Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 88 - Chris Bell and Daniel Orrego

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Back on the scene, crispy and clean, Big Bro Chris "Boar" Bell and Daniel Orrego hang out with Mark Bell on today's podcast. Chris is the director of the classic Bigger Stronger Faster documentary and more recently, the Kratom Documentary, A Lief of Faith. It's safe to say Daniel is the brains behind the operation. He is the Co-Founder of the Epigenix Foundation and is a wealth of nutritional knowledge. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: 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

We're rolling? We're good? All right, so we just had a little audible and this is a good life lesson. You know, things happen. You try to set things up a certain way and you try to make sure you do the best possible job that you can and making sure that things go according to plan. And sometimes they just don't. We were going to have Mike O'Hearn here today to talk to him about We were going to have Mike O'Hearn here today to talk to him about his Mike O'Hearn-ness over the years. And we were going to talk to Mona on the podcast, and then we were going to do some movie stuff with them. But Mike was coming back from Texas, and it just turns out he wasn't able to make it here. And so we audibled.

And now we're hanging out with my bro. And powerlifting, we call it bombing out. He bombed out on us yeah well regardless of what he did or regardless of our feelings towards it um it's just the way it is and you just move on you know it's important not to get stuck on any one thing he's been a friend for a long time yeah just figure out what who really fucking cares tomorrow i'll talk to him just say hey i'm disappointed you didn't let me know a little earlier so it could have made other arrangements with our day but who really cares yeah that's about it anyway you're making some gains over there with a z capital gains i

don't i don't like labeling things with the z because you're doing a great job yes i know that uh jen wiederstrom's against the z i remember we walked by phil's one time and she was like i'll never go in that place has a z and anything And anything Jen is against, I'm against. But then you're missing out because Phil's is amazing. No, Phil's is amazing. So you have to let the Z in every once in a while. But like 1-800-CARS-FOR-KIDS and stuff like that, you're like, come on. CARBS-FOR-KIDS?

CARBS-FOR-KIDS. 1-800-CARS-FOR-KIDS. I think that's with a Z. We got some cold brew coffees over here? Trophy Kids, they wanted to put a Z on the end, and we said no. Get that shit out of here. Get that shit out of here. Trophy Kids with a backward Z on the end.

So you made a lot of progress. You lost a lot of weight. You're getting in better shape. You and I are on a nutritional journey together, a fitness journey together. We are working on a movie. We're trying to find some more answers but like what has been your answer towards being able to make progress recently because for a little while um you were stuck and the cops are here as soon as you ask me there may be a lot of noises on this podcast we have a house full of about 75 kids so like as soon as you asked me what the secret was there right steroid

coming in um now for me i didn't ask about any secrets because i know that there are none so yeah yeah uh for me the biohack the real change has been um really focusing and buckling down on the carnivore diet um for me the carnivore diet seemed to be where I found success. And the more I go towards just red meat and water, the better I do for me. And so I buckled down and went more towards that. And I also kicked up. So I work out twice a day, every day almost. I do cardio once a day.

And I do weights usually once a day. and I just switch up the body parts. And so I know that sounds like a lot for a lot of people, but I just really love having a relationship with the gym again. You know, I had for a long time had a relationship with food and that was something I'd visit six times a day. Now I'd rather visit the gym six times a day and the food once. So I eat like once a day usually maybe twice but usually maybe maybe a small snack in here something like that the biggest key for me was like going down eating i would say once a day and a snack is how i normally eat and then sometimes it's twice a day and then like a little snack and by a little snack i just mean like uh

usually under 400 calories of of something well you and I get people sending us stuff all the time. You know, protein bars and pecan butters. And it cracked open a cold brew right here at Caveman. I did it right back. Shout out to our boy. Yeah, Tate Fletcher. Tate Fletcher. It's amazing. This coffee is so good.

I'm coffee. I'm just CT. Yeah. They're homies, though, I think. They're brothers. They're brothers. That sounds racist to say that they're brothers. homies though i think they're brothers they're brothers that sounds racist to say that they're brothers yeah you know what i mean but anyway um you know i think a lot of times you know we're getting sent you know these different uh these different cool like keto things yes so sometimes sometimes that plays into it a tiny bit this is amazing a guy sent me a

killer way he sent me keto ice cream and it was really good. You know, so he's like, hey, I want you to try my keto ice cream. He sent eight things of keto ice cream. Oh, your stomach. They were gone in two days. That's great. And that's just part of my diet. And so I consumed all that, tested it out for everybody out there on Instagram that wants to know.

And I'm like, hey, this stuff is pretty good. If you want to try it, try it once in a while. Now, see, I haven't had it since. It's not that it's not good that I haven't had it. It doesn't really actually fit into my diet. So I didn't buy it again, but I did try it, and I showed everybody like, hey, I think this is legit. It didn't make me fat. It was only maybe a few weeks ago where you and I were talking on the phone and we're talking about some fasting and we're

talking about like intermittent fasting you were saying you have a hard time doing it so the intermittent fasting the longer intermittent fasting is like a newer thing for you right it's definitely a new thing and I think that um everything goes in waves and cycles including the carnivore diet the ketogenic diet everything in our lives goes in waves and cycles so my steroid abuse yeah when i keep saying waves and cycles carnivore diet carnivore diet and i keep saying that over and over it just means for right now it really just means for right now that's what i'm doing that's what i'm heralding you know yeah who knows like in 10 years i might be in a different spot where i might need to use

a different kind of diet to get out of the spot that i'm in then. And so, um, while I know that this is effective for a weight loss and for, you know, for my health, uh, right now, I don't know that it'll be that forever. I think it's hard to speak in absolutes. And I think that's something you and I talk about all the time and something that, um, really, but we don't talk about it all the time. Cause that sounds too absolute. We talk about it often. We talk about it often. Yeah. And it is hard to not talk in absolutes. You say, Oh, never do this and never do that all the time because that sounds too absolute we talk about it often we talk about it often yeah and it is hard to not talk in absolutes you say oh never do this and never do that all the time like hey never eat bread you should never eat bread like well you're actually starving and maybe you should eat bread you know so i think well and then what if information is out there that shows that bread's really good there might be information says like hey this guy ate a loaf of bread a day and he got jacked like there's uh all of a sudden you go some people that really believe that sour sour

dough bread it's good for you you know like there's like ben greenfield he has sourdough bread i think every day some sort of special weird version of his own sourdough bread but yeah and he does a lot of weird like crazy interesting things and i think that in a way that's the way you find out things. The only problem with biohacking is like the things that you disregard. So a lot of times these biohacker guys, they keep showing you things like,

hey, try this and try this and try this. And what I've found is like, as somebody out there experimenting for myself, and this isn't specific towards Ben at all, this is just in general. If you like come up with something it's like wait a while before you tell people about it because a lot of times you get too excited about something and then it like actually doesn't work or maybe it was only

working for everybody should also always understand that there's whenever you're going towards one thing you're going towards that one thing and you're leaving other things behind from something else some sometimes for better and sometimes for worse so even with fasting there's a lot of pros that could happen with fasting but there's also a lot of cons that can happen with fasting i used a keto diet i did the carnivore diet um i did a mix of things and my muscles didn't feel like, they didn't feel like they were kind of like, it's hard to put into words, but they didn't feel like they were like with me for my workouts. They didn't feel like they were underneath me for my workouts as opposed to having carbohydrates in the mix.

And so some people that continually do keto diets may not understand mixing in some carbs can make them feel better. And I think what gets undersold a lot is how valuable the actual training is. We forget about how important the actual training session is and how important it is to be able to train hard. There's times where you go in the gym and because you didn't eat that much that day or the day before, maybe you did a lot of fasting, maybe you're trying a 24 hour fast or whatever. If you can't put into the gym, what you need to put into the gym, then that's, that's a huge negative too, unless it's just going to be for a short period of time.

Yeah. A lot of people don't understand that they, they, it's worth, it's worthless to go to the gym and not get stuff done. You know, you want to go in there and you want to attack it. You don't want to go in when you can't, when you can't do anything. The other day I was going to go back and do another session of cardio and then i just realized like i'm way too tired that this is going to do nothing will we be better is if i get to bed a little bit earlier and put a little bit more into my cardio in the morning so some of the things i've been doing that

a little bit that are a little bit different around i used to just get up and go on a treadmill for an hour just to like warm up my body and get moving. But now I go into the gym at five o'clock in the morning at Gold's Venice and you're already there. And you're on the boner. Yeah, you're on the step mill. And I'm like, son of a bitch. If he's going to be on the step mill, I got to get on the step mill. So a lot of it is like motivated by devastating. A lot of it's motivated by just what you're doing.

So if like if you ever want to get me to do something, all you got to do is just do it. And then I'll end up doing it. It's stupid like that. Like if you're doing a bodybuilding show, that would be the only way to get me to do a bodybuilding show. I see you do it. I might say, you know what? Let me try that out. And we were just cruising on the beach.

We were running on the beach. When's the last time you ran? I haven't run in, like literally you ran i haven't run and um like literally run i haven't run and i tried to do it the other day but besides that i'd say it's been at least 20 years i'd say that you know i figured the sand would be a good opportunity to introduce you to it i think for somebody that hasn't run before somebody that's listening to this podcast and they and they want like a lot of times you want to do stuff but you're kind of scared to even try it like i've been wanting to do yoga for a long time and i just haven't done it i probably just need someone like to be like

hey you got to go with me or whatever i probably just need some sort of some sort of any joe rogan who's like a maniac about it we keep trying to talk joe rogan in a lifting but all he needs to do is invite us to a yoga class and we'll back out just as easy as he backs out of our lifting. Well, we'll put on a pair of Lululemon pants, and we'll work it out, right? But anyway, as I was saying, getting people to run, running can be intimidating. It can be hard. Anyone who's big, it's going to have too much impact on you. But if you run a hill, the impact's a lot less.

You move a lot slower. The intensity is greater, but the rate at which you move is a lot less. So running on a hill is fucking great. And also running in sand can be really beneficial, can be great, rather than just running on regular concrete like a trail run or something. People start thinking about who they really are when i say the words i can't that's a big problem that's it that was a huge problem that i had for so long i would just say i can't and as soon as you say i can't you just say like what are you

a loser that's how that's what you feel about yourself that you can't do anything like so you gotta you gotta take a step back from i can't and start thinking about what you can do. And maybe you can't do something. There are some things people can't do. But when you can't do something, what's the alternative? And that's what I really got from you. And that's what I got from our guest today, who's not here. But just don't say that you can't, because if you say that you can't, you're already setting yourself up from the very beginning for failure. when i said i can't squat you said but you can safety bar squat i said well yeah probably i don't know i don't know if i can because i never tried it well you're like try it so now i'm safety bar squatting with 405 well yeah you were saying

well you're saying that you can't squat because your shoulder and i was like well there's other options you don't have to be a regular squat bar it's still that question that you asked me when you said yeah um are you going are you going next on the incline yeah you're in and i said i can't and then you said i said i can't do i can't do that weight i can't do that weight you said that's not what i asked you yeah and i just stopped it right there and just said that's it that's and then we got you moving those are moments though that i think people need to have more of you need to have more life-changing moments where you somebody says something to you and you stop and you say, that's not who I am. That's challenging my manhood.

That's challenging my pride when I say I can't do something. I'm basically putting myself in a category of worthlessness when I say I can't. And we've got to stop looking at things that way you know i mean with the exception of it like just 100 not being in your best interest to try something because it could be like not safe for you for the moment because you might not be able to do it like a 40 inch box jump or something out of nowhere right like it might not be smart to try it um but i think a really important thing that i've learned is just to let go of who you were who care who cares because who you are is is a made-up thing anyway it's it's made up by your own interpretation of how people think

how you think that people think that you are so it's a totally made-up thing that you made up in your head oh people think i'm just big and dumb like no they actually don't they don't and you want to know why because they don't care yeah people don't care people care about themselves they care about their families care about their kids care about their wife they care about their job they ain't got time to think about your bullshit everybody just thinks i'm all i can ever do is be a a documentary filmmaker the word no one ever no one does no one thinks that no one even cares the, all it is, is just a culmination of all these ideas that you have in your own head. And you just call it everybody or them or they. They don't want you to know about this, bro. They don't want you to know. And it's like, there isn't a big people conspiring against anything. Like even with Kratom, they're like,

oh, they don't want you to know about it. It's like, that's not really it. It's like people are just unaware, right? Really, we haven't educated the world enough on it that's really the scoop there isn't any meeting uh behind the scenes it took them five seconds they're like we don't know much about it okay there's no meeting on mark bell where everybody's sitting around going mark bell is big and fat and stupid like what an idiot and then they're all agreeing right yeah he is right and then you know there is no so when you're you're right when they say everybody thinks i'm just this or they said i couldn't do it is my favorite when people you hear every time a team wins the nba championship here's all people said we'd never win a super bowl and it's like yeah we banded together and no one thought we could do it well

why did who are these people that didn't think you can do it you're part of this professional league look the cleveland browns have fans right now that are like, bro, they're going to the Super Bowl this year. So even the people on the Cleveland Browns. That's a bad example. No, no, no. You'll find some dude in Cleveland who's drunk off his ass right now, who is like screaming at somebody going,

they're going to the Super Bowl this year. Remember when they had Jim Brown? They were great. So it can't be everybody. It can't be't be everybody right there's got to be like one or two people that yeah so i just think um negativity is not an option and that's something that we actually learned from o'hearn even though he's not here yeah but we learned that you know negativity is not something that should ever enter our uh our zone bloodstream when you were running what was actually hurting because you said that it hurt to run uh just my hips in the hip capsule but it was also is there a way

to describe that or does it just not make any sense to your average person doesn't have fake like your knee when you land you land on your knee and it feels like there's no um there's no shock absorber there yeah and the shock you go to go up the stairs and there's like it feels like someone's jamming a fork into your knee. It just hurts a little bit. So when I'm jogging, each step hurts. But here's what we did to the hip capsule in the past two days.

We squatted, you know, I did 315 for three sets of 10 on a box squat, you know, and that's pretty heavy. And then we did, we deadlifted 500 pounds yesterday yeah trap bar deadlift but well then you did regular squats and you didn't think you could really do those we did regular squats after we trap bar deadlifted because you made me and then we did um what do you call it leg extension so yeah if my knees and my hips kind of feel beat up today um then it's because of that but you know one of the things that's been amazing for all around has been the kratom, the CBD oil, and the carnivore diet,

and those things, and also mariva curcumin, it's called. People take curcumin all the time, and a lot of it doesn't actually ever get absorbed, but there's a kind called mariva curcumin, and that along with CBD and kratom, I found to be just an excellent way. called mariva curcumin and that along with um cbd and kratom i found to be just an excellent way any idea what curcumin does lower lowers inflammation uh really really well across the board they're starting to say now um we can start to bring daniel regal in on this oh yeah get in here daniel things will get a little technical yeah hopping on my buddy

daniel's here and daniel used to work he's going Seinfeld on us With the white shoes Look at that He used to work for Quest Nutrition And he's super smart He's been on the podcast before Yeah Daniel Alright my man

Oh this guy's leaving Right in the middle of the podcast Give me a big hug It's just weird timing Good things buddy Good to see you man Thanks for everything buddy That was great

That was a good weekend man Good weekend Whatever Hey I'm just gonna leave too Right now So I gotta go Yeah way to do your job Andrew Hey That was great. That was a good weekend, man. All right. Good weekend. Whatever, folks. Hey, I'm just going to leave, too, right now. So I got to go. Yeah, way to do your job, Andrew. Hey, at least if you're going to. Hey, way to put your family first over top of this job.

At least if you're going to leave, can you at least send me those pictures of my calves? Yeah. Yeah, I can. Please. Cows. They turned into cows. No, no. Like now.

I need them now. Now, when you get to the airport. It's so important that he posts them on social media you know hey you know because of social media you know that's right andrew you're you're awesome it was great to see you down here thanks for coming i'll see you brother yeah thanks for working out with us too that was fun yeah oh yeah hashtag me now wait that is confusing me three can we start off with that real quick? Well, that stems from what was our cardio session this morning where we were commiserating about some of the challenges

with the Me2 movement. It's very controversial. And we said, hey, you know, the idea is it should be even more inclusive than it is now hashtag me three yeah we're adding ourselves in yesterday yeah we had a really we had a really good conversation with victoria we were over at bulletproof what's her last name uh field victoria field we had a good conversation with victoria field and uh she is a researcher for the Keto Pet Project, right? Yep.

Epigenics, right? Epigenics. And she also helped Quest Nutrition start a keto meal prep company they did a while back. They had dissolved that. But anyway, she's a strong woman, you know, and it's clear that she's fit. She works out. And she was kind of— Remember, she's also an IFBB pro.

That's what a lot of people don't know. That's awesome. Yeah, she's fit she works out and uh she was kind of she's also an ifbb pro that's what a lot of people don't that's awesome and she had a she had a uh a very very uh successful short yeah in that period of time successful uh she was talking a little bit about the me too movement and some of that stuff and she was like yeah just be strong just you know lead just just do you know you don't have to be so wordy you We're so wordy with it. She was an awesome example of somebody who's leading a bunch of women out of things like cancer. Right. And she's helping a lot of people,

um, you know, to health and fitness. There's not enough of a strong voice from women, I feel like. And it's great that somebody like her, I'm excited that you guys are going to interview her for the movie. Uh,

we'll, we'll get her in there as well. Cause we do need some women voices. There's other people like, we've met too, Jen Wiederschram yesterday, and she's awesome. Another person that's always positive

every time you see her, always encouraging girls to get out there and do it and go train. We definitely need more of this. It's got to be easy to be positive when you're hot, right? Right? I mean,

she has problems too. She has problems too. That's true. That's like we all do. Yeah. But yeah, she was, she's always been super excited about fitness and she's always brought a lot of enthusiasm to it.

You know, she's always like really fired up and excited. And part of that is part of the way that she got on, you know, Biggest Loser, being a coach. She had the part of the way that she got on you know biggest loser being a coach she had the quote of the year yesterday and it perplexed daniel so much she said come on let's take a picture because you know social media and daniel was like what does that even mean yeah that was a great moment because it seemed because you know yeah sort of self-evident that by all means we should have this photo. Why? Well, because social media.

That's the new hashtag, right? Hashtag because social media. It's rare for anybody to be that upfront about it. Right. Because, you know, social media. Well, the transparency was so charming, you know. It was like almost like, hey, let's make sure that we video this so I can become famous. Right. Because that is sort of what you're doing.

You want to show what you did for that day like here's these exercises and not only did i do these exercises but michael hearn's in the photo with me like this should really help me be famous well it's like people like get a picture people say i don't want to be famous or anything but they have a camera crew following them around right but you know that's not my goal is not to be famous but i have a camera yeah i always use that excuse i'm like i never wanted to be famous or anything but i made a movie i put myself in it that's the cheapest anyway we're talking about inflammation curcumin and there's uh there's even more evidence now uh mounting as we speak as we do this podcast, there's more and more information coming out that the more you can, I guess, fend off or yield inflammation, it can even help with weight loss.

Is that right? Yeah. I mean, that's not an unfair statement. In fact, what's so interesting about inflammation is how the, what I would call the cycle or interval of inflammation is managed. And what I mean by that is that it's not a one-way street. So, for example, like today, this morning, all of us caused quite a bit of inflammation in our own bodies as a result of doing heavy, heavy, very rigorous resistance training. Well, provided that we attend to that with appropriate foods, supplementation, very importantly rest, that interval of inflammation can be managed in a way that's very, very advantageous. Why?

Because we're inducing adaptive response. It's when inflammation is left unchecked that, okay, then you can run into problems. You can impute disease processes or or just challenge overall health by that so you could be training really hard but you could really be shooting yourself in the foot because if you're not recovering from these workouts exactly and recovery is a weird thing to talk about because some people might say like all right i feel okay but are you drinking are you not sleeping um are you just kind of behind in general like if you're behind already you're 25 or 30 body fat uh you're gonna have to figure out a way to make some

changes to get momentum to even start heading in the right direction and there's some interesting nuances to the whole thing so for example like a lot of people are aware that the use of omega-3 fatty acids can you know help to manage inflammatory response but here's where things get a little bit curious so and they've looked at this in in rats so if you have two cohorts of rats right that are both uh receiving training on a wheel cohorts or groups i should say two groups of rats right so you have a group of friends that receive omega-3s and you have a group of rats that receive omega-3s and you have a group of rats that do not. Well, the group of rats that receive omega-3s

do recover faster, but over a long enough time horizon, they are not as strong as the group of rats that do not, which tells you something important about managing inflammation is if you do it too much, you may actually be reducing or tamping down adaptive response so it's not it's not a one-way street it's not almost a little thing or all the

other almost a little bit like that ice pack theory you know if you use the ice pack after every training session for your knees uh maybe it's not the greatest thing but if your knees are actually swollen and you fell and you hit a curb or something your knees all jacked up by all means chuck some ice in there. But if you're doing it all the time, maybe it's starting to have a negative effect. Yeah, and it's probably true. The same thing about supplementation is probably true as the same thing is true about any given nutritional program, which is you may not do it in perpetuity.

You may do it for a period of time for a certain effect, and then that may evolve into something else as your goals and aspirations change. Is there proof that, uh, in that, um, uh, is there proof that a ketogenic diet is better for inflammation than like, let's say if it fits your macros or diet that is, uh, I guess following, fits your macros or diet that is uh i guess following um a caloric maintenance or restriction well this this goes back a little bit to what we talked about with uh peter attia the other day right where he was talking about the two groups of rhesus monkeys the one wisconsin and the other in the east side about peanut butter yeah right because of the reason and. And it showed that in contextual to one group, they didn't do as well with caloric restriction, but it also depended on what the baseline food substrate was. So if the

baseline food substrate was terrible, then caloric restriction really helped. But if it was pretty good food, then it didn't really give them that much of an advantage. And I think the same thing is true here, which is ketogenic diet can be very powerful in controlling inflammation. But in comparison to if it fits your macros, well, it depends on what are the macros, right? So the macros could be a ketogenic diet.

They could be high protein. They could be higher carb. It depends on what the spectrum is of macronutrient distribution. You could have a very inflammatory ketogenic diet. You could be eating something like canola oil or something that's inflammatory on a ketogenic diet. So you still have to avoid dairy. It can be very inflammation-causing to certain people

and cause leaky gut in some people and certain kinds of dairy or milk or whatever. We used to do kind of a haphazard keto. We would go to like Dan's and load up. Yeah, chicken wings is bullshit keto. And we used to do stuff like that and we used to tell people like don't worry there's no carbs in it and like i would i was guilty of that there's actually what you're talking about there's scientific precedence for

uh well they did studies yeah and one of the guys that really brought this to my attention was uh dr laszlo boros who's a pediatric oncologist at ucla yeah and he he was one of the first guys to start to unpack some of these studies that ketogenic diet doesn't work. And what he would do is he would go back and look at the methodology for what they were feeding the rats. And what he showed was that, yeah,

it was a high-fat diet, low-carb, low-protein, but they were feeding trans fats. And trans fats are not ketogenic. So the choices that you make actually do become very, very important. Even if they are ketogenic, though, even you make actually do do become very very important even if they are ketogenic though like even if it was canola oil that can still cause inflammation in the body right so like let's make sure that when we're talking about you know a ketogenic diet needs to be a ketogenic diet with all the things that we've we discuss it enough for people to know but

like no vegetable or seed oils no sugar you know those things are definitely going to be inflammatory even if you're on a ketogenic diet. So it'll lower inflammation if you stay away from all the right inflammatory foods. And the great news is with what you guys are talking about here is these are knowable phenomenons. So you can measure, you can go to any doctor, your doctor here locally, people can go to Dr. Rand, whoever they want to go to, and they can measure interleukin-6,

they can measure homocysteine, they can measure high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, they can measure galactin-3, and they can know what these inflammatory markers are telling them. So it's not as if you have to be out of the loop in terms of what your response is to any given nutritional and supplementation protocol. You can just go measure your own blood and find out. And that's the beauty of these things is you can sort of produce that feedback loop and say, hey, I'm looking at my blood numbers, inflammation, at least according to these panels, is low or medium or high, and you can make adjustments accordingly. Any ideas as to any theories on why a carnivore-style diet works we asked peter it about it he was like i'm not sure how it works it's amazing a couple other people that that kind of some of the top people in

the world are like kind of like i don't i don't really get it right like yeah i said the same thing kind of like i don't really get it so a good maybe a good point of departure for thinking about this is and this was something that i have to give our colleague Ron Penna credit for, because he always presents this as sort of a thought experiment. He says, look, if you were locked on a ship at sea for a year, right, or perhaps for two years, and you could only select one food with which to survive for that extended period of time, what would you select and would you make it? And the answer, sort of fast forward to the punchline, the only food that you could select

that would allow you to survive is meat, right? Some sort of beef. You might be able to scrape through with eggs, possibly. Possibly. But any other food choice, you wouldn't make it because you would run into micronutrient deficiency and you'd run into challenge. Now, is that a perfect thought experiment?

No. But what it does is- I think it is. Right. But what it does is it gives you occasion to really put in stark relief what is the most important input nutritionally that we have in a survival situation, right? And it's a little bit counterintuitive. It's probably not, you would, probably most people wouldn't select meat as the first go-to ketogenic diet is survival mode yeah

to a degree it's a survival mode diet and what it really teaches you is that when it comes to conferring health benefit this a lot of times is what you don't do right so if you're not eating high carbohydrates right just by not incurring that insult, boy, oh boy, you buy back so much health benefit. So there's nothing magical about eating meat per se. It's more so when you do that diet, what are you not doing? You avoid chips, oh boy. I'm not eating the Twizzlers and the Hot Pockets and the delicious chips, oh boy, that you mentioned. What he technically called eating carbs, he technically called it an insult yeah and that's that's what people call it an

insult you're insulting your body you're insulting metabolism to a degree right when you have an excess right there's there's lots of reasons to eat carbs like not the least of which is you're doing a bodybuilding show man that's gonna you're gonna get a lot of benefit from yeah get glycogen in the muscle and your liver load up what are some of the so like on a ketogenic diet typically you know it might be about one gram of protein to one gram of fat usually the fat is even a little bit higher and the protein is even a little bit lower what's the disadvantage of somebody um you know riding out a ketogenic diet for kind of a long period of time and not moving or shifting in and out of it at all so so using dr atia as an example uh you may recall when he was here the other day he mentioned hey there was a period of time for three years

right a thousand days this guy was in nutritional ketosis right so what happened to him well lots of good things happened to him not too many bad things happened to him other than that for a period of three years he didn't eat delicious pizza and delicious chips ahoy that you might say hey that was actually a bad thing he didn't have that in your life but in physiologically not he didn't move backwards doing that and it tells you something very important, which is, hey, look, if you or I never ate another carb in our lives, no great harm would come to us. Now, our lives might be poorer socially as a result of not being able to have the fantastic Twizzlers and Hot Pockets, But we wouldn't move backwards physiologically.

Now, we may not be able to move forwards with performance in every way that we might want to, right? I mean, Peter's not going to step on a bodybuilding stage anytime soon, right? You are. Carbohydrates are a part of that landscape. So, you know, when you start thinking, I mean, we've talked about this before. I love to think of carbohydrates as a supplement. Yeah.

Right? Not a prerequisite for physiological health, but a supplement for performance. I think all of a sudden now- It's an interesting way to look at it because you don't need them, right? Yeah. You don't need them, but you could utilize them all the time for different things. There's lots of advantages to having them, but they are not a prerequisite, A, for survivorship or B, for long-term health. Yeah.

You know? Can you be on a ketogenic diet and can you mix in a little bit of carbs? You were mentioning for yourself you have a little bit of like oatmeal before you hit the gym. Can people have a little pre- and post-workout carbohydrates to lift them up a little bit, to give them a little extra in the gym, but still be kind of in ketosis. Absolutely. I mean, and probably sort of the version of that that really threads the needle is the use of substrates like clustradextrin, in other words, highly branched carbohydrates that induce no glycemic response.

Some of these carb powders. So let's talk about that. Where would somebody get something like that? What is it in? What is that? Well, you can buy it. Clustradextrin?. So let's talk about that. Where would somebody get something like that? What is it in? What is that? Well, you can buy it. Cluster dextrin? Cluster dextrin, yeah.

Like a cluster? Like a cluster of dextrins. Yeah. Cluster fluff. Hanny's company and some other companies make carbohydrates like that. That's what I take in my post-workout supplementation. It's the stuff like the resistant starches, basically. Effectively, yeah.

And it was really- You Can makes yeah jeff volex company i think also like carbolin yeah i think uh gaspari makes one yeah and basically what they those those products were actually originally developed for kids with glute one deficiency so that they would be able to extend the window of time without having to refeed. But then somebody clever sort of figured out like, oh, there might be a performance benefit to this. Somebody had things about an anabolic window terms. Right. And also, you know, if you are eating other carbs, then you can take that carb in without

inducing a glycemic response or an insulin response. And then you can save that for other carbs. Or if you're saying, hey, I want to train, but I want to have the performance benefit of carbs without dismantling my state of nutritional ketosis, this is how I can thread the needle. So post-workout, for a lot of the workouts I've been doing over the last 20 years, I've always had a post-workout shake. Even through doing a ketogenic diet, I would do two scoops of either like a whey protein isolate or a hydrolyzed whey right after the workout that's like kind of always

been there now sometimes i add carbs in depending on what i'm doing now i'm doing bodybuilding stuff so there's about it's like 25 grams of carbs which is not a a lot, but there's a scoop in there, right? When you're on a ketogenic diet and you lift, I'd imagine you probably produce a lot of the same hormones and things are going on in your body as if you weren't on a ketogenic diet. Talk a little bit about what that post-workout window like looks like and does it make sense for somebody that's on a keto diet to have straight up protein post-workout because there's isn't there somewhat of an insulin response from from getting there is so like if you if you looked at like insulin response curves for fat it's flat for protein you get a little bit of a bell shape. And then for high glycemic carbs,

you get this sort of peak, right? So if you compare those three macronutrients, and then fiber is sort of like fat. If you take in just a pure fiber, it's pretty flat response. So it really depends on what people's goals are. So for example, like if you look at, say, example like if you look at say our colleague uh dom dagostino right he will stay in ketosis for pretty extended periods of time and still outlift you and still outlift me right and i've watched like i've personally trained with him and watched him lift in a fasted state man it's mightily impressive to watch him he'll kill you yeah move some weight around. Now, his goals are different in the sense that he's not trying to put on muscle, but he understands that when you're calorically restricted and eating ketogenically, training helps you to maintain the musculature that you have.

So if that's the goal set, then staying in ketosis makes a lot of sense while you're doing resistance training. Now, if you're trying to put on more muscle, then staying in ketosis makes a lot of sense while you're doing resistance training. Now, if you're trying to put on more muscle, then staying in ketosis doesn't make a lot of sense unless your goal set is very modest. And what I mean by that is Dr. Jacob Wilson and Dr. Ryan Lowry have probably done the best work looking at resistance-trained athletes who are in a state of ketosis who are able to still put on a little bit of muscle. So there are thresholds to what you can achieve.

Now, obviously, the ketogenic ratios that those athletes are using are going to be a little lower to allow for more protein so that they can put on a little bit of muscle. But obviously, they're not going to have the same response as somebody eating very high protein with also a good amount of carbs. There's just going to be a different range of response. So it really depends on, you know, what's the goal set, what am I trying to achieve. What's going on with your insulin after you exercise? Why is that

a post-workout? They say your post-workout window of food or carbohydrates or whatever. Also, just to say, I think the post-workout window, that myth's kind of been shattered, hasn't it? To a degree. It's sort of like fasted cardio versus fed cardio

not in terms of bodybuilding i mean it's still alive yeah like bodybuilders are not they're not going to get done with a workout and not have that shape that's exactly right and there is it and you said they're not going to take their chances right like why take a chance you said it perfectly there's lots of things that science proves that really has nothing to do with how athletes perform right so like the the like a good example of that is like fasted cardio versus fed cardio there's been a lot of great scientific studies that basically come to the conclusion like not much of a difference yeah but if you talk to say for instance your coach uh mr rombaut he said no no no no i don't care what that science

says do it here's what you're doing and here's, and here's the context within which that is happening, and here's my experience with thousands of athletes that informs me that this is the way to do it. He told me, wow, he's like, you'll just lose fat faster. Yeah, the smarter reason. Right, and he's right in the same way that the science is right. In other words, he's right for what he's doing. The smarter reason is that you wake up in the morning,

you're already fasted, and then you're going to induce exercise in an already fasted body. There's nothing blocking you. And you're already in ketosis for the most part most of us that we're talking about here you're already in ketosis so you're already burning fat when you wake up why not exercise while you're doing that and burn more fat to me the science saying that it doesn't work doesn't make any sense like i i'm even if it doesn't work i'm still going to do it because on paper it makes sense to me right like it makes and it makes the most sense to me also even though i said you know they busted that myth uh it makes more sense to me to work out and you're starving afterwards you

go eat right you just go down a ton of food like that's what we've always done and it's always been effective and it's been effective for everybody so like why stop doing that because a scientist said you don't need to do that well and here's the other thing that's interesting right don't be surprised that with certain athletes honey breaks his own rule right because he knows that for that athlete he needs to make certain adjustments because they're unique yeah maybe phil heath wakes up and he's starving in the morning or something yeah and so when it comes to performance like you you definitely have to refer to the science because that gives you an understanding of what's been done according to a certain standard of rigor but you may end up electively throwing that out for this athlete or this situation or this particular circumstance

yeah for me i like my situation here um i have to just get the gym done in one shot right and so you're like hey man you got to eat because you're you're with me for hours you don't see me eat all i have is like liquid right but i have aminos while we're training and i have a post-workout drink and i usually have food about an hour after the only reason i'm doing that is that's just because that's the way it has to be for now that's the situation that you're in precisely it's the situation i'm in so it might not be the most ideal like we could all sit here and probably be like yeah you know if you waited about two and a half hours and you got back to the gym, you'd probably have some more vigor and be able to attack

that cardio a little bit more or that second workout a little bit harder. When I get back to Sacramento, I'll probably be able to do some of that again. Will you be able to control time better, distance better, timing better? Because now it's an hour of cardio, it's an hour of posing, and it's an hour and a half of lifting. And it takes about half an hour to get back and forth from the gym. And it takes about an extra 30, 40 minutes too of just kind of BS. You can't be in the gym.

Especially Gold's Venice. You can't be in the gym and be an asshole. Right. Especially Gold's Venice. You go to Gold's Venice and so many people know me, they just even want to meet you. So like,

ah. And if you didn't stop and talk to all those people, they'd be disappointed. Well, yeah. Because, you know, hashtag because social media. Yeah.

It's just what we do anyway. We just always go in and speed stack meet and greet. You walk around the gym and you drink a speed stack. Also, our boy Bruce, you know, our boy Bruce is like, hey, you gotta be social, you know, come on. He's Also, our boy Bruce. Our boy Bruce is like, you gotta be social.

Come on. He's like, kids, go over. Bruce is a prime example of that. He runs around with Quest, giving out bars to everybody. And it's like, he's just, everybody knows him. Look at that guy's life, though. I mean, he's crushing it. He's having so much fun.

Look how much fun you can have being nice to people, right? Exactly. Well, and that's why I call him Mr. Handshake, the mayor of Quest. Why? Because he really is, in many respects, he's not just the face, but he's that. Chris is the mayor of Gold's. Right. Chris is the mayor of Gold's.

I'm up for re-election, by the way. Right. But now I've got to battle the governator. You mentioned something earlier about the hour of posing. And we've talked a lot about it. All, and we've talked a lot about it. All three of us have talked a lot about it. That is something that is so uniquely ascribed to bodybuilding, and it's one of the parts of bodybuilding that a lot of people don't get

exposure to because they don't compete on stage in a sanctioned, competitive ecosystem where the posing is how the judges evaluate your physique by itself and in comparison to others. competitive ecosystem where the posing is how the judges evaluate your physique by itself and in comparison to others. Posing can also stimulate muscle growth, right? It can. And that's what I wanted to get your take on. You've had an interesting experience up to this point.

You've worked with Charles Glass. You've worked now with Big Will Harris and started to get really into the posing. What's changed for you now that you've had exposure to that? Well, it's becoming more fun. You know, even today, first of all, it's very difficult, as you're mentioning. It's very hard. And I'm only doing, like, classic physique poses. So I can only imagine when you get into bodybuilding and you got more,

there's a lot more poses that go on. And with bodybuilding there's a lot more like just flexing that goes on it's even though i'm still flexing it's not as uh not as intense as when you see the the pros going head to head and they're like right you know at the end of the competition they're they're just going as hard as they can that looks insanely difficult um you know each guy's got their own little spin and each guy gave me a little tidbit of information but the amazing thing is so many people at gold's gym have been so positive about it um there's probably been five or six different bodybuilding people i can think of that i've admired for a long time,

or even just people that have good physiques in there that have been so excited and so positive that I'm doing it. So that has been really cool. Even Tito Raymond has competed over 60 times on stage. He's put his ass on the line many, many times. His brother couldn't be any more successful. His brother kills it. And Tito's just showing me a small thing to do with the bicep. He's like, everybody wants to try to curl their wrist downward. He's like, don't curl the wrist downward.

Curl it more back, and your bicep will come up. Well, here I was thinking both my biceps kind of look like a flat tire because I've torn both of them. Well, now when I flex them them there's actually some peak there and i was like wow like just through learning some of these things uh you can really make a big difference so and what will has showed me you know rather than like the side chest pose or some of the posing i was doing um rather than just thinking about these strict angles i'm going to be head on i'm going to strict angles, I'm going to be head on, I'm going to be this way, I'm going to be this way.

He's like, no. He's like, point this way and try it this way. And I did, and I was like, wow, all right. Well, I got a hamstring now. I got some different muscles popping out that I wasn't aware of. So it's cool. And I feel more confident.

At first, I'm like, I've never really posed in the mirror before. I don't really sit there and flex in front of the mirror. Yeah. You know, at first I'm like, I just, I've never really like posed in the mirror before. Like I don't really sit there and flex in front of the mirror. Yeah, right. I don't. No, I mean. Ask Andy. Yeah, it sounds. Obviously, just like anybody else, I always check myself out in the mirror, right?

Oh, okay. Any reflection we got. I mean, maybe. In the car door. Yeah, maybe i'm in the gym and i see the tricep on a tricep push down like of course i mean those are very common i throw a tricep down when i walk past them yeah those are those are very common things but i've never like sat there and really tried to work on it so uh it's been a huge confidence boost

it's been feeling good and it also i could feel it kind of almost drying my skin out as I was flexing and stuff. And that's, I think, one of the sort of the hidden secrets of posing is a lot of times when people want to make improvements and after photo and see dramatic change in how your physique presents because of the water you're pushing out and the fact that you're actually bringing blood into the muscles yeah so that is all that's like an instant transformation almost and that's to me what i find what was amazing is um people can watch this on mark's youtube channel too there's a video that we did with charles glass put right in the posing room and he's like get over here chris get over here and he calls me over because he's like look what happens when he just sits down on that leg and all he did was like sit back on his calf a little bit and his hamstring just popped right out and charles like see that like now you can

see it yeah it was just one little move one little flinch you know yeah boom and all of a sudden it popped out the attention of the attention of uh like all the detail that you need to kind of go over we were working on calves today i haven't done that in years i did some ab work today i haven't done that in years there's a lot of things that i just haven't really messed with before and even just the tanning you know yeah you just tanning is a discipline yeah no i'm learning a lot about all this. You talk about leaning out, laying out in the sun for a few minutes. I come back and every vein is popping everywhere, all through my stomach, all through my chest. It looks crazy.

Well, that heat just very slightly evaporates water under the skin. So that skin then sits down on the fascia more. And then you see more vasculature. What do you do for tanning? You're just, because you're here in Malibu, just going outside, literally malibu just going outside literally or yeah tanning bed no just laying out out there it's you know it's kind of hard to lay face down as much and so you know getting the hamstrings in the back it's all sounds so weird but it's all a uh it's all a discipline of things that you don't want to do when you don't want to do them and it's over and over and over and over and over again overall would you say that your experience has been hard uh like it it's it's

continuous it's a it's a full court press um but i feel like i'm winning i feel like i'm scoring you know like i'm i'm still i'm still able to dribble the ball and make some shots if you had like a but it's fucking hard if you had like a nine to five? But it's fucking hard. If you had like a nine to five job, do you think it'd be different for like some of those guys that are doing that kind of stuff? I think sometimes the more structure maybe the better. And so I certainly don't think that it's necessarily easier this way. What is easier for me is just the fact that I have finances and that helps a lot. You can operate.

I mean, I can buy an eight or nine dollar or ten dollar whatever the hell it is prepped meal from the or twelve dollars i think it was yeah from the gym and not really you know not really worried about it go to bulletproof and grab something i can uber around like i don't you know i just don't have any restriction when it comes to that and so that feels really good yeah i could pick up salmon from whole foods or you know i have what and what i do some people don't have those options what i do like about what i what i'm doing with the carnivore diet is like a lot of people can't afford stuff so just put them on eggs and ground beef and they can they can make it you know you

know what though you're gonna eat less though that's the message too like hey you fat bastard you're gonna eat a lot less yeah you just can't that'll cost you that'll cost you less because like you said it's what you're not eating and what you're not eating huge yeah five dollars per like ounce you know what i mean like think about how much a dorito the margins per ounce and stuff like that company's making more money on that yeah the margin is different yeah they're shipping it cheaper they're everything like the stakes you're giving are obviously marked up just like everything else like you said they don't celebrate when people come back with a bag of vegetables they celebrate when the truck when the hunters come back with a big thing of meat some people got berries yeah they're not here comes some granola well you bring up a great point

which is you know a lot of people say oh you know i would i would maybe change my nutritional program but you know there are financial limitations But what you guys are talking about actually addresses that head on because while you have the ability to incur convenience in terms of how you buy food, which is great, ideally you have that, even if that's not the case, if you plan how you buy your meats, if you plan how you buy your rice and your vegetables, man, your cost per serving can go down dramatically. Particularly if you're consistent about eating that way and you don't eat out and

you don't buy packaged foods, which you're absolutely right. There's a very different cost structure and margin structure. If you were thin and you could eat rice on top of eggs and ground beef, you'd be totally sick. And you're training in the gym? Your response to that is going to be massive. You'd probably be lower on the fat scale, but it'd be fine.

Well, we got these people that are whole egg fans, and you got these people that are egg white fans, right? If you were to look at some of these things from a financial standpoint, if you ate whole eggs all the time that are the most expensive eggs you can buy at the store, that's going to end up you can buy at the store. That's going to end up costing you a lot of money.

There's not a point in time where egg whites became unhealthy. I think we need to make things very clear to people. Egg whites are not unhealthy. They just don't contain a lot of nutrition. Chicken breast is not unhealthy. Turkey is not unhealthy. It just doesn't contain a lot of nutrition. And those are all really important things. And if people don't want to spend money on these grass-fed products and these higher-end meats that may have a better fat ratio in it for them, which may be more beneficial, their omega-3, omega-6 balance, and all these different things,

then you can simply purchase some omega-3 eggs. You could purchase some egg whites. When you have the opportunity to, get some salmon. When you have the opportunity to, get some grass-fed beef. But in between that, you can eat things that are a little bit leaner. Maybe you get chicken, or maybe you get get turkey or there's lots of options. There's elk, there's venison, there's a list of options goes on and on, even just leaner ground beef. You don't have to worry about the fat that's in there, what type of fat it is. You don't have to worry about whether it's grass-fed because there's no fat in there

The ground beef at Costco is fairly lean. It's like 88%. It's pretty lean. It's 14 grams of fat per serving. It's like 30 grams of protein per serving. So it's leaner than your normal 80% at Ralph's and it's good. It tastes amazing. And Costco is a great resource.

Even if you're not on a budget, it's just a great resource in terms of, you know, if you say- You know what it is? I actually never used to go to Costco because I never used to eat that much of one thing. But now- And when I did, I was really fat. Like before I went to Costco, I was really fat. Now that I'm eating, a big thing that Mark and I talk about, and it goes back to what you just said about what you don't do, I just eat a lot less things.

There's a lot less on the menu, you know? Well, and what you do eat is of pretty high quality. I mean, those meats at Costco are pretty not too bad. They're darn good. And you can get them at a very economical price point. And for someone who, I think, you know, if you're helping somebody with their diet or, you know, somebody's watching what you do and they say, wow, you know, I'd like to replicate what those guys are doing. They can do that even on a very, very modest income. It can be done so you know those are some

of the things that i think are so important to mention because you remove that barrier to entry it's not just something like oh you can only do it if you're and it's not just what mark and i are doing it's yeah look at that it's you know like the vertical diet it's very similar right all stand stuff he gets at costco right so it's like yeah it doesn't have to be expensive you know for you to do it sometimes it might get boring but uh that's why we spice things up like there's ways to spice things up mark just cooked up uh chicken breast that was pre-cooked and he boiled up some bone broth on the um stove yeah and he said it was amazing it looked great it was it was like it's ridiculous how good it is that sounds really civilized it's, it's ridiculous how good it is. That sounds really civilized.

I'd like to try that. It's basically a chicken crime. It's like chicken soup and chicken broth. Because I am starting to lean towards a little bit more of a caloric restriction, I'm trying to kind of do it one meal at a time, so almost per week. one meal at a time so almost per week so i'll have like two or three maybe like two so far small meals per the seven or six meals that i'm having maybe next week or the week after there'll be a third meal in there that's small right and so i'm trying to line things up with conditioning myself for eating a little bit less and just it's like you know 4.5 to 5 grams of chicken

you know per per meal whereas when we started we were at 10 yeah and you just you keyed in on something that's very interesting now that makes me reflect on when we were doing squats the other day which is you said boy you know could it be possible that the same principles and practices that we use in the gym that we use in planning out what meals we're gonna eat not, not just later today, but tomorrow, the next day. Could that be applied to other areas in life? Could those same principles of discipline, forethought, thrift, all of those things go into financial planning, relationship planning, business planning? And you're right, that was the answer. No, it couldn't possibly be done. But it brings up an interesting thing. And this is something that, again, mentioning our colleague Ron Penna, we've talked about a lot, which is, you know, bodybuilding, strength training, powerlifting, Olympic lifting have so many principles that, if applied to other areas in life, can be absolutely transformative. How do we have that conversation?

Yeah. Right? How do we get into that? Right? The ultimate example is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes. He has done everything a human being could possibly do. He still walks around with a smile on his face, shaking hands and taking pictures in

Gold's Gym. He's the man. And people admire Jay Cutler for that reason. Yes. Yeah, he's a great example. He has successful businesses. He's very nice. He's fun. He's's funny you see i mean he seems a little he seems a little vanilla but you're not going to meet a high level bodybuilder that's not that way he like kind of has to be that

way and he's he's actually talked about that in some of the some of his interviews am i supposed to be excited yeah he he talked about that in in some of his videos where he said you know he almost became like a machine like his ability to do the same ostensibly boring thing every day was so profound and such a determinant in his success i will eat these six meals a day i will do this extremely rigorous training i will do the tanning i will do all the things it takes you know what's great you know i heard um patetic, who's a friend, who's a fighter, had the Miletic fighting system and everything. And he just said when they interviewed him after his first fight and he won, he's like, I don't know if I was that much better than the guy.

I was able to shirk a lot of responsibilities off. I'm good at that. I can get rid of a lot of things in my life and focus in on the fight. And he actually attributes that a lot to why he was so good. I don't need trappings. I don't need a nice house, a nice car. I don't need anything. All I need is a gym and a place to work out and some food.

And that's all I need. That extends so far into everything. Because he was able to not need anything, he was able to fucking perform, man. He killed everybody on the way up. Everybody some people when they train they don't need music they don't need pre-workout they don't need hype this is great they just yeah on the way to his on the way to his first fight guy pops in a metallica tape and it was cassette player milatich pops it out and throws it out the window and the guy's like what the fuck did you do that for it was metallica he's like if you need fuck did you do that for? It was Metallica.

He's like, if you need heavy metal music to get fired up, you're toast already. And that's what he told the guy. And the guy was just like, okay. And they just drove in silence the rest of the way to the fight. And he was very stoic like that. Just like, okay. But that goes back to the principle we touched on earlier.

A lot of success is attributed to what you're not doing. In this instance, what you're able to box out and only focus on what's essential pursuant to your goal. You detach yourself from the ketchup that you think you need on your burger. You don't necessarily need it. Let's get rid of the word need. You don't need it. You like it, and it's understandable, but you don't need it.

Remember when they went to Russia and Rocky IV? Yes. What did he have there? Nothing. Right. They didn't have his comics here. They didn't he have there? Nothing. Right. Well, and that was... They didn't have my comics here. Yeah.

They didn't even have all his comics. And nothing there. They just had a barn. Yeah. Well, and that was a great juxtaposition, right? You had, you know, the Russian guy with all the scientists. And the steroids. Yeah, right, right.

And he had a little bit of... He plunged a big needle in his shoulder. A little pharmacology to help him along there. But then you had Rocky who was in the snow and climbing the mountain, you know. But there's something great about that. In 87 when I came out, or 85, whatever it came out, I was like, when I saw that needle going to that Ivan Drago's arm, I was like, you cheater, man. I can't believe this, you know.

And that was what I really thought. So he put it over on me. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So much easier to be negative, I think, is ultimately what we're facing a lot of times. It's so much easier to talk yourself out of the things that you try to make a commitment to. You know, starting on Monday, I'm going on a diet, right?

And you're like, well, it's Friday. And then you just blitz yourself on Friday, Saturday, Sunday with drinks and all kinds of different things. Commitments are the worst tactic. Like if you want to get somebody to do something. So this is a sobriety tactic. It's called commitments. And we're only as good as the commitments we make. Right. So when you go to AA, you make a commitment and they're like, what's your commitment going to be like?

Now, it sounds worthless, but like, duderis griffin you're the coffee guy greg you're the guy that brings the sugar mark you bring the cream and you're going to pass out flyers you know yeah everybody's got a commitment you're like what do you mean and so you have to be at the meeting because you have a job now and i think that that's really important yeah to um give yourself commitments you give yourself things to do you join groups or you join you know groups of lifting partners and that's sort of what we have in the morning right so i don't need to show up at the gym at 5 a.m right now but we got a little club going like while mark you know what though it's very negative when when somebody doesn't show up i didn't show up and you guys were all like i'm really disappointed i'm like we were interviewing Thomas DeLauer that day, and I didn't want to be tired to interview him.

I couldn't get to bed till 1, and everybody was disappointed. I'm like, I'm not missing again then. I didn't know it was a big deal. So apropos of that, I got a great story for you guys. So our colleague Heath Evans, who you know. Heath Evans, oh no. I texted him the other day. I texted him that great photo that you took of me squatting with you behind me

and that O'Hearn looming in the background. Yeah, that was awesome. And I sent that to Heath, and I said, hey, man, we're missing you at these workouts. Perfect. Why don't you come tomorrow? Picking up the spirits. Right? And he said, oh, dude, I'm in Florida.

So I texted him back. I said, so you're going to make it, right? Right. That doesn't matter. He sent me back a thumbs up. right you know he's he sent me back like a thumbs up uh but it was great because you know that that's the type of you know i think support that this yeah you know this sort of club that you i'll sometimes check in with some of my guys and say are you training and then the next morning they send me a picture at like 7 a.m and i'm super greg greg does that right i'll take a picture

i'll be walking down the street and like you just know that he's going and like sometimes like the other day i called him and said i just want to let you know i'm proud of you there's no other reason to call him you're right i like what you're doing just keep going and that's just because i think about it and go like hey i hope i hope my guys are doing good if we're going to encourage people you don't encourage them and leave them off on the sidewalk you encourage them and you know you try to help them if you can and that's what i do with a lot of people that i help with sobriety like sometimes i just randomly check in with with people to see how they're doing. Cause usually when you throw somebody off,

it actually helps them even more, you know, like, you're like, Oh, they, that guy really cares, you know?

And like, they, it's just, I think it just means a lot of things. More of us need to show that we care about each other too. I was pressing on Andrew a little bit today. Like he's already made a lot of progress. Yeah.

But he, he talks about his stomach, his stomach bothers him here and there. And I'm like, I'm not going to say 100% that his stomach is 100% related to his diet. Maybe he just has gastrointestinal problems, period, right? Yeah. But he's mentioned to me many times that the more he's on his diet, the more those go away. Yeah.

So let's not keep having this conversation about how your stomach's killing you. keep saying it but you know let's let's go let's go all in you know and he's he's been working out in the mornings and stuff and he's making some changes to his body it's like you're starting to see it and it's like well let's go all in with that food he's like ah things have been different because of this week yeah and he but he he gets into a rhythm of saying that oh you know he'll say oh what are we off off the training you know yeah it was all positive it was all positive but like hey let's let's stop saying that i haven't done that in a while because i haven't been in the gym for a minute you're like wait why are we why do we've said that three months ago i told him this i said you have

two choices when you go away right if you go away and haven't been away and had a vacation and been with your family in a long time just go okay cool i'm going on vacation i'm gonna just not worry about what i eat for a week or you're gonna go on vacation and you're gonna pack every single thing that you need you're gonna think ahead you're gonna order stuff on amazon you're gonna order all the snacks and pre-packaged things that you can bring along that make it easy to travel like i know they're not the most optimal things but you're gonna travel bring some quest bars, bring this, bring that. They won't damage you. They won't insult you that bad. Right.

And that kind of thing. And just do one or the other, but don't show up and fucking complain. Not to the bell brothers, not to him. Like, come on. Like, don't like, especially don't complain to me anymore. After I had to take it from him here and like how pathetic I was all the time complaining. Another thing you can do when you, when you travel is you can just figure out a way to like stabilize some things um maybe about a year ago i went to canada with the family and while we were there i was like well i don't really want to carve out time to lift so i'm not going to

mess i'm not going to mess with a bunch of lifting um and i'm not going to try to find gyms and stuff but we were gone for like eight days so i was, I'm going to work out once or twice with weights at some point, but I'm going to walk and I'm going to walk a lot. And it just, we just walked every day. The whole family walked every day. And then even when there was, uh, even when we got back to the hotel and there was, you know, just some downtime, it was like, I'm popping out and I'm going for a walk. I ate, you know, not anything that i wanted it wasn't like

this gluttonous uh uh long you know week week or whatever but right uh i when i had an opportunity to eat something i wanted to eat like a burrito or uh something that i just thought was going to taste really good i just went in for it but i was like you know what i'm gonna still weird to see the least manage some of this with some other other thing as your brother, it's tough to handle when you're on vacation. You're eating a piece of pizza. You're like, oh. I ate some cookie dough the other day. It was amazing.

What is he doing to himself? Yeah. I don't even know if I'll get another cheat from here until the contest. That'll be tough. I don't really need a cheat, but it would be nice to have a day where I just eat a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes that's just the thing. It's just like, just like oh man i wish i could just even eat more

steak yeah and so um that's been tough for me like some days like cutting back on food and eating once a day it's been tough sometimes do you do that every day no no no because i think that if i do like uh actually it's kind of like every other day i'll be right back yeah i think it's every other day because in talking to thomas de lauer and other people that are experts in like intermittent fasting they say there's two kinds of intermittent fasting there's intermittent every day like you could do an 18 hour fast every day and yeah for six hours or eat for eight hours fast for 16 or whatever it usually starts around, but really most people think it starts around 16. So I'd say 16 is probably your minimum, right?

And I'll do 16 to 18 like twice a week. And lately I've been doing, like actually lately I've been doing 18 like three days a week, about 18 three days a week. And then the rest of the days I just eat kind of a, I don't eat all day. I kind of keep it in a window, but my problem is I have a hard time shutting down at night.

So some of the days where I'm not intermittent fasting, I'll end up eating like, like a snack around like midnight or something some days, like even like some days I'll eat really late. I just admitting and uh i'm trying not to but i'm up and i'm like well what's a hamburger gonna do right now it's not gonna really do much you know it's not gonna hurt me and so i just eat it you know and so um i don't know i don't you know i actually want to try i was thinking this week of doing some days of like eating a lot and then seeing the next day i could not eat at all and see how that works just to try to test some things you know because like you said some days you just

wish you could eat but other days you're not hungry at all it's really strange do you find on the days that you fast that there's any correspondence between that and say increased productivity or increased creativity do you have you noticed any It's so hard for me to fast. So I'm probably mentally abused by, like mentally destroyed in a way that I think about food still. And so when it comes to a day of not eating, I'm still weird about it. Do you struggle with it?

Even after all this time? Like you're kind of watching the clock a little? Well, I feel like, okay, so because I'm sober maybe I should say too, like I feel like I have nothing to do. What am I gonna do if I can't eat and I can't drink anything and I can't smoke anything and I can't take any pills? It's like walk or go to sleep.

It's like they don't seem like great options. No, that's not a good option. Yeah, they seem shitty. I don't know. Compared to eating. Eating's fun. Maybe if I had a hot girlfriend or something, it'd be easier, but I've got to find that.

Hashtag goals. Hashtag, yeah. Hashtag guys. I think that food is really ruling people you know that that website ruled.me like the guy nailed it that's what i'm saying like i'm that website that's what i'm saying it's like i think i'm still mentally like there's that song cash rules everything around me it's really the food well you know that's ruling everything dr atia spoke to that point right he he he. He mentioned that it's empowering to have this understanding that you don't require food. That you can go for significant periods of time without it. It builds, I guess, a confidence that's sort of a very interesting form of confidence.

And he's pretty extreme. I would say a seven-day fast, that's sort of a very interesting form of confidence you know and he's pretty extreme i mean i would say a seven day fast is that's pretty extreme i've i've done a three and a half day fast and it was extremely difficult for me yeah i've done a a three day fast as well and you know i i kind of i like the challenge of it yeah um i also lost like about I like the challenge of it. I also lost about... Shit, what did I lose? I want to say day one, I didn't lose much. But day two, it just started to peel off.

And I want to say I lost about six or seven pounds. Yeah, the water will go out. If you're not taking salt, the water will go out. And I would say net body weight loss, once I got back to it, was about a pound or two. Which is still really good in that quick period of time. Now, again, it could have been just, you know, I don't think I lost a pound of fat in three days necessarily, but it did help with just general weight loss.

But I didn't like fasting. I didn't like doing a lot of fasting. I didn't mind it. I didn't really, I wasn't crazy about the food i did notice from my work perspective that i felt awesome and i think that a lot of people maybe not even so much fasted but with light amounts of food you hear that all the time people like i just want you know something there's lunch menus at restaurants for this very reason there's less food they give you less food they give you something uh that's not as uh savory as they might give you less food. They give you something that's not as savory

as they might give you in the morning or at night, right? And it's so that you don't eat and then feel tired as shit. Yeah, crash out. Yeah. Because I don't know about you, but like when I was, see, here's the problem for me with fasting. When I became unfasted, when I ate, it would still make me really tired,

even though it was keto. And that might have been because I was like, oh, it's time to eat, and i engorged myself with food so i tried to learn i i started to incorporate a pre uh fasting like snack so i would still go to the designated amount of hours of 16 hours yeah but i might eat something small that's like 300 calories and then another hour two hours i'd eat something else. And that seemed to help a lot. Yeah. It really helped a lot with how much I ate

and it also helped a lot with me feeling that kind of dip. I'd have to say like lately, and maybe this is the past two weeks, we've been getting up, we've been doing the 4 a.m. workouts and 5 a.m. workouts. It's really early, right? doing the 4 a.m workouts and yeah um 5 a.m workouts it's really early right so when you wake up that early uh it's it's harder for me to not eat you know like so i used to be like i'd get out a longer eating window yeah so i would i would go to sleep at like 10 o'clock at night and then i'd wake up at like seven o'clock in the morning or something i I'd go to the gym. I'd get done at the gym by like – I'd be home by 10.

Then we would work all day on our movie stuff and then whatever, 5 o'clock we're done or whatever and then off to doing whatever else for the rest of the day. And so it was just easier to like – the day is taken up. But when you come home and you have this big window between like – you come home and it's only 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. You just feel like cooking at that time you're like well i still have like two hours before i meet with anybody or do anything really you know so it's like what do i do i ate meals the other day because i was just up for a long ass time like sometimes that's just the way it is it's hard to fill in the spaces sometimes we need something else other than eating like i don't know virtual reality what do we need conceivably we need something like virtual virtual eating oh virtual eating yeah we just stuff our faces with fake food and then i think that's where we're at now with all

the processed foods yeah and we're doing that yeah except it's not virtual it's actually doing damage right without doing damage well cool man Without doing damage. Well, cool, man. You were saying that you eat once a day. What else do you eat other than meat? What do I eat other than meat? That's it, pretty much. Meat, then some snacks. I have some chocolate every once in a while,

some dark chocolate that I like. I'm trying to think of what I normally eat. On a regular, everyday basis, if it's not like cheating something that i'm eating the only things i eat are red meat and then like nuts and seeds i would say like so pecans macadamia nuts um there's our friend makes that our friend gavin makes the pecan butter beardy boys uh pecan butter that's really good it's really good um it's sweetened with a tablespoon of maple syrup in the whole jar so um by eating some pecan butter that's really good it's really good um it's sweetened with a tablespoon of maple

syrup in the whole jar so um by eating some pecan butter that's not bad macadamia nuts are great peely nuts are great and um trying to think if there is any other stuff that i eat really like maybe yeah eggs avocado bacon coffee um cheese but not really not really cheese because i find cheese um you know kills you know i had a um protein bar yesterday and um i literally farted the entire day remember that best protein bar ever or whatever you know those yeah yeah best bar ever if you want to fart for eight hours straight like the absolute best bar on the market for farting all day and i've actually still have farts today from it and nothing else on this diet has made me fart not once so that's why i think like stick to real food eat real shit you know like don't eat uh the one time i go away from something they sell in

costco and i fart devastating devastating it's gonna blow up the world. Some of what I'm doing right now is, you know, I got the 350 grams of protein every day, the 65 to 70 grams of fat every day, and then 150 grams of carbs, which is, you know, not a ton of carbs. People are like, you left us. You're not on the war on carbs anymore. But I haven't checked, but I might even. That's low-ish carbs, though. I'm probably not in ketosis

necessarily because i don't have enough fat in my system to even really produce protein so high the other thing i eat i should mention this because i know it's not going to air today but it's not actually national ice cream day today july whatever today is and um i eat keto ice cream that i make but it's made with butter, coconut oil, and eggs. I have some downstairs. Today, I whipped some pecans into it. It's really good. It's something that's

pretty much a saturated fat frenzy right there. Coconut oil, butter, MCT oil, and eggs. Tomorrow, we got some training with O-Tren, Michael Hearn. He said 8 a.m. as you predicted because he said that a lot of times

when he's coming off of something that he's going to get a little extra snoozing in. And I think he said it's squats tomorrow, which is... That's going to be a challenge for us. Yeah, we already... Oh, we toasted ourselves. What the fuck is wrong with this? He must know. must know he must he must have a spy on the inside all right

we got to go to sleep right now yeah yeah he must go to sleep immediately yeah he was uh i don't know maybe he didn't get some of his leg training and i don't know maybe this is a setup and daniel's part of it the conspiracy the conspiracy. Daniel's the inside guy. Concrete shoes for Daniel. I was just like, you know, I told him I was, you know, we texted back and forth and I was like, I trained legs like two days ago, but I'm in. Regardless, who cares? Figure it out.

I haven't squatted with Michael Hearn in like 20 years. It'd be great. Let's do it. What does he usually do? It depends. Like a lot of times. of times a lot of similar things yeah you know he switches it's not uncommon though to start on the rack with um with heavy squats right singles um and then singles yeah and then progress from there to um a press of some

sort and then sometimes there's variations on it. Like sometimes we'll do the yoke squats on the plate with their feet very close together. So it's a version of a sissy squat. Is that a hack squat? Yeah. You have the yoke that comes over your traps. Those are extremely challenging. You don't need a lot of

weight to get that done. And then some sort of variation on an extension and a curl. So maybe like four exercises or so? Yeah, usually it's not anything. There's high volume, but not a high number of different exercises. I notice that every time we do anything, it's like the first exercise, like 10 sets of it. Everybody just goes and goes and goes.

It never ends. Oh, because he warms up a lot. Yeah, and those singles are part of the warmup. Like, that's one of the things. Yeah, that's okay. It's fun. I like it.

I really learned from him. I never know how many we're going to do. Those, oftentimes, what you're doing is you're really just loading your nervous system. Right. And preparing it

for the subsequent exercises. Charles Poliquin. That's a powerlifting technique, too. Charles Poliquin told us that. And Charles Poliquin, a long time ago just said, always warm up with the bar. It just shows you the pathway of the bar.

It's always going to give you a neurological response. I've just always done that. I've never not warmed up with the bar. People always make fun of me too because I grab the bar, I warm up with it. I don't know. It's just what I've always done. Poliquin was the one to point out. I don't know if the research has changed. Charlie Francis was another one to point out the fact that when you had a lot of blood uh let's say in

your chest from doing like bench press if you do a lot of reps on your way up if you do 135 for 10 and 185 for 10 and 225 for six and then you do go to do 275 for a few sets of three he said that's oftentimes where they saw the most amount of pec tears the most amount of labral tears and tears and the rotator cuff and all kinds of things so basically it was uh and then they basically started to incorporate a lot of power lifting stuff where it's just like it's really not any reason to do like more than one to three reps and do multiple sets of that and also too it's it's a good gauge to see it's a it's a warm-up yeah and it's a tune-up for the workout you know you're really that's what you're trying to do is yeah you are trying to get your body warm but there's many different ways you can get

your body warm but it's really when you're talking about actually doing the exercise that you're going to engage in for the actual day. Because we'll warm up the elbows. And that's more of an actual warm-up where we're doing all these other exercises for the elbow. But it's more of like a tune-up. Like, all right, central nervous system, here we go. This is what we're doing today. This is the movement. And you get on board with that movement.

And then you're able to stack on more weight as you go. Yeah. Yeah. All right, peeps. Let's do it. On that note. Let's go eat some time. Strength is never weakness.

Weakness is never strength. See y'all later. Keep it cheap.