be blessed to, to be able to do. I was able to turn my slingshot invention years ago, uh, the upper body device for bench press pushups and dips. I was able to turn that into something and able to, uh, make a living off of that product. And this is the, uh, everything that we do exists because of the slingshot because of that invention and we're

speaking from uh slingshot world headquarters here in west sacramento that's where we film the podcast that's where we lift and that's where everything's done for slingshot as well um but all that stuff uh was a passion for me it is a passion for me still to this day but your calling is kind of like a different thing like what were you put on this map for you know why are you here and i don't know if i can really distinctly answer that because that's a really tough question uh kind of like answering the question of who you are it's a really difficult thing all you can think about is the things that you've done or things that you do and it's hard to actually answer that question

but anyway um i actually am starting to feel now that my calling is not with lifting weights. My calling is not bodybuilding. My calling is not powerlifting. My calling is into this topic that we're going to dive into right now. And it's, it's into diet. It's into diet, exercise, health, and wellbeing. I feel that that is my calling. When I think about where my friends execute really well, when I think about Andy Frisella and some of these other guys that I listened to, and some of these other girls I listened to around the country that motivate, inspire, and fire people up, guys like The Rock, guys like Andy Frisella, Ed Milet is somebody I've been listening to a little bit more of lately.

When I listen to some of these guys and, and, and there's even some girls I'll listen to as well off of YouTube and podcasts and things like that, you know, they're inspiring me. They're firing me up, but I'm also kind of thinking, you know, part of knowing who you are is knowing who you're not. So I'm not going to shift gears and be them. I'm not going to shift gears and try to do anything they're doing. Instead, I'm going to shift into my own gear, which will be another level, another gear. And that is to get into this space and to talk more about the carnivore diet, the war on carbs, how to inspire and help people to change their lives forever. Because it is of my opinion that everything comes from what you eat. Everything comes from what you eat and what you do.

You're the byproduct of those two things. Obviously, there's a lot more things that are involved in all that. There's a lot of environmental things that happen as well, but man, the food that you eat, I am fully convinced that nearly every disease that people have can be at least helped and at least managed through

your food and through exercise in combination with each other. Food, exercise, sleep. Put them in whatever order you'd like. I don't think you can really outweigh one versus the other. And today we have Paul Saladino on the podcast. This is somebody my brother made me aware of. Saladino on the podcast this is somebody my brother made me aware of and I listened to some of his content our brother um advises us on a lot of stuff and it's great to have him in our corner he gives me a lot of great information a lot of great insight and when he brought up this guest I immediately started listening to some of his information on his YouTube channel started following him on Instagram and started stalking him a little bit. And I was like, wow, this guy knows what's up. Plus he's a good looking dude and he's in shape. You know, I'm not,

I don't want to sit here and take advice from people that are fat, people that are out of shape when it comes to health and fitness. I want those people to be inspiring and motivating to me. Not that someone that has excess body fat on them, not like they don't know anything. I mean, of course they could have great knowledge, but I want them to really be walking the walk. And I, I want them to look the part and not only be able to know about the part, to be able to look the part is a whole nother thing. And, and I think when you get in conversations with guys like Dr. Baker, Dr. Baker looks like a savage and he performs like a savage and that that's what fired me up to get on this carnivore kick again was uh

Dr. Baker's persistence. I tried it last year And I did it for a few weeks and I liked it um, but uh this year it's a way different ball game. I got a lot more information And uh, i'm following some other protocols that some other people are shouting out. So we're going to dive deep in here with Paul. And we're going to ask him some deep, dark questions about something that you guys may not have heard of, but this is going to be a hot topic in 2019. And that's the psychobiome. So you've heard of the gut microbiome, but no one's really talking about this. Depression and anxiety runs deep in a lot of our

youth today. And it's sad. You know, I almost wonder if I knew more about this psychobiome, basically the reaction that your gut has to your brain. There's a lot more that goes into all that than I can explain. But Paul is a, I believe he's at least partially a biochemist and he can probably break things down for us really well in just a second. But man, I think that depression, anxiety, I think a lot of the things that my brother Mike suffered from is bipolar disorder. I think all these things could have been managed had we, Chris and I, if we knew the information that we knew now, who knows, maybe we'd be able to save him. Maybe he'd still be here. Maybe he would be able to, uh, still live a good fulfilling life and, uh, not be pissed off, sad, whatever, whatever, uh, wherever his mind was, uh, drifting towards. But anyway, we're gonna get Paul on the, uh,

on the phone now, give him a shout. And, uh and we're going to see what kind of questions he can answer, especially, you know, doing a carnivore diet, people always have the question about whether or not you can poop. And there's a lot of other questions I got more recently, cholesterol, heart disease, gout, skin disorder, what kind of macros should you have, hunger, intermittent fasting. So we're going to dive into all this with Paul and I'm super excited. So let's give him a call. What's up, man? Hey, man. How's it going? Good. Let me get settled here. I'll get in position. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. Just sitting over here, sipping on a protein shake over here. It's good to meet you. I've crossed paths with Chris, but never actually had to have a full conversation with him. But it sounds like we're going to try and make all that happen too.

Yeah, I'm excited to dive into some of this. And so more recently, you've been on the carnivore diet. I've been following along with some of the stuff that you're doing. Can you first, you know, kind of before we dive into some of that, give us a little bit of your background? Yeah, absolutely. So I've been all over the place, Mark. I've taken a long time to get where I am.

I had a circuitous route around. I was a ski bum after college and traveled a lot and did all these adventures and then eventually decided I wanted to go back to school and treat patients because I had a lot of interest in this kind of stuff. And I went to PA school first. So I was a physician assistant. And at the time, I was doing a lot of running. So I got focused on cardiology. And I worked in cardiology as a physician assistant for about four years. And in that process, I sort of was in medicine and slowly was losing my faith in it as I was in it. You know, I saw people who came in with hard conditions, whether they were heart conditions or blood pressure, and you would give them meds and they didn't always get better. And sometimes they got worse or they would progress to, you know, further heart attacks. And so it was a, it was a pretty

strange, difficult time. And I eventually found functional medicine, which is this really cool sort of ideology around the root cause of illness and root cause medicine. And I started pursuing that. And then I realized, oh man, this is what I want to do. I have to go back to medical school, get an MD, and I want to do functional medicine. So in 2011, I went back to medical school at the University of Arizona, where there's a pretty strong focus on integrative medicine and was there for four years. I got my MD and then went to residency at University of Washington in Seattle, where I'm at now. So right now I'm in the last few months of my four-year-long residency. It's in psychiatry, so we can talk about mental health in relation to all this stuff too. But yeah, it's been a long journey for me with a lot of stuff along the way. So one of the things that really interests me, because

I'm just seeing so, uh, such an overwhelming out, outcry for help with anxiety and depression. I know that these two things get, they get lumped together and maybe they, maybe they shouldn't. And, um, I'm also not going to discount, uh, mental illness. Like illness like you know just like somebody might be born without a hand maybe somebody's born with maybe somebody is uh born without some coping mechanisms that maybe the rest of us have um you know just like uh we might think it's insane to kill another person and chop them up and put them in a box there's people that have done that before and for whatever reason that's the pharmacology of their brain. And I would say that, you know, who, who knows, we could try to argue all day long that, that

food may or may not have caused these things or exercise or depression, or, you know, we can go through a lot of it. But I think for the most part, we would all agree, like, look, that person's just kind of jacked up. Like they just have, they just have something, they just have something wrong. They're born with like a screw loose. up. Like they just have, they just have something, they just have something wrong. They're born with like a screw loose. But I do think that there's probably a difference between what everybody's experiencing anxiety and depression. I think that social media is a huge part of it. I think that

your sleep is a huge factor. And I think that your food, uh, in my opinion, like if we can grab a hold of the food, we could probably manage the sleep. And then if we can communicate to our youth, like, look, man, you need to not pour everything that you have into that damn phone and into the Instagram and stuff like that. I think that we can really help better manage anxiety and depression. What are some of your thoughts on that? You know, this is such a fascinating topic. Being in psychiatry for the last four years in residency, I've seen it all over the place. And I will agree with you that depression and anxiety are often quite comorbid. They do exist independently sometimes, and they're probably unique things, but they're often co-occurring in people. And I'll tell you that from the perspective of someone that does psychiatry, anxiety is incredibly difficult to treat with mainstream Western medicine. And depression can be incredibly difficult to treat with mainstream Western medicine. And there's a lot of these cases that are recalcitrant to these medications and that don't respond. And, you know, one of the

things that's so wild to me is that traditional Western medicine really ignores the impact of food, nutritional biology, biochemistry from a nutritional standpoint on these issues. And on most issues that we deal with from a medical perspective, I mean, I'm friends with a lot of GI docs and I have clients with GI issues, whether it's Crohn's or ulcerative colitis or variable bowel syndrome. And they will go to their GI docs who are brilliant, well-meaning physicians. And the GI docs will say, food has no impact on this. And the traditional Western medicine view on mental health is also that food has no impact on this, which to me is just wild.

It's such a misstep. And I think you've seen this, and I know Sean Baker has seen this. If you look at meatheals.com, I mean, the number of people who are writing in with responses to dietary changes, like a carnivore diet with anxiety or depression is staggering. And that's one of the things that got me most interested in this when I first started doing it. I think the food is so powerful. We can't ignore it. Yeah. And you know, I think it's, um, when you go on a carnivore diet and even just after doing it for two or three days, I mean, you really start to, you start to feel way different. And I, you know, I've done like keto style diets and stuff. And in the beginning,

when you go from, you know, burning, burning sugar all the time to like kind of transitioning into learning how to utilize fat, um, it's an interesting transition. It kind of kicks your brain into high gear and you're like, Oh, maybe this is what I'm supposed to feel like. And it's a huge transition, but even just two or three days, like if the people that are listening to the show, like, you know, I know it's world carnivore month, uh, forget, forget a second about committing to a month, try to commit I know it's world carnivore month. Uh, forget, forget a second about committing to a month, try to commit to a day or two and see if you could string together a couple of days and maybe even just try, say, no, I'm going to do that for five days. I'm gonna do it for seven days. Just try it. And you'll be, it'll, it'll blow your mind. Like, I don't think

we maybe have all the information on like why it all works. We're starting to gather more of that. It seems like there's more people like yourself that have the scientific background to, to be able to explain it really well, but the damn thing just works. And, uh, we were all brought up to believe that,

uh, fruits and vegetables were kind of the backbone of what we're supposed to be doing. But, um, sometimes those things can be inflammatory and cause some problems. What, what are some of the reasons why maybe vegetables aren't great for some of us sometimes?

Well, I'll just echo what you said there, because when I started doing carnivore about three and a half months ago, I noticed it within two or three days, but maybe within 48 hours, my mood was better. I was thinking more clearly. I was more emotionally resilient. It was a transition. It was so impressive to me. I thought, this is wild.

I'll tell you something else. When I started carnivore, I wasn't doing it keto. I was doing a paleo diet before. I was using honey in the first few days that I was doing sort of a paleo diet before and so I was using honey in the first few days that I was doing carnivore so I can't attribute those mental benefits to ketones and ketones which we know helps clear the mind right and so in retrospect for me at least I thought wow this is so cool like I've cut out all the plans I'm not in ketosis because I'm doing honey but my mood is better I'm more positive I'm more emotionally resilient what is going going on here? And I think that this is a, such an interesting idea. And so I think that, you know, from my

perspective, which is hypothesis, um, as a psychiatrist, as an MD, I think that what we're probably dealing with here is immune activation and, you know, this low level chronic inflammation that can be triggered in some people by plants. And I don't think we know how much is triggered in which people or which plants. And I don't think we've totally figured out if everybody's sensitive to every single plant. But I think that one of the cool things about carnivore, it makes it so simple. You eliminate all the plants. People have talked about this before.

It's like a super elimination diet. And you eliminate all the plants and you look to see how you feel. And you look to see how the target symptom that you're addressing responds. And I think for a lot of people with anxiety or depression, it responds really fast. And I've seen this in my clients. I have one guy who has really bad anxiety. And I kind of coached him through how to do the carnivore diet. And once he got on it for about a week pretty solidly, his anxiety got much better. And then he just

texted me the other day. He said, I have my anniversary. I went to a restaurant and I cheated and I went and I had dessert and all these things. And my anxiety has just been through the roof for like the last three or four days. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is wild. I mean, that's almost like, that's, that's one of these things that you learn about in medical school, this idea of like Koch's postulate. Like if you have something like an infectious agent and you induce the infection with the infectious agent and somebody gets symptoms and then you can remove it and then reintroduce it and they get symptoms again, that's really a powerful sort of experiment. It's an end of one for this guy, but I've seen that in other people too, that anxiety can

respond strongly to diet. When I was at the meetup with Sean and Chris and William a couple of months ago, I sat down with some people there and there were numerous people there who said, oh, my anxiety got better on this. And I thought, oh, that is so cool. And I think that it's an autoimmune, you know, inflammatory type of mechanism. And I'm happy to talk about those in a little more detail. I think inflammatory ideas, inflammation is misunderstood, but yeah, I think

that that's probably what's going on, but it seems to respond. And then that I'll just add that the cool thing about that from my perspective is that that challenges the notions of psychiatric disease and a lot of medical disease. And I would argue that a lot of things in medicine are autoimmune or inflammatory, which I believe are essentially synonymous. And we don't necessarily consider them that way, you know? And so I would argue that a lot of psychiatric disease has an autoimmune inflammatory component. We're at interesting times, you know, I think our psychology toward food has changed a lot, but our physiological response to food is probably, has probably never really changed a whole lot. It's probably been similar to the way we were thousands of years ago.

Yeah. So, you know, it's, you know, we have this idea of like, we're going to eat pancakes for breakfast and we're going to have steak for dinner. going to eat pancakes for breakfast and we're going to have steak for dinner. Um, and the bodybuilding community has been great with this, where they, they've always been like, no, like if it's time to eat halibut, you just eat it. Like you eat it in the morning. You know, they, they've kind of thrown away some of that notion. Maybe some of the, some of the guys and girls, uh, eat like oatmeal or something in the morning, but this idea of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a lot of these things are garbage.

A lot of things are trash. It's, it's to sell certain foods at certain times. And it, it doesn't really make any sense to start your day with a bagel or donut. There's no, there's nothing in your system, uh, physiological that's going to get yourself ready for, uh, frosted flakes. Uh, the first thing you, when you roll out of bed, correct? Oh my gosh. No, no, no, no. I mean, if people haven't seen it, there's a really great YouTube from Belinda Fetke, who's Gary Fetke's wife. You know, Gary Fetke is a sort of pedic surgeon from Australia who got really put through the Inquisition in Australia for recommending a ketogenic diet to his patients. And she has

this great YouTube about the history of sort of the dietary movement in Australia and how politicized it is. And that was the beginning of Kellogg's and Battle Creek, Michigan. And I'll let people watch that, but it probably has to do with, you know, kind of political and religious, um, ideals that influence all of these corn-based cereal makers and kind of gets put into the dietary platform around dietary pyramids. Who says that you have to eat 10 servings a day of whole grains every day? It's crazy. So if we just eat meat all the time, if we only eat meat,

then how do we have bowel movements? How do we go to the bathroom? How do we poop? Well, we should dog here that there's a couple of things I'd like to kind of talk about this. So one of the things which I'll talk about in a second on a carnivorous diet, from my perspective as a physician, somebody that's really interested in biochemistry and nutrition is this idea that we probably shouldn't just be eating meat on a carnivorous diet. It's pretty important to think about where we're getting different nutrients from

and eat more than just meat. But I'll talk about that in a second. The pooping thing is super interesting too. I mean, we can geek out on this all day. So fiber, as you've heard, as I'm sure most listeners are aware, is one of these things that's just been suggested to us in sort of the subtle not so subtle propaganda throughout our lives as being absolutely necessary for bowel movements or for proper functioning of the colon and that's just false um as anyone that's done carnivore diet will tell you you still poop on carnivore and what happens is you poop a lot less because you have less of this insoluble fiber to make bulking of the stool, but you're still passing some food fibers and a lot of the stool is

actually bacteria that you're passing every day that are making a smaller stool, but you're passing bacterial organisms and you're passing still some of the food fiber that you're not digesting, but you still poop every day. And the fiber arguments are a deep rabbit hole. So I'll just, I'll just dive into that a little bit. So I think people say like, if you don't have fiber, your colon won't be healthy. You won't poop. We know that's not the truth because you will still poop. You'll still be very regular. And what I've actually seen in clinical practice, and maybe you've experienced this, is that the patients I have with bloating and gas get so much better when they eliminate fiber. There's this idea that, you know, these IBS, whether it's IBS-C or IBS-D for constipation or diarrhea, these are probably synonymous with something called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And that's where a bunch of the bacteria from the colon move up into the small intestine.

And all this fiber that people are eating gets fermented by the small intestinal bacteria, causing gas and bloating. It's not supposed to be there. The small intestine isn't supposed to have that level of bacteria in it. And so when you eliminate the fiber, it sort of starves those bacteria and hopefully starts to correct some of what appears to be a hypomotility issue. We don't have to go too deep into the SIBO rabbit hole as well, but fiber tends to create a lot of problems for people with these issues. So people are having gas or bloating. It sounds counterintuitive, but removing fiber is so helpful. And there's a great study

that was done where they removed fiber from patients and they went to a zero fiber diet. These were patients with constipation and a hundred percent of the patients resolved. And the party line is if you're constipated, eat more fiber, right? It probably has to do with these methane producing organisms in the small intestine. And then the methane is toxic and paralyzes the gut and nervous system. But so the fiber probably makes a lot of people's digestion worse in terms of gas, constipation, all this kind of stuff. And then the other thing that people say about fiber is that we need butyric acid or we need butyrate and that the colonic bacteria use the fiber or carbohydrates to make butyrate. But there's another really fascinating study.

I can link to all these on my website for people where they fed people an animal-based diet. So they basically did a carnivore diet for people for a week it wasn't an ideal carnivore diet it was kind of like lunch meats and stuff but then they did a vegetable-based diet and looked at these two groups of people side by side and what they saw was that the microbiome just shifted it wasn't that the microbiome died or that the inflammatory markers went through the roof. It was that the microbiome shifted from a carbohydrate-preferring microbiome to a bile acid-tolerant, able-to-tolerate and digest amino acids microbiome. And those bacteria make different short-chain fatty acids. Subuterate is a short-chain fatty acid, but so is isobutyric acid,

which is another four-carbon short-chain fatty acid that can also be used by the gut enterocytes. So when we go to this no-fiber, no-carbohydrate diet, we still get short-chain fatty acids produced in the gut. We're not going to starve the epithelial cells of the gut or cause problems. So it's just a crazy thing. I mean, there's so many misconceptions about fiber and microbiome in these diets. Hey, Paul, it's Andrew here. Andrew? microbiome in his diet hey paul it's andrew here uh andrew i'm on the flip side of the uh like when people are afraid of going carnivore like oh i'm never gonna poop because of the fiber and whatnot i i have to share this on on air but like i haven't had i haven't had a solid stool in over three weeks like it's just i mean it's peeing right out my butt.

But aren't you kind of, are you normally that way anyway? And well, so normally, yeah, it's, and it's, it's a topic on this show, but I do normally poop quite a bit, but it's normally not like a straight water hose the way it is with switching over to the carnivore diet. Yep. I did a YouTube video about this. I'm sure we'll link to my YouTube channel or whatever. Dr. Absolutely. Dr. I had the same thing, Andrew. I think mine probably lasted about two and

a half, three weeks. I think everybody's got a little different gut microbiome and a little different tolerance to bile acids. So, bile acids are produced in the liver and then concentrated in the gallbladder. And when we eat fatty and proteinaceous food, there are hormonal signals from the stomach and the gut, cholecystokinin, things like this, which cause the liver and the gallbladder to release bile acids in bile. Now, bile acids are what system and the gut is kind of adjusting to it. And it takes a little time. Now, I've heard on Instagram and social media that some people have this for like seven months. And that's a little too long. In that case, I would say it's probably worth doing some gut testing with a functional medicine doc or something to make sure there's nothing else in there. But for most people, it usually resolves pretty around

three weeks. I would give it a few more weeks and see, and then you feel free to reach out to me and I'll help you through it. But the other thing that's happening is that the gut flora, like I was saying, is totally shifting over. So before you had a gut flora that was used to probably, presumably a little bit more carbohydrate and the you're starving at a carbohydrate. So all that is dying and all of these bile acid tolerant organisms are having to grow. And so that kind of has to, has to settle down and rebalance. And once that gets rebalanced and things get, your digestive system gets a little more used to all that bile acid, it usually resolves for people. But this, people run into

this a lot. And I think that probably, you know, the majority of people who stop a carnivorous diet, it's because of this issue. And it's unpleasant, but it's usually something you can work through. I almost wonder, I've never had any issues like that, but I I've also baby stepped my way into a lot of these things. Cause I've, you know, been in a diet and exercise for so long that like I've done it, you know, I was damn near on a carnivore diet anyway. Uh, and a long time ago to lose weight for a powerlifting contest. I, I just, my coach, he just said, eat red meat and water and you'll drop, you know, 12 pounds over the next couple of a couple of days to make the weight

class for your powerlifting meet. And I, I did, and I had great results. I carved back up and competed and I did really well. So I've, I've been kind of used to a lot of these things. So I haven't had, um, any, any issues of that, uh, nature, but what are some of your thoughts about, you know, um, being like, you know, being very conscious of your health, you know, in terms of eating, uh, eating these amounts of meat, um, you know, Dr. Dr. Davis, we had Dr. William Davis on the show and he provided us with a lot of great information.

Uh, he was a cardiologist for years. So he's, he's been around this stuff for a long time. And he talked about the benefits of the prebiotic fibers and how he feels, you know, it helps with the, uh, I believe it was the gut flora. I might be having a hard time remembering exactly what he was talking about, but, um, he was just saying like, you know, how important it was, uh, to kind of, to kind of keep this, like, you know, how important it was to kind of, to kind of keep this, you know, keep these prebiotic fibers in the diet, inulin and things like that. And, you know, people talk a lot about probiotics and he was also a fan of that, you know, in terms of yogurt and some things like that. What are some of your thoughts on, before we dive into prebiotics, probiotics, what are some of your thoughts in terms of, you know, is this diet okay for your heart? You know, I know it can change the cholesterol and there's a lot of other questions that go into it, but you know, the heart specifically, like, do you feel that

this is a, do you think this is okay for your heart? Yeah. Yeah. This is so interesting, Mark. I mean, I, yeah, all these topics are such cool rabbit holes. And one of the things that I think is so cool about our carnivorous diet is that it challenges all of our previously held notions about these things. It really makes us question and understand them deeply. Lipids, cholesterol, this is a pretty complex topic. I'll try and break it down for people and not get too technical, but here's the deal. I was a PA in cardiology for four years previously, so I've got a pretty good experience in cardiology, but I'm not a cardiologist now, so that's the caveat. But I'm a physician, and I think a lot about lipids, and I've done advanced lipid testing on myself, which I'm happy to talk about,

in addition to all my labs that I've done on myself on this carnivore diet. So the thing that people worry about with a carnivorous diet is that the LDL goes much higher than the previously seeing in a lot of people. In some people it doesn't, but this gets into what Dave Feldman has hypothesized to be like lean mass hyper-responder. Who knows if that's actually true, but what you observe and what I observed in myself is that my LDL went much higher when I was on a carnivorous diet. This is probably due to something about saturated fat being made into cholesterol. Is this a bad thing? I would say no. I think this diet is totally safe for

your heart, and I'll tell you why. And again, this gets into some nuance around lipids and cholesterol, so I'll try to make it clear for people. So LDL is a lipoprotein particle. It's a single layer, single phospholipid layer of like a balloon. And it's a balloon that holds cholesterol and triglycerides. So there's a lot of colloquialism around cholesterol. So cholesterol is actually a steroid molecule. It has a steroid backbone. It's a precursor to your steroid hormones.

So cholesterol is different than LDL. But we say cholesterol to mean LDL. LDL is a balloon that has a protein on the surface called apolipoprotein B100 that identifies it as an LDL particle, an LDL balloon. In the balloon is cholesterol and triglycerides. Triglycerides are basically three fat molecules, which are long chain carbons held together by a glycerol molecule. There are some studies in the past which have shown that raising LDL in some people can contribute to heart disease, but if you look at it over the spectrum, and Ivor Cummins has done a great job on YouTube of showing this, LDL is a very poor marker of cardiac outcomes by itself.

I think of LDL as dry wood. It's like wood that you've got stacked in the side of your house. It's under something. That wood is not going to ignite and cause a fire. It's not going to ignite and cause atherosclerosis unless there's a spark, right? Wood does not combust by itself. But you need wood to make a fire, to get a forest fire, to get inflammation, to get atherosclerosis, you need LDL. This is why

it gets implicated, but it doesn't do it by itself. It needs the spark. What's the spark? The spark is inflammation. So in the absence of inflammation and insulin resistance, which is another term that gets thrown around a lot, that's a little complex that I can try and break down for people. In the absence of inflammation and insulin resistance, and those two are probably intimately linked, LDL does not appear to be atherogenic. It's just a particle that moves things around our bodies, and our cells need cholesterol and need triglycerides to make cell membranes. We would die without cholesterol. We need this. It's a good thing. It's a balloon. It's a bus that moves building blocks around the body. Now, if there's inflammation, the people on that bus or the contents of that balloon

can become fuel for the fire of atherosclerosis. So people always send me messages on Instagram and say, my LDL is this. Is this a problem? I say, show me your inflammatory markers. So I want to see HSCRP. I want to see fasting insulin. I want to see fibrinogen. And I want to see a little bit more complex markers of LDL. I want to see LDL size. And I want to see oxidized LDL. And I want to know triglycerides and HDL. And those are all indicators of insulin resistance and inflammation. So what I've seen every single time, and 100% of the people I work with on a carnivorous diet, and I know that's a strong statement, but it's true, is they get a high LDL, they get low triglycerides, they get a moderate or high HDL,

they get the lowest HSCRP, which is high sensitivity C-reactive protein, that I've ever seen, which is good. So that's a marker of inflammation. So these people and myself included get really low HSCRP, low fibrinogen, and their fasting insulin is lower than like the cutoff. The fasting insulin is like three or 2.5, which is super low. So that's really good too. Fasting insulin is a measure of insulin resistance. And the oxidized LDL is low. So they're not having that spark. Oxidized LDL is like how much of the wood is on fire. So it's kind of complex. Hopefully that's helpful to people. The other thing that you see in people is that, you know, on people who have been doing this, their calcium scores are

zero. And so there's no evidence of atherosclerosis actually happening. You can also look at carotid intimal medial thickness, which is CIMT. But I think that the confusion is just that LDL is often a bystander. It's needed for atherosclerosis, but it is not enough to cause atherosclerosis. And what you see on these carnivorous diets, which kind of circles back to our other, um, discussion is that inflammation is really low. HSCRP, there's no insulin resistance. These are the primary drivers of atherosclerosis. Does that make sense?

It does. And some of what you're talking about, it sounds like, you know, when you're talking about insulin resistance, when you're talking about inflammation, um, not in all cases of where you were talking about, it almost sounds like they could be synonymous with, uh, uh, sugars and grains. You know, it almost sounds like they, they can kind of be, you know, insert the word sugar here occasionally, because a lot of times the sugar is directly causing, uh, that irritation, that inflammation. So it might not be, it might not be the burger that you have when you roll through in and out, but it's probably the French fries and the soda. All of those things are coming together and the cholesterol, the saturated fat along with the sugar is a really wonderful recipe

for an early death. Exactly. Exactly. It's like you're walking through the forest and you're chopping a bunch of dry wood and you're also smoking cigarettes or, you know, you're, you're also, you're also having things as sparks flying everywhere and it's not the wood, it's the sparks. And when you get rid of the sparks, the wood has a purpose, you know, the cholesterol has a purpose, you know, triglycerides have a purpose. These are things you need. You don't want zero. That's what, you know, that's what a lot of my blood work showed. It did show, you know, I had, you know, some high cholesterol. Then when I looked into it further, the small particle LDL was was elevated higher than what they'd like to see.

But as you mentioned, everything else was checking out pretty, pretty good. My calcium score, you know, keep in mind, like this is not only dietary for me, this is a environmental, uh, this is the choices I made to be bigger, stronger, and faster as well. And so there's, you know, there's some strain, uh, and some calcification that probably came along with that. And I'm trying to figure out for myself, you know, how, how to kind of, uh, you know, unring that bell a little bit because my calcium score, I think it was like three 30 and, uh, you know, unring that bell a little bit because my calcium score, I think it was like three 30 and, uh, you know, I'm 42 and, uh, you know, I'd like for it to be lower. And they, they kind of basically say that, I don't know if you can actually physically lower it, but you can

at least keep it the same for many, many years. So that those are kind of things I'm looking to do. And it's great to get somebody like yourself on here. And I'm not scared to share stuff with people. Um, because I think it's important to get the message out there. And the more people that we hear from that have more scenarios, you know, like your carnivore diet is not just in a box. Like maybe you do carnivore and maybe you do extreme marathons. You know, I do, I do carnivore and I take lifting to the extreme. And maybe there's other people that just, they have a nine to five and they don't really exercise and they do the car.

So it's good. We hear from a lot of different sources, a lot of different people. Yeah. Yeah. You know, um, I would bet, I would bet, and this would be an interesting experiment. I bet we could get your calcium score down. Let's do it, bro. Yeah, let's do it, man.

I'm pretty sure there is such thing as regression of plaque. Yeah, let's do it, man. I'm pretty sure there is such thing as regression of plaque. And, you know, the fact that you have a non-zero calcium score would indicate like, well, that's great. We have something we can follow. And, you know, if, you know, if you do a carnivore diet or a keto diet, or we can, you know, tweak your diet for six months or a year and we do the calcium score, I bet it would be lower. That would be cool. I, you know, I was also 330 pounds for a period of time, you know, and I was squatting, you know, it's my best squats, a thousand 80, I bench pressed eight 54. Like, you know, I was, I was pushing, I was really pushing the limits of what the human body is capable of doing. And even without the excess body weight, I think we can all agree that once something becomes competitive, well, now you're maybe aligning yourself up with, you know, some severe injury or some danger.

I mean, it could be baseball, could be golf, doesn't matter what it is. It starts to get more dangerous the higher up you climb, you know? Yes, I think at the elite level, you're sort of walking that thin line between performance and longevity, you know, and you're sort of saying, I want to perform the best I can, and I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit on some of these other things, whether it's cortisol, you know, these other things. So, yeah. Um, what about, uh, you know, some people responded on my Instagram because I've been jumping on the world carnivore month as well. Uh, they've been, uh, talking about, you know, things like gout, um, from, from the red meat. What, what's kind of the, it sounds like there's a misconception there as well.

Oh yeah. Yeah. There's a big misconception there. So this one, I did a, I did a couple of posts on Instagram about this as well, because I've done all these blood work on myself. So my uric acid on three and a half pounds of meat a day was 4.1. And I think that's milligrams per deciliter is the unit. I'd have to check off the top of my head. But what's interesting is that is the low end of normal of uric acid. And the way that gout works is that you get this accumulation of uric acid crystals in the body. And you can either be making too much uric acid or not excreting uric acid well. The idea that meat equates with gout is an oversimplification of the equation. It's very similar to the cholesterol thing.

We can see that in someone like me or other clients that I have who eat meat in the setting of a healthy diet, that would be a diet that is low in fructose, will be my qualifier for that. The uric acid does not go up. What we see is that fructose, and there's articles published about this and I linked to one on my Instagram, that fructose is probably more of the culprit in gout than meat. Now, could someone who has high fructose diet or insulin resistance, which is, again, rearing its ugly head here, could someone who has insulin resistance precipitate a gout attack by eating meat?

Yes. But is it the meat or is it the insulin resistance? It's pretty similar to the LDL. If you give your body purines, which are molecules in meat that get broken down into uric acid and you're not clearing the uric acid well or your biochemistry is disordered because of insulin resistance or fructose, you may precipitate gout. Does that mean that meat causes gout? No.

Meat does not seem to cause gout. And so in the patients I've worked with who have had gout, when we eliminate alcohol and we eliminate fructose and we control insulin resistance, meat no longer causes a gout flare. But this is so cool because the carnivore diet challenges so many of these long-held nutritional things. So yeah, in me, my uric acid was so low. It was like the low end of normal eating three and a half pounds of meat. And it's clearly a more complex equation. So I would challenge if someone has gout and they're listening to this, if you're

eating fructose of any kind, and fructose is also in sucrose. So table sugar is fructose and glucose. But if you're eating fructose, if you have insulin resistance, which you can measure, you can measure insulin resistance just by fasting insulin or hemoglobin A1C or fasting glucose are good measures, or you're drinking alcohol, let's get rid of those things. And then we'll, then we'll talk about gout. You know, I know like, you know, when I was a kid, you know, I would experience acne here and there, just like any other teenager. But I kind of think like when I'm going around and I'm going to Starbucks and I'm going to some of these coffee shops and I see some of these young men and women, I feel like, man, everyone's skin is just like at all time worse. I'm seeing girls with makeup piled up.

Sorry, ladies. I'm seeing girls with makeup piled up sorry ladies i'm seeing girls with makeup just piled up on top of you know the makeup's probably causing some of these issues in the first place but do you feel that like um you know some people say there's no magical diet or there's no magic from the carnivore diet there's no magic from a ketogenic diet and i used to kind of buy into that. I used to kind of say, yeah, you know, you're right. I guess they're all kind of similar. Like as long as you, as long as you equate for some sort of control over the foods that you eat, you could probably lose weight. Well, now I'm starting to be in total disagreement of that because I'm seeing too many people

get healed that, you know, these, these problems that they have are going away these uh and and it's many problems and these are severe problems depression anxiety um acne eczema gout uh all kinds of things are happening from from diet but i'm starting to see it be more overwhelming from guys like dr baker who's recording a lot of this guys like yourself it's just i'm starting to think god damn you know what this is magical like dr baker who's recording a lot of this guys like yourself it's just i'm starting to think god damn you know what this is magical like some of what's going on here this can this is undeniable and maybe just eating meat maybe that's not where the actual magic is maybe maybe the introduction of getting rid of a lot of other stuff is where the magic is and then maybe

you reintroduce some things, but what, what do you think's going on with, uh, with, with, with what's going on with, uh, you know, do you think that this kind of diet can help somebody who's got acne? Do you think it can help with, I think you had eczema, you, you shared that before. Um, what can a diet like this do and what's it done for you? Yeah. So this is, this is probably the coolest part of it. You know, people who've listened to Joe Rogan have heard, you know, Michaela Peterson story, Jordan Peterson story, and Sean's got meat heels, which is an awesome compendium of this kind of stuff. You know, I think that, um, I think this goes back to the autoimmune thing and the idea that for a lot

of people, the removal of plants seems to create significant improvement in what we could term autoimmune issues. You know, I think this is kind of what I was saying earlier, that I really believe that there is a big spectrum of autoimmune disease that we are not seeing here. And I think that skin stuff is autoimmune. I mean, we know eczema and psoriasis are autoimmune. I think you could make an argument that acne is autoimmune. And I'm going to make an argument that psychiatric disease is often autoimmune. And so what we're seeing here is if we remove immune triggers, if we remove these plants, which may be triggering immunity, then the immune system kind of calms down. And that's the magic of it, I think. And we have to eat something, you know, you can get the same effects by doing fasting, but you can't fast

forever. And, you know, our bodies run on nutrients and need nutrients. We need these things. And you can get the same effects by doing a lot of times, not entirely elemental diets, which are liquid diets where you take out all the antigens. So for me, this is really interesting. You know, you see a lot of people with like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, which are prototypic autoimmune diseases in the gut, get better on elemental diets. And it's like, what's going on there? Well, they're removing antigens. They're removing plant antigens. And I mean, that's the, that's what's so crazy about a carnivorous diet is this is going against this long held sacred notion, even in functional medicine, that fruits and vegetables are the bee's needs. And that, I think, we need to challenge that. And I think for people that have autoimmunity

or have issues that are not responding to what they're doing now, something like a carnivorous diet can be a really powerful tool. Do you feel there's any compelling evidence towards eating any fruits and vegetables for you personally? No, I don't. Now what about, now what about for people that you're trying to help? Do you, do you say like, Hey, look, if, if, if it feels okay, you know, like if you, if you took some things out of your diet for a little while and then you reintroduced, uh, you wanted to have some greens and you wanted to have some apples here and there or something like that. Do you, do you find yourself feeling that that's okay? Or do you still want people to kind of like still pump the brakes on stuff like that? I mean, you know, I try and meet people where they are in my practice. And, you know,

I think that, I don't think we know if all plants are bad for all people. And I think there's a really plausible hypothesis that some people are more sensitive than others. And so some people may enjoy eating plants. They may enjoy a salad. They may enjoy an apple here or there. And if those kind of things don't bother them, that's totally fine with me. But I think you have to be a little bit aware of this kind of thing. And the notion that fruits and vegetables are totally innocuous is just not true anymore. And I think that's probably one of the greatest contributions of this diet that, I mean, I've

talked a little bit about this on Instagram. There are tons of anti-nutrients in plants. There's oxalates are rampant and things like spinach and rhubarb and almonds. There's digestive enzyme inhibitors. There are things which inhibit our absorption of things. So, and then with fruit, we have the fructose problem. So one of my clients, you know, he said, I was eating six apples a day and then I decreased it to four and then I got rid of the apples and my gout got better. And I said, yeah, right. Like maybe one apple is fine

for this guy, but four is not not and so maybe the dose makes the poison for some people but i felt for myself that i feel the best without any plans right now and one of the things i've sort of been thinking about a lot recently is where we get all of our nutrients from and this will be the argument you know the argument against that is oh you're eating such a limited diet you're going to get nutrient deficiencies. That's why I've done looking at all the different nutrients, trying to figure out, am I deficient in this, am I deficient in that, where am I getting this and that? That's one of my things about carnivore and what I would recommend to people is if they're doing a carnivorous diet, think about where your nutrients are coming from and don't just

eat meat. If we just eat meat, I fear that people are going to get nutrient deficiencies and this diet and this way of eating can be so helpful for people. I don't want them to have bad outcomes. Um, I want them to do as well as possible. So I think it's important to think about where all those individual nutrients are coming from. And I can talk more about that. People want to hear about it. Yeah. Filling in blanks is kind of the nose to tail type of thing, like where you eat as many parts of the animal as possible. So you eat the muscle meat, but you also are figuring out ways of eating liver. You're figuring out ways of eating heart and figuring out ways of having collagen,

which could easily be solved through bone broth. If the sound of eating liver and heart, uh, sounds too disgusting, you can go to like, uh, websites like us wellness meats. And I believe they have like burgers that are regular hamburgers that have the liver or have the heart. I can't remember what it was in the patty itself. And they taste like, it tastes like a normal burger. It's a, you don't, you're not like, Oh my God, I could taste that. I could taste the heart, you know? Yeah. It's still, it's still, uh, it's still a tasty burger. And the fat content of those is like, uh, through the roof, it's like 55% or something because, uh, I don't know why they're, they're that fat, but

that's, that's, that's kind of the case, but we kind of need those fats sometimes anyway, because the, uh, macros that we're getting percentage wise, maybe isn't, uh, maybe as an optimal for only eating steak, maybe they're not even fatty enough sometimes. Right. I agree with that. You know, I have a client that I just posted about Instagram probably about a week ago who said he was, uh, I think he was training for, uh, uh, uh, 5k or something. And he would just maybe a 10 K and he would just die on just the meat. And then he added a bunch of fat, and he got so much better. So I really think you have to take care to watch your macros on a carnivorous diet too. I add extra fat to my steaks.

I've talked about this in one of my YouTube videos. But I think that human biochemistry doesn't really run on protein. But I think that human biochemistry doesn't really run on protein. We need protein and we can use protein to do gluconeogenesis and make acetyl-CoA out of protein, but we really run best on either fat or carbohydrates. I would argue we run best on fat. I would think at a basic, overly simplified level, I would think of protein as building blocks and fat as fuel. And so if we're not getting enough fat, then I think we can run into issues where there's lethargy and not enough energy.

And just adding back fat can be a big improvement. I just take tallow and melt it over my steaks. I do probably 200-plus grams of tallow a day in addition to my three pounds of steak. Yeah, that's a pretty large amount of food. About how much do you weigh? I'm about 170. So I'm 5'10", 170. And so even for someone like me, you know, I eat three and a half pounds of meat a day. I'm pretty active. You know, I do jujitsu and martial arts and I surf a lot, but, um, so people might not need quite that much, but, um, I think a lot of people end up eating too little on a carnivore diet sometimes, or they don't eat to, uh, satiety or they're hyper-focused on weight loss. And as you mentioned

earlier, a carnivorous diet can be so much more powerful than just a weight loss tool. You know, I think that's, that's an interesting thing. I think that, um, with the amount of food that you're eating at the body weight that you're at, I think that's, that's an interesting thing. I think that, um, with the amount of food that you're eating at the body weight that you're at, I would imagine that it probably blows away the amount of food that you probably used to consume because you're, you're maybe weren't digesting the foods as quickly and turn them over as fast. I mean, steak probably does take a little while to, uh, to digest and things like that. But something that I have noticed more recently, I've been utilizing a lot

of intermittent fasting and been utilizing a lot of the carnivore diet. And I, it's just something I, I should have, you know, figured out a long time ago, but, uh, hunger is a huge friend of ours. You know, being, being hungry is in my opinion, it's that it's very, very important. Like people that listen to the show that are trying to lose weight, you're not, you're not going to get away with not being hungry. Now for the first few weeks that you try something, it's not a good idea to mess with fasting at all. Just get used to the foods.

If you're trying to carnivore diet, just eat and, you know, eat when you're hungry and eat till, eat till you're full. But if you're somebody that has been, that wants to start to lose some weight and wants to really have that be the major focus, you might want to try some intermittent fasting. And what you'll learn is by developing this appetite and by also kind of adhering to either like a ketogenic style diet or a carnivorous diet, the, the food that you're attracted to is the food that you're supposed to eat because you're just like, you know what? I am absolutely dying for some food.

But the amazing thing is that you're dying for some steak. You're not dying for pizza. Whereas if you're on a macro diet where you're trying to weigh this out and weigh that out and you're trying to figure out these things, your mind might be going a little bit crazy. You might be in like week number three or four of this diet and you're like, I just want some damn pizza. And I'm not saying that can't happen on a carnivorous diet, or I'm not saying that it, that it can't happen on any diet, but for myself, I've noticed that I get locked in. I get, I get honed in and I'm like, these other things aren't even other options for me. And so the hunger seems

to play into it a big time and you know, 12 hour fasts are okay. 14 are okay. But you know, I've heard Dominic D'Agostino and other people, and I agree with this. You start to get in that 18 hour range and that is the magic. That's the magic number. And you will be shocked at how focused you are. And I'm almost like negative towards other people in a way, like, which I need to be careful of, but I'm almost like, fuck everybody else, man. I'm doing what I want to do. I'm doing my shit. I'm doing it my way. I get like fired up. It's, it's a weird place to be, but maybe you've been there yourself with some intermittent fasting. I have. I mean, do you ever check your ketones at that level? I wonder where your ketones are at. I haven't, I have not checked, but I'd imagine that they're probably pumping at that point, you know? I imagine they're pumping

at that point. And that's, that's what's happening is the ketones are going up and the physiology's changing. But yeah, I think you bring up a great point. And Sean Baker has talked about this before as well. One of the cool things about a carnivorous diet is I think that as you go through the first month, people start to really wrestle with like carb and sugar cravings and this idea that like the body can sometimes work against us when we're doing a diet where we have a lot of different foods. People will say like you're saying, oh, I'm really craving pizza. And it's crazy because like evolutionarily, there's really not much in that pizza micronutrient wise that your body wants. You're craving macronutrients, you're craving carbohydrates because your biology is adapted

to carbohydrates, right? People will say this to me all the time, the first few weeks, they're like, I've never wanted a carb so bad in my life. It's not your body saying, I want a micronutrient, like a mineral or a vitamin in that carb, in that carb. It's saying, I want that carb because my biochemistry wants carbs. What you find is that as you push through that, your biochemistry develops the new mechanisms and you can run on fat and then you stop craving carbs, which is what's cool about it. And so Sean has said, you know,

if you're on a carnivorous diet and you don't feel like eating a steak, don't eat. And I think that's a great idea in some ways. I mean, or you could eat eggs or whatever, but if you don't feel like eating something on a carnivorous diet, you're not hungry. That was the exact recommendation I gave my sister-in-law the other day. She was like, I'm having trouble with my hunger. And I said, well, fast until 3 PM. Now this was, uh, around 10 AM that she, uh, texted me this. And I said, and at 3 AM cook up a ribeye and, you know, and, and then she texted me back. She's like, I ate the ribeye in like 60 seconds. She crushed it. And so that, I mean, I do think know, and, and then she texted me back. She's like, I ate the ribeye in like 60 seconds. She crushed it.

And so that, I mean, I do think that, um, we can utilize hunger to our advantage. And I think it's, it's good to get yourself a little bit hungry. Intermittent fasting really, that, that one really boggles my mind because when I first started hearing people talk about it, I was like, that's bullshit. You got to eat, man. You got to, you know, I had the bro mentality of like, no man, we're on a clock, man. You got to eat every three hours and you got to stay fueled and you got to stay jacked and there's no other way of doing it. And, um, you can utilize intermittent fasting and it would be hard. You'd be hard pressed to see, uh, that you've lost any muscle at all, if not even gain some, I don't know how

the hell it works, but it works. You know, I remember I listened to you and Chris on Peter Atiyah's podcast, and it was interesting to hear about what you had done in the past and what Chris had done in the past for bodybuilding, where you were doing 50 grams of protein seven times a day. And what's interesting is that, you know, 350 grams of protein or thereabouts, you know, that's basically what I eat a day. I just eat two meals. And I was thinking, but, you know, there's this idea that like we can run just fine twice a day or once a day. And yeah, I guess I've never been a bodybuilder, but maybe we absorb a little more of it when

you eat seven times a day. But for most of us, you know, we don't need to eat seven times a day and, you know, letting the insulin drop. I mean, on a carnivorous diet, your insulin is always pretty low, but, you know, letting the ketones rise a little bit. These are evolutionarily consistent themes and I think are good things. But yeah, I think, you know, for me, I wonder, you know, how much net nitrogen utilization I'm getting out of my 350 grams of protein versus if I did it seven times a day. But, um, I, yeah, bodybuilding is bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is very interesting. And it's like, there's not a lot of different ways of doing it. However, I do think I probably could have had less meals. Um, but I couldn't, I most likely wouldn't have been as effective with two meals

could have probably done like four and that might've made some sense and a little bit more, but there's something very specific about bodybuilding where your, uh, your nutrition really fuels your workouts. And it's almost like the cardio training, which I know this is not a hundred percent correct, but it's everything gets partitioned out. Cardio training is for fat burning, quote unquote. The lifting is to gain muscle and the food is to fuel both of those things. And the carbohydrates that you eat,

you could probably gain some size without a massive amount of carbohydrates, but you're trying to pump and stress and jack up the muscles as much as possible. And you really can't do that without glycogen. You're not going to get that same feel. Now you can get a pump otherwise, but it's not nearly the same. And so you're, every time you train in bodybuilding, you're trying to, um, not just expand the muscle to where it can go.

You're trying to expand the muscle to where it can go and then some. You're trying to expand the muscle to where it can go and then some. And so if you have glycogen in the system, carbohydrates, they help hydrate the muscle and salt and potassium and that kind of stuff. Then you can, you know, you're, let's just say like you're training your arms, your arms might be an extra half inch bigger during that training session. Now, if you continually do that, the idea is that maybe your arms will eventually kind of stay that way. Like you're trying to swell up, so to speak. And that's, that's a very like, uh, beginner, you know, introduction to how some of that works, but that's what they've been doing for years. And it's amazing because it does work, you know, guys like Charles glass and some of

these great bodybuilding coaches have been around for a long time. They've been, they've been executing on these things forever. And I, you know, brought these things up to some of these guys are like, Nope, I'm like, can I do intermittent fasting? Like, Nope. Can I do it this way? Like, Nope. It's very, very specific. And, uh, I, I don't have a lot of experience doing it. So I was like, all right, I'm taking your word for it. I'm going to let you lead me, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I agree with you. I think that when there's glycogen in the muscle, as you know, that all the water is kind of stored with the glycogen. And so it will be

bigger, but it's, it would be interesting to think about the physiology. And I wonder if anyone's tried to do, or will try to do bodybuilding and gain mass on a carnivorous diet. I mean, you and Sean are both pretty huge dudes. So right now, right now, I think like, I don't have, I don't have the same tan I did when I was bodybuilding, but I think, I think like, I don't have, I don't have the same tan I did when I was bodybuilding, but I think, I think I'm like getting close to about as lean as I was. So it's actually getting kind of interesting. Now I don't only eat meat. I have a little bit of dairy in there, here and there.

Um, I got some yogurt. I have some, uh, uh, occasionally I'll have milk, cheese, uh, butter. Um, but that's, that's kind of about it. How about for yourself? Are you, you know, straight just steaks and ground beef type thing? Well, uh, so what I eat in a day is I, I eat essentially steaks. Um, so three and a half pounds of grass fed steak. I find that I do better with grass fed.

Um, and then I'll also do egg yolks. I'll do raw egg yolks. I don't do the whites. I was talking to Chris about this the other day. Whites, the whites of eggs when they're raw have avidin, which binds biotin. So I've always avoided the whites raw. And I feel like I digest the eggs a little better when I just do the raw yolks. Do you just throw the yolks on top of your steak sometimes?

I just put them in my hand and down them. Nice. Nice. Yeah. I throw them on top of steaks and stuff and they're, it's delicious. It's amazing. It's delicious on steaks. Egg yolks are amazing or duck egg yolks. Um, I'll also do collagen. I'll do extra tallow. I'll do liver in the form of like liver jerky. That's the way that I found to make it most palatable. You make it yourself? Yeah. I just put in the dehydrator. It's pretty easy. You know, liver has a lot of water in it. So, um, you just put it in the dehydrator for 24, 48 hours, but maybe I should, uh, I don't know, this carnivore thing got me thinking, maybe I should make liver jerky and sell it. Yeah. Why not? Or, or maybe I just, uh just had people go steal the idea and start making it right now.

You can take it. That sounds awesome. You know, the other thing I've recently started doing is thinking about bone meal. So we kind of touched on this earlier, but I think it'll be an interesting thing for people to hear on the podcast if they're thinking about a carnivorous diet. about a carnivorous diet, I'll just reemphasize that when I looked at all of the nutrients that a human needs, you know, all the vitamins, all the minerals, all the micronutrients, what's so cool to me, and this probably shouldn't come as any shock, I mean, is that you can get all that from an animal. And I think this kind of is another argument for carnivore, or it's a rebuttal of the plant-based argument saying, oh, you're going to get nutrient deficiencies. You can get all the nutrients you need as a human from an animal. And Sean has said

this as well, you know, eat what you are and, you know, a cow or, you know, an elk looks a lot more like a human than a piece of kale. And so they're going to have all the things that we need in them. We just have to eat from all the different components of the animal or supplement accordingly. And so the one compartment of the animal that I think I was missing for a long time on this carnivorous diet was the bones. And you've mentioned bone broth. And I think, you know, I've talked a lot about collagen on my social media and stuff. And I think, you know, it's important that we balance the glycine from collagen with the methionine from the muscle meat. And we can get collagen from tendon and organ meat or tendon excuse me and hide and bone broth

but what when i looked into it there are a few things that seem to only be found in animal bones and this is really cool um so boron is one of these and boron is something i posted about a lot recently i did a post a few days ago on my Instagram. So I tracked my testosterone, my sex hormone binding globulin and my free testosterone for throughout the three and a half months that I've been doing carnivore. And it actually went, the free testosterone went down, not a ton, but probably about 20% from, I think it was 67 picograms per ML, uh, for my free. And it went down to like 47 and it stayed consistent at 47 and then i started thinking about boron and i supplemented this is i changed nothing because i'm on a carnivorous diet and i'm kind of crazy like this i changed nothing but added 10 milligrams

of boron glycinate to my diet for nine days and i rechecked my testosterone and my free testosterone was 81 picograms per ml and my sex hormone binding globulin is much lower I posted a graph on my instagram and so I thought that was so cool that um and boron is just a mineral that we need it's a trace mineral and probably has to do it affects the way that sex hormone binding globulin is produced and it's been shown to lower sex hormone binding globulin and raise free testosterone in male. It seems to have positive hormonal effects in women, too. They've done studies on postmenopausal women who were boron deficient and it raised estrogen and testosterone. And women need both hormones.

But I thought it was so cool that my free testosterone went up 70% with a little boron repletion. And I thought, wow, that's cool. What else is in bones? And boron is really only found in bones. It doesn't come out in bone broth. I found this interesting bone broth analysis. You'd think maybe the boron will come out of the bone when I make bone broth. It doesn't really.

But there's a few nutrients that are only found in bones that we should think about on a carnivorous diet. You know, calcium, which you're getting in dairy, but I don't do dairy. And then manganese, which is important. And boron are some of those. So I started doing bones as well. I just eat bone meal from a producer that is prop 65 compliant. So there's not lead or a significant amount of lead in the bones. How the hell do you eat bones? There's this bone meal powder. It doesn't, it just, it's just like, you just put it in like

water and kind of mix it up and drink it. Is that, is that how you got the, is that how you got the boron? It was, was through the bone meal? No, I just did a supplement, but I've started doing the bone meal and the supplement. So I took boron glycinate 10 milligrams a day for, it was only eight or nine days before I had my testosterone checked and it went way up and I'll repeat it to show that it stays up and high, but I believe it will. Now supplements can kind of be problematic as well, right? Supplements because, you know, the capsule that they're in, they're in like these veggie caps and there's like silicone dioxide and there's all these other things. Like maybe some of these things that we think are helping us, maybe they're actually kind of harming us, huh? That's a tough one. You're right. You're right. And that gets deep into the rabbit hole. You know, I think that I would, the holy grail for me would be to get to a point

where I can take zero supplements. But I'm not there yet. I take a few. I'm happy to talk about the ones that I do take. It's just based on the testing that I've done on myself. And I haven't been able to get there yet. And I may not be able to get there. And I think that's a whole rabbit hole that, you know, we could go down further is like, are the supplements helping or hurting? And yeah, I'm not sure, but I think ideally you get it all from food. But for me, I haven't been able to do that yet. Um, maybe further in the carnivore diet or maybe if I do more bone meal or something, I don't know. It hasn't worked yet, but I'm close. Do you supplement fish oil? I do not. And what's the reason? I will. What's that? What's the reason?

Oh, you know, I, so I do a couple of things for my iodine and my omega-3s. I do, basically I get all my omega-3s now from salmon roe or salmon eggs. They have the phospholipid form of DHA, which is more bioavailable. And I will post about this on my Instagram. It's on my queue of things to post on Instagram. But, um, I did a, a red blood cell, omega three fatty acid profile on myself because I'm super geeked out about all my numbers and it looked really good. My EPA and DHA were very high. I have not taken fish oil for probably over two years. I believe that omega-3s are important. I believe that you can over supplement with omega-3s and I just get it from salmon eggs, which have less mercury and more bioavailable DHA. So that's how I do it. Um, and then what other

supplementation do you use? I personally like use a magnesium and zinc. And I mean, some of this stuff is just stuff I gathered over the years and I just never really looked back to like, get rid of it, you know? So I've just kept these things around and what's kind of happened to me over the years is I just kept adding and adding and adding. So my entire house is like full of, I got my cabinets and my, I got everything full of like supplements everywhere. And I know that I probably don't necessarily need them, but there's that, you know, meathead geek, you know, in me that like thinks that I need it. I've got an apothecary too, and most of them have been retired and are collecting dust. But, you know, I don't do zinc. I'll tell you about zinc a little bit. So you're going to get a ton of zinc from the meat. And if people are zinc deficient, this is why I think micronutrient testing is so cool for athletes.

You can test all these things. You have to be a little bit aware of which compartment of the body you're testing the different micronutrients in. Zinc is fairly accurate in the serum or the plasma. I think the serum is the most accurate for the zinc. Things like magnesium, you want to look at red blood cells. Potassium, you want to look at red blood cells. But if you get a micronutrient panel, we could definitely do this for you. We could look at all your micronutrients and tell you where you're at and give you a little

more tailored recommendation. The thing I'll add for people listening is that unopposed zinc supplementation, and that means if you take zinc without attention to some other minerals, it can be a little dangerous. So in the small intestine, there are these proteins called metallothionines, which bind zinc when it's in excess and we excrete it because our body doesn't get zinc toxic. But the problem is that those proteins also bind things called like copper and manganese and so the biggest issue i fear for unopposed high dose zinc supplementation people is copper deficiency and you see this a lot people who take a bunch of zinc can get copper deficient if they don't have enough copper to go with it so this is kind of where the whole functional medicine thing comes in and like

working with somebody like me comes in you know you can like oh your copper is okay we don't need to or generally the ratio i recommend is about 15 milligrams of zinc to one milligram of copper but you'd want to know where your copper was because there are some diseases where you over accumulate copper but that would that'd be all i'd say about your zinc is i'd be careful with zinc without copper unless you know your copper level um copper's the kind of the bugaboo on that um so right now yeah yeah, were you going to say something? I was going to say, what supplements are you on other than the boron?

So I take boron right now. I take 10 milligrams a day of boron glycinate. So I also take a B vitamin supplement. And the reason I do that is because I, though I'm getting B vitamins from liver and eggs, at this point in my diet, based on the urinary organic acid testing that I've done on myself, it looks like I need more B6. I probably need more thiamine. I probably need more riboflavin. It may have to do with my epigenetics, my polymorphisms. So I'm in the process of sort of optimizing. And I mean, I think about this stuff a lot you know the B vitamin compartments are generally meat has a lot of B vitamins but it doesn't have a lot of biotin thymine or folate so I try and get thymine and folate and biotin in egg yolks and liver but I might not be doing enough so anyway I supplement with a full spectrum methylated B complex that's

a whole other thing I can talk to people about and then I also do you boron do methylated B complex. Um, that's a whole nother thing I can talk to people about. And then I also do you boron, I do methylated B vitamins. I do, um, uh, glycine for myself. So I do collagen and glycine. Um, and so glycine is one of the three amino acids in collagen and it's, uh, used to buffer excess methyl groups. So I do a little bit of glycine. I don't know if you'd even consider that a supplement, but it's a special amino acid. So probably, and then I just started doing a little bit of magnesium and potassium chloride because I was getting some cramps in my feet and my arms. And I thought, huh, I wonder if that's a little low. My red blood cell potassium was kind of on the low side and potassium at that level on the red

blood cells is probably due to magnesium deficiency. Um, and magnesium deficiency can be connected with boron insufficiency too. So it's this really complex interconnected web. I will just keep sort of tracking all my stuff. So I've started supplementing magnesium, a little potassium chloride. I do the boron. And again, the boron and the magnesium are connected. I do bone meal and I do, um, the full complex B spectrum. Uh, and that's it. I don't do vitamin D because I get out in the sun and I am getting it the real way. And I check and my levels are about 55 milligrams per mil. You know, what's really hard to tell is like, um, like, uh, I guess the real hard thing to tell is what would be low for you? You know what I mean? Like, so we can sit here

and kind of say that I think I need more vitamin C or I need more of this, but like you, you, you probably, the answer is probably, you probably don't, you know, and, and, and even the stuff you're taking and stuff I'm taking, it probably doesn't really make a difference. I think what you and I are in hopes of is, uh, you know, we, we understand that human beings, uh, could survive on, on many different things. We wouldn't be here if they didn't, but I think what a lot of us are hoping for when we take supplements is we're hoping for almost like a superhuman response. We're hoping this zinc or the ZMA or the magnesium, we're hoping it's going to bolster our testosterone or help us sleep better. And we're hoping it's going to do something heroic to our bodies.

And really what I've learned over a long period of time is that there's not really, the foods that you eat when considering all foods, eating food seems to be almost more of a negative than it is a positive. And what I mean by that is the negative route that you can go seems to outweigh the positive route that you can go. And it takes a lot of positivity. It takes a lot of positive meals to start to outweigh, uh, all the things that we've done to ourselves over the years. Uh,

you know, you can, you can, you can, you can go out and you can, uh, you know, eat pizza and you can drink beer. Right. And I think that that would be like a, you know, 10, you know, a negative 10, right. But, uh, eating like the cleanest meal that you can possibly think of in your head, whatever that might mean for you. I don't think it cancels out the negativity of how bad that meal is. And we came up with this idea of these superfoods like blueberries and avocados and, and some of these things. And I, and I think that, I think that so many of us, I know I still feel that like, there's a magic thing somewhere. Like if I could just find that, you know, a mushroom, whatever, or a kratom, or you still

think there's like that magical, uh, supplement or food or man, if I just get more manganese, or if I just get more of this, like maybe I'll lift more and maybe I'll be able to do this or that more. And the truth is it probably really won't make that big a difference. It's probably just a very small piece of the puzzle. And as I like to put it, it's not part of our fight. You know, it's not part of our mission. And when I try to help people, you know, I'm just trying to tell people, look, man, if you can start to cut back on some sugar, if you can start to cut back on some grains. If you can get out for a walk, that's a pretty good victory to start with. And hopefully that'll give you momentum

to start to feel better. That momentum to feel better will hopefully start a cascade of other things and have you kind of wondering, hmm, I wonder if I put a little bit more into this, what I'd get out of it, that type of stuff. Yeah, totally agree with you. A couple of thoughts about what you just said. Lots of good things to talk about there so I think you bring up sort of subtly or what I heard and what you were saying was this idea of like cheat days or these kinds of things or just the pizza thing and I think that I agree with you that and this is my issue with cheat days and I I would say that if cheat days allow people to have an overall better diet, fine, do it. There are different levels with which we are approaching these things. My

problem with cheat days is the immunologic level, which is a super geeky way to say it. The problem with a cheat day is that the macronutrient problems that you accumulate on a cheat day are much less important than the immunologic fallout of a cheat day. What do I mean by that? So this kind of goes back to the idea of like what's so cool about a carnivorous diet and all these things is that I think what we're dealing with here is a very sensitive immune system. And when you have a cheat day, you are introducing again all of those really complex triggering antigens into your body, whether it's gluten or a plant antigen or a digestive enzyme inhibitor

or a lectin. Those effects on your immune system last much longer than we think. They can last weeks. This is the thing. When people have celiac disease, which is the gluten intolerance, those people cannot have any gluten because the immune system will react to gluten for weeks after one exposure. And this is what's such a hard thing about immunology and diet and food sensitivity is that when you eat something that triggers your immune system, your immune system can be triggered for a long amount of time after you eat that, which is why I try and help my clients not do cheat days when they're trying to sort out autoimmune issues, you know, and people will say, oh, I only eat a little gluten. And it's like, no, a little gluten and celiac disease can still

cause total problems with the gut villi and small intestinal hypoplasia and things like this. And it's just a metaphor or a, you know, a model for other immunologic activators. So people, if they're doing cheat days on a carnivore diet or a keto diet, you're not really understanding how good you could feel from an immunologic standpoint. And as we were talking about earlier, I would argue from an immunologic slash inflammatory standpoint, which is really what we're talking about here, and really what's so cool about all this. In terms of supplements, this may be my bias, but I sort of divide supplements into two categories. I see some subset of supplements I see as building blocks for your biochemistry. You know, I think of myself as a mechanic, as a human mechanic, and somebody brings a car into me and I'm like, oh, the timing

belt is off. Right. Like I'm not. And then I see some supplements that are like all the like pinstripes and the fenders and like the big spoiler you're going to put on the back, you know, but some supplements actually help the engine run. That's probably not a great metaphor. So what I'm saying is that I see supplements as two different, two different sets. And the one set is like, does your body have all the building blocks that it needs to run the biochemistry? These are things like zinc and manganese and copper and boron and all the B vitamins, things like this, right? So these I think of as gears and levers in a watch or a complex machine that we don't see anymore, you know, with gears and levers, like inside of an old timepiece or

a Rolex. If one of those gears isn't working well, and we can put in like magnesium and I can put in manganese and I can put in boron, everything starts to work better, right? And we don't know, as you said, we don't know that until we test our individual physiology. And so that's the hard part. People can try and construct a good diet and I can make recommendations about a diet based on theory and where the nutrients are. But until we test someone, we don't really know. Until I pop the hood on somebody's car and say, your engine isn't functioning well right there, your carburetor's a little off, the injector, you know, what's going on with this engine? It's different than that engine, right? Somebody's a Porsche and somebody's a Lamborghini. We'll use all the exotic cars, but they're not going to run the

same, right? So I need to look at the engine and know. So that would be the class of supplements that I feel better about prescribing to people when I know what they need. The other class of supplements are all of like the accoutrements, right? The spoiler, the fender, the pinstripes, you know, like that's not really, I feel less excited about those. You know, those are things like, like you were saying, um, I know people do like deaspartic acid and things like this, things that the body doesn't need or use. We're trying to hack something, right? We're trying to like, we're trying to like get a little more performance out of it or, you know, like those I get a little worried about because those can imbalance the system and those I'm not as big a fan of. Um, and I use much more sparingly and much more

cautiously and judiciously. Does that make sense? It makes total sense. Um, what if somebody does want to cheat? What if they do want to enjoy an anniversary and they, you know, they want to do something. So, uh, let's kind of forget like, um, gluten intolerance or something like that, or, or even autoimmune disease, just, just kind of talking about kind of your regular, uh, person who just wants to kind of have at it. Um, would you maybe recommend that they fast their way into that, that they try to earn it? Maybe they, maybe they exercise a little bit more that day, save it for the second half of the day. And, um, you know, can drinking even play into some of this, some wine, some beer, some whatever alcohol.

Yeah. Um, so I think that what I tell my clients is ultimately it's about quality of life. And at some points in your life, the quality of life is higher by doing the cheat, right? Your anniversary, a wedding, like those are big deals. You know, that's quality of life. I would never tell anyone to not eat cake at their wedding or something. It's a big deal. You know, that's when the quality of life, it's all about overall quality of life, you know? And so like my client went on his anniversary and said, Oh, I'm going to have this stuff. I was like, that's awesome, So like my client went on his anniversary and said, oh, I'm going to have this stuff. I was like, that's awesome, man.

You know, he's happily married. It was a really great thing. And so I would say, you know, just think about the quality of life in terms of cheat days. Is this cheat going to increase my quality of life more than this dietary strategy I'm doing? And if it is, then do it. You know, and I tell people that with everything in regards to diet. If somebody came to me and said my quality of life hinges on gluten and bread, I would say, fine, you know, who am I to tell you not to eat it? You know, if your quality of life is higher in terms of how to like mitigate the stress from a cheat, you know, people talk about things like you want to be

hydrated. You want to do the right things. You could consider something like activated charcoal. You know, you can take activated charcoal before the meal or with the meal, which might bind up some of the toxins in the meal, things like this. I definitely think alcohol is a toxin and people always ask me about coffee. Um, I, you know, I think that it's, I think it's a net negative for most people, but that's just my opinion. And again, it's a net negative for most people but that's just my opinion and again it's a quality of life thing you know I think people need to realize that coffee is caffeine and coffee has polyphenols which can inhibit the absorption of other nutrients and coffee is from a plant it's from a bean you know and it's going to have things which might trigger people

immunologically but it's the quality of life that people get from drinking coffee is more than the quality of life they're going to get from not drinking coffee. Then it's a different equation. So, yeah, in terms of cheat days, in terms of cheat meals, I would say think about hydration. Think about activated charcoal. You could even do things like glutathione if you wanted to do. I don't recommend glutathione overall. But if you want to do a little bit of like acetyl glutathione, you could do a little bit of that. A little bit of antioxidant support.

But generally, I just say, do the cheat, enjoy it, have the anniversary, have the wedding, don't feel guilty about it, and then just get back to your life. Your body is evolved to be an incredible machine that can take the hit and then get back. It'll be fine. It'll readjust. But watch the symptoms too, because what was really cool for my client was he said, oh, my anxiety got much worse. And I said's interesting he's probably gonna be more motivated in the future you know I still want him to eat whatever he wants on his anniversary but as he's going through his daily life he's gonna be like you know what now I know this actually affects me in that way that kind of stuff is so much fun for me to help somebody with because when I hear them kind of walking me through

the steps of kind of what's going on with their diet, I'm just thinking in my head, I'm like, man, this time next year, when I'm talking to this person, they're not going to even have any of these problems because they're going to be so like, once you get in, you can't really go outside that much without getting harmed. You know, you, you go off your diet and man, you're on the toilet for two days straight. You know, it, it's crazy what happens and it kind of almost forces you to, uh, live a, uh, kind of quote unquote, better, better, better way of life, a healthier way of life. It can be a big motivator, you know, it could be, I forgot about two supplements. I am taking vitamin C. So I take about 250 to 500 milligrams of vitamin C.

I know there's a lot of talk about scurvy and the absence of it in the carnivore community. I think this is a really interesting topic. And I went down this rabbit hole for myself. So I do think there's vitamin C in animal foods. But what I looked at when I was looking at papers and the analysis that had been done and like Arctic Inuits and stuff, and the papers that I saw, it looked like there was the most vitamin C in things like adrenal and kidney and like whale blubber and brain. And I was like, well, I don't need any of that. So let me just make sure I'm getting enough vitamin C. I didn't see a big downside to doing it.

One of the things that I should have done that I did not do was check, you can check a serum ascorbate level, you can check a serum vitamin C level. So anyone that's doing carnivore and they're not taking vitamin C, I would definitely recommend that they check a serum vitamin C level just to make sure that it's within the optimal range. I see it as something that's like a very low cost addition in terms of supplements. You can get bulk supplements, seems to be a great company. They make a lot of this stuff with just pure form, no fillers, no powder. I just have an ascorbic acid powder. It's not even a pill.

I just put half a gram, a quarter of a gram in some water. I don't have to think about it in terms of vitamin C. That's the other thing I was thinking about in terms of supplements. I used to take methylfolate because I do have an MTHFR polymorphism in my genetics, but now the methylfolate is incorporated into the B vitamin supplement that I take. That was the one thing I wanted to add to people. The vitamin C I think is an interesting thing. It's pretty safe. I would probably take it. I don't think people are going to get scurvy, but being suboptimal in terms of vitamin C is not worth it. I don't think people are going to get scurvy, but being suboptimal in terms of vitamin C is not worth it. You're just, you're going to function better. You don't

need a ton. You don't need a mega dose, but a little bit every day is probably a good insurance policy. I should mention, uh, anyone who's, you know, trying to carnivore diet for the first time or a ketogenic diet. Sometimes you get into these spots, especially if you're trying to lose weight. And as you're mentioning, some people don't eat enough. First of all, I always think it's a good idea to get acclimated to the food. So you shouldn't really be all that deprived. You shouldn't be that hungry. Give that some time.

And by time, I mean like a month, which is kind of a long time. I think people feel like they're in some sort of race to lose weight. But if you spent the month recalibrating your tongue and recalibrating your palate towards some of these foods, that's a worthwhile investment that will have long-lasting health gains for many years to come. So take your time with it. And it's okay if you only lost one pound in a month or two pounds or, or whatever, whatever it turns out to be. But I will say I have noticed, um, a lot of people ending up with, um, you know, cramping and, uh, just kind of bonking during their workout and not having enough, uh, kind of a zip, uh, you know, on the back half of their workout. And, uh, one thing that's helped me as a supplement and it's, uh, I'll plug a specific supplement is, uh, called keto vitals.

And, uh, the guy has actually really worked on this project for a long time. He made some capsules for a while and then he turned it into a powder and it has magnesium, uh, calcium, uh, potassium, and maybe something else. I can't remember, but, uh, and maybe sodium, I think. But anyway, yeah, he's got, he's got this, uh, powder. It has a monk fruit and stevia in it. So there's not a lot of crap in it and it's just kind of the raw ingredients. And I think that might be helpful to some of the people that are listening, um, because that is something that's helped me. Another thing that's kind of helped me with the back half of those workouts when I'm getting

fatigued and getting tired is, um, uh, the addition of, uh, uh, some amino acids and I've been, I've been utilizing, um, uh, essential amino acids. So those are just little things that I, that I personally use that have helped a lot. Can you give us a rundown of the actual food that you eat? Like, or even the actual food that you would recommend, period? Yeah, absolutely. So on my Instagram, I've got some photos of all the food that I eat or most of it. It's pretty similar every day, which is probably not uncommon in these communities. So in the morning, I get up and I have probably about half a liter or three quarters of a liter of water just to like hydrate my system. And before I eat anything in the morning, I'll do probably 15

grams of glycine, a little bit of vitamin C, a little bit of potassium chloride. Like you were saying, I think some of these electrolyte replacements can be really helpful for people. We know that we waste some of the electrolytes in ketosis and until the body adjusts, I think a lot of people are going to get cramping and it's not a problem. It's not a problem with the diet. It's just that the body's adjusting and it takes time and the electrolyte supplements can be pretty helpful. So I do a little vitamin C, glycine and potassium chloride in water. And then I generally eat about probably about a pound and a half of steak in the morning. It's either a grass-fed ribeye or a grass-fed New York steak. I put some collagen

over it. I add Redmond sea salt, which is one of the ones I like because it's an inland sea salt and probably has less of the microplastics in it. And then I'll pour tallow over that. I'll also do probably, if I'm doing chicken eggs, I'll do probably five to six raw chicken egg yolks. And I'll do maybe a tablespoon or a half a tablespoon of salmon roe. So that's my breakfast. maybe a tablespoon or a half a tablespoon of salmon roe. So that's my breakfast. Um, and then I generally only eat twice a day because the meals are kind of big, but it's interesting. And people will know if we're doing the carnivore diet though, is that even after I eat a pound and a half or two pounds of meat, I don't feel bloated. I don't feel heavy. And I've gone to the gym, maybe 35 minutes later and been able to do pretty good workout, like hitting the punching bag or something. It's crazy. You feel a little

bit, but not bad. So, you know, I'll eat that amount of food and then go surf and be fine. Generally, if I can, I eat my second meal around two or three in the day, two or three in the afternoon. And it's pretty similar. I'm going to eat probably a little more steak in the evening. It's just how it works out for me eat probably a little more steak in the evening. It's just how it works out for me. Maybe 30 ounces of steak in the evening, probably two pounds of meat in the evening. And it's going to be the same kind of thing. Usually it's going to be grass fed New York or ribeye or tenderloin or something with

added fat and salt. I'll do more glycine in the evening and I'll probably do a little more potassium chloride. I take my supplements in the morning and then I'll do a little bone meal in the evening. I'll add a little bit of bone meal to water and drink that. And then throughout the day or with the dinner, I'll probably do a little bit of liver jerky. And I usually do about an ounce to two ounces of liver a day. And it's small. So small so you know when you make an ounce of liver and liver jerky it's a piece of liver jerky about that big you know it's not a big piece of jerky so I'll do some liver and that's pretty much what I eat in between I drink a lot of water

I think about where my water is coming from I have a spring that I get it from and that's it I don't drink coffee or anything else but But yeah, so I try to cover all the components of the animal. I try to get the muscle meat. I try to get the connective tissue from the collagen. I try to get the organ meat from the liver. Sometimes I'll do heart or kidney if I can find it. And then I try to get the bones. I want to get some boron. I want to get some manganese. I want to get some calcium. So that's pretty much it. You know, every once in a while, something will vary. I'll go to sushi. I need some sushi or sashimi or something. I won't eat the rice, but, um, pretty much that's my standard diet. When's the last time you had a carbohydrate?

It's like, uh, well, you know, what's interesting is there are actually carbohydrates in meat. So if you look at a carnivorous diet, just, just what I just told you, there's probably 10 grams of carbs in that. Right. The last time I had a vegetable or a plant was three and a half months ago. Uh, the last time I had, yeah, I mean, that was probably three and a half months that I haven't any like plant-based carbohydrate. Yeah. That's, that's, uh,

that's pretty interesting. So it sounds like to me, I mean, for the most part, uh, you're sticking with a cow meat, um, cow muscle meats, right. And, uh, tallow yolks, salmon roe, and then you're figuring out a way to get some liver with the liver jerky and then a bone meal. But that's kind of the, the list. Is there a particular reason maybe why you don't like eat like elk or bison or, or do you eat some of those things and do you eat ground beef as well? You know, I've just found in my personal experiment thus far that steak is much more rewarding than, uh, than ground beef. And so I think I figured that out pretty quickly. Like I always eat, I eat lamb sometimes. I had some lamb chops the other day.

I don't want people just to think I'm just eating grass fed meat. Yeah, I just have found that the steak meat is somehow rewarding, you know, like I was making lamb burgers. Have you found that too? Yeah, I agree 100%. I mean, there's, I mean, different people have different tastes for different things, but I think you can't really compete with a ribeye, a well-cooked ribeye. I mean, holy shit.

It's so good. It's so good, yeah. And, you know, in terms of elk, I'm waiting for Joe Rogan to call me up. You know, once I get on his podcast, I'll get some elk from Joe. This is the minor leagues to the Joe Rogan show, So he'll be calling you pretty soon, I think. So Joe, if you're watching this, we're going to get some help, buddy. He might be because we got him on the carnivore diet. So me and my brother got him on the carnivore diet.

Something I was going to ask is, so is there anything that we can do? And maybe it's not something that you do, but is there anything that people can do that just enjoy to have something a little different? Because most of the foods that we're talking about, they are savory, they are filling. Um, you know, it's, it's wonderful to, to have some eggs and some butter or some meat and some tallow. Like it's, it's ridiculous how good it is. I mean, there's not really many things that are better than this, but, uh, how good it is. I mean, there's not really many things that are better than this, but, uh, are we able to mix in something sweet somehow? Are we able to get a different flavor? Because most of the things we're talking about are kind of, uh, I'll call them buttery. They're buttery,

they're salty. Can we, can we mix something else up, you know, get something a little different on the palate, uh, maybe in the way of like a protein shake or what are some of your suggestions? So, you know, it's interesting. There's been, I've seen this, you probably know about this more than I do. I've seen this monk fruit extract a lot in a lot of the supplements now. And I have to look more into like the compound in there that makes it sweet. One thing I will mention to people is that glycine is a sweet amino acid. Glycine tastes like sugar. So if people want sweet in their tea or their coffee, if they're drinking tea or coffee, or people want a sweet flavor, glycine is sweet. So if you mix 15 grams of glycine in tea,

it's going to taste like you put sugar in there. You won't even tell the difference. I'll give it a shot. It's interesting. It's kind of geeky science. It's probably the glycine and tea it's going to taste like you put sugar in there you won't even tell the difference i'll give it a shot it's interesting it's kind of geeky science it's probably the glycine molecule which is amino acid probably has a resonance structure that's a ring structure that looks like glucose but obviously no insulin response and you won't get any sugar crash anything with glycine the other thing i would say is if people really want sweet, you know, there are all sorts of flavors, I think, around like, if we're just sticking strict carnivore, there are all sorts of flavors around fish. And, you know, I don't know if they've ever had people have ever had urchin or salmon roe isn't really sweet, but some of the fish can taste a little sweet. Definitely. I mean, like octopus or lobster or crab these are actually

sweet foods you know and when it comes down to it i don't think if people really wanted to have something sweet i don't think a little bit of raw honey is the worst thing in the world you know like there's it's made by bees you can make an argument that honey is actually carnivorous you know like yeah it's made by an animal. Yeah. So maybe if you feel like having something sweet, don't beat yourself up. If you feel like having a Quest bar or having something that's kind of way off the carnivore diet in particular, but it's still not a totally unhealthy thing for you to have and it doesn't trigger anything for you, then maybe it's fine, right? Yeah, I think I would just

say watch your symptoms, see if you get triggered. And this kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier, that it's kind of all about the quality of life, right? And, you know, my job as a physician, my, you know, what I want to do for people is help them with whatever knowledge I've accumulated, add some knowledge to them that helps them get back to or attain the best quality of life. And they define what that quality of life is, you know, not me, I'm not here to tell someone what their quality of life is. But, you know, if someone has a bad autoimmune disease, then yeah, the quality of life is probably an improvement in their autoimmune disease. But yeah, I think, you know, when people, if people go off or they,

they have an anniversary or they're wanting a quest bar or protein shake or have some honey or whatever, like don't beat yourself up about it. Just watch your symptoms and kind of think like, what is the real, what is this worth to me? You know, and what are my real goals and kind of get back to that. Yeah. How does it help? How does it hurt? Something I've been doing, something I've been doing that might help some people out there is, uh, Mark Sisson, you know, he makes some really great products. He makes some steak sauces and stuff from Primal Kitchen. Um, I'll use those occasionally. I love this taste of steak. I don't really need anything else on there, but occasionally when I'm eating a steak or pork, I want something just a little bit different. I want a little bit different, uh, taste, you know? And so I'll mix it up a little bit here and there. And then also, you know, have the knowledge, have the understanding that if the goal is to lose weight and you're not making progress, then some of what I might mention right now might be something that you, you want to try to take back out or not overdue. But what I'll do is I get some yogurt, uh, from a local grocery store out here.

It's, it's a, uh, called grazers, uh, yogurt and it's, um, it's, it's grass fed, uh, dairy and it's, it's got a good, good chunk of fat in it. It's nice and creamy. And I mixed that with some primal kitchen, uh, whey protein and it's freaking amazing. It's, it's fantastic. It's really good, really good flavor. It's a nice way for me to end a long day. Um, and then how many times a week do I do it? Maybe twice a week, you know? So it's just something I still have that fat kid inside of me that, that still wants a little happy dessert at the end of the night. And so those are kind of some of the things that I've done over a period of time that I've, I've kind of looked at and said like, okay, well, you know, the, the yogurt still is providing some value in, in many different ways, got calcium and some other things and, uh, getting some protein. And like, this is not anything that

I'm noticing is, is harming me in any way. And if it does slow down my progress towards getting leaner or losing weight, I'll just get rid of it, but it's nice to have it in there on occasion. I agree completely. And I think that if people monitor, whether it's weight loss or acne or eczema or psoriasis or autoimmune issues or joint pain, just keep track of that and keep your goals in mind. You know, I have one of my clients is an ex NFL linebacker. And he said, you know, when I eat macadamia nuts, my joints hurt more. And I was like, there you go, man. They're delicious. And, you know, many people would probably say they're super healthy, but it looks like

they could be triggering something for you. And so if you want to cut them out, I would say let's cut them out. And he's now doing a full carnivore thing. He's doing great. Awesome. I know you get around a lot of really brilliant people. Are there a couple of really brilliant people. Are there a couple of people that you would suggest that, A, some of our fans, you know,

kind of check out and B, maybe some people that we interview here on the Power Project? You know, there's so many smart people right now in this space. I think people are familiar with, like I mentioned, Dave Feldman. So Dave Feldman is a guy on YouTube. Some of the, I mean, I'll tell you what, in the carnivore, keto, low-fat space, some of the smartest guys pushing the envelope are engineers. They're software engineers. They're so cool. So Dave Feldman is a great guy to check out on YouTube. He has a bunch of videos about cholesterol, about lean mass, hyper-responders,

about things that happen. Peter Attia, I'm a huge fan of Peter Attia. bunch of videos about cholesterol, about lean mass, hyper responders, about this, you know, things that happen. Peter Atiyah, I'm a huge fan of Peter Atiyah. You know, I know you guys know Peter, but I think Peter's stuff is great. And I would recommend people check out Peter Atiyah's podcast. He, Peter Atiyah did a seven part series with Tom Dayspring. That was incredible. If people really want to geek out about lipids, Peter's interviewed Ron Krause about cholesterol. Peter has a podcast about LP little a, which is a confusing thing for people that we didn't talk about today. That's a great podcast. Um, so Dave Feldman, Peter Atiyah, you know, Ben Beekman is also on YouTube and Instagram. He is a PhD researcher at, um, Brigham Young and does a lot with insulin and glucagon and has some really, he's contributed

a lot of really interesting stuff around insulin resistance. So there's insulin resistance is this interesting topic too much for today, but there are two competing schools of thought, whether insulin resistance happens because of too much glucose or maybe because of inflammation might be the original triggering event for insulin resistance. So Ben Beekman is great. He's got a YouTube video online where he talks about insulin and glucagon ratios when you eat a lot of protein.

There's this misunderstanding or misconception that if people are on a ketogenic or carnivorous diet and they eat a bunch of protein, they're going to go into gluconeogenesis and they're going to push their insulin up and they're going to raise their blood sugar. This doesn't happen. And he shows you why in like great detail, because your body keeps the ratio between insulin and glucagon the same. So Ben Beekman is great. Um, you know, Ted Naiman is a physician, uh, and also in Seattle who, um, has some great videos on YouTube about insulin resistance and protein to energy ratios. And those are, those are pretty darn interesting as well. So those are probably the first ones that I recommend off the top of my head. Yeah. What were some of your thoughts on when my brother and I

were on Peter Itea's podcast, because these people that you're listing off that are, that have been on his podcast and the conversations that Peter Itah has are just off the charts, high level in terms of, uh, the, uh, I guess I would say medical and science information that he spits out. And my brother and I are by no means, uh, in that, in that field. So what was that like for you to kind of listen to, uh, two guys that have kind of been in the trenches and not in the classroom? Well, I thought it was really interesting, you know, because it's a different experience for me. Like I said, I've never done bodybuilding and I think that bodybuilding has contributed a lot to the field. I mean, bodybuilders, I have a lot of kinship with this perspective because you guys are looking to just optimize your body in a certain way and

I'm looking to optimize my body in a certain way so I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff that's come out of bodybuilding so it was cool to hear the story that you guys have had and to hear about you and Chris and what you were doing as you were bodybuilding and using different things and it was cool to hear Peter's perspective as well I mean as you know he's a brilliant doc it was cool to hear him say that he kind of had his mind open to the use of testosterone and things like this. And I was like, wow, that's pretty interesting. Maybe I need to think more about that too. I have, I have a lot of clients who take testosterone supplements as well. And, you know, I think hormones are super interesting. So that was really cool to hear the story. I really liked it. Awesome, man. You got

anything coming up that you want to share with people? So I'm going to be moving down to San Diego in June of 2019. So moving in with Peter Atiyah, are you? What's that? Are you moving in with Peter Atiyah? I don't think he wants me to. I'm renting a room in Peter Atiyah's basement. That's right. He doesn't know it yet, but when he hears this, he's going to, yeah. No, I'm going a room in Peter Atiyah's basement. That's right. He doesn't know it yet. That's right. Here's this. He's going to, yeah. No, I'm going to be moving to San Diego and opening a private practice there. So if people are in Southern Cal and are interested in functional medicine, like I said, I'm going to be doing functional medicine and psychiatry.

I'm going to have a practice in San Diego. And then I'll also continue to do remote consults from that perspective. So I do, I have a website. It's paulsaladinomd.com. My last name is spelled like salad and dinosaur or just like salad, which is ironic, right? Right. And I know, but I see patients remotely right now throughout the country and do stuff like micronutrient analysis,

looking at gut flora, working with people on dietary stuff. And I think in the next, you know, a few months before I moved down to San Diego and opened the practice there, I'm just going to be continuing to do things like this and build the internet media presence and build the social media. So I'm on Instagram. It's Paul Saladino MD is the handle I just got on Twitter, which is like a whole new world for me. The handle is MD Saladino. Um, yeah, so people can find me all those places. If people want to email me directly, they can just send an email to Paul Saladino, MD at gmail.com. And we can set up a time to talk about whatever issues they've got going on. So that's the big stuff for me, just kind of getting the practice going over the next few months. And then, you know, maybe in

four or five months, I got Joe Rogan and Peter Atiyah's podcast to be on. Who knows? We'll see. Yeah. 2019, you'll be on Joe Rogan's podcast. I guarantee it. Andrew, got another question? Yeah. I mean, first of all, I do thank you for everything today. It's been freaking awesome. A pleasure. Yeah. Hopefully we can keep in touch because I have a ton of other questions like on a personal level and whatnot. But I was watching one of your videos where you're talking about how we even like something like a ribeye might not have enough fat in it. Right. Like the protein to fat ratio. What about something like eggs? Is that ratio a little bit

more balanced or is that even more off than steak? Well, you know, if you think about it, I think I'd have to look at the actual carbon. I think an egg has about six grams of fat and about six grams of protein. I'm really just kind of eyeballing that. So, that one is a little more balanced. You know, an egg is about the same protein and fat. Generally, what I've found to be best for me, and this is going to be individual, everybody's going to have a little bit different macros. What I aim for is about one-to-one protein to fat in terms of grams. So if I'm eating 350 grams of protein a day I'm trying to get about 200 to 300 grams of fat a day and I think I usually get it most days I don't get super particular about it but with all the tallow you

know if I should uh post some videos about it I mean I'm basically taking like a big amount of like liquid tallow and pouring it all over the steak in addition to like all the fat that's in a ribeye. But I would just, yeah, I would just put that out there for people that if they're doing a strict if they're eating a lot of steak on a strict carnivore diet without adding extra fat and they're not feeling as good as they want to feel in terms of energy, then think about adding a little fat back. It's been good for me because the stuff I do like jujitsu and hitting the punching bag and doing Muay Thai is pretty cardiovascular, and I don't find that I bonk or have any trouble with endurance.

And that's the issue with the fat is just giving your body enough of that fuel and not pushing too hard on the protein and kind of letting your body do that. Sean Baker had Miki Bendor on his podcast, which I thought was an awesome podcast. Miki Bendor is an Israeli anthropologist. And Miki Bendor has a great video on YouTube about humans as fat hunters. And I think that maybe if I weren't going to be a doctor, I'd be an anthropologist because Miki Bendor's idea is that humans are fat hunters. And that evolutionarily, we've always sought out the fattiest animals. Evolutionarily, we've always sought out the fattiest animals, and it's the fat of the animal that actually was the prize thing because that's the main nutrient that we want rather than the meat.

We wouldn't kill lean animals. Yeah, we went from chasing down fat animals to just chasing fat butts all day. I know. Yeah, another quick question about eggs. You said on certain days when you have chicken eggs, what other eggs do you have? Oh, I have duck eggs and turkey eggs, depending on what I can get. So if people have not had a duck egg, they're amazing. The yolks are bigger and a little bit creamier. Turkey eggs are probably my favorite

they have kind of speckled shell and um yeah the yolks are really good before i was doing bone meal as much i would eat the shells also which people always ask about no it makes you feel like a cave man you just clean off the shell and then dry it out and i would eat the shells um for calcium and probably some other trace minerals. I know, I think Ray Pete had talked about eating calcium. Yeah, there's some, there's some insane amount of calcium and, and you supposedly absorb it really well from the shell. How the hell do you eat the shell though?

Don't you have to like cook it or something because there isn't a bacteria in it or something like that? I've never had a problem with it. So me eating raw egg yolks, you know, I, I probably have eaten six raw egg yolks every day for the last eight years. So we can do the math. Thousands of raw egg yolks and I've never gotten sick from it. What I've read, not being a poultry farmer, is that organic eggs are much less likely to have contamination with salmonella and campylobacter. And if we're looking in terms of egg contamination, the salmonella and campylobacter contamination is on the shell of the egg. So if

people are worried about this, they can definitely boil the shell or put it in boiling water for a few minutes, dry it out and eat it. And you won't get sick out. That'll sterilize it. But, you know, I kind of live dangerously on the edge anyway. So I just, is that, is that weird to eat the shell? Uh, no, I mean, I do a lot of weird things anyway. I eat liver and bone meal,

you know, uh, I don't think it's weird. It's definitely crunchy and you get used to it. And then after you eat the shell, like you're kind of crunching things for a while, you know, if I'm hanging out with friends,

they'll hear me like crunching the eggshell for like 20 minutes later. And it's not the best thing, but you can do what you got to do to feel good, man. I want to kick as much ass as possible. I agree with that. Last question for me. You said that you eat grass-fed beef. Is there any studies or proof that grass-fed is better than grain-fed? Well, I don't think anyone's ever done a head to head

trial. But what we know is that grass fed beef is going to have different ratios of omega three to omega six. Because they're eating grass, which is going to be higher in probably in the grass, it's going to be alpha linoleic acid, which is the precursor to EPA and DHA. So you're going to get more EPA and DHA in grass-fed meat. You're also going to get more of conjugated linoleic acid, which has been associated with improvements in outcomes. And so you're also going to get a little more vitamin A in the fat of grass-fed meat. The main reason that I eat grass-fed meat, and this is something that hasn't really been talked about much in the space, is glyphosate, which is Roundup. You know, it's this Monsanto sort of badness right now.

And the idea that this is pervasive, we can't avoid it. It's a water-soluble pesticide that chelates divalent cations. And it's on all of our food now. It's on soy and corn. And when they make crops GMO, whether it's Roundup Ready corn or soy, what they're doing is inserting a gene into the crop that allows them to spray higher amounts of glyphosate on it and without dying. So that's the problem with GMO, in my opinion, is they're just, they're so full of glyphosate and when people are getting grain fed cattle what are they fed they're fed glyphosate covered corn soy grains and so you just what i worry about

is this bioaccumulation of glyphosate so i'm just trying to mitigate that and be aware of it now is grain fed meat better than no meat at all? Probably. You know, I think that if we're dealing with autoimmunizations and stuff and people can't obtain grass-fed meat, then that's another issue and we have to kind of deal with that. There potentially are ways to mitigate glyphosate as well, but I try and avoid it as much as possible. And with things like ButcherBox and these other places, the grass-fed meat is more available. And I know finances get to be an issue too. And, you know, I can work through that with people and try and figure it out.

I think ultimately we just all need to get out hunting or, you know, figure out some way to crowd share meat or something so people can have healthier meat. Awesome. You know, I think it's a statement that's, uh, it's in the Bible, um, that they, they, you know, they say to live off the fat of the land and that's, you know, they say to live off the fat of the land. And that's, you know, that's what we're trying to do, I guess, you know, to sum up this podcast. Thank you so much for your time, man. That was fascinating.

And we'll have to get you here to Super Training Gym, too, because there's definitely a large field of a lot more questions that we'll gather for you in the coming weeks. And I'll be in communication with you and we can talk more about trying to lower that calcification that I got going on there. Yeah, do it. See what we can do about that. But again, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Have an awesome day.

It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you, Mark and Andrew. It's great to be on this podcast. I'm a big fan. And it's like, yeah, I was super stoked when Chris texted me on Instagram. I was like, hey, let's get you on Mark. And I was like, that's great. Let's do it. So stoked. Awesome, man. Have a great day. Thanks, guys. Take care.

Shit. That wasn't useless. hey thank you guys for so much for listening and uh you know we're doing the best job we can here with the streaming and sometimes it's going to get slightly interrupted um you know that was pretty minor so so hopefully all the podcasts go that smooth but uh just be patient with us we're always trying to make things better here we will continue to figure out how to you know get rid of any bumps and bruises and glitches and stuff but man that was a wealth of knowledge right there that was awesome that was so cool i mean i i have i mean we we tell everybody that's listening like to take notes like i was running out of space on my pages and i'm i'm gonna take full advantage of that connection i'm gonna send them an email or i might send them or uh ask them if

we can hop on the phone because yeah when you know when you guys are talking about eczema and stuff, there's so many things boiling in my head right now. Honestly, I genuinely think that it has something to do with the carnivore diet, but my mind has been going like 100 miles per hour. And it's kind of amazing. And, dude, he's, man, he's one of those guys that we got first. Uh, he's going to be everywhere pretty soon. Oh yeah.

You know what I mean? And it's really cool. Also this topic of the gut being connected to your brain. Um, it's not like people haven't talked about that before, but that'll be a huge, huge deal in 2019. This, uh, the psychobiome as it's called, I think you're just going to hear more and more conversations about it. Um, he said some fantastic things in there and, you know, you got to hang with some of these guys sometimes because, uh, myself included,

sometimes we're going to get a little nerdy, get a little geeky about, you know, what we take and, and, you know, I just bought like magnesium thionate the other day. Like it just, you know, it doesn't, the reason why I don't share all those things with people's, I don't want them to think that that's the main part of anything that I do. It's a side thing to what I do. It's, it's a, it's a small part of what I do. And a lot of times I don't even share stuff until I know what's really working well for me. Like, um, I, I implemented, uh, K I implemented, um, implemented, uh, vitamin K and like, I've implemented some of these other things that, uh, uh, Dr. Um, Dr. Davis, uh, suggested to me, uh, vitamin D vitamin K omega-3, you know, he said this will help with, you know, keeping a healthy heart. And that's something that I want to do.

And I do some things that maybe aren't always so healthy for my heart. I think some of the training that we do sometimes isn't necessarily great for it. Pushing the way that we push and then also, you know, the usage of PEDs. I think it's, it's pretty clear that it's not great for your cholesterol profile. It's not great for, necessarily great for your heart. So I'll have to figure out all these things, but these are all things that I want to figure out. These are all things I want to learn about. And these are all things that I want to work on doing better. But I thought he had some outstanding information.

And, you know, if you're new to dieting and you're like, man, I don't know if I'll ever be like some of these guys. And look, you know, Andrew is only a few months in, he's only a few months into getting on a regimen, getting on a schedule, but you could walk up to Andrew on any day, except for maybe on a day where I suggested fasting to him. And you have what, two or three meals in the fridge every, right right so that those meals aren't those meals don't fall out of the sky you got to prepare those meals you know i don't know if the meals were prepared yesterday if they're prepared two days ahead of time or what the schedule is but you're someone that has just you know started to catch your groove on all this stuff and

and and you've been able to do it um Um, you know, Andrew does, Andrew's not born with any, uh, special, um, special thing. He's taken advantage of some of the gifts that he's been, uh, given some of the things he's worked for. He's taken advantage of all these things and he's implementing the information that's being shared. We've had Stan Efferding on this podcast many times and having Stan around and having Stan talking about meal prep. Gabrielle Lyon, when she was here, she ate a steak. She freaking whipped the steak out of her bag. She's like, all right, time to eat, boys.

And we had Jake Cutler here. I can bring those people around, many many other people and maybe it won't have the same response that it did on you but it's working right yeah absolutely and i don't i don't want people to think that because i'm surrounded by all these people that i i definitely have an advantage but that doesn't mean that it was any easier than anybody listening to this right now i have actually i i mean, for the first couple months that we started going really hard in the gym, my energy levels to keep going, like to keep pushing on the podcast, to keep my photography going, even filming, everything became extremely

hard. And it's just barely right now kind of starting to ramp up to where I can kind of handle doing way more than I was previously, which is, I mean, you know, do more, be more. But it's, it's taken me a long time and it's, you know, it's only going to get better, but it's still going to take me a lot more time, time under, under tension to get to back to where I was when I was doing just photography or doing, you know, one thing or the other to do all of it at once. It's been really freaking hard, but it'll get better. It'll get better and it will get worse. You know, the, the cool thing is you'll have stronger, you'll have a stronger tools to deal with everything. So now when something comes at you, you got a fucking machine gun, you know, with unlimited

bullets, right? Like you can, you can fight off just about anything, you know, and you can be laughing about it almost, but it's still going to be hard to hold onto that machine gun and fire off that many rounds. Like it's still going to be difficult, you know, when, when, uh, you know, people kind of assume that things just get easier, but you can kind of look at, look, everything in life is uphill, you know, and, and no matter what you've achieved, everything's uphill from here. Uh, even for myself, you know, I've, I've acquired some financial freedom, but things are still uphill from here, man. Like the company

can't do worse. The company's got to do better. I can't do worse. I can't be worse. I can't be fatter than I was last year. I got to be in better shape. I got to represent. The only way to lead is to get out in front. You get out in front. And the only way to get out in front is work your ass off and to try to think of ways of always being ahead. And that's, I'm obsessing over it. And I'm trying to be better at everything that I do.

I'm just trying to, these little things, these little holes I have in my game, I'm trying to patch those up because even though everything's an uphill battle, it's worth going up that hill because the view, when you get there is going to be fucking awesome, you know, but you're not working towards getting up that hill and going, ah, and just chilling there for like, you know, you don't, you know, that's not, that's not going to happen. That's not the way that it works. It doesn't work that way. You get up the hill, you get 10 seconds to look at the view. You get a couple deep breaths and you're like, oh, there's a larger mountain over that way.

Whoops. And then you start working your ass off all over again to get up that one. That's the way it goes. Yeah. One thing I just, and I hope I don't offend anybody if they know exactly who I'm talking about. But when somebody asks you what you're doing, never say just chilling. Somebody who's just chilling is not getting better.

I'm going to completely remove that phrase from my vocabulary. Because I looked over, answered the phone, ah, you know, just chilling. I was like, oh, that's, nope, I'm done with that. I'm never saying that again. What you doing? Nothing. Yeah, no.

I mean, and obviously, yeah, you can relax and stuff, but if you're simply just chilling, you're not really doing anything. If you're hanging out with the family, like, oh, I'm with my family. What's up? You know? It's not, these are not good things to talk to yourself about. The can'ts and the, you know, saying things that, uh, are so permanent, you know, and, and just thinking that like, this is just the way things are.

This is just the way things are. And this is the way they're always going to be like, there's no reason to really, uh, to really speak that way. Try to try to clean up your language. I'm not talking about cuss words and stuff, but just the, the dialogue that comes from your body. I mean, you know, we were working out today and we're doing incline bench and, you know, like just little things, like if something hurts when you're lifting, you know, share that towards the end, you know, don't, don't talk about,

you know, when you're, you're, you're squatting or, or whatever with some people and your knee is just killing you. You either bow out of the exercise and say, Hey guys, look, I'm going to do something a little different. And you don't even have out of the exercise and say, hey, guys, look, I'm going to do something a little different. And you don't even have to tell anybody anything. Just say, you know, it's not feeling right today. I'm going to move on to something different. Still help everybody through their sets and still be productive in that way. Go off and do your own shit and bite your tongue and pound your fist or whatever, but do it kind of on your own.

And then when the workout's over, you tell everybody, dude, my fucking knee felt like it was going to explode. That's a time where you can be, and then, and then you could talk about it. You can say, okay, well, maybe we got to try this next time. Maybe we should try a different warmup or maybe we should try this or that, but you don't want to be dragging everybody else down. Oh man, this hurts. My wrist hurts. And this, everything hurts on everybody all the time. Shit hurts on everybody. Clean up your language. Stop speaking so poorly and stop thinking that you can't do something. Don't be like everybody else. You know, the easiest thing in the world to do is to be upset. The easiest thing in the world to do

is to be sad. The easiest thing in the world to do is to sit there and feel sorry for yourself. sit there and feel sorry for yourself. But it's also not that hard to be different than everybody because so many, so many just, they just want to be the same. They just are stuck in their own ways. And when you start doing, when you start doing stuff well, and you start being good consistently, other people will flip out.'re like man that guy's always on time he always does his work that's impressive like that shouldn't be impressive but that's the standard that we're dealing with nowadays and so look just just doing that and doing it all the time and and never dropping the the ball. Ball gets thrown your way. You look at it with both, you know, both eyes and you catch it every single time.

You don't drop it and you let, you let it make it, uh, make it work whatever way you have to. We got to get you out of here. I know I got another podcast to do guys. Appreciate it so much, uh, that you guys are listening. Uh, give us a review on, give us a review on iTunes, please. Um, appreciate you guys as always. Hopefully you got something from this podcast and, uh, look forward to doing another one in a day or two strength is never a weakness.

Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.