Mark Bell's Power Project - Rethinking Carbohydrates What Low Carb Diets May Be Missing Ft. Zane Griggs

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Zane Griggs joins me to challenge some of the most rigid beliefs surrounding carbohydrates, keto, carnivore, and metabolic health. We break down his experience with high blood sugar, low thyroid, poor sleep, and under-fueling—and discuss why better health may require more flexibility and less loyalty to a particular diet.Follow Zane:Website: ZaneGriggs.comInstagram: @ZaneGriggsFitnessFree metabolic health guide: ZaneGriggs.com/freeguideSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!

I had high blood sugar, my thyroid was low, my sleep sucked. Glucose is more efficient at making ATP per oxygen molecule than fat is. I really don't want to go back to that overstressed state. I find the carbs really help with insulin signaling, with keeping thyroid up, and those two things really have a downstream effect on a lot of other hormones. Sugar diet was amazing. Some of it's just an evolution. When I eat carbohydrates, my glucose is actually lower.

There's a conflation of carbs and processed food. When I'm telling people that eat more carbs, I talk about fruit, potatoes, rice, things are true carbohydrates. They don't have some sort of oil or fat cooked into them. If carbs and sugar caused metabolic disease, how could a diet that is 95% carbs and sugar reverse it? The more we know, the more we realize how little we know. All right, so we got some comments here from Bart K. Let's kick off the show with listening to some of this. There is no argument whatsoever that a person can bring to the table

that can change this fact. It is a known physiological fact. The exact requirement for exogenous carbohydrates and human nutrition is not one single gram ever. Positive. What do you think of that comment right there, Zane? Right off the bat, what do you think of that?

I mean, I know that you guys got some beef, but aside from the beef... From the actual comment in and of itself? Yeah, yeah. Like, do you think, I mean, do people, quote-unquote, need carbs and let's, I guess, Let's maybe talk about the word need. Need.

So here's where a lot of that gets blown. They use this word essential, right? That carbs are not essential. It's technically nutrition, essential nutrient or macronutrient is one that your body does, your body cannot make. And our body does make glucose from our liver, right?

Our body also makes saturated fat out of sugar. So technically, I can say saturated fat's not essential, but I don't see any carnivores cutting back on their saturated fat. Or spouting that saturated fat, is not essential. So there's only any amount of protein that's considered essential.

I'll interrupt for a second too, by kind of saying a little bit, you know, the body's designed to figure out a way to survive. To survive, yeah. So it's really smart. So if we have to go a couple days or a couple weeks, only eating fruit, we can easily do that.

Correct. And if we have to go a couple weeks, only eating meat, we can do that. And potentially, you can maybe go longer. I don't know how long you can go. And there's also even like trace amounts of fats within fruits and stuff like that, which I learned during the sugar diet. Correct. So to your point, right, or you're going to that, it's like there's survival mode

and then there's optimal nutrition or what makes us operate optimally. And I would say zero carb is not optimal, any more than zero fat is optimal or zero protein is optimal. We have wonderful choices nowadays. We have, we can just go and pick. We have abundance. So I want to be on a mixed diet. I'd like to have a little bit of carbohydrate, a little bit of protein, and keep the fats low.

You can do that. You can and we have plenty of science showing how optimal athletes who perform optimally are, have a great mix of all three of these things. Athletes are very, very, very, very rarely super low carbohydrate. No, they want, they don't win if they are. Really rare, right? It's pretty rare. Yeah.

I mean, we've seen people flirt with it. You know, we know, there's some people that do it like really high. endurance feats and stuff like that, they kind of mess with like a lower carb, carbohydrate thing, but they still use carbs as a performance enhancer, as a supplement almost. Glucose is more efficient at making ATP per oxygen molecule than fat is. So the PO ratio is actually higher.

Which is POSPFORUS to oxygen ratio. So phosphate or phosphate, excuse me, to oxygen ratio. So the PO ratio for glucose, meaning, it takes less oxygen to make the same amount of ATP and with glucose than it does with fat requires more oxygen to make the same amount of ATP. So we're talking about efficiency, not in grams, because we don't have a gram, we don't have a shortage of calories anywhere.

We have oxygen as our rate limiter when it comes to performance. And so when making ATP, if oxygen is your rate limiter, then glucose is the most efficient because it requires the least amount of oxygen to make the same amount of ATP as fat. Even more than ketones, it's about 4% more. So if you're getting really nitty-gritty, but there's different ratings that's shown. Glucosis is the higher ATP,

the more efficient ATP producer when it comes to oxygen being the rate limiter. We can end up talking out of both sides of our mouth a little bit on this show. And I think that we've had a bunch of people on the show talk so in depth about the ketogenic diet and some of these other diets. And I'm really a fan.

I'm a fan of all these different diets. And I think they could be a strategy and I think they could be utilized for certain periods of time. But one thing I want to actually just dive right into right off the bat to make sure that we don't miss the mark on this is that for yourself, your own experience, and the experience of some others as well.

You're not the only person that experienced this. You had some negative side effects that weren't great from plunging into being maybe too dogmatic with low carb and we should also say some fasting as well. Correct. So you weren't really hitting your calorie requirements either. So it wasn't just, is that true?

I would say that's pretty accurate. There'd be days when I wouldn't hit the calorie requirement. I'd be and training very fasted and underfielded. So pretty depleted and working hard and building your business and your family and all these other things going on at one time. So it's not just the low carb, but low carb compounded on top of working hard

and being in the chloric deficit hearing. in there. Correct. Absolutely. And I think I've seen, but I've talked to a number of people who are in, who are ketogenic or carnivore or just low carb who had similar symptoms. So across the board, who maybe aren't fasting, but they have the same symptoms over and over again. I had several of them end up in my, in my feet or my comments asking questions. And what triggered a lot of this, like what you see from from Bart there and several other people was. Bart is so nice and he's such a lovely internet person. Yeah, subtle and considerate in a person. He made two 90-minute videos on you, you said?

There was one, no, he made one, and then some other kid I'd never heard of, but made one from his basement. Looks like his mom was probably bringing him, you know, pork rinds, and he was making his videos. But it was basically, I was seeing these people talk about their,

they're either high blood sugar, low thyroid, or low energy, or just unmotivated, or something called, you know, hairs falling out. basically all these textbook symptoms of low thyroid function where they had high blood sugar

high A1C on low carb and keto couldn't figure out why and these coaches these carnivore keto coaches were coming in saying well you just need a diet harder you need a keto harder you need just eat more fat

you must be eating dairy drinking alcohol cheating blaming them blaming them basically invalidating their experience when I and wait a minute so that's when I kind of jumped in and said this is common

I see this with other people I experienced it myself. It's insufficient fueling, and the body is responding. It starts adapting by elevating blood sugar, lowering thyroid. Because it's, like you mentioned earlier, we can go for a period of time to survive, but we go too long, we start adapting, the body starts shifting into this survival mode.

And these are some of the common consequences. Ketosis mimics fasting to some degree. It does. It also is not too far off of, even a diabetic response where they have high fat going on, high gluconeogenesis with fatty, with fasting or with, excuse me, with fatty liver disease or diabetes, they have high liposis.

They have high gluconeogenesis going on. So they have fat and sugar coming at the same time. Well, when we do a very low carb diet, we also relying on a lot on gluconeogenesis and fat burning. So I think it mimics, in my opinion, a diseased state just on a slightly lower level. It has lower insulin than someone who's diabetic, but you're still relying on, you have high glucagon levels.

So you're still relying on glucagon to be your primary source of fuel, which starts elevating that blood sugar. Which that was talked about in Dan Dushain's book many years ago, Body Opus where he talked about like intentionally raising your glute, your glugon levels. But a lot of those early day ketogenic diets were like, hey, keto for three to five days and then bump your way back out of it. I think anything like that for three to five days,

is ideal. Before you start adapting, you can leverage the benefits. Like sugar diet was amazing in that if you did it right, if you looked the way Joe wrote it, it was a three to five day sugar fast. And then he would spend two to three days bringing protein back in and kind of refeating. And then you go back into a three to five day sugar fast. Just a recap on that real quick. Yeah. Sugar fasting was you're mainly utilizing sugar sources. A lot of times fruit or fruit juice. juices during a period of time. And then you would shift into what we kind of called the sugar diet. And the sugar diet was where you then switched from only having sugars during that time

to having a mix of carbohydrates and protein. And sometimes you would have like a starch. You might have a potato and some lean steak. But you're really trying to keep the fats relatively low. And some people like they don't like the flip flopping and why are you doing this. You talked about war on carbs. I know you're part of a book, too, with low carbs and you have videos and stuff where you've talked about lower carb diets before. And now you're doing this other thing.

But I think it's like some of it's just an evolution. You know, we try things. We do things. Like I did powerlifting for many years. I'm not going to necessarily one rent max for the rest of my life. I'm not necessarily going to bench squat and deadlift the rest of my life. Although I like those movements, so I will continue to utilize some strategies from power. because they're valuable.

Just like I'll continue to still utilize some aspects of a ketogenic diet. Actually, it just came back from Greece. And I'm like, as soon as I get back, I'm going to do like a lower carb diet. And when I, you know, yesterday in the last maybe two days or so, the most amount of carbs I had was just maybe a couple handfuls of blueberries. But this is a strategy just for a couple days. Just to kind of get rid of some bloat. I was drinking way too much alcohol and just consuming way too much food, period.

and I just had a little bit of bloat on me and I'm like, well, I know that this works for this particular reason. A lot of times when people do a low carbohydrate diet, what do they experience in the first three to five days? They experienced this whoosh of losing weight because a lot of times they flush out some water. So that was my exact goal.

I got what I wanted out of it. And so probably this weekend, I'll probably bring some carbs back in and probably just beyond my normal, which these days I'm on kind of a bodybuilding style diet, I guess you can call it. So lower fat and higher carb. Yeah.

Yeah. And is that kind of where you? That's where I am now. I mean, I really don't want to go back to that overstressed state. And I find the carbs really help with insulin signaling, with keeping thyroid up. And those two things really have a downstream effect on a lot of other hormones, but also keeping glucose gone down. My sleep improved. My HRV starts going up.

So I think I'm getting more in a parasympathetic state, better sleep. I have more energy. What about maybe certain times a year? What about going into like winter or something like that and saying to yourself, you know what? And maybe it's cravings and maybe it's like I just want, you know, whole eggs and I want cheese and I want bacon and I want a rib eye. Yeah, absolutely.

I think and we have to be careful is we do live in abundance. We can have as much of many things as we want. And so where I think it's all so good. It is. But I think there's some toggling. If you're trying to watch body fat, body comp, that kind of thing, then you have to toggle. some things you've got to adjust because we could have abundance.

But personally, you know, I mean, I like keeping an eye on those things and I'm just curious about it. So I don't mind toggling back and forth. But definitely my winter, I had more fat in my diet. But I come back and certainly come out and get outside and lean out and start moving more. You have all that fat during the winter and you look like you were storing walnuts in your face. Right, yeah. You know, like the squirrels. You know, I reposted one of your videos recently and it was where you were referencing a study where people were, I think, oh, I think it was referencing the fact that a lot of people's glucose went up quite a bit

when they are lower carb diets. Is that what it was? Yeah, there was so, so there were some, there have been plenty of states that show when they did lower carb, higher fat, glucose tolerance was low and their glucose was high. When they flipped them in the diet, they flipped their carb and fat and they lowered fat dramatically,

took carbs up to about 80% of the diet. and actually improved glucose tolerance, lower blood sugar, lower insulin. They're more insulin sensitive essentially. And so they move. We want to be insulin sensitive. We want to develop resistance to insulin and we don't want to be in a state

where if we do eat carbohydrates that we're not utilizing them the way that we should be. Properly because they do compete in the mitochondria for being oxidized. So if you have too much fat coming in to the mitochondria, you can block a certain amount of your glucose from getting oxidized as well. It's not like the body can't do both in different tissues.

That's metabolic flexibility, right? But when we have a lot of one, it does block the other. And if we're blocking glucose from getting oxidized properly, well, that's going to cause a bit of a backup. It can cause a bit of a backup, more of it turns of lactate or higher blood sugar. We start seeing blood sugars rising over time. There's plenty of studies showing a high fat diet

will cause some level of insulin resistance, or even high protein, very high protein diet can cause some of that insulin resistance as well. So that's where I think when I ran into my wall with the issues with the high blood sugar and the lower thyroid and I just decided I'm gonna wipe my little rules way and start being very open about what's going on out there

and start listening to other voices that maybe I would have shut out. What do you think crack the door open for you? Was it a particular person or a particular video that you saw? particular symptom where you're like, I'm tired of this? Yeah, well, I had high blood sugar. My thyroid was low.

My sleep was sucked. It wasn't bad. It was like mid-90s, but when I had the carbs in, it was intact down to 80. Well, I like saying between 70 and 90, like I don't believe. Why am I living this lifestyle against carbs? When I eat carbohydrates, my glucose is actually lower. Yeah, and that's what I saw with a lot of other people coming from keto and carburens. They had carbs and their blood sugar comes down.

You're lowering the glugon. And so it was digging through. through, it was like, okay, listening to other people like, like we've mentioned before, Jay Feldman, Joe Benley, who the sugar diet, like, what's he, what's he plugging into here? Why is this working so well? Joel Green, who you had on the podcast earlier this year. Yeah, Joel is a mastermind. I love that guy.

He's brilliant. He's brilliant. And he and Joe Bentley both have kind of, I think, talked about this seven-day cycle that are you think our body's working this a septo-circo-cerco-septin diet. So our circumception cycle where our hormones fluctuate over seven days, that's where that cycling of three to five days, something stressful, maybe you come out and repeat a couple days. Talks about like eating more food on like a Sunday and stuff like that.

Like it's interesting. You're like, how would the body know that it's Sunday? But it kind of does. I think we go through cycle. Why do we have more heart attacks on Monday? I mean, it's, you know, I think there are some cycles. And if you think about, I mean, women's cycles are a 28-day cycle. The moon's on a 28-day cycle.

the moon's on a 28 day cycle. We can have seven day cycles. Supposed have 13 months, I think. We are exactly. I think at one point we did, you go back to Rome. But I don't think it's too far out to think that, you know, we have cycles that maybe we're not aware of

or that we just work within that aren't super strong, but we can tap into on occasion for, you know, making our body adjust for a period of time or have to have to adjust. And like what you're doing, when you use keto to kind of take some of the water out or maybe we, you know,

I just see, I see so many misconceptions in the space. And I hear, when I hear certain things, it just makes me think like, oh, I think we're not really experiencing the full picture. And we could always say that

because there's always shit that we just don't know. But I think when people are like, man, when I was eating carbs, man, I always felt so, I felt so tired. Well, yeah, okay.

If you, you know, went into your fridge at 1 p.m. And you had your leftover pasta, garlic bread, meatball thing that grandma made or something like that. And you just devoured a ton of it. Then I could see how you could be fatigued or you had some giant sandwich and you ate some chips with it or something like that. But almost always, and I'm sure there's some caveats this may be some people have just poor reactions to carbohydrates. even when they're eating them or whatever, right? There's always people that have certain particular issues. But for the most part, it's probably people overindulging or overeating

and or people aren't maybe used to utilizing these carbohydrates because we all know the kid, you know, from fifth grade, sixth grade that was skinny and lean and shredded that was just always sucking on a lollipop and eating sugar and had jolly ranchards and all that kind of stuff. And he was just like his mom like wouldn't allow him to have. You know, he'd get sugar from all the other kids. He'd try to make a trade or something at lunchtime.

He wasn't allowed to have sugar because he would just be, you know, quote unquote, bouncing off the walls is what we would hear. But for some reason, as we age, we like a lot of people lose some of that ability to be so sensitive to those carbohydrates. What do you think is going on there? And what is that experience of being super fatigued

midday having some carbs? I think there's a conflation of carbs and processed food, which does not get clearly defined. When I'm telling people to eat more carbs, we talk about fruit, potatoes, rice, things that are true carbohydrates. They don't have some sort of oil or fat cooked into them. People talk about, oh, carbs, yeah,

you're eating donuts, which is 30% fat. Or you're eating... You're tired because you went to Chipotle. Exactly. And you had this big ass burrito that had, in addition to having 150 grams of carbohydrates and maybe like 80 grams of protein, which is great, it probably had 80 grams of fat with it.

And we may have shut down your stress, hormone. I mean, if you think about when you're low carb, something's got to create carbohydrate or create glucose. And that's a stress hormone. Glucigon comes up. You do it long enough. You got adrenaline. You got cortisol going. These are stress hormones. You finally eat carbs. We're stressed. We want a carb. We want sugar because it takes down our stress hormone. So some people are really running on stress all the time. And if it helps shut that down, maybe it's just your adrenal, you've been so busy running on adrenals, especially you come off a keto diet and you eat carbs, you're tired, you just shut down your adrenals. Now your body's got to actually create

energy from true energy, not just nervous energy. So there's a shift there in how, in the metabolism. But I think, you know, some of those other studies I've shared, we see indigenous populations eating 60, 70, 80 percent of their calories from carbohydrates that they're growing, hunting, gathering, you know. And they're, they have excellent heart health, the excellent metabolic health. or diet interventions with 70% carb, and they're reversing diabetes or reducing need for insulin and it's lasting, you know, follow-up study over three years. So this is not new.

We have studies going back decades of this. This is just ignored. And so I think that's what really made me start looking deeper was we have evidence of this that is, depending on which camp you're in, gets ignored. And it isn't sexy anymore. It isn't like in the news. It doesn't, you know, make headlines.

And again, if they're 50 years old, nobody's looking at them. But this is, these are studies that were controlled. They were published. And if you look at even vegans, okay? So I followed a vegan diet for about three and a half years in my 20s. It did not turn out well for me. I don't recommend a vegan diet. But I could see if you had someone who was diabetic and you put them on a vegan diet as an

intervention for about four weeks, you would see improvement in their blood sugar. in a high carb, high fiber, whole food diet, you would see improvements in their blood sugar and in their insulin sensitivity because you've removed the fat and now glucose oxidation becomes more optimized. So that's not me making a recommendation for that, but it's acknowledging that that exists, that works.

That's a tool that has worked for people. And so what can I learn from that? And how do I weave these things into how I'm an approach? coaching people. And, you know, some of the stuff kind of depends on, you know, some of your goals and things like that. True. Like, we know that you can primarily eat protein and have the fats through the floor and mainly just eat vegetables and you can get, like, really shredded. You can.

But that's not necessarily a great idea for overall health. Like having your fats in the basement perpetually and having your carbohydrates in the basement perpetually. It's something that if you're going to try something like that, you're going to find that you're probably going to run into fatigue, you're probably going to run into erectile dysfunction, you're probably going to run into sleep issues, probably going to run into a lot of things. And you are going to get leaner.

And improve blood sugar. Yeah, you're probably drastically going to improve your blood pressure, your blood glucose, and you'll probably lose weight rapidly. Like if you had, let's just say you had four or four, five chicken breast every day and a decent amount of vegetables with no added oils or anything else, man, you would get, you would get very, very lean. You could take the heaviest person and, you know, within a month or almost guaranteed going to lose like 30 pounds. Right. Agreed. But it's boring and it's hard. And long term, there's adaptations to it. It's not much different than going

carnivore or keto long term. Like how long is sustainable for this? Is this an intervention? And even the highest level of bodybuilders, they just use a strategy like that just for a couple of weeks. Exactly. You know, heading into a show and they'll still have, they'll sprinkle in some carbohydrates

because they have so much muscle mass and their output is great and they're on every drug in the book. Yeah. But I think it's how do we use them strategically not turn it into our mantra, our diet cult, our new eating disorder,

which is the other thing I see a lot of people switching, following these diet camps, they've taken their old eating disorder habits and they've just applied them to a new eating disorder. new eating disorder, which is now has a name that's popular on social media. And they're still in the same kind of like, I'm on my eating disorder, you know, charge here. I'm really doing well. And then they fall off and they binge and they come back. I mean, you know, I know that eating disorders can be,

you know, huge issue. They are. But I kind of like that thought process for everyone to kind of check in with themselves and people listening right now to kind of think about. Did you develop a little bit of an eating disorder. Do you think that if you eat carbs that you're going to get fat? Do you think that if you eat fat, you're going to get fat? Right. These aren't great things to think. And I still, I still, I'm totally guilty of thinking this way.

Sure. I'm like, man, if I eat too much fat, I'm going to, like, while I was in Greece, I'm like, man, if I eat too much fat. But what I did was with each meal that I had, I kind of just like weighed things out a little bit. Like not literally. I didn't bring a scale with me. Right.

But I was like, okay, well, this restaurant, the choices are on the fat of your side. So I'm going to choose to be a little bit more on the low carb side. And I'm going to try not to like really overindulge and really overeat. I'm going to enjoy it, but I'm not going to like overdo it. Next place we went to, it had leaner options. So I'm like, good, I get to eat more carbohydrates. Right. Little things like that.

But is that some disordered thinking? You know, it's good to check in with yourself on that. It is. I agree. And I had to, going through this process made me start thinking about that kind of orthorexic that we can get into in our healthy space. and made me more aware of some of the responses people have who are some of these coaches they are truly, you look at them, they have eating disorders.

And I see some of that being spread through some of these popular diets. But in order to do that, had to check in with myself, as you said, and really acknowledge like, why did I go there? What caused me to go that deep that I was ignoring for so long when I did, ignoring these symptoms when I was in? You're very lean. You have veins in your arms.

Yeah, I've always been this way. You've got some good lines in your face. Like you look lean, like not lines like old age. You got lines like, like you're lean person. I'm not a spring chicken. You got a full head of hair there. You're pretty tan, jacked and tan. And so, yeah, it's like, why do you think you need more, right?

Like, I need to do better. Yeah. It's like how much more can we dial in? I think we can get a little obsessive with stuff, you know? And I think that's where I'm, and if you ask my family, they tell you through some of those years, I was a little on the grumpy side. I was a little grumpy.

They might use a different word than grumpy. Yeah. Like, what was it? But I think it really had to, I did have to check myself before I could move forward and start pointing fingers to other people. I just like acknowledge

that I put myself in that position. And I made those choices for me. And so now I'm much more kind of trying to be open and honest about what I went through and then where I'm looking forward. I'm trying to just learn from everybody, but be discerning.

what's your thought process on? Like it's more, it's more than just Dr. Brad Baker out there. He's not the only person that's like low carb, but he's one of the few, right? He's one of the few people that's low carb and you look at him and you're like, he's in the 60s, he's a high level performer. He's freaking huge. You got Dominic Dagestino, who is a little bit more on the keto side, but he actually eats some carbs.

He eats like chocolate and some different things here and there. Yeah, what are your thoughts there? Like obviously those guys seem to be thriving, seem to be doing well. Yeah, they found what they need for them. And I don't know how they toggle that personally, but it does sound like they're not, you know, pedal down zero carb all the time.

They're allowing stuff in for, allowing some carb in for there. Yeah, I know Dominic does, but. Yeah, performance needs. Is he pretty low carb? He's just making sure it's accurate. He just eats, he only eats meat. He only eats meat.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think there's some genetic differences with people, I think, who can maybe stay in that survival state a little better than others. I don't, we don't know how that's going to catch up with them. I mean, we have to consider gut health long term and how that impacts heart, fat, you know, liver. I don't think we have all the answers. But most people don't want to only eat.

one kind of food. They'd rather have an approach or a strategy that allows them more freedom and still be healthy and avoid disease. And so that's what I'm looking for. What's the most sustainable or a more sustainable way to approach this for people so they can not feel odd when they go out with their families or they're sitting down with their families or they can eat on a regular basis and have performance improvements and avoid disease, metabolic disease. That was my initial. That's what got me into this space is avoiding metabolic disease. How do I avoid metabolic disease? And so all the experimentation has been from that desire.

And if I can eat fruit and rice and potatoes and meat and avoid metabolic disease, well that's the path I'm gonna be looking for. It feels good, feels comfortable, and it makes eating the meat easier. Like I find that, and maybe for Dr. Baker, because he eats the fat, you know, he has the rib eye, has the butter,

maybe that makes it go down nice and smooth for him. But for me, if I have a little bit of vegetables with something and I have a little bit of starch with something, I like kind of mixing everything together and spooning it or forking it all together. Right. Sheveling it in my face. I actually find that that it feels great to me.

I would say that for Dr. Baker... You're about Sean Baker. Yeah, Dr. Sean Baker. There's some interesting things with him. He does perform at a high level. He's doing all these crazy things on a rower. he's preparing to do a decathlon, I believe. So it's kind of nice too that he's actually like testing himself to kind of like see like,

you know, he has performance markers. He does. Where you're like, this is, this is kind of great. It's kind of savage. And I know that he sometimes goes on the concept to Rower and he's like broken some records on there and things like that. So I really, I really admire what he's doing. But what I would say, I don't have any issues with what he does.

I don't have any issues with what he promotes. But your body seems like it wants to do a lot of things and try to regulate itself by jumping through all these loopholes when you could simply just eat the glucose. Right. So like his body does certain things to create the glucose, you know, protein gluconeogenesis. Right. And you could simply just have a little bit of honey here and there. You could have a potato here and there. And there's been some recent studies that show the.

amount of carbohydrates that you might quote unquote need is tiny. It's not nearly what we thought it was. It could be very low. So like, let's just hypothetically, Sean's like, oh, there's some interesting research. I'm just going to have like 30 to 50 grams of carbohydrates a day. That could potentially prevent his body from having to do all these other things, which I'm not even saying that I have proof or know that the things that his body does are bad. But it seems like a faster way to handle it, it's just to eat a freaking apple or have a little bit of juice here and there. It seemed like you could circumvent all these different things that your body's trying to do to make up for the fact that you're not having any carbohydrate.

Right. So can, so just because you can do something, I say doesn't necessarily mean you should. And so I know, I know Dr. Rayford as well as you do. I love him. I think he's an amazing guy. He's, he's, he's, he's just always, he's helped a lot of people and he has a big heart. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. Absolutely. No shade on him as a human. However, I would be interested to see a comparison of him of, you know, six months after consuming maybe two or 300 grams of carbs and see what his performance look like.

That's what I'd like to see with his genetics. And let's put the carbs in there and see how that, that would be the true comparison for Sean, not to compare me on 400 grams of carbs to Dr. Baker at zero. That's not a that's apples and oranges. I you know so let's let's keep comparisons equal there. But I mean, if he found something that he works for him. Why would he change it? Yeah. Yeah. That's not it's not the point to tell him to change it. I'm I'm talking to people who are like I'm having these problems. This isn't working for me. And I'm letting them know that's what started kind of this this

kerfuffle on on social media was that's textbook. That's textbook symptoms of reds, which is reduced energy deficiency in sport. Or LEA, which is low energy availability, where kids, usually like college athletes, they're seeing this who are trying to make weight. They're lowering low carb or low calorie diets and they're having low thyroid function. They're having low libido because of the impact of thyroid on sex hormone production. They're not recovering. Brain fog, things like this, disrupted sleep.

These are textbook for low calorie and low carb diets. So the majority of people are going to respond that way to a very low carb or no carb diet. So far in my experience. And if somebody is kind of more on the low carb bandwagon right now and they're kind of considering, you know, moving into something slightly different, maybe they're listening to this show right now.

maybe they've heard Paul Saladino talk about his experience with carnivore and now he's moved into eating some more carbohydrates and fruits and stuff. Yeah. What's the steps? Like can they just start, you know, tomorrow they just start drinking some orange juice or do you think they should start a little slower maybe? That's a good question. I think it depends on what state they're in.

I mean, if you're talking about somebody who's maybe they're already in some form of metabolic disease versus a very healthy athletic person, you're going to take those steps a little differently. That makes sense. But I would think if you start adding carbs in, you want to start reducing the fat to allow your body to make it easier for your body to start oxidizing that glucose appropriately through the mitochondria. So it's not stuck in glycolysis all the time, which is, I think, where there's a misunderstanding around glucose metabolism. But let's reduce the fat as you increase the carb. And you might need to, you know, reduce, depending on how much protein you're eating, you might need to reduce the protein to get the fat down. But I think,

You know, if you're in a carnivore state or low carb and you're eating a gram or a gram and a half per pound of body weight, well, I understand you're turning some of that into glucose, right, to make up for the fact that you're not eating carbohydrate. So if you're raising carb, you're eating more carbs. You don't need as much protein to be oxidized as into glucose. So there's some adjustments there, but I think you could do it over a period of weeks. I think the first step would get to 120 grams of carbs, in my opinion, a day to feeding the nervous system, feeding the brain, what it needs. it's going to burn about a quarter pound of sugar a day. And then maybe adding 50 to 70 grams, depending on your size per week,

and just seeing how that impacts your energy level and your blood sugar. And if you were to get blood work done, what would you try to be looking at? Is there anything specific that you could look at your A1C and say it should be here, or you can look at your fasted glucose or fasted insulin? Yeah, and during the adjustment, I wouldn't look too much under a microscope.

I would watch it. and see where things, trends start moving because there's always gonna be that turbulent when you shift your diet that much, you're gonna have some turbulence. Yeah, and you might have, like, for some strange reason, your LDL cholesterol might skyrocket or something like that.

Yeah. But you know, hold for a second. Yeah, and watch. Get another test of your blood because it might be just a recalibration of your body, right? Yeah, I've looked looking at glucose, fasting insulin, A1C, or those are all important to keep, when you're talking about metabolic markers.

I've actually just added glucagon, to my panel for clients and for myself to see because that does get elevated and often is driver of a blood sugar, especially that morning glucose that's high, whether you're diabetic or your low carb or you know, that's driven by glucagon, not from the foods you ate nine or 10 or 12 hours before. Work in concert with insulin. Cortisol maybe as well. Well, it does.

It's kind of the early stress hormone that gets stimulated, but it's it comes from the pancreas, just like the insulin. So it's from the alpha cells, insulin's from the beta cells. And they are supposed to, so when insulin goes up, to move carbohydrates and proteins out of your bloodstream into tissue,

glucagon should come down so it's not stimulating as much glucose to be released. It stimulates glucose from the liver as well as fat to be released. But glucagon can sometimes go up can stay high. Can stay high. The meal because of protein as well sometimes, right?

It can. Yeah. It can. And or if we're in a underfueled state. because it's trying to make more glucose, is trying to stimulate gluconeogenesis or release more fat from fuel. So it is a stress hormone.

Or if you've just, you're in a stressful state, you've got to speak somewhere, or you have a relative in the hospital, you don't feel like eating. Well, that's part of our survival mechanism. It comes up to release stored fuel, glucose from the liver, fat from fat stores,

and gets us through that period. What the problem is long-term sustained high glucagon. Now we're getting into a problem with what could be sustained, with high blood sugar and that's what we see with diabetes. So there's a lot that mainstream medicine, mainstream nutrition doesn't address, right? And I think it's where these kind of conversations

where we start helping people think a little differently and outside the box because your doctor's probably not going to add this to your lab report, but you have every right to. You can go get your own lab stuff. You can add these things and start looking at them. And being your own best advocate, for your health. And that's where I think, I think that's where the real message is. It's like we ultimately

are our own best advocate for our health. And we have to take responsibility for it and I advocate it to somebody else. Right. And if you are following a particular diet, let's say that you are extremely low carb and you're a fan of that and you get your blood work done and your blood work seems to be pristine and you feel really good, then probably stick to your guns. But maybe pay attention to the fact that like, you know, maybe, maybe there's going to be times in your life where there's going to be reasons to change some of these things. I personally just love to change diet just out of like just sheer excitement when I switch from one thing to the other. Like that's, it's exciting to me. Even thinking about like keto, I'm like, man, I'd love to do. I'd love to run keto

for like a couple weeks. I'm just thinking of like all the fat I get to eat, right? That I've been not not eating as much fat. What, what have you noticed? What, what have you noticed? happens, what were your cravings like, you know, a few years back? Because something that hit me like a ton of bricks when I did the sugar fasting, it's like, man, a lot of cravings just, just, they just completely were dissolved because I was eating like, you know, at one point I went up to a thousand grams of carbohydrates, more for experiment, experimental reasons. Probably could have stayed at three, four hundred and had plenty of carbohydrates in there. But for myself, personally, almost all cravings, every once in a while, there's still like craving of pizza or something

like that. But for the most part, almost all cravings like completely evaporated during that time. I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health. All they want to do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White. Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tan. A lot of us just want to look good, feel good. And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have, high cholesterol, or these various things, it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through the process,

as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing, they can look at your cholesterol, they can look at the various markers that you have, and they can kind of see where you're at, and they can help guide you through that. And there's a few aspects, too, where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shade to doctors,

but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication. A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient care coronators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust that, boom, you could be at the right levels, including working with your testosterone. And there's so many people that I know that are looking for, they're like, hey, should I do that? They're very curious.

And they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the Hulk. But that's not really what happens. It can be something that can be really great for your health because you can just basically live your life, little stronger, just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s. And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys, when you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms per deciliter of test, you're good, bro, even though you're probably feeling

like shit. At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially, TRT. So these are things to pay attention to to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work. It's not like you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. Sometimes it's supplementation. Sometimes it's TRT. And sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels,

heads to Merrickhealth.com and use code Power Project for 10% off any panel of your choice. Yeah, I didn't have, when you're eating a lot of even fruit and fruit juice and honey, even as whole food, not necessarily candy, which is the conception around the sugar diet. You don't, it satisfies those desires for sweet. You almost start craving salty things. You start craving the veggies and the meat. I was thinking about you like a ribbi. Yeah, exactly. You start craving protein.

And that's not, I don't think that's a bad thing. Especially if you're going to shift into eating more protein about three days later. Hey, your body's ready for that, right? So it definitely shut off my need for sweet. You don't just keep eating at it. You have a satiety point. And I think that's something that's also a misconception. People think, oh, when you're just eating sugar, you're just going to be hungry all the time.

no I had a hard time getting enough calories in when I was just eating carbohydrates especially fibrous ones like fruits and things like that so you know that was my experience as well you start craving the things you don't have what are some of your go-to foods with the diet that you have now and what are some of your go-to meals well I eat a lot of fruit

sweet potatoes white potatoes and white rice those are my main starches I'm eating leaner now so we're getting leaner cuts of beef, maybe like a top round, but also a little bit of, you know, lean chicken and fish. But not, I'm really avoiding kind of the fattier cuts. I think I'm just, I'm really enjoying staying, saying low carb and lean. So it's really things like the chicken, the lean beef and lean fish with whole food carbohydrates but then like on weekends i'll bring in a little more bad of your cuts a little more

diversity in that regard maybe some you know eggs whole eggs things like that and so it's those a couple different sweet potatoes some chicken some beef there it doesn't i don't want it to be static you know i don't want a static like i think we can adapt to anything and that's not always good I don't know that metabolic adaptation is not a good thing. I think we get kind of stuck. About how many grams of carbohydrates do you think you have on most days? Targets usually right around 400. That can go up.

That can be lower depending on what's going on with the weekend. Fats or maybe like 50, something like that. I think that's a good, yeah, that's a good estimate for me. I can be lower and on the weekends it might go up a bit, but average would be around 40, 50, yeah. Do you think it's possible for somebody to get? gain body fat if they are restricted to just 50 grams of fat a day? I think they'd have a hard time gaining body fat on 50 grams.

There's always a possibility. There's an outlier out there. They could have a good time losing fat or reversing some insulin resistance on 40 or 50 grams of fat a day, depending on their weight. It makes it really tough and there's a couple of reasons for it. One is that it seems like extra protein. I know there's been some recent report. where some people have talked about,

like there's been an additional like 700 calories of protein added to a particular diet. It was a particular study that was done. And they just were like, we don't really know what happened to the calories, but they didn't equate to more fat gain. And that's been shown, I think, a handful of times with protein. And protein is really weird.

It has four calories per gram, but it maybe should only register as like two calories because you lose a lot, I guess, in absorbing the protein. Digesting and thermic effect of the food and everything like that. So protein is a weird one. Carbohydrates, there are a lot of times when you just consume more carbohydrates, it's going to just, in some cases, it's just going to make you probably burn more calories. You can raise your metabolic rate, especially if it's on the low side.

You can lift your thyroid hormone up over time. Now, it probably won't do that indefinitely, so you can't just like blast thousands and thousands of grams of carbohydrates, but... No, not overconsumed. Yeah. But as you said, you had to push that to get there. You had to want it, and it was intentional. I feel pretty good.

I mean, depending on what your calorie intake is, I mean, size definitely makes a difference in activity level. But when we look at what the caloric or the carbide recommendations are for athletes right now, they're refueling on, you know, what, four, 500, 600 grams carbs? So that's a high performing athlete who's lean and they're very active.

Well, we can adjust down depending on your, on your, on your caloric ratio. I mean, you know, your calories you're taking in. But I like 50 to 60 gram or 50 to 60 percent of my calories coming in from carbohydrate. I think I feel really good there. With adding a little bit of fat and and about 15 to maybe 20 percent from protein. But that's a nice, for me, that feels really good. I sleep well.

I have plenty of energy. it really, I'm purring at that point. And I found my mix. I realize not everyone has the same mix, but I think somewhere around there, if you're eating whole food, you're gonna find a diet that's sustainable and keeps you healthy.

And you're basically, what I would say is maybe depending on age and maybe depending on some factors, you're trying to figure out a way, and there is convenience of keto, there's convenience of like intermittent fat. There's some conveniences to these things because then you don't have to be as attached to your food.

But I think ultimately what your goal is, your goal is to try to eat as much food as possible. It really is because that's energy. Like let's just as much food as possible without having excess energy in your bloodstream, right? I mean, you're trying to really maximize your metabolic rate. Like if currently your metabolic rate is 1,800 or something like that and you're a 200-pound guy,

that just means you're eating very little amount of food. Yeah. You're probably going around pretty hungry. And maybe you're kind of like skinny fat and you're not real happy with your physique. Low energy, maybe depressed. Right? And there's a way that you can kind of shift some of that around.

And a guy like that could be telling their coach, hey, man, I'm doing what you're saying. And the coach doesn't believe that they're doing what they're saying. But their metabolic rate for whatever reason is just, it's very slow. Maybe they're inside a lot. Maybe they're playing video games a lot. And they are starting to exercise

and they are starting to have some better habits, but unfortunately, their metabolic rate is super low. And one of the best ways to, to, one of the best ways to kind of turn all this around is to add some muscle mass, add some movement to your life, add some sunlight to your life,

and to probably look into your nutrition and figure out how do I have my nutrition assist with increasing my metabolic rate? And the only known way that I know to do this is by, increasing your carbohydrates and decreasing your fats. I think it's a fact. I think I could bring on anybody, I can bring on any metabolic doctor

or talk to any really high level person and they would say yes, fat can slow your metabolism down. Especially in excess. It could slow it down. And I asked that question directly to Jay Feldman. And we know Jay Feldman and Mike Fave, they put out a ton of information

on how to, you know, how to increase metabolic rate, and they talk a lot about this repeat type stuff. Incessantly, they have a podcast, and they talk about it a lot. So they have, they're a great resource as well if you're looking into that. But that's an interesting thing to think about. Like, how do I increase my metabolic rate? How do I increase my burn?

How can I eat, how can I get away with eating a lot more food and being more fueled while also having like good glycogen stores in my muscle tissue? and stuff like that. And the answer is through some carbohydrate. More carbs. And that goes back to that efficiency for making ATP with less oxygen. Your body has more ATP being produced

at an efficient rate. It's happy. It's happy, you know. And I think that that's at the root cause of mitochondria. When that gets inefficient, in the mitochondria, we have inefficiencies there. We see a stress response.

I think that is our root cause for metabolic disease. It's not because you ate too much sugar. It's because there's some sort of inefficiency in the mitochondria where all of your energy that you're consuming is not going to ATP production. There's some oxidative stress in there. Whether it's heavy metals,

whether it's endotoxemia from the gut, or it's some sort of processed food additive. We have an inefficiency. It's diverting some of that energy to fat storage. We have low ATP, the body senses, we don't have enough energy. We get an elevation of these stress hormones, the glucose, the cortisol,

adrenaline and that's really seeing more fatty acids and we begin the cycle of metabolic disease but it's i think that's my personal uh belief or or what i see right now and in my current i've learned not to commit too hard right but because i want to keep learning but this is what i see is that's our root cause is we have something interfering with energy production in the mitochondria which leads to a stress response and that's what triggers all of these responses we see in our liver and our fat tissue and our heart with these symptoms of metabolic disease. It starts with a stress response

to inefficient energy production. And then the downstream is what we're seeing with high blood sugar with dysregulated hormones, but it starts with the mitochondria. And the sun is such a huge part of that. Yeah, I think. You gotta get your butt outside.

Well, we need light. We need community and we need whole food. We kind of forget about it. about that part. We need community, we need relationships, we need love, like it just hugs and peritone and connection and whole that stuff is huge. And then diet and movement. Those are our foundations.

Those are foundations. Everything above that is great and can add some value, but I think our foundations are diet, movement, light and connection. Do you have any concerns over like just blasting your insulin? Do you have any thoughts on like, I don't know, you got home from doing a bunch of stuff and you're just like, man, I just want a glass of orange juice. Do you just like drink it or do you have some thoughts around like maybe I should try to do something to stabilize that blood sugar and have some yogurt with it or something like that?

These days, I've been just drinking the orange juice. Two years ago I would have had some thoughts. But these days, I'm enjoying orange juice or I'm enjoying grabbing a sweet potato and just maybe putting a little honey on it and consuming it because I know, I feel like I have a better sense of how my body is responding to food. I've better relationship with food now. I did before. And rather than trying to leverage or over leverage metabolic stress, I'm trying to leverage metabolic flexibility.

And like you said earlier, eat as much food as I can to generate as much energy I can for, you know, all the things I want to do and still remain metabolically healthy. You know, I know that comes from clean food. You don't see, you don't see. indigenous populations, whatever their diet is, what's missing is processed food. They're all healthy. What's missing from their diet,

wherever they are, is processed food. And I think that's where we've gone wrong. And that's why we've had this epidemic of metabolic disease hit our country and then we've exported it to the rest of the world through our production of processed food over the last 120 years. You know, it's interesting because,

you know, processed food does taste good. You know, you got like, you know, certain types of candies and chocolates and fast food and some of these things. But, man, it's really when you compare it to a well-cooked meal. Yeah. It's just not even close how good a well-cooked meal is. Like I know there's people who are probably still on the other side. And they're probably like, no way, dude.

Like Carlos Jr. is way better. Or, you know, some French fries or whatever is way better. but like to me like where I'm at in my head I just think like that's just garbage like it's just trashy food like it is to have it be somewhat part of your diet okay sure yeah it makes some sense but to have that be like a routine that you're going to like roll through like Taco Bell or something like that I just can't get on board with it no my stomach rebels when I if I bet my body but when we see that that's that's the average American diet is about 60 65 percent ultra-processed food that's very different than it being occasional indulgence

that takes up maybe even 10% of calories. Like you have some chocolate here and there, or you occasionally have the Coke, or you have something that just you wouldn't normally eat, but you're out with your family, you have the pizza because you're out at, you know, visiting your kid in college somewhere, and they all go out for pizza,

and you have something, but you know that's such a small percentage of your entire diet that has little to know, negative impact, negative impact. And if you can't have those foods, then something's off with your training and your nutrition, I think. Yeah, if you can't handle a little bit of divergence here and there, then you're a little too fragile probably. Yeah, for sure. And maybe that's what we mentioned earlier. We have to check ourselves on our, on our, maybe our eating disorder where we think this

is going to send us into a tailspin. We're resilient creatures, but we need to major in the things we know that are healthy, right? And know that we have flexibility. What about how do you with, I know you have kids and stuff like that too. And in your household, do you have a way of like keeping food kind of close by within arm's reach that's healthy? That's like ready to go. You know, you got blueberries and there's always. There's always fruit available. There's always meat in the fridge. There's always drill cheese, there's also always ice cream in the freezer. So we've never been,

the things that we think are like, oh man, that's toxic, okay, we try to keep those out. Like we, you know, but there's things that are just indulgent. A ton of potato chips around or something. Right, right. Or we find, now that we, now we can find tallow cooked potato chips

or whatever. And my son loves, yeah, they're better options that I don't, I don't particularly, you know, want the canola oil or soybean oil in there. And so, feel much better about my son, my kids having those things. And it's made an influence on them. I mean, they paint down, three of them are adults now, like working, self-sustaining adults. It's great to see. And they still ping me. Everyone's want to ask me a health question. So it's great. I had influence without being dogmatic. Sometimes I was dogmatic. But they'll tell

them, they'll say their little brother. I'm being the parents. The hardest job is ever done. It's terrible. And you go, wow, I probably overdid that one. Or I really missed the boat on that. But overall they're still thoughtful about their health. They're not over, they're not over one way or the other. They're not rebelling, completely rebelling against what I asked them to do. And they still ask me questions about it. So I think tempered it fairly well. But it wasn't something where all, all what we call bad foods were eliminated. But there was a nice balance there. And then there was example. And at some point, it really comes down. Do they, what do they see? you doing. And I think that's the biggest thing with kids more than what we say. It's what we do

and we have to lead by example and knowing that when we were teenagers, we were eating all sets of stuff from the 80s, right? And we were eating all kinds of stuff that was, we wouldn't touch now. It was like, you know, toxic mixed up mac and cheese. I would eat like a bag of Doritos like every other day. I mean, easily drinking sodas and yeah. And so we survived. We survived. We made adjustments when our health start pushing back at us. So as they grow into that, as the older they get, the more conscientious we have to be about our health, right?

I mean, we should be. And I think there's that awareness. And as long as they're thinking about it, I think as parents, we've done our job. Yeah, for me, in my household, if we have ice cream, if we have cookies, if we have, a lot of times, like, people might come over for like some sort of event.

Someone might bring cookies. You know, they come over for a full, football game to watch or something and we all enjoy some food and maybe there's some leftover you know, cookies or something like that. If the cookies stay at our house, which is rare, we usually try to give them away to somebody. We always say give these away to someone that we hate. So if you receive cookies from us, you know where you stand. But a lot of times if we do have stuff like that in the house, it will last a while. Yeah. You know, I'm always like, man, it's kind of crazy that we have these like cookies just sitting here. We have this ice cream in the

freezer because when I was a kid, me and my brothers would just, we would just devour that ice cream. It would be gone. And my mom just like, she just refused to buy it because she's like, you guys just hammer it in like half a day. Yeah. Yeah. She couldn't keep it like in stock, so to speak. Serial probably too. Oh yeah. Serial. Yeah. Giant, giant ass bowls of cereal. Those are the 80s. Yeah. It was good times. We survived. We survived. How important do you think fiber is. Do you, is that something that like in your diet, you know, try to make sure that you're, you know, eating vegetables or or is there enough fiber in the fruit and stuff that you eat? Or what do you do with fiber? You know, I think gut health is very important overlooked. And I do think

that the endotox, metabolic endodysmia, which is, again, also overlooked, but as a driver from metabolic disease from leaky gut, right? The, the wall of the gut gets inflamed. Yeah, permability gets inflamed and then endotoxins leak. And so we need a healthy gut, you know, population there. And I think fiber can be a part of that, but I don't fiber max on it. Like right now, fiber and protein are having their day, aren't they?

Fibre's kind of making like a comeback. It's like drizzled out for a little bit and then now we're kind of seeing people talking about. I think it's important. I think, look, you know, for each quote unquote meal that you have, anytime you have an opportunity to have a meal, it should have protein carbs and fats. and fiber.

Yeah. So I eat a lot of whole food. A decent way to try to look at it. Like get all that stuff in. And there's different types. But I also include either sourcrowder or kimchi. I'll do some carrots here and there. I'm not a big,

you're not going to see me eating a lot of broccoli. That's just something that I'm like, you better cook it to death before I eat it. Because I don't want to eat raw broccoli because I think there's some foods that just like doesn't make sense we would use that as a food. But I think there's some amount of fiber, mushrooms are great, carrots are great.

And a lot of fruit, I think we can get plenty of fiber from those from a diversity of whole food without feeling fearful about it. You know what I mean? I think we can get enough. And I mean, I think that's where there's some balance there. I'm not choking down Cillium Husk. I can tell you that.

But I, which I did the 90s. I mean, you know, but. I always have friends. They still talk about Cillium husk. I'm like, I just don't, I'm interested in trying that out. How about an apple? It's got pectin.

got some fiber in there. I had some. Actually, it was funny. I had some at Michael Hearn's house. I don't know if I did something wrong. Sillium husk? Yeah, he just gave me this like, I don't know.

We just got done working out. We had like a protein shake or something. And he's like, have some fiber or something too. And then we were like gonna eat like chicken and some rice. And he gave me this like Sillium husk thing. And I went to like mix it

and they were just laughing so hard. It must have been a joke. It just turned to this like giant thing of gel. I'm like, what the fuck? He put Sillium husk. I remember those from the night. he's a cillium husk with there was some kind of gel you'd mix with it and choke it down it was nasty it was crazy i was like he's like i drink this every day i was like what the hell is this well it's mike

yeah you know it could have been some trend in there who knows yeah oh oh well he's he's a specimen i mean he's a specimen he's he's amazing he's no spring chicken either have you uh did you start out a fan of like bodybuilding this how he kind of got into lifting and some of that stuff you know I started late lifting. It was like college. And it was just, I had a buddy who played on the college football team. And he's like, man, you got some veins. You should try that.

I bet you'd blow up. I'm like, okay. So I went to the gym with him. You had veins without training? I was lean. I played water polo in high school. So I was always lean and always. That's an underrated sport.

That shit's hard. It was not easy. People are trying to drown you while you're trying to like throw a ball around something. Yeah. And I was always running around somewhere. I was always very active. But it was, just kind of a lean, skinny kid.

And he started showing me how to do a few things in the gym. And I started doing it. And I blew up, like six months to put it on like 20 pounds. Shit. So it was like 17, 18 years old. It was primed. Everything's perfect. Right.

It stopped growing, but I had lots of testosterone. And I thought, well, this is kind of cool. I'm getting different kind of attention, different kind of looks, you know. And so it kind of stuck. And I just kept going. So it wasn't so much for competing in bodybuilding. But I just liked, you know, I liked how I felt being strong. and fit,

it seemed like an easy way to stay lean. And then getting to, as I started, I had relatives who were struggling with metabolic disease and that really led me into just trying different diets, vegan, low carb, and eventually became a trainer because I just, I wanted to pursue this. How do we stop metabolic disease?

How do we reverse metabolic disease? This was my, this was in my head. So that's what drove me into the space with coaching people. But it was basically, I think I enjoyed the experimentation and I enjoyed trying new things. I think we're in a really interesting time right now where we kind of recognize like we'll talk about like walking and we'll talk about lifting and some of these things. But I think we know that like even walking and as profound as lifting can be, it's really not enough. You know, it's like we need to kind of like mix in other stuff. You were talking a little bit about like mobility and yeah.

it's an unfortunate thing, but like there's, there's a big list of shit to do. There's a big list of stuff, you know. And when you start to really think about it, you're like, man, it'd probably be good for me to do like some martial arts, like punching and kicking a bag and stuff just because of the mobility and a flexibility and do some stuff with a, you know, a ball, like throw a football around or kick a soccer ball around. Explosive stuff, pliometrics, right?

It's like, holy shit, my list of things that, you know, I'm starting to be responsible for. just keeps growing and growing. Then you're like, well, what do I share with my audience? You know? Right. But for you, like, what are some of the different things that you do other than just lifting? You were mentioning maybe some sprints and stuff like that? I work in sprinting once or maybe twice if it's not, if it's wet, like it's always wet in Nashville, but I'll get on the salt bike, you know, a little bit.

Just get the heart right up. A little bit of really zone two of just for the base cardio, not because I'm trying to lose weight. I don't use it as a weight loss tool, but it's like I like building mitochondria and having, you know but do a lot of walking and we do a lot of walking and talking i think as part of our connection with my with my wife i think i've seen you do that with yours absolutely um and mobility work first thing in the morning i'm getting up and trying to move like like you know move the hips the spine all that gets locked up i think we just we sit too much and then as we get older i know you've noticed this you know 40s and then 50s it's like movement uh if you don't move

it you lose you lose that range of motion i think moving into those ranges of motion that we don't normally get into. Lifting tends to be, oh, there we go. A lot of times, you know, what you're experiencing. Like, that's not graceful. That's me struggling through that.

That's incredible. It looks great to me. Oh, well, thank you. You know, I think what ends up happening is like, you kind of get done with your days and you don't, you don't, you like you want to do less than you used to. Yeah.

And you're not, you're not necessarily really in a ton of recognition of it. Like when, when five o'clock, six o'clock rolls around and you get home and you maybe cook some food you just want to kind of like plop down or you just want to like kind of veg out and just like watch TV and just like sit in a recliner or sit in a chair or sit on the couch and really not participate in some of these movements but like that was fine to do when you were a kid because you got all those inputs like you went to

school and you had recess or you played a sport afterwards you played water polo you did all this stuff with your arm and you were swimming and you were you know You had all those inputs. But as we get older, all you did for the day was like maybe go on a walk, maybe record a video or two. And you just didn't really do a lot of stuff where you're, it's not like you and I are like mechanics or construction workers where we're, you know, getting in a very particular position. Swimmers. Twisting and moving stuff around it. That would be different, right?

Like, yeah. If you have those types of jobs, you actually have to figure out almost the opposite of what we're talking about. You got to really figure out different ways to like relax in some way. but you know we can't afford to just like plop down in the chair you know we have to we have to do a lot and I love that you're doing this stuff do you tend to get after in the morning so that you're not you know late like for me if the day gets away from me I'm less inclined that's true after 4 o'clock I'm less likely to do something other than go for a walk I go for a walk then I want to chill out I want to bring things down I think that's better for us to get done early in the day and that

I love that doing that when it's hot. For some reason, I like being out of the sun. Where did you find that particular movement? That's something you just saw someone else do. I saw other people doing it online. I'm going to get a movers, but I'm going to give it a try, dude. I started moving animal flow. Oh, got you.

Look at animal flow and there's some of those other ones like that, and I just started mimicking them. And it's a challenge. Like, you'll feel some sortness in your hips, but I started, I was like, I got to pull back somewhere. So I just maybe pulled back on some of my lifting time and start moving in different. ranges because you know lifting the traditional moves you end up staying in very same planes of movement

all the time and i i i were seeing the you know the older guys walking around the gym they start walking like robots a little bit you know what i mean and i was i was starting to happen to me like i'm not getting into these deep ranges of motion a neck and traps in your hands it's just like like this hips don't move you're not getting deep into squats because you know so if i can move my body into these ranges and tell my body i'm safe there you got to let those joints on those muscles and nervous system, you're safe in this range. So if you do fall, if you do something that's a little bit unusual movement where you're in the garden, where you're doing something like that, you're picking up a grandkid.

It doesn't destroy you. It's not unfamiliar. And that's where we start losing. I think that's where, like, we fall our whole life. You played sports. Everybody falls. Why is it at 60 when we fall? It's suddenly life threatening that could put you in the hospital that, like,

the majority, such a high percentage of people who fall from 16 over into, they die in two years, right? Yeah, if they break their hip. They break their hip. Why are they, they're falling in their kitchen. Yeah. That wouldn't have bothered us at 35. So it got me thinking like, what's, what's going on here? We have to be able to catch ourselves in those of the ranges. We need to have bone density, which you and I have solved for, I think, with lifting. But we got to be able to move in a way like we did we were kids like you said. It's also like I gotta say like

you're trying to hold like a standard you know like when you when you leave the house you try to put on like you know some decent clothes or whatever it might be right you're trying to maybe you're not always trying to like you know quote unquote like look your best but you're trying to like just look somewhat put together

right when you leave your home you're not wearing like a bunch of ripped clothes and you're not you're you're trying to have a good representation of yourself, right? Yeah. And another representation of yourself is this body that we live in, right? So having a nice physique is great. But then having a physique that, you know, clearly isn't moving around so great is a little

embarrassing, you know, and to be kind of clumsy and to and to be uncoordinated. It's not a good feeling. Like we all remember what it was like being a kid and being picked last for something or or just to struggle with something more than other kids because something was unfamiliar to you. You know, normally when it came to physical stuff, I usually did pretty well. But there are situations and cases, even today of like when I go to try to do something for the first time, people will make fun of it. They'll talk trash about it or whatever, which I'm totally accepting of because I understand that anytime I try something new, it's new.

You're going to be awkward. And it's going to be awkward. and especially if it's if it's something I did you know when I was younger and haven't done a really long time that's almost the same as being new to it but in this case it's almost even worse because my body when I was young moved so much differently than it moves now because the body tends to get stiffer and you know your body will probably get stiffer whether you train or you don't train but training and lifting and deadlifting and squatting and doing some of these movements in the gym and, you know, these heavy rows and heavy bench presses and all the

stuff that you might be doing in the gym, that's going to stiffen the tissues up clearly. Like, there's no question about it. Like over the next couple days, you'll have a lot of soreness, and then you might walk kind of funky for a few days. And if you're kind of walking, kind of hunched and kind of waddling, what message is going on in your brain? Your brain is saying, like, man, our legs are sore, your butt is sore, your hamstrings are tight. None of this stuff is safe going up and downstairs and it's safe. So you do so slowly,

your back is tight. And so you're pushing down on stuff to try to like, you know, rest your spine and rest your back. And you're not even really thinking about it. But if you do that all the time, it's like, man, you're really putting a kink in the armor over time to where you're really siphoning off blood flow and you're really restricting the body. So you have to kind of think about how do I get myself still moving around and you do so by really opening up the playbook and doing some movements that are I mean I took a ball with me on a walk today it was a ball that you can bounce and I would just bounce it or I'd throw it and I'd run underneath it like just try to turn some of the stuff into some fun yeah and it looked like you were having a lot of fun in

the grass plus your barefoot and everything too I love it it feels good for me to get out there and do that like it's just it's not just the movement but it's like getting in the sun and sweating a little bit I think there's a There's a feel to that, but it does feel good after you do it. But yes, you're awkward. Like you said, you feel a little awkward. I think that's where growth happens, isn't it? When we put ourselves in position to do something that's a little bit uncomfortable and it's

awkward, it doesn't feel good. That's, we have the greatest curve for improvement in that space. I mean, you're doing some lot more running and sprinting recently and, yeah, and it feels good. But there is that, there is that learning curve or that adjustment. And that's growth. We found a new place to grow. you know, we found a new place to improve that our body starts responding to

and when it does, it's like, hey, great, we're in our 50s and we're still finding ways to improve. It feels awesome to run and just to have the wind kind of whipping back on your ears and stuff. I mean, it's like... I have that range of motion with your hips moving like that. I mean, when you're a kid, like...

Right. You took it for granted. Yeah, why do kids sprint around all the time because it's fun. They're like sprinting and jumping and, you know, for those of you that have kids, You know, you know, when they're six, seven, eight, nine, they just are always like running and jumping and doing like you're like, what is. And they bounce.

Yeah. You're like, what are they doing? You know, but as soon as they turn like 11 or 12, a lot of that starts to really like shut down. Yeah. They start to gain, you know, gain some size. They go through puberty and stuff and you, and they don't really do that again. And for many people, once they kind of get through high school, they're not really experiencing any sport or any sprinting or any running at all. have to be like us and you got to like make shit up for you to do yeah like the animal flow stuff

that you're doing yeah and and it it felt awkward several times I did it it was it was very like I feel like the biggest clawed just sitting here trying to move through these things uh but you know put your ego aside for a minute and thinking about your health and how you can move and improve I just it just I feel better my body have you ever done any rope flow type stuff I haven't have you seen that for right with the take the rope and you kind of you know twirl it around and you're not jumping over it like a jump rope but you just moving it around yeah it's it's cool I just haven't dug into that someone we're done with the show here today because uh I think I think that you would dig it how'd you like some of that mild fascia release on the hamstring I definitely need it yeah that's that's great

with the tennis ball yeah I little any little injury kind of seems to hang on at this age doesn't it it's like so well hamstrings are tough because yeah I don't know why but once a hamstring starts to like bite it tends to like hang out there. And that really stays in your head. And your brain's telling you like, don't go fast. Right. Don't extend. Don't go fast.

Yeah. And that's exactly what's happening. So I appreciate that. I got to get back to my full sprint stride, you know. And that's always pulling back. So recovery and I think recovery and those kind of things where you're, you're paying attention to injuries and addressing them instead of ignoring them. I think that's comes with age comes wisdom, right?

Right. But recovery becomes more and more important. In this video, you're doing some, what, Bulgarian split squat type thing? Bulgarians. And do you do some plios and some jumps and various things like that too? Yeah, I'll jump off that, like one foot up on that bench. I do a lot of single leg and single arm stuff these days. But yeah, I'll jump up, do some hops just with calves and then just jump through that.

And my son plays basketball. So actually get there, look, I can, I can reach the rim, you know, so he'll get out there a little bit. And that's cool. You know, kind of a little competitiveness there to make it fun. So that's where I think, you know, kids can keep us, I think, moving and keep us stimulated when we see them. I think it's inspiring. Oh, yeah, for sure. If your kids play sports.

But, yeah, I try to work the pymetrics. Let's play some defense against him and be able to steal the ball. He's a feel free. He's bigger than me now. He's 14. You're going to have to cheat. Exactly. Throw a forearm into the...

Exactly. I'll use the muscle, a little cheat. Yeah. No, he's amazing. And it's just fun that. to engage with them that way and to compete in that way. But it's... What has been like in your research and in, you know, diving into all this?

What are some things that you've been most surprised by? You know, really, I've been surprised at what I didn't know, at what is not understood by so many nutritionists, doctors, people in the space about our metabolism, about how our bodies actually respond. And to food and to carbohydrates, what I missed out on, it's all published.

It's all out there. And we get in our, I'm surprised at the way we wall up our ideas and the way other wall up their ideas and they don't see the other side of the fence. Well, I can see benefit to what the vegans are saying, but the vegans can't see the benefit to what I'm saying about protein or fat,

and then so we have these that's what surprised me the most this knowledge is out there we are adaptive we have ideal things but we're adaptive but it's how much we close our mind to something once we've made it once we've made up our mind how much it keeps us from seeing i think they say that's six percent so they say don't waste your breath only six percent of the people that you ever communicate with on just about anything are going to change their mind that's sad and you know I don't think I don't I don't I don't think it should be 90% or anything like that but I think that um why not just go into everything and say you know what I'm not quite sure I've actually noticed for myself what I'll do my son was asked me some question about something the other day and

then it turned out he knew a little bit more about it because because I haven't heard of it before but I can't even remember what it was um but I just relinquished my power I was like well I don't know sounds like you know a little bit more than I do. Then actually made me feel really good because I was like, I need to do that more often because I just took, because I started to have like a defense around what I thought, right? I built like this little, this little castle that I was trying to protect.

And I was like, wait, why am I trying to protect something? I actually don't even really know that much about this subject that he just was asking me a question about. Sounds like he knows more. So I'll turn it back to him. Yeah. To let yourself be the learner and the student is really,

it's freeing and it is setting that ego aside but I feel like that's what I've done as I mentioned earlier I've just kind of wiped clean any preconceived notions and I'm trying to be open to not not without discernment but be open to different ideas or counter ideas well how could that work could that work in this situation or is there a short term period or is it is it you know that so basically be more open-minded but I really am surprised so here's one out of the blue it really is It really dropped me when I heard the first time, the Kempner diet. You familiar with the Kempner rice diet?

A little bit, yes, we go on. 1940s, Dr. Kempner. He had a large group of people with high blood pressure, hypertension, and he put them on this diet. It was 90, it was basically rice, fruit, fruit juice, and sugar. So it's like 92% carb, almost no fat, and like 3% protein. I think he was adding sugar to rice. He was adding sugar.

white sugar to rice and some fruit, some fruit juice, reversed the high blood pressure, reversed diabetic retinopathy, which is not supposed to be reversible. He had a group that was diabetic, reversed their diabetes, lower their need for insulin, had a weight loss group which cut calories, but the same diet.

And they dropped, I mean, the average weight loss over a six or eight month period was like 115 pounds. And so on, and so is this the ideal diet? Of course not. But this diet ran for 70 years out of Duke University. And with 18,000 people coming through it, they have like a 2 3rd success, 60% success rate on reversing different symptoms of medical.

They did this diet with various people for 70 years? Yeah. Wow. Out of Duke. So it's not like it was, you know, it was Duke. It's noted. The prominent university. Yeah, it's a prominent university.

They did different variations of it in one with the diabetic group where they said, well, we don't want them to blame the reversible diabetes on just the weight loss. So they increase their calories to keep them from losing weight while feeding them this very high carb diet. And they still reverse their diabetes because they lowered the fat and raised the carb using not a lot of whole food, white rice, sugar and juice. Sugar does not drive metabolic disease. That was kind of like that that's what broke. And when that broke, that opened up everything else, we're blaming. sugar and sugar is not the culprit. And that's what made me dig deeper. Yes, it is. It's the donuts.

Oh yeah. It's like, well, wait a second. It has a ton of fat in it. Like 35, 40% fat. And it's saturated fat or is it? I don't even know. It's usually canola or soybean oil. Yeah, there you go. It's fried in oils. Yeah, it's a seed oil. So that, that broke. When I, when I read that, I was I was like, okay, that breaks all the rules. Is this the ideal diet? No. But if carbs and sugar caused metabolic disease, how could a diet that is 95% carbs and sugar reverse it?

So that means we don't know what we think we know. And that's all it took. That made me dig deeper, but that kind of broke my rules. And I get a lot of pushback on that one. Like I'm recommending, like I'm telling, people to do this like this is dangerous it's just think about the concept let's think about the concept and rethink what should your what could your diet look like if you weren't afraid of a particular

macronutrient i mean some people some people will like there's been like some pushback on something like oatmeal right like some people are like oatmeal for you know poor folks or something shit like yeah it's poverty food yeah and we're like well okay just you know throw throw aside your feelings for a second have oatmeal every morning and see like do you have like really negative outcomes from that or like or does it feel nourishing and help fill you up? I mean a lot of people don't like really love the flavor of oatmeal. And that's understandable. But oatmeal seems like oatmeal to me seems like a secret weapon in some ways. Like it has it's so fibrous. It turns you know it it's a small like little tiny food and then it turns into this like bigger kind of puffed up type thing. I actually personally like oatmeal. Post workout. Quite a bit. I think is great. What a refuel.

Yeah. Amazing. I didn't have it for years on my low-carve little journey there. And now I'm on a weekly base. I'm having it every week. Like I'll make some and let it cool off. And then after a workout, I'm like, this is amazing refuel post-workout. Yeah, it's changing those misconceptions and being a little more open to what you were closed off to before.

I think that's, I think that really should be kind of our goal is to make sure we're checking ourselves like you said check yourself on your on your ideologies on the way you're thinking about foods am i putting myself in a box for no reason or is it harming me you know i think i think that's part of wisdom and getting older you start the you should be able to like put your ego in check and realize the more we know the more we realize how little we know you're protecting your ideas so strongly and sometimes you're getting so wound up about it. And sometimes it can be hard because you do feel like sometimes you feel like what somebody else is saying is threatening in some way when it could be like potentially like a political view or it could be, you know,

some sort of religious conversation or something like that. You feel like it's like too challenging or too threatening. I understand how people could feel that way. But I think if we are willing to understand the fact that only 6% of the people are going to change their mind in the first place, and we also understand that somebody else just has a completely different point of view. They have a completely different life. They have a completely different circumstances to where they ended up thinking the things that they currently think now. And maybe at some point, maybe they'll start to think your way. But maybe they want to. And you've got to almost be okay with that.

And you gotta kind of say, okay, well, I think these things, and I'm gonna share this information, and I'm okay if people get upset with it. But you know, here- I have to be. You saw, I can't let that bother me. Right. You know, yeah, you have to.

Your convictions and, but we, that's how we have, that's how we learn is having conversations with people that we don't necessarily agree with. and we start listening to something that challenges our beliefs. That's part of the human experience. Right. That's what makes us able to let some of it go sometimes. Yeah, you got to let it go, but also why do they feel that way?

Let's put ourselves on their shoes for a minute, like you said. They have different circumstances. They've experienced something else. They've, they have a different life experience than we do. And so that's put them in a place to think this way. Empathy. Right. It's really important.

Where can people find you? Zanegrigs.com is probably the easiest way to find my socials. I'm pretty active as you've seen on Instagram with Zane Griggs Fitness. If you don't mind, I have a free guide that'd love to offer your listeners. So it's at zanegrigs.com forward slash free guide. It has a list of the hormone and the metabolit markers that I use for myself, my client. It's just a little guide that says optimal versus normal ranges and some things that your doctor probably isn't looking at. some of the people that are scared of carbs, they can, they can try some of this out and

hopefully have someone kind of walk them through it a little bit. I'd be happy to. Yeah. Thank you. Strength is never a week. This week is never a strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.