Mark Bell's Power Project - The Truth About Getting Lean (No One Tells You This) | Max Lugavere

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Everyone wants to get lean… but almost nobody talks about what it actually takes.From energy crashes to mental fatigue, getting shredded isn’t just about lifting weights—it’s about discipline, consistency, and understanding how your body really works.“Everybody is a bodybuilder… the question is what body are you building?” Special 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!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=e#PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Everybody is a bodybuilder. The question is what body are you building? There is this impression when you see jacked people on social media that they're walking around feeling great all the time. But the metabolic adaptation is real. The leaner I get, it's remarkable how your energy just like goes out the window. Your body is fighting against what it perceives as a threat. What about having a big bag of Doritos just sitting there?

Just to like train yourself for it. No. Your willpower wasn't designed for that. Willpower is a finite resource. We're living in an amazing time. like the excuses are becoming fewer and fewer to get into the shape you've always aren't being. Nobody's fat because they didn't count calories or didn't track their macros.

The only way to send the appropriate stimulus to your muscles or you have to be working out to a certain degree of intensity, that usually entails going to failure. All right, man, so you're looking peeled up. You're looking lean over here. What's going on? Thanks, man. Yeah, I've been kind of obsessed with learning about fat loss. And, you know, I've always been.

a bodybuilding enthusiast. You're saying you developed an eating disorder? No, I did not develop. I've always had a very healthy relationship with food. But I, you know, I've spent the bulk of my career thus far learning about the myriad risk factors that pertain to brain health and preserving cognitive function long term. And, you know, more and more of what the research is pointing to is that,

and what it has been pointing to is that metabolic, health is crucially important when it comes to the brain. And part of that conversation inevitably is going to be skeletal muscle and the health of your skeletal muscle, your strength, your vigor, and maintaining that as you age. And I guess one of the areas that I intended on learning a lot more about, especially over the past couple of years since my last book had come out, is really the applied science, like the mechanics, the knobs and levers of how to actually shift body composition in a meaningful way towards more strength, more muscle, less body fat. And again, I'd always been an enthusiast. I mean, this goes back to like my high school years.

My senior, my high school senior thesis paper I wrote on creatine monohydrate. It's like 20 something years ago. A meathead. I love it. Yeah, I was like a meat, you know, from way back in the day. And yeah. And so, you know, I had all this knowledge in theory in the back of my head. course I needed to do a little bit more reading. And then ultimately, I think the missing link was

finally applying it to myself. And so over the past couple of years, I've gone through periods of, I guess, you know, what the bros would call bulking and cutting phases. And I've just found such joy in the process. And it's been so rewarding to like learn about, you know, how my body actually responds to the various inputs that I, that I give it. What bodybuilders do is actually really amazing and fascinating. And I know it's very easy to look at the pro. IFBB pros and the Ronnie Coleman's over the years and stuff. And that's not so much of what you and I are going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking more about,

more about your average person doing some bodybuilding type stuff and utilizing the practices of bodybuilding, because there's a lot of practices in bodybuilding that are actually very healthy. And there's a bunch of practices in bodybuilding, and on the fringe side of bodybuilding, and on that extreme side of bodybuilding, that's extremely unhealthy. And so, you know, the first thing I'd like to kind of point out is that what people are going to notice as they get leaner, as they get in better shape, as they start to recomp their body, you're just going to be like more in tune and like tuned up to every little tiny thing.

You have an extra 15 grams of carbs. You might actually feel that. You have too little of fat. You might actually feel that. You might actually start to, as we were talking earlier, you might start to kind of feel a little bit like crap. Like, man, my energy, like I thought I was going to get lean. and I thought I was going to be super pumped and want to go out in a run. But you feel quite the opposite sometimes. And that normally comes from just continually day and day out, maybe not consuming enough calories or enough of specific macronutrient. And you've got to kind of be careful on how you ride that line.

How have you been sort of navigating some of this? Yeah. Well, it's super interesting. And just to underscore what you've said, I mean, I'm a real person. Like, I'm not trying to be a professional bodybuilder. you know, but what I think it's important to state outright is that everybody is a bodybuilder. The question is what body are you building? So for me, you know, it became, I actually had a revelatory moment.

This isn't to sound really cheesy and many listeners might roll their eyes. But a couple years ago, like four years ago, I was watching Casino Royale with fresh eyes, which is like the first Daniel Craig stint as 007. Right. And, you know, I saw when it first came out, but I didn't really get the James Bond phenomenon. I was like, I had a cold one weekend and I decided to binge watch all of the James Bond movies. And there's this like cultural script, right, that after 35, everything just like goes downhill, right? But he was.

Oh, wait till you're my age. That's when I hear people say stuff like that. You're like, what's going to happen when I'm here? You're only a couple years old of them. There you go. But he was 38 when he filmed that film. And subsequently, I mean, he was in his 50s in the last, in his, you know, last go-around. And so it kind of just like cut through that cultural script that everything is just inevitably.

like it's dad bod, you know, or bust after your mid-30s. And it was really inspiring to me. And it, the question that it asked was like, why not experience that degree of vigor, getting that kind of shape, that degree of capability, at least once before you die? And what that question did for me was it exposed some knowledge gaps. Like, I really wanted to know, like, how to actually optimize for muscle protein synthesis, how to actually lose fat and do it in a way that preserves that. hard one skeletal muscle that I've been training my whole life to to build, you know. And,

um, and so yeah, so I've, I basically did a deep dive into the, into the literature. And this is stuff that you, you know, can recite with your eyes closed, I'm sure. But, um, but yeah, it was just super interesting that when you optimize for protein, when you spread that protein evenly over the course of the day, when you train with a certain level of intensity. I mean, that's, that's another thing that I didn't really realize, I think, until I began this journey is that when you're trying to lose body fat, you don't change your, you really shouldn't change your training or assume that you're going to be weaker at all. You should train with the same level of intensity because that's going to send the stimulus to your body to hold on to the muscle, you know, as you enter that, that gently catabolic state, right? And so, so yeah, it's just been super cool.

And what I've done was I've gotten from like probably around 16, 17% body fat, which is still in the healthy range for a guy, down to probably around 10%. body fat, maybe even less than that. And I see bicep vein as we're talking a little bit here. Thanks, man. Yeah. I get compliments in the gym sometimes, which is like crazy to me. Like guys will come up and it's never the girls. You know, it's like we shouldn't, we shouldn't pretend that it's not exciting.

It's exciting. It's exciting to see like a little ripple in the in the shoulder. It's exciting to see, you know, maybe like a little striation or a little definition comes out of the tricep and it's super motivating. So, you know, for years from, we meet with my. myself being a power lifter. You know, we always kind of made fun of the bodybuilders. We're like, I don't need to mirror and all this kind of stuff.

But it is nice to, you know, wear a tang top or wear shorts are a little shorter. See the muscles in your legs actually working. To me, it's motivating. It's like it's you're seeing the muscles working and you're seeing the progress too. And then, yeah, you do get compliments. And that's not the only reason why we're doing it. We're doing a lot for self-improvement. But I think it's actually, it's like,

underrated how difficult it is. Yeah. It's very difficult and we could say, oh, you know, this guy's born this way and this guy's got these great genetics, but even the guys with great genetics are working hard at it. It's very difficult. I saw, um, a few years ago, Brent Contreras made a hypertrophy like, he made this like hypertrophy like box, um, that he, a chart that he put online and anybody interested should check that out just because it just has the recipe for hypertrophy. It's like,

there's a recipe to it. There's a standard way, and there's other ways to get some hypertrophy too. If you do high school wrestling or something, you might get a little hypertrophy of your neck just from somebody else pulling on your neck and you might get some hypertrophy from a sport. But there's some rules to hypertrophy on exactly how you kind of go about doing it. We've heard people over the years talk about three sets of ten. That predominantly came from Joe Weeder, and that's a great principle. And what they do with three sets of ten is they go light, medium, heavy.

And then they'll do that for one exercise. And then they'll pick one more exercise that's related to the same body part. And then you usually move on. So you usually do two different exercises, two to three different exercises per body part. Two to three sets, two to three times a week. And years ago, I used to say, like, oh, just do some for a few. And I used to say, you know, and someone said, what the hell does that mean? I was like, I don't know, two to three exercises, two to three sets, two to three times a week, that kind of thing.

And then it was Andy Galpin, who I'm sure you're aware of Andy Galpin in his research. He came out with this, like he was like talking about the study on one of Huberman shows about how accurate that is. Two to three sets done intensely, obviously. Two to three exercises per body part done two to three times a week. It usually checks almost all the boxes for most people. How are you recomp in your body when you're strength training? Yeah. So, I mean, and, you know, I'll just say I'm a student here.

Like I learn from people like you, Andy, and, you know, Alan Aragon, all the other, you know, evidence-based experts in the field. But, you know, it's just incredible how if you just trust the science, I mean, saying that is kind of makes me want to roll my own eyes at what I just said. But no, but there is this applied science to hypertrophy and fat loss that I think is just fascinating. and anybody can achieve it. That's the thing. Like you're never that far out from the shore. The science of bodybuilding is really nice because it's, there is research. There's a lot of research, but the research is usually done after the bodybuilders already know.

So their bodybuilders like find a bunch of stuff out because they're meatheads and they just want to get to stuff quick. And then research later backs up those methods a lot of times. That's what we see like over and over. So I think that the bro science sometimes gets a little conflated and people are like, well, that's not actually. actual research. And it's not actual research, but a lot of times a bro science gets confirmed by research. Yeah, no, bro science is great. And also, like, I'm a fan of bro science.

And at the end of the day, I mean, there is truth to the, to the saying that success leaves clues. And, you know, for me, what has been what I found to be really effective is, of course, hitting my protein target every day, which is, you know, I try to aim between 0.7 grams of protein for my body weight to one gram per pound of my body weight and protein every day, evenly distributed over the course of the day. One thing that I read recently in a review by Don Lehman, which kind of was shocking to me, is that most adults in this country save the bulk of their protein intake for their last meal of the day, for dinner.

They save their big protein bolus for dinner. They tend to under-eat protein for breakfast, for lunch. That wasn't necessarily my problem, but it does expose a window of opportunity. I think for many people to hit, you know, a meaningful bowl of protein first thing in the morning, like, or with breakfast. Why do you think? Well, it's important for many reasons. One, there is data that suggests that just, you know, getting a hefty dose of protein for

breakfast tends to keep hunger on a more even keel over the course of the day. So you tend to consume fewer calories over the course of the day when you eat a lot of protein, when you front load your day with protein. And the other thing is that muscle protein, turnover is occurring constantly, and it's a balance between muscle protein breakdown and muscle protein synthesis. And over the course of sleep, you know, that long fast between dinner and your first meal in the day, I mean, you're tilting the scales towards in favor of muscle protein breakdown. And by hitting your protein target in the morning with that, with that morning

meal, you're stimulating muscle protein synthesis. So it's, without doing that, it's basically a missed opportunity. You're leaving quote unquote gains on the table. And so yeah, so I try to hit, you know, 40, 50 grams of protein first thing in the morning. It does a great job of making sure that I'm not hungry until 1, 2 p.m. And then, and then, yeah, and just keeping that that protein distribution even over the course of the day because muscle protein synthesis is stimulated. When you hit that leucine threshold, muscle protein synthesis doesn't, you know, continue. you for the rest of the day. It lasts about two to three hours. And so you want to make sure that, you know, with three, four meals, you are regularly hitting that, that lusine threshold over the

course of the day. When I was, when I was a kid in the magazines and stuff, and that's all, all I kind of had back then, but the magazines would talk about nitrogen retention. And you don't really hear that talked about as much anymore. But basically trying to retain amino acids and trying not to basically burn through amino acids. And something that some people may not be aware of is that carbohydrate can be protein sparing. Yeah. So if you are, you know, getting in, you know,

one pound of protein per, or one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, you can spare some of that protein. You may be able to afford to eat a little bit less protein or your actual protein count will, might matter a tiny bit less if your carbohydrates are intact and then your fats too

because the fats are also protein sparing to some degree as well but the carbohydrates and that's why the bodybuilders that's how they came up with what they came up with. A bodybuilder is usually not going to have more than 10 to 15 grams of fat in a meal

they're probably going to have 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrates and probably 40 to 50 grams of protein in each meal and then depending on the size of the individual they might do that three times, five times, six times, and even as many as seven or eight times I've heard of people eating per day of these. And you're trying to be pretty, trying to stick to a pretty lean diet. Is your diet

pretty lean? Is the meat that you consume pretty lean and stuff like that? Yeah, I try to get about 25% of my calories from fats, but my on ramp into this field was through the lens of dementia prevention because my mother and we'll talk about this I'm sure had dementia for many years and so I first became interested from a nutritional standpoint because my lens was trying to do whatever I could to help my ailing mother who was suffering from a neurogenerative condition I became very interested early on in the ketogenic diet and and so I've written about that extensively and there's still a lot of promise with regards to the kid with with regards to ketogenic ketones are also protein ventions protein sparing as well yeah but um when you know again success leaves

clues and when I realize that you know bodybuilders have long made use of carbohydrates for their protein sparing effect for their you know their ability to energize them through workouts particularly later in the cut um loading it loading glycogen literally into the muscle tissue into the muscle tissues yeah it that forced me to to challenge some, you know, some beliefs that I had about carbohydrates that I think were not all that helpful and maybe not all that accurate with regards to body composition. And so what I've been really enjoying is learning more about the utility of carbohydrates and eating what I guess I would, you know, describe as a higher carbohydrate diet. And I found that that's,

that can be super effective in terms of keeping my energy levels up, keeping my, you know, muscles looking full even though my you know overall like I'm losing I'm losing weight um and uh and yeah so it's been it's been great I think that there's still a lot of dogma out there with regards to carbohydrates I mean I see it all the time a lot of people are are carbphobic they're afraid of eating carbohydrates um you'll see people that have lost weight and they claim that they've lost weight by cutting the carbs when in reality what they've cut out is donuts and pastas and you know fried foods and things like that and so um part of what I you know what I want do is help to redeem carbohydrates. I mean, I think there's a lot of carb rich foods. Also,

carbohydrates are, there's this idea that eating carbohydrates automatically, you know, leads to hanger down the road. But carbohydrates, carbohydrate rich foods are actually second to protein rich foods are most satiating foods. I mean, if you look at the satiety index, which anybody can Google, it's on PubMed. They're the, you know, researchers have actually looked at. Ryan, can you look up what's the, what's the food at the top of that list? Yeah. Because I think it's a potato. You're going to be shocked to find out. It's a potato. Right. It's a potato. Yeah. If you think about it, baked potatoes, rice by itself, oatmeal and stuff like that. These are all incredibly satiating foods. And so, so yeah, so I think that they can be very useful when it comes

to adhering to a, to a calorie deficit. If that's your goal. What did you find over there, Ryan? Oh, it's still. Oh, your service is shoddy, but yeah, I do believe. Spoilerler or their potatoes. Yeah, I do believe it's a potato and we hear all the time that it's protein and who knows, maybe some of the science or research is off a tiny bit. Maybe it is a steak or something like that. Something that maybe is more rich in fat or something like that. But I think experimenting is really important for people and people should kind of experiment a little bit on their own and see for themselves rather than just take someone's word for it at the kind of the face value of, hey, carbs are bad. Yeah.

Just try them, especially maybe post-workout. see how it works for you, maybe try it before you work out and see how it maybe serves you during a training session. Something I'm interested with you and all the stuff you've learned about, like the brain and everything, when it comes to doing, I'm sure you're doing some sets to failure, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So doing some sets to failure where you really got to like kind of, you know, there's a switch you have to turn on to like push yourself a little bit past, you know, You know, you get to that seventh, eighth rep. If you're going for 10 and you get to 10 and you still got a little juice, you go to 12, you still got, you know, and you might go to 15 reps.

What do you think that does for someone's brain? Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, it's a valuable challenge. I mean, I think working out with intensity, what I think most people don't realize. And I see this in the gym. First of all, if you're in the gym, like you get credit for being in the gym for sure because it takes initiative to to, to, to, to, walk through those tours.

You know, and so if you're there, that's a great thing. But I think it pays to understand how to resistance train effectively, you know, to make sure that your workouts are providing the stimulus that you intend for them to provide, right? Whether it's cardiovascular training or resistance training. And so the only way to send the appropriate stimulus to your muscles to grow, to get stronger, you have to be working out to a certain degree of intensity. And that usually entails going to failure, if not failure, close to it for the majority of your sets. Particularly for muscle growth, for hypertrophy.

I think with strength, you get a little bit more leeway. Like the proximity to failure is a little bit more forgiving when your sole goal is strength. Correct me if I'm wrong. No, it's usually way, yeah, you're right. Because like, so most of the time during a strength protocol, if someone's doing it, like say five by five sets of five reps, you don't want those, you don't want those five reps to look like someone's going to die. You know, you don't want those to be max effort all-out lifts because you actually want the five-by-five performed. You want picture-perfect form on every set.

And what we used to say in powerlifting is we're talking about you might brush up against mechanical failure as like your mechanics breakdown a little bit. You might brush up against it on rep number 23, 24, 25 of your 5 by 5, but you didn't start out the workout by, you know, putting in a really crappy set of five reps because in powerlifting and in strength training, you want the inputs to be really clean and smooth. And we want that from bodybuilding as well, but you find that you can lean back a little bit more. You can jerk the weight around a little bit more. You don't have to, you still want your form to be good.

You don't want to be flailing with the weights. but a little body English here and there can actually help you get closer to pushing yourself to failure because sometimes that mechanical failure and the mechanical tension that you're searching for, it doesn't really stick until you get to those kind of grindy reps and sets. Yeah, so I generally train not for, I mean, you know, strength and muscle size are definitely correlated,

but they are independent. And I would say that the bulk of my training, I try to focus more on hypertrophy. I'm not like a big, like I'm not trying to be a strength athlete. I have certain limitations. I, you know, I don't squat. I don't deadlift. I had spine surgery a year ago. And prior to that, I had 10 years of chronic low back pain.

So, you know, I try to be as careful as I can. I try not to, you know, push things too hard with regards to my body mechanics. But within the bucket of my limitations, yeah, I try to. try to go as hard as I can. I just mean like in terms of you're doing like a lateral raise, you know, and maybe it starts out being this strict and at some point there's a little. Yeah, you can. Little body.

Yeah. Not anything nuts, but just a little bit. But like, yeah, to like cheat. What is it called? I've heard it referred to as like deliberate cheating or, um, yeah, cheating with intent or whatever. Or sometimes somebody spots you a little bit on a, on a machine or something like that. Yeah. Like intensifiers.

Yeah. Very common practice. And actually like if, if you were doing a set of like, like chest press, if you're on a machine, and I actually pull the machine towards me and I assist you, it actually makes it almost harder for you because now your muscle contraction can be, it could be harder throughout the whole range of motion because otherwise your muscles would have failed and they would have kind of given out in you. So we're kind of like getting you to a potential spot that you maybe wouldn't be able to get to by yourself. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. So I mean,

I've gotten, I've gotten stronger and you're getting sore and all that or did you get past Most of that phase. Yeah, no, I get, I get sore for sure. But I try to make sure that I'm, you know, if I'm in a calorie deficit, I try to make sure that it's very subtle. And I also try to hit my protein target every day. I take creatine. I try to stay hydrated. I try to optimize for my electrolyte intake, which really helps with muscle contraction.

I try to make sure that my recovery is on point. I sleep pretty well. And so, yeah, so it's been a really fascinating journey. One thing that I think is super, another tactic that I think more people should take from the field of bodybuilding is that, you know, bodybuilders, like the chicken, rice, broccoli meal has almost become a cliche. But again, success leaves clues. I think there's a quiet, like, brilliance to the way that those meals are built. Today, in the nutrition literature, these are sometimes referred to as mixed dishes. but everything today has become what I call like a combination food.

You know, like bread isn't just bread. It's bread with an over easy egg on it or some avocado spread on it or, you know, we dip it in oil. But if you can separate your starches from your proteins from your, you know, from your veggies and derive the bulk of your fat from whole foods like red meat or eggs and whatnot, it makes your foods a lot less prone to overconsumption. The minute you take, like rice by itself is actually. pretty satiating and is not prone to over consumption, like rice by itself. A big potato. A lot of it, yeah. You have to eat a baked potato by itself.

You're not prone to over consuming a baked potato. But it's the second that you add, you know, the butter, the sour cream, the bacon bits, that potato, you know, pushes your brain to a bliss point. It becomes amazing. It becomes like absolutely amazing. And similarly with rice, like people aren't typically prone to overconsuming rice. But the minute you douse that rice with chicken tika masala sauce, right? It becomes something that's like, you know, evolutionarily.

like it's the equivalent of the 4th of July's like fireworks, right? Independence Day fireworks and your brain going off. And this is actually what there's an obesity researcher who also happens to be a neuroscientist, Stefan Gwainé, who has referred to this as a supernormal stimulus. So the way that we combine modern foods, it basically provides a super normal stimulus to our brains. And what bodybuilders, I think, have done so, like, Like what they've figured out, right, is keeping food enjoyable and nourishing and satiating, but they've removed that supernormal stimulus from the equation by keeping their starches separate from their proteins, separate from their veggies.

One thing that's great about, you know, when you're eating like leaner foods, you do need to try to figure out how to, how to eat them. So like eating like chicken breast or eating turkey, especially if it's lean, like if it's 99% lean ground turrets. turkey, that could be pretty dry. And so there are situations where if you cook that with some vegetables, well, it just gets to be that much easier to eat it. And so you can kind of, you can use the same tactic that you just mentioned for health purposes as opposed to it like working against you. Because you could get way more calories in, you know, if you're combining rice, chicken thigh, some broccoli and some terriaki sauce. And that would probably be an example of not the greatest meal because it might be easier to overreate that because the amount of fat in the chicken

thigh and the sugar in the terriaki sauce and so on. But if you have kind of the regular standard bodybuilding diet where you have the chicken, the rice, the broccoli, or some other type of vegetable that you maybe like better than broccoli, you can just kind of mix the chopped up chicken with a little bit of rice with some of the vegetable, maybe pour on something that you enjoy that's not super calorically dense. And you're going to have a meat. that it's going to be easier for you consume the food without going over your calories because there's so much protein in it. Yeah.

Lights just came on, boom. Is that okay? Yeah, that's okay. We can just talk through it. Yeah. I think reducing the, I mean, for most people, look, if you're trying to gain weight, like, it's a sort of a different approach, but reducing the food reward value, I think for many people, thinking about it through the lens, of that neuroscience, I think, can be really helpful.

And it's sort of an under-discussed topic, the idea of food reward. Because if you, and actually, if you think about it, the success of these GLP-1 drugs, like, yeah, they mechanically, like, they boost satiety, they increase fullness, but they also reduce the reward value of food. And they also do that with other stimuli as well. There's now studies showing that GLP1 drugs reduce addictive behaviors. They reduce the reward value of, you know, whether we're talking about like nicotine, nail biting, things like that. Like there's been this signal to emerge in the GLP1.

Yeah, one of them got approved recently for alcohol, right? Yeah, I believe. So it's just super interesting that that's like another mechanism by which they work, which we can actually like borrow from reverse engineer and implement in our own lives with our own diets. I think when you start to eat like this, you get locked in. Like that's what's happened to me before. And you can get locked out too. But you get locked into it. And then you're kind of like, why was I even bother to eat any other way?

But at some point, you know, you'll get to a point where you're, you know, lean enough or you're too lean for yourself for the moment and your body's not used to it. You might get a little bit thin. You might just look at yourself and be like, I'm kind of stringy. I don't like this look. I want to put on a little bit of weight. you might recalibrate and sort of overshoot and be like, shit, I'm getting fat. And so you're going to keep going back and forth and back and forth over time.

But ultimately what you're doing is bodybuilding because that's what bodyblowers do. They're excellent at a recomp. And seeing you today, you look so much different than when you were at my gym. I know you had a lot of back pain and stuff like that too. But how much weight have you lost? So I started probably back in August of 2025 and we're currently at the beginning of February. When I started, I was about 196 pounds. And now I'm like 180 roughly.

See, that's a great example because that is a nice shift in body weight, but it's not crazy. Yeah. It's not like we're not talking like that you lost like 40 pounds. No, no, because I was never, I was never overweight. I was always like within the realm of, you know, a healthy weight. Just by adhering to the principles that I was talking about, prioritizing protein, when I think implementing, initiating a cut, you want to be a little bit more deliberate once you have a goal in mind to make sure that you're not spinning your wheels.

And so for me, I set out with the intent of getting to a certain body fat percentage because I had been there before. and so, you know, eating, sticking mainly to whole foods, optimizing for protein, I mean, that goes a long way. That, like, nobody's fat because they didn't count calories or didn't track their macros on a macro tracking app. I mean, most people today are overweight because of the food environment and the world that we've inherited that, you know, makes hyper-palatable, supercalorie dense, ultra-processed foods constantly available, always at arm's length, 24 hours a day, right? delectable, aggressively marketed. Like, this is the food environment that we've inherited. Like, your average supermarket today is three quarters ultra-processed foods.

These foods drive their own overconsumption. So just by reducing your consumption of those foods and sticking mainly to minimally processed foods, I mean, most people will end up inching their way towards a healthier body composition, recomposition towards a healthier weight, more muscle mass, right, when optimizing for protein. but to get what I've heard some refer to as exotically lean, which isn't necessarily a health goal, but it's an aesthetic goal. It's like a challenge.

You know, it's a challenge of discipline. That's where I think it becomes really valuable to start auditing what it is that you're eating specifically, maybe even doing a little bit of tracking because you don't want a day to go by where you're not sure that you're in a slight calorie deficit. Are you tracking? Are you doing all that?

I've started tracking. Yeah, generally like the leaner, I guess, the more important I think it is to track because you don't want to you don't want to lose fat to or weight too fast because then you risk muscle loss particularly as you get leaner like however many you know say you're trying to lose a pound a week at 196 pounds which is where I was when I started that makes up a much larger proportion of my body weight than one pound at 180 pounds so you want to be a little bit, you want to be more deliberate about, you know, how the calorie deficit, the leaner you get, you want to make sure that you're hitting your protein target every day. And you also don't want to be wasting your time because you want to have a goal.

You don't want to just like be perpetually dieting. You want to have a deadline in mind, right? And so you don't want a day to go by where you're not sure that you're in a calorie deficit. And then when I have like trips when I travel, like there was, you know, the holidays in between. I just kind of let it all go and I just like went back to normal and I considered that like a diet break and it was great. Yeah, tracking is always been interesting to me, but I've always done my best to not track, but I'm not against it. I just I like the challenge of trying to figure this out without really knowing the calories because I feel like your body it like wants to do different stuff on different days. And so I just try to let it the best that I can.

but it is it's hard to kind of do it without without knowing the actual numbers. I do know I've had some friends over the years that track their calories and then later on the day they're like, oh, I still got room for this, which is kind of nice because they might have 700 calories left that they didn't know and now they get to eat, you know, 500 calories so they're still 250 under or whatever the case may be. Where I think that that right there is a place where a lot of people sabotage themselves. Maybe not your average person, but your average person that goes to the gym that doesn't quite have the physique that they want, they just mess up later on in the evening.

And it might not even, it might not even be quote unquote bad food. They might be eating natural peanut butter and some honey or something, but they're combining the two together. And they just inhaled, you know, 800 calories. Yeah. And now this well-meaning day that started out with a great workout and started out with all this great food and everything, they just botched the whole thing by this. small error at the end of the day. And maybe if they were tracking,

they could say, I can't really afford to do that. Yeah. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man.

It's called Good Life Protein. Okay, tell me about that. I've been doing some Good Life Protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of Good Life Proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops,

all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes of mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy, kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat, and that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80, 20, grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef.

I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style, where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why like neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full.

I look forward to every meal. And I can surf and turf, you know. I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it or I could have some steak. I would say the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard for me to lock one down. But I really love the bovette steaks. Yeah.

And then I also love the rib-eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rib-eyes. So, guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, you can have to Good Life Proteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website. Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save. to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. Well, I think tracking is very valuable, but to be clear, it can lead to obsessive

behaviors for the wrong person. And so I just want to caveat that. I've never had that problem. Like, I'm easily able to, like, give that up when I feel like my cut is over. But being able to audit my food, like, I have a digital food scale discovering, and this is another thing the bodybuilder's been doing, like, for millennia. discovered fairly recently like just a couple years ago I have my digital food scale out at all times because it in keeping it out it reduces the friction that I'm actually

going to use it and I use it to audit portion sizes just in my own head it provides a little bit of friction like if I you know go to Costco say and I pick up a bag of dried mango like a Costco size bag of dry mango which might as well be crack cocaine for me which is like because I think it's like one of the most delicious things these are so good these are so good I could literally in one sitting I promise eat 3,000 calories of dried mango. But having that big bag and my digital food scale out on the counter, I can weigh out a serving or two servings and know that I'm not eating five servings.

Same with like nut butters. Like nut butters are a big pitfall, I think, for many people. Because if you and I were to measure out a tablespoon of nut butter, we might end up with like wildly different portion sizes, whereas 15 grams of almond butter is 15 grams of almond butter. And you got to have like a scoop or two. between actually using it, you know, whatever way you're going to use your nut butter or if you're just eating it. But like, you're going to have probably a couple scoops that he didn't even

account for if you're not tracking or paying attention. I think like the main reason why people today struggle with their weight. It's not due to a lack of willpower. It's not due to a moral failure. It's that the environment like has become so difficult to navigate today. Again, the predominance of ultra-processed foods in constant proximity, even in our own homes. We've got to take some responsibility as well because we are. putting ourselves in like we're not giving ourselves a good chance you know if you're staying up the middle of the night you know watching TV or on your phone or playing video games the likelihood that you're going to order DoorDash and order you know cookies or

whatever it's just going to increase yeah and I'm not saying like everyone should go to bed at this particular time but even that's a really helpful thing because again I think there's a lot of people in this country a lot of people that are training and they're doing all these well-meaning things getting in good steps. And I think it's maybe after, I don't know, 8 p.m. or so, 9 p.m. Where the kind of the demons come out and that's where people make their mistakes with overconsumption or just eating bad foods and having the stress of the day kind of leaning on us. And then you just want it, you know, you want pizza, you want this, you want that.

Because that food reward, that food reward actually works really well. Yeah. And it's, but it sends you into this. You're on, you're on a wheel. once you do that. That's why, like, I mean, I have no affiliation with legendary, but I'm so psyched to, like, to be here. You know, because as easy as it is today to slide into overweight and obesity,

it's also easier than ever to reverse that process because of the proliferation of these, like, better for you foods that make it so easy to hit your protein target. You know, these are, like, I'm assuming that I've never tried, you know, the protein pasta, but I'm assuming that it's going to be way more satiating and nourishing than, And like boxed craft mac and cheese, like, based on what I know about protein being the most satiating macronutrient, diet sodas and the like.

Like I don't personally drink a ton of diet soda, but the fact that we can now supplement for the lost reward value. Manipulate, yeah. Yeah, I think it's like we're living in an amazing time. Like the excuses are becoming fewer and fewer today to get into the shape you've always wanted to be in. All the meal prep companies?

All the meal prep companies, yeah. There's easier access to food, Even foods that aren't processed and input into the packages and stuff. Because I know some people have conjecture against that. But there's, again, the convenience. There's so much convenience. Yes, and you can look at there's so much convenience around these unhealthy foods. But DoorDash and stuff, they don't discriminate.

They actually can deliver healthy food to you as well. Exactly. Yeah, they don't shame you for ordering healthy food. I can't believe you ordered chicken breasts. Right. No, it's great. And I think that all it takes is a little bit of environment. design like keep the food scale out you know put the unhealthy foods away so they're not

visually out at all times like put your food or even healthy foods like keeping the cabinets so you're not constantly reminded it's the equivalent of like you know if you were to like break up with somebody after they just like trampled all over your heart would you still keep them as the background on your iPhone would you still keep the photos up in your house no if you were trying to quit cigarettes would you keep cigarettes out everywhere would you keep nicotine lip pouches like on every you know counter in your house no Similarly with foods, I think you got to like keep this stuff out of sight because if it's out of sight, it's out of mind, and it's going to become a lot easier to stick to your to the plan. What about having a big bag of Doritos just sitting there, you know, or or Doritos, you just put them in a bowl and why test willpower?

And then maybe some peanut M&Ms and just to just to like train yourself for it. No, because your willpower wasn't designed for that. Damn it. Yeah. Why can't we be strong? It's a finite willpower is a finite resource. You don't want to rely on it. Yeah, you want to do the best that you can to let your environment make the decisions for you.

And, you know, because our environments shape our thoughts. Like our spaces shape our thoughts. And if we reverse engineer that and change our environments, often the behavior change follows. What's been the hardest part of this for you? This hardest part of recomping your body. The hardest part definitely has been the fact that, I mean, I mentioned this already, but it's not necessarily a health goal. It's like an aesthetic goal.

It's a personal challenge. Like people train for marathons and whatnot. Like I'm not like an athlete in that way. And so for me, this has been a really fun, you know, quasi-athletic challenge. And it's been great. But I will say that there is this impression when you see jacked people on social media that they're walking around feeling great all the time with their six-packs, right? But the metabolic adaptation is real.

And it's not always comfortable. Like the leaner I get, it's remarkable how your energy just like goes out the window. I mean, because your body's like, it's energy conservation. Your body is like fighting against what it perceives as a threat, like an energetic crisis. And so the decline in non-exercise physical activity is like remarkable. Like I just feel like some days like your body drops things out right away. It's like libido, I don't really need that.

Yeah, no. It's it's really wild. Like I become psychological. It affects me psychologically like I've become less excitable, you know? Like there's a bit of like and hedonia When you get super lean you know what that means like it's basically like you become less excitable as Like it takes more stimulus to you don't even want to go there because you don't want to waste the energy Yeah, exactly. It's like it's literally like thermodynamics 101. Yeah, this is proven. I mean that even even just us talking with our hands you do less of that Yeah, you do less of that when you're in a chloric deficit, which is you you're not even aware that you do it. You just tend to

to do less of it. You're more lethargic. Bodybuilders, you know, I don't know how they do it. They mastered it, but they just, they cover up. They got the hoodie on and they go and they do their cardio and they just kind of like sit around. And they're just like, it's like a dark cloud over them, but they're just like focused and they just need to stay. I think they need to stay kind of in that closed environment so that they don't expose themselves to potential, you know, overeating or binging. I've heard some crazy stories about some bodybuilders, binging just a few weeks out from a contest and just having everything, like just thrown away. Damn.

In the last few weeks. No, I mean, yeah. So it's crazy. And that's where I think the value of like diet breaks comes in. Super important because that's, it's all reversible. I mean, the minute you go back up to like maintenance, your energy comes back, feel way better. And then psychologically, it gives you the, it gives you the fuel to persevere to whatever it is that your goal happens to be. But it is crazy how it affects like not just your, your movement.

and like your tendency to want to get up off the couch, but also like psychologically I felt it as well. Do you want to try to get down like 8% body fat or something, some single digit body fat type? Yeah, I think I had my goal to get to around like 8 or 9%. I haven't. Is that Dexas scan or how you're measuring it? No, I use, well, here's the thing.

So I use like I know it's not super accurate, but I use like the in body just as a directional check for myself. In my gym, I try to, you know, use this, like do it under the same condition. every time. I know it's not super accurate, but another really useful tool I've found these days is AI. Like, it's not, it's not 100% accurate, but you can literally like now upload photos of yourself, like mirror selfies into AI and have it estimate. Yeah, like estimate roughly like your body fat percentage. And it's like, it's pretty close. I'm

not going to say that it's as accurate as like a DECSA. And even DECs are not. I've heard, yeah, 100% accurate all the time, right? But yeah, it can. be super useful to do that. So yeah, I'm just kind of like I figure I'm not my my I have no intention of like you know trying to go pro or anything like that. I feel like I would I would you know I do not have the stomach for that. I would not do that but on the other hand like I've tried to approach it as seriously as somebody who is who is you know like trying to go pro just for my own learning experience you know and it's again it's been like fascinating. Something kind of keep in mind as your work.

working on this, there might be like a little back and forth between gaining muscle and or obviously you're trying to hold on as much muscle tissue as you can because if for every two pounds or so that you lost, you lost like a pound of muscle. That makes your goal of your body fat percentage. You still will reach it, but it'll it'll be harder. You know, if you're losing I'm sorry, two pounds of fat and then losing like one pound of muscle each time, that'll make the process super slow. And I think what people maybe miss is that you can get a lot out of having the muscle mass. Like if you have the muscle mass, it actually makes everything a little easier.

I have some friends that have competed competitively. And at 12, 14, and even right around 16% body fat with their shirt off, they still look incredible. You're like, how do they look? But they have a lot of muscle mass. And even some of these guys are natural too. And you're just like, man, that's, so it's interesting because we, in our head, we get fixated on these, like, particular numbers. And it is nice to be like 8% or 7% and work towards that and to have abs and everything.

But just kind of, that's something maybe for the people listening to kind of keep in mind. It's like you, you don't want your strength to really go down too much. That could be like a guideline. And it doesn't have to be like the bench 405 or anything crazy. But whatever, whatever standard of measure, like, whatever machine or whatever exercise you like to do in the gym, try to just make sure that doesn't like just completely fall apart. Because if that's falling apart,

the odds that you're probably losing some muscle mass are probably pretty high. Yeah. No, I try to keep tabs on my lifts. I try to maintain my lifting intensity. I try to like concentrate my, my carbon take around my workouts. I work out earlier in the day so that I can caffeine max. And I, you know, and I do my best.

And I haven't really gotten any weaker. I will say that I'm like, you know, it's the curse of the natty, the leaner you get, the smaller you look in T-shirts. And especially when you're carb depleted, it, you know, it's, you look small when you're like in a t-shirt. But then, like, you know, the minute you've got a pump going and you've got some carbs in the system, I mean, yeah, you look, you look like pretty great. So I was not ever somebody, again, like who was an athlete or anything like that. But I just wanted to like put all the science that I had accumulated and, you know, my, my ability to understand science and to know where to find good science and good reputable, you know, expert voices in the space, such as yourself. Like, I wanted to put that all to the test and see, like, what, what I could do, you know? And also, I'm in my 40s now at this point.

So, so again, there's this, like, cultural script and I look at my peers and, you know, the dad bods are starting to come in. It's just like, I don't want to age that way. And especially, you know, knowing the benefits to not necessarily being, you know, in the single digit body fat percentage, you don't need to be there. But in knowing how valuable skeletal muscle is and not having visceral fat is to, you know, to brain health, to cardiovascular health. I mean, it definitely felt like a challenge worth undertaking. And also because I love teaching, like I love sharing. You're going to learn so much about it and you're going to grow so much from it. Um, are you, is, are there any intent of like, you know, trying to really work on like a V-Taper?

Like, are you specifically? Because that is a strategy in bodybuilding. You know, that's, that is bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is like you, uh, are, are you creating like, uh, you're creating like your own avatar, you know, you're, you're trying to sculpt something together. And it doesn't necessarily, like, again, I have friends who, who've competed and they're just, they know how to like, make. themselves look awesome. They're able to build their back out. They're able to build their shoulders

out and their body fat percentage might not even be that great. But do you kind of have a goal to like are you trying to do some extra sets, extra work on like shoulders, arms, chest, that sort of thing? Who doesn't want those cap shoulders? Who doesn't want shoulders like you? Right. Right. Yeah, just spend a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So a little extra sets, extra reps, extra attention. Is there, you're doing an extra time per week or anything like that? Yeah, I try to do, yeah, I have like a dedicated shoulder day where I try to work on my, you know, my middle delts, give them a little bit of extra love. I try to, I don't do, well, I don't do a ton of, I don't do like excessive core work for a few reasons. One being, you know, like I do mainly like isometric stuff for my core because, you know, some of that sheer, I don't want to put excessive sheer force on my, I have an artificial disc.

So I have now, at my LF level of my L5S1, I have an artificial disc. And so I want to preserve that for as long as I possibly can. And so I'm just very careful about how I move that part of my body. But yeah, so I mainly do like isometric stuff for core. And, you know, what I've gleaned, again, I'm not a professional bodybuilder or anything, but that, you know, you don't want like excessive hypertrophy of like your obliques or whatever. Right. Right. See, I pick up stuff and I, you know, I implement it where I can. But yeah, like going for the V-Taper, I like spent a lot of time on my back and yeah. I mean, I'm very happy with the progress and I think it's super valuable. And again, I think it's something that anybody can achieve. Like I, not to go too off topic, but I, when I was in my 20s, I decided that I wanted to be a musician. And I, you know, having grown up with no music, ability, no, you know, there was nobody in my family who was a musician. I realize that there

are enough people who can play guitar and who can sing and who can write songs that there has to be some method here that can be not just taught, but learned. And so I dedicated myself, beginning in my early 20s, to learning about the mechanics of singing, like what I meant to be a singer, to, you know, play guitar. I'm not saying that I'm the best or anything like that, but, but I was able to learn a lot to the point that I was able to achieve that. And similarly, you know, with bodybuilding, I think there's this impression that these physiques that you see on social media are unattainable. And granted, there is a lot of filtering that goes on. There's a lot of augmentation.

There's no doubt about that. There's a lot of like professional editing that goes into that process. But all that being said, like when you look at anthropometric statistics on the national level, I mean, there is really no excuse for the fact. that now by some metrics, 70% of the U.S. adult population is obese, not just overweight, but obese. So it's something that I think, like, more people should be, you know, should be aware of. And I think, like, going back to the whole bro-science thing, I think that there's a lot to be learned from, from, you know, people who are, like, in the trenches, like, doing this stuff regularly. Like, fitness trainers, personal trainers and the like, professional bodybuilders, like, there's a lot of good to be learned. Is bodybuilding a sport that is solely, you know, health?

Focused, absolutely not. But that being said, today our biggest problems are that of body composition and associated conditions to, you know, to a body composition that's fallen out of line, right? Like type 2 diabetes, you're dramatically increasing your risk for type 2 diabetes if you're if you're overweight and obese. And type 2 diabetes dramatically increases your risk for Alzheimer's disease. So learning about how to work the knobs and levers of your. your own body composition. I mean, it's not just rewarding from the standpoint of what you see in the mirror. It's rewarding in terms of your mental health. It's rewarding, typically, it's rewarding in terms of your confidence. But it's also rewarding in terms of your, like, health span and longevity

as well. Amazing. Thanks for your time today. I appreciate it. Where can people find you? Thanks, Marky, Mark. So I'm very active on Instagram at Max Lugavir, and I host my own podcast, which is called The Genius Life. And we try to be rigorous while still being fun and achievable and not super long-winded and dry, so come check us out. Strength is never a week. This week, does never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.